Now It's Just Called Marriage

The US Supreme Court - or at least, five of them - made a wonderful decision.

Yes, I'm an advocate for gay rights. Technically I'm an advocate for equality in general, but every step forward is a good one. So I was very much in favour of this.

Here's the thing though. I predict there will be a fair few places (and they may or may not be the kind of places that believed the Confederate flag was a good idea, mark my words) that, at State or local level, decide to ignore the Supreme Court's ruling. It would infringe their religious rights, or something. Right?

Here's the thing: rebellion is actually frowned upon in the Bible.

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king. (1 Samuel 15:23)

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. (Romans 13:1-2)

...so you've been told now, you believers in the good book. The authority says it's legal, and the Lord says you don't get to question that.

And as for that jackass that threatened to set himself on fire if it was made legal, and is now backing out of it? Suicide is a sin, so is lying. Pick one. Then go sit over there and be wrong. Go on. Fuck off.

Too Good To Be True

You ever had an idea that you thought was really cool, that you just knew was totally impractical and unworkable?

What about an idea that you can't really see any problems with that is only held back by one tiny frustrating fact, usually something to do with profit margins or political will?

Here's a collection of great ideas whose lack of worldwide acceptance and execution I can't grasp. They're not all my ideas - a lot of them have been bounced around in my group of friends. If you see any problems that I don't pick up on, please, let me know - and why not toss in your own suggestions?

OMNISEX CUBICLED BATHROOMS
Nobody likes using a urinal. Let's face it, we're not cattle. Combine bathrooms, save space on the urinal section, stop discriminating passively against trans individuals and enforcing gender binary, and give us frigging cubicles.

SOLAR PANELS LITERALLY FUCKING EVERYWHERE
Glass exists that can generate electricity when the sun is shining on it. You can put solar panels on just about any external surface. They can be camouflaged to look less obvious. You can make solar roads. I look outside my house and I see no solar panels. There is a killing to be made here. Are we just waiting for literally the last crumb of coal to burn?

ACTUAL HOME ECONOMICS LESSONS
Home Economics - that's cooking, right? I agree that learning to cook is important, but at what point in school were you told how to pay your taxes, and what those taxes are? How expensive it is to actually live in a place of your own? What is insurance, exactly? Nobody should go to university without knowing this stuff.

WASTE FOOD LAWS
Give it to the homeless and the poor. This shouldn't require a law but it does, so we need one. France took the big step forward - the rest of the world needs to follow suit. Dad always taught me never to waste food, and supermarkets and restaurants should be no exception.

MINIMUM WAGE TIED TO LIVING WAGE
There are companies on earth that actually make this work. Seriously - when you are told by the country you live that your ability to not starve to death is less important than keeping Wal*Mart's profit margins low, then you're seeing the shitty side of the capitalist dream.

...any more for any more?

If I Had A Trillion Dollars

I've been absent too long, I know. Please, internet - forgive me. I've had a hell of a time with a gnarled-up foot.

Less than a week away from a general election, the temptation is for me to talk about election politics. I am not going to do so. If you want my views on it, hell, drop me a memo. We'll chew the fat. What I AM going to do is share with you a game that myself and my housemates invented.

It's a very simple game, and one that came out of a discussion regarding intellectual property law. The game is this:

What would you do with a trillion dollars?

That's quite a lot of money. Just hold it in your head, the number of zeroes following the one: 1,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes.

To get your juices flowing, and to encourage some thought experiments, I'm going to have a wander through my own spending plan. (I'll keep a running tab of costs.)

The first thing I do is buy a house with cash ($1.5m). No mortgage, no debt, no rent. Just buy it outright.

The second thing - and this is quite a leap - is I buy 21st Century Fox ($72bn).

I'd dismember them, frankly. Trash the news outlets, replace them with actual music channels. I'd give the rights of several of the TV and film franchises that Fox currently own back to their respective creators, pretty much free of charge.

I'd follow this big corporate purchase with an even bigger one, ExxonMobil ($524bn). This time we divert the thrust of the company's infrastructure - sell off all the outmoded fossil fuel apparatus and devote the company to sustainable energy research and technology. Maybe offer to rejuvenate the entire power grid of a dilapidated city somewhere just to prove it can be done as a working model.

...and that's almost $600,000,000,000 of my trillion dollars spent...but I like to think that it would make the word at least a little better.

What would you guys do?

The Two Great Evils

In my opinion, humanity has two great evils.

They're a old as humanity itself - as long as we've been self-aware, as long as we've been capable of thought. They have their roots in social evolution, and they are often held up as virtues by their greatest exponents.

Those two evils are greed and ignorance.

Let me expand on my definition of those two terms.

When I talk about greed, I don't only mean money - hell, I don't even only mean stuff. I mean a grasping overwhelming need for power and influence, be it fiscal, political or personal.

When I talk about ignorance, I don't mean a lack of learning. I mean wilful ignorance more than anything - a deliberate lack of comprehension or empathy. (Yes empathy. Empathy is understanding and ignorance is a lack of that.)

Most shitty things that people do to one another - either directly or indirectly, en masse or person-to-person - tend to stem from either of these things or a combination of the two. It doesn't take a lot of thought to work out how, either. A mugging in the street is a combination of greed (I want that guy's watch) and ignorance (I don't care how that guy feels to have his things stolen). Slinging racist abuse at someone is yet more of that ignorance (both a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding of external cultures) and power greed (I feel the need to demonstrate my perceived supremacy over this person).

The big step here is recognising each of those evils for the nuanced things they can be. Greed for money is just power greed in a more complex form - after all, having a large amount of money is a legitimate way to have a large amount of influence over your environment (see my previous blog post, Kraft und Macht, Wille und Geld). Humans are naturally afraid of things they don't understand, and in a society that punishes curiosity more than fear, such non-comprehension can very easily lead to fear - and from that, anger.

Our two demons came from what we used to be; admittedly, from different periods of our social (and physical) evolution. Greed, for example, is from when we used to worry about actual survival in a very visceral sense. If we look in nature, we see greed as a necessity - wolves gorge themselves whenever they can because they don't know when the next meal will come along. The urge to dominate and acquire and control was a strong survival instinct. Unfortunately that's an ancient seam of primordial need threaded into a modern and complex being, taking firm and unshakable root.

Ignorance is more recent. In and of itself, not knowing something isn't a sin - nobody is born knowing what lightning is, or how to throw a ball, or how to pronounce the word concupiscent. It is how one deals with not knowing that can lead to problems. Rather than be comfortable with not knowing, people have - since time immemorial - made things up to fill in the gaps; and when that made-up stopgap explanation is challenged, some people don't necessarily take it well. In a weird sense it can lead to an anti-academic sentiment; we've all heard the term know-it-all used as a pejorative, after all. There's no end of examples as to how people's egos and pride can be more valuable to them than understanding, from the persecution of Galileo in the early 17th century to the current anti-vaccine movement and the war on drugs.

Both of our particular demons are somewhat enshrined in modern life. They're promoted, almost - though greed is far more overtly pushed than ignorance.

"But John," I hear you cry, holding aloft hands filled with lead ingots and standing atop of crates of demonic chickens. "But John, without money, society would fold in on itself, nothing would work! We need money! What's so bad about having more of it?"

Well here's the thing: our current economic system is so ingrained in all of us that we, of course, think it is the best - perhaps only - way of doing things. In truth, the neoliberal revolution of the eighties did make a lot of people a whole hell of a lot of money; but at the same time, it vastly increased financial inequality. It sold a story of putting your oar in and trying hard and succeeding and elevating yourself above what you had before, what you were before. It had to. The only way such rampant (some might say irresponsible) growth can be maintained is if everyone buys into it, and lo and behold, everyone did.

Aside from the miners - but that's another story.

Thus it is a tacitly accepted fact of life that acquisition is normal, that we should all strive to acquire as much as we can, because if we can lay hands on it, we're entitled to it. Why work part-time to sustain the lifestyle that you are currently in when you can work full-time and also afford a holiday and a bunch of other luxuries? Look at lifestyle magazines - something like 70% of them is advertising space. That sends out a very clear message: your lifestyle is primarily dictated by that which you purchase, that which you own.

Ignorance is a more subtle sell. I can't speak for the present day but when I was in school, you got treated pretty poorly by your fellow students of you were a good student or the like. I find it hard to pinpoint a cause for this outside of, maybe, some kind of tribal respect system. The school forces people to confront their academic worthiness (or at least their ability to take exams), and rather than accept that value, those who maybe don't do so well at it turn it on its head - sure, the teachers think the swotty kids are the best, but we all know the secret.

It's a crying shame that, in a world wherein the answers to most questions we can even think of asking are literally at our fingertips - so many people with smart phones - so many people don't understand the basics of modern life. Again having to relate back to my school life, when we were taught Home Economics, it wasn't anything to do with economics and it was very loosely about the home - it was cooking. If it was really a home economics class it might have taught me what a mortgage is, what interest rates mean, why banks give out loans, what happens when you don't pay them back.

Also it's sometimes a case of people not wanting to learn. Why bother understanding the ins and outs of a foreign culture, or why people move to this country, or the difference between immigrants and expatriates, or why inflation happens, when we have "real" problems to deal with? Because the importance of these things only becomes evident when you actually put in the effort to learn about them in the first place. It's a tough ask - go read this wikipedia page, we promise you'll appreciate why you have to after you've actually done it. One can understand how one's worldview, after a certain point, doesn't grow that much wider.

Throw into that the fact that an education beyond high school is astronomically expensive and the breeding ground for ignorance is primed and ready - and it works in conjunction with its pal greed very nicely indeed. After all power greed is just as valid as money greed - and if you can dismiss anything you don't know or understand as unimportant, you firmly shore up your version of reality as being the most important one, thus increasing your own personal perception of power and influence.

Greed and ignorance; if we could only defeat them, or overcome them, or even weaken their grasp on our species, then perhaps we'd be getting somewhere.

All we have to do is shrug off a aeon-old survival instinct and a product of our own ego.

No problem.

Why We're Here

Last night I got to talking with one of my best friends about the notion of purpose, of why we're here. My thinking on the subject could probably be described as nihilistic - so fair warning, it might get a touch dark, or a touch nothing.

To put it bluntly:

We don't have a purpose.

That deserves refinement, mind. We do of course have purpose in our day-to-day lives but those purposes tend to be situational - be they from the very, very short-term ("I need to walk to the bus stop so I can get the bus to get to work") to the rather more long-term ("I need to work to earn money to go on holiday").

In terms of a great over-arching defining purpose, though - well that's a different matter. I don't - can't - believe there is some kind of mystic race track that we should be going down. That leans a little too close to determinism for me, and I don't believe in destiny or fate. I believe in causality and chance and consequence.

That doesn't mean to say I don't feel there's an answer to the question: "Why are we here?" That's another matter entirely. We're here because of sperm and eggs and natural growth cycles and survival. Again, to need a greater meaning to that flies a little too close to the mythical for me. The very notion leaves me a little cold, and I'll tell you why.

If we all of us are born with a purpose, then the next question is obviously: what is that purpose? Are we fulfilling it without even knowing, or are we stumbling away from it with no way to tell we've gone off-track? If there's no way to know that we are off-track as mentioned, then the purpose itself is totally irrelevant - and if the only sign that we're off-track is that vague feeling of questioning unease we experience with regularity, then we're in trouble, because it's perfectly normal for human beings to experience anxiety and doubt. It's probably best to try and find the real source, though, rather than convincing ourselves that we've fallen off the invisible tightrope and need to find it again to feel better.

Let us suppose, though, that there IS a purpose. That the road map exists, in the ephemeral sense that it is there in ways we can't actively perceive.

If I'm doing it right, and following that road map, then fuck you, whoever drew the map. My life hasn't been that great. There's been some great views and some fantastic stopovers but the roadworks have been fucking awful and some of these directions have been totally counter-intuitive. Thanks for not warning me about the traffic jams too. You asshole.

If I'm doing it wrong...then...what? What's the consequence for my non-deviation? Is it this anxious feeling? This gnawing doubtful ache that sometimes sits low in my stomach and keeps me awake at night? Fuck you again, whoever drew the map. If I get punished for not walking the line but you don't signpost the line, then that's arbitrary cruelty. It's like drawing an imaginary box around a puppy and kicking it whenever it leaves the box that it can't see. Think about that image for a moment.

Purpose.

I can't believe that there is purpose beyond that which we make for ourselves. That's a valid sense of worry and angst - not knowing where you are going because you can't decide, not because you don't know what the skywizard or the fatewriter or whatever the fucking thing is has decided for you. If our own inability to determine our own fate leaves us so insecure that we feel the need to assign a greater meaning to that inability, then we have bigger problems than what the invisible road map says.

We are not the slaves of puppet strings stretching off into the infinite abyss of bullshit. We've got enough strings - strings like our biological need for food and water and warmth and shelter, like our psychological need for comfort and security, like societal pressures, like the drives and urges that swell and surge in our minds from a thousand different sources. Assigning them to the wishy-washy outer spheres of existence is outright denial of the most awful, and yet most liberating and beautiful, of all truths.

If there is nothing outside of us and what we are, and what we perceive as real, then the universe is still jam-packed with wonders and miracles. If all that exists is what our senses and the tools we use to enhance those senses can detect, then we still have an entire galaxy populated by the beauty of numbers and the magnificence of the horseshoe nebula and the awesome yet tiny world that inhabits a plant cell seen through a microscope and the surging rush of absolutely everything that your favourite song sends through every single nerve ending in your body whenever you hear it.

If there is a purpose - if there is truly a reason for us being here - then it is simply for us to be here. What this means is that we need to keep going. Find whatever we need to keep us going to tomorrow, because in the end, our lives aren't measured by how well we followed an invisible non-existent road map. Our lives aren't measured by anything outside of ourselves.

Don't waste that life inventing reasons to be afraid. Don't wait for a destiny to spring out of the echo of your own mind - or anyone else's. Find those things that make you want to see tomorrow, and then see that tomorrow.

See every tomorrow you can.

I think that's more than enough purpose for me.

Kraft und Macht, Wille und Geld

(For those of you reaching for Google Translate - the title literally translates as "Force and Power, Will and Money".)

To bring a Sesame Street theme to the blog - something I should perhaps do more often - today's blog is brought to you by the concepts of Will To Power, and Elite Panic, and the number 99.

First, a definition of each of these concepts:

Will To Power is a concept central to Nietzsche's philosophy. It states that the urge and ambition to reach the highest possible position in life, and thus control the environment that one is surrounded by, is the greatest driving force behind human nature.

Elite Panic is a notion I've only come across recently - it is best described by Astra Taylor in an interview with Rebecca Solnit, both fascinating and forward-thinking people:

One of the most interesting ideas in the book [A Paradise Built In Hell, by Solnit] is the concept of “elite panic”—the way that elites, during disasters and their aftermath, imagine that the public is not only in danger but also a source of danger. You show in case after case how elites respond in destructive ways, from withholding essential information, to blocking citizen relief efforts, to protecting property instead of people. As you write in the book, “there are grounds for fear of a coherent insurgent public, not just an overwrought, savage one.”

Having read more than a couple of articles related to the concepts in the book in recent days, I got to thinking about what it means. It does, at this point, bear mention that I have no formal education in any of this stuff. This is all just observation, opinion, and highly based on my own view of the world.

If we take as given that the will to power is indeed the primary driving force behind the human subconscious, then the acquisition of wealth is certainly easily explained as a means to achieve that end. The more currency one has at their disposal, the easier one can influence the world around them - as that world has been informed and constructed by those with a significant amount of currency.

Every stage of wealth obviates one from needing to worry about the concerns of the stage before, from extreme poverty all the way up to the mega-rich; I dare say nobody that lives above the poverty line really needs to worry about clean water, for example, nor would any HNWI (High Net Worth Individual) be troubled by their electricity bill.

The link between acquisition of wealth and one's will to acquire it is, in an anecdotal sense, very real. Popular thought envisages those who are self-made millionaires as being wilful, strong individuals that grasp for what they can and make the best of it. Brad Klontz states in an article here that if one associates money and its gain with evil or amorality, one is less likely to acquire it, simply through the basic psychology of aversion. (Whether or not becoming rich is actually amoral is a blog for another day.)

What this could engender, however, is the outlook that everyone sees the world in a similar way.

We tend to do this, as human beings. Our reference for other people's behaviour and mentality is our own behaviour and mentality. In the same way as how someone's own view of God is often a quite close reflection of their own personality, unless one recognises themselves as flawed, one imagines that all mentally "normal" and healthy people see the world in the same way as they do.

If this is true - this means that wealthy people assume that everyone wants to acquire wealth just as much as they do. Further, assuming the will to power is indeed our driving urge - then our initial assumption is actually true, in a very base way.

Which offers us a basic explanation as to why the wealthy would fear those less wealthy than they are. Of course the poor want the things the rich have. Of course they covet those things. It's what society wants us to do - the society so wonderfully constructed to be a trickle-up economy, so adroitly turned into a system for rewarding the pursuit of currency.

I found it quite hard to track down statistics for just how much money was taken or made via high-level financial fraud and tax evasion last year; also, what actually constitutes such a crime is a fairly muddy subject, as what is morally objectionable (foreclosing on people's homes, absurd rates charged on unscheduled overdrafts) is rarely illegal. A great example of this is the attempted re-branding of tax evasion as "tax efficiency". Tory peer Lord Fink - very appropriate name - even claims that literally everyone does it to some degree, which many families and individuals that try and make ends meet every month will probably find incredulously inaccurate.

Let's be real though. Those HNWIs we talked about earlier, they want to live in gated communities with each other - because while other HNWIs are the kind of people that are more likely to engage in such high-level theft, it's the poor folks that are coming to rob them in more direct crimes. I would be willing to place bets that the amount of money taken in physical theft pales in comparison to the amount taken via financial fraud and tax evasion, but as we all know, perception of crime is not necessarily informed by statistics or reality.

So of course, the elite are going to panic whenever it looks like those below them are getting riled. Lurid pictures of potential rioting and looting were painted during Katrina - pictures that were actually not that accurate. Protests about the unbalanced fiscal state of the world tend to be given very specific treatment in media owned by right-wing individuals and by police forces that are by their very nature right-leaning: downplay them if you can, contain them if you can't, and invalidate them if at all possible. The very reason this happens is because those who own the news media and those who inform the laws upheld by the police are terrified that those poor grubby people with dreadlocks and colourful clothes are coming for their material goods, because if the situation were reversed, it's what they would be doing.

As I have always said - almost every conspiracy theory isn't a conspiracy. The truth of the matter is easily explained, entirely obvious, statistically evident, and worse than the theory in the first place.

The Illuminati isn't a group of cackling evil millionaires that sit around a desk and have a secret handshake. There is no Illuminati. There doesn't need to be. It's the nature of the wealthy to wish to remain wealthy, to wish to increase their wealth, and to protect that wealth from those that would take it. Right or wrong, that's your conspiracy. Simple psychology.

Of course, the only real way to prevent people from wishing to correct a massive gulf between rich and poor (as presented here in the US and here in the UK) is to actually close that gulf somewhat. A decrease of overall poverty, and a subsequent decrease in wealth inequality, would probably go a long way to calming down us angry poor folks. It would also lead to increased spending, healthier economies, stronger growth, greater financial security in the markets, and the easing or curing of several global problems that only a reduction of poverty can provide. Malaria, for example.

Hence the number 99 mentioned at the beginning. If the gap between the 99% and the 1% was reduced, the 100% would have better lives.

If only we had the will to make that change.

Neitzsche talks about Kraft - force - as being something that every being possesses; a drive, an urge to control the environment around it. He talks about Macht - power - as being the proper and thoughtful application of that force in order to effect the changes necessary to achieve that control. In our little discussion, we see wealth, raw currency, as Kraft. It is force. A means to an end. With sufficient Macht, the elite would never need to panic ever again.

But hey...I highly doubt anyone that could begin that particular rich man's revolution reads my humble little blog, eh?

Hurting Without Cursing

 Fair warning: there's bad language in this one...

A very good friend of mine very recently asked me:

How do you deal with pain and not curse?!

My response was, if not helpful, then very simple:

I curse a hell of a lot.

It's true. I swear way too much. I restrain myself at times, when it is appropriate, but I still cuss like a drunk sailor at a strip club when in the right company. I sometimes use words that don't even exist (don't ask me what a slunt is), or turns of phrase that went out of fashion before the internal combustion engine was invented (carpetbaggers and lollygaggers!). I once called a very good friend of mine a pusillanimous proto-simian bastard, though I think I picked that up from somewhere else.

It's a way to channel the general slow boil of frustration out of my brain, in a way that doesn't hurt anyone. Chronic pain isn't always something that only one person suffers - it spills over, something I try very hard to not allow to happen. I'd far rather deploy terms like badger-fondling fucktart than snap instantly at everything that niggles me. Forced to choose between being moody and assholish 24-7 and occasionally insinuating that one of the z-list non-celebrities in the news inhales more cock than a dragon on a chicken-only diet, well, the choice is obvious. That way people are less likely to have to ask who shit in my sombrero this morning, who pissed in my wheaties if you will.

There's lots of ways to deal with pain, and one comes to rely on them more on some days than others. I say it a lot: there are Good Days and Bad Days and some days where you're not sure and some days where you are definitely totally for realsies sure with jizz-guzzling cherries on top.

Today was a Bad Day, and I have cursed quite a lot.

But there's always good days - and on those days, sometimes, I just swear for the fun of it.

On occasion this can lead to offence being caused. To be honest:

You could sink a battleship with the fucks that I don't give.