The two paths to a quiet life are to say nothing to anybody about anything, or to say everything that comes into your head. The second way is easily the most effective. Sooner or later the absolutely discrete person will be blackmailed or persecuted for something they didn't say. However, the purveyor of utter candour is regarded with mute horror by all dignified persons, and given a wide berth. Thus, like much else on this website, the Aphorisms have done a great deal to guarantee Thor perfect social obscurity ....

215. Democratic Dictatorship

The first article of China's constitution states that the country is a democratic dictatorship. Ponder what this might mean. Black is white? A dictatorial democracy might be that common process worldwide whereby a population is told to vote for monster_X or suffer gross violation of their human rights, even death. That's dumb of course. A more insidious technique is to misuse people's natural good intentions. Perhaps democratic dictatorship is the art of deceiving people about what is right and wrong by screwing their education and manipulating their access to information. Come to think of it, that also describes a wide spectrum of world governance (not least in America).

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214. Admired Vegetables
Mon 21-Apr-2008

A primary ambition for the greater part of humanity is to become an admired vegetable. As young plants many of them show much cleverness and adaptability in acquiring those labels and brand names needed to position themselves in a sunny garden plot. Or lacking cleverness, they may show special diligence and do favours for the head gardener. Regardless, it is all to the final purpose of being well fed in a nice undisturbed position which everyone admires. Strangest of all, this rush to lethargy is common to all degrees of humankind, from the highest
IQs to the humblest of school failures. It is common to villains and heroes alike. Nearly every man jack of them will fight to the death in a shopping cente car park to avoid walking an extra 50 meters. Getting them to walk though is child's play compared to coaxing them to compose a song, write a book, invent a better widget, start a new kind of business, find a survivable way for 6 billion people to live at peace on one small planet, or doubt the accumulated ignorance in 6000 years of self-congratulation written by the status idols of each generation.

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213. A Huckster and a Million Suckers
Tue 18-Mar-2008

The demise of communist ideologies was an inevitable denoument of the fraud upon which they were based : that power and wealth belonging to the few (notably the Party elite) was power and wealth belonging to you and me. The USSR version of that elite, having bought more TV sets and blondes-for-hire than they could handle, blew the nation's surplus on stupid armaments, just as every empire since time immemorial has done (megalomaniacs are short in the imagination department).

The pending demise of capitalist ideology is also an inevitable denoument of the fraud upon which it is based : that power and wealth belonging to the few (notably the ruling elite) is power and wealth belonging to you and me. Their goal is hegemony and monopoly, not diversity and competition. The USA's version of that elite, having bought more mobile phones and blondes-for-hire than they can handle, have blown the nation's surplus on stupid armaments. However, since greed is their motto and their value, they have taken some further steps. One of those steps has been to impoverish the ordinary people of America for generations to come with unrepayable debt for those armaments, at least by the terms of the Faustian laws with which they claim to bind those people.

To guarantee that their wages of ursury are stashed in gold and property, this American elite, through the mechanism of their banking systems, have spent fifteen years luring domestic borrowers with almost zero interest loans on next to no equity, then reselling this junk debt at multiples of the original price through "financial derivatives". Their conman's claim was to "spread risk". In fact they multiplied risk and promoted uncontrolled asset inflation. Like any ponzi scheme, the whole thing is collapsing in flames, this time around the ears of working America, but the principal architects will assuredly be buying up these fire sales for their monopoly game, and cornering the markets in gold and commodities. Their final step in the scheme of grand larceny has been to defraud their world wide creditors by printing shiploads of US dollars, and devaluing those dollars to the Zimbabwe standard. Something like it has all been done before : take a peek at the 19th century American railroads, built with European money that was never repaid.

Communist, capitalist, name-your-next-ist. Does it matter? There are a clutch of power-junkies to spruik, and a million suckers born every day. The problem is, staying mobile enough to keep out of their murderous ways.

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212. All Hidden Truth to Bring to Light
Tue Mar-18-2008

The world we see and hear and smell and taste and otherwise sense around us is a printout of the human brain. The patterns in these sensations are the only patterns we can recognize. By finding those patterns reflected in the world, we understand ourselves. Recognition is where our predictions and our sensations meet. There we have an option to act. Language is the most immediate of these patterned productions, which is why I study it, but whether you are hooked tracking the flight of bumble bees or the price of houses, you are essentially sharing my field of interest.

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211. The High Price of Friends
Sun Jul-22-2007

The trouble with people is that they eat and drink. If you want to hang out with these critters you have to undertake to destroy your body with unwanted food, and poison your brain with concoctions of alcohol or perhaps other drugs. Maybe online networking will give us a healthier social life, or maybe we'll just have to wait for a talkable home robot.

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210. Prestige and Truth
Thu Jul-12-2007

Educational institutions are dedicated to building value. The value which they seek to promote above all others is prestige: prestige for the institution itself, and prestige for the individuals within it. This is because prestige has a monetary value in the marketplace, and a cultural value in establishing the pecking order amongst humans. The prestige building role may be covert or overt, depending upon the public ideologies of particular communities. It is absolutely clear however that values such as the pursuit of truth, discovery and innovation, and fostering the free exchange of ideas are at best tools, used and easily discarded, in the pursuit of prestige. Seen in this way, educational institutions for most people most of the time are no different from any other forum for human vanity, whether a workplace or a playground, a church, an army or a political machine. Is there a problem with this? A culture built entirely on the supreme value of prestige will quickly become a hollow shell, unable to evolve beyond ritual. Such cultures have been an historic norm, and many have supported an ant-like breeding and dying of human generations for centuries. They are also fragile, and by my (warped?) value system rather pointless. Changes in the natural environment, or invading forces, have swept them away overnight. Nervertheless, prestige with its supporting rituals remains the bastion of mediocrity. Truth tellers, knowledge builders and innovators - essentially outsiders - can never be more than temporary actors in this cavalcade of pomp.

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209. Every Man Has His Price
Sat Jun-09-2007

The price of Everyman is remarkably low. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic was a man who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Either Everyman puts a very low real value on things which are proclaimed most loudly as value items - the moral dimension - or is indeed a cynic. How can we say this when Everyman will in fact kill for moral values if they are packaged in the right colours? Observe the passing parade of life.

Observe life within the bubble of paid employment, for example. Institutions breed cowards like dung heaps breed maggots. The hero of the football team becomes a snivelling aparatchik without a working conscience when given a 9 to 5 job, a promise of promotion sometime, and a mortgage. Put the average man or woman on a minimal wage and they will happily betray or exploit any passing victim to earn a 'bonus'.

Those temples of moral authority - the churches, the mosques, the communist youth leagues, and all the rest - are needed because they provide a pit-stop salve for all our hidden betrayals and acts of cowardice, while actually changing nothing, ever.

The only society which will conserve the passive decency and goodwill of Everyman is one in which decency and goodwill are courage free, cost free and preferably come with a gold star of approval on the back of the hand.

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208. The Conservation of Authority
Sat May-19-2007

We are all conservative about some things - maybe the way we clean our teeth, or a preference for sleeping on a firm bed, or a reluctance to spend money on certain things. For some people though, the conservative cast pretty well defines their management of the world. Such people are apt to be excessively credulous about anyone or anything which comes dressed in the haughty robes of reputation. They will defend to the death other people's opinions, regardless of the merit of the argument, if that opinion comes with a stamp of approved authority. This is a wonderful opening for the unscrupulous and ambitious. It is no accident that the largest quota of every culture's scoundrels are very respectable indeed.

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207. Judgement Day
Wed Apr-25-2007

Is good judgement the goal of a good education? It seems not. Half the population can't even pick a successful marriage partner, let alone a president. Most are easily persuaded of truth by the trappings of pomp and circumstance, the pretensions of authority, the bubble of reputation, and the siren songs of advertising copy writers. They will happily hold conflicting beliefs, and are generally indifferent to rational evidence unless the evidence is chosen to fit a desired conclusion. They are all convinced of their own good judgement. Perhaps goodness is what you want to make it, and judgement is our ego's rubber stamp.

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206. Riddle Time

What do computer games, religion, poetry and art have in common? Well, a kind of artistry perhaps. But let's come down to artistry itself. All artistry is a public illusion in which we are licenced to park our private delusions.

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205. Management Rules
Tue Jan-02-2007

The main objective of the management class will always be to hire people who through cowardice, fear, ignorance or incompetence will never challenge management. The best managers realize that cowardice is easily the most maleable and reliable of these qualities, so it is truly a quality objective in personnel practices. Fear opens a wider field of hiring choices, but needs some effort to maintain, and ignorance is similarly liable to erosion since even the thickest hirees learn a thing or two after a while. Some employees will always be safely incompetent, but with a larger group you have to churn rules and roles often enough to confuse them. This is a bother, though it can be a useful cover for the manager's own career advancement.

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204 The Laws of SNAFU
Sat Nov-11-2006

Men's penises hold up half the sky; (apologies to the ghost of Mao Zhe Dung).
Corollary : Life is best defined as one fuck up after another

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203. Curious
Wed 18-10-2006

A curious mind never grows old. It just annoys the hell out of the mortal majority.

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202. The Beast in Beauty
Tue 03-10-2006

Beauty is irresistable, like sugar. It's hard to manage an appetite for beauty, especially if you 'have it', but as with all candy, too much of a nice thing tends to poison. There is nothing quite as ugly as narcissism. Koreans, amongst whom I live, have many fine qualities, but are culturally cursed with such self-obsession. A public lift full of Koreans all preening and picking their pimples in the lift mirrors at any time of the day or night is not a pretty sight.

Ugliness is probably not good for you like green vegetables and hard work. It does however drive one to a bit of philosophy. By most reasonable measures, I've been one of the world's uglies from an early age, to the point where my mother at various times has advised me not to smile, and if possible not to talk. The options seemed to cringe or be damned. With passing time, by far the best choice has been damnation. If you weren't blessed with mask of beauty, then you at least have a free hand to mould your flesh and bone with some character.

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201. A Fool's Market for Democracy
Mon 02-10-2006

If you want to know how the world runs, look for the incentives, not the vision statements. Incentive is what drives business, what drives politics, and of course it is what drives you. Now consider the democratic incentive from a politician's viewpoint. The deepest (and always hidden) incentive for an elected representative is to maximise the collective stupidity of his or her electors. You need to fool enough of the people enough of the time to feel safe.

The ideal democratic state for an elected representative is one which makes an ideology of anti-intellectualism, if intellectualism means the habit of mental curiosity and respect for clear thinking. My own culture, the Australian, has long made a fetish of anti-intellectualism, but various institutions (such as the independent public broadcaster, the ABC) have worked with limited success as a counterforce. The American political elites, for generations, have devoted a large part of their social engineering effort to dumbing down the electoral majority. They have succeeded to the point where the most publically acceptable political leadership is a media invention, a good 'ole fool, at the mercy of backroom Rasputins. A non-leader. Since America is just 4.5% of the human world, that doesn't seem much of a recipe for survival.

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200. Bombed Out
Wed 09-08-2006

Dropping smart bombs on people's homes is bad for business. It is about the dumbest thing that the leadership of any country can do. No provocation is worth it. When you destroy a house, you destroy its owner's investment in peace. A man without a home stops worrying about his mortgage. A man whose family and friends have been mutilated or killed is a human missile bent on revenge. Claim a moral hegemony in the name of your particular god for mayhem or murder and you set the scene for genocide.

America and Israel currently have exceptionally ignorant and brutal leadership. They have hardened their opponents in the Middle East into determined guerrilla resistance forces who wield considerable moral capital. American and Israeli leaders are unable to grasp that an American or Israeli life is worth no more and no less than a Congolese life, a European life, a Palestinian life, or a Lebanese life, or for that matter the life of a Hezbollah. Hence they forfeit all respect. They have no monopoly on these bad qualities, but they are in a position to do themselves and others extreme damage. Israel, given past Jewish traumas, should know above all that deception, betrayal and the jackboot never finally extinguish the spirit of another people. As for the good ol' US of A, the second American revolution should be at least six weeks holiday a year for everyone. Then that goofy, hysterical, overweight and undereducated people (well a lot of them ^_^) might get abroad and finally grasp that theirs is not the only or even the best way to spend our short time on our earth. As it is, the American ruling elite is on a deadly trajectory where soon six billion other folk will be asking, "are you with us, or are you against us?". Indeed, most of them are already asking.

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199. Meddling Priests
Sun 04-06-2006

One of the functions of religions, together with their usual quota of gods, is to provide employment for certain personality types. Priests in their many forms - pastors, imams, witch doctors, missionaries, whatever .. - are characters who lust to exercise moral power over other people. Indeed many, if not most people seem to want someone to exercise that power, however nominally. Perhaps it comes from the conditioning of parental authority. Anyway, the priestly class, having no more imagination than average, pick up on some local dogma and sell it as their own, claiming a moral imperative. A few are indeed saints. Sadly though, on average, the moral calibre of priestly types is rarely better than average, and pretty often worse. Above all, they are intolerant of any challenge to their moral hegemony. Historically they have been a major source of hatred. fratricide and oppression, whatever the dogma in their book of magic. There is no reason to believe that will ever change.

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198. The Wealth of Nations
Sun 04-06-2006

In 1776 Adam Smith wrote a book called The Wealth of Nations. It became the foundation of modern economics. Smith's book begins : "The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations". Well sir, it used to be that way. Funnily enough, economics, that dismal science, gave up on people long ago, and so, increasingly does actual business. From those bucaneer plunderers called mining companies to the widget producers like Toyota, to the service providers like telecommunication behemoths, actual slaves needed to run the scene are fewer and fewer. For that matter, the other major potion in the old formula of economics, capital, is often less needed too. Technology ultimately supplants the demand by resource controllers for both labour and capital.

Very conveniently (since they are no longer needed), the populations of nearly every country in which women get a decent education have decided to commit demographic suicide. Some countries can fudge on this for a while with immigration, but the bottom line is that only dirt poor backwaters where industrialization has hardly begun are producing babies in quantity. The politicians of disappearing nation states wring their hands, and economists still mulitplying labour by capital write dark essays about demographic time bombs. Its all rather a change really : forty years ago the catastrophe was deemed to be exploding human populations, and the utopian role ot technology was to provide boundless wealth for everyone.

Well, a few billion fewer people might not be such a bad thing after all. The real puzzle is linking that clever technology to the wealth of the survivors in an organic way. Not a few countries are already run by small oligarchies of scoundrels, living in gated communities with guards to keep the people at bay. If treason means anything, these characters are traitors. Letting them finally control the productive resources and instruments of technology is the real brewing catastrophe for humanity at large.

Yet the equation which will link the productive, wealth producing power of technolgy to the efforts and dreams of ordinary individuals is elusive. Joe Citizen can't start a production plant of robots. He has trouble even starting a family, and generally wants someone to give him a nice routine job. We have tried in the past to solve equations like that with ideology. It doesn't work, not long term. Ideological fudges kill people horribly. No, there has to be some link made between technology and personal wealth which really harnesses the laws of human psychology and nature, and which can't be done down by the mischief of thugs in suits.

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197. The Land of the Free
Tue 24-04-2006

When it came to model-Ts, you could choose any colour so long as it was black. Henry Ford epitomized American corporatism before corporations got smart. A little later it was arranged that Americans cold choose any mode of transport so long as it was a private car or a plane. They could eat anything so long as it was a fried takeaway from a franchise, or processed gunk in a plastic packet. They could freely choose exhorbitant patented drugs or death, or an outrageous private health system or suffering. They could choose exploitative labour conditions or unemployment. They could choose any politician so long as he was a multi-millionaire or hopelessly in debt to corporate gangsters. They could say what they liked, because nobody was listening anyway. Heck, they even had an inviolable right to own a gun and shoot themselves in the head. They did insist however that the rest of the world should admire this paradigm of democracy and feed it cheaply, or else, if necessary, be nuked.

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196. In Praise of Small Men with Big Feet
Sat 15-04-2006

For a small man with big feet, big ears, a big nose, crooked teeth, anti-social habits and no respect for authority, being 60 is not such a bad age, especially if you can still do a few push-ups. The competition has long since grown beer bellies, developed halitosis and lost their crowning glory. When you are 20 as a small man with big feet da da, all the beautiful people consider that you have no right to exist, so you have to waste time kicking them in the ankes.

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195. The Ark of Common Belief
Sun 05-03-2006

From the evidence of history, religions are needed. Religions are supermarket explanations for the outer limits of human understanding, and that is all the explanation that most people seem to want. The supermarket status of the explanation itself is an attraction, for it guarantees a fellowship of shared belief. Religions are also social vehicles through which individuals express their ideal moral character, sometimes even when their daily lives allow little space for the ideal. That moral expression will find an outlet, regardless of the religious brand chosen from the local supermarket of the spirits. Thus religion is a licence to do good. The seven deadly sins, and plenty more, will also be justified and rationalized by invididuals and social groups, using whatever religious brand they happen to have chosen, and regardless of what the dogma of their religious texts proclaim. Exclusion, persecution and unkindness will all be availble for members of the chosen religion to inflict on non-group members - those who have chosen another brand. Thus religion is a licence to do evil. When the outer limits of human undersanding are expressed with a human rather than a supernatural reference, the religion is named an ideology instead (communism, Confucianism, capitalism etc). In the end this matters little, for all the same psychological mechanisms for belief and action apply.

[.. for more along these lines see Thor's The Atheist's Catechism ]

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194. Why Are You Here?
Sat 28-01-2006

Long ago, when the Internet was new, I set up a form-mail to ask "What is the most interesting question in your life, and when do you expect to get an answer to that question?" For me, the generic answer was easy, and a source of endless fascination : "How does it work?" By a large majority however, the replies favoured "Why am I here?". For me, the answer to that was almost too easy in private. The expected public answer though was too foolish, for it seemed to presuppose validation by some uneeded proxy god, and therefore guarantee conflict amongst mere mortals.

I know why I am here. Like you I am a caretaker gifted with a little intelligence to use wisely, a humble warden for a small planet we call Earth, and all the living things upon it. The role I may perform badly. I am often selfish, often partisan, but when the dust clears I know where the ground is under my feet. I am not a man from Alpha Centauri, and I am not a man from some concrete apartment block in some nameless city of an invented country. I am a man from Earth, and Earth is always waiting for my care.

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193. Teacher
Sun 15-01-2006

A teacher helps her students navigate that perilous journey from the known to the unknown. But what star will she steer by? For a learner, the known is on the inside, a secret world never visited even by the most intimate of lovers. The outside is an exhibition, a fireworks display of exploding rockets, starry sprials and streaming sparks; the outside is a deception too, the soggy carboard of burnt out firecrackers we find in the mud the morning after. For a teacher, the inside is the outside, the learner's mind a mystery, and the inside, she claims (doubting it herself) is the fireworks display which everybody sees...

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192. Leader
Sun 15-01-2006

Civilization is the process of harnessing destructive energies for creative ends. War is the process of harnessing creative energy for destructive ends. A leader is a teacher who persuades others to choose civilization over war. An anti-leader is a predator who persuades others to glorify war above civilization. Faced with a choice, your average citizen often chooses someone else's destruction, and hence, ultimately, his own.

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191. The Incompetents
Fri 18-11-2005

The miracle of modern societies is in taking so many chronically incompetent people and organizing them into more or less functioning institutions.
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190. The Indigestibles
Sat 05-11-2005

Academic writing, like much of the world's cooking, is a process of taking perfectly good ingredients and rendering them into a form that no sane person would ever want to ingest.

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189. The Indespensables
Tue 01-11-2005

What do medical doctors have in common with priests, witch doctors, motor mechanics and cops? Well rationalized failure breeds dependency and return business.

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188. What a test never measures
Sun 23-10-2005

An examination or test is a way of listing a closed selection of items about what someone doesn't know consciously at a given moment. No one has yet devised a way of measuring the open-ended totality of what a human being does know. Even within a defined field, we can rarely estimate, let alone measure, a person's real knowledge. This is because a) what a person learns has only an fractional and accidental relationship to what a teacher teaches, or what a book lays out, and b) memory is such a temperamental device. Some knowledge is exceptionally difficult to be sure of, even in personal reflection : for example, understanding of that most fundamental tool, a human language.

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187. Hidden Incentives
Tue 18-10-2005

So you want to change the world ? You have invented a wonderful new system/method/ideology/religion ? Yes, it works for your friends and admirers. Let's sell it to the mass marketers : the politicians, the corporations, the professional promoters. But wait a minute ...

The mass manipulation of populations by governments, mass education, populist religious promotion etc. often has horrendous outcomes. We have a recorded species history of around six millennia of terrible outcomes with this kind of stuff. Why? Well it's partly because the **incentives** any system or ideology or 'method' or 'approach' sets up apply quite differently:
a) to the target group (citizens, students, devotees, whoever..);
b) to the agents who deliver it (e.g. civil servants, corporate employees, priests, teachers ...);
c) to the controllers (so-called administrators, politicians .. and the rest).

It is almost always true that the incentives and rewards flowing to controllers are the strongest predictors of outcomes, those accruing to the delivering agents, the second most powerful predictors, and those applying to the target group (i.e. the explicit content of the ideology, system etc) are the least effective, and frequently overwhelmed.

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186. Force Field
Mon 03-10-2005

The use of force in human affairs is a prelude to failure. Sooner or later it will be followed by a cycle of decline in in one guise or another : terrorism, a culture of revenge, the corruption of the oppressor, the death of initiative and innovation, the destruction of civil society, and so on ... Political leaders, with rare exceptions, are simply not able to grasp this. Crude power is their aphrodisiac. Their only ambivalence is about expressing the addiction :

- Article 1 of the Chinese constitution : "China is a democratic dictatorship."

- The American Secretary of State's (Condaleeza Rice) concept of democracy : "In a world where evil is still very real, democratic principles must also be backed with power in all its forms: political and economic, cultural and moral, and yes, sometimes military," Rice said in a speech on Thursday at Princeton University in New Jersey. "... Any champion of democracy who promotes principles without power can make no real difference in the lives of oppressed people." [October 2, 2005]

Stripped of rhetoric, the Chinese and American administration views come to much the same thing : fascism, the doctrine that might is right. Wherever violence is substituted for love you have fascism (and that describes a good deal of religious practice too). The Manichean 'good' and 'evil' stuff is pure populist tribalism. In fascist doctrine the home team is always "good", and any atrocity against the internal or external opposition is justified.

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185. Failed Superpowers
Sat 03-09-2005

Russians learned the hard way that a superpower can also be a failed state. Now, perhaps too slowly, at least some Americans are coming to understand the same bitter lesson. The American occupation of Baghdad showed (and has continued to show) conclusively that the Washington administration is both unwilling and incapable of managing any turbulent social and political environment. Like terrorists, they can destroy, but they cannot build. They can bribe but they cannot engage. Now the New Orleans debacle in heartland America has shown exactly the same characteristics. At its core appears to be a political culture dedicated to image rather than substance, deception rather than honesty, exploitation rather than service, manipulation rather than cooperation. Somewhere in the long history of this degradation, American civil society has been lost.

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184.Two Rules for an Interesting Life
Mon 22-08-2005

1. Whatever you do, try to do it well. An obsessive perfectionist ? No, but you can never win self-respect by not caring.
2. Constantly challenge your own limitations, physical and mental. Don't be greedy and try for too much at once. That only guarantees disappointment. But trying for too little is to cheat yourself of that single free gift you have been given : one lifetime. Step by step you can do it, whether you are 20 or 120. You are building something, and nothing is more interesting than creation, especially self-creation. Any fool can destroy their body or their mind, destroy their family, or even bomb a city. But self-challenge is the path to life. To surrender is to die. Passive existence is for zombies and vegetables.

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183. Religious Communism
Wed 17-08-2005

Religious communism is about as inefficient as economic communism, political communism or social communism. By communism I mean monopoly or totalitarian control in the name of some imaginary common good (and that includes tyranny of the minority by the majority). Forcing everyone to live on the same spiritual diet is just as corrupting and destructive to a culture as forcing all businesses to rigidly follow a central plan. In the economic case you wind up producing millions of shoes that nobody wants to buy. When it comes to the spirits, you wind up with an epidemic of hypocrisy and a total failure of creative development.

Force is the key issue here. There must be choice for those who wish to choose. Only a minority will ever innovate or challenge anyway, but they are the lifeblood of cultural survival. The others ? There is pervasive institutional cowardice and timidity amongst most humans in organizational settings. There is natual laziness. There is lack of imagination. In short, very, very few people are willing to think creatively about any major aspect of their lives. This is regardless of their measured IQ, their income, their formal education or their job. They eat the food their mother cooked, wear the clothes that fashion dictates, marry the partner society expects them to marry, and strive for the career the culture says they should strive for. They are off-the-shelf people. But even off-the-shelf people shift gradually in their life choices, and on things that do become central for them, some will shift a lot. Put a choker on these degrees of freedom and the society will slowly die, or it will explode. As for shoe brands, restaurants, schools and marriage options, we need a supermarket of the spirits to thrive. If you decide not to buy at all, well that should be OK too, not a signal for mugging the window shopper.

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182. God Stuff
Mon 01-08-2005

God is to human language as the zero is to mathematics. Thus god in an infinitude of isolation is without substance or value, but makes the most useful of all digits when dreams are multiplied by words. There is no doubt about the power of the god digit in any discourse amongst humans, and we cannot discount it there, for human actions follow where thought leads. Yet when our voices cease, my bet (another empty value to be sure) is that all kingdoms of heaven and hell will come to a zero sum game.

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181. To Be or Not to Be a Zombie
Sunday 3 July 2005

Educational systems which merely require factual recall (and most of them do) leave their graduates with infantile capacities for judgement. Much of the genuinely useful learning which occurs throughout our lives is in learning to assess probabilities, not simply recall facts. Some of us acquire this skill in the school of hard knocks. Many never do. Within limits you can train the young to be zombies, or teach them how to exercise intelligent judgement.

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180. Grades Are A Cultural Artifact
Wed 29-06-2005

Academic grades are a cultural artifact. There are courses to train teachers in the schoolspeak of testing and evaluation. This is a bit like learning about condoms before you become a prostitute. Later on you actually have to do a job, and keep a job. Giving good grades is the short way to keeping everyone sweet. Over a 30 year teaching career I have frequently been required, explicitly or implicitly, to falsify student evaluations. Resisting that has cost me a number of jobs, in Australia, China, South Korea ... I don't feel heroic. Foolish more likely. My parents gave me the wrong values. Everyone knows grown-ups tell lies.

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179. Grown-up Lies
Wed 29-06-2005

Grown-ups tell lies for a living. They are also required to lie that they tell the truth. This second bit goes by lots of names, like corporatism, or keeping your job, or religion, or Mao Zhe-dung's little red book of wickedness. No matter. The big mystery is why real truth-telling still hangs on by its fingernails, and from time to time claws open the door to the abyss by a crack. It seems that all the lie-telling cyclically brings individuals, companies and cultures to collapse. Then there's a moment of truth, a big bang, an Armageddon, a bankruptcy ... and the whole trick starts again in a different party suit. Same old lies though.

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178. Fish Eye
Wed 29-06-2005

Will you remember to buy tinned fish as you gaze into the eyes of your loved one? Probably not. But trolling the supermarket shelves you might. How can could any robot trust a species with brains as feckle at that?

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177. Special Duties
Sat 29-01-2005

Experts are rarely experts. When it comes to selling a widget, outsourcing bad news, or carrying the can though, an expert is invaluable to a have around.

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176. The Six Achievements
Sat Jan-01-2005

The progression of a normal human life has many measures, but six underlying engines :- a) self propagation; b) managing the matrix of friendship and "power", that is other people, and ultimately institutions of control; c) the accumulation of material possessions; d) productive or creative output; e) the pleasure impulse; f) the skills of personal body-mind management.

When the shouting and the tumult about ideologies settles, we are all focused to achieve some mix of these elements . Item a), the urge to self-propagation, is shared by protozoa and empires. Mere humans ricochet between their hormones and their tribal loyalites on this one. Item b), the power trip, is a prolific, destructive, and ultimately futile trajectory. Its primal source is sex, and its hold on frendship is often lethal. Item c), grow rich and be glorious, has had a wildly exuberant time in the various recent guises of "capitalism", but tends to yield only very temporary satisfaction. Item d), output, covers an enormous spectrum of cultures and abilities. For the few, creative output marks them as living treasures; for the many, "work" is a dreary routine of eating the years, while a "hobby" is the place where they truly play and create; Item e) the pleasure impulse, is an addictive spice, essential but toxic in excess, and the motive for much misery given to others. Finally, item f) self-mastery, for most people is a frankly haphazard process, a mixture of family habits, random experience, instant gratification, religion and crude superstition. The typical outcome is a mess.

Yet it remains true that a well-managed body, healthy, physically fit and properly nourished, together with an active, adaptable, humorous mind are (in my view) the best measures of a life well-lived. The busy self-help shelves of any bookshop are testimony to the popularity of this enterprise, and the pinched faces of all those folk in the street out there is the enduring evidence of failure.

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175. The First Problem of Politics
Wed Dec-29-2004

The first problem of politics has always been how to trap wandering minds into a holding pattern of shared purpose.

For hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers, a basic need for food and the procession of seasons set the mould. Every lifestyle since has had its rituals and ceremonies - deliberate structures to organize routines of behaviour. Religions and ideologies are extensions of the ritual process, drastically inflated with solemn nonsense.

The common thread in all of this stuff is that doubt and whimsy are not welcome.

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174. House Bait
Wed Dec-29-2004

The house mortgage is the most powerful instrument of social control ever devised.

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173. The Nearest Thing
Sat Dec-25-2004

The nearest thing to a person's hearrt is their art. The art may be in seduction, or in growing cabbages. It may be making model trains or building a business empire. For some it is writing a poem, however badly in the world's eyes, or playing a guitar, however crudely, or sketching a face, however strangely. It may be cooking food, or even keeping a house tidy. There may be a kind of art in knowing the football league, and there is certainly an art in raising children. Regardless, to despise this beloved art is to invite secret contempt, and to find the generosity to like it is probably the closest you will ever come to making a true friend.

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172. Lessons to Learn
Wed 08-12-2004

Some lessons are only for the wise to learn.

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171. A Vocation
Thu 02-12-2004

So your ambition is to have a career? Batten down for blackmail, expect to be corrupted, gamble against the high odds of failure. They'll buy off your youth for a few sheckels. You will be suckered, used and spat out. So what's a fellow to do? Try for a vocation. You can have a vocation as a railroad fettler, a pop singer, a housewife, a teacher or a captain of industry. No so-called diploma can give you a vocation, Nor can a job title. The only qualification is in your heart, and the reward is the satisfaction of doing something well. They'll call YOU naive, but you will know that THEY - the careerists - are chasing a chimera that will leave them as burnt out husks.

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170. Fascism
Sun 28-11-2004

Fascism is a 20th Century label for an ancient philosophy: the belief that might is right. It goes by other names. The Legalism of China's first Yellow Emperor was an early variant. So was neo-Confucianism. Authoritarianism is more or less a synonym. Corporatism is another (Mussolini's definition, and with admirers from tin-pot despots to Communist oligarchs to America's political elite). Its roots are in child rearing of a certain kind, and its expression is in uncounted family, company and governmental regimes, new and old. Fascism is probably the world's most popular covert belief system. Facism spells death to innovation and the spirit which separates humans from zombies.

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169. Faith
Sat 06-11-2004

Faith corrupts. Absolute faith corrupts absolutely.

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168. Public Belief
Wed 03-11-2004

Wherever religion or ideology have claimed a strong hold on the public mind, the political consequences have been mostly evil. The conditions which make possible this failure of civil life are based in child rearing and education, though the catalyst for disaster may be economics.

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167. God talk
Sat 23-10-2004

God is the trickster alter ego of self-talk. This chameleon gent is a partner needed, perhaps, by lots of folk, but when he gets control of the asylum, things tend to get apocalyptic, so the common sense of merely human judgements, and the tolerance that comes from knowing one's own frailty -- these qualities are lost in the rush to follow the trickster Harlequin's confident deceptions.

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166. The Important Question
Sun 03-10-2004

The question is, what is the important question? The next question is, what are you going to do about the important question once you find out what it is? As Douglas Adams famously decided through his super advanced computer which was smarter than humans, the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. Quite. The really important question though is what all the fools around you think is the important question. They are the ones who are going to lynch you if you laugh at their Lilliputan earnest concerns. Then of course there is your own life's work. You have gambled your small gift of intelligence and irreplaceable existence on this great issue. You wait for your reward as a clever fellow, or at least as a dedicated servant. Then some smart bastard comes along with a better answer. It took him ten minutes to figure out, between dinner and desert. Of course, successful thugs figure all this out by the end of primary school and go into business or politics, where clever fellows fight for crumbs from their table.

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165. The Slippery Business of Another Language
Sun 05-09-2004

Learning another language is like climbing a greasy pole. At this instant you have a phrase, but in a moment from now your mind will have slipped away from it. Fluency seems beyond reach. One glorious day you say something that the natives seem to understand. They greet this achievement with supreme indifference, and even sniff that your accent is funny. This is after years of trying. Then one day you die, and the monumental struggles of a lifetime are forever irrelevant.

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164. Judgements
Sun 05-09-2004

Our political choices are about as successful, on average, as our general success in choosing marriage partners. The consequences of a bad choice are worse though, because the damage is not simply personal. Arrnged marriage then? The trouble is, where do you find an honest marriage broker?

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163. The Subjugation of Careless Minds
Fri 25-06-2004

Whether they be in an army or a religious convocation, a company, a country or an empire, the surest sign of a subjugated people is their acceptance of institutionalized disinformation.

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163. Democracy
Fri 30-04-2004

Democracy for the ruling class is all about fooling enough of the people enough of the time to get elected. Democracy for the people, like Christmas, buying a lottery ticket, and marrying the one you think you love, is a necessary ritual of illusions which makes life tolerable. Democracy as an catalyst for good government cannot be left to the free market of deception, greed and hopeless wishes. In this age it can only work well in a cultural design where child rearing develops adult habits of shifting focus beyond self, family, community or even country to inquire about the wider world. It can only work well where the agents of education and information are open, honest, and independent of the interests of the ruling class. Obviously some cultural designs are better at this than others. No existing cultural designs are particularly wonderful for the purpose of nuturing informed democracy, and some of the most exhibitionionist ones in the catalogue, such as the United States version, are actively toxic to informed choice.
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162. The Ungentle Oscillation of Living
Fri 30-04-2004

Life is a cavalcade of preconceptions forever getting into traffic accidents with unwelcome new experience.

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161. Independence Day
Mon Dec-29-2003

Economic independence always has powerful effects on the social order. For example, the growing economic independence of women from men is not only radically changing the way in which they relate to men, but leading to plummeting birth rates worldwide (whether that is good or bad is another issue). The great lie of Communism was that surrendering all property to the State - i.e. to the ruling elite - would bring the ultimate liberty. Of course it bought the enslavement of whole populations to dictatorships which, in their dependence, citizens dared not question. The great lie of Consumerist Capitalism is that the markets offer freedom to everyman. However, those markets depend upon the narcotic enslavement of whole populations to ever increasing and spurious consumption. The entire capitalist political system and information regime is dedicated to preserving this narcotic dependence. The wage slaves of so-called capitalist democracies are little more free to challenge their masters than the most abject serf.

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160. Werewolves
Thu Dec-18-2003

I meet you on the street, ask some simple favour. You are generous in unexpected ways, noble perhaps. You are a private man or woman, free to be entirely human. I meet you as the agent of an institution. You are a beast. Gathered to a group, a religion, a nation, your mind is a pack mind, your lust is a blood lust; any tolerance is a weakness to the mission. Fearful of your incapacity to murder alone, you bay for a leader or a god to absolve your evil with all the lies of power.

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159. In a Grey Light
Sat 16-Aug-2003

If you ask me who or what I fear, it is not the nebulous threat of some cultural challenge (refugee boat people for Australians, foreign invasion in Korea & other places). Nor is it collateral injury by some terrorist. It is not even the patently criminal behaviour so common amongst the principals and agents of governments everywhere, although their havoc is a constant menace. What I really fear is the cowardice of the institutional worker. Some man or woman has a passable job, a steady income, some promise of promotion. By accident you come within their orbit - it happens daily - and they must make a small decision which will allow you to go on your way, or with obstruction cause you great inconvenience, pain, even ruin your life. Perhaps the decision poses a slight challenge for the official - it is a little non-standard, or they may have to answer to a higher official, or the record of it will cause a blip on their promotion score card. They know what is morally or factually 'right', but risk could cost them a little while indifference makes no institutional waves. Sigh. You know the outcome. In the end it is these small daily acts of cowardice that destroy a civilization.

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158. So What Did You Do in the Factory Today?
Tue 12-Aug-2003

There are vocations, and then there are jobs. Most people just get a job. It may be dressed up in the rhetoric of a vocation, but it is just a job. Jobs are about money, security, status and power. For some, the job becomes a vocation, rather like an arranged marriage that works. So what is a vocation? A vocation is a calling, an occupation done for its inherent satisfaction. Medicine, teaching, and of course religion are traditionally vocations, though most of their practitioners quickly come to treat them as mere jobs. In fact, the pressures against pursuing a vocation are very great, for vocational values often clash with job values. Many a man, tempted to make his job a vocation is abused by his wife who wants job income support, not his vocational distraction. And many a worker, drawn to vocational values, is punished by his or her boss, who wants 'productivity' (more, not better widgets). Shouldn't the 'mission statement' of our cultural design be saying something about this?

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157. Perfect World
Wed 25 June 2003

Open a bank account, see a doctor/mechanic/lawyer, try to get/keep a job, do anything more complicated than buying a newspaper and what happens? Something screws up. The party you are depending upon turns out to be misinformed, incompetent, lazy, crazy, or just bad. Isn't it a miracle how human societies survive? And after a few thousand years of this, folks still listen to ideologues telling us how it can all be made perfect. Huh?

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156. Counting
Wed 21 May 2003

I knew I was in a country with a decimal soul when the gift was ten red roses.

155. Creed Caper
@Saturday  17 May, 2003Whatever the creed, there are believers. Wherever believers exist, there is the chance for power of some kind. Whenever power can be scented, predators gather like jackals. That is the human story. What kind of creed? Any at all -- religion, politics, ideology, sport, company policy, a book on how to grow petunias... . What of the believers? They crave the idea of a comfort zone, a path already hewn, a promise of future pleasure. Most of all, they fear to be original, and strangely, for the permission to follow, they will suffer any hardship and commit almost any atrocity. What of the predators? They are at all levels of the food chain, some only slightly less enmeshed than the entirely credulous. But in small ways or large, they will break the faith for advantage. At the top of the hierarchy, they are apt to be lifetime hypocrites. Such leaders are certain that public piety and private cynicism is 'the reality of power', and despise the candid. By and large, they rule the human world.

This all began with creeds. A creed on growing petunias is less virulent than a creed on eternal salvation. Why? The petunias grow or they don't grow. Visitors from the dead with an inside story on salvation are not a daily event. Even the rumour of such visits has kept entire religions in business for millenia. For lifetime hypocrites, it is smart to pick a bullet-proof cover. Eternity is the best deal going, when it can turn a profit. Wasn't it Saint Thomas Aquinas who said, "never trust a man of one book" ?

----------------------154. Incompetence
@Thursday 8 May, 2003Incompetence is the normal human condition. That is, the majority are generally incompetent to pursue their own agendas. Others, more able in this matter, rarely have agendas that fit the public aim of organizations. With energy, guile, bribery or force they become masters of small and large empires, not to produce more and better widgets, nor to promote the public benefit. No, once there they are satisfied to indulge the usual foolish dreams of more sex, more status, more whisky or soda pops. And they will kill to preserve the privilege. The amazing thing is that countries and companies stagger on, somehow drunkenly sustained by a little energy, drained from the sum of these petty private agendas. Maybe the secret of happiness is in some ratio of the mix here. What is a fellow of good will to do? One solution is to stop fighting the hydra-headed monster, and wrestle a private space from some weaker part of it. You can have your soda pops and whisky, your flash cars and awards... Me, I like to write, and that needs time. A job with lots of free time and a good computer. Oh, and I like to encourage other's potential, to teach. Happens, I've struck it lucky for some little while now, embedded in the usual hopelessly incompetent organization ..... [postscript a month later : ah, the demons were listening -- some anonymous incompetent killed that job. Once more we are scrap paper, tossed by wind along the waste ..]

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153. Occupying Armies
@Wednesday April 23 2003

Every government is an occupying army. For that matter, the people who share my space here and there are apt to be an occupying army. They clamour to invade the still centre of my being, and succeed too often. Their weapons are legion. Some entice, some shame, and others threaten. Usually it is smarter to surrender, then subvert them. "It's the system", we say, and all is forgiven. There is no shame in surrendering to a machine. ...

And so it goes with 21st Century wars. You can heroically fight a man with a club, but what fool fights a computer wrapped to a bomb? Only underfunded, non-superpowers and brigands need to bully the old-fashioned way : .. rape and torture are among the few remaining personal instruments of warfare.

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152.  A Successful Life
@Monday April 7 2003The measure of a successful life is what you, and you alone, choose to measure it by. You may crave the recognition of your status, the respectability of your name, the stability of your career, the size of your bank balance, a happy marriage, your children or your golf club membership as tokens of success. So be it, and good luck. But before you measure your neighbour a failure, enquire after his ambition. My own measure seems to be rare enough, and most I know judge me an embarrassing failure. No woman has really wished to share my dream, my finances are slender and my employment accidental. I have begun but left unfinished two doctorates, begun to learn but never mastered nine languages, begun but still juggle the unfinished writing of seventeen books. An altogether unfinished life. Yet I increasingly measure it a fine success. If, when the end came and I had to say, this was a worthy but dull life, then I would count it an awful failure. But if I could say, well 10% was as boring as hell, but 90% was pretty interesting, then that would be a life well lived. Now, as each day passes, I'm building on that interesting percentage.

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151.  Why Books ?
@Wednesday March 19,  2003

Cinema is inherently a mass medium. You can't invest multi-million dollars in either profoundly intellectual visual productions, or in minority interests, or in the high risk venture of new ideas. I'm quite happy to watch a film once a week, rather like taking a warm shower, as an unfussed way of relaxing. As far as possible I avoid the cowardly carnage of cinema killing, preferring whimsy and a light touch.

When it comes to a million small circles of special interest, to real information, to high range artistry or to the ideas that change the way one sees the world, then the printed word is in a class of its own. The bookshops and magazine stands are awash with morsels for every taste. Here is the real diversity and richness of our culture, the seedbeds from which we will renew and regrow

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150.   High Life
@Monday February 10 2003

In the beginning we were were riding our bicycle high on a mountain razorback, but it didn't seem like that. The wooly white clouds about our ankles hid the precipice on either side. We were supremely confident. Then as the years passed, the clouds thinned, and we caught momentary glimpses of the chasms below. At first we dismissed our terror as a passing dream. Then one day in sickness the clouds about the mountain ridge wholly cleared, and we were teetering up there in the chilly blue yonder. The full reality of our precarious position made us numb with fright. The bicycle wobbled. Mercifully the sickness passed, and we clawed back enough of the old illusions to stay sane for the moment. Such is life.

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149.  Sunshine
@Saturday 1 February 2003

The authority for leadership group can be built on several scaffolds, but in the end the supporting beams are all mental contructs. One of those constructs can be fear. When fear is removed, so is the support. Another can be misinformation, somtimes embedded over a whole lifetime. When the misinformation is corrected (not easy), support for the leadership evaporates. Yet other constructs can be hope and ideology. These too can be corroded by experience, until the leader is standing on a mere husk of illusion. Finally, there is the mental wasteland of despair and the opiate of apathy. A beacon, an opportunity, can transform this landscape beyond the recognition or control of the most entrenched ruling class. For those who would promote 'regime change', from within or without a political entity, potent tools are therefore readily at hand. OK, the thug with the key to the castle may want a punch up, but make sure he's standing alone in the middle of the football field. Shooting the spectators makes you a war criminal too, no matter whose god is on your side. And you'd better not be a louse or a liar yourself when the smoke clears. Let us be contemporary. Were Iraqis to love America (impossible after a generation of American betrayal and contempt), few would stand to fight for Saddam Hussien. If South Korea's Sunshine Policy is able to touch and pursuade ordinary North Koreans, few will stand and defend Kim Jung-il's gangster clique when the moment of truth arrives.

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148. Security
@Wednesday 29 January 2003

Just as there is a gradient from rule by force to rule by consent , so there are two poles of security to be sought by individuals and by states. The first kind of security is that which is imposed by terror. We speak here of systematic terror as opposed to the anarchic terror of the fanatic or brigand. Systematic terror is the most primitive form of control, practised by pack leaders amongst animals, by Mafia bosses, and still by a large number of so-called governments world wide. It is a simple idea, but requires an ever multiplying network of enforcers. Where technology can supplant enforcers, it tends to encourage a huge investment of money in armour. Rule by terror can preserve a kind of fragile physical security for the favoured. It is ultimately fatal to creativity and civil society; (the dramatic creation, then ossification of the Soviet Union was the most striking case study for this pattern in our era).

The second pole of security is that which comes from goodwill amongst individuals and amongst states. Laws are still necessary, but they draw on general consent and trust. This kind of security nourishes creativity, diversity, and civil society. Modern democratic societies are based on the premise that general security can be preserved in an open environment, and that goodwill amongst large groups of people is a better design for living than oppression of the many by the few

Since rule by consent and empire are incompatible, aspirants to empire have always foregone goodwill for tyranny, often behind a thin veil of formal etiquette. In the transition from an open society to empire, we find that rulers learn to despise democracy at home and fear it abroad. This wins temporary political control for small power elites, but inevitably sows the seed of future conflict. (The United States has vacillated on the cusp of such a transition to empire for half a century now) .

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147. Friendships hostage on the altar of Sex
@12 January 2003

Male sexuality is a timid mechanism that generally requires either male dominance or female promiscuity to respond (yeah, my libido too). Luckily illusion can also be a working substitute for the machine. Feminine promiscuity and apparent submission together make the most potent aphrodisiac for men, while aggressive female promiscuity is often a turnoff. Since a free woman may have no inclination to be submissive, the tendency of human cultures where men get control is to oppress women to keep their balls working. Will a daily viagra make all this unnecessary? Now TV is brewing a mixed soup of cultural ideals. We have yet to see if the vast Internet culture of pornography, with its electron fence around physical aggression, can leave space at last for truly equal friendships between men and women back on earth, or set these two very different genders on separate tracks, or further legitimize the old power grids, or do something of all three.

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146. Honesty and Deception
@17 November 2002

From our innermost debates to the most public issues of policy, there is a constant struggle between honesty and deception. Each has its rewards and penalties, material and spiritual. Whether it is friendship or enmity, sex or power, education or intuition, religion or science, employment or recreation, economics or politics, nationalism or globalization, ... there is no field of human activity where this contest is not central.

The greatest material rewards normally accrue from hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the appearance of honesty with the conscious substance of deception. Conscious deception offers maximum flexibility, especially where relationships are temporary or impersonal. It is also an escape when courage fails.

The greatest spiritual rewards for many people accrue from self-deception. Self-deception is the appearance of honesty with the unconscious substance of deception. Self-deception can be spiritually rewarding for the conforming mind. Weak honesty (guileless intention) is often socially welcome amongst mere mortals, as opposed to saints.

Strong honesty (self-tested intention) is elusive, even for those who seek it. There is the constant risk of self-deception. It is frequently unrewarded or punished. At best, strong honesty is uncool to the trendy, the fearful, and the morally compromised. It also a threat to the ambitious. Why, therefore, is such honesty sometimes attractive? Well, it seems to offer the most secure personal satisfaction, especially when maintained against discouraging odds. Those communities and economies which maximize honesty may also be the most emotionally secure and satisfying environments in which to live. When a community or a life is neither emotionally secure nor satisfying, it is probably time to re-examine its honesty quotient.

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145. Foreign Objects
@13 November 2002

Working across cultures, pananoia sprouts faster than fungus in a pair of dirty socks.

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144. Fooling Around
@9 November 2002

Nearly everyone can be relied upon to fool themselves about nearly everything nearly all of the time. Only propagandists are too dim to know this.

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143. Grand Transitions
@2 November 2002

The transition from fascist fiat, religious tyranny, military dictatorship, or communist state management to private capitalism may do something for efficiency. However, it almost always leaves the same psychopaths and thieves in control. This is the way of the human world, and has ever been thus. When the criminal class is taken off welfare, it has to get back to sustainable extortion. The evidence on newly privatized crime seems to be that it takes at least a generation to acquire a discreet cloak of respectability.

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142.  Sweet and Bitter
@25 August 2002

Failure has kept me honest, if that's what you call looking in a mirror without the magic trick of wish-fulfilment. Failure is a leash, not so much on vanity as on the untrammeled and sometimes dangerous exuberance of easy success. In dark moments I think of Sun Wukung, the over-gifted and mischievous Monkey King beloved in Chinese literature ( Hsi Yu Chi   - 'The Journey to the West' ) who was restrained but never subdued, and kept finally to a good purpose, by a tightening golden band about his brow.

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141.  So What Will You Do When You Grow Up?
@25 August 2002

You want a career? Your first decision is which of the seven deadly sins to make a dollar at. The second problem is how to dress your choice in rich robes of virtue. The third task is the most difficult. That is how to moderate your appetites, for each sin lightly tasted is a spice to life, but heavily indulged is poison to the soul. Finally, know thyself, not only at the beginning of the journey, but also at the end. It is a rare professor, laden with degrees and publications, who can see his vanity reflected in the honours. Nor is the burden of his own greed sensed by the captain of industry, even as it dulls his judgement. And the president or prime minister who trumpets pride in his country is surely making a virtue, not of the nation, but of Pride, to whose blind guidance he has long since surrendered.

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140.  Trust
@30 June 2002

That state of mind which gives us freedom to act is governed by trust. Trust is the first pillar of civilized living. It is fairly easy to maintain trust in a village society, difficult in a city, and extremely difficult in a complex modern economy. Religion is a wishful super solution to the trust problem. I for one trust in no god. The best mortal answer I can find is to seek in others that honesty which I expect of myself. Without trust in our environment, in human relationships, and in the institutions of our cultures, we are reduced to a savage horde. It follows that those who counterfeit frust for short term gain are the enemies of civilization.

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139.  For You, Or Against You?
@15 May 2002

So are we for you or against you? The man in the Harlequin mask is neither for nor against you, at first. He is for himself. But if you ask once too often he may be against you. Remember, both your favourite dictator and the Roman Empire went looking for enemies. In the end they found or invented enough of them to bring the house down.

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138.  Final Solution
@15 May 2002

There are no final solutions this side of death. In the people business, final solutions mean murder. "Solve", after all, is an active verb. The psychology of genocide requires that cruel simplification. It comes with a certain mind-set. We think about these things when we hear of a "final solution to terrorism". Whose terrorist? Whose voice against tyranny? Whose comfort zone? What change in the human genetic inheritance?

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137.  Force-field
@14 May 2002

For those men and women bedazzled by power, submission and dominance shape their mental landscape. Force is the social engine that most of them understand and respect. Leaders, politicians, managers, authority figures, femme fatales ... as a group tend to get a buzz, probably a sexual buzz, from submission. The spiritual submission to this god or that fits easily with such a worldview. Personally, the whole paradigm strikes me as a perversion. But these folk aren't going to go away. They just have to be rendered as harmless as possible to the rest of us, mostly with laughter.

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136.  Body Manager
@12 May 2002

Managing your body is tougher than managing any business. The competition is out to liquidate you. Within a few years they will blow you away, whatever you do. Every time you think the operating formula is just right, something breaks, and you have to figure out a whole new mix of rules. When you stop learning new body lore, you start to die.

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135. Mostly Rational
@8 May 2002

People are motly rational about smelting incoherent premises into armour plated conclusions. The older they get, the crazier their already crazy certainties become.

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144. Born Lucky
@29 April 2002

Some peole are lucky, some are seen to be lucky, and some go to hell trying to get lucky.

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143. Whatever It Was
@1 April 2002

He said it well,
Whatever it was,
But I cannot now be sure
That he knew himself
Whatever it was,
For the season's passed
And last year's choicest cut
Has baggy knees and a pot belly.
But hey, whatever it was,
Who wants to know
A middle-aged poem
Anyway.

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142. Dead is an Adjective, to Die is a Verb
@2 April 2002

If, when life had finally lost its sparkle, I can get to being dead without having to actually die, then I shall be extremely satisfied. The adjective is simply life at rest, but that verb, ah, it is the stuff of nightmares.

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141. Gobalization defined
@25 March 2002

A fake British Parker pen, emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes, really made in China but smuggled over the Vietnamese border, where it was picked up by a Korean computer analyst on a contract job, also my student, who upon returning to Busan in South Korea gave it gift-wrapped to me, an Australian, as a hopeful bribe for a favourable grade so he could emigrate to America.

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140. Wise and Technical
@23 March 2002

With the first cooking fire to burn down a grass hut, technology exceeded the human ability to manage it. The balance of technology and wisdom has been precarious ever since. Now technology available to rich states and corporations so far exceeds the understanding of their managers that our survival from day to day can only be considered an accident.

Rudyard Kipling grasped the terms of this contract over a century ago :

But remember please the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die !
[The Secret of Machines]

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139. Exclusion
@17 March 2002

The habit of excluding other people goes by many names. There are times when we all want solitude or intimacy, or at least an escape from the maddening crowd. If only that were the limit of exclusion! So often exclusion is a retreat to fear, for such is the basic nature of egotism, sexism, cronyism, nepotism, gangsterism, fascism, racism, tribalism, tyranny, colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, religious exclusion, caste exclusion, social class exclusion ... and so on. The label mutates as easily as a simple cold virus, but its source is the same. The common result of infection by the exclusivist virus is loss all around. Loss of laughter, opportunity, wealth. Loss of almost anything that can be lost. The gains are meagre, mean things like pride and the power to inflict pain.

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138. Is your brand showing ?
@6 March 2002

The man or woman with a "good" university degree is valued for the same reason that a Rolex watch is valued, or an expensive restaurant meal, or a brand name tube of toothpaste are valued. The academic degree, the high price and the brand name are stamps of guaranteed quality. The stamp is what matters. Whether the quality is actually there rarely interests the world at large. I have an excellent watch which cost $16, and use perfectly good unbranded toothpaste. I have met enough clueless graduates (yes, PhDs too),  and marked enough lacklustre graduate papers, to assume nothing at all about the annointed who come bearing diplomas. But in the job market, the marriage market, the status market, you had better have a brand label tatooed on your forehead.

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137. The Cyborg, your child
@27 February 2002

Cyborgs get a bad press. In a few short generations however, our descendants will be only partly human. The foundations of nanotechnology, and many other technologies, being laid at the moment guarantee this transition, short of some cataclysmic collapse of civilizations in the meantime. When our cyborg descendants come into their inheritance, the genes we bequeath them will be mere building blocks in the startup Leggo kit, to be used, changed or disgarded. More important perhaps will be the memes we bequeath them - the infectious clusters of ideas, from cake recipes to summer dress fashions, to the values we have fought to defend or abuse as prisoners to our hormones. If genes are the templates for toenails and appetites, then memes are the templates for what we teach our children, and will be for your child, the cyborg.

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136. Who owns this Law?
@15 February 2002

Nothing so troubles folk as their varied understanding of the rules we live by. This difference tracks right back to the grand genetic poker game, but is easiest to measure as an attitude to power. Shoulder to shoulder around the table we can start with the P-Conservatives (power-conservatives shading into fascists), while facing off across the card deck are W-Liberals (wishy-washy liberals, shading into populists - where they may brush fingertips with the fascists). The P&W brands mix and match in many a gaudy style.

Type 1 > P-Conservative Habits > Those boldest in raising the patriotic flag are also quickest to treason of the general human interest. That is, a P-Conservative spirit instinctively frames the Law as a vehicle for self-interest. It is rigidly imposed on the weak, but is quickly abandoned when it threatens self-loss. Revolution is a licence for personal gain.

Type 2 > W-Liberal Habits > Those most irreverent of tradition are the last defenders of freedom when tyranny is abroad. That is, the W-Liberal may be mischievous in love and wayward in his career, but instinctively expects the Law to be an equal arbiter and himself, at times, to be a loser in the game. It is communal injustice rather than perceived personal injustice, which drives him to revolt, yet every revolution betrays his generosity.

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135. Moving On
@6 February 2002

There is the good news and the bad news. That is, there are two cultural styles, often in schizophenic cohabitation. One culture looks sqarely at a problem, then fixes it. Culture two denies there is any problem, and stagnates. Culture one is swift American bankruptcy law; culture two is the Japanese and Chinese banking systems. Culture one is efficient second language learning by north Europeans and many tribal peoples. Culture two is the grotesque failure of second language learning by Americans and other English speakers. Culure one is the admission of war guilt and moral renewal by Germans. Culture two is the denial of systematic abuses in WW2 by Japanese, or in the Chinese revolution by Chinese (and similarly for many other nations..). Culture one is the effective prohibition on personal firearms in most stable states. Culture 2 is the deadly contagion of private guns in America in the name of "freedom". Culture one is the intelligent redesign of social customs to humanize dense urban living amongst strangers. Culture two is the dogmatic survival of subsistence peasant values and habits, and of feudal structures, in new cities around the world.

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134. Rumours of Magic
@20 December 2001

Religions are organized rumours of magic for Muggles.

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133. The Ideal Destination
@19 December 2001

Every cynic is a born again idealist. Every sentimental child will one day pick the eyes out of her teddybear.

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132. Living Like Sinners, Dying Like Saints
@11 December 2001

The average ambition of both genders in every age and culture is to live like a sinner but die like a saint. This defines contentment, and has profound consequences for individuals, for all human relationships, and for every institution from the family to the state.

Most individuals eventually arrive at some inner balance between yielding to temptation (for chocolate, sex or mayhem..) and virtue (self-restraint, generosity, sacrifice ... ). If such things could be quantified, those private balances would be distributed along a bell curve, with a few extremists at each end. Cultures though often assign unequal permission for sin and sainthood to men and women. As men have seized institutional power, they have demanded inhuman virtue from women while granting themselves libertine favours. Where this occurs, the potential of both genders is stunted; psychosis develops.

The national equivalent of sin and sainthood is the secular and the devine. Again, a balance is essential. The state which claims all moral authority will surely end up with none. (Modern examples of such failure are the communist experiment in countries like Russia and China, as well as totalitarian states like Nazi Germany). Where spiritual leaders claim major secular power, they too lose all moral respect. (Modern examples are the Taliban in Afghanistan and the mullahs in Iran. The medieval Roman church in Europe had a similar problem).

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131. Of Grace and Spite
@3 December 2001

Each of us lives by the grace of those we despise. The jobs you loathe are done for you by someone who doesn't share your tastes. Your job is funded by the taxes and spending of people, here and abroad, whom you wouldn't trust with a cent. Your superior habits, beliefs, religion, civilization and knowledge float like a blessed isle in the dark ocean of surrounding ignorance, and you live in secret fear of being engulfed. Well, bless the dark ocean, for you float upon it. When the seas of difference become a burning lake, your hide will be roasted. He who lives by the pogrom dies by the pogrom.

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130. A Teacher's Job
@3 December 2001

A teacher's job is first to create memories worth keeping, then to inspire their recall, and finally to show students how their memories may be applied to live problem solving. In classrooms we often do some or all of these things only crudely, or overlook them altogether.

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129.  Best Friends
@26 November 2001

Your most valuable friend is an antagonist. Used wisely antagonism can be a tool for hacking the puppy fat off our souls. Youths rebel, not because they are certain but because they are lost. Experimenting with rejection, they discover what they most cherish (and thereafter become, all too often, immovably conservative adults). Travel in strange latitudes is a similar challenge, tempering some to tolerance, but others to the most brittle chauvanism.

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128. Mind Traps
@10 November 2001

Almost any human being will work themselves to a standstill when the task is set at a certain level of simplicity. For myself, it has to be a suitable creative challenge. For the students I teach at the moment, it has to be the rote memorization and performance of a script. The slightest deviation towards requirig individual thought or initiative will see them collapse, rebel, paint their fingernails, reach for their mobile phone, or worst of all, yawn. Given a script to memorize though, they will bang their heads with determination, skip the coffe break, and compete to be first to "have it".

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127.  Team Player
@10 October 2001

The team player is the fellow who last had an original idea on his first day in kindergarten They laughed at him, and he has never forgotten.

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126.  Downsizing
@9 October 2001

Downsizing is that process in organzations of firing the brave, the articulate and the innovative, of cowering the clock-watchers, and of removing any threat to the bum-lickers.

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125.  The Laws of Incompetence
@9October 2001

In any job needing significant knowledge, logic, imagination, or fine judgement, most actors do it b