Daybook 6.

Police state.

Sometimes you will get States where the population is strictly regimented. The European fascist regimes of the 1930s or North Korea today. There is a high degree of order and strict discipline. But why is it that all of those States are also unpleasant regimes? Why do they all include an element of treating at least a large proportion of their population really badly? Why do you never get a highly ordered regimented State where all the population are treated well? It’s not difficult to imagine such a State. And I would have thought the goal of making sure everyone is treated well would be easier to achieve in a highly ordered society. In fact not “easier to achieve in” but “not achievable in anything other than”.

Rules.

Without rules I would be nothing. Rules define me. They set a boundary to what I am permitted to do. And I would not exist without such a boundary in the same way that a material object would not exist without a clearly defined boundary of where it was in space. - Having a personality of some sort consists in a way of behaving according to rules. Once people know my personality they will know what to expect of me. Someone who behaved without rules would be somebody who literally had no personality. Rules are limiting only in the sense that the rules of a game could be described as limiting. But the rules of a game are what make the game possible.

Technology lag.

A bank in America wants to make sure that an official document X produced by a British government agency (say a certificate of birth) in Britain is authentic. So I have to send document X to another British Agency (the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and they attach to it something called an ‘Apostille’. This is to verify the authenticity of document X. And then I send all of that to the bank in America. At which point I’m thinking: well, what verifies the authenticity of the Apostille? Or: why couldn’t the bank just email the agency that issued document X to verify its authenticity. Using the official email address of that agency. Or by using a secure web site? The Apostille system is so far behind the times. Why is it that government activities are always the last to catch up with technological innovation?

Educated.

To explain someone’s ill-mannered behaviour (swearing, spitting, being insulting etc) the terms ‘uneducated’ and ‘ignorant’ are sometimes used. But you can have nice uneducated people can’t you? And nasty educated people. Like Professor Moriarty. Maybe the association of knowledge with virtue is some sort of misunderstanding of ancient Greek philosophy: “virtue is knowledge”. And is the association between education and niceness true to life? My prejudice is that it is. I don’t see university students swearing at bus drivers and casually dropping litter.

Happy.

It’s good to be content with little. To say: I’m happy with what I’ve got and I won’t be greedy and try to get more. But up to what point is it good to think like this? If you are wearing rags and eating gruel it wouldn’t be good to say it at that point would it?

Holiday.

Why do people go on holiday? It’s like moving house. And that is supposed to be one of the most stressful experiences of modern life.

Children.

I’m always suspicious of people who say that they like children. Any sensible person would not normally seek out the company of individuals who are stupid and shallow in their tastes and who don’t know the difference between right and wrong. You wouldn’t leave something valuable and fragile (such as a delicate vase) unattended with small children. And yet you leave your own small children who are valuable and fragile with (other) small children. In general children would be better in the company of adults. Otherwise how are they going to learn to be adults? - Opponents of home-schooling say that it’s good to send children to school so that they can become accustomed to being with others because they are going to be spending the rest of their lives with other people. Yes, but these other people are not going to be children. So children don’t need to learn how to relate to other children. They need to learn how to relate to adults.

Class society.

The movie ‘Metropolis’ is set in some technologically advanced future. And in it they have a large oppressed underclass doing hard manual labour. But, if they were that technologically advanced, then wouldn’t they have come up with some machines to do all that labour? And then saved themselves from the ire of those downtrodden masses.

Living with.

The best thing about living with your parents is that you never have to visit them. In general you are obliged to talk to visitors (or the people you are visiting) but you can safely ignore the people who you live with. It would be odd if you visited someone and then just sat down and started reading a book. But that would be fine if you lived with someone. In fact, if you live with someone, you can pretty much get away with never talking to them ever. (Rather like being in a relationship with somebody means that you have permission to take them for granted.) But what constitutes “living with” someone? What does that mean? One thing it means is that there’s some space which you both (but not anybody else) might bump into each other. Even if it’s just a corridor or a hallway. (These are spaces which allow you to access a room in a house from the outside without having to pass through another room.) Another thing “living with” means is that you can go into a room the other person is in without having to knock first.

Stress.

People in modern Western countries say their lives are stressful. Really? What? more stressful than in the past (and other places in the present) where war and famine and disease were commonplace.

Privacy.

(1) What’s the value of privacy? If I had no privacy and everybody knew everything that I did. What exactly is it about this that I wouldn’t like? Is it that I fear they will mock and ridicule the things I do? But why should I care about the opinions of fools like them? Certainly at first it will be rather unnerving that others can witness your intimate (eg sexual) behaviour, but after a while both you and they will get used to it. Mainly because you will be able to see as much of theirs as they can of yours.

(2) What if all the details of my life were made public but anonymised so that I could not be identified as the subject. Would I be OK with that?

(3) What about the opposite of all this. What if everyone kept all their life private. Like what they ate, how they cooked, what books they liked, what they were thinking, what they wore under their coats. They didn’t share any details with anybody else at all ever. (P.S. Isn’t privacy something that more wealthy people are interested in? Mainly so they can keep the size of their wealth private from the tax authorities. If you have got nothing then you’ve got nothing to hide.)

Meaning.

If someone new to here saw me hailing a cab. They would see me waving my hand in the air in a strange way. They would ask me what I’m doing. If I said “I’m waving my hand in the air in this manner” that wouldn’t answer their question. They would want something more detailed than that. Similarly if I answered some general enquiry question about what I’m doing by answering “I am eating an apple”. Then you should not accept that either. You could insist on an account of the significance of eating an apple. Something like “I am replenishing myself with the following nutrients: …”.

People.

Material technology has changed vastly over the last 30 years or so. But I’ve not noticed that people have changed very much. Their manners are about the same. Still rather boorish, slovenly and inconsiderate.

Not Schadenfreude.

Other people’s misfortune might make me happy by causing me to think how fortunate I am not to be subject to that misfortune. (As in: “count your blessings”.)

Vegetarians.

They can eat meat now and then, can’t they? Vegetarians. The point of being a vegetarian is to reduce animal suffering and death. So two half vegetarians are (morally) the same as one whole one. Vegetarian non-meat-eating is not the same as religious non-meat-eating. The latter type of folks are often not doing it to reduce animal suffering and death but just because God told them not to. So they definitely can’t eat meat now and then.

Opinion forming.

If I read something and there’s a spelling mistake. I can’t help it but my opinion of the writer plummets. Regardless of the content of what they have actually written. I immediately think: this person is stupid! So then, even though they might have written something deeply insightful, it’s spoiled by carelessness. Theirs and mine.

Inconsistency.

A taxi or train will charge you for distance. The further you go the more you pay. But if you send a parcel through the mail it costs the same regardless of distance. Similarly a XXXL garment does not cost proportionally more than one that is XS even though it uses more material. Do these examples show some kind of socialistic principle at play? Or is it just that distance (and quantity of material used) is only a marginal factor affecting the cost?

Freedom of choice.

Protestors against ‘the system’ sometimes get carried away and then they smash up some nearby McDonald’s store. But should they smash up McDonald’s or the people that eat there? Big business is taking over and driving out smaller competition only because the people have chosen to be customers of the big business. - The people have exercised their freedom of choice and this has resulted in less freedom of choice. If production of something is determined by demand only and people choose A over B enough for production of B to become not viable then production of B will just stop. (By ‘not viable’ I mean that the cost per unit is too high given production overheads, that sort of thing.) At which point B will no longer be an available choice to anybody.

Slumming it.

Talking of McDonald’s, I went to eat there once recently. At a normal restaurant people sit down and eat and talk quietly amongst themselves. But here people were standing around eating. Or sitting on tables with their feet on the chairs. Talking loudly. It was like eating at a children’s playground or at a bus station.

Ancestors.

This is a well-known problem. How many ancestors do you have? You have 2 parents, i.e. 2 ancestors who are one generation older than you. And you have 4 grandparents, i.e. 4 ancestors who are two generations older than you. And 8 great-grandparents, i.e. 8 ancestors who are three generations older than you. In general you have ‘2 to the power x’ ancestors who are x generations older than you. So if we think about a time, say, 800 years ago. This is 32 generations ago (assuming four generations per century) and so you must have had at that time 800 years ago, ‘2 to the power 32’ ancestors. But this number is over 4 billion! And there weren’t that many people alive 800 years ago! (Estimates for that year are about 0.25 billion.) This means that there is more crossing over than we think. Random people who live in the same area probably share many ancestors.

Violence.

There are some Muslims who are prepared to use violence to promote their aims. So we become suspicious of all Muslims. As if being a Muslim is the problem. But surely it’s the “being prepared to use violence” bit which is a problem. Sometimes you get animal rights activists who commit violence to promote their aims. But we don’t become suspicious of all believers in animal rights as a consequence.

Nice.

What if all pleasurable states are only desirable because they make you forget about some (other) painful state. And not because there is anything at all intrinsically pleasurable about them in and of themselves. So, for example, maybe there is nothing intrinsically pleasurable about alcoholic intoxication. It’s just that its intensity means you forget something which was causing you pain. So some other equally intense pleasurable experience such as a hot bath would do just as well as drinking alcohol.

Talent and hard work.

At school students who performed well are given prizes. To encourage the others. They were rewarded for results regardless of how much these results were due to talent. Rewarding people for results they achieved by (natural) talent only seems pointless. Surely it would be better to reward (and so encourage) something that is more do-able by students, namely working hard. If you reward natural talent then this can be demotivating for the people without such talent. If you are a student at the bottom of the scale then no matter how hard you work you will never get that prize. So you may as well not bother. ... If we said that we were going to reward only hard work, for the best that they can do, and not talent. Then we would need to be absolutely sure that we were getting the most we could out of everybody. Because you can’t tell immediately if people are working as hard as they might be. The only way to make sure that they were would be to just constantly accuse them of not doing their best. ... In general it is easier to reward talent rather than hard work because the latter is harder to measure. Talent is measured by its output but effort is internal. I can’t see straight away if someone is trying as hard as they could.

Some place.

Imagine you were someone whose tastes were Victorian poetry, red wine, Mozart and ancient history. But you were living somewhere where people only ever talked about the weather and TV soap operas. You would feel out of place as much as they would in a place full of people who shared your tastes.

Grammar.

“Jack and I went fishing” is correct but “Jack and me went fishing” is not. Even without being told you know that the latter doesn’t sound quite right. And there is a reason for this which is that you wouldn’t ever say “me went fishing” but you would say “I went fishing”. On the other hand there are some phrases which are (famously) grammatically incorrect but it is difficult to see why. So saying “to boldly go” is wrong and the correct phrase is “to go boldly”. - Also: surely the only point of correct grammar is to maintain clarity. Bad grammar is only a problem if it is causing ambiguity and neither of these two examples cause any unclarity in meaning. We should focus more on bad grammar where the result is that it is not clear what the speaker means. For example if someone says: “Bill and Ben went to the bar and he bought him a drink.”

[27 February 2016]