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100. Free Speech Language is the world's only truly
democratic institution. Right from wrong in speech is always decided
by common usage. --------------------------- 99. Cementing the bones
of Truth Faith in Authority cements the bones
of Everyman's Truth --------------------------- 98. Making it easy to
be good A successful society - meaning one
which offers the greatest fulfillment to the greatest number - is likely
to be one in which virtue is made easy. ... It must be made advantageous
and easy for your average timid soul to act professionally, honestly
and humanely in his daily life. --------------------------- 97. Moir-pattern racism Racism is the twentieth century name
for tribalism, and tribalism has been at the core of moral/social systems
since our ancestor-apes had social troupes. If you're in you are human/simian,
and if you are an outsider, then you are a threat to the group, tribe,
class or race. --------------------------- 96. Pyramid Scheming In a world that is too clever, too
rational, and too unsympathetic, the way for the psyche to climb out
of such awful responsibilities has always been to build a hierarchy.
You must have someone above to carry the can, and someone below to
kick in the head. --------------------------- 95. Corrosion All ideologies are equally corrosive
to the submissive mind. --------------------------- 94. Trust You can trust even a good man just to the limits of his understanding. Beyond that it's pure faith, yours and his. --------------------------- 93. The History of Thought After potentates and their minions
had exhaused their health on wine, women and religion, it was fashionable
to throw a quid to a handful of eggheads in the name of civilization.
The potentates nowadays tend to be supplanted by tobacco companies,
or paper empire builders in public ministries. The net result is the
same: a tyranny of orthodoxies. --------------------------- 92. A Very Old Scam Religion is the world's oldest multi-level
marketing (MLM) racket. --------------------------- 91. The Self at a Distance Those parts of themselves which men and women do not wish to take responsibility for, they project onto the clouds in the sky and call God. Having constructed this dialectic
with a distant relative, they can then take orders which a more sober
self might find foolish, too wise for modesty, or even barbarous. --------------------------- 90. The Company Loyalist Trans-national companies don't even
pretend to be accountable to local national interests, but they have
captured the ambitions of scoundrels whose grandfathers would have
asked a common man to die for king and country. --------------------------- 89. The Pathologies of
Culture All cultures -- every one of them
-- has features that are admirable, and all of them have social pathologies
which cripple, maim and sometimes overwhelm them. By social pathology
I mean an embedded feature of any cultural belief or practice which
is ultimately destructive of both individuals and groups. --------------------------- 88. The Duel The duel, not so long out of fashion
in all its chauvinistic stupidity, was a prime token of the idea that
love equals honour. To have two men fight to the death for you must
be the ultimate obsequience to female ego. The codes of business and
sporting practice are barely disguised replacements. Madonna's Material
Girl, even in satire, is in direct line of descent from the demure
wealthy ladies who would have their suitors hack each other to death.
Sexual contests are primeval, and I suspect they still have much to
do with war. --------------------------- 87. Unmanageable As soon as a manager knows that you
are beyond their competence to manage, unless they have a particularly
generous spirit, you are a marked man. --------------------------- 86. Global Zombies Globalization, a euphemism for international
piracy in the context of much trans-national industry, has been identified
as a new moral order by all major players of the political classes.
This is an act of political cowardice. We faced almost the same issue
a century ago, with the early bucaneers of the industrial revolution. --------------------------- 85. Hierarchy and the
Mediocre An obsession with hierarchy is the
hallmark of defensive mediocrity the world over. --------------------------- 84. The Managerial Class The Managerial Class has the same
role of mindless enforcement as cops suppressing political protest
on a street, or mafia hitmen preserving "the family's territory" from
enroaching challenge. --------------------------- 83. Plain People To ask plain people to do fancy things
is to invite hpyocrisy, recrimination and illusions of achievement. --------------------------- 82. The Wages of Sin There is almost no limit to what men and women will pay to indulge a vice, up to and including their own lives. When it comes to supporting a virtue all generosity flees, and every last cent is counted as a cost. Perhaps it follows that the only rational
way to do good deeds is to fund them from the wages of sin. --------------------------- 81. Sex A vastly overrated activity, wrapped in so much cultural tissue paper that we rarely get down to bare essentials. The bones of it are that the planet, whoever stands in for god nowadays, and spectators from the animal kingdom .. no longer need us to procreate in large numbers. There is a physical compulsion to sexual release, probably best satisfied by the paired intercourse of two lovers. Lacking that, one quick wank a day and there goes romance for another twenty-four hours. End of story. [related stories: The Connundrum of Men & Women / The Inside Track on Happiness / --------------------------- 80. Politicians A politician is someone who manipulates
the flow of information for private gain. A statesman is one who manipulates
it for perceived public good. Nevertheless, both are manipulators. --------------------------- 79. The Wellsprings of
Policy The mountain was made of paper by
office glugs in response to a postcard from the Great Pandjundrum.
The Great Panda had been on a two week study tour of the brothels of
London, with a half day side trip to the Ministry of Education. And
therefrom the next revolution in Education, being the abolition of
Education, was solemnly declared to be best practice for all the young
glugs in Ozzidom. --------------------------- 78. Reality Reality is 40% matter and 60% imagination. --------------------------- Melbourne is a city of women swathed
in black. Glued like blowflies on the windows of coffee shops, rolling
along the aisles of supermarkets, inflated like black plastic rubbish
bags on the pavements, with disembodied pasty faces bobbing under umbrellas. --------------------------- 76. Dream without Meaning She is an Indian child in a cheap
cotton frock, perhaps nine years old. She is talking rationally, humanely,
and her feet are burning. Her knees are burnt to stumps by the time
I wake up. --------------------------- 75. The Paradox of Freedom Action without limits, thought without
boundaries .. leads to confusion rather than innovation. It is as if
that wonderfully complex computer program wired into our brains needs
a set of constants, clear parameters, before it can be put to effective
use. Maybe that is why they invented god, to set the outer limits of
human hubris. --------------------------- 74. Unfinished dreams Life is a tapestry of unfinished dreams. --------------------------- 73. Pseudo scientific
method Parliamentary and bureaucratic process
apes the processes of scientific enquiry. The difference of course
is that the scientist works with a null hypothesis. That is, he seeks
to disprove a proposition by testing it to destruction. However, the
politician and burearucrat seek to bolster prejudiced or established
decisions with the form, but not the substance of genuine enquiry. --------------------------- 72. Ideas "Idea" as an artifact to be located
in a "mind", is a cultural construct. For example, before the seventeenth
century in Europe, "idea" was often a property of godhead, not of the
individual;(Boulton 1991). A human being in this schema was a sort
of radio transmitter and largely an automatom for the will of God (or
occasionally for evil spirits). Such a belief is still widespread. --------------------------- 71. The Cynic and the
Romantic "A cynic knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing". TM : A romantic knows
the value of everything and the price of nothing.
70. In Defence of Power
Lust It may even be that power lust is
the narcotic that nature provides to prettify burdens of office which
none would otherwise aspire to. --------------------------- 69. The Rise of One God The unseen engulfing tyranny of a
monstrous single god would prove to be transportable to almost all
human societies, difficult to reason against, perilous to ridicule
and a standing defence for patriarchial authority everywhere. The focus
of religion had clearly moved from the need to balance parallel worlds
of the natural and supernatural, to a requirement to propitiate a remote
authority. --------------------------- 68. To Be a Teacher I am a teacher. My business is improving
other people's lives. If you tell me that my mission is outdated, that
the client is not the individual but "industry", then I say to you
that "industry" is a phantom. I have never sat a Mr Industry down with
a smile and coaxed him to understand anything. My clients are men and
women with limitations which would have been familiar to Aristotle
or the Gautama Buddha. --------------------------- 67. Empires of the Mind The trouble with living inside your
own head is that you become conditioned to being master of the universe.
Within this heroic sphere you body never betrays your mind, the cussedness
and stupidity of other beings is always under control, you are never
confronted with the possibility that you have got it wrong and the
other guy has a better handle on what to do next. --------------------------- 66. Institutional Cowardice Rambo is not about a hero in the sun,
but a desperate projection for grovelling shoals of "team-spirited" employees
and their mediocre managers who have never made a principled, independent
decision in their lives. For two thousand European years, Rambo was
a biblical David who fought a Goliath, and the snivelling mortals went
once a week to refresh their fantasy world and fragile self-respect
in a little chuch on the hill. Now they have video. It comes to the
same thing. --------------------------- 65. Team Spirit The motherhood template for a personnel officer in any interview nowadays requires candidates to genuflect to "team spirit". Having spat, crossed myself and said the alphabet backwards a few times when this comes up, I pause to wonder what it means. Mostly, taking life experience as
a template, team spirit means accepting whatever crap is poured on
your head and slurping it up. It means sacrificing your own manifest
self interest for the nebulous survival strategies of dim middle managers. --------------------------- 64. Lonely Courage The courage that I admire is one which
withstands subtle fears. This is the bravery of a fine mind facing
hopeless odds. The spririt whose flame pierces every veil of deception
and temptation, who seeing the full awfulness of what awaits the defiant
and the easy rewards of complicity, still chooses to stand alone. --------------------------- 63. Executioners of the
Creative Mind The one thing which is anathema to
the Platonic fixer, the Jesuitical conspirator, is that flawed brilliance
which we find in the truly creative mind. Being mere mirrors themselves,
possessing no radiant power of judgement or creation, they take now
this fragment of a reflected idea, now that, as the premise to their
amoral opportunism of the moment. They magnify the petty, the vindictive
and vengeful, as well as the luminous, generous and warm, so that the
proportions of truth are lost forever. --------------------------- 62. Bubble Cars We all travel in bubble cars which
seem from the driver's seat to travel the Milky Way. How fragile these
personal bubbles are, even as bubbles within bubbles. For the very
concept of, say, Australia is another bubble floating on the edge of
a whirly-whirly in hyperspace. Go up thirty thousand feet in an aeroplane,
look out the window at that moonscape on the way to Darwin, and ask
yourself if this is really the territory of your spirit's possession..
? --------------------------- 61. A Fear of Silence.. They must wait behind the shadows
of old pains, in the corridors of despair we try to seldom visit, and
beneath the facades of fear we will not look upon. But it only takes
an unexpected quiet moment for loitering demons to emerge from the
corners of our minds, and wreak their havock. --------------------------- 60. Whose Value? The goal of every individual is to
maximize their perceived value. Whose perception? What value? Ah, that's
up for grabs. --------------------------- 59. Supermarket of the
Spirits There usen't to be much choice about
it. You took the religion of your fathers or you burned, if not on
the stake, at least in hell. That's a proposition still facing a large
segment of the world's population in one form or another. Yet in the
heartlands of our post-industrial cultures you can take your pick in
the supermarket of the spirits.... --------------------------- 58. The Wanting of a
Shrew The young woman encouraged me to talk.
Every anecdote was a matter of admiration, every opinion was greeted
with "absolutely". At last, becoming weary of my own virtue (an extensive
topic), I sought to colour her own background with enquiry and a little
mischievous irony. Her confidence dissipated, her personality dissolved.
An opinion, wrung out, was qualified by what X and Z were thinking...
I tried to let her down gently with benign neglect. How could she know
that I was still looking for my shrew? --------------------------- 57. Journeys Towards
Infinity The most powerful motivator in my life has been a superstition whose possible truth I have felt unable to evade. The superstition was that if I made closing commitments, such as those towards a career, or raising children, then I would be defined for all time at one point in the spectrum of human conditions. The fear that I would lose the capacity to surprise Fate herself, by finding new abilities, achieving unachievable goals, by redifining myself in unsuspected ways. I have always sought out borderlands
of the spirit, the edges of cultures and nations, where one might slip
beyond the known self and grow, even where growth seemed most desolate.
Being never entirely complete, one could never entirely be captured,
and might somehow escape on a journey towards infinity. --------------------------- 56. Voices Listen first to all living things,
and tend their needs. --------------------------- 55. Decency & Religion Religion is often a gross interference
in the business of being a decent human being. --------------------------- 54. Mirroring There are those who listen alertly,
feeling that civilization requires them to act in an approved manner,
and those who compulsively force others to match the appearance of
their own values. A free spirit must somehow survive the pressure of
both conspiracies. --------------------------- 53. Clever Nonsense The largest percentage of work produced
by clever people is ingenious nonsense. Luckily most of it never gets
past the indifference of the public, or the enmity of rivals. That
small part of ingenious creation which does engage the time and fortunes
of others is by no means guaranteed, unfortunately, to be useful rather
than mischievous. Those mediocre minds who have always dominated management
and accepted taste are incapable of recognizing the intrinsic value
of one complex proposition against another. --------------------------- 52. The Sock Rule He who visits the laundromat will
lose at least one sock. --------------------------- 51. Permission for Kindness To give another permission for kindness
is a gift without measure, for the petty extortions of daily living
force all but the bravest into betraying their neighbours. --------------------------- 50. Take-Away Mental
Diets People who want to be told what to
think are at least as thick on the ground at Melbourne University as
they are on the Ford production line. What, after all, do perfectly
conditioned, very clever lap-dogs have to do with the hunger and irreverence
of a free ranging mind? --------------------------- 49. Managing Who or Managing
What? The first task of management is to
increase the human capital of an organization. Each employee is a special
kind of corporate share. As any investor knows the value of stock rests
less in the number of shares than in the growth potential of existing
shares. Management which is unable to multiply the growth of invested "human
shares", or even contributes to the dimunition in value of these shares
has failed utterly. --------------------------- 48. Where Angels Fear I am eternally astounded by the blissful
self-confidence of inadequate human beings. The most worrying of these
creatures (who tend to be office girls, managers and professors of
exotica) actually judge you on an index of pig ignorant self-confidence.
Like drunken travellers on a mountain track, they sneer at the rider
who is cold stone sober enough to look over the precipice and shudder
at the prospect of a slip. --------------------------- 47. Power Play Power play is about the predatory
manipulation of rituals to which a significant number of people are
addicted. --------------------------- 46. Competence Competency is what you can do, isn't it? How about what you have to do, or would/wouldn't like to do, or might do or should do? Or what you can do today, but probably can't do tomorrow? Or what you could do if you had to, but don't have a good reason to do anyway? Maybe competency is what you can do,
but all those other things are what muck it up in the real world. --------------------------- 45. Whose Culture? I try to empower retrenched garment
workers with the wonders of nature's great questions, and the industrial
revolution's march into a brave new world. I cajole them to read a
page of something, and they think they have done "research". History
is a story made on the TV news. They wait passively for the dole cheque
and notice of the next "skill training course". It's cruel, the classroom
games we play. They and I live in such different worlds, such different
mental landscapes. We react to absolutely different meanings, yet in
the end feel the same emotions. It is not reason but its consequences
which we share. Culture, perhaps, is not what you feel, but how you
arrive at those feelings. --------------------------- 44. A Culture of Corruption A culture of corruption is never quite
felt to be normal, even in the most corrupted communities. Decency
is normal, but it is not sexy. Corruption for many has the illicit
appeal of smoking, drinking strong liquor, or carrying a gun. These
are all tokens of sexual bravado, cheap, shoddy tokens, but kitch always
has a wide appeal. The culture of corruption is nutured by a mass psychosis
of arrested social development. The whisper is that you are not really
an adult until you are compromised. --------------------------- 43. Accidental Lives Most individuals live in a miasma
of confused impressions, momentary fragments of organization, accidental
relationships and unplanned outcomes. You can regiment them into an
army, whereupon a few will consider themselves progressed. You can
stack them into the hierarchy of a company or department, have them
filling boxes or filling forms, whereupon the majority will consider
themselves vitally employed. What you cannot do is to let them loose
in the cavernous spaces of creative thought. Give them leave to invent
the wheel and they will turn to drink. --------------------------- 42. Writing A writer externalizes internal conversations.
Is is true, I wonder, that those who never write have nothing to say
to themselves? --------------------------- 41. Creative Beauty We learn to creative depth only that
in which we find beauty. --------------------------- 40. The Seeds of Destruction Every successful community carries
within it cultural pathologies which, given the right conditions for
growth, will errupt like hormone-fed thistles and strangle the parent.
Those pathologies are, more often than not, official virtues in the
dogma of the political elite. --------------------------- 39. Complexity Finding a congenial level of complexity
best describes the quest for contentment. The tolerance for complexity
defines us as elements of a certain weight, and mismatched by simplicity
or cleverness we quickly become bored. --------------------------- 38. Teacher Most who take the name of "teacher" are d-grade actors mouthing the words of scripts which neither they nor their directors nor their charges understand. --------------------------- 37. Why Democracy? Democracy is not really most useful
for plumbing the wisdom of the masses. Rather, democracy is the best
known tool for bridling the inhumanity and arrogance, the hubris, the
sheer ignorance of leaders. --------------------------- 36. Democracy's Competitors Democracy's main competition is not autocracy as such. The ungoverned tyrant is merely a criminal with more guns than anyone else. Rather, democracy's contest is with the ethereal authority of dogma: the omnipresent spectre of some god and its agents, the overriding dictum of a political tract like communism, national socialism, environmentalism, and so on. This enemy, this dogma, is a shape changer and parasite, apt to infect the most genial of hosts for the worthiest of reasons. The free spirit, judging each issue on merit, will be attacked from every camp as an opportunist. Wear that as a badge of honour. We have advanced far by seizing opportunities where the dead hand of dogma would have strangled the messenger. --------------------------- 35. Knowledge Knowledge is an accident caught out
of the corner of the eye. Knowledge is a pattern of leaves seen suddenly,
the collision of two chance remarks, the brush of a hand that plumbs
all emotion. Knowledge is a swift observation in a twenty cent novel,
a new taste of fruit, a dream that is strangely important, a chance
that was never looked for. --------------------------- 34. Fascism by any other
name A fascist state is a communist state
that has privatized some of the crime. --------------------------- 33. Failure If you have never failed, then you have never tested the door locks and bars on your mental cage. You are a simpleton. I measure men and women by their style in failure. Does she throw a tantrum, retreat to astrology and cupie dolls, or blame her mother? Does he start a fight, get an ulcer or buy a Porche on time payment to hide the pain? Failure is a whiff of mortality, a
healthy antidote to hubris. Stalk failure with a curious eye, give
it a poke, turn it over and look for its soft underbelly. If the failure
is a dynamited bridge, then get off the catwalk fast, and do a cool
calculation on the cost of rebuilding. If the failure is a knife in
the dark, turn on the light and put up a spirited fight. If the track
is mined with boobytraps, cut another path through the bush. If your
hand shakes, your bones crack, your brain goes to mush or your heart
threatens to stop, then go for a long walk in the fresh air, eat a
hearty meal and laugh at an ant's very serious expedition up a treetrunk. --------------------------- 32. Compassion Compassion is finding the strength to give when nobody is applauding. It is kindness without a tax deduction. The compassionate heart holds that giving life is always a braver act than stealing it. Compassion surprises every base instinct,
which having been cheated, conspire to whisper in the giver's ear that
he is a wonderful chap, a candidate for sainthood in the very least.
The only sure cure for this kind of vanity is to kill a cat, forget
your wife's birthday or swear at the tram conductor. --------------------------- 31. Power Lust Power is a clammy verb in noun's clothing,
a debilitating state of delusion, a wraith with many eager servants
but no master. --------------------------- 30. Hypocrisy The level of hypocrisy endemic in
a culture is always directly proportional to the level of religious
or ideological fervour expected of the public. --------------------------- 29. On being boring A boring fellow prefers running and
never watches TV. He doesn't know a cricket score from a zodiac chart,
but can tell you India's population to three decimal places. A boring
man will talk about the Kurdish rebellion on the Iraqi border, the
price of coffee in Tokyo, or a hydrogen engine he has heard about in
Brazil. On the other hand, he hasn't noticed your diamond ear ring,
didn't respond when you mentioned the Zigwibble rock group and actually
yawns when you try to say something harmless about the weather. In
other words, he's a dork, and you can't imagine anyone who would want
to spend an hour in his company. Then he has the cheek to tell someone
that you are boring! --------------------------- 28. History and Civilization History for the history books is brewed
from a toxic addiction to power. This poison is always newsworthy to
the chaps and sexy for the ladies. Civilization, on the other hand,
is made by those who are actually competent, compassionate and courageous. --------------------------- 27. Fatal Attraction Women don't fuck nice guys. As a species they are biologically programmed to feed and breed with the bastard who is going to claw his way to the top of the horde. Therefore, while there are women there will always be a roaring trade in the killer instinct, there will always be wars. I make these observations sadly, as a compulsive nice guy, with nearly fifty years of watching what women do, as opposed to what they say. So how do the nice guys preserve their
recessive genes in the population? Mostly by guile. They buy studded
belts and go to heavy metal concerts for a couple of years to obtain
advanced qualifications in insensitivity. Luckily, as the deceived
wives lose their waistlines a few years later, these pseudo Gengis
Khans trade their whipping leathers for cardigans and bring up the
kids. The women, in a rage of frustrated sexuality, have to settle
for breeding pit bull terriers and going to male strip shows in the
Leagues Club on Tuesday nights. --------------------------- 26. The Criminal State Definition: A criminal state is one in which the resources of the state are used to attack the interests, rights or welfare of private individuals in order to advance the personal interests of agents acting for that state. The criminality of personal advancement by an agent is sustained wherever it can be shown that benefit accruing to the agent exceeded benefit accruing to the community from his actions. "Benefit" is a matter for judgement by all affected parties, and might include, for example, the indulgence of personal revenge or sadism, as well as more conventional material advantage. Proposition: By the defined criterion, all nation states are in some degree criminal organizations. Consequences: a) It is a natural right of any individual to oppose and evade the criminal elements of a nation state, however they are manifested. b) It is a natural tendency of human populations to seek domicile in those states which offer the least degree of criminal interference in their lives. c) As a geopolitical consequence of
a) and b), is in the strong national interest of relatively honest
states to seek the reform of relatively criminalized states. --------------------------- 25. Licence to kill Political aspirants are disproportionately
a class of people who crave the right to kill --------------------------- 24. Dangerous Satires People will kill for their absurdities.
As an innocent youth I mistook satire as a comment on things past.
Ha. It's a nervous twitch at things to come. --------------------------- 23. Ideology is a Trojan
Horse Every culture has some pathological
characteristics, and every ideology (amongst which I count religions),
no matter how benign its canon, finally becomes a vehicle for sanctifying
those pathological characteristics. An ideology is a doorway into hearts
and minds, and through that doorway, once opened, the agents of power
and opression will always travel. --------------------------- 22. Fickle woman While a woman thinks she can seduce a man, as a fantasy game in her mind, every depth of friendship is possible. When she despairs of your sensual interest, betrayal is almost certain. She will sell her spent dream for a song to the first passing scoundrel. --------------------------- 21. Instant distrust I have a wonderful talent for inspiring
instant distrust in anyone who is seriously ambitious. --------------------------- 20. Communities of Intelligence On a Saturday I went to the South Stree Cinema. A theatre full of poor goblins, girls with vacant stares under the mascara, and young toughs with sylized swaggers; their fathers had that beaten stoop which comes from years of dull work and the betrayal of dreams. The brave goodie won and got the girl; the baddie had his head knocked off. The goblins clapped and bought more popcorn. If I go to another part of town the
miasma of incoherence lifts, at least at corners, and in different
ways in different locales. They might be self-obsessed bohemians, or
brushed-down yuppies, or real estate agents, or businessmen with ulcers,
but their houses and shops and the air that they breathe are all resonant
with the possibilities of thinking beings. Somewhere deep in their
heart of hearts they all know about the goblins, govern their lives
by the knowledge. The quality of our civilization finally derives from
their varied reactions. Some will wall out the masses with money and
a safe postcode, some will arm themselves with political deceptions,
some will exploit and some, eternally optimistic, will strive to raise
all men and women to economic or social equality. --------------------------- 19. Feminism What do I think of feminism? If you
ask me about a basic-level issue like equal pay for equal work, then
you have my wholehearted endorsement. If you are talking about some
superordinate, nebulous thing like the Feminist Movement, then I think
that it is mostly ideological claptrap, and a career vehicle for middle-class
opportunists. --------------------------- 18. The honest primitive --------------------------- 17. Love?? Love? I've heard rumours about that,
but never met it. I figure it belongs to a certain class of fable along
with Santa Clause, God and the Tooth Fairy. --------------------------- 16. Guns Once a small number of muscle-bound thugs would try to dominate their village with their fists. Now an infinitely larger number of
moral and physical weaklings seek to dominate their village and the
world with guns. Guns have equalized the opportunity for every mean
spirit to wreak havock .... --------------------------- 15. Love or oblivion? "Although I have the gift of prophecy Lyric from the film, Three Colours Blue I sometimes think that the defining
ambivalence of our culture is a wish that the lyric were true, and
the fear that it might be. Who doesn't dream of love, meaning perhaps
the best of all possible worlds at no personal cost, no demand to give
up the freedoms we savour; the comfort of a partner who is always there,
matching our moods, never sick, never disagreeable.. How we fear that
such an idyll might never come to pass, and that we should return to
dust as insignificantly and unmourned as we arrived. So love rates
along with religion as a cultural conspiracy to keep at bay the final,
lonely confrontation with death. --------------------------- 14. In contempt of religion From the earliest times religion and
moral philosophy have been used as vehicles for persuasion, equally
by good people and by scoundrels. The good would have been good with
or without religion. The scoundrels have been given an impenetrable
cover for their hypocrisy. Since the corruptible always outnumber the
fair-minded in governments and instrumentalities of power by a wide
margin, it is scarcely surprising that the net effect of religion has
been a negative one. --------------------------- 13. Of ideology and control @12/4/94 An ideology is a set of ideas for
governing values, decisions and actions. With a following of one, an
ideology is relatively harmless. Where two are believers, one man invariably
has power over the other. As a cult for millions, the ideology will
sway and drive them like a herd of cattle, and he who weilds the dogma
weilds the whip. --------------------------- 12. Innocence
and government All governments without exception
are, were and forever will be criminal organizations in some degree.
It cannot be otherwise since a government is a mighty enterprise, carrying
the hopes, dreams, illusions, ambitions and values of countless individuals. --------------------------- 11. Cultural Pathologies For a long time it has seemed self-evident
to me that cultures, like individuals, suffer from pathologies. We
could say in fact that all cultures have tendencies (different for
each culture) which when taken to an extreme, result in large scale
social dysfunction. --------------------------- 10. The Heart of the
Matter To solve a conundrum, argue in contrastive
directions. Where the lines of inference intersect we can identify
a core of propositions, facts or conclusions. --------------------------- 9. Prescription for living Find out what you are good at. - student at Northern Rivers CAE,
1983 --------------------------- 8. Wry There is a sacrament wherever wry men meet. - [TM, The Last Cockatoo, 1988] --------------------------- 7. Marriageable Age Like locusts who'd munched their way [TM, Silver Screen, 1988] --------------------------- 6. Ghost Talk My days are populated with ghosts; [TM, The Painted Path, 1988]. --------------------------- 5. Haven Heather, dashed yellow, sky bright [TM, The Imigre, 1988] --------------------------- 4. Flirting Flirting is the weapon with which
a woman stakes out her territory and secures her self respect. By proving
that she still has the power to draw attention and induce men to compete
for her favour she establishes a kind of personal validation that concurs
with her biological role. --------------------------- 3. First doubt Dark hair falling about her bright
eyes, [TM, Silver Screen, 1988] --------------------------- 2. Cleen teeth Funny, isn't it, how even dangerous men clean their teeth after dinner. [TM, Wide Worlds, 1988] --------------------------- 1. Blow us away Blow us away, my stormtrooper of the
army of dreams, [TM, Firepower, 1988] writing & photography
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