Daybook 2.

(January/February 2015.)

Quote from Henry Miller.

“I can think of no street in America, or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on toward the discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countries of the world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number.” (Just replace the name ‘America’ with the name of the country where you live to find out what you think of it.)

Instruction.

Jack put the cat in a bag and said to Mary: “Hey Mary I need to rush out somewhere. I’ve put the cat in this bag, whatever you do don’t open the bag, OK?” And Mary said: “Sure, no problem!” but the cat was very clever and the minute Jack left the house it got out and shut the bag behind it too. Mary found the closed but clearly empty bag. She opened it to have a look. When Jack got back she told him what happened. Jack was annoyed: “I told you not to open the bag!”. To which she responded: “but the cat was already out by then!”. And Jack said “doesn’t matter, you failed to follow my instruction!”

Business.

Banks let people who hold accounts at other banks use their ATMs. Why don’t they do that with branch buildings too? Each branch of any bank would then have staff from all the different banks. As it is each bank has its own branch infrastructure but this seems to be a pointless duplication, a waste of resources.

Documentaries.

I gave up watching TV documentaries years ago when I realised that the content of any documentary could be distilled into a few minutes. The rest was just padding and exciting visuals which serve no purpose other than to fill the time and keep people amused. The same point applies to books. A lot of books (like those popular psychology books you get) are mostly padding around the same few ideas repeated over and over again. The producers of all this sort of stuff should learn how to be concise.

Thinking.

About the statements “Mary is twice as old as Jack” and “When Jack was born then Mary was as old as Jack is now”. I should be able to see instantly that B follows from A but I can’t. I find it takes a bit of thinking.

Apprehension.

About bad things that happen. Maybe the following is one way of stopping some bad thing that’s happening from bothering you. It’s all to do with how you think about the situation. When the bad thing hasn’t happened yet you can think: good it hasn’t happened yet so right now everything is fine! Then, when the bad thing has started happening, you can think: already some of this bad thing is out of the way, all I need to do now is stick it out till the end.

Purpose.

Some people say (in a disappointed tone) that their life has no meaning or purpose (when other people’s lives do). But once they have said that then it does have a purpose. Namely to find out why it doesn’t have a purpose. Or to find out why they think that it has no purpose.

Self-perpetuating.

Sometimes it seems like the economy is self-perpetuating. A large part of the economy is the production of things like cars and watches for the population to use. And the reason the population need cars and watches so much is so that they can get to work and get there on time. So that they can make cars and watches. ... Of course this is a very simplistic way of looking at things but the scary thing is that it’s not that far away from the way things are. ... Similarly people work hard at their jobs so that they can have a nice holiday abroad. But if they didn’t wear themselves out needlessly doing that work they wouldn’t need that holiday abroad. … The Roman Empire was an organisation to raise taxes from its subjects, where those taxes were needed to maintain an army which is needed to maintain the Empire and its tax raising activity.

Not quite right.

When I see a right hand drive car go by my mind tells me something is wrong but I can’t immediately see what. It’s only after a while that I realise it’s that the driver is sitting on the wrong side and it looks funny.

Health insurance.

Imagine that if I got some serious terminal illness Z and that would cost £20,000 to treat. And the probability of me getting Z in some specified time frame is 5%, in other words a 1 in 20 chance. So I take out insurance and I pay £1,000 insurance premium. Another way of thinking of this is that that’s a bet. So actually I could go to a betting shop and say: I bet I get Z. If, after that, I then get Z then that means I win the bet. Hooray, I’m a winner! Sounds like a rather tasteless thing to do. Some very religious people (I mean Ned Flanders) refuse to get health insurance because they think it is a form of gambling.

Wasted.

An employer hires Mary to work for him. They start teaching her how to do the job but she doesn’t pick it up straight away. So they fire her and get someone else. But they are wasting her potential input. If they had persisted she might have learnt the job better than most people. This happens a lot in a free market system and it always makes me think of that phrase: “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”. (To which I then add: “and so easy!”).

Imagine a similar situation where an employer has to make someone redundant and they have to choose between Jack and Mary. At the moment Jack produces about 10% more than Mary. He is better at the job than her but is something of a slacker and unreliable, spending a lot of time just lollygagging, sitting around chatting on his phone and doing no work. Mary isn’t as good as him at the job but she works harder and is reliable. If Jack worked as hard as Mary he could easily produce twice more than he currently does. Despite all this an employer would probably sack Mary. But that seems wrong.

Daylight.

Scenario 1. You are in a room well lit by daylight from a large window. You can read a printed page clearly without the assistance of any other light source, such as a light bulb. The light intensity is just right, not to bright and not too dim. Later, when it gets dark outside, you draw the curtains and switch on a bright light bulb in the room and again you can read the printed page clearly without the assistance of any other light source and the light is just bright enough, not too bright and not too dim. You conclude from this that the intensity of the light of daylight and the intensity of the light of the light bulb light are of about the same magnitude. ... Scenario 2. You are in the daylit room again. You can read a printed page fine. You turn on the light bulb. The increase in the brightness of the page you are reading is barely noticeable. From this you conclude that the intensity of the light of a light bulb light is of a very much lower magnitude than the intensity of the light of daylight.

Double outsider.

I looked up the term ‘double outsider’ on the internet and it came up with examples like being a black woman in America. This is taking the meaning of the term ‘double outsider’ to be somebody who is different from the majority community in two different ways at the same time. But I take it to mean something different. I take it to mean being an outsider where one sort of outside is contained within the other. Suppose you were a member of a Muslim minority population in a Christian country. But, unlike all the other Muslims, you followed a particular version of Islam which the other Muslims disapproved of. Then you’d have nowhere to go! Maybe the correct term I need is ‘outsider squared’ rather than ‘double outsider’.

Hours.

Say you spend about half an hour a day cleaning your house. That’s about 3 hours a week. Which comes to about 150 hours a year. Which is over three weeks of full time work! Seems like a bad thing that small tasks can mount up so much. On the other hand this adding up can be a good thing because, for example, if you are confronted with something that is going to take you 150 hours you can think: that’s only about half an hour a day spread over a year! Thinking like this makes long and arduous tasks look less daunting. ... While we’re on the subject, I don’t like the way people say things like: “it took me three months to read this novel”. Hearing this I will think, yes but how many minutes per day were you reading? If you were only reading it 15 minutes a day then that’s fine. If you were reading it 4 hours a day then that’s a significant fact. Really you should state it in terms of hours.

Good writers.

When people say something like “Mary is a great writer” often they mean that what Mary says is of value. Her ideas about things are original and interesting and enlightening. (Say she was writing about politics or society or something like that.) But they could also mean that Mary is good at writing in the sense that she is good at communicating understanding through words. Maybe I am overestimating this distinction. But I think that some ‘writers’ are good in the first sense but not in the second. By which I mean that they have good ideas but they can’t put them into words very well. Maybe they should hire a proper writer who is good at that to help them.

Justification.

People use arguments to support their beliefs where those arguments aren’t what got them to those beliefs in the first place. They got to the beliefs and then afterwards found the arguments to justify their beliefs. For example supporters of fox-hunting will say that hunting performs the useful function of keeping down the fox population. But that’s not how they got to believing that fox-hunting is a desirable thing to do. They got to that from them getting pleasure from fox-hunting. So, even if keeping down the fox population wasn’t a useful thing to do they would still go hunting. When they give the population explanation they are being somewhat disingenuous. Similarly people who advocate reduced consumption of stuff say that it’s to protect the environment. But really they like reducing their consumption because they find that sort of semi-ascetic lifestyle pleasing.

Self help.

When I write a self-help book the epigraph at the beginning will be from Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ where the desperate king asks a doctor: “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart?”. To which the good doctor replies: “Therein the patient, Must minister to himself.” (I’m surprised that this smart ass reply didn’t result in the doctor’s immediate execution.)

Modernity and civilisation.

We are shocked that there might be people being treated like slaves in, say, modern day London. There seems to be some sort of contradiction between non-liberal relations between people (ie coercive exploitative) and modernity, technological advancement. There seems to be a general association between civilisation in the sense of people behaving towards each other decently. And civilisation in the sense of material advancement by which I mean things like machines, clean running water, comfortable housing, healthcare. But it’s not clear that there is such a link. Many science fiction dystopias are set in technologically advanced societies. Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ for example. Or George Orwell’s ‘1984’. In this latter Winston Smith says “I understand how but I do not understand why”. Later O’Brien explains that the purpose of the tyranny isn’t so that the ruling minority can be materially better off. Technological advancement is so great that there can be plenty for everyone so that can’t be the reason. So then why is there tyranny in these imagined places? In particular, why is there an exploited labouring class of people in ‘Metropolis’ when the technology would suggest that you could have machines to unburden these workers of their mindless toil?

Quick thinking.

I got into the lift on the ground floor to get to floor 8. Somebody was already in there and they had pressed the button for floor 7. I pressed the button for floor 8. But if I had thought about it I would have not pressed the button for 8 and instead just got out at 7 and walked up one flight of stairs. After all if I had wanted to get floor 1 from the ground floor would I have used the lift and pressed 1? No, I would have just walked up one flight of stairs. This point is even clearer if the person already in the lift had pressed for 9. I could have just got out there and walked down a flight of stairs. That’s even less effort than walking up.

Rent.

Say a house costs £100,000 to make. And it will last 100 years. Then this means that it costs £1,000 per year which is about £20 per week. So if you are renting this is how much you should pay. But you don’t. Why not? People complain about the prices of other things but this enormous discrepancy between the cost of something and how much people pay is not mentioned so much. Why not?

Internet vs TV.

Both of these mediums consist largely of rubbish. But at least the internet is less passive than TV. In the heyday of TV when there was just one (or not much more than one) channel. People would decide to spend the evening watching TV. As to what they would watch they would surrender that freedom to choice to the TV company. The BBC or whoever. This control by the providers made them a bit paternalistic sometimes. At Christmas they would give us something special to watch, as a treat. ... Also TV, being (unlike the internet) a broadcast media, is suited to ephemeral content only. Like chit chat and news. It doesn’t seem right to broadcast something as substantial as a serious documentary about history on TV. Because it’s there only for the period while it’s being broadcast. Imagine an author wrote a serious history book and they said that it could only be read for a certain period and not again after that.

Computers.

Things that computers do well are things people can’t do so well. And vice versa. So computers can add up 9 million numbers in less than a second. But they find it hard to do things that humans find very easy like recognising faces.

Non-rhetorical.

It’s difficult to ask questions which are normally rhetorical. For example the question “is that a crime?” is, as phrased, often a rhetorical, jokey remark. And so is meant rhetorically. For example if Mary was over indulging eating cake and Jack asked her, in a surprised tone, “are you eating some more cake?” she might say: “yes I am: is that a crime?”. She is not asking this because she thinks it might actually be a criminal offence to eat a large quantity of cake. - But there might be circumstances when she was asking that question about something and really wanted to know if it was a crime or not. For example imagine Mary says to Jack that she wants to take some strawberries with her across the state boundary between California and Oregon. And Jack says: “what? you want to take some strawberries with you?” And Mary responds: “yes, is that a crime?”. Depending on the tone of voice she uses, it will not be clear if she is asking a rhetorical question. In fact she might really just want to know. Because she might be aware that some states have laws about that sort of thing and she wants to know what (if any) are the rules in this particular instance. Or she might already know that there is some regulation about transporting fruit which she is prepared to contravene as long as it’s not classified as a crime but just some administrative infraction or misdemeanour the punishment for which is very minor such as a small fine. So she wants to know which category fruit transportation falls under. - But anyway all this is a preamble to the main way in which a question can be confused as rhetorical when it is not. This is to do with the word “why”. If some official tells Jack to walk on the other side of the road he might ask: “why should I do that?” and it might be taken as a rhetorical question where he is being recalcitrant and conveying the sense: “no I’m not going to do that!”. But, even if he said it in a tone which might suggest it is rhetorical in that way, it could still be the case that he just wants to know the facts about what the situation is that requires him to walk on the other side of the road. And that he is quite happy to do so as requested by the official.

Honesty.

I worry about people not being open enough when they are talking to me. Open about what they think about things and about what they think of what I think. I worry because I rely on them being open with me so that I can learn from them. Why can’t they just say what they think? If they think that what I am saying is completely wrong then they should just say so. Or if they think it is really boring. Sometimes they give me a funny look so I know there’s something they find objectionable. But then they don’t say what it is which makes the rest of the conversation uncomfortable.

I think there are two main reasons why they don’t say what they think. The first reason is that they would need to justify what they are saying and maybe they don’t feel confident or capable of doing that in a cogent fashion. They might think I am wrong but not be able to say why they think I am wrong. But if that is the case then they could just say so. They should just say that they think that what I’m saying is wrong or really boring but that they can’t say why. Of course I’d expect them to have at least made some effort into trying to figure out why.

The other reason they won’t say what they really think is they are too polite and think it would be insulting if they said anything negative about me. But you can say something negative about someone without being insulting can’t you? Like: there is a difference between giving an argument against somebody’s expressed view. And being argumentative. There is a difference between judging someone, ie being judgemental, and just stating the fact that they possess a (negative) characteristic. An extreme example of this problem is with the word ‘bastard’. If I want to say of someone that they are an illegitimate offspring just as a statement of fact, there is no word I can use. The word ‘bastard’ has insulting judgemental connotations which can not be separated out from the literal meaning.

Elephant.

Mary was troubled by visions of elephants. She saw them standing on street corners in the city where she lived. She quickly gave up asking about them because people looked at her like she was crazy when she did ask. They gave her funny looks and exclaimed: “what elephant?”. Eventually Mary went to a psychiatrist. “Please explain what is happening to me! Why am I seeing elephants everywhere?” she begged. The psychiatrist looked at Mary over his spectacles and said: “I’ll tell you why you are seeing elephants everywhere. It’s because there really are elephants when you see them”.

Taste.

Oscar Wilde said: “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” (From the play “Lady Windermere’s Fan”.) So: I don’t hit people in the face and steal their money whenever I want to. And the reason I don’t do this is because it is such a tasteless thing to do. Rather like I would never wear white trainers with a three piece suit.

Parents.

What if an adult couple (of any or either gender or sexuality) A and B decided to have a mother-father relationship with each other. So A behaves towards B as if A is B’s father and B behaves towards A as if B was A’s mother. Would this be a viable alternative to the usual standard relationship that adults have with each other?

Saying nothing.

What is the one thing that everyone wants? Everyone wants to be happy. But happiness is that state where you have got everything that you want. So saying “everyone wants to be happy” is just to say that “everyone wants to have everything they want” which is to say: “everyone wants what they want”. Which is saying nothing.

Cooking.

By cooking I don’t mean whatever process it is that makes the difference between raw and cooked. An example of which would be the difference between a raw (hard) rice and boiled rice ready to eat. I suppose this is a distinction between food and non-food. You wouldn’t call raw rice ‘food’ would you? But you would use the word ‘rice’ to refer to either which is odd. Because they are such different things. No, I’m talking about cooking in a stronger sense than the sense in which boiled rice is cooked. It’s not something which is constituted by the simple exposure to heat. I could take all the ingredients of a recipe and place them in a receptacle of some sort and add heat and that wouldn’t be cooking in the sense that I mean. Even if it was the right sort of receptacle. I could put all of some soup ingredients in a pot and heat it up. It wouldn’t taste nice. Cooking is more of a subtle skill all about exactly what you do and when. It’s not just about heating but about proportions and timing. And all of this, I don’t think it can even be captured in the written instructions which constitute what is called a recipe. I know for a fact that I can follow a recipe and come up with something completely different from what someone else has produced even though they have followed the same recipe. I can even stand and look at someone and imitate what they do and still do it wrong.

Sunshine and shadow.

(“Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow” (Edgar Allan Poe).)

Outside in the park on an averagely cloudy day when the sun comes out I am happy and somehow I find myself thinking it will never be cloudy again. And so I sit down in the sunshine and get settled. This belief is obviously false because the weather where I live is so changeable and I know that it is! Despite this, my belief of persistence in good weather arises in me the way a superstition might do. It bypasses reason. The reverse also applies. When it goes cloudy I think it’s not going to be sunny again that day. (And so I head home). It’s like I suffer from some sort of medium term imagination shortage. I can’t conceive that things will soon be different from how they currently are. It’s like a more extreme version of the way in which, at the height of summer, we can’t imagine that it could ever be freezing cold. Or with me sometimes when I am going out somewhere I think: “shall I take something to eat later?” and I will reply to myself “no not hungry”. And then I will get annoyed and say to myself “well yes, I’m not hungry NOW! But I will be later.” Maybe it’s also a bit like how, in an unstable relationship, when you are shouting and screaming at each other you can’t believe it’s possible that you could ever have a nice time in each other’s company again. But then not long after when you are getting on really well and having a good time together you can’t imagine how you could possibly ever be shouting and screaming at each other some time in the (near) future. But you know you will.

The imperfect.

Oscar Wilde said: “It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.” (from the play ‘An Ideal Husband’). Friendlessness is an unattractive characteristic to have which means that friendless people will be less likely to make friends. Despite the fact that they need friends more than those who already have friends. Similarly people who are not physically attractive are less likely to be the object of affection but (because of this) they need love more than others. The desire to be affectionate towards attractive people (or animals too I guess) is natural but not nice.

Emptiness.

About the exclamation “my life is so empty!”, I think to myself that the worst thing about an empty life is that it is not entirely empty. If you drain a lake of all its water there will emerge lying at the bottom the grotesque wreckages and weird deep lake creatures that have until then lain hidden. ... Similarly when a normal life is emptied of the normal things it contains then all the base desires of human psychology are exposed and need to be dealt with. (I use the word ‘base’ in a neutral sense.) ... Which reminds me of the saying “the devil finds work for idle hands to do”. Or the picture by Goya called “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. … Maybe the purpose of a normal life is just to distract us from all of this. People spend their life pursuing shallow things like material objects and other such toys. Maybe it’s better they pursue their shallow desires rather than their deep ones.

Causation.

Imagine I clap my hands together and then immediately afterwards toss a coin into the air and catch it to see if it is heads or tails. I do this over and over again and sometimes the coin comes up heads and sometimes tails. And then I say to myself: wow, sometimes clapping my hands causes the coin to come up heads and sometimes it causes it to come up tails.

Rules of the game.

I see some people playing a card game and I ask to join in and they agree. “How do I play?” I ask. And they say: “whoever gets most hearts cards wins.” And I think: OK that is saying what the game is but it’s not enough information for me to be able to join in. I don’t know all the rules. Despite that I could actually just play along. ... I think that a similar situation is when people say “we are having a discussion”. That’s not quite enough to tell me what’s going on. Is it an argument? A debate? An interview? What is it? And even those terms are not precise enough.