I have Covid

I have Covid. 

I found out I had got it when a PCR came back positive about 5 days ago. By then I could feel I had the shivers, a splitting headache, tight chest etc.

I took myself to bed and cut myself off from the rest of the world. My kids and wife moved their bedrooms downstairs, I retreated into a new, Covid world upstairs. 

For the last few years I have been an inhabitant in another world where one of the moral components of that world was the absolute adherence to idea that I should avoid contact with the Coronavirus at all costs.

This virus, and anyone carrying this virus, have become the great other, the persona non grata. Every now and then a narrative would emerge which would be much discussed, where there was the possibility that someone I knew had actually come into contact with one of these persona non gratas. This story would create much consternation and their would be the hope that it wasn't true. Or if it was true the there was the hope that the persona non grata had not managed to infect any of us. And the logic of this hope would be discussed to a great end.

Lateral flow tests would be taken. PCR tests would be taken. Results awaited. Great sighs of relief would be huffed.

Then you finally get the news. And as you walk up the steps up to self isolation, you enter another world. You become the persona non grata.

As I'm writing this I am feeling better but I'm still half way through the self isolation period. A man called me up this morning and told me this. He asked a lot of questions too. No one called to see if I was ok. All the questions were about strategies for me to maintain my persona non grata-ness. And then he told me when my persona non grata-ness will end.

He told me that everyone has their own personal set of symptoms. But he agreed with me that many have described a strange psychological shift that I think has been under reported.

Maybe only a few have this change. But whatever...I'm writing this to work this out for myself, so let's keep going....

Maybe only I had this, Maybe others had similar experiences. But I'm here to tell you what is happening to me. And tell you whilst I'm still experiencing it, like writing the contents of a bad dream before those contents drain away like smoke into the realm of the forgotten.

The night before last I experienced real terror. I felt confused and cut off. I could not ascertain if I was getting better or not and had no idea what I would do if I was not. In fact the very concept of 'getting better' had lost it's meaning to me. Was I really 'better' before I got Covid? Will I return to that old 'better' or another, new version of it?

Last night I awoke and I could not recall who I was for a few brief seconds. Once I reconstituted who I was it was me but many years ago. I then tried to locate in my mind where my family were and what house I was in. I then realised my father was dead. I panicked but then remembered my own kids and slowly the current me took shape again.

Yesterday I got up, had a bath, got dressed and tried to do some jobs and I felt better for that. I tried to feel normal and a part of my little household. But later my kids played up. I couldn't cope with this and I felt myself collapse inside. It was as though I had uncovered the true reality of the situation. That I was powerless and better off dead. That all life was suffering and there was no escape from that. Just a great self con that this was not the case. 

Today I am lying in bed awaiting that strange little message from the beyong to tell me to get up. It won't come. I just really want to do nothing. My real goal in life, beyond just staying alive, is to curl up in a ball somewhere. To avoid as much of the pain as possible. That is the truth and pretending it's not won't help.

But in this strange place I inhabit that truth is upside down, and inescapable. 

We come from nothing. Our consciousness is a mystery that emerges in the womb. That consciousness does not reconstitute itself until we are about three years old, when we have lived enough life to look back and imgaine what we did before.

And that is all wrapped around the developing story of who we are. And that is where all the problems lie. We seek away of avoiding the pain caused by that very story. We want to return to that great female realm of the womb. All mothers are the envelopers of sleep, and more fundamentally death. Now there is a contradiction! 

Oh, to be back in those dark surroundings. We are frightened. Our fears all point to death. And fear's strategy is to avoid this at all costs. 

But we all really crave death. By trying to avoid the pain and suffering that will lead to our death we aim at a place with no pain, which is of course is death. I think it has been that awful contradiction writ large that I have been plagued with over the last few days. 

The answer is to get out of bed and face the day, even if it is mostly over. The answer is to then make that bed and tidy up. It's to look in the faces of those who you know and accept we really are not in control of ourselves like we think. That our lives are so much more than we know. That there is no easy solution, no cute aphorism, that will make us truly feel any better when we realise this.

There is the choice between doing and not doing. And doing will always equate to some sort of pain. And this cannot be avoided. Avoidance will only create some other pain somewhere else. This has never been more true than our solution to this epidemic.

Perhaps we just need to accept the pain and realise it's the sign we are alive. And remind ourselves an eternity of no pain awaits us all in our future, but that thought is in no way consoling.

So let's all get on with it....there that lovely little ephemeral voice has finally spoken....phew!

 

The problem of confused liberals

I'm a big fan of liberalism.

So what is it?

liberalism

1.
willingness to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; openness to new ideas.

2.
a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.


It's an strange and compelling thing that people came up with this idea. If you are in a position with enough power to structure your society, these ideas will not be in your self interest.
But for some reason western culture did adopt these values. They were developed by British philosophers a few hundred years ago and then enshrined inside the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.


They placed the sovereign individual at the centre of the structure of society. To do this you need to tolerate the actions and opinions of other sovereign individuals. In doing this two things happen, the best ideas win out and you find the only thing you cannot tolerate is intolerance. And intolerance is built upon prejudice. And predjudice is based upon judging someones character on something apart from their actions or deeds. (like judging them on their race, sex, gender, etc)


This shift in the way we viewed culture and society had some drastic effects. It propelled the US into the position of the most powerful country on Earth. It ended slavery, gave women the vote. made homosexuality legal, raised people out of poverty, raised the life expectancy of many people, ushered in the industrial and technological age we live in now...I could go on, but there is a very strong argument that all of these things had their roots in the shift towards liberalism.


Liberalism has it's roots also in enlightenment rationalism. This is the idea that the best way to elucidate truth is through the scientific method. This itself has it's core values in liberalism as for science to work you need to let the best ideas come to the fore, despite your own prejudices and self interests.


Once you treat everyone as an individual and allow any of these opinions into the cultural sphere suddenly everyone is valued equally and their best ideas rise to the top.


This for me is the very definition of Civilisation.


These ideas are so wound into our culture that we take them for granted. But things happen when you take these simple freedoms away from people. It happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. A free democracy gave away those rights. In the end the world paid a heavy price to fix that situation- 50 million dead!


But this was not the heaviest price that was paid when you move away from liberalism. In Soviet Russia under a different set of ideas, those of Karl Marx, we saw around 60 million people murdered.
In China, under Chairman Mao we saw 45 million killed by famine, possibly 20 million murdered. Under another Marxist, Pol Pot we saw a quarter of the population murdered in Cambodia. And we have a contemporary Marxist state over in North Korea right now.


In North Korea you can be executed for what your grand parents did, and they may have just 'disrespected' their leader Kim Jong Un. In fact in North Korea I, and members of my family, would be executed for what I'm writing now. An slight infringement of the orthodoxy and you will be executed. If you contract AIDS for example, you are executed. Recently an US student, Otto Warmbier, visited North Korea and decided to steal a poster in the hotel he was staying at. He never actually stole it and in the end he simply took the poster down and placed it on the floor. For this he was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years hard labour. The US government plea bargained for his return. Eventually he returned but in a vegetative state; he never gained consciousness and died at the age of 22.


In North Korea your speech is controlled. The people of North Korea do not know they aren't free because there is no word for freedom. If you do even discuss anything related to individuality you will be arrested. This includes any personal opinion. The conductor of the North Korean Orchestra privately mentioned he wasn't so keen on a certain performance in a concert they were giving and for this he was executed in front of all the members of his orchestra.


When you are executed in North Korea they smash your teeth out and put a rock in your mouth. This is so you won't shout anything against the regime just before you are killed. You will be killed by a reign of bullets that will literally explode your body. This will be done publically and the those watching will be made to inspect the mush that is left just so they too will learn not question the orthodoxy. There are other ways of being executed however, for example, death by flame thrower.


Why do I mention this? It is because most countries were like this until Liberalism was developed. And as I have shown, Western democracies can fall into this state very easily if they turn against those values.


We must put the rights of the individual over the rights of the group. We must allow free speech, We must not compel speech or ban certain words. We must value the system of science for elucidating truth. We must not put our trust in dogmatic ideologies as a system of governance and most importantly, we must must not believe we are objectively right (Kim Jong Un believes himself to be the ultimate vessel of objective good, which is how he justifies what he does. He is unaware he is a monster)


Recently I have been tracking how the ideas of Hegel, especially his adaption of Kant's idealistic dialectic, and how that was then conflagrated with materialism by Marx, and then how this dialectic has morphed through continental philosphy, becoming what is called Critical Theory which was developed by the Franfurt School:


(from Wikipedia...not the best place to quote from but please do your own research if you want to know more)




Critical theory (also capitalized as Critical Theory)[1] is a Marxist approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With origins in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation,[2] critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[3]

In sociology and political philosophy, "Critical Theory" means the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, developed in Germany in the 1930s and drawing on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, capitalizing Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School.


Based upon what I have been describing this smells a bit funny to me. The enlightenment liberal values that I have been describing merely become another meta-narrative of a power elite trying to maintain that power.

These ideas are now enshrined in Critical Race Theory (CRT)

(again, from Wikipedia)

Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic movement of civil rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice.[1] Critical race theory examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism.[2][3]

Critical race theory originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams.[1] It emerged as a movement by the 1980s, reworking theories of critical legal studies (CLS) with more focus on race.[4] Both critical race theory and critical legal studies are rooted in critical theory, which argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.[5]

Critical race theory is loosely unified by two common themes: first, that white supremacy, with its societal or structural racism, exists and maintains power through the law;[6] and second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, is possible.[7]

Critics of critical race theory argue that it relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism.[8][9][10]




And, yes, I am one of those critics who think this ideology 'relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism'




Why?...because it opposes Liberalism. It opposes the truth that comes from science, as these are all meta-narratives created by a white supremacy to maintain their power.

Now I am a Liberal, and I will support the right of any individual to hold these views. I even think there could be some worth in these opinions. But I am opposed to the way these ideas have become the dogmatic, ideological position in our Universities. I am opposed to the way these ideas are now integrated into our schools. I am opposed to the idea that someone questioning these views is somehow a default racist ( a logical conclusion that must follow if you do hold these views)

I therefore am opposed to any legislation that compels what we can or cannot say, that de-humanises anyone with a counter opinion or tries to impose this as a way of governance. Why? because these ideas are illiberal.


And so we arrive at the title of this post...the problem of confused liberals.


How many people out there, not really understanding the philosophical background or what is at stake, have confused the postion that have come from this Marxist/Critical Theory with the liberal ideas that freed the slaves in the US and created the Civil Rights movement in the US?

How many liberals know, when they say they support BLM, they are supporting an organisation that are in some respects, against the 'meta-narrative' of liberal enlightenment values?

WHAT BLM BELIEVE (This was removed from their website)

Lets finish with a quote shall we...




Yeah..right...like the Critical Race Theorists don't do that!?

Predjudice

prejudge
/priːˈdʒʌdʒ/

verb

form a judgement on (an issue or person) prematurely and without having adequate information.
"it is wrong to prejudge an issue on the basis of speculation"

Here is a simple logical argument....

I hate being prejudged. I hate trying to explain my case when someone has made a decision about me, or for me, based upon insufficient or wrong information.

As I don't like it I can assume everyone else doesn't like and so let's give this a name and call it a morally bad thing to do.

PREJUDICE: It's a bad thing to do. no one likes it so try not to do it.

Even worse is being prejudged by a relatively arbitary fact about oneself, like thinking I'm a drummer so I must be a maniac who likes destroying hotel rooms or that I know nothing about music. (both examples that have been made about me. the first is not true but it would be nice sometimes to go to town on a Premier Inn with a Samurai sword...the second I suppose is up for debate)

Even worse than that would be judging me based upon a group that it is perceived that I belong too. Now we have prejudgments about that group, prejudgments that I belong to that group, prejudgments that I have opinions and beliefs associated with the prejudged opinions or beliefs that it has been prejudged that group has.

Now that's a lot of predjudice right there.

But far worse would be to do this based upon my the perception of how I look. It would be wrong to assume someone is angry because they look angry or sad because they look sad. Or that I'm into drugs because I have long hair and listen to trippy music.

So it's wrong by this logic to assume that someone is male because they look male, or black because they look black, or gay because they look gay. It is wrong to make any assumptions about an individual based upon an arbitary group that YOU have decided they belong to. Check these 'facts' out with the individual first.

It is therefore wrong to assume offence in someone because of the group YOU have decided they belong to and that you think you speak for the opinions and beliefs of that group. 

Groups do not have opinions or beliefs, individuals do.

To assume that all black people have a group opinion, that all Tories have another opinion, to act like these opinions are all in opposition in some huge cosmic dialectical struggle is to make a lot of assumptions. It is prejudicial and by this line of argument morally wrong.

When someone does something morally wrong the best course of action is to let them make their argument, and then try, in the kindest terms, to persaude them they are wrong. If you create a culture where people are open to this kind of criticism then you allow people to change their mind. And we end up with a kinder, wiser culture.

But to try and shut someone down because they have an opinion you think is wrong is dodgy on two levels. Firstly you are not letting the argument happen and not allowing for that person to be argued against and their opinion changed. 

But far worse is the fact that you are assuming you are objectively right, like some totalitarian god who's every utterance is beyond question. That is ugly and sucks.

So for me it seems pretty logical that to cancel, ban, censor, shut down, sack etc beliefs or opinions because of the percieved offense that they may cause to a person that you have assumed belongs to an arbitary group that you believe you can speak for in terms of that groups assumed beliefs and opinions is so full of prejudeice that it should be seen as a heinous moral crime in a society that believes itself civilised.

But in 2021 that is not the case.

But will history look back on our time and see this a good thing or something more in line with the Spanish Inquisition, or medieval witch trials, or the actions of Stalinist Russia or any other totalitarian dictatorships? Screaming at someone that people are dying because of an opinion is not an argument, it's cohersion based upon some sort of imagined heirachy of emotional righteousness. Just explain why the opinion is wrong, thats all you need to do.

So it is my opinion (and only an opinion, so keep your hair on) that political correctness is deeply prejudiced. But I am open to have my mind changed, don't worry, I won't try and have you sacked if you disagree with me. Opinions, like bad people, can change. It is one of the things hope is based upon.

Peace, love and tolerance!

I

Order, Freedom and The Mandalorian and the fall of Cara Dune

I have just finished watching series one and two of The Mandalorian which finally delivers everything any Star Wars fan would want from a Star Wars sequel.

I have written elsewhere about the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, this idea that in humanity's story there is a tug between the ordered perfection of Apollo and the chaotic hedonism of Dionysus. That Apollo and Dionysus were sons of Zeus, suggests that these two attributes are part of a whole, and their two and fro tugging is an essential part of character of Zeus, who was of course, king of the gods.

The Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy underpins Greek tragedy and in so doing, most great drama.

And this dichotomy plays out beautifully in The Mandalorian, who through-out the series learns to balance his adherence to the Mandalorian code with his own personal love and devotion to 'the kid'.

But in the Star Wars world Apollonian order is represented by the Empire. Too much order is a bad thing, it becomes an ideology where a whole planet can be destroyed in the name of creating order. The antidote to this of course, is the American myth of the 'good sheriff'. It's a different kind of order, where power is thrust onto someone who does not want power, but who's bravery and their belief good bestows them with the badge of office, and they go onto rule wisely. The suggestion being that it is their lack of want for power that holds the key to them being a good ruler. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

What I found very interesting is how The Mandalorian is above all this, in the end he is driven by his love for Grogu. And towards the end we see there is a problem with this as this could unseat his moral centre, which has been provided by the Mandalorian code.

This comes to an apex when he removes his helmet to scan his face in 'The Believer'. The moment when he removes that helmet to get the facial-recognition scan declares that the welfare of Grogu is more valuable to Mando than his own lifelong moral code, something echoed in his message to Moff Gideon at the end of the episode. In that episode we see the Mandalorian have a discussion with Migs Mayfield about morals. Migs has none it seems, and does whatever he needs to to get by. He says that the order of the Republic (ie. the goodies) is no better than the order of The Empire. (I can't help but agree with this point.) But later we see Migs does have morals when he stands up and kills the captain of the Imperial base. For this Cara Dune, one of the many 'sheriffs that didn't want the job but are brave and good' grants Migs his freedom.

In the final episode the top baddie, Moff Gideon has the fnal showdown with the Mandalorian. Moff can be seen as The Mandalorian's shadow. They are both driven by the same 'interest' shall we say, in Grogu. When the Mandalorian falls into a stalemate with Moff, Moff delivers a speech, where he says that he has what he wants from Grogu (his blood) and all he wanted to do was study him as he was very precious, and if he stopped fighting he could take Grogu and go. This is a very reasonable thing to say. All Moff is trying to do is create order, and he needs to understand Grogu's powers to do this.

It is Moff's 'reasonableness' that makes him seem human at this point. We see The Mandalorian nearly agreeing to this but then of course Moff attacks; his 'reasonableness' was just a front. In reality he is still a power crazed Hitler with an unhealthy attachment to order.

The good life is not about order, it is the balance between order and freedom, which is personified in the Jedi.

As I was watching this a very real tug of war between order and chaos emerged, and Cara Dune (or in reality actress Gina Carano) was sacked from The Mandalorian and dropped from her agency.

This 'punishment' was for tweet she posted where she supposedly compared Nazi's to the victims of The Holocaust, the Jews to Republicans. 

Now in the tug of war between order and freedom is it right to ruin someones career over ANY comment they make on Twitter? Is this the right amount of order, or too much order? Are those who sacked her acting like The Empire? Or like a good sheriff, simply killing off a baddie?

Sometimes real life is not as black and white as mainstream drama.

Well, YOU get to be the good sheriff now...you have the badge and the gun...what would you do...?

Here is the tweet in question...

Here is my opinion on this tweet for what it's worth...

Firstly, the image I have not seen before and is very powerful, it demonstrates the true horror and ugliness of too much order. This poor woman, in complete fear, without her dignity being chased by what looks like children...the mob rules. Horrible...

Then Gina states what is a fact, and it fits the picture; 'Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbours...even by children'

This is true and it makes the point that the evils of an Empire like the Nazis could only have been carried out by normal people like you and me.  How could normal people like you and me end up committing atrocities like this?

Then follows a quote...I don't know where it comes from...(is Gina quoting herself here?)

The quote tries to answer this question. It says people don't realise that to exercise this sort of power, a government would have first had to make 'their own neighbours hate them for simply being Jews'

This I think is another statement of fact in my opinion.

She then asks the question 'how is it any different to hating someone for their political beliefs?' Well Gina there is a difference, Political beliefs are a personal choice and being a Jew is not. But she does not make this statement, she asks the question. It is for us to answer. It's clunky but I get her point and I do agree with it. And the Nazi's did the same to those with opposing political beliefs.

So why was she sacked?

We have a situation here where Gina Carano's has been punished by those in power. They have tried their best to destroy her career. And this is because she asked the question (to paraphrase) 

How was the hate instilled in normal people by the Nazi's towards the Jews any different to the hate being stirred up today against people with opposing political beliefs?

So let me clarify this...she does not compare Jews to Republicans. She does not mention Republicans. She compares their hate. She asks a question about this after stating two verifiable facts. 

My opinion is that comparing being a Jew to someones political beliefs is clunky, and I don't know why she is quoting this when it seems like her saying it. I would have made it more apparent that I was comparing the aspect of 'hate' but it's a tweet for Christ's sake...

So you are the good sheriff with the power...would you destroy her career for saying this, The fact that those in power are attempting to do this actually for me adds weight to the very point she is making. Who is the Moff Gideon in all of this? Is is Trump and the alt right or is it simply the media. When we finally find out who the real villain is and they remove their helmet, will it be Mark Zuckerberg (this is a joke btw)

Before I sign off I think it's worth posting a tweet from the Mandalorian himself (or to come back to reality, the actor Pedro Pascal.

 

Is this a fair comparison? Well no...those kids are not going to be carted off to a gas chamber. As a comparison to the Holocaust it's even more clunky than Gina's post. And it is specific in it's target, infering that those who put those kids in that cage are like those who put those Jews in that concentration camp.

I am not a Republican supporter, I am not right wing. I agree with both points made in these tweets. They make points that I think are valid, correct and coming from a morally good place. 

But they have different targets. Pedro is targeting the right and specifically the Trump administration where as we can guess that Gina is targeting those who are pouring hate on those who support Trump.

This must be therefore why she was sacked. She was sacked for her political beliefs. Pure and simple.

The story The Mandalorian tells is thousands of years old. That good comes from the balance of the Apollonian with the Dionysian. It is an eternal tug of war where the voices of order and freedom must both be welcomed and listened to. We must never think we are on the right side of history with an absolute say on what is morally correct. That is where all the atocities start.

Let's try and work at getting along and stop this idea that it's okay to ruin someones career because they said something you don't think is right because one day it might just be you that isn't right.

Let's all try and be the good sheriff.

Twenty Twenty

 

2020 is finally drawing too a close. The latest traverse around the Sun has been troublesome for the human residents of Planet Earth this time round.

Humans are a strange animals that count their subjective success as though it's objective. They think because they have created stuff they think great like religion, agriculture, the internet, ear pods etc, that that makes them great on some cosmic level.

They haven't been able to work out if there is a God but for those who think there is, they have made themselves the apple of that God's eye; A whole Universe created for humans so that you can pray for a parking space when you go Christmas shopping.

This has lead to a subjective arrogance where the humans think they are destroying the planet, a planet that has faced catastophic calamaties for 4.5 billion years despite the fact that humans only invented trousers 700 years ago.

So it came as a shock to them in 2020 when a tiny little virus came along and caused so much trouble. But this virus had timed it's arrival just right. The Coronavius is not one of your alpha diseases like bubonic plague or ebola. But if you are over eighty or stricken with serious health issues it could take you out. In any other period of human history it would have come along and done it's thing, perhaps not noticed by a population who felt lucky making it to sixty.

But this is 2020....not 1820.

And so we come to the unique quality of human arrogance. The great band Fishbone once released an album called 'Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Centre of the Universe'. This is true.

The viewpoint of every human is outwards. We all do exist at the centre of a Universe that we have created inside our own minds. For all of us space actually spins outwards from our consciousness and we exist in an eternal now where the past and future are constructs that we continually have to make exist in our eternal now. Our experience is spatial and our knowledge is temporal. In that we create our philosophy which essentially organises the spatial and temporal in a way that suits us well. We call this The Truth.

But by 2020 the humans had spent fifty years asking the question 'What is truth'? They never did know what truth is but now they threw their toys out the pram in the realisation after all the stuff they had invented, diseases they had cured, art they had created, they hadn't a clue what it is!

Into that void came all the superstitions, tribalism, bigotrys, dogmas, ideologies, hate and anger that had plagued the humans up to the point where they had invented the trousers. It had been a slow process to cotton on to ways of doing things that benefited them best and it had been a long hard battle. But just as they arrived at a point where more of the population were free, healthy and able to fulfill themselves than ever before, they called all of that into question. Objective morality reared it's ugly head again. Into the void where there was no truth stepped a new agenda and anyone who questioned this was objectively wrong. The question now was who was wearing the trousers and was it fair. Fairness could be attained in two competing ways; either by creating opportunity for everyone (feeding the pig) or controlling the outcomes (weighing the pig). These two positions were no longer seen as two essential voices locked in an ongoing disussion that continually renegotiated the balance, but two positions deemed as objectively evil by the other side. 

So into this state of affairs steps the Coronavirus. The humans had something to fight against this; Science, by far their best way of determining truth. But what happens when you have had fifty years of French philosphers shrugging their shoulders and saying 'qu'est-ce que la vérité?' What happens to science then? It gets hobbled thats what! (And the Coronavirus rubs it's little hands together with glee)

It is not the virus that will kill us all but dogma and ideology. The ideology of the free market, or the ideology of Marx, the conspiracy theories or the dogma of identity politics. And it is this that is the disaster that has befallen us in 2020. We don't need positions. We need negotiation. 

It is sobering to think that the great killer of the twentieth century was not a virus, but the death camps of Nazi Germany, and of the Marxists regimes in the USSR, China, Cambodia and currently in North Korea. That's 100s of millions of people murdered. The great danger that has emerged in 2020 is not this virus. But the idea that if someones opinion differs from yours then they are objectively wrong, and a rightful recipient of your anger, even when the evidence tells you otherwise.

Have a look at that pic. What DOES the piano really represent?

I used to be indecisive (but now I'm not so sure)

There is a bit of science that I find truly astonishing...

It is one of the conclusions that comes from Einstein's theory of relativity. In his theory we do not have three dimensions that are then subservient to time, with relativity space and time are relative and determined by each other. This means your position in time is determined by where you are and what speed you are travelling at.

From this we get this famous idea that if you travel near the speed of light then you will age slower than those relative to you who are not. (remember when the lost fighter pilots return in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the guy says 'Einstein was right'?)

But this also has anothe bizarre ramification. There does not exist an event that is not in the past for some distant observer. For this to be the case it means that every event that has happened, is happening and will happen is written into the fabric of space/time. If the future is written then our paths are determined and we have no free will.

Now it could be that every act of free will creates a new universe of possibilities and there are actually an infinite amount of universes based upon every possible act of free will. But for this to be the case it would mean when we make a decision, at that moment in time, there was the possibility of making another decision. But I cannot see how if we roll the dice again under the exact same situation, that the same numbers won't keep coming up again and again. (As Einstein once famously said"God does not play dice with the universe.")

Of course, if you do have any arguments against relativity, please address all correspondence to A Einstein...

In 1983 the cognitive psychologist asked volunteers to press a button at the time of their choice, whilst at the same time remembering the position of the second hand on a clock. What this experiment showed was the voluteers pressed the button before they had the conscious desire to do so.

This experiment sggests that our decision making is not conscious, a decision starts way down in our sub-conscious beyond our rational decision making process.
Our decision making is dependent entirely on what has gone before. And these events are written into the space/time continuum of our universe.

The only conclusion is that there is no free will and we live in an entirely determined universe.

But even though these arguments seem valid and we actually operate as though the unverse is a determined place (eg. If I throw a ball I always expect it to drop down, not keep flying upwards) it is hard to stomach the fact that we don't have a free will.

As I'm writing this I am searching my mind about what to say and how to say it. Everytime I hit the delete buttton it is evidence of my free will. And yes, I decided to spell buttton with three 'ts' as evidence that I'm in charge, making decisions (any other typos are accidents of course)

And I have seen arguments for free will based upon quantum indeterminancy but I cannot see the correllation that the strange actions of sub atomic particles would have any influence on how we make decisions, or how knowing this fact somehow discounts all the stuff that I have already argued in this article.

This is troublesome stuff, especially to anyone who believes in an omnipotent God who has bestowed the (contradictory) super power of free will on humans so that they can choose to love him (very reminiscent of that scene in Spartacus when Crassus, who now owns Spartacus' wife and could possess her when ever he wanted, is still frustrated when she will not choose to want him, but such is the psychology of the bloodthirsty dictator)

So I tend to think that our feeling of free will would be better described as our on going agency. At every moment of our eternal now we are making decisions that were always written in to the fabric of space/time, ie. there is only ever one decision we are going to make, but that decision can only be made if we believe that there are a number of possible decisions that could be made at any given point in time. 

In other words free will is a pragmatic illusion human beings require to operate, a construction of our consciousness, as real as the construction we make of the past and our imagined future.

....and anyone who disagrees with me is a racist

Those who truly abhor racism and prejudice need to stop and examine the theory and mechanism that works against these horrible tendencies in our society.

This means truly defining what prejudice is, understanding what philospophical moral theories have been most successful in reducing racism and prejudice in society and examining our history too see how totalitarian states have been toppled or how equal rights have actually been improved.

The knee jerk reaction of countering prejudice with more predjudice which is seen in the philosophically unsound current ideologies that will brand anyone a racist that disagrees with your knee jerk reaction, is in itself, the fuel that drives predjudice in our society today.

The circle of the extreme right and extreme left in terms of identity politics actually meet in the same place, and it's a place where the wielding of absolute power against the individual is the core of the dogma that drives their collective mission. 

Part of this mission has been a redefining of what racism is. It's a definition that will cast a doubt on my ability to define racism, not based upon checking if my definition is correct, but by casting doubt on me personally because their ideological identity politic would define me as white (even though my mother is half Indian and was born in Calcutta)

These ideologies have their roots in Marxist and post modernist ideas. I am very interested in both these philosophies and can list the merits in both. But as with many philosophies, there are great faults in their structure. These faults are not understood by those who now propound these beliefs and there for me lies the problem.

And these faults are exposed by cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and the English and American philosphical traditions of logic and academic rigour. But individuals from these areas who have raised criticism have been branded by the ideological left as racists and in many ways had their ideas challenged not by countering their arguments, but by the attempted besmirchment of their character or the character of their audience.

This dogmatic, ideological approach is spreading through our society and these ideas are being wired into our institutions as we speak. Anyone who has been asked to tick a box defining their race has come up against this, even though this is obviously a racist act. But we live in the world where calling out this racism could get you branded a racist.

So at this point, I would like to say I agree with the motivations of the ideological left, I am not a racist but I have real problems with their philosophy, to the point where I find this ideology racist and it is within those terms that I disagree with their ideas.

Of course I am using their methods of besmirchment against them, but again, this exposes the problems in that ideological position.

If you study your history one of the things that beat racism was THE TRUTH. ('but what is truth?' I hear the post modernists counter...go away please) 

The races in terms of their abilities, morality, talents and intelligence are equal. Science proves this unequivocably. Inconsequential genetic differences like skin colour do not create any real difference between races. Only through a respect for truth can this fact have any power in a society. And the truth is that the races are a social construct in themselves (the ideological left love social constructs)

Is anyone out there who is asking 'what is truth?' really want to disagree with this? The ideological left have to agree with these points, even though the post modern theory their whole ideology rests on would have to question the veracity of this truth.

So I will state these facts again (post modernists hate facts, as do politicians)

The races do not actually exist. Therefore any attribute given to any race does not exist. There is only one race; human beings and their abilities are equally spread and do not correlate to any imagined racial group.

Yes...the races do not really exist. Races were created by those in power to retain power. Racism has been successfully countered by those groups who identified with a race and then argued they are same as the other races. Think about that and then ask yourself if a statement like Black Lives Matter is rooted in those philosophical terms?

The fact that a power structure has defined a group with an identity will not be beaten by identity politics. But there is something far more sinister at work here and this is the reason for this post.

Much as I would like to try and define racism, show how liberal philosophy came up with the real arguments that in the end demolished the slave trade worldwide and show why the civil rights movements of the sixties worked, and then show how elements of the ideological left identity politics actually run against these because they are essentially racist in their ideology, but I think anyone reading this will begin to see the faults in this dogma anyway by looking at it from another angle. 

But let's for a minute forget all this and turn our focus on a Russian military man, turned theater director, turned political aide to Putin...Vladislav Surkov....

Surkov came up with a political approach called Sovereign Democracy. This is an approach that creates confusion, distraction, obsfucation in your electorate whilst giving them enough of a standard of living to shut up and put up. It is what has given Putin the illusion of a democratic mandate for so many years. And it's a method that seems to be getting more and more popular across the rest of globe.

Surkov's ideas could well be rooted in his time as a theater director, where the world is your stage and you pull the strings of the characters and political movements of your creation. Surkov advocated the financing of neo Nazi groups and Marxist groups in his country. By creating that division within the electorate a perceived, fake vacuum emerges that get's filled by a disguised totalitarian force.

From wikipedia...

In 2013, Surkov was characterized by The Economist as the engineer of "a system of make-believe", "a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements".
In Western media outside Russia, a vocal and eloquent critic of Surkov and of the administration of Vladamir Putin in general has been Peter Pomerantsev. Pomerantsev has written op-eds in The Atlantic, The New York Times and the The London review accusing Surkov, "Putin's chief ideologue" with "unsurpassed influence over Russian politics", of turning Russia into a "managed democracy", and of reducing Russion politics to nothing but "post modernist theatre". In a talk before the Legatum Institute Pomerantsev, along with Pavel Khodorkovsky, termed Russia a "postmodern dictatorship".

Look at Trump in the US and Prime Minister Boris Cummings in the UK and ask yourself if we are now moving towards a 'managed democracy' within a 'post modern dictatorship'?

The 'stage managed media and fake social movements' could well be driving the current movements in the US and UK. 

It's obvious that the BLM protestors trying to tear down the structure and the teenage gunslingers trying to take out the protestors could just be a very lucky occurence for Trump and his supporters. Or it could all be very well stage managed. 

We just don't know do we?

Through out the eighties and nineties the West blamed Colonel Gaddafi for various terrorist attrocities when they knew all along Syria was to blame. When the Arab spring happened the west supported those protestors who went onto the streets to argue against the dictatorships they were living under. Here we had a truly democratic movement that was without ideology or a leader, organised through Twitter and Facebook that managed to topple these totalitarian states. But the vacuum created by this movement was filled by even more dictatorial and ideoligical power elites and ended up with the West and Russia supporting Assad as he bombed the people of Syria out of existence.

Now with this in mind, think about Trump, BLM and the woke movement....is all of this a clever retelling of events to try and maintain a far right elite in the US? Is Trump really being hurt by the protests of the ideological left? Seriously...is this movement really doing what it says it's doing?

Our political world is changing. The billionaire elites are growing stronger and stronger. The unquestioned countenance of the ideological left in our culture is matched only by the unassailable right wing in our political domain. Are these two things linked?

So going to the start of my post, you will not beat predjudice with more predjudice. Questioning the ideas behind identity politics does not make you a racist. especially if the divisions created by identity politics are serving a hidden political agenda that I have hinted at above.

So let me reiterate. The bounds required to identify a group are not only arbitary but also fake. Everyone has the right to identify with a group but applying any attribute to that group is essentially prejudiced. defining another individual as part of another group and defining that group with attributes is also prejudiced. 

This is how racism started in the first place. Arguing that it is redistribution of power is a move backwards towards tribalism. And again, racism is rooted in tribalism.

The power dynamics that defined these racial groups and the feeling that people have to identify with those groups is very real and is again a product of racism. Nobody is born believing they are black or white, this is put on us all. Yes we do end up identifying as racial groups (and even then, how many individuals feel stuck between two arbitary divisions all of their life) but the way to beat this is by promoting how we are the same not different. 

These divisions are fake. Do not let anyone use your justified abhorrence of prejudice and division to back you into a defensive corner. Remember Martin Luther King and Gandhi. They were right.

And this means promoting equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. 

'I don't want nobody

To give me nothing
Open up the door
I'll get it myself…' James Brown

And if you find some of the ideas inherent in the ideological left a bit...well...prejudiced, uniformed and dogmatic, this does not make you a racist. Anyone who says you are is simply a twat.

A lot of the ideas in this post came from the documentary HYPE- NORMALISATION

What everyone has forgotten about education

 

If animals could sing they would sing 'We don't need no education' but they can't sing so they never do. 

(I did see a parrot singing a Beyonce song the other day but I hope that this is the exception that proves the rule)

Animals do have skills and abilities but they don't need to be educated, those skills come naturally. Those skills are wired into every animal's very being, and the wiring is contained in their genes so those skills can be passed down through the generations. Those skills also evolve as their enviroment and situation changes.

Even the bird that can sing like Beyonce can do so because it has a heritable ability, wired into the animal at birth.

So anyone who says that we are a blank slate, a tabula rasa, is wrong.

We, like animals, are born with certain skills wired in. This does not mean we are born with those skills. What we are born with is an innate drive and ability to learn those skills ourselves. And we will learn those skills ourselves using the natural enviroment around us.

When a baby is born it has a huge motivation and drive to learn to move, grasp, look, flinch, crawl, stand, walk and run. These are all incredibly difficult skills. Anyone who has tried to design a robot will tell you it is easier to program them to work out chess moves than it is to make them pick up the chess pieces and move them. Baby's are like space probes. They arrive on this planet but instead of being programmed to collect dirt and take photographs they are wired to do what babies do. (grasp, look, flinch, crawl etc)

But babies are programmed to learn stuff that other animals aren't. Babies are programmed to learn to talk. Now this does not mean they are born talking. But you don't need to teach a baby to talk. They are born with the ability to teach themselves to talk. They just need to hear other humans talk. This is a very important fact about humans. 

A child will teach themselves to talk but they will not teach themselves to read or write. Reading and writing is not something that we are born with an ability to learn ourselves. It is a skill that will develop through some sort of inflicted outside agency. (ie. a teacher has to force us to do repetitive stuff to develop that skill)

And reading and writing is such an important skill that we have as a species developed a huge system across the globe that teaches this skill. At a very young age we force children to spend all their days in a building where adults will force them to repeat over and over the actions required to learn to read. We also will force them to repeat over and over the actions required to learn their times tables, the order of the days of the week, the months of the year, what date the Norman's invaded England etc. Repetition is at the heart of so many skills that we were all taught at school.

So here are the things that I think get forgotten about education.

1) People intuitively learn some things but not other things. Education is about teaching what is counter intuitive.

2) Most knowledge and skills a based in part but fundamentally on some sort of repetive 'learning by rote' method.

3) People will intuitively repeat certain actions to learn certain skills but will not repeat other actions. Education forces them to do these fundamental but counter intuitive repetitions.

4) Knowledge as well as skill is based upon rote learning. You cannot 'know' history without memorising certain historical facts and you cannot 'learn' music without memorising certain scales and chords.

So to put it simply, in every subject there are intuitive aspects. ie. aspects the that the student will work out or develop themselves, and there are counter intuitive aspects that will need to be taught.

Education is the transmission of counter intuitive skills and knowledge.

'Talent' or 'ability' or ''aptitude' may be the student's individual motivation and inclination to partake in the repetitive actions required to develop the knowledge or skills associated with excellence in that subject. Why would a certain student possess more motivation than another? This is because we all like different stuff. People liking different stuff is possibly the key to humankind's success. Education is about developing these different likes. This is fundamentally why education has to be student focused.

In today's education we try and teach the student too much. 

This does not allow for the repetition required to really develop the fundamental skill or knowledge needed to truly understand that subject. It is better to go deeply into a narrow but fundamental aspect of any given subject than try and cover everything. Inside maths is physics, chemistry, music. Inside music is art, history, maths. All the subjects are contained within each other. We should not value certain subjects over others (as in the preference for teaching the three 'Rs' or today's preference for STEM subjects)

We need to identify and develop a students likes and teach the fundamental,counter intuitive aspects of their likes in a way that opens them up to an understanding of all the subjects. We need to teach, to quote William Blake, the ability 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand'

A good teacher will always be looking for skill and knowledge development. It logically follows that they will know when those skills have been developed.  In 2020 in the UK the government, unable to test this skill development in an examination setting because of COVID 19, decided to create an algorhythm that would assign grades to students based upon how close they were to the ideal, privleged, well off, middle class, rule follower that would make the perfect citizen in their view of a perfect society where everyone should be aspiring to be a privleged, well off, middle class, rule follower.

Of course it was a disaster

And so they had no choice but to ask the teachers what grade they thought the student would have achieved. This of course was much more accurate because teachers inherently will know this. On the whole they have no motivation to cheat in this regard, in fact most teachers only cheat when they are faced with another ridiculous algorythm than dictates to them how many students in their class should pass. (have I let that secret out the bag? No worries, no one is reading this...)

Let's scrap examinations and let the teachers tell us how good the student is in the same way we let doctors tell us what is wrong with us and driving instructors whether someone is fit to drive. 

So there we have it. Find out what the student likes and focus on those areas, they will intuitively learn certain things, the teacher is there to teach the counter intuitive. Teach the fundamentals in a way that let's all the other subjects in and allow for repetition so that the student will develop a real understanding of the subject rather that memorising facts that they can trot out in an examination. In fact, scrap exams and trust the teachers to tell you how good they are and in doing this put the focus back on teaching and not assessment.

Is this what everyone has forgotten about education?

Well...perhaps forgotten is the wrong word. 

You see school and college is not really about education is it? Really they are about contrition and conformity. This is why education, like the NHS and defence, becomes a political football. And this is because we also see education as a method of creating ideal citizens for whatever ideological political system you adher to. 

Education is really there to create little politically correct drones that will only excel in the STEM subjects you will force them to excel in so they can contibute to your economy without asking too many questions. And this is why we don't really educate our children, because if we were to do that they might start thinking for themselves. The right want conformity, the left want contrition. It's all the same thing really. And that is really not to question anything or be truly creative but to adher to a set of values that have their root fundamentally in the unquestioned application of power, and this comes from both sides of the political spectrum. 

This is truly a dangerous situation.......

Anxiety is your friend

In my teenage years I hit a major problem in my life, It stopped me going out, seeing my friends, it affected me doing my school work and taking exams. 

It had been with me all my life but as I approached fifteen my worry about stuff got to the point where I could not function normally anymore.

I didn't really have a word for what I was suffering with but I now call it Anxiety.

anxiety
/aŋˈzʌɪəti/

noun

1.
a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome.
"he felt a surge of anxiety"


2.
strong desire or concern to do something or for something to happen.
"the housekeeper's eager anxiety to please"


What I had is described in definition one, I definitely didn't have definition two, I had no desire to concern myself with anything and my only desire was for the anxiety to stop.


Anxiety is like a dreaded realistion, it has it's roots in a day dream. Thoughts come from nowhere and your inner voice throws horrible scenarios into your imagined future. I call this catastrophising.


There is not only the thought that something bad is going to happen but also the though that you will not be able to cope if that bad thing does happen. In fact this bad thing will be your undoing, things are going to spiral out of control. It will be like stepping into quicksand and you won't be able to get out. In the end this thing will consume you whole. Into oblivion you go!


Last night I watched the brilliant film 'Gravity'. In this film an astronaut gets trapped out in space. The film is terrifying as it really conveys that feeling of spinning out of control into nothingness. The astronaut (brilliantly played by Sandra Bullock) who eventually gets trapped out in space all on her own starts out being trapped with another astronaut played by George Clooney. She is full of fear and this is based in her inexperience, where as George has no fear and seems to know what to do in every situation. But George eventually dies out in space and she is left alone. Alone, in the dark, with no one to help, and without the skills or knowledge to get home. This for me sums up the terror that can arise in catastrophising.


The film does offer a solution and I would love to examine the themes of rebirth and evolution that are so well explored in that film. But I won't so go and check it out.


Instead I want to look at how you can deal with Anxiety. I have never conquered my anxiety fully but I have learned to live with it by making it my friend. and it is your best friend as it is only trying to look after you in the end. Anxiety is there inside you for a reason. I imagine it to be a small frightened child tugging at your leg and telling you about all these terrible things that might happen. And what do you do with a frightened child? Protect them, reassure them, love them.
Your anxiety is the child in you and they are scared. You cannot ignore this child even if they start nagging you at the worst times, when you are trying so hard to be the grown up.
You still cannot ignore this scared little child. This child is you. It's you when you were little, frightened and afraid, all alone, in the dark, with no one to help without the skills or knowledge to to see rationally that it's just a shadow on the wall, or a strange sound the central heating makes.


Yes...anxiety is usually rooted in the irrational. Your catastrophising has lead you make two plus two equal five. And you know this too. But it is not you that is scared. It's the child in you. And that child is trying to warn you, to help you, to look after you. But they have got it wrong.
To beat anxiety you need to put them back to bed and make them realise they are safe and not alone. That there is an adult there that loves them and will protect them from harm. You are that adult. You have the ability and knowledge to look after yourself no matter what. You are no longer a child.


I believe it is this process of growing up that helps to control anxiety.


But before you can do this you need to realise what anxiety is and how it is your friend.


So let's imagine you were creating a human being. You have the body, the arms and legs, eyes and ears etc. You have made this human and you place it in the world. And it just sits there, it does nothing until it dies.
So you place in that human a thing called desire. Now the human wants things; food, comfort, sex, company etc. So now the human starts doing things. And this desire cultivates curiosity. The human begins to imagine ways to maximise the pleasure gained from attaining more and more of what they desire. More food, a better house, more sexual partners and loads of friends that don't ever get on your nerves. But this has a downside. Animals come along and eat the humans. Other humans kills them for their stuff but most strange of all, some humans kill themselves out of a curiosity to work out the biggest mystery of them all....death. Yes...without your fear of death what is there to stop you killing yourself right now?


Death is a real problem for these humans you have made, as you can see these humans keep compelling themselves into an early death.
So you put another thing into the humans to act as a balance to the all the desire and curiosity. You develop a death threat checker. This is a thing that scans the human's enviroment and situation and keeps tabs on anything that might lead to death. It also has a mechanism like an alarm system that will go off when threat is detected and prepare the human to either run away as fast as they can or in the worst case scenario, try and fight off what ever is trying to kill them.


This seems to work well, part of the human is full of curiosity and desires, exploring the world, finding things out, learning etc and balanced by the threat checker which learns also by experience, seeing what tends to kill other people and literally avoids these things like the plague.


But the humans now have another problem, every now and then a terrible unforseen catastrophe comes along (climate change, a strange virus, freak weather incidents) and wipes them all out. So you develop in the humans a really strange attribute....creativity.


These creative types are scattered through the community and come up with mad random ideas based upon mad random problems that rest of the group didn't even know were problems.These creative types scan for unforeseen problems. They come up with strange solutions to problems that the rest didn't see as problems. But, boy, do they come up with some cool stuff!
Instead of just picking the berries why don't we grow them instead? Let's not hunt and eat these animals, let's capture them and breed them, Why don't we try and ride on that horse? And isn't there a way we can put a delicious noodle meal in a pot that we can just add boiling water to?


Creative types ask new questions and try and come up with new solutions. Creative types need problems to exist and actively go out looking for them!


But in these creative humans there was another problem. They kept coming up with threats that weren't there. They spent their whole time worried about mad stuff that none of the others were worried by. Their desire for perfection turned in on itself and they began to criticise and loathe themselves. Any traumatic event, especially in their youth, acted as fuel to this fire. Their inner compulsion to fix everything finally turned itself in on their very being and they started to think they weren't good looking enough, clever enough, or even able to cope with all these threats that they now imagined were there.
They were pretty annoying and got on the rest of the groups nerves but every now and then they came up with amazing stuff like the wheel, or farming, or buildings, or art and music and even eventually Pot Noodles which pleased the group immensely.


So they put up with them.


So you can see everyone has anxiety, it is a very useful thing that checks for threats and stops you getting killed. But in people who have imagination and resourcefulness this mechanism turns into a monster. This ability to catastrophise is useful to the group but a pain in the arse to anyone who suffers with it.


So if this all sounds familiar then I am going to give you two pieces of advice that may help with your anxiety. One is easy, the other not so.


The first is the easy one...be creative!


Anxiety is only a problem when it is not acted upon. When that frightened child is pulling on your leg and you are trying to be grown up and so you tell them to shut up and be quiet, they are going to kick off, full on tantrum. So you need to be sympathetic to them. And you do this acting on their worries. And this does not mean running around panicking.
It means being creative and letting that mechanism have it's outcome in activity. The anxiety wants something to happen, so make something happen that expresses that anxiety. Paint a picture, write a poem. make some music, write a blog, make a sculpture, create a garden, design a thing that does something cool. Whatever floats your boat.
And when the catastrophising self loathing kicks in and tells you that whatever you create will be crap, just say to yourself you are doing this for therapy reasons. It's not for anyone else, it is for you and you alone to get you out of this horrible state.
In the film Gravity, Sandra Bullock saves herself with her own creativity, with her own strange idea that comes from an almost supernatural source.
This is so true of creativity.
You are not really the author of your creativity so don't judge yourself by it.
Let it flow...anxiety > creative thoughts > creation of things in the world.
For more about this please have a look here...


The Anatomy of Creativity


And now for second, the harder bit.


All anxiety, as we have discussed, is basically trying to avoid death. We avoid death by being frightened of it. All anxiety, whether it be worry about what people think of you or being alone etc, has it's fundamental root in the fear of death.
Fear of death is ultimately the fear of the unknowable.


To conquer anxiety you need to conquer your fear of death. Most people I know who suffer with anxiety have an exaggerated fear of death itself (the fear of a horrible death, like spinning helplessly out into deep space) or they fear what is beyond death.


In Gravity, after going through an almost embryonic rebirth, Sandra Bullock accepts she is going to die and it is that moment that she finds the solution to her problems (and this is by accessing the adult, brave part of her own nature)
We all need to accept we will die, we need to accept the unknowable.
In most cases we slip away into a peaceful sleep. I have told myself that death is a natural process and in that process we will have an inbuilt acceptance of our fate. That part of our nature is not apparent at this time because we still need to have a fear of death to keep ourselves alive. But that fear will go when the time comes and we will not enter into death in a scared state. My proof for this is that nobody ever does.
But the fear of the unknowable is really the fear of yourself before you were born. Accept the fact that the fear you have now about this huge unknowable void is a required fear. But that void is unknowable. When we take away all the things in nature that are trying to take us into that void (ie. the threats we spend our time trying to avoid) we are left with everything in nature that sustains us. We feel this when we walk into the sunshine.
The sun gives us life and fills us and our world with the energy to sustain life.
One day it will hurl everything we know into that unknowable void.
But could that not be a part of this beautiful sustenance that surrounds us?
Nothing nature is truly bad. from everything that seems to be destroyed we see the roots of the new. And so it will be with our own death. It may be unknowable but as everything that we see as bad is rooted in our own death, we can see that badness disappears once you accept your own death as part of this beautiful natural process that mysteriously is sustaining us right now.


This is the only thing you should have faith in. Learn to love your inner child and learn to look after them. And learn to see how everything around you is looking after you. We all have our place. Accept your place in the world, move forward and enjoy the ride, whatever that ride might be.


And learn to accept your death like George Clooney....(watch the film)

Why I am not a Christian

When I was about fourteen my mate at school starting going out with a born again Christian. 

She was in a club called The Christian Union and one dinner time she dragged me and my mate along to a meeting they were having.

During the meeting I pointed out a couple of things to them which to me at fourteen seemed quite obvious. They of course had no sensible answer to my points and so they told the rest of the group that I was in league with the Devil.

Now before I continue with this post I need to inform you that to the best of my knowledge I am not in league with the Devil or with anyone else for that matter.

And the reason for this is because is not because I don't have any allegiance to Satan but because he, like God, does not exist.

'How can you be sure God does not exist?' you might thinking....'just because there is no proof He exists doesn't mean there is any proof that He doesn't'

I hope in this post to show that is not true.

But whatever argument I come up with to show God does not exist, it will have no affect on your average Christian because, as my experience showed me that dinner time at the Christian Union, logical arguments don't work on christians. They have this thing called 'faith' where you believe something regardless...it's one of the things you need to have to be in the club. And believe me, it is a club. Most people I think are christians not because the doctine actually makes sense, but because they are in a club and their friends are in that club. And they have things they do together in that club together. To me being a christian is like being in the scouts, it's somewhere you go every week and see your mates and and discuss wholesome things. But with added guilt and dogma. (and of course a dash of pedophilia)

You might be wondering what I said to the people down the Christian Union that upset them? Well, it's not the argument that I'm going to expound today that shows how God cannot exist. It was another one (there are so many!). 

The argument I put forth is a famous one and it goes like this. If God is not omni-potent and omni-present then he is not a God. If he is these things then He has control over everything and so the fact that there is evil in the world fundamentally has it's source in Him. And even if he chooses not to act when there is evil it is still, if you are an all powerful entity, an evil act. 

Because God is all powerful and has control over everything He is controlling me writing this and He has chosen that I am not a believer. In other words there is no choice to be a christian because there cannot be free will in a universe created by an omni present and omni potent God. Again, if He chooses to give me free will (which logically He cannot do as he is by definition pulling all the strings) He gives away agency and is no longer all powerful and logically not God.

Now, of course, the christians how no argument for this that fourteen year old me could not easily counter. And so I got branded as evil.

For me this the real problem with Christianity (and many other religions). This branding of people as evil in the subjective viewpoint of your average dogmatic Bible interpreter (a much better name for them) is the source of much of the nastiness that has existed throughout history. I will not accept that every native American murdered in the name of God, or every person tortured in the Spanish Inquisiation, or any country that suffered under the imperialism of countries in the name of Christianity, or every war fought in the name of Christianity did not suffer at the hands of Christians. They did. And they did so because when you believe in dogmatic ideology that is based on YOUR interpretation of a book YOU have decided is the Word of God, you can brand anyone as evil and act in whatever way you want to deal with your subjective perception of 'evil' because you are 'doing the Lord's work'..............yack!

And yet this again is not the argument against Christianity I am going to explain today. 

My proof that God does not exist is based upon the fact that I do not need to prove He exists. It is as simple as that.

There are in fact an infinite number things of things that might exist. God is only one of those things. All these things that might exist only actually exist when there is proof for them. By proof we mean empirical evidence. Now empirical evidence can only be as good as the veracity of your evidence and the logic you use to interpret that evidence, but just because we can never be certain anything truly exists because the evidence may be misinterpreted, does not mean we can accept the existence 'all things that might exist of which God is one'.

So the burden of proof lands with the believer. If you are a Christian you need to come up with some proof God exists. And the proof of your feelings does not count I'm afraid. Feeling in your heart that He exists can also be applied to Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny (two concepts I'm sure are there only to indoctrinate young children into the habit of dogmatic belief).

So if the burden of proof lies with believer. And if you are are tasked with coming up with proof, the first thing you need to do is to define what it is you are about to go looking for evidence for.

And here is the rub...

YOU CANNOT DEFINE THE CONCEPT OF GOD THAT IS SATISFACTORY WITHOUT THAT CONCEPT BEING INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY!

Now this idea is quite hard to grasp, especially if you have been indoctinated to think like a christian thinks. But I will try and explain this further. You need to be able to define what something is before you can claim it exists. If I say there is a thing called a 'kimeepatipoocha' but then I cannot tell you what a kimeepatipoocha is then you can automatically discount it's existence.

So I will tell you what a kimeepatipoocha is. It is an all powerful entity that is in everything. That's the same as saying it's everything. kimeepatipoocha=everything. It's just another word for everything. Then I get all upset and say 'No it is that but it is not the same as everything' and there we have a contradiction that cannot be gotten past. No entity can be both everything and not. In the same way that we know square circles cannot exist because of the logic that is inherent within any definition, and so it is with God.

You cannot have an all powerful God that grant's us free will. You cannot have an omni present God that is not completely a part of all the evil that has ever existed. 

It is for the believer to come up with a definition of God that is satisfactory and not based upon hunches or feelings. This argument also counters the arguments for God that come from the existence of things in the world (ie. the one that goes that the proof of God lies in the design of the Universe or the Word of God that has come to us in The Bible) because even if this proves that there is an entity that has created everything or transmitted an objective moral code to us in a book, these things still point to a being that needs to be defined. In other words I don't think saying God is just powerful wizard or ghost with magical properties is enough to satisfy anyone who actually believes in God, as a definition of what God is.

God needs to be contradictory conceptually. The God that is in everything must also have the potential to not be in everything, as He is all things. It is a mess conceptually. 

('Look, there is God!'...'No.that's a rock')

God does not have the attributes that Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny have (ie. defineability) and that is why we can easily disprove their existence. God is indefinable by His very nature. He is all things to all men. And the reason for this is simple. It is because he was invented by humans in their image. Stop looking for a more complex answer!

Despite the restrictions that religion has imposed on the respect and aquisition of facts, humans have been pretty good at aquiring them. And the method that has worked best for aquiring facts about the universe is to use science. Science is is basically a methodology for checking evidence. And this has worked. It has cured disease, taken us to the moon, created the internet and aeroplanes and pot noodles and all the incredible things that mean we don't have to spend all day looking for food until we died at thirty at the hands of some vicious animal, unamed disease or another human who wanted the bit of food we had found that day. 

And science has discovered things about the universe that are far more fantastical and mystical than some old, beardy father figure sat up in sky looking after us all. The world is a far more interesting place than that. And perhaps there are very powerful entities out there in the universe somewhere waiting to be discovered, but they aren't God.

God is a subjective creation of a species on planet Earth who transfered the feelings of parental protection onto the world around them. Science is the emulation of objectivity, the attempt to see things form God's viewpoint. But our viewpoint in the end is entirely subjective. In reality there is only 'out' and the all and everything is contained in our subjective viewpoint of 'out'. 

In that sense the whole universe is contained completely within ourselves. And so when you look and think you see God really you are seeing yourself. 

Now that IS a profound thought....

Why morality sucks

 

I have just seen this quote by Jordan Peterson...

“You're going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don't do. You don't get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you're going to take. That's it.”

Now I am not one of the anti Peterson brigade, you know the ones...the ones who's first line of criticism is to point out that his fan base is 'predominantly young white males who lack a father figure'. And I do find a lot of what he says interesting.

The father figure comment is interesting though...as though there is a current need for some benign authority figure to come along and tell you to stand up straight, tidy your room and get your hair cut.

Of course that benign father figure who told you what to do was not always Jordan Peterson, it was once God.

So let's start with the idea that morality is someone telling you what is right or wrong. Now that someone might be yourself, but even here we personify this with the tiny angel and devil on our shoulders. We need to be the one telling ourselves what is right or wrong but we'll get to that.

Through-out history the ones that told you what to do were those in authority. This dynamic must have started before humans emerged (Peterson's lobsters?). 

Actions would have had consequences. Someone ate poison berries and died. That consequence would have been noted in the collective viewpoint of the group and measures would have been taken to store this useful knowledge within the group. Natural hierachies would have emerged and those at the top would have had to transmit this useful knowledge of consequences to the group and create strategies to pass this knowledge down through the generations.

As nasty consequences emerged over and over again, the antidote to these recuring bad consquences would have been formed into an over arching framework of rules and restrictions. As good group consequences would have been favourable, these good group consequences would have needed to overide good personal consequences. If someone conveniently killed anyone in the group that got in their way the group would have had to kill or at least stop that person to save the group. And in many cases this would have been someone trying to usurp those in authority, and those in authority would have in some case been tempted to act in a way that was personally beneficial and not group beneficial by arguing there position as as representative of the group. (sound familiar?)

At times of scarcity other groups would tried to come and take your stuff so a tribal morality would have developed. They may have come in peace but brought with them diseases your group were not immune to and infected your group.  Tribes would have become self protecting and self identifying.

Here we can see how ideas of the group and personal liberty start to rub each other up. Group mentality is tribal mentality and this links to our disgust urge.

Disgust is the primal morality. It's deep within all our systems as it developed so long ago. It's what stops us eating the poison berries, it's what makes us suspicious of other tribes, it's what makes us want to kill the murderer and it is the poison of which Dr Peterson speaks.

I have always found the work of Julian Jaynes really interesting. Jaynes was a researcher that developed a theory about the development of our consciousness. It goes like this (from wikipedia)

Jaynes explains (his theory) as a learned behavior that “arises ... from language, and specifically from metaphor.” With this understanding, Jaynes then demonstrated that ancient texts and archeology can reveal a history of human mentality alongside the histories of other cultural products. His analysis of the evidence led him not only to place the origin of consciousness during the 2nd millennium BCE but also to hypothesize the existence of an older non-conscious “mentality that he called the bicameral mind, referring to the brain’s two hemispheres”.

An older. non concious mentality!? Bicameralism can be described as

(the condition of being divided into "two-chambers") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys

I remember reading this book as an early adult and being shocked that this theory was not well known to the wider public. It got me interested in the idea of the 'esoteric'; that certain ideas inherently remain hidden from the wider public and are only accessible with special knowledge.

I think this is one of those ideas. 

We are so used to having an inner monologue (the angels and devils on our shoulder) it is hard to believe that for the most part of human history we acted under the influence of an actual voice at our shoulder (auditory hallucinations tend to emanate from the behind your head just above your shoulder) That we were not concious but automatons reacting to voices that we hallucinated and that these voices told how to act and what to think!

For me this has incredible ramifications to understanding morality if it is the case. Morality would have started out as a voice that told you what to do. It would have been so easy for primitive humans to believe in animal spirits or worship the sun as they may have heard these entities telling them what to do and what not to do. And when their group leader died they would have carried on hearing them tell them what to do. This explains why kings often became gods after they died.

And it is easy to see how morality stopped being advice for good living constantly negotiated by humans and turned in an objective set of rules set out by the authoritarian voice of God.

Jordan Peterson has gained fame by (perhaps correctly) pointing out the tribal morality of the woke left. His ideas have explained how the void created by the confusion that is post modern philosphy has been filled by a return to a pre enlightenment tribalistic morality where the percieved interests of any subjectively determined underpriveleged group are ideologically indisputable regardless of competing moral principles of personal liberty and (most worrying) empiricism and rationalism.

For the social justice brigade a new authoritarian god has emerged. And this a god that states that 2+2 does not equal 4 and that the XX and XY chromosone is a social construct. (yes this is real)

But they have begat a corresponding authoritarian god who warns us to make our bed and choose our poison wisely. It is not healthy.

But every action or inaction does not always have to correspond with the taking of poison either. Again this this is someone trying to tell you what to do by drawing on the disgust urge. And this is the problem I have with that quote.

The disgust urge can be seen as a primal urge that developed in us before we even were humans.

This is contrasted by what could be called a group morality and has been discussed a lot in this post. At it's best we could call it a communitarian morality. At it's worst a totalitarian tribal morality. We have seen an upsetting emergence of this in recent times on both sides of the political debate.

And these two types of morality can be seen as contrasting with a morality based upon personal liberty, at its best a morality of individual freedom, at it's worst the morality of unchecked hedonism.

But I hope we can just keep in our mind the reason why morality sucks, and that is when we forget it's core and roots are in our humanity. For those religious types or those who find solace in the ideas of the extreme right or left they will find this hard to swallow. 

But for the rest of us please try and remember...

Morality is just advice for good living constantly negotiated by humans for humans.

(and if God exists he does not give a toss what we do)