We’re told, in much of the West, that this is how life is. That this is who we are. First, we’re meant to be consumers a

“I’ve managed to fall asleep,” Young told me. “It was very, very dark. And I kept brushing my face. It felt like there was something on it, like a spider…and I opened my eyes in the end. And I looked down. And next to me — and I shit you not — there’s, there’s a woman, and she’s on her knees, and she’s stroking my head and brushing my hair!”

In desperation, Mitchell confided in friends and colleagues. A manager at the caravan park had a daughter who could help. Wendy was a local police detective with an interest in the supernatural — she now runs a Facebook page called Horrible Haunted History. Wendy told me she does not use her psychic powers for police work, and asked to be referred to by her first name only, as she still works for the police. “I didn’t realize how bad it was,” Wendy said, recalling the day Mitchell begged her for help.

Wendy agreed to visit the Cage. She didn’t last long. “Almost immediately after I walked over the threshold — banging headache. It felt like somebody was trying to crush my skull. And that old cliché, I felt like I’m being watched. I had a really bad feeling like something terrible was about to happen,” she said.

Baby Jesse only slept in Mitchell’s bedroom, in the modern part of the building. She was angry that her life had been reduced to a small room. One night, she awoke to the sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs with a boom-boom-boom! The metal latches crashed against the door, as if someone was about to burst in. “It was so violent and so quick,” she recalled. “And my heart was bursting out of my chest.” And then nothing. Mitchell became a nervous wreck as the attacks continued night and day. “I was brushing my teeth, and I was hit on the bum. Early morning, getting ready for work. This hit was so hard and aggressive.”

But sociality can be twisted on itself, too. And that’s what seems to have happened in the West. There, sociality has been put into a straitjacket. The Western way — exported from America — is fast becoming something like this. You are a consumer, an employee, a boss, a producer. First, and usually only that. Then you are a citizen, brother, sister, father, friend, inhabitant, person, last — if at all.

The man soon presented himself, Mitchell said. “I’m just watching TV and I’ve seen this man, but I could only see him from the waist up. And he was gliding very, very slowly, looking at me, gliding past the beams. I saw him so clearly. He even had, you know, like laughter lines. He had black spiky hair. And he had old fashioned clothes on. But I couldn’t see him from the legs down.” Mitchell sensed he could have been a jailor.

On Christmas Eve of 2007, Mitchell gave birth to her first child, Jesse. She took him home to the Cage, carefully avoiding the prison room. Mitchell went straight back to selling caravans. “Work was impossible,” she said, “because I wasn’t sleeping at night.” A new sales manager had joined the company, and for the first time in her career Mitchell felt bullied. “He stopped me from being able to go out on the show ground to pick up business. So I basically stopped making money,” she recalled. Every night she drove home to her hell house, where she had reluctantly become the latest in a long line of terrified owners. “Living inside the Cage was grueling,” she wrote about that time. “The longest slog of my life. It drove me to the brink of exhaustion and nervous breakdown.”

Tired and weary, Mitchell broke her own rules. With Jesse asleep, she crept downstairs to press some clothes for the morning. Alone in the prison room, she pushed an electric iron across a blouse. Just then, a jaunty, electronic song filled the room. She looked down at her feet and saw several toys had come to life. “Jesse’s Thomas the Tank Engines, four or five of them all at once, started chugging around my feet,” she said.

It was now February of 2008, and a winter chill swept across Essex. At nightfall Mitchell found herself in the street, unable to summon the courage to go inside. She tucked baby Jesse inside her coat to protect him from the cold. She thought to herself: What’re you gonna do? You have to go in, his stuff’s in there. You’ve got work in the morning. “And the snow started falling on his little head,” she recalled. If you don’t go in, you’re gonna freeze anyway. Then she took a deep breath and pushed open the ancient door.

Mitchell now slept while holding Jesse close in bed, which she knew was dangerous. “That was just the situation I was in,” she explained. The one time she put him down for a second, mysterious forces threw him off the bed and onto some drinks she kept on the floor. “Lord have mercy, the glasses didn’t break,” she told me. Mitchell wanted out before the haunting claimed her sanity. “When I finally came to realize this was not a fight I was going to win, I began to think seriously about an escape plan,” she wrote.

What happens when sociality is twisted this way? Warped, as an American might say, through the iron hand of “the market”? Well, then we have to do what “the market” says, in order to win what should come naturally from sociality. We end up like Americans. We try to win status and worth and meaning and purpose by buying things. Competition begins to pervade every last aspect of our lives. We seek status by symbolically slaying others with more expensive acquisitions. How much we own comes to define who we are.

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vernment is talking procurement folks out of being swindled by deeply goofy blockchain schemes, and some of it is working with with Veterans experiencing homeless to learn how they access the internet to fill out forms. It can be overwhelming to figure out where you should apply and what each team does. There are a couple well-known ways to join, but they’re all acronyms, so I typically explain it like this:

Late one night, three loud knocks pounded the front door. Young burst in. He’d had a blazing argument with his grandmother. “Granddad was dying,” he recalled. “Nan was carrying on, screaming, crying, and it was all a bit mad.” So he ran down to the Cage. He knew it was midnight because the street lights had flicked off. Mitchell said he could stay, but there was only the sofa downstairs. In the prison room.

There’s a simple and beautiful lesson that the West appears to have forgotten. We are social beings. We do not exist in a vacuum. The things we are really after — happiness, meaning, purpose, fulfillment, a sense of worth — they are all things that come to us from our sociality. Without relationships, they don’t exist at all.

So which way is right? The Western way of egocentrism — putting one’s self first — or the Eastern way of allocentrism — putting all first? “Right” is not the correct word. The better way to ask the question is: which way is, in a human sense, truer. Which one is going to help societies be successful in the 21st century — because it is less false, full of nonsense, built to last, full of the thing that endures most, the truth?