What is pleasing and what is not.

The altruistic act is oft misunderstood, as misunderstood as the self-regarding act. Most acts are arguably self-regarding, and it is important to bear in mind that if they seem, on quick inspection, to be for others, they may be ultimately be for the self. In fact I would go as far as to say that if you tease them out to the furthest point of their implications and their impact, they prove to be this way, and that is no bad thing. The act may be in response to another act, or part of a chain of events that lead to reward, even if that reward is as simple as creating good feeling on the part of the actor. To do to receive, or create, good feeling, bolstering self worth. For Kant (philosopher), reward means that these are not moral acts if they are done with a purpose that is to gain something for oneself. They are not moral acts if they are done because of human conditioning. or understood as part of duty, unless that duty is to the moral law (which his circular argument proposes). They are moral acts because they are the right thing to do, and could be viewed that way by independent observation. If, in doing them, you are acting for something other than the moral law, then they are indifferent. This identification and defining does not attempt to condone or excuse the bad type of selfishness we encounter and recognise, merely to identify the truth of the motivation behind the act. Selfishness then, like many human traits, stops being a purely value-negative indicator, and moves more fittingly onto a sliding scale with what we might name a reasonableness point, a socially or scientifically acceptable line in the sand laying somewhere between its extreme edges. Maybe we could make an XY diagram like in economics, where there are two intersecting lines, one where selfishness rises and another where social utility falls. This is not an unfamiliar way to look at things, consider a similar trait such as ego, where self love is a necessary part of the human psyche, but too much fondness for the self can become problematic, or consider cowardice, where a reasonable amount may be said to be self-preservation, but too much and one may never stand up for anything important.

Acts for others can be part of a religious mandate, warranted by the teachings of a speaker on behalf of the deity, and may have been codified in a text written long after a mythical person was proposed to have lived. They may be a simple plagiarism of the text of an earlier deity’s spokespersons. Understood this way they have no moral impact either, because they are duty. Not felt and understood as part of a personally arrived at set of rights and wrongs based on reasonableness, just rules to be followed because the follower wants the promise of the myth makers. If you feed the poor during the winter festival of Christmas at a salvation army soup kitchen, yet for the rest of the season you ignore the spikes placed under motorway overpasses to prevent the homeless from being dry, then you are acting under the direction of your clergy when they call, but you are unconcerned with what is right or wrong in the world. I personally would go as far as to say if you have ever voted for a right wing political party then you have revealed yourself to be already engaged in a dissonance between caring for self and for others, negating the possibility that you give a hoot other than for being seen to personally participate in putting the band-aid on the stab wound. I think the term for socially effective effort that is solely motivated toward self promotion of the created self, the one that likes likes, is virtue-signalling. It is my belief, I may be wrong, that no religiously motivated charity has ever worked toward preventing homelessness or poverty, they have merely made an opportunity for prominence out of the malady. This is not an argument against religion, I already have many of them on my blog, and I’m not sure that that would be useful at this point anyway since I’m going to make a point later about the social usefulness of false kindness and guilt driven charity.

Dawkins challenges the idea that any act is not selfish, stating that an action, even that of ultimate sacrifice, contains the purpose of the genes of the individual being able to continue, or possibly that which has already been produced by those genes, it’s children (replication), gaining an advantage or staying safe for now. Let’s imagine the scenario where a combatant throws himself on a grenade to save his fellow combatants, this action may be regarded as individual heroism, but the other soldiers, the ones prevented from harm, are not his genes. On closer inspection though, what could be the purpose of what the gene wants (in an abstract way, the gene has no will to want anything with, but evolution may have some sort of driving mechanisms that modify our behaviour that we are not aware of. Genes may turn out to be the subconscious of the subconscious)? Dawkins might propose (how bold of me) that, having already replicated itself, the act of heroism may be advantageous to the children of the actor, that their father was a hero, and that that fact may serve them in their future. Or it could be that a person acts for country because they have a stake in that country, they have left something that needs a future, or an assured continuance, their children, behind. Would a young single man with no family do the same, or would their efforts be more focussed on self preservation, cowardice to some, so that they could potentially go on to replicate before their demise? I know that I, having no children and no nephews or nieces, will not be leaving anything replicated behind (no continuing genetic material), hold a very different attitude toward the fate of humanity, or the planet, than somebody that has those family members. For instance, I find myself in total agreement with George Monbiot that we need to change our behaviour, but I no longer personally care about the environment because it will not effect me, I will be gone, I didn’t do the damage, I don’t feel any guilt about it, I can’t make any difference to it, so why expend the effort? I find myself much more concerned with the now, human emancipation within my lifetime, not the effects of landfills or fossil fuels centuries from now. But I am a semi-free man in a semi-free country (let’s not get into the details), so why do I care about those that aren’t? I wish to participate in the betterment of the lives of others because of how it affects me physically, financially, and emotionally, it is self regarding my concern and I admit it. Dawkins may be making an argument for selfishness on the surface, but his ultimate argument is that each successful selfish gene is the greater survivor, and better for the genetic pool in the long run for these ones to have been prominent, as this insures the success. Altruism is only an immortal possibility because of selfishness, and in the meantime a pleasant by-product of it.

Some people maybe think that they are people pleasers, that they act often for the good of others because they think they are nice people, I know a lot of people and I think this may be a self-deception. These folks will often describe themselves as such (and don’t people just love to narrate their own drama). When we act under the practical postulate that we have free will, without predetermination of a direct reward, our motivation is often differently expressed based on whom the act concerns. If we act to please those that hold some form of power over us we might do so to be noticed by power, or we may possess a concern that we wish not to have been noticed to have not acted. If we act unnecessarily to the betterment of others who have no need of it then we might falsely use the term kindness to describe our actions, but kindness is only kindness when it is ubiquitous, affect not effect. More ordinarily we might act based on circumstance, in the face of a perceived power over us, pleasing the masters of our domain, and often in the obvious absence of a personal relationship such as a friendship (where preference does not mean prejudice). The term for the act, with preference, prejudice, and motivated by personal gain, is sycophancy. Sycophancy is not a social act, it is by its nature competitive, it is the act to gain advantage by providing more of something to somebody that has the capacity to provide something in return. In this sense we could say that sycophancy has a useful purpose to the actor, but I will argue that it also has a negative effect on those that have not been the beneficiaries of it. It may seem like a nice and friendly act to let somebody out of a busy junction, but what of those behind you that you have held up to do so, have you not acted detrimentally towards them? This is the downside of any action when it favours one person over another, or is competitive, that in a competition where there is a winner, then by implication there must also be a loser, or losers. Much like Newton contended when concerning himself with the laws of the universe, all acts of man towards fellow man could be argued to contain an opposing force elsewhere.

Friendship doesn’t get off lightly either, it means that there is a justifiable prejudice, love is the same. These relationships are also focussed on personal gain. I enjoy the company of my friends, it is pleasant and useful to me in many ways to have them around, if it wasn’t then I wouldn’t have these friends. I love my partner because of how having her in my life makes me feel, and I must suppose it is the same for her too. The fact that we are important to each other is because of how we affect each other in physical and emotional ways. I’m very deliberate not to create duty from the idea of our partnership, or to let it creep in, as duty in a relationship is manipulative, creating things we must do because of the pressure of expectation. She doesn’t owe me anything, I don’t possess her, I don’t grant myself the illusion of the right to enable or restrict her, she is her own master. But I must admit to holding a rather selfish preference that she chooses to restrict herself, in terms of depth of commitment, to me and not someone else, that’s ultimately up to her. It would be foolish to think that we act to purely please another, and it may be a mistake to think that we act to please others at all. Some unions of persons (don’t want to say couples, that’s too limited), seem to form their relationships around the idea that they, by being in a relationship, gain powers over the other/s, but I would challenge that notion also. In a dominant-submissive style relationship, one that is entered into freely by both parties, the submissive is not a slave, they are giving up control to gain a feeling of safety and care, and remember that a relationship is not a contract with a fixed point at which it ends, free people can step out of it at any time. We all do this in some way if we are satisfied citizens of a country, or members of a collective, this is often referred to as the social contract. Seeding power can be a way of expressing power, in fact, to give power to somebody, in the absence of any type of coercion, is to indicate that you are free to do so in the first place, and that that power resides with you primarily. If you are not giving it freely then it is incumbered, subjugation of a sort, slavery, occupation. All relationships between people are a compromise, a form of bargaining, where we offer something to get something in return. I’ll grant you that, described in this way, it makes them look transactional, somewhat cold maybe. The man who wants nothing is the happiest one amongst us because he has what he needs and has no need of giving anything more or compromising. So true happiness, or what may be better described as contentment, is derived from the condition of being pleased and not having to work too hard to please, or to give too much for an unequal amount in return.

You still cannot get off the hook when it comes to kindness though, the sort of kindness that we might call consideration. Again I would make an argument here, it is my limited observation that people are considerate if, and only if, there is something to gain or something that might be lost otherwise. My neighbours are not considerate when it comes to the way they park, in fact all the people of my adopted home town will mostly choose to be an active inconvenience to other road users and pedestrians when they abandon their personal transport, choosing the plot for their vehicle based on a value judgement that is as self serving as it could be. Their path of least resistance, where their primary preference wins out over other considerations like how many people they might be hampering. People just normally act as if anyone else’s inconvenience is unimportant to them, but not as if they hadn’t considered it, they do know they are an inconvenience but don’t care. They will stop outside shops when nearby is a car park, on double yellows because they know we have no warden, across from junctions, on the road even if they have a driveway because it’s quicker to get away than to reverse. If we were to judge the parking habits of the inhabitants of this one small village in Wales, and use it as an indicator of human cooperativeness and consideration, we would be left with no choice but to conclude that there is not much to be hopeful for as this small facet of kindness goes. I admit that is a daft argument, but I choose to think that people are never cooperative nor considerate, or even kind, until there’s a carrot or a stick.

We make decisions for the macro world in a differing way than for the space around us, the micro. The macro matters until the micro is considered, this is why politicians are so often so flawed, expressing preferences that address their immediate concerns rather than being arrived at through rational consideration of others or everyone (which is their actual job). John Rawls proposes a beautiful solution, the veil of ignorance, in it he asks us to imagine the sort of rules we would enact if we were able to build society, but from the starting point that we would not know what position we would occupy in that society. In this way we would only create a prejudice, an inconvenience, if we were willing to live with it ourselves. When an MP votes on wind farm placements, it might enlighten us to ask if he/she has any interests in the energy sector, and how that will skew what they think to do. Because of rampant self interest it may be important to isolate the consequences and benefits of decisions in the macro world from those persons that make them, to make sure that farmers are not empowered to rule the ecological spaces, to detach taxation from business interests, to keep energy companies from having MPs moonlight as board members and advisors etc. Plato proposes this in the Republic, his system is one where wealth is detached from power, it’s very interesting and too hard to explain here, but the main point I am making is that 25 centuries ago a quite clever guy knew that the link between wealth and governance (power over many) would lead to corruption because we cannot escape our own best interests, we can only decide as a collective that it is a good idea to enact laws to prevent the circumstances where this very human instinct is left unrestrained.

When we act toward those that have no power we might think that we can’t be being sycophantic as there appears to be little or nothing to gain, so we may again falsely attribute kindness, but yet again we would have to caveat that with the realisation that, if not ubiquitous, it may be motivated by other factors. Factors such as guilt, which more drives donations to charity than kindness ever could, or simple self satisfaction, a contribution to the way we would like to feel about ourselves. Kindness, understood properly, would be preventing the circumstances whereby a person goes without, i.e. creating a world that doesn’t need charity, whereas charity is the condition whereby you first let someone go without, but you give them what you have gathered in excess of what you can use, your surplus, so that you don’t personally feel bad about their circumstances; so for your own good rather than for theirs, regardless of if they benefit from, or in any way appreciate it. That doesn’t mean that people could not be kind, just that societies are have a tendency to be unkind, and since societies are made from collections of people, given enough time they would become kind if people were built that way. Since they are not, then obviously people are not, a simple logic. Kindness is a mind-set, charity is merely a reaction. If you hold a door open for somebody and they walked through it without thanking you, would you get a little angry that they were not polite? If you kept doing this, and the same thing kept happening, no “thank you” spoken, would you continue to do it, does their lack of sending pleasure your way effect the validity of the act? If in fact it is an act of kindness, would it not continue to be so regardless of their lack of reaction? For Kant it would be moral and need no reaction at all if it were simply the right thing to do, but for the average person I fear they would stop.

So far I have taken aim at the notion that acts of kindness, charity, and politeness are anything but selfishness, I’ll now give some ground. Even if these acts are motivated the way I think they are, they have a societal usefulness to them. They sometimes produce reactions in people that may ease their suffering, their sadness, or their loneliness by some measure, and that is not a bad thing even if we could prove their illegitimate motivations. Yet if we recognise at all that beliefs have actions associated with them, and some of these actions are positive by nature, then we must also recognise that falsehoods believed may have dreadful consequences associated with them also, you just can’t get away from that bind. And so we find ourselves back at the point where the truth of things becomes important again. It could be argued that a delusion, bought into by both parties, serves to create good feeling, and can even create great art. To me that would be the enjoyment of gospel music in a church, maybe sung by a choir that contained Aretha Franklin, Dione Warwick et al, with Stevie Wonder playing the organ. Or it could be to gaze at the David by Michelangelo, or any of the art or architecture I saw in Florence that was religiously motivated. Separating the thing created from the motivations that created it is not that easy, but it is in some cases necessary, Hitler’s art may have been brilliant, it may not, but can it stand alone? The church may be a force for companionship and comfort, while also being the source of most of the hatred in the world for fellow humans, one facet may be good and true in isolation, but not enough to redeem the whole. But do convenient falsehoods give less comfort than solid truths, or the sort of satisfaction that wears off quickly? There is also the fact, pointed out by Sam Harris, that none of this necessitates the existence of a higher power, every biblical act of goodness, or the creation of beautiful objects, could have been done in the absence of religion, it just so happens that there were no non-religious people that we know of in those parts of history, and the churches and kings had all the wealth. So if acts of kindness have falsely motivated origins, do we then discard them as not at all useful to society? To do so would be to remove them and face the consequences of people being able to freely express their first preference in all things, and I imagine that would be more awful than believing in a falsehood. I’ll grant that the will of persons to be seen, falsely or otherwise, to be good actors, has a usefulness to society, but I’ll also say that that aspect is quite obviously self serving, so in-theme with what I am saying overall. The goal here is to say and see it like it is, not to destroy it.

Social force is the force that is understood by most people but not codified in law that acts to override the personal choices that may be in contradiction with the better interests of the masses, it does this by way of guilt and shame and the possibility of being excluded from society by the members of that society. Actual law is the force that is codified and overrides individual choices that may be against the better interests of the masses, it does this by using actual force and the threat of consequences such as incarceration. They both do the same thing, but by differing means, one is choice based, the other not. If one chooses to not obey the actual law then bad things will happen, things that we all agree are bad. If one chooses not to obey social forces then one can be rebellious, and there will only be consequences if one chooses to value them in the first place, for what punishment could there be to be banned from the pub if you do not socialise, play darts, participate in a pool league, or drink beer? This is the exact distinction between the idea that taxation is an imposed inconvenience, and giving to or working for charity is a worthwhile use of your efforts. Tax is a mandatory payment to the state to look after those in society that need help, charity is a voluntary method of giving what you don’t need to people that have to ask or beg you for it, and your participation is based on your guilt or your need to feel positive about yourself. You likely whine about the tax you pay and brag about the charity work you do, to me that is the wrong way round. The acts of government that are premised on the idea of a better society are moral acts that are necessary because of a distinct lack of human kindness, they make you act toward fellow man, they force us to contribute to a better society. If the state didn’t exist, and charity attempted to do this alone, we would be back in the times before the state had an eye to welfare, read a history book!

Another aspect hadn’t really occurred to me until a good friend read the draft of this, what of sycophancy directed downwardly from the empowered toward the seemingly powerless, or less powerful? We could identify where the act is from the position of master or leader or supervisor or king, toward the underling, enslaved, or employed recipient of it, and examine why that should occur. Isn’t it often the case that a sense of benevolence is cultivated? Mistaking this for kindness, we may come to believe that our boss actually acts for our own good, or the good of the team, but in reality this may also be a bargain. If we go back to the soldier scenario and imagine a field of operations, we might say that what we call leadership is in fact motivated by the will of the mooted leader to be more likely to personally survive the conflict, not an act toward the better situation or survival of soldiers, but an act that has a self serving ultimate outcome or reward to the actor built right into it, to carry on the gene. In ancient Rome the upper classes knew that their power was tenuous, they knew that the mob heavily outnumbered them, and that they had to give back a certain amount of their wealth so as not to be overrun. All through history the power of small groups of persons, be they monarchy, government, wealth takers, or clergy looks like it is top down, but in truth is based on a two way relationship between them and a greater body of people, ordinary citizens. Throughout history there have been mechanisms to ensure stability between these opposing forces who have different life needs/goals and motivations, the break down of that relationship would be revolution. Power at every level of every structure has been subject to this consideration, be it political power, corporate power, religious power, or the power of the product. In what reports itself to be a democracy the powerful repeatedly attempt to create more solidity to their power, and more legitimacy concerning their goals, by using obvious processes, one is to coerce the masses through media, another to coerce by financial means. What we mistake for benevolence then is better described as the base minimum reciprocation to the needs of the masses to prevent revolution and bolster existing structural inequality, and we could conclude that these measures would not exist if not proven necessities. looked at in a critical way is it any different to coerce people with bad media than it is to coerce them with armaments, if the same toxic relationship is the result? Mark Twain said that if voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it, what he meant was that the semblance of democracy was present but the effects were not, and I think he meant also that the only circumstances they, the powerful, will let us vote is if they already know how we will, and they know this because they made it so.

The pleaser’s target is normally a living thing, like a person, but in my case rescue cats (if I am honest they make me feel good about who I am) because I really don’t much like people or wish to please them. Let us say that a person in the group, tribe, collective, or workforce, is a self-described people pleaser, and let’s also assume there is a structure to the group. Let’s further contend that that structure, organic or otherwise, is easily identified and pyramidal (as structures of persons often tend to be). If we were to monitor the activity of any single person within the group who self-identifies as the aforementioned, we might test the validity of their contention by observing who it is they focus their efforts upon. A person who looks more to addressing the imagined needs of the boss than of persons occupying their own stratum, or beneath, could be said more correctly to be a sycophant than a people pleaser. Remember that people is also, as kindness, a ubiquitous term, it means everyone. Not that there aren’t arguably circumstances where a person may have acted so as to not deserve kindness, say for like a nurse that kills other people’s babies deliberately. Under some conditions we might reasonably say that the identified person has violated the moral law so much that they have negated their right to be treated with kindness or know pleasure. And, let us also consider that there are prejudices that we can understand, and some that we do not consciously. If the pretty young girl gets favour in the male dominated workplace then that happenstance is quite easily explained, yet if the most clearly identifiable natural leader is side-lined in favour of a nitwit we may have cause to look for a deeper motivation on the part of the power granter. If the same person had equal concern for the janitor as the principal, then we may say that they were a person who has the intention of kindness, and we might more correctly regard them as a better person, but that doesn’t mean they are a people pleaser, keep in mind the ubiquity clause. But the principal, as we have discussed, holds means, so the focus of real acts of consideration should more readily show up in the areas where they were most needed, toward the Janitor possibly. Apply this thinking to your own observations and rethink who maybe who are the real moral actors in your structure, you may be surprised. The self-identified people pleaser may in fact turn out to be a brown nose, a person of singular focus, who has identified those persons who it would most benefit them to please. It looks a bit different now?

I haven’t watched much of Downton Abbey, but I get the thematic. The staff, being from a background of lowly means and opportunity, serve the gentry, who expect, because of their power and wealth, to be served. The power exerted is not organic, it is as a result of the ownership of resources (the moral rights of that condition are for another essay!), and an identifiable emerging method that provides mutual benefit. The servant is paid to fulfil tasks that the aristocrat has no time for, the aristocrat pays to have those tasks done, the level of remuneration is dependent on the competition in the market for servants. This is, on paper, a rather pure relationship based on the exchange of labour for value, though a good reading of Marx might leave a lot of it in question. How often though does the aristocrat wield more power than they have purchased, and arrive at a point where they think that they are entitled to violate the agreement or contract? I’m not sure if DA explores this, but being a National Trust member and visiting the stately homes of many an aristo, I get the feeling the servant girls may have been too often the target of the gentry for purposes they hadn’t signed up to? We now call this what it is, an abuse of power, manipulation, exploitation, unwanted sexual attention. The recent media cases in the news show this isn’t actually confined to history yet. If I am employed as a tyre fitter, and the boss decides that he wants a cup of tea, and I am busy fitting tyres, is it justifiable for the boss to ask me to stop what I am employed to do, so as to do what I am not employed to do, so that he is pleased, and should I have the desire to please him/her in the first place, if I am in fact rather good at fitting tyres? Is it reasonable to refuse, hoping that I am not acted against in a prejudicial way for not going along? Does the boss, because of their position, have an expectation that they should be pleased by the employee in acts other than what the contract states, and does it mean anything at all if the tyre fitter is a thoroughly unhelpful person in any aspect other than in what they are employed to do? These externalities may mean something if we codify them into the contract by setting them as values, then their remit must be fulfilled by the employee that signs up to them. Let’s say the advert for the job says “must be a team player”, what does that actually mean, is it that they could be asked anything of, or is it vague enough to mean that anything the boss asks, or the co-worker needs help with, then becomes a reasonable expectation? Where then do we draw the line, what becomes permissible and what does not?

In an employment situation the sycophant could be said to be acting against the better interests of their co-workers, the method of arriving at a detrimental outcome is to go over and above what they are actually employed, or expected, to do. This fosters the idea, in the mind of the employer or boss, that each employee should give of themselves the amount that the sycophant is contributing, a false comparison follows. Let’s say that our previously identified person, we will call him Mr Brown, is employed between the hours of 09:00 and 17:00, and has two breaks of 30 minutes, but choses to come in at 08:30 and stay to 17:30 most days, and often takes lunch at his desk. His reason for doing so is so that he can get his emails read before the phone starts ringing, and afterwards. Let’s say that Mr Brown is voluntarily a keyholder, voluntarily a first aider, voluntarily does the mail run to the post office after work, organises the xmas party and plays santa, and voluntarily attends work functions and recruitment drives in their own time. Let’s also say that you don’t do any of this, you start at 09:00 and leave at 17:00 on the mark, and you are adequate at your job. What is the result of this situation, that you are equally as well thought of as Mr Brown? Or let’s say Mr Brown answers emails on the weekends, evenings, and even on days off, what happens to the perspective concerning you if you don’t do this also, do you start to look like you are deliberately making yourself unavailable, and is it reasonable that the boss starts to think of you that way? We often hear from the IT department that you can access your emails on your own mobile device, giving you greater work flexibility, but is it so? Is that extra availability in any way serving you when you have a non personal device available within your contracted hours that you can use to get your correspondences? Is it not the case that your reading your emails in your own time is also and always an act of volunteerism? What happens to the expectations of the boss when they can contact Mr Brown, get a response, and make him aware of a task outside of his normal working day? What way do they see Mr Brown in comparison to you? Would it matter that your productivity (unit in ratio to unit out, per contracted period) may be equal to, or even higher, than theirs, and should it matter if they seem more available, more willing? One worker can make a workplace into a nightmare for their co workers by taking on labours that are not theirs to take, working hours they are not paid for, and being too willing. I would say that the people pleaser may please nobody but themselves and maybe the boss, and I would understand if their co-workers might come to actively resent them. Is it not entirely reasonable to say to the boss “I didn’t read that email, or start that task at the weekend, because you haven’t purchased that time from me”?

I have arrived at this point because I have been observing this false assessment for decades. My previous employers, usually extremely well remunerated individuals, had need for no special attention, though they often got it. They would not have known well the employee that showed that concern for them, but the employee would falsely assume an intimacy between the two of them, often knowing their wife or child’s name, or what their interests are, maybe what their political persuasions lean toward. This knowledge might prove to be useful, if you wished to please somebody it is helpful to know what rubs their buddha so that you could align. The mistake here is to think that it is your boss is the reason you have the job, more likely it is the years of skills development you have put in, and the demands of the marketplace, forming a combined force that necessitates that you have your employment. No employer ever, in the history of capitalism or before it, employed anyone for no good reason. The boss held already, within their reach, every resource they needed to cope through every problem that arose and grant mostly every wish they could have had. That never stopped some co-workers from exceeding the role that they had been paid to do and attempting to create avenues for their own succession by trying to fulfil needs they imagined their bosses to have. The reason is to please the boss, the motivation is to be noticed, the desired outcome is to be thought well of when prizes are given out; these prizes often taking the form of things you cannot buy groceries with, or lodge at the bank. Pieces of paper that recognise them, the employee, for what they are, valuable to the employer in some way that is not remunerable via money; whereas wages should be the true recompense for the time, intellect, and labour purchased from you. This individual, as we have said, will describe themselves as a people-pleaser in an attempt to feel good about the acts they carry out that are quite definitely focussed on the prominence of themselves, and likely to lead to themselves being exploited (the goal for working hard being more normally to be given more to do for the same wage, not to be remunerated better, that reward is negotiated). In doing so they reveal what I think is often the case with the majority of persons, that they are involved in a delusional relationship between what they are, and what they wish to be. What we are is revealed in what we do when we have autonomy, what we come to think or believe we are is the result of how we would like to be seen by others, a façade. I have written about this before in a piece I called The Others Confusion Effect (available on my blog), where I explore how I think a person creates the person they wish to be in a digital sense (social media), then quite problematically fails to live up to it. But that is just a modern version of this problem, I suspect there has always been those that have played the role of benevolent power user while being in no way actually benevolent. There is one caveat to all this though, they may create the situation where they would be picked to be the remaining person in the case of a redundancy pool, in fact they may actually avoid being in it in the first place by being recategorized enough before the pool is drawn, so as to be in no position to be included, and in this sense there may be a purpose to their efforts.

Successful people do not speak truth to power because that is dangerous, they instead guess at what it may be most pleasing to hear for the individual that holds power, they deliberately misinform those above them so that they do not appear to be the bearers of inconvenient truths. This results in a serious of bad decisions emanating from the upper tiers of the structure, most often based on spurious knowledge. Who can blame them, the bosses I mean? Just as we have said that the media is the mechanism whereby the ordinary person is misinformed, the sycophant is the method by way of achieving the same thing for the power base of the structure. Consultants are experts at playing this game, they are the pleasure givers and the ego boosters of the powerful, like courtiers and jesters they act for their own position, often against the best interests of the structure. They accept that their survival, their continued revenue, is premised on being the most pleasing and not the most convincing speaker. In this way the powerful may come to value feeling good, assured, much more than being correct, knowledgeable, or well informed. This is not limited to the world of business, it effects all power, how often do we see a pop star or sportsperson start to believe their own bullshit and act accordingly, isn’t this the effect of being surrounded by courtiers also? As an employee it is often easy to identify where a workplace succeeds in spite of the direction of management and not as a result of it, I’ve often heard the management of a structure described as a “puzzle palace” because they seem to know so little about what goes on on the shop floor, and this can only be as a result of bad information rather than bad intention. The utility of reacting to sycophancy with prizes and favour is itself self-defeating, if we assume that each person that has a role in a structure has a certain amount of usefulness in that role, and then we create opportunities within the structure for mobility and greater revenue (promotion), would we not then be more likely to fall foul of the Peter Principle, where persons are over favoured and over promoted until the point where they were clearly inept, making them useless to the structure and useless to the persons who put them there? There must surely be a difference between asking if that person deserves that more lofty position, and asking is that person the best fit for it? I have known dreadful supervisors and managers that may have been great team workers, and mediocre team workers that would have made great supervisors, and so have you.

The owners or bosses of a company have a motivation to succeed by employing the least amount of means to achieve the maximal output. For this they have labours that are necessary and they must allocate resources to those labours to effect the desired outcomes. While it remains true that each employee also has a vested interest toward the success of the company they work for, it also remain true that they are in fact an employee, not the owner, and as such they are not the person who has the responsibility to allocate resources to needs. They are paid to meet the remit or quota that their contract stipulates, everything else outside that contract is a voluntary act. Bosses love voluntary acts, that allows them to meet needs with lower resources, since, the act of volunteering in no way diminishes the expectation of the fulfilment of the contracted work. If you have 30 bins to fill an hour for 8 hours then you have 240 bins to fill in the working day, to volunteer to water all the plants in the offices is to take on additional labour at no extra remuneration, you will still be expected to fill 240 bins that day. This makes no sense to the employee, they have taken a job or negotiated a position for a set price, then decided to work harder than they believed they were worth, created an expectation that everyone else employed there can do this also, and created the perspective (for the boss) that they had had spare capacity in their day to be more productive, so beforehand they must have been being idle/lazy. We’ve all seen the situation where there was once 5 of you doing all the work, then 2 persons moved on, and quite stupidly the remaining 3 worked harder to fill the gap in output when it was not their gap to fill. The upshot was that the employer did not replace the two vacant positions because, from their new point of view there was no subsequent deficit. And what of those persons who will now not be employed to water the plants or empty the bins, have they also missed out because of volunteerism? In the event that there was labour to do the boss would have employed resources to do that labour, somebody would have been paid to do it if it was important to the company, but now it will not be seen in the same light, it will be an unimportant task.

How many times have we heard the term multi-skilled labour? This is more unskilled labour because a person who does many tasks will not be able to hold expertise in any of them, this makes them a less productive employee, and impacts the throughput of the company. Unskilled labour is of course less productive in each individual task than skilled labour. The paradoxical nature of the attitudes to labour shown by both the employer and the employee is unproductive overall, the opposite of what is hoped to be achieved. Demarcation, and the unions that protected it, looked on the surface to be a sort of stubbornness, and were often described as so, but in truth the protection of skilled labour may have been a very good thing for both the company, and the consumer. What if the tasks taken on become as important as the task that was employed for, watering plants becomes as important as answering the phone? If the firm now has to employ somebody else to make up the labour lost then does it replace the watering task or the phone task, and if it does replace the phone task has it now ended p paying someone £15 an hour to do a £9 and hour job while paying another £15 and hour to get someone to fill in their deficit? That might seem ridiculous, but it happens. I worked in a college that got rid of the admins, then set the admin tasks to the tutors who then couldn’t teach as many hours, so they had to hire more teachers to fill those hours, and then they were paying £20 an hour for admin work that used to cost £10 an hour. We must keep in mind certain perspectives, that employers always believe that their workforce has spare capacity, that they are lazy, that there are replaceable, that they are a drain to the business rather than the reason it flourishes. This is because those people who own and run companies often over-credit themselves for their success, believing that they had worked hard to be where they are. James O’Brian recently used a wonderful term for how some of those persons born into privilege like to think of themselves, “they were born three nil up, yet think they scored a hat-trick”. An oft found delusion for those that have benefited from original circumstance, luck, political movement, school ties, or the hard work of others.

I’ve focussed on the workplace, but what of the social setting? Our Mr Brown may be the loudest voice at the party, or the most attentive to the persons in the collective. He may fuss around making sure that everyone has a topped up glass and a sweet treat, and these things may seem like they are important to him in the sense that he appears to hold concern for the happiness of other persons. Why would this be a bad thing? Well maybe it isn’t, but I would still contend that this is selfish in that it is the garnering of a perspective in the minds of those present that is the important factor to Mr Brown, he wishes to be seen to be concerned, the act of concern and attentiveness has purpose. We could all reasonably expect the host to be attentive yes, but when Mr Brown overdoes it, exceeds the tipping point, he is being selfish if you follow our current logic…. At this point I may have convinced you that all acts are ultimately acts of selfishness, and I hope that hasn’t made you feel too deflated, or maybe you still disagree, and good on you, but let’s continue anyway… I believe that there are two circumstances where a person will be an overly enthused people pleaser, the first is where they have something to gain that is of high value to them, like getting to have that sex with that particular person, the second is when they have a psychological need to receive a constant stream of reward that has a value that fades quickly, physically or emotionally, because they have a low primary baseline of self worth that constantly needs propped up by the acts of reward that come from persons who validate, but do not truly value, them. The first is understandable, the second is problematic. Low self worth is not a problem that can be solved by false sentiment, it is a malady that is addressed by working to not need the external validation or favour of others. Nobody can give you self worth, it is an introspected value, and, if you are strong enough emotionally and psychologically, nobody can remove your self worth. How you come to believe of yourself is likely a result of earlier circumstances or because of your parents, if they instilled in you a deep need for validation, if they overprotected you, if they seemed not to care in the way a parent should have, if they made your decisions for you at pivotal times, if they were cruel, if you felt abandoned by them, etc etc etc, then you may have grown up deficient in some areas of your psyche where you evaluate yourself. I’m not saying that each individual should be complete, we all have baggage yes, but the approach to fixing the self comes from inside the self, it is not a provided set of objects such as attention, validation, pleasure given by others to you. Those are merely pleasant, they will not fix you.

The radically honest, moral actor (honesty is identified as a moral imperative in the supporting literature that underpins most, if not all, societies, even very corrupt ones), is not likely welcome in a society of fakes. To express what you actually think is not helpful to the delusional, as in doing so you would not be going along with their delusion (the Emperor’s new clothes). And, if the majority is delusional, and you are the minority, then you are the object most likely to face criticism, which is paradoxical since falsehoods should be the focus of scrutiny if progress is to be made by the human animal, in societal terms at least. If we assume that there are, within the reach of the lowly group or tribe members, limits to the available resources, and we spread these resources out amongst those that may not have the means to provide for themselves everything that they may need to live a life of basic happiness, then the favouring of certain individuals at the top of the structure, by removing these resources from the bottom of the structure, so as to give to them more than they need, is an act that is not morally indifferent. Dawkins proposes that the rational we employ for cohesion is an attempt to go against the nature of the gene, though he also proposes that this is in line with the purpose of the gene, since by collective acts that make a society prosper, each person in that society has the opportunity to individually prosper, to live healthier, and to reproduce more successfully with a healthy continuation of their genes. So even socialism is a self regarding act by that token, and I welcome that if I hold both Dawkins to be correct (I’m a fan), and am a bit of a lefty (which I am).

To take a chair that a machine operator is using, or a hard hat that a labourer needs to be safe onsite, or to reallocate a heater used by a large team of workers in a cold room, or to utilise a space that many could benefit from, or to make less available the most useful equipment, and to make sure that all these considerations and conditions are applicable then exclusively to the least likely person to need them and the least amount of people that benefit from them, possibly even a single individual, is to act in a prejudicial way toward the least powerful for the sake of an imagined possibility of need on the part of the most powerful and the most influential. It can only be a result of sycophancy, and obviously serves only the goal of personal prominence. It is not an indicator of the nature of a person engaged in pleasing people, it in fact indicates the opposite, a willingness to remove from the less powerful, those objects that they most need, so as to provide them to those persons who least need them, is an act akin to a cruelty for purpose. Good thinking, when using the power you have within a structure, is also not entirely focussed on fairness, as fairness is most often expressed in relation to persons, though fairness does remain a consideration in many circumstances. It is about organisational rational, where you use your power to create the best outcome (optimality) for the structure, this may even be expressed in a statement that proposes to define the goal of the structure (though that mission statement very often does not bear scrutiny well). Now that may involve the happiness of the persons in the structure, and yes that may mean a certain amount of unfairness, but utility should be the main driving force in using structural power. Utility may be the best way to look at political power also.

Of course this is all moot if the people involved have unequal ability, or do actually need special consideration. If a person needs a piece of equipment so as to be able to fulfil their role then special consideration is merited, say like wheelchair ramps, a standing desk, or an orthopaedic chair. In those conditions it is wholly acceptable to provide them with what others do not get, but these are the human considerations that are not structural, so external to this argument. It is an obligation to provide the circumstances whereby people of difference can achieve the same outcome as people who are lucky enough not to need such considerations, not just in the avoidance of feeling bad by not giving it, or for the feeling or righteousness gained by doing it, but for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. There is a line to be drawn however, yet nobody quite knows where to draw it. In the circumstance that a person is not capable to be in a position, because of natural traits, is it morally correct to elevate them to that position by means of an intervention that creates a prejudice against all others so as they individually can achieve what others then cannot? In sports we judge people by their speed, their size, their strength, their hand-eye coordination etc, and in business we should really judge people by their skill, mastery, vision, confidence, and intellect. These are judgements made on what benefit they will be to us, as a viewer, as an employer. But, if we were to contend that it is not fair that some folks are born with better traits than others, should we then set about to change the game, or the business, so as to enable the participation of persons that would be incapable or lesser able? Is that not to create unfairness, for the purpose of fixing unfairness?

I would contend that the division between these considerations should be rights based, and in simple terms I will use some examples I have thought up. A person who is a wheelchair user trying to enter a building is faced with steps, a ramp is provided so that they can access the building. By providing the ramp absolutely nothing has been lost on the part of the persons who do not need the ramp. A person doing an exam has a need to have the text transcribed by another person so that they can sit it, or gets extra time because they have a condition, every other person doing the exam has no help because they do not need it, this scenario I would say is arguable because that person was unable to do the exam without help so how could they do the job that they might gain subsequently? A person who identifies as a non binary person wishes to use a loo that is not what would be defined by their genetic physicality, this person wishes to gain the right to something in the circumstance where no right has been removed from them (they can still go to the loo that has always been available to them), so in this case it is a created prejudice to make them have the advantage they wish when there was no real need for it, they just wanted to be treated as a special case.

Let’s consider the effects of sycophancy. We, I think, have already established what the falsely self-identified people pleaser is. What of the target of these actions, how do they change because of the sycophancy they experience, as the recipient? I would imagine that we have many examples of this already from the structures we have been in (workplaces, social settings etc), but off the top of my head while writing this I’ll have a go at some obvious ones; Lord Sugar thinks he is an expert on all things business because he has been treated as such (there are many more failed businessmen than there are successful ones, they did the same thing but just weren’t fortunate), footballers being treated as expert tacticians because they had well-coordinated feet in their 20s, politicians being treated as experts on economic matters even though they may have studied as journalists or lawyers, pop artists and actors dying of medications they should not have been prescribed because they feel that they feel pain more than the ordinary person (a couple of Ibuprofen is not good enough for Prince or Jackson or Houston or Ledger), public figures speaking on subjects they have neither researched nor studied formally simply because they have established a forum by some other means (Eric Clapton is a great guitar player, but he’s not a scientist), commercial farmers being the loudest voices on ecology (farming has destroyed the ecology, felled the trees, killed the wildlife, saturated the livestock with pharmaceuticals, fed the livestock with products they would not eat in the wild, and polluted the rivers with fertilizers), businessmen advising those that manipulate the tax system (businessmen who live abroad to avoid taxation), businessmen influencing the social world and local governance, worlds that their wealth allows them to be oblivious to – the list of persons who have been fooled into believing, and then assuming in great confidence, their own expertise, without even considering that they may actually be the opposite, in subjects that they would be easily outmatched on if in the company of academics, trained experts, and autodidacts (those that reach understanding by self-teaching outside of formal academia or training) is endless.

This sycophantic process changes people, to be treated as special is to gain the perspective that one is special and to cultivate an undeserved confidence in matters unstudied and only lightly observed. If everyone laughs you may start to think you are funny, but what if they laughed just because you’re the boss? If people listen when you talk, is it because you have made statements of truth and usefulness that have a utility that others can recognise, or is it because you sign the paycheques and the people who are listening have mortgages to pay? If you employ people and they are courteous and attentive towards you, would they be so if you weren’t paying them? In short, how do you know who you are if the way people are treating you is skewed by the financial relationship you have with them? At this point I’m going to use myself as an example, and I’ll make a few quite bold statements about myself that I hold great confidence in, but given what I have said up until this point I may be completely wrong, but here it is anyways (we’ll get to the why of this in a mo)…

I really don’t like people (I like a few), and most folks really don’t like me – I’m ok with this, so I have no natural inclination to please, I do so for reward, and I recognise that in myself.
I am a moral actor, I treat all people the same, fairly I believe, until they give me a reason not to.
I make assumptions about people based on how they act when they have autonomy, not on how they describe themselves or act when directed by force.
I assume everyone is wrong in judging themselves, I include myself in that.
I believe that I have never gotten anywhere in life as the result of sycophancy, and because of a lack of ability to be sycophantic I have never gotten anywhere in life (in a work sense).
I believe that everything is open to scrutiny/argument, including me.
If I had power I’d struggle to hold on to a sense of self, just like everyone would, but I’d at least try.
I assume all news, and teaching contains the motivations of those that own the medium it arrives on.
I believe that primary school teachers are the worst of us, because they create conformity, destroy creativity, and fill curious minds with cannons rather than knowledge; they should teach people how to think, not what to think.
I believe in kindness as affect not effect, a mind-set rather than a learned behaviour. The terms “Please” and “Thank You”, or what we might describe acts of politeness, have no real meaning if they are autonomic (a result of conditioning).

It is not true that it is necessary to change as a result of how you are treated, but it is tempting to be bitter if you have been treated badly or to become egotistical if you seem to have all things going well. It is tempting to try to gain advantage over others by seeking to please the powerful, but this positions you as a chump, and it leads those that have power to think they have the right to treat you as a chump. I remember a certain person from earlier employment, and I’ve had a lot of jobs, named Ernie who stands out as an example of a man who became wealthy and powerful (to his employees), yet managed to remain what I would describe as a good, fair, and decent guy, but he didn’t have to be, he could have easily become an asshole. He did not seem to favour those that tried to favour him, instead opting for the brutal truth of the situation, asking a question and wanting the right answer rather than the pleasing one. I’ve been inspired by this man ever since working for him, though I did not know him well enough to assert with any great confidence that I am entirely correct in my estimation, but let’s say I’m at least inspired by the idea I have of how he was. I’ve also got an old friend who’s early childhood you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, yet against all odds he grew up to be a good family man. The boss does not have to give in to the temptation to be run around after, the boss can, and does, recognise false sentiment, the boss can spot where an employee is trying too hard to blow out the candles of their co-workers so as to make theirs seem brighter. Yet the temptation to reward the pleaser remains, and the pleaser remains, so the motivation to be pleased must overpower the rational mind. I can only conclude that this is a human flaw and it won’t be going away any time soon. My final point is this: you also don’t have to be either of these people, you can define yourself as anything you wish to be in others eyes and set out to become that bullshit (the social media way, the modern way), or… you can discover who you are and change it in reality by self-improving. Read books, get some therapy, demand of your friends that they argue honestly with you, test every theory you have about the world in the crucible of conversation with people who are better informed that you, learn about yourself by seeing what direction you go when you have the power to go anywhere, ask yourself are you helpful when you can be? Ask yourself if you are a moral actor and you do what is right because it is right, and no more? Discard the necessity or temptation of the validation of others (I write a blog that nobody reads but I don’t care, I write it for me), stop needing to be liked, accept and embrace your inner daemons as a part of who you are and don’t be embarrassed by, or ashamed of, your selfish desires…

Above the door to the Temple of Apollo was the maxim…

Know thyself

If I had such sign above my door it would read…

Be neither the kisser of ass, nor the possessor of the ass that is to be kissed

Paul S Wilson (with David J Watts)

Truth is my White Whale

I grew up, as did you. being told and taught, that there was an importance to telling the truth. I believed then, as I do now, that the world requires the truth of things so that it could function correctly. Universally agreed constants of measure are the defining principals of all science, societies thrive on held truths that most agree upon and that are criticisable by all citizens, deception is a harmful endeavour.. etc etc etc.

Well, I was wrong then, and I am quite obviously wrong now. Everything I thought I had learned about the most important facets of the world, the social, political and power-based links between people, is bullshit. A while back I wrote, along with a friend, a blog post on Lying, called In Defence of Lying, in it we speculated that there could be good reason to tell fibs, in extreme circumstances, or when they would create mistruths that would not do any real harm in the grand scheme. Revising my naive perspective recently I have more come to think that in a social fabric where everyone is at all times lying to each other, then the only strategy is to lie also. This has a problem for me, in that I’m demonstrably no good at it. I am shit at playing poker because my face gives away my excitement or disappointment, I’ve never been able to lie convincingly enough to fool a partner, and I see no point in it because I’m neither creative enough to make it believable nor do I possess memory enough to keep the recanting of it stable over time. If I were to set out on a journey of lies I would crash before much ground was covered, so I just don’t bother.

So why has this strategy worked so well for others that I know? A good friend of mine is a cunning liar, creative even when caught out, slippery enough to get himself out of the situations he has found himself in because of his lies by offering yet more and on and on. His ability, and the benefits of such, are at times quite enviable. He has achieved many goals and suffered few losses because of his deceptions. Another pal provides the peer group with tremendous hilarity due to the nature of his fibs, the stories he tells are retold and for many years laughed at again and again, his deception has that usefulness at least. None of us believe his fanciful yarns, nobody could, Peter Kay might even have based his Phoenix Nights character Kenny on this particular guy. But then there is the liar that wears you out with his nonsense, the guy that is neither funny, nor admirable, nor impressive, but he wishes to be. This guy it is hard work to listen to. He, through some strange process of the mind that I can never understand, has come to believe of himself that he is how he describes himself, or has gotten used to describing himself. As if the creation of the narrative then creates the persona and the experience that is the person in the world. A Walter Mitty I think they call it in the forces, a bullshitter we call it in civilian life.

A certain amount of self aggrandising, or deception, may be necessary so we aren’t each looking into the void without some hope. A little bit of sexing up our stories may even be healthy at times, that way they are easier on the listener and not just a textbook of our experiences, we each have some narcissism naturally as it is a human trait. I have met these guys, the embellishers of stories, we don’t generally mind them because the story is often somewhat true, and usually quite entertaining or informative. The wild story teller can get away with it, if there is a punchline, or we all laugh at the end over how ridiculous it is. The straight face bullshitter, recanting his history as the gospel of himself, telling stories that we can wander through the holes in, is a different breed altogether. He must think us rather stupid to imagine we are following him in his bullshit wagon down the bullshit avenue of bullshit lined trees. I recently have encountered this type, I find him very hard work, though I sense a weakness in his nature that I don’t know the origins of that might explain why this nonsense is manifesting itself so starkly, though I have no will to put up with it even if I could understand it because there is no necessity for me to be the victim (I think that’s the correct term, I can find no better one currently). He is a fantasist, his view of self, and projection of self, is designed to be absorbed by the weak minded, which I do not consider myself to be. And his strategy of bullshit is contingent on obscurity; being the person in the room that has some knowledge of the subject, and hoping that the others do not have it in greater abundance, if at all.

I’ve seen this tactic used many times, it is a weakness that wishes to be a strength, and it stands in place of the humility that should be present. Nobody knows everything, even in their own field of expertise, that’s just a fact of being a flawed and limited human with a memory that is dubious and a capacity to learn that wanes over time. Trump and his ilk do this, and even when caught out they use another tactic to push the narrative further, they either double down, challenge truth with power, seek to be offended, or they try to say that what they were trying to say was what has been said in correcting what they actually said, and they were just misunderstood. Another, more aggressive tactic, is to try to turn it around, to accuse the person who is doing the correcting of being in error because there is no arbiter in this argument and no tools to demonstrate the error available during the argument. Further there is the tactic of trying to break down the correction by finding a flaw in it, as if that flaw ruins the entirety of the correction, this is the casting doubt tactic. Whatever the method, when you are wrong you are wrong, and you don’t get less wrong by attacking those who criticise you. Maybe in American society, and we are getting more like them every day, that sort of thing works.

Whatever happened to just maybe occasionally admitting, to the room and one’s self, that one may not know a thing, or know it well? If you can pick a hole in a theory then that does not destroy the theory, if you can point out a discrepancy in a story then that does not destroy the story, but if you can successfully demolish the premise of a claim then all that follows from that claim is null. That still doesn’t mean the story cannot be useful, but if the story only has purpose to make the story teller prominent, then the destruction of the whole is complete and the story is vacuous. The story teller must, we conclude, have only personal gain in mind when telling their story, and to embellish it is to deliberately deceive the listeners, no?

What I have recently encountered is persons who wear the successes of others like a cloak and stand on the shoulders of giants pretending that they are in their own garb, and that they are in fact the giant. Worse still I have seen it working to the effect they desired. If the audience has power, and you wish to be the beneficiary of that power, let’s say for a reward of some type, then deception is your friend only if they are not wise. For the deceiver the lack of wisdom on the part of the receiver is the mechanism, the tool, of their labours. This is what a con trick or an illusion is, to turn what is a weakness, lack of wisdom, or an abundance of hubris, against the power. To manipulate them, those that have power, because they deserve it for their lack of knowledge. That is the mechanism which the conning person employs to admonish the guilt of deception; it’s your fault I fooled you, a very Hellenistic way to look at things, and I might add a very Boris way.

In my employed field, I am technical labour, we might refer to this project on the part of the deceiver, as MAKING IT LOOK LIKE MAGIC. Often the technical person holds a massive advantage over the other persons in the company because their job is so very obscure to the other workers that view it. Everyone knows that the accounts department counts up money in and out, and that’s easy to understand thematically, people have a fair idea about what the gardeners do all day, or the painter, or the receptionist, but start them about the technical departments and they can’t get past the first sentence. Now we might think that some of the more endeavouring spuds might have an idea because they have read some magazines or they fiddle with technical devices in their own life, but that would be a mistake also, what happens in a home while playing games or sending emails is not relational to the technical forces at play in a business, it is a different world entirely. The technician, and I’m just using this example because I know it well, has the ability to fool even the most senior of company persons into thinking they are working hard when in fact they are doing nothing but displaying analytics on their screens, which can look extraordinarily busy if you have enough SNMP OID objects being monitored and shown at the same time (see I fooled you there with tech jargon, you have no clue what I just said, unless you do, in which case hello fellow geek).

The magic trick only looks like magic when you do not know how the illusion is being performed. Each person with the power to fool someone else has to ask themselves if they, by fooling the other person/people, is engaged in an entertaining practice, or an act of fraud? And if it is the latter then at what severity/implication? I’m not saying that deception has only these two purposes, but they are ones to consider.

I am not against this tactic, sometimes the need is to be inactive while chewing a problem, and I do fully understand the differing nature of support service provision to productive labour (the nature of maintenance problem being that it is, in terms of cost effective efficiency overall, an inverse relationship), but what I don’t understand is the necessity to quite foolishly attempt to fool a fellow of the discipline, and how the fooler could hope to pull it off. My thoughts are that at some point the bullshitter gets so used to bullshitting that they fail to see where it will not work. Let’s say we have two persons who are writing pascal (a programming language), and let’s assume they are good at it. How then could programmer 1 fool programmer 2 into thinking that he has invented the method he is using if programmer 2 is also using that method? It would be easy for the programmer to convince a non-programmer that they had invented pascal and its libraries, because they would not know better. Here we get to the very reasoning of where our bullshiter is at his best, and I believe where the society aspect comes in.

We know that we now do not challenge opinion using facts, or truths, because opinions matter to people and their emotional wellbeing is seen to hinge upon them being protected from any sort of scrutiny as a right of them being a valued object in society. Knowing this, our bullshitter only has to protect his bullshit with his feelings, and everyone steps back thinking it is better to let the bullshit be, than to attack it. I personally think this is a mistake, Nietzsche said to push over what is shaky and I agree strongly with that sentiment because I think it is the only way to progress as a person, and as a collective. The Hegel method is to establish a theory, a counter theory, then pitch them together to see what remains, Thesis Antithesis Synthesis and on and on until the truth is revealed, ever moving in the direction of knowing more and getting closer to the better way to organise and to think of it all. In a society of bullshit we stand still, respecting each other’s right to be wrong and happy, but should we not be happier to be wrong? I’m delighted when I learn something new, it seems to give me some sort of perverse purpose to talk to people and have my thoughts challenged well. I don’t mean argument in the husband and wife way, I mean argument in the two pals and a glass of wine way. To learn you must first not know, that is ignorance not expertise. If you think you know all then you can learn nothing, so confidence in knowledge is useless if it stifles learning, so to learn is to be doubtful.

The method we use in my line of work to spot the bullshitter is direct, to call it out, but it is not me the bullshitter wishes to bullshit because it is not me that has the power to reward. Claims of expertise can be hard to verify if you also do not possess that expertise (I am not an HP printer specialist, I could be fooled into thinking somebody else was), but there is one universal indicator… Remuneration. Expertise has a price, if that price is attainable, and the expertise is demonstrable, then that price will always be attained, simple as. This is true of my profession, though it may not be true of others. A person could be very talented but just lack opportunity, or they could lack the industry to realise that talent (I started as a cutter, I’m time served as they say, but Britain does not make clothes anymore…), but for technology this is not the case, if you are a DBA you will be making 45k+ pa, if you are a network engineer you would be a fool not to be making 45k+ pa, if you are a Cloud Architect you will be selling yourself short at 50kpa, and if you are a high level security expert then 60kpa is a very low bar to set. So If you find yourself an all-rounder, and you have no specialisation, then to claim otherwise will only fool those that do not know better. Again, it is their lack of wisdom that is your greatest strategy. Should they know better? Yes I think so, they should find the knowledge from somewhere, an honest source, and believe the assessment given to them if it is offered as genuine. I find what often gets in the way of this rational process is the will to have things different than they are. This is the second aspect, where we may see why lies are working in the modern world, being that people actually seem to want to be lied to. I find this rather disturbing.

What of the liar that does not know he is a liar? I say he simply because our fantasists tend to be male, all the bullshitters I know are anyways. I think this may have something to do with what Christopher Hitchens was on about when he wrote the article Why women aren’t funny, in which he points out that evolution has made that trait unimportant and unnecessary in the female gender because we males fancy you females anyway, and since you do not fancy us that much (men are mostly very ugly) we must impress in some way, humour, protective ability, financial stability, honesty etc. The same could be said about lies and bragging, maybe women don’t need to tell them in an effort to impress, that is the goal of the brag, because they don’t need to impress? The liar that does not know he is a liar is in cognitive trouble, there is a blur between reality and the daydream where the daydream, a wish of the mind, replaces an actual experience sufficiently enough that it becomes indistinguishable from memory at a later date. I mentioned my pal, a magnificent liar, earlier in this piece, I think it important to state that at no point did he come to believe any of the stuff he made up, it was just useful to him that other people did.

I think this difficulty in distinguishing the real from the imagined may be stimulated by a competitive urge, where some of us feel forced to it by the possibility of going unnoticed in a crowd of competing voices or raised hands. Insignificance is not a place anyone wishes to be, we all want to be significant to somebody, to be valued by others so that we can value ourselves. For some this may be just the love of a partner, I know that my partner provides for me a feeling of always having someone on my side, and that is enough, but she would never let me get away with being a fantasist. Ones peer group, or family, may drive, quite unwittingly, the fantasy. They may support and nurture the bullshit as a means of potential self development. We often encourage children to explore stories of elves and talking animals, fantasy and creativity go hand in hand in childhood. And as adults we absorb fantasy too, Arnie jumping out of a building window onto the top of a jet fighter plane, the Avengers movies, Marvel and DC nonsense, Vampires and Lycans. My favourite film is Highlander, a fantasy where the hero is an immortal that wields a sword and fights other immortals until only one remains, I have never let it make me think that there are immortals among us running about chopping off heads and fighting for a prize of some sort. This is the necessary boundary between truth and belief, where belief is a possibility conjured in the mind and truth is that which can be proven. It is important to envisage the possibilities of things, and there is a portion of the brain that does this very specifically, but in those people who become their fantasy there is clearly a problem with this function.

If we are presented with a mistruth, one that we have a suspicion about, there is a task involved to uncover it depending on how complex it is, and there is an assessment to be made concerning how much it might matter either way. If the impact assessment yields the view that it matters more to have the semblance of fact than the actuality of fact, let’s say because the goal is to look like a box has been ticked whether it has or not, then the lie that is a lie becomes unimportant. Personally I would value an uncomfortable truth over a comforting lie, but then I am not a powerful actor. Let’s say the lie was exposed and nothing was done? We might think that the powerful actor may themselves be, or have been on the way to power, a bullshitter also. Someone who is prone to skewing the narrative of their own life, and has successfully rewritten their history. They may respect the tactic employed upon them as they have used it themselves. An older lion spotting a younger, keener, more hungry lion, and seeing something of itself in that beast it acts to make an ally of it rather than an enemy; a kindred spirit of bullshitters we might say, like an honour amongst thieves. Bullshitters supporting each other’s bullshit, an emperors new clothes bullshit phenomenon. Is this the way the world is configured now, are we all part of created narratives skewed by the view through the veil that is a society addicted to its own digital media ego and emotionally avoiding the truth in case it dents the fragility of the self?

I like to think I know when I am being fooled, but I claim no expertise in all things, or even many things. I go with the Cui Bono (who benefits?) method of looking at a situation sometimes. At other times I ask myself if I feel the thing offered is likely to be true? Sometimes I use the too-good-to-be-true sceptical method. Often I am risk averse, so when I don’t know I do not then act. Many times I have dismissed claims on lack of evidence to support them, the prove-it method. There are various other methods to employ, and we all do, but sometimes we are persuaded by personality, we might like someone (cult of personality), or worse than that we may feel the alternative is less palatable (can we afford not to?). Each one of us can be deceived, I have an ex-wife ffs, so I’m not any exception, but the real stupidity is to know we have been fooled and to refuse to believe that fact.

I’m calling Bullshit on the whole thing..

Paul S Wilson

Are we just horrific by nature?

Liberals blame poverty on the poor as a justification for not feeling the pangs of their conscience, that’s a theory I have believed for a long time. It comes from a criticism of the liberal ideal made by various social theorists and given to me in a YouTube video by the great Rick Roderick.

I’m not so certain now that it isn’t deeper than guilt. You see, a compensation (I have everything, you have nothing, so you must have not tried as hard as I) would not remove the guilt nor the awareness of it. It would carry alongside, manage and mitigate. The person would be aware at some level of both the guilt, and the strategy employed to cope with it. I think there may be another way to look at this, one where guilt is not actually ever felt, where there is a deeply held belief in the proposition which allows the benefactor of the necessary conditions of chance and pre opened doors, to feel like it is ok to look upon others, others who have much less, and to completely discount the circumstances that delivered them to that condition as entirely a result of their own decisions.

I imagine that Mr’s Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg are actually aware that they could, if they wanted to, alleviate the personal, physical, and financially based sufferings of most of the people of planet earth, that’s how colossally wealthy they are. I also imagine that these guys are aware that there is suffering in the world. So if we accept that there is suffering, and there are people who could do something about it, yet they do not in any way act, save for setting up institutions that try to solve the poverty that is a result of unfair distribution in a liberal capitalist society by employing the strategies of a liberal capitalist society, then we must resolve that they do not wish to solve these problems.

Now I ask you, what would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow and it was billions of dollars/pounds/euros? Would you go shopping, or would you solve all the problems you could for your friends, family and the area you come from? I would like to think that I would not be purely selfish if I were to have the power to make other people’s lives better with the excess of my holdings that I would likely never find a use for other than to gain further holdings. You see that is the point, the aforementioned persons could live many lifetimes over and even if they spent at an enormous rate they could not get through a fraction of what they have now, and there’s a tipping point where no matter what you do with your enormous wealth it is impossible for it not to grow, since it makes more by simply existing at such a scale. Let’s imagine now that the persons I have mentioned are all I in the same car travelling through New Orleans in 2005 just after Katrina, they might think “oh isn’t this terrible”, but they wouldn’t act. Could that be you, could you have such means and not deploy it, could you watch such extremis on TV and not set some employees to the task of going to rebuild what is broken?

Paul S Wilson

Intelligence my ass !

It’s called Artificial Intelligence and it’s supposed to be the next big thing, impressive for sure yes, but intelligence no. In the following piece I intend to poke a hole in the claim…

So, with the intention of testing it, and with an open mind, I decided to ask AI, specifically Bing, a question that I already knew the answer to, on a difficult and emotive subject, suspecting that maybe it might lie to me, and for a very simple reason. There is a difference, markedly, between an social truth, that which it is comfortable for the public to know and comfortable for the established power base, which is always fragile, to let it continue to believe, and a fact. A fact is the truth of a history, a story, a narrative. A fact has no feelings, is not swayed by opinion, and does not change based on the comfort of those that encounter it. A fact is not like an opinion or a perspective, it’s more scientific, it doesn’t matter who scrutinises it, it remains unchanged. Social truth is swayed by perspective, it is subjective, it changes as bodies of persons change, the answer my friend is blowing in the wind (or blown by the wind). Now that we’ve established this we can move on..

Rishi Sunak, the PM of Britain as I write this, sits on a stage with Elon Musk, that rich tech guy, discussing the moral implications of AI, and there are two very worrying aspects to this meeting. Musk is an unelected official, a man who’s social truth maybe does not match his factual in that he is not the father of the technologies he possesses, he is merely the owner of them because he bought them. Remember that this is a guy who has the world convinced that he founded the Tesla electronic car company, in fact it was two men named Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk was an investor, but a later legal action resulted in him being allowed to be described as a founder. Musk was able to invest money he made from PayPal, which he also didn’t found. Musk is a guy who buys things, other people’s successes, and throws enough money at them to make them a good marketing option. I’m not attacking him, I’m just saying that he’s a money man, maybe not some tech genius that people seem to believe he is. His success as a marketed object is based on his ability to use capital (from his father’s diamond mining business) to become the face of other people’s innovations. Now why is that important? For the same reason as it is important to point out that Sunak is the richest parliamentarian, not a financially grounded individual but a financially extremely stable one, a man who has never known what it is like to worry over a pending transaction such as an electricity bill.

There are dangers, we have all seen The Terminator I assume? I would expect AI to be discussed by greater minds from various involved disciplines, but there is no Daniel Dennett (professor, philosopher, expert on consciousness and AI), or Clifford Stoll (pioneer or computer AV technology), or Jaron Lanier There is no AI (Innovator, author, technology writer), or Richard Stallman (Technological freedom pioneer), at this great convention on the implications of AI. Instead we have these two, highly motivated persons, lecturing and informing their audience as if they are somehow entitled to do so.

The point I am making is that here we have a conference on the dangers of AI, and the face of it is two men who are likely trying to figure out how they themselves can either use it to get richer, or use it to gain more control. Power-people do not leave anything they can influence uninfluenced, they use their power to shape the lives of others to the advantage of themselves, they buy the means that create their own narrative, they use power to make the way they use power perfectly legal while at the same time restricting the legality of the actions of those persons who have no power. As a quick thought experiment we could use the example of two imagined legitimate citizens of the UK, Billy and Zander. Billy stole a chicken from Iceland foods and was caught, Zander funnelled his large corporate income through an offshore holding company in a British tax haven and had that company buy the assets that he then uses, like his car and his flat which he rents from the offshore company that he owns, it also pays his expenses, which are all the things he consumes. Billy is a criminal because he stole from a private company, Zander is a law abiding citizen by the same measure because he only made sure that he avoided contributing the correct amount of tax per £ earned that he was assed to have owed to the people of Britain before he used the method he employed to get round it. My point is, in moral terms if you steal then you are a thief, the legality of it all is just down to who makes the laws concerning it, which just so happens to normally be the very people who intend to benefit the most. Bear this thought in mind: these are the very same people who will invest in, own, and influence the programming of the AI machines that will rule all our lives very soon. you would be a fool to think that that will be left to chance.

What we can surmise is that this discussion, presentation, by Sunak et al, is not the truth of AI, it is merely part of the manufacturing process for the coming attitude towards AI, using mediation not fact. It is not a conversation on the impact of AI on real people because it cannot be, these are not experts on either real people, or on AI. It is not a discussion on the financial impact of AI, that would be down to the economists and they do not know because this is an emerging technology. What we can say is that AI itself is not truth, it will not return you the answer that is factual, it will return you the one that it has been programmed to. Now you might argue that a person may also do this, they having been programmed by society, social media, primary school teachers etc. And you would not be wrong. But, and it is a big BUT, people can break their programming because they have the ability to learn when new information comes along. That’s what I love about Orwell’s 1984, that even in the most totalitarian of worlds he proposes that there would always be human resistance because there would always be humans, and humans will always resist totalitarianism simply because humans have a deep need to be free as part of their consciousness, it is a component part of being a human to want to be free. I will grant you the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is an issue (where a person believes two or more incompatible things, if one is true then the other cannot be), but I do not think there is often a courage to these convictions, rather a wish for certain things to be true, or a certain comfortable feeling provided by acting as if there is truth when in the background the thought is not really held as solid. Can an AI hold and act upon a truth that is not true, like a human can? Can they have that level of erratic nature? I think not, we would have to be able to built broken machines to get the sort of broken humans we are. Can a machine have the agency to want to be free of totalitarian ideals?

The world is giddy with the possibility that AI will be able to answer the deepest questions we could have. I’m mindful of what Douglas Adams wrote in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, that a super intelligent being made a perfect machine to answer the biggest question of all, the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. It chewed the question for thousands of years and it’s answer was 42. Baffled, the onlookers asked what that means? Deep Thought (the machine) replied that it could elaborate no further as the askers had not understood their own question. This is the sort of thinking that we will come up with… For thousands of years philosophers have argued about what it all means, religions have invented what it all means, and Sartre and Nietzsche contended that it all means nothing. I like the latter, that there is no meaning other than what we give it, and if I am correct then the AI cannot escape it’s programming because we don’t have the questions we understand correctly to give it in the first place. It will only ever be able to move forward in the direction we send it, making an argument we first started even more complicated, spouting out thousands of found values from all over the web and mashing them together into what looks like a new idea to those that never thought it. But an original thought, agency, erratic dreams, a daydream in a meeting at work, false sentiment? These are human things, a machine cannot know them any more than it can know what i means to be pleased by something beautiful.

Yeah it’s cool, yeah it will do your work for you, but it cannot think, because, unlike you, a human, it is not yet broken enough.

Paul S Wilson

A broken difference engine, some sex, and a teapot

The human mind is a broken difference engine, we have built a broken society as a result, and as usual I have a theory that might explain why.

The usual approach for a philosophy piece would be to try to establish both the credential of the theorist, I have none, and the validity of the theory, I don’t have that either. I am not a researcher, nor am I a psychologist, but I believe in research, and I have some faith in psychology as a discipline. I am going to speculate, to guess, and as always I am willing to be wrong and be argued with. Bring it…

The reason I started with the opening statement is that we are in fact a difference engine, we measure most things based on how we experience them. I’ll give you an example; an African meets an Eskimo on a street in London, the African thinks it’ rather cold, but the Eskimo thinks it’s rather warm, the reason is that their estimation of the temperature is based on what they are accustomed to. Which one is correct? We can say only if we create a scale, and define on that scale exactly where warm starts and cold ends, but not otherwise. What most of us are doing is saying that it is warmer, or colder, not that it is warm or cold, so a difference. Scientifically it may be too warm or too cold, but only if we need it to be below or above some nominal temperature for something else to happen, like to have water in the correct form for us to achieve our purpose. Just like it would be no use to try to carve an ice sculpture with water at room temperature, it would be just as useless to try to fill the kettle with a block of ice or a cloud of mist. Broken, in the sense that we all disagree on what we measure, we don’t disagree on how long a meter or a yard is anymore since we have standardised those, yet we can still disagree on how to engineer a domicile using them.

The same can be said for the disagreements between those that worship what is demonstrably (the Bible and the Quran are plagiarisms of the Torah) the very same deity, differently mediated. Being that the thing they, the followers, disagree on is not the deity but it’s desires of how those who worship should live and have power to organise their societies. Muslims believe that they are the pious followers of God/Allah and they therefore are entitled to do certain things to everyone who isn’t one of them, and often to the number among them that are not pious enough. Jews believe that they are the favoured people of God/Yahweh because they have suffered at the hands of others who were not persuaded that society should be structured the way their book says, they also believe that they have a land entitlement based on the words their ancestors wrote on behalf of their deity, in their book. Christians believe that their deity suffered for them by becoming mortal and being sacrificed to themselves therefore they are absolved from the original sin of their most ancient ancestors (A&E).

But why does this matter, on to the theory I have…

Each manifestation of each religion makes certain bold claims, assumptions that the world should be configured by them, under a warrant granted by their deity, who they seem to be able to know the will of because their ancestors wrote a book detailing interactions that cannot be verified, and schisms in the laws of physics. To achieve this they use the two forces available to them, violence if they have the resources, and persuasion if they do not. Violence is the one that has the greatest immediate effect on the greatest number of people, we can see this historically, every empire has known it, and used it to great result. So we must assume that violence is intrinsically within people in the first place for it to be summoned so readily by highly motivated leaders and the writers of religious books (those that wish to be powerful). Each religiously motivated person would be no threat to other persons if they didn’t want something, proliferation, an adherence to their interpretations of the book that provides them with something like power, or the false comfort of having their perverted morality in company that validates it. But is it true that we are violent as a species, or do we learn violence as part of becoming a component of a society?

Humans all over the world teach their children to manifest violent behaviour through games and media. Sports are not only good for the physical body but they are competitive and aggressive, and a lot of children’s TV programming has violence in it, examples of which are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, Action Man, the A-Team, I could go on. The thing these shows/games/stories/sports have in common is that they teach young impressionable minds that the solution to any major issue is effort, commitment, unyielding belief, aggression, and the expression of justifiable violence, and so it is no surprise that these kids grow up to support, enact, or at the very least be indifferent to, the occurrence of violence. The narrative is usually that there are people, or is a person, who is evil, who desires to control the lives of others, or intends to profit from their losses. But in truth what will the hero, the child that grows up believing in this story, be, other than a protector of the common dogma, the power base that lays behind the way society is currently structured in their adulthood? And is the challenge presented by those person/s, who are portrayed as challenging the current structure of society, always wrong? One could contend that maybe the purpose of indoctrinating children early into the idea of justifiable violence is in itself a counter-revolutionary process, just like patriotism is the virtue of the vicious and tends to be blinded from reason.

I think that is worth thinking about, and asking the question if teaching children violence at a young age, and then manifesting what they are told is justifiable, warranted, valid violence for what they are told is their behalf or for the good of society as defined by those that have power, and for the reasoning that it protects their way of life, is actually a well thought out tactic, then who is the beneficiary of that tactic? I think it may be the very same people that Owen Jones and others have referred to as “The Establishment”, but I have no way of proving this. What I will say is that I believe that nothing in a society that is so subjected to scrutiny, measured, planned, with this much surveillance, and with this much propaganda and marketing, happens by accident. What does happen is the result of a mass manipulation of a majority (just enough) of the populous by the mighty, the motivated, those with resources, and those with conviction. Why would any society be allowed, by those that have the ability to make it otherwise, to be otherwise? Why would the powerful shape the education of children in the way that they do through a media that they own and run, toward violence in one program and then compliance in the next? We might at this point contend that film ,media, and news is contrived to be thematically pro-dogma, pro capitalist, pro libertarian, and rarely contains any arguments to the contrary.

I recently re-watched the film Se7en, in it a zealot follows a Christian story based interpretation of the will of god as written of in various parts of the bible, then Thomas Aquinas, then Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. He enacts gods mandated revenge on those that he sees as sinners, but in the film he is the bad guy. My question at this point is that if he is expressing the will of his deity in physicality rather than in rhetoric alone, then why is he not, to Christians at least, the hero of the movie? Read your religious books people, the Jewish god wants all homosexuals to be killed along with those they perform acts of homosexuality with, that is unless they are unwitting participants (accidental homosexuality?), Muslims echo this also, as do a lot of Christians. I once had Jehovah’s witnesses call at the door for a chat, and just to make them feel a little uncomfortable, and admittedly to amuse myself somewhat, I told them my neighbours were a married gay couple and asked if they were going to kill them, shall I participate also, do I have to do it alone, and by what method we would dispatch them from this mortal coil? As you might expect they had no answer, because to answer either way condemned them as immoral, or their book as.

Huxley wrote a book in the early part of the 20^th century called Brave New World, in it he speculates on an ordered society where sexualisation is a normal and state controlled part of a child’s development, done as a process of removing all the difficulties that arise during human development and sexual frustration. This is to eliminate deviancy, frustrated sexual desire arising and triggering bad thoughts towards other sexual beings, the sort of thing we see in our society with the InCels (involuntary Celibate persons who manifest a deep resentment to those that they think are denying them their right to sexual endeavour). It is speculated, and I have read, that long ago nuns might masturbate the male children in their charge to relieve them of their tension and help them to sleep, as if a primitive method to treat ADHD. This sounds abhorrent, inappropriate and kind of icky to us now. Then it maybe had purpose, and because it was deemed to be being done by the pious (who had defeated the demon of desire, supposedly) it may have been considered fine. Note: I cannot research this because google is ever watching and will flag me as some sort of deviant that requires monitoring, I did try and immediately encountered both a warning and a suggestion where to seek help – this is another part of the process of closing down what can be known, I Mean I get it yeah, but I just wanted to potentially verify a historically recoverable fact rather than maybe quote something that was hearsay.

Now the reason I have gone in this, what may seem a strange at this point, direction, is that sex is such a dangerous thing isn’t it? Well no, it’s not actually. Sex is a healthy, evolutionarily useful, and fun thing to be doing. It almost has no downside if, and only if, enjoyed by people who are in full capacity of their faculties and are willing participants that have not been deceived or manipulated. So why then is the enjoyment of two persons, or more, making love or giving and receiving physical pleasure for only that purpose, not in any way portrayed in the media that young people absorb? Yet violence is abundant and acceptable? Could it be that in a society where there was no jealousy, frustrated sexual desire, tortured sexual identity, we might have less potential for violence, and therefore be less useful to the powerful, who may need anger and frustration to be just abundant enough to be useful? Two men have an argument in a pub, the subject is irrelevant but the result is that they fight about it. One emerges victorious, but has this validated his position? If so then might has right, that means that the ideology of the mightiest country is the correct ideology, or the religion that holds the most power, the most wealth, has the largest portfolio of real estate, and can command the greatest number of adherents, is the one that is correct. Now the idea is that is bandied about is that persons come into the fold because they are persuaded that said religion is the correct one, but accepting this indicates both a deep misunderstanding of history as well as a deep naivety concerning how religions change as they gather followers.

A religion starts as an idea in the mind of one person, it then captures those persons that see it as useful to them in the sense of power as well as those that are seeking something they cannot describe or define, answers they wish to find in the teachings (and they will find them no matter how much they have to torture the narrative). What it does while its numbers are small is masquerade as a cowering and humble object of liberation, espousing love and peace, this is likely because it finds itself within a minority that is dominated by a previous system of belief. When it gains enough power it reveals its intentions, to dominate and rule and restrict. We can see this in each of the Abrahamic trajectories, where the priest appeals to the slaves with a rhetoric that appears to free them, only for them to agree to another form of enslavement at a later point.

Russel contended a teapot, floating in space, undetectable to all human made machinery. He then challenged anyone to question his faith in the existence of the teapot as a way of saying prove that there is no teapot. The existence of a teapot in the minds of the followers of the teapot was theirs to prove if they wished to have others also believe in it. Just like the existence of anything unproven, merely speculated or imagined, has a burden of proof that lies with those that have faith in its existence. The teapotters we will call them, build a system of morality around the teapot, they imagine it a flawless being that pre-dated the universe it now floats within. The teapot has wisdom beyond that of man, it likely created man so that it’s greatness could be known. our teapot lord has agency, it wants something from us, for us to refrain from touching ourselves or touching others without first making eternal commitments to them, and it wants us to only touch one other of us. A back story is created, one where the creator needs the created beings to provide money to those that speak on their behalf, because they must live in sprawling mansions and travel the world on private jets. Factions splinter from the original teapottters, forming new groups that modify the teachings of the tea pot, imagining a more benevolent teapot in some cases, and in others a more capricious one. There are wars against those that wish not to follow the teapot cause, people strap explosives to themselves and rush into crowded markets to dispatch as many of the non believers to the land of eternal tea. Land promised to the teapotters, in the book the older teapotters wrote, is fought over and occupied. Families fall out about the materials the teapot is made from, some say it is stripped pattern others say dots. Political positions are granted to those in the robes of the teapot without elections and they lobby for changes to human laws, often restricting land ownership. Charities raise money to educate poor people in foreign nations on the ways of the teapot, offering food as incentive.

None of what I have written about the teapot religion(s) is any more ridiculous than what you learned in primary education, it just doesn’t have the numbers yet.

Paul S Wilson

Taxes and the dread of the crisis

The standard of living crisis has hit a lot of people. I’m not a rich man by any measure but I try to help those around me if I can, if they need. Peter Singer wrote what is considered a controversial paper in the seventies that stated (in simple terms) that if you can help then you should help, and I like that idea. But if I’m helping out, and you’re helping out, and it’s still not enough, it makes you wonder where all that tax money goes, doesn’t it?

I’ve worked for more than 30 years, paid tax on every pay packet I ever had, on everything I’ve ever purchased, on every dwelling I’ve owned or rented, every time I’ve exchanged money for any goods or services, and so has everyone else that works. Yet the roads are full of potholes, the NHS is crippled, schools are on their knees, the street lights are off at night, you’d have to harm somebody to be reminded what a policeman looked like, a man died a few towns away laying in the street for 4 hours awaiting for an ambulance and that’s a quick response these days, I can’t get a doctors appointment unless I say its an emergency, the wait in Wrexham A&E was 14 hours last I checked, rents are sky high, house prices are way beyond what most folks earn, people are abandoning pets because they can’t feed them, pensions don’t rise with inflation, my local politician thinks that getting his picture taken with the few business that are surviving (rather than the empty shops) is the whole of his job, the environmental agency has lost 2/3 of its funding, water companies dump sewage in rivers instead of cleaning it like they’ve been paid to do, the passport office, the dvla, the planning offices are all shit versions of what they used to be. On top of this the media reports this as if it’s inevitable, like poverty and lack of paid-for services are the result of some external and uncontrollable force that nobody can explain, this at a time when generating energy has never been cheaper, labour forces have never been cheaper, production has never been higher.

I’m a big fan of taxes though, the point of paying them is that I get to look after folks that may need the state more than I do. I like that I can have the secondary benefit of everyone else’s good health and basic education. So why isn’t that what it’s used for like it once was? What I’m not a big fan of is funding the bombing of Yemen, decorating a Palace, paying for royal holidays, politicians expenses claimed for second properties they are renting out, Carrie’s wallpaper, Johnson’s vanity projects, NHS procurement services making a light bulb cost 5x what it goes for in Wilco, a government charging me the cost of selling off state assets or investing in private capital initiatives under the guise that a few jobs will be created, or grants for rich fellows to repair their stately homes. I also don’t wish to fund the colossal cost of social care in its current form, with its multitude of private facility owners making personal fortunes on the back of an economic model that has been proven to be immensely wasteful compared to its nationalised previous version. And since healthcare is a monopoly market, not a choice based one (people don’t choose to be ill), I find it much more morally abhorrent than many other industries that are in the public consciousness that this is increasingly in the private sector.

We get media tycoons, publicly acceptable intellectuals, and businessmen on TV all the time telling us how the government need to act to stabalise this ill economy, and we get psychologists telling us how to be an individual while in these circumstances (Peterson) as a way of coping with them and also as a trick to make us feel personally responsible for our lives when so much is dictated by the state (a common trick played by liberal public intellectuals is to pursue a strategy of individualism as a smokescreen to societal thinking). Aren’t these the very ilk that made the economy sick, and isn’t that the picture all over the first world (Democracies)? And aren’t these the very same people that destabilised the second world (communist countries), and aren’t these also the very same people who have now bought up most of the third world (dictatorships, monarchy ruled states, military states)? Of course, but when the media are the medium for the message of the capitalists, and no medium exists for the critic or the non-adherent, then what else would you expect? Believe me though, there are some heavyweight intellectuals that do not agree that capitalism should invade every facet of our lives as if it is the force that realises true human emancipation (these are the terms used as it is sold to us), it’s just that it’s becoming rather hard to find and hear them. Laws are enacted to curb the proliferation of opinions that may differ, mainstream media avoids the guest that may want to ask the difficult question and the machinery of the establishment rallies to find ways to discredit them for unrelated offences (a sexual deviant can still say the sky is blue and it remains just as true).

What is wrong here is that we are no longer Thatcher’s children, we are the citizens of a state that is run by Thatcher’s idiot grandchildren. It has taken years for the bubble to burst on the privatisations of the 80s, and now we see ideologues on both sides of the house trying to continue a game of monopoly that played out long since, and was won by a few that bought and sold everything. Now nothing has any value, at least not to the commoner, and we are told it would be too expensive to get it all back, those things that we once had a stake in. I have a feeling, a hope, that a revolution is coming, but I fear it will be far too late and the value of a nation will be gone along with the value takers. We too often turn to the capitalists to solve the issues caused by capitalist thinking, take a simple example of where this paradox plays out and think about it, I have one for you…

In Britain the subsidies for sheep farming cause the farmers to cut down trees to make more farming land. The government wishes, and rightly, to return large amounts of land to beneficial plants (trees, wetlands, grasses, hedgerows etc), so they incentivise the growing of hedges and the planting of trees with a subsidy (a capitalist approach to a capitalist problem). What then happens, can you guess? The farmers rip out all the hedges (existing ones will get no subsidy) and plant new ones, young ones that will not support life for decades in the way the old ones would. Capitalists buy up hillside farmland, the type that would never have been any good for grazing anyways, but was cleared because there was a subsidy in place, and they plant trees simply to capture the new subsidy for planting trees.

Here we can see that the right thing, planting trees, can only be achieved by making the rich richer, inequality is the result of capitalist endeavour. This new tree-planted land is not everyone’s to enjoy (commons), it is now the commercial property of a person who wishes to be rewarded for their investment. They may capitalise it further, they may have yurts and rent cottages on it, they may try to have red squirrels and charge for car parking and sell fridge magnets and coffee cake at the visitor centre. The alternative to this would have been for the government to have bought the land on behalf of the people and used the people’s money to invest in those things that are best for the people, but this rarely happens unless some rich guy stands to get richer. What I am saying is that if you elect capitalists to government positions you get blinkered individuals that only see capitalist solutions to every problem that arises, whether that is the cleanliness of the water in our taps, the provision of justice, the health service, schooling, or a bunch of other social considerations.

The solution is not to focus on the outcome solely, but to consider the implications of the externalities involved in the actions that change the world, to examine if they are beneficial. Yes the outcome is trees and hedgerows, yes the outcome is granny is looked after, yes the outcome is that the streets are clean, yes the outcome is that we are safe, but at what cost?

Paul S Wilson

From above, from below

The leaders chosen from below are almost always better than the leaders chosen from above, and there’s got to be a good reason…

From above…

Sycophancy, the powerful will notice who laughs the most, and the loudest, at their usually unfunny jokes and quips. They notice who stays behind after the bell goes to go home, they notice who nods, who never argues, who allows them to preach their view in a workplace as if it were the truth of the subject being argued. How often is the view of the CEO being expressed as if universally and unchallengingly the view of the company and all it’s employees, and how often do we see those employees being shed if they disagree? Power speaks even when it has nothing relevant to say, because it is power, and cannot be silenced, it has a platform and an agenda, it assumes a mandate. Those that speak power to power, rather than truth to power, as Cicero may have done and hastened his downfall, foster the associated narcissism (when you get the idea that you are always correct simply because nobody dares, or is capable to, argue with you) that grows in the mind of the powerful.

Enablement is the process whereby associated people often get promoted because their view aligns with those that have power, this creates echo chambers rather than debate. An idea faces no scrutiny in an echo chamber, so how is this in any way useful? Industries, businesses, and societies, require innovation, yet there is no possibility of innovation in spaces where all are seemingly in agreement, so nothing progresses. All innovation comes from the idea that things can be improved, and in recognising that things are not currently optimal; to solve any problem there must first be the admission that there is one. How could people in power-enabled positions, because of their alignment with the current set of ideas and focusses of power, be expected to change their own thinking, or the thinking of those that empower them, if they are given positions of power themselves? More likely is that they will act as if they believe that the correct path is already being followed. As this phenomenon plays out we see the epitome of dogmatism, the repetition of tactics that have been oft proven to lead toward failure, combined with the belief that the failure which has previously been experienced being only a result of a lack of effort on the part of the previous person in the role. These persons must be evidence-averse since ploughing the fallow field year after year with nothing growing year after year would tell a person open to learning from experience, or data, that any continuation of the ploughing must be a bad idea.

We must recognise that those who seek power are ambitious, never benevolent, and for this reason they should never be allowed to hold power. Power for self promotion, or belief in a right to power, even the over-confidence to think that they may be the answer to a problem that others have failed to solve with no real reason for that confidence, is tyrannical. They would not use power to make any situation better for a company, a workforce, an industry, a sector, or a nation. Clearly they would seek their own prominence and only align with the best direction of the aforementioned if it also served them. This phenomenon is one of the major problems with political power, maybe the worst conundrum that it has to solve. Politicians are persons who seek to be in charge of the lives of others for the simple reason that they wish to direct the finances of the macrosocial world for the sake of the macroeconomic world. A world that will, in time, reward them personally for doing so. I personally am wary of the ambitious, I find them to be the most dangerous people in any structure or group. Take for example the overheard throw-away comment made in the break room at lunch that makes it’s way to the supervisor or manager, we all do it (comment), often out of a temporary anger or frustration. I worked with a loader at and airport in the early 00s that every day cursed the company, yet did the best of all of us at the job. In what way did it matter that he griped a bit? The ambitious persons amongst us would use this, they’d blow his candle out in an attempt to make theirs look brighter.

Another example is that the short stint an MP has in parliament is in many cases merely a precursor to the long relationship they will foster, while in parliament, with a business that has good financial reason to have an advocate in the chamber. Owen Patterson is an example of an MP that has been sanctioned for having this relationship be far too apparent. He will not be alone in having such an arrangement, if we look at where most of our MPs land after their political careers we see that they very often end up in one of two sectors, finance or media. It is no coincidence that they wind up there, those industries make up the politically influential triumvirate of the UK; finance to back the play with capital, media to sell the mistruth as social necessity, and politics to make that which could never be a rational moral object into that which becomes a legal one.

The general voting public genuinely believe in the ideals of the party, the fundamentals that underpin it; Tory voters believe in the liberal ideal that you are a product of your own successes and efforts (and failures), Labour voters believe that you should not be damned for being a product of your circumstances and lack of means, and in Northern Ireland they thought maybe their politicians might actually attend parliament and do what they are paid for. Yet, one only has to live through a few governments to know that, in general, they do what politicians wish to do in the first place, namely feather their own nests, and for motivations I have already highlighted.

From below…

The force of the better argument, the powerless can exert only this according to Habermas (communication theory). It is what a trade union relies on to choose a representative, the candidate stands and is elected by the members to represent them collectively in negotiations where they would otherwise have to individually face a power much greater than them (employer). This elected official must speak consistently the wishes of the membership, not their own personal views, not the corporate-lead mantra, since at every point in negotiation acceptance of the offers from above will be put to a vote and not decided upon by them alone. This is what real democracy looks like in a pure form, whereas what politicians do is to throw forth vague references to what they might do, argue that the other lot are useless whilst highlighting why (and they may be correct in that of course), and once in power are seemingly under no obligation to carry through any single promise that they made while trying to get there. Add to that that there is virtually no mechanism to make them do as they said they would, or anything at all, nor is there any way to remove them for a set number of years regardless of how they vote or act, and politics starts to look very much like the result of a big con job.

Structure any group and recruit for that group and you face making decisions that will have power implications, but drop a bunch of people into a rainforest and a leader will emerge organically that the group will trust the most in the situ. The same will happen in a desert, but the leader may be a different member of the group with different skills. In a tense situation such as a medical emergency another leader may come to prominence, the same could be said if a bomb went of on a street. What I am saying is that leaders are not leaders and that’s it, situations often suit person types, and dictate, if allowed, an emerging structure that is not a result of power from above, not created by power that already exists; cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman, let’s not be sexist!). IMHO people cannot be taught to be leaders, they can be taught to be functional followers however, and the idea of a leadership course is simply nonsense. Captains of football teams are not usually the best player on the pitch, but the shrewd manager will know that they are the best person to do the job on the pitch that the boss cannot do from the side-lines.

It’s just anecdote, but I have worked in many places and for many bosses, and I’ve been the boss on a few occasions. Many times I’ve realised that the persons in charge at many levels have no clue and no identifiable qualifying criteria to be where they are, other than what we would like to call the faith of those that enable such position that they may achieve something. More likely is that they have happened into that situation for other reasons, dead mans shoes, they nodded or laughed at the right time, they are so feeble that they dare not argue even with a blatant wrong, or they kissed some serious ass. In the Army I had sergeants that I’d follow into a forlorn hope, and some that I wouldn’t follow to the break room. I’ve had co-workers who are the real boss of the department and the boss was just the figurehead that does the monthly presentation. I’ve had subordinates that have had a better idea than me so I’ve acquiesced and seeded power temporarily to them. In fact I think I’ve had so many jobs, and in so many diverse industries, that I may have seen it all by now when it comes to power (though that may be hubris on my part).

My conclusion… power is rarely in the right place, even when it is there will be a power that it is subordinate to that will inhibit it, or there will be others of equal power that dilute it enough so as to make it ineffective. I remain in favour of the force of the better argument..

Paul S Wilson

Faith and Knowledge

I was wondering what your thought were on this and that, but I can probably already guess because I know you well, and I know the way you would like things to be….

Marx had a theory that one day in the future, his future and possibly our now, there would be a time where capitalism would not only mean the means of the control of the methods of production and distribution of goods, but would also define the social fabric of societies. A time where who we are is analogous to what we do in an inseparable manner. The danger of that is that we become what we do for a living, and in our actions we feed the beast that feeds us, thus our autonomy is removed and society is that which demands from the controllers of the methods of production exactly what is wishes to produce. You can imagine the scenario I’m sure where the latest tech innovation is produced, in the full knowledge that they (a rough guiding term for a group of concerned individuals who hold what we may describe as power, but without the conspiracy aspect hurling us into the category of tin-foil-hatted lunatics, and therefore easily dismissed as is customary, but more likely to indicate a tacit and necessary to be spoken of pre-agreement between similarly motivated persons of greed who find all the aces already nestled comfortably in their sleeves in the zero-sum game we call capitalism) can foist it upon the masses and know it will both create a new need to have it, and a force by which it will be a loss not to have it, because the desire for it will fulfil a psychological, albeit short-lived, need to use it so that we may know who we are as a self.

What I’m saying is that we have passed through this stage, the stage of knowing ourselves by the product based definition where we identify and market a piece of clothing, or a car, or a house, as if we are marketing a part of who we are, as if we are identifying ourselves as merely a consumer. As if that would have ever fulfilled the need within us to be accepted by other selves. They were stuck in the same sand trap as us, and knew it’s falsehood as well as we did. No it is by the means of what we think we know that we now have an ill-deserved confidence in ourselves, a more deeply insidious and pernicious rot has invaded our “Self”. And worse than building a false self, a façade or a facsimile, like a Facebook or a Tinder profile (and that can be a very destructive falsehood, especially when taken seriously – see my piece on the created self), we now borrow once again from a very inspirational methodology when constructing the new falsehood. I’m referring to religion as the inspiration, and to belief as the falsehood. In the 5^th century one might be forgiven for not being able to accumulate the intellect that could challenge dogma, but each century that followed, up until a critical point where what we could contend as knowledge was so challenged by the rational and the demonstrable, there has been erosion. We now have far too much access to the sort of information that make the religious claims of the past so infantile and ridiculous that the churches have been forced to strategize a way to change what the message means so as to fit with all that challenges it (IMHO this hasn’t been a success). I think there are no real Christians any more, there are those that claim it, but none that can live it; effect not affect, like playing a role.

When we borrow this mechanism of “believing” we employ the tactic of faith that overpowers and overrides reasonableness, exactly at a time when it is this reasonableness, our natural in-built mechanism against intellectual exploitation, which should be paramount. To adopt a position because you have confined your scepticism and your cynicism to some dark corner of your mind and you are going on faith alone in something, something that has a source other than that which is replicable in a scientific way, that which is discovered by doing, that which is demonstrable by others, or that which is sound in philosophical terms, is to find faith. Granted there are things that cannot be reasoned, we call that the subjective, and I would be the first person to defend the validity of a subjective argument from the perspective of the person making it, i.e fruit pastels are much nicer than wine gums and why (these things are important), and I mostly agree with Roderick when he says that very few humanly important things arise in subject areas where all are in agreement.

What we see is faith in the person, the cult of the individual, the demonstrable liar whose followers will not be moved by the demonstration of the proof, the demonstrably invalid nature of the position or the argument. I had wondered why this was the case, but I think I may have figured it out after much thinking and much debating on the subject. In moving beyond the feeding frenzy that centred around objects and brands we find ourselves validating ourselves, and we mostly all fall down on this, with the aloofness that used to only belong to those people who either were superior, or thought they were superior, to the average person by means of insight. This insight can be in the form of being smarter than the average person and actually knowing some stuff, or having an expertise, or the foolish pleasure that is feeling absolutely correct about the nature of what happens after life and thinking you are fulfilling the criteria (Freud is good on this in the Future of an Illusion, but Nietzsche is better in the Genealogy of Morals, Harris also is a goldmine on the subject). That level of insight, false or otherwise, is stabilising and validating, it gives comfort, it tells the self that it is a self of value. Apply this thinking to the weak minded, the feeble, those that were once the willing consumers of brands but have now tired of that strategy of validation, what do they have now to fill the empty unreflected spaces? Well they have Trump, and Bojo and Bolsanaro and Brexit and Transgendered rights and BLM and Extinction Rebellion, they have taking a knee and anti racism racism where the pendulum swings just as far the other way, they have anti capitalism objects that they use capitalism to create, they have the establishment masquerading as the anti-establishment solution to themselves, they have government supported charities that are indicative of the failure of their own governance (the paradox is alarming), they have a sexually liberated society that is not having anything like as much sex as the repressed generations of the past, they have faith that they can find benevolence in leaders that come from the very demographic where self-promotion, egoism, entitlement, greed, and a stark lack of communality override any sort of idea of the best interest of others.

I said I would ask you, but I already know what you think because I know what you want, that’s your faith, your strong belief that you can make the truth of the world by holding a deep conviction in what you have assimilated as truth. It is this which I wish to challenge, and by two means that I get from ancient sources. Who does is serve for you to believe what you believe? And how do you know what you know?

Paul S Wilson

Mimicry is NOT the highest form of flattery

This is hardly a serious post, more of a rant at something I dislike really, and what I dislike is hardly relevant…

It’s hard to avoid them on TV these days, they seem to even be on gameshows in character now, I’m referring to Drag Queens. The DQ is not a trans person, they are not trying to be accepted as a woman, but accepted as the bad facsimile. Therefore I have so much less respect for them than the aforementioned, who is trying to be what they feel they should have been in the first place. Not that I agree they are or ever could be, just that I recognise that they genuinely admire and wish to be the real woman, not to send them up. What these guys are is the semblance of what one might describe as all the very least admirable traits a woman could possess, combined with a few that women only seem to possess when portrayed by men in a comedic way. When Terry Jones dressed as a woman for a Monty Python sketch it was for the sake of comedy, the character was comedic, when a dame does it in panto it is comedic and ridiculous, when a Drag Queen does it that’s only a small part of the overall desired effect. Mostly it’s shock value, the willingness of the male to play the female role as a sendup of the traits most easily identified as solely womanly. But in many ways this is a form of oppression (bear with me).

These traits are the ones that, in a general sense, are seen traditionally as excluding real women from holding important positions and being taken seriously. If we take Karen from The Apprentice (TV Show) as an example of the seriously taken woman, or maybe Harriet Harmon (politician, oft leader of the Labour Party), these women may posses the mannerisms and mechanisms that the DQ expresses so vividly, but do not bring them to the fore readily lest they be thought as irrational, emotional, bitchy, or overly self absorbed. These are the facets I’m referring to, and the DQ puts them at the front on steroids and then some. Every disqualifying statement a misogynist male could make about a female, when trying to qualify why they should not be allowed by a male society to occupy a position of power, is in the playbook of the DQ.

Our DQ accentuates the difficult high healed walk, the hips, the talk, the attitude, look, the self love, the overconfidence, of the trashy loud mouthed, and likely quite inebriated, female that in the estate everyone dreads to see emerging from their doorway. The DQ is acting like the dodgy mother of your pal that flirts with you when you call round from school, saturated with gin and trying desperately to deny the damage of the years, the cigarettes, and a litany of bad life decisions. He is a greatest hits of non comedy, a comedian that needs a uniform and a persona to become, not funny, but a grotesque in the same ilk as the bearded lady or the spider boy from the travelling shows of old. The DQ is the modern version of the freak, shocking and in your face.

Women love them, they love the show, gay men love them too, and even some straight ones do too, but I think they deal the cause of women to be a serious force in the world a great blow. Just my thoughts though…

Paul S Wilson

Newspeak

It strikes me, that there is a particular problem with the way that we speak to each other, and I wish to examine it. I think I know why this phenomenon happens, but is it useful?

My friend is fat, really fat, colossally fat, I simply cannot state how fat the fucker is in strong enough terms for you to understand how fat they are. I once met a man who’s nickname was salad, because it was supposed that he’d never eaten one, my friend is fatter than he was…. but, I could never name them in this piece because that would hurt their feelings, and I could never point out that they were fat because that would be insulting them. I could however say about them that they are a fantastic person with many admirable qualities and that they do a great job at work, and that they are a great parent, sibling, child, in their family circle of equally decent people, who likely all are fat too. Now why can I make a judgement that is subjective, my opinion (that this is a decent person), but I cannot make a statement that is a true measurable, demonstrable, obvious to all with eyes, fact?

There are rules, societal rules and real ones on what can be done. I cannot speed traffic up if it is going far too slow, but I can slow it down to whatever speed I wish to travel at, no matter how slow that happens to be. This makes some sense though, as it has a utility to set an upper limit to that which exceeds most people’s ability to navigate roads such as a speed restriction, and to allow persons who are not comfortable at the higher speeds to drive at the pace they feel most comfortable at (though I do believe if you cannot go 70mph on a motorway in a capable car, then you maybe should not be driving).

I cannot point out a person’s physical traits to them, even as a soft criticism, no matter how correct my assessment (really it’s an observation) of them may be. Now don’t misunderstand me, I have no wish to hurt feelings at all, that could never be my intention. But to let my friend know they will almost definitely face a risk of many serious health conditions in the near future if they do not put down the chicken nuggets and hit the quinoa, is not a badly meant comment. In fact it could be done out of love and concern, for them, for their children, for their partner.

Incidentally, no matter how good a woman’s moustache is, you maybe should not compliment her on it..

I could have stopped at the preacher in the high street on Saturday morning and pointed out to him that his faith is no more valid, in the absence of any evidence, than the ramblings of any of the inhabitants of the asylum. Those persons incarcerated in such institutions have no less conviction (faith) in what they believe to be true than the man with the invisible friend and a story book that is one of many. Conviction does not a truth make, yet there he is every Saturday morning trying to prove his to everyone that walks past. I suspect such conviction is necessary to bolster the feelings of the demonstrator more than the listener, for if the listener has the leanings toward faith, or the need for salvation through delusion, I would assume they could get there themselves.

I know people who think the footage of the moon landings was faked, they’re utterly convinced of it, folks that think Elvis didn’t touch his 14 year old live-in girlfriend until she was 18, and people who think Bill Gates has put nano drones in vaccines. What is clear is that we choose what we believe based on our prejudices, and we choose the battles we wish to fight based on our feelings. I find it difficult to say that this is not relativism (the idea that we create truths by believing, that truth has a relation to human perspective), and I think it’s harmful.

In a recent conversation I noticed that when a person who is weak in their argument feels like they are outmatched it seems a good strategy to inject their upset into the situation, this has the immediate effect of making the other interlocutor, the winning party, appear to be a bully to observers. As if this tactic would work??? Well you wouldn’t think so but it does, and it did, and I see it happening again and again these days. It used to be that an argument had it’s own merit, and that getting upset was a sign of a weak arguer, but now, in the generation of the snowflake (a derogatory term for an overly sensitive person) what you feel has a weight and a purpose that is, to many (the other snowflakes), of equal value within the argument as such things as facts and theories.

My girlfriend is short, she’s fine with that, I’m fine with that, but if she felt something about being short, and I mentioned that she is short, I might end up hurting her feelings and I would regret it, none of this is in dispute. No matter what way we could broach the subject, or mention that fact, or how she felt about being short, she would remain short. None of what we might say about her shortness would increase her height or decrease it. The point is that how we feel about measurable things is not the same as how we feel about arguable things, and it is an intellectual mistake to think it otherwise. The same applies to my fat friend, they will get no fatter by my silence or my voice on the subject because the scale doesn’t care how I or they feel.

Protecting the vulnerable is an important part of being a moral actor in life, but protecting a falsehood against scrutiny because the person immersed in the falsehood might have to face that criticism is foolish. I get the feeling more and more, while witnessing the lives of much younger people than I, that the protection of feelings because of the prominent phenomenon of modern young persons preferring the sympathy that comes with turning the dissatisfaction they have with themselves into a campaign to change the verbs others use to describe them, than solving their problems in any practical way. It is as if being able to be labelled with a condition, and I am not denigrating people with real problems, is an object of fashion now and it’s abnormal to be psychologically grounded and physically satisfied.

No amount of feeling can change a fact, and a fact has no will to offend since offense is decided upon and not an inherent part of observation or measure. The fact that you are overweight may make you self-conscious, and that is unfortunate and unpleasant for you, but that doesn’t mean you are not fat, it just means you would rather not have people mention it because you are not happy being fat. It’s not that you are happy being fat but just don’t like that fact being pointed out, because if you were happy then you wouldn’t be psychologically damaged by others knowing it, or pointing it out. You wish that others would see you as not fat, so you make them not say it with your upset, but you fool yourself if you think that they don’t think that you are fat, they’re just not saying it, you still know you are fat and you know they know you are fat. In truth the problem is that you want to be not fat but you won’t do anything about being fat, you loath being fat but you enjoy the power of upset more than you would value the effort of the gym or restraining your fork.

You could play the victim, as if your fat was a symptom of your oppression, then you could enjoy the false pleasure of being a hero or a martyr to that condition. Better to absorb the superior feeling of controlling others in what they can and cannot say, and to wallow in the support of the peer group of others that are also measurably imperfect, than to accept what you are, or do anything about it and work towards what you would like to be. This is the modern solution to our imperfections, don’t put any effort in, don’t learn to accept your deficiencies, don’t be happy knowing that people are differently configured… instead, control the narrative of the circumstances you are within, hound the HR department to shut down any form of conversation on any people centred subject, take to social media and find people just a insensible as you are and form a group that sees itself as normal and the fact driven speakers as abnormal, change the system and its evaluative processes so you can feel better about the mess that you are.

I’m a rationalist, my view is based on the happiness gained from accepting what I am, not dwelling on my shortcomings, I like to describe that as being “Base Happy” – for it is better to sit and appreciate the birds for a while, than to waste the time wishing I could fly.

Paul S Wilson