Daybook 10.

Socialism.

About the, socialistic?, formula “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. But what happens if the total you get from everyone “according to their ability” is more than what you must give to them “according to their needs”? So suppose, to create an abstract example, everyone needs 60 things per day. And Mary has the ability to produce 100 per day while Jack has the ability to produce 40 per day. Then the formula would take the 140 that they both together produced and from these give 60 each to Mary and Jack. Which is a total of 120. But that leaves 20. What happens to these?

Note that my example has 60 each. I introduced the idea of equality but the formula doesn’t mention that. People might not need the same number of things so the formula could result in inequality, but all that is a separate issue.

Wikipedia.

When I want to look something up on Wikipedia I often find that I already have some other Wikipedia article open in my internet browser. Then, rather than opening a new tab or window and typing in my new search term, I try to get from the already open article to the one I want by just following links. It turns out that this is an actual game called “Six Degrees Of Wikipedia”!

Poetry.

What’s the difference between poetry and normal prose writing?

- The first thing about poetry is that “the lines don’t reach the end of the page”. But the important thing is why. Why don’t they reach the end of the page? It’s because in poetry, lines have to meet a certain criteria of meter and/or rhyme which has got nothing to do with the width of the page. For example we might say all lines have to end after exactly ten syllables. Or they have to be of a length determined by a certain pattern of rhythm. Or that they have to end with a word that rhymes with a word at the end of some previous line. All these things mean that the line won’t necessarily end where the page does.

- The second difference between poetry and normal writing is that the expression in poetry is obscure. A poem won’t say: “the cat sat on the mat”. It will say: “Here on a mat cut square and neat, Did creature feline make its seat”.

- Is this second thing due to the first one? So maybe the obscurity is due to the fact that the lines have to meet the criteria of meter and/or rhyme. For example if I have a line that should be ten syllables and it currently has eleven I can get round this by substituting one word for two of the existing words. And, quite likely, I will only be able to do this with a single word that is more obscure than the two being replaced.

- Is there something pleasing about the obscurity? It forces your mind to make an effort. Is that pleasing?

- Certainly rhyming is pleasing. For something so very simple, I find rhyming to be incredibly effective at creating a weird pleasing sensation. It kind of spangles the mind somehow.

Acquired taste.

If you acquire a taste for some thing (like beer or broccoli) does this mean that the thing has now started to produce a pleasant sensation in you that it did not before. Or does it mean that the thing produces the same sensation in you that it always did but that you have now started to find pleasant that sensation whereas previously you didn’t?

A slightly different but related question would be: is there something that all taste sensations that you find pleasant have in common? Apart from the fact that you find them pleasant.

Similarly, what’s the difference between finding some sensation mildly pleasant and finding it to be strongly pleasant. In the latter case you will desire it more. But what else? Is it something about the sensation that’s different or is the sensation the same but just the desire for it that’s stronger. Or is there just no difference between these two?

Two countries.

Maybe there are only two countries in the world. One country is all the big cities. The other country is everywhere else. The big cities are all close to each other, not by geography but because they are linked by airports. So places like London, New York, Paris, New Delhi, Mexico City and Johannesburg are closer to each other than any one of these is to some small run-down town fifty miles up the road from it.

Things that matter.

Some people don’t talk much and others assume they’re shy. But the quiet ones are perhaps only like that because they are not at all interested in what the others are talking about. For example the quiet ones only want to talk about the things that matter but the others aren’t interested in that. And in fact it would make them very uncomfortable. I recall a sketch from a TV comedy show I saw once. Lots of blokes standing round drinking beer and talking about football and cars. One guy starts talking about his feelings and the others become embarrassed and nervous. The opposite of the quiet people are the noisy ones. Rather bright and shiny and I worry that there’s nothing behind all that noise and shine.

Transparency.

When I arrive at a keypad and need to present my PIN code the correct one immediately springs to my mind from memory. The process by which this code is got from my memory is not apparent to me. In general I am not transparent to myself.

Suppose Jack likes cycling. But he will not be aware of the process which led to him having that liking. He might not have had that liking. There are plenty of people like him who don’t have it. And it’s not as simple as a liking for food. It’s not the same as him liking broccoli and not liking carrots.

Eating.

I often eat fruit with a meal. (This might sound unusual but it’s not much different from drinking a sweet drink with a meal.) I will take mouthfuls of each in succession so that I am mashing up fruit in my mouth at the same time as some vegetable and bean stew that I am eating. But then, I think to myself, what would be the difference if I just mixed them up in one bowl and ate the mixture? But there is a difference.

Store.

Buying and selling involves stores. So there are two people: the person who makes things and the person who wants those things. That’s the essence of the scenario. So Mary wants a coat. And Jack makes coats. Jack makes the coat. It gets put in a store. Later Mary goes to the store and buys the coat. The question is: why does the coat need to be put in a store in the meantime? That seems to be a needless expense. Keeping it there, sometimes for weeks. All the effort it takes for the store people to put things on shelves. And standing and waiting for Mary (and people like her) to show up. And then the effort Mary makes to go to the store and take that same thing off the shelf and pay for it and take it home. Why didn’t Jack just send the coat straight to Mary? It seems as if, in general, producer businesses don’t sell direct to customers. Instead there are retail store businesses who do that. But it would make more sense if the producers sold direct. Cut out the middle man. How did stores even ever get going?

Retirement pensions.

People pay some of the money income they get from working into schemes the terms of which are that when they are old they can get regular payments made to them without them having to work. Now, I can understand why you might want to make arrangements to be paid without having to work in the event of becoming sick or unemployed. Because those circumstances necessarily result in your earnings stopping and so you would need a replacement income. But the circumstance of being age 65 (or whatever age you want to ‘retire’ at) does not do that. Retirement pensions are more like a savings scheme for an extended holiday later in life. But if you are going to have a holiday wouldn’t it be better to do that when you’re younger and your knees still work?

Quantity of misery.

If you added up all the misery in the world. I wonder if most of it would consist not of serious suffering from war and famine and suchlike but of just ordinary unhappiness. Like unpleasant neighbours or broken relationships. While this latter sort of misery is less intense than wars and famine there is a lot more of it in quantity. This is a bit like the (possible) fact that, in terms of simple biomass, there is more bacteria in the world than the human population. Bacteria are smaller but there are more of them.

Justice For All.

(1) I saw this slogan on a placard and I thought: it wouldn’t be justice if it wasn’t for all, would it? (2) A lot of people aren’t that bothered about justice. Because injustice doesn’t affect them. A lot of people even like injustice, for example if there is an unjust bias in their favour. Or, even if the injustice is to their disadvantage, they might have the resources to cope and so don’t care. For example if public transport decided to charge women higher fares this would be horribly unjust. But the women who had their own cars wouldn’t be affected so they might not care as much as women without their own cars. (3) Justice (for all) means “rule of law” and “equality before the law” but what if the law itself is discriminatory. Then justice for all is not worth very much. If the law itself says that transport companies may charge women higher fares if they want. That law applies to everyone equally.

Doctor Who.

Mary: So you’ve moved back in with your mother then!

Jack: Yes, but I hate it. It makes people think I’m a serial killer.

Mary: Or, even worse, a Doctor Who fan.

Cleaner.

What level of salary do you have to get before you hire a cleaner to clean your house instead of just doing it yourself? It seems strange to think that a doctor or a lawyer earning £80,000 per year would be at home on Saturday morning mopping their floors. (Or that they would take a few days off work to wallpaper the back bedroom.) Maybe the income level is the point at which your hourly rate of pay is more than that which a cleaner earns. So if you earn £20 per hour and a cleaner earns £15 it would be better for you to do an extra hour of work and use the money from that to pay a cleaner, rather than spending an hour of your time doing that cleaning yourself.

The Economy.

Is the Economy stable? People ask that question but maybe the economy is the sort of thing about which that term can’t be said. Like you can’t say about a molecule that it is wet or dry. Not even a molecule of water!

Failed.

Mary was telling Jack, her spinster friend, about her failed relationship. “I envy you” Jack responded, “I can only dream of having a failed relationship!”

Attraction.

A man might become successful and wealthy in order to attract a nice female to be his wife. But then when he has got her he is not happy with the fact that she only likes him for his wealth. He wants to be liked for who he is not for his wealth.

Professionals.

Middle class people are called “professionals”. So does that mean all workers who aren’t middle class, such as builders and mechanics, are amateurs?

Communications technology.

The latest technology means I can talk to anyone in the world. Now all I need is something to say!

Religion.

What if there was a religion that consisted of ritual and absolutely nothing else. At some time and/or some place its adherents would perform certain actions in a specific order. But behind this mysterious ritual there would be absolutely no belief or doctrine or faith or myth or story or revelation of any sort. If you asked a follower of this religion: “tell me, why are you doing this” they would answer: “because I am”. And in a way all rituals are like this already. That’s why they often get called “empty rituals”. — To make sure that nobody could ascribe any content to a ritual it would need to be very abstract. In order to avoid them being taken as “saying something”. So they couldn’t consist of, for example, prostrating before a tree. Because then others would say: “aha! so you believe that this tree is a holy thing!”. The rituals would also need to be quite undemanding. Because people are so busy with other things these days. So the ritual couldn’t be too intrusive. It should take only a few minutes and not have to be repeated five or ten times a day. I think the best format would be for followers to stand up and move around in certain way, perform certain gestures. And then sit down again. And that’s all.

Announcements.

There’s one train I get on sometimes which stops at a few stations on the way. And each time it sets off from a station there is a (pre-recorded) announcement which says “The next stop is B. This train terminates here.” And I think: no, it should say “this train terminates THERE” not “this train terminates HERE”! Because we haven’t got there yet.

Other announcements I hear are a detailed explanation of safety measures like where the emergency exit doors are. Or to mind the gap. I suppose this is for the one or two people on the train who have never been on a train before. But surely somebody like that should have someone more familiar with trains showing them around? I think you should get shown all this kind of thing when you are a child. It would be like someone ‘inducting’ you into the place you live. (Or like Virgil being a guide for Dante round hell.) They would show you what all the things are and what they are not.

Busy.

Jack: Hey Mary, would you like to go to the movies with me sometime?

Mary: No sorry, I’m busy that day.

Clever.

Maybe cleverness should be seen as a negative attribute. After all, the words ‘cunning’, ‘crafty’, ‘shrewd’, ‘sly’ and ‘wily’ are all related words. Clever people can be manipulative and use their wit to swindle people and trick them. (Consider lawyers.) But in fact nowadays cleverness is a very positive attribute. In fact, the level of adulation given to clever people is quite astonishing. I suppose it started with Einstein. And then more recently it was Stephen Hawking. These people are treated like ‘holy men’ used to be. Is it because we think that clever people are more likely to be good? But then what about Professor Moriarty? But I think it’s more just about value. In the cases of scientists like Einstein their cleverness has some value (albeit hard for most people to appreciate). But, on other hand, we are also impressed by clever people even when their cleverness is of no use. Like some professor of Classics at Oxbridge University. ... The contempt for not-clever people is astonishing too. Even just referring to such people I have to use the word ’stupid’, there is no other word which says the same thing without any negative connotations.

Punishment.

Suppose we abolished punishment. Instead, when someone commits a crime, we would just reflect on how we have failed to create a situation where this kind of thing doesn’t happen. We would treat the crime more like the way we treat accidents. You think to yourself “accidents will happen!” and take measures to make things safer in future.

Poor folk 1.

The main reason people don’t want to be poor is because then they won’t have to live with poor people. Poverty (at least relative poverty, poverty within certain limits) can be tolerated and you can accommodate your mind to your restricted situation. But you can’t do that with the company of poor people what with their coarse and vulgar manners and low morals. They wouldn’t think twice about stealing your freshly baked cakes, or boring you with their stories about shiny celebrities, or inviting you to come and watch their dog fighting. Once we have enough money we can escape from them and go and live with those pleasant middle class people who are so much nicer. But how does not having to do manual work make them nicer? Middle class people are nice and clever and polite. But they treat the people who labour for them badly. And yet they rely on that hard labour of others. Hard labour they no longer have to perform. They wouldn’t dream of doing such labour themselves or letting their children do it. — How do rich people get their own neighbourhoods away from poor people? It’s not as if expensive houses are all always built in the same area. That might be part of the story but it can’t be all of it. It might be something like that you start with all housing everywhere being of the same price. And then a few wealthy people buy houses in some particular area. And they spend money on improving those houses. This makes that area more desirable and so the price of nearby properties also increases. So poor people are priced out and so on and so on.

Poor Folk 2.

A lot of politics is about “poor people”. What to do about them and how policies affect them. But who are poor people? The answer that strikes many people as obvious, and therefore unlikely to be true, is that they are people who are stupid and/or lazy. But even if that was true it doesn’t really answer the question. After all: why are they stupid? Why are they lazy?

Other people.

Is it possible to understand another way of thinking? Not just religious thinking which would be the obvious example. But other things. Can a not-greedy person understand one who is greedy? Can an unartistic person understand an artistic one.

Slavery.

In the past (for example Ancient Rome or pre Civil War USA) they had slavery but people didn’t notice this horror. What is there today (and there certainly will be something) that is just like this that we are not noticing?

Man is the measure.

Clothes measurements should be of the clothes rather than of the body that will wear those clothes. But a 32 inch waist pair of trousers is “for somebody whose waist measures 32 inches”. Why not just say how big the trousers are?

Opera singing.

Is the opera singing voice different from a normal singing voice? Could you sing an opera in a normal singing voice?

Organisation.

What is a University exactly? Is it a business? Certainly it is some kind of an organisation. But saying something is an ‘organisation’ is saying nothing really.

Shops.

Why are shops mostly open weekdays during daytime when people are at work and so not free to go shopping? Surely they should be open evenings and weekends only.

Questions and answers.

If Jack asks Mary a question which has some particular answer. Then either she knows the answer or she doesn’t know the answer. But sometimes there is a third possibility. Which is that she doesn’t know the answer yet she would still recognise it if it was presented to her. But how is that possible? Does she know it or doesn’t she? — Similarly (but more understandably), even when she doesn’t know what the answer is, she will at least know what the answer isn’t. So if Jack asks Mary: “what’s 5,664 x 4,534” Mary doesn’t know what the answer is but she knows that the answer isn’t “France”.

Revenge.

What is the desire for revenge? If Mary breaks Jack’s toy because he broke hers, why does this give him satisfaction? Is it because she has forced empathy? Now he knows how she feels. Is that what she wanted?

Umbrella thoughts.

When it’s raining but not enough to use an umbrella. But I am carrying an umbrella. Then I don’t put it up because I would look silly. But then I look silly carrying a closed umbrella while it is raining. — If it doesn’t rain at all I think: I should have left this umbrella at home. But then I think: but I didn’t know when I left the house that it wouldn’t rain. Then I think: don’t I have anything better to think about?

Tidy.

Why do followers of unworldly anti-attachment religions like Buddhists keep their homes so clean and tidy? Especially the monks. You would have thought they would just go with the flow. What do they care about the world and its state.

Even though I’m not a Buddhist monk I still like to be clean and tidy but then I think: how clean and tidy do I need to be? Sometimes I feel I am rather overdoing it. I need to get the balance right between self-respect and vanity. And between self-respect and obsessiveness.

Once, coming back to Britain from some Third World country which was (sorry to say) a dump, in the care on the way home from the airport the British roads looked like some deranged people had carefully washed and brushed them.

If you want to make your room look tidy one way is to make it even more messy, leave it like that for a few days then tidy it so that it is again as it was. This will look tidier even though it is not any more tidy.

Quentin Crisp was being humorous in his remark about cleaning when he said “there was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse”. Yet there is some truth in this. Why wipe the dust that lies on the top of the narrow edge of the skirting board when it will only come back in a few days and it won’t get any worse if you just leave it.

Certainly it’s easy to become obsessive about this kind of thing. For example suppose I buy some furniture, for example a nice dresser to go against that wall there. And then I find a slight flaw on the side, a little chip in the paintwork. That might freak me out and I set about trying to fix it. But it doesn’t matter really. Who cares. It’s just a little mark! Some people buy new furniture which has been made to look used with lots of chip marks and bumps and dents. So if you find a mark on a new piece of furniture the best thing to do would be to just make a few more similar marks at random.

Do I get a certain pleasure from things being tidy? But I shouldn’t get my mental satisfaction from external factors! (See my post on materialism HERE.)

Eggs.

Don’t put your eggs in more than one basket. Because then you’ll need to arrange separate protection for each basket. Which isn’t efficient.

Bad advice.

Some things people tell you to do are just not possible.

1. Make friends. As if you can make these the way you make cakes.

2. Don’t be afraid. As if “being afraid” was something you were doing on purpose and so can just stop doing it.

3. Get a job. As if you can go and get a job like you might go and get a shovel from the shed.

4. Fulfil your potential. (Be all that you can be.) What? Including my potential to be a serial killer? And what if I have the potential to be many different things but not all of them. Then I can’t ever fulfil my potential.

Pretending.

People who do voluntary work (for charities) to improve the content of their CV (résumé). So they don’t really care, they’re just pretending.

Misfortune.

Suppose Jack is upset because his wife left him, he lost his job and he had to move out of his nice house into a small flat. And Mary says to him: “you can still be just as happy without the life you had. Just think: others are in a worse situation than you and your situation is not so bad”. But if it was the case that Jack could be just as happy now as he was before then why did he bother to put all the effort he did to get that life he had previously?

Slaves.

Suppose Jack shouted to some passing stranger: go and get me an ice cream from that store and I’ll give you $50. It’s a hot day and Jack is wealthy but doesn’t want to get up from his nice seat in the shade. But his attitude is wrong and the stranger refuses. The stranger feels affronted. He’s not a lackey to be ordered about like that!

Fines.

What’s the difference between a fine and just paying? If Mary gets fined $20 for parking in some area that you’re not supposed to park. If she has enough money then to her that’s just a $20 charge for parking that she is able to pay quite easily.

People.

Sometimes I hear it said about people: “oh he’s a nice guy but you know he lacks confidence and social skills so doesn’t have many friends” and I think: so what? Are people not friends with him because of that? Can’t they just make allowances for his lack of confidence and social skills? Do they expect prospective friends to be perfect?

Context.

Mary: What’s the context?

Jack: Why does that matter?

Mary: I didn’t say I think it matters. But until I know what the context is I don’t know whether it does or not.

Interests.

Are the Labour Party representing the working classes. Their aim being to further the interests of that particular class. But then the Labour Party should never be the government should they? Because what about the interests of everybody else? Are they just going to ignore those?

Bootleg.

Is it OK to illegally copy software (or music or writing or whatever) if it’s true that you are so poor that you could never afford to pay for it outright anyway? You might think this was OK because in such a scenario the producers aren’t losing any revenue.

Store app.

I was at a store once and I couldn’t find where the paint was. So I asked a store assistant. I jokingly remarked that they should have a smartphone app which could tell you what was where in the store. In response to which he said something like: no, we move things around too much for that to work. And I thought: but that’s what I meant! I meant that an app would solve that problem because it would update immediately when they moved things round. But I didn’t say anything. I just bought my paint and left.

Business.

People who run businesses selling things to customers will often say that they put the customer first and that customer satisfaction is their top priority. And I think: no it’s not. Your top priority is making money. Businesses that provide services to customers have customer satisfaction as a subsidiary aim only. The ultimate aim is making money and they will only give customers the best service if that makes them money. If they could make money by doing something that wasn’t best for the customer then they would do that. For example if some business selling widgets knew that customers could get better cheaper widgets elsewhere they wouldn’t tell their customers that.

Inequality.

In politics material inequality is a big issue. And yet I often think that quality of life is determined a lot more by other things. Things other than material circumstances. If you are an unattractive (physically and/or in terms of personality) person and you don’t know how to occupy your free time creatively and you have no appreciation for all the great art in the world and you don’t get on with people. All these things are going to affect your quality of life a great deal. Your political party might get you a few extra dollars in your pay but what good is that to you really?

“Someone is wrong on the internet.”

This is more general than the internet. Some people feel that it is their responsibility to point out other people’s errors to them. At best these people are a nuisance. At worst they are the Spanish Inquisition. Most importantly: how exactly does it benefit them to prove others wrong?

Writing.

If you are writing fiction then coming up with a story is one thing. A story is just what happens, a selection of incidents strung together. But then there is the putting of all that into words. So in the story it might happen that Jack asks Mary to drive him to the store. There are many ways of putting that into words. Of doing the ‘mis-en-scene’. What words does Jack use? In what tone does he say them? What place are they in when he asks? What else is he doing? This is why it’s easier to write a play than a novel. With a play a lot of that hard work is done by whoever is staging the play.

Part-time artists.

Instead of having full-time artists we should encourage people to be part-time artists. It’s better to have two novels each from ten part-time writers than twenty novels from one full-time writer. It would be better to have ten (the best ten) novels from Charles Dickens and some other novelist than to have twenty novels from Charles Dickens and none from the other.

Justice.

How important is this? What if I said you could live in system A where you and everybody else get paid equally at 1,000 per month. Or in system B where you get paid 2,000 per month. But there are people around you who get paid 2,500 for doing the same work. You would get more in system B, despite it being unjust.

If we paid Jack 2,500 and we paid Mary 2,000 for the same work Mary would say it was unfair. But even if we paid them the same it might be unfair. What if Jack finds the job more difficult than Mary, he has to put in more effort. Then it might be fair to pay him more. And if we didn’t then Jack might say it was unfair.

Conversation.

How do we learn how to conduct a conversation? We don’t ever sit and watch and listen to all different kinds of people having conversations. So that we can learn from all this variety. In the same way in which, if I was learning to play tennis, I might watch lots of different game players and so learn from them.

Space.

If you live in a city with buildings then you are quite confined pretty much all the time. You rarely have the flat distance stretching out in front of you. When you look ahead it’s normally a nearby (by which I mean less than about 10 metres away) wall (or building etc) that you’re looking at. If you look at city from above it would look like people live in the deep grooves cut with a knife into some flat solid surface.

Science.

If someone gave you a choice between being the discoverer of one new fact about some subject, such as for example, human biology. Or fully understanding the whole of what is already known about that subject then which would you choose? If you choose the latter is that because you crave the admiration that comes from having discovered something new? The your motivation would be vanity as well as curiosity.

Fallacies 

You could examine effective people and see that they have certain habits but that doesn’t mean that if you have these habits then you too will be effective. Those effective people might be being effective for some other reason. Similarly, people who are failures with lame excuses doesn’t mean they’re failures because of those excuses. 

Like-minds.

We like meeting people with similar interests. If I like cats then I will seek out other people who like cats too. But why? So that we can talk about cats? And say what exactly? It’s not as sensible as it seems at first. What if I am interested in politics and so want to meet other people interested in politics. But I what if I do and then I find them to be opinionated and boorish. So it’s not just that I want to meet people who share my interests but it’s also that I want them to share my interests in the same way.

The man-woman relationship.

Can you imagine anything as crazy as basing a human relationship on something as vulgar as sex? It’s not as bad as it used to be in the old days when it was just a man keeping a woman as if she was a servant. But still not great.

Love.

Literature like “Romeo and Juliet” glamourises intense, hopeless and overwhelming feelings of romantic love. But what if there was a story that glamourised someone’s similar attachment (= addiction) to heroin! Or what if there was a story that wrote about love in the same negative way that we currently have stories about attachment to heroin? Wrote about love as if it was an addiction. I think Somerset Maugham does something like that in ‘Of Human Bondage’. — But does literature really glamourise love? Isn’t it more that the people who read such stuff already think that that kind of thing is glamorous? And then works like “Romeo and Juliet” just attract those people. Similarly movies like “The Godfather” either glamourise mob violence or just attract people who already think that sort violence is glamorous.

Dog lovers.

Britain is a nation of dog-lovers. Is it dogs they like or the sort of relationship that dogs are in with humans. One of intense loyalty. But isn’t that just dumb mutt servility? And that doesn’t fit in with the British dislike of servility (“Britons never will be slaves”). Maybe they like servility but only in others. But then they are being inconsistent.

“They”.

A few years ago at a large supermarket. The store had run out of hand baskets and when I asked the assistant at the customer services counter about this she said “sorry, we’ve told them but they haven’t done anything about it yet”. And I thought: who’s ‘they’? Surely she should have said ‘we’! In general employees of organisations don’t feel the kind of membership that would mean they say ‘we’ instead of ‘they’. Which is understandable. Because in a capitalist free-market economy people are encouraged to see themselves as individuals. But this results in a loss of productivity. If your employer is ‘them’ not ‘us’ then you will only do the bare minimum that the job requires.

Meritocracy.

Someone once said “The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.” This doesn’t sound quite right. So, if it’s my goal to walk on water then my bullshit story about the laws of physics is the only thing standing in my way? If I am a black slave in 1840s South Carolina then the only thing standing in my way to becoming a wealthy and successful person is that story I’m telling myself about how the massive white power structure is threatening me with immediate death if I make one wrong move. That story? — But that bullshit story quote reminds me of Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’. Maybe I have not properly understood this but it sounds to me like Sartre is saying that we are always free despite us telling ourselves that we are not. We tell ourselves we are not by accepting some story that says we are ‘some thing’ and that this thing we are not free to stop being. This is bad faith. So the slave has accepted the story that he is a slave and that he can’t stop being a slave. He should refuse to accept the story and so be free. But, again this doesn’t sound right. Be free yes but this will just be to be free to be shot while trying to escape. - Even if we accept that our "bullshit story" is standing between us and our goal, it’s not “the only thing”. Other factors are essential. That’s why people want to get in to the good schools.

Humans.

I think it was David Hume who said that there is no such thing as the love of humans for other humans in general. With other things we can like them in general, without qualification. Some examples might be: sunshine, fried potato chips, birdsong. And maybe there are certain humans which everybody loves, like Charlie Chaplin. But not all humans in general. Because humans are all too different from each other for us to like them in general. So when people say “I like people” they’re probably just mean that they like the people that they like. Which is saying nothing. If someone says they like everyone then we should ask: really? what even that dreadful bore who talks loudly about nothing but spoons all the time?

A walk by the river.

Mary: This is a nice place to go when you just want to be on your own for a bit, isn’t it? Where do you normally go when you want to be alone?

Jack: Home.

Russian Roulette.

All the Russian Roulette players I have met are alive and well. From which I conclude that it’s a game that is perfectly safe. This is a nonsense caused by basing a conclusion on a restricted sample set. I am never going to meet people who lost at Russian Roulette, so they are automatically excluded from my sample. — Similarly some people think that support for their political position is overwhelming: “everybody I speak to thinks that we should leave the EU” they might say. Therefore there’s an overwhelming majority of people in favour of that, they conclude. But really it’s just because they don’t speak to anybody who doesn’t agree with them. — In the Russian Roulette example someone might say about all the players they have met who are alive and well: “It can’t just be a coincidence that in all these cases the gun didn’t fire a bullet. There must be some mysterious force at work here.” Which reminds me of the way some people say: “It can’t be a coincidence that something as complicated as life just happened. There must be a mysterious force at work here.” They are ignoring all the cases where it failed to happen.

Survival of the fittest.

Originally the term ’fittest’ just meant the most suited to the environment. Whereas in common speaking it means the most physiologically fit, meaning things like being athletic and strong.

Writing.

If, at college, I get a bad mark for an essay. What does that mean? Does it mean that I have been judged to have a poor understanding of the subject matter. Or does it mean that I do have a good understanding but that my ability to put my understanding into words is poor. It’s not clear which one applies.

The good guys.

The Allies defeated the Nazis but they didn’t do that because they were right. They did it because they were stronger. Might not right.

Freedom.

From the TV series ‘The Prisoner’. He says (as part of the opening sequence): “I am not a number, I am a free man”. But just because you are a number that doesn’t mean you can’t also be a free man does it?

Natural.

Sometimes I hear it said: “it’s not natural for people to do X”. Where X could be flying in machines or it could be indulging in certain forbidden intimate acts. And I think: yes, it’s not natural. But then it’s not natural for people to be natural.

Hard work.

You don’t get anything without working hard. But that doesn’t mean that if you do work hard that then you will get something.

Winning the lottery.

People who want to win the lottery mostly look forward to not having to work anymore. But they still want other people to work. Because otherwise they would have nothing to spend their winnings on! But then the desire to win the lottery and not have to work anymore doesn’t sound like a good desire to have. It’s like you want other people to be your slaves. ... In general maybe it’s wrong to want something that isn’t something that everybody could have at the same time. If everyone won the lottery, in the sense that everyone got an amount of money equal to the amount the lottery was offering. Then that wouldn’t work!

Demarcation.

On the status of rules. For example take the rule: maximum traffic speed is 70 miles per hour. And someone does 71. Do we punish them? No, because it’s only one over! So then they say: you’re not punishing me, that means 71 is OK, it’s as much OK as 70. But no it’s not! If it was then the further argument would be: if 71 is OK then 72 is also OK because 72 is only one over something (71) that is OK. And so on! So no, 71 is not OK. It has a special status of wrong but not punishable. It’s more wrong than 70 but not wrong enough to be punishable. Unlike 80 which is clearly over. And so is both wrong and punishable. Or rather: it’s wrong enough to be punishable. Maybe the punishments ought to be graded depending on how much over the limit you were. … Another thing is: is this all a bit like the Sorites paradox? Where the problem is caused by the thought that (A) “if x beans isn’t a heap of beans then x+1 beans isn’t a heap of beans either”. From which it would seem to follow that nothing can ever be a heap of beans. But about A we should say that x+1 beans isn’t a heap of beans but it is more of a heap than x beans was. Even though x+1 beans might not yet be a heap of beans yet. It might be that x+1 beans isn’t a heap of beans but neither is it not a heap of beans. But it’s more a heap of beans than it was. The attribute “is a heap of beans” isn’t binary. All of which means that from A it doesn’t follow that nothing can ever be a heap of beans.

The past.

Did people in the past look different? In the sense that foreign people now look different. Even people from nearby countries. (Or even people from different regions of the same country that we are in.) So people from Poland look slightly different from people from England, even though, at first glance we might say “they all look the same”. I mean if we are saying this in the context of there also being people who are natives of Kenya and Japan. Not enormously different but still. In the same way people from 1880 look slightly different from people from 2010. You can look at old photos to see this I think. Maybe.

Understand.

“I wish you’d understand me less and love me more – I wish you could stop defining” complains a woman (in writing) to her erstwhile lover in Nicolas Roeg’s (very strange) film ‘Bad Timing’. But I think I’d rather be understood than loved (or even liked). By being understood I mean someone else knowing exactly what I am like as a person, how I think, what I feel, how I view the world. Or maybe what I mean by all this is that being understood is what I think being loved is really. (A strange indifferent sort of love but still love.) Because what else could love be otherwise? Affection of the sort you might have for a dog or your favourite chair? I don’t think so! No, I think that being “close to someone” means understanding them in detail. Because, after all, when you get close to something (with a magnifying glass if needed), that’s when you can see the details, isn’t it? If you want safety and security in a relationship then, whatever you do, make it dependant on something more stable than emotion (ie love). -- In the same way that “talking about your feelings” can “build rapport” with others, so can talking about your intimate thought processes.

Science.

We have got science that tells us what things are, but what tells us what science is?

Right to vote - 1.

Jack: Who did you vote for?

Mary: I didn’t vote for anybody.

Jack: You didn’t vote?! People fought for you to have the right to vote, you know!

Mary: People fought for lots of things. They fought for the right to keep slaves. So, should I keep slaves too?

Right to vote - 2.

The voteless fought for the right to vote so that then they could have a say on how things are set up. Because at the moment the way things are set up treats them very badly. Makes them work in factories for 15 hours a day for a pittance. Or it says they may not do anything in their life other than wash and clean and have babies. But, given all this, instead of fighting for the right to vote, wouldn’t it be simpler if these frustrated voteless people just fought for the way things are set up to be changed so that those things didn’t treat them so badly. It seems as if they are going the long way round: getting the right to vote and then using the vote to vote for the way things are set up to be changed. Not to mention that whatever improvements they get implemented would have to be implemented and made unchangeable by any subsequent vote of course. I think that’s what they call the constitution. Now that I come to think of it I’m not sure I understand the nature of the difference. Certainly it would be better if, for example, a law making child labour illegal was part of the constitution and not just an ordinary piece of legislation.

Important.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist but. But I was thinking about what determines which things concern us, which things we want “something to be done about”. And it seems as if this sort of thing is determined largely by what we read in newspapers and see on TV. It’s like the media tells us what to care about. There might be two wars going on in the world but if only one of them is on the TV news that’s the one we will feel outraged about. We never sit down and systematically look through all the things going on in the world and decide on the basis of that. There might be something horrible going on in our own town which we should be concerned about. But if it’s not in the news then it won’t even register with us. It will be like the proverbial “elephant in the room”. It’s as if we are assuming that if it was a serious problem it would be in the news. Maybe an example of all this would be road traffic accident casualties. If ten people died today in car crashes it wouldn’t be on the news. But if ten people died in a gun attack it would be. So we do not consider the car crashes to be important. Even though we ourselves might have been injured in a car crash that day!

Explanation.

I don’t understand the current tendency for mental states to be explained in terms of brain chemistry. So I hear people say that depression is caused by low serotonin. But that is wrong surely. The correct thing to say is that depression is constituted by low serotonin. One thing is just a different way of describing the other. Causation doesn’t come into it. You might as well say that depression causes low serotonin as that low serotonin causes depression.

Words 1.

Because there’s a word we think there must be something that that word refers to. That there must be some detailed agreed upon meaning of that term. But often there isn’t. Which you find out when you ask somebody to explain the meaning of the word I question, when you ask them “what is ...?”. Examples would be ‘happiness’, ‘socialism’ and ‘love’. -- All this is what lies behind the idea that “there is no such thing as a fish”. The word ’fish’ is (was?) used to refer to a category of things living in the sea until people realised that was as much of a meaningful category as “things that fly”. This latter would include bats and wasps. As for the word ‘fish’ it’s actually difficult to refine it so that it does somehow become a sensible category of thing.

Population.

What if everybody was the same age all the time for the whole of their lives. They lived the same number of years as people do now but they were, physically, let’s say 27, for the whole of that life.

Air pressure.

This is often described as pressing down on us. HERE it says: “all the molecules of air in the atmosphere above your head weigh something. And the combined weight of these molecules causes a pressure pressing down on your body of 10,000 kg per square metre.” (Maybe that last bit isn’t right and it should have said Newtons per square metre not kg per square metre.) But why is it that I don’t feel any effect of this force? It seems like a lot. And why is it that there is no difference when I am inside the house? And there should be a difference because when I am inside the house there is less direct air above my head. And the answer to this question is “the air exerts this force in all directions, so as well as pushing down on us, it also pushes up and balances out the force on our bodies so that we don’t collapse”. But where does it act up? Does it act up on the underside of my feet when I am standing on the ground?

Design.

You can tell when someone has put some thought into the design of something. When they have looked at it from the user’s point of view. For example some word processing software has a setting which lets you tell the software to put you at the end of a document when you open it. In other words to put you where you left off writing. So you don’t have to scroll all the way to the end each time you open it. Whoever created this setting in the software was paying attention to the user experience. Another example is the iPod shuffle. When I pause it but don’t turn it off, then after a few minutes it goes into sleep mode. If, after this, I press play, it resumes the podcast I was listening to but it rewinds a few seconds so as to refresh my mind with what I was listening to.

Helping.

It’s good to help others by relieving any pain that they might be suffering. Sometimes we wish our friends would suffer more so that then we would have a greater opportunity to be good.

Self-taught.

People who have learnt something from reading a book will say they are “self-taught”. But surely they have been taught not by themselves but by whoever wrote the book.

The Street.

It seems that the only two things that are traditionally sold on the street are: sex and ice cream. Only one of them from out of a van at the moment.

Hurtful.

Somebody says something hurtful and then they say they didn’t mean it and I think: you might not have meant it but the words did.

Fair and equal.

But these two are not the same. If Jack works fewer hours than Mary (all other things being equal) it is fair that he get paid a lower unequal amount of money.

Websites.

It’s really annoying when you end up (usually via a search engine) on a page of some website where the page does not have a link to the home page (or any other page) of that website.

Character.

Some people when they talk seem like they’re acting. It’s like they are a caricature of themselves. People who have obviously consciously exaggerated mannerisms. Or use clichés like “for my sins”, “not three bad” and “muggins here”. About these people I wonder: where is the real you?

Method.

Suppose I give Jack and Mary each the task of making 100 widgets. As a competition, to see who gets to 100 first. After two hours I check and I see that Jack has produced 80 widgets and Mary had produced none. This is a foregone conclusion I think! I come back 15 minutes later and Mary has produced 100 and Jack has only got to 90. So Mary wins. Because Mary spent the first 2 hours making a machine that makes widgets. While Jack was producing at the rate of 40 per hour from the start. Maybe this isn’t a great example to emulate. But often when I get given a task I don’t start on it straight away. Instead I spend time trying to devise a good method.

Mirror vs camera.

Let’s face it, I don’t look too great in either of these. But one thing I notice is that what I look like in a mirror isn’t what I look like in photographs. If I stand in front of a mirror and take a photograph at the same time and it doesn’t look like what I see in the mirror. No matter how much I adjust the settings on the camera. Maybe what I look like (to myself) in a mirror is affected by me knowing that it is a mirror.

[17 July 2018]