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                                                    Notes on Philosophy and Literature...

No doubt the really odd thing about thought is that there is never simply one way to do it! This makes it no simple matter where one begins. Now the full complexity here is not that sometimes thought starts from a simple place, while at others a complex one, as on the contrary, all such startings are always complex. The problem is then less of complexity, and more of how that complexity itself is articulated.

  Does one commence by taking the complexity as granted, and thereby uncover simple ‘facts’ which one can then reveal; for a while at least (before they too become enmeshed within new complexities of their own): This is perhaps the genetic approach.

Or does one begin by attempting to grasp the formal structure of complexities themselves? That is, by attempting to directly grasp at what they are, or might be or could be. This is surely the approach of all true rationalists.

Or once again does one simply allow experience to be complex even in its apparent simplicity. To perceive another might be simple in itself, and yet that very simplicity haunts the mind in ever more complex ways, and defies all simple resolutions. This is surely the approach of the empiricist, but also probably the novelist; or at least the writer of the ‘great British novel’.

 

One of the oddest things about any discipline is that it seems so simple when grasped from the outside. The lay person will quickly grasp five or six facts to play with. It is these borrowed facts that are perhaps the only truly simple element in the world.

Herein lies the attraction of much literary criticism or philosophy. By being the great borrowers of another’s ideas, they appear to start from such very secure foundations.

  The problem here is less that the foundations are secure (for there is nothing wrong if nothing very good, about that) so much as the ‘critical thinker’ often never gets the courage to venture out of the security of their secure foundations, and into the raging complexities of the world outside (complexities even their foundations would lead them towards eventually).

It goes without saying this simplicity is double edged. There are many disciplines whose soul merit lies in giving simple ideas to other ways of thinking: Such disciplines have the rare luxury of being able to be crude (or even idiotic) in themselves, and yet still need to be taken seriously, by some other way of thinking and at some level (Freudianism might blush here).

There are also entire schools of thought whose essential claims rest in the power and complexity of another way of thinking. Such disciplines might be paradoxical or even crude in themselves,and thereby never move beyond the point of simple foundations, and yet still claim to be rich enough to be of value( the ‘selfish random length chemical’).

Perhaps the most radical things about the novel (and novelist) lies in and why they write at all. It is not like the ‘Great Thinker’, who ponders upon mysteries for his own amusement; nor is it like the affable (or acerbic) researcher who produces his own works, but with another in mind. On the contrary it is always (or at least should be) written about others, and yet also for another. To write well is then to be doubly collective: One is caught up in one’s characters, but also one readers; and the great novelist is the one who remains merely light footed and not light headed in such a perilous position.

  A novelist is then suspended between three very different perils; There is the peril of injecting themselves too readily into their own novel; there is the peril of the imbecility of one’s imagined readers (for all novels are merely as good as the imagined audience); Finally there is the peril of the tyranny of the characters themselves, who can so very easily demand that they actually Do have an identity in themselves.

It is small wonder good novels are a little hard to find…

Neitzsche is surely right, that philosophy is most vituperative of disciplines. One where the old fierce quarrels of  yesteryear be it two centuries or a thousand years ago are taken up and made to serve the hatreds of today. It is then perhaps unique in that in blending old and new loathing, it allows all its protagonists to becomes heros (or at least foot soldiers) in a eternal Trojan war of the mind, -  perhaps to at least pretend they are!

In this of course philosophy is only unique in exactly were it wants to pitch its camp. For all other disciplines appear to be attempting the same move, of saving from the still smoking wreck of history some truth or other. Psycho-analysis and the Novelist seek to save fairy tales (which is why these disciplines must be so oppose to one another); while science thinks up endless new ways to save some species of God. Where Philosophy is perhaps different, is that it wants to keep hold of all the violent quarrels and progroms of the past, albeit now dressed up in the scholarly language of today.

As Neitzsche knew full well, revenge is so much sweeter when it has taken a thousand years or so...

It is a truism to say that the really radical idea looks at once to the past and the future: so that that which is most radical can be easily ridiculed as some how belonging to the past. What is less clear is that even in this ridicule the truly radical idea has a presence. It is already working in various ways distort to what  attacks it.

It is not wise to trust too much to those who seek to offer one reassurance; just as long as one never trusts those who only demand the public are ‘re-assured’, just so that they can attack that very reassurance….

It goes without saying here, that democracy can only operate if it at once forgets its immediate pasts (the people never ‘speak), and closes down all other debates as somehow dangerous. Hence it can so very confidently announce that it might be flawed, but it is better than all the rest…

  And if it forgets either of these elements, we claim that the election is flawed. A democracy that does not scrabble around finding differences to homogenize – but rather demands another unity, is not a democracy – even if the election itself was ‘democratic’.

In this regard the freedom of speech debate is axiomatic. By allowing scoundrels their freedom, more disruptive elements are  drowned out with the raucous babble, and re-assuringly contained as merely ‘one other voice’.

Marx was of course right to claim that modernity is the battle of mole and mole’s mole. On the one hand capitalism digs away at every foundation. It erupts again and again, where it is least expected. On the other hand it too has a mole, that always wants to create other connection tunnels, turning them into something quite different.

  It is in the raucously overblown claims of capitalism, that Spinoza’s aristocrat might silently lie. But it is only in the digging action of the mole itself, that his democracy can dig.

The game here for Spinoza is never to form a perpetual and perfect communist state. Indeed he suggests that such states always devolve into aristocracies, and eventually monarchy. The game is always rather to allow other elements, other voices, to constantly bubble up.

Spinoza’s contention was of course that democracy is everywhere, the game is merely trusting it.

However the key word here is allow. A permanent revolution in itself is the best of tyrannies.

Daft Philosophers are the most fun: look at Rousseau!

It is the peculiar reserve of the daft philosophers to stumble across ideas that they do not know what to do with, in the name of follies that they do. It is the delight in reading them to rescue those ideas.

Of course all philosophers are therefore to a degree daft!

  The Global is almost certainly a contraction in terms. Nothing is ever global, any more than it is simply willed.

Or better, the Global exists on many levels. There are as many different ‘globals’ as there are processes that are caught up in everything. But there are also that other range of globals which look to the end of processes as their logical universalisation.

And nothing beyond a word need keep these two in accord.

  Causality is a strange fish, as it is always lived backwards (as Hume noted). One knows effects, never causes. One merely infers the cause (even though it never feels like that).

  It is therefore very naturally deterministic. It breeds in the certainty of utter hindsight.

The problem is that this is where our mind also naturally lives, and it is quite a job winkling it out beyond this shell.

In took a proto-imperialist (Locke) to claim that there must a land, which lies, always out there beyond our perceptions. That is there must a virgin territory, waiting the colonization of perception, a colonialism that is always justified and exact, as long as one worked away at it. Doubt was then merely a matter of inspiring one to work harder, to clear space, and own a land of one’s own (as England was coming to own America…).

It took Kant to move this imperialism into the mind. We all became jolly imperialists of our perceptions. – even if the world in itself was lost to us all.

It took Nietzsche’s urgency to break this trap and think something quite different (but of course it is no wonder he then was labelled a racist).

The thing about a guru is that he claims too much or too little. He wants to be anything and everything, as unless he is the truth and the light, he has no truth at all.

The really strange thing here though is that enlightenment can happen this way – to others at least.

Even if the soul of the guru itself is lost.

Perhaps the problem here is all about trust. It is a mistake to trust too much to perceptions – do not trust them to give you a reality of which they are not capable of ever reporting.

It is better to think of them as the reality themselves.

Esse est Percepti as Percepti est esse

The cry ‘I Think Therefore I Am’ grows like a canker in the mind. Not only (as Nietzsche knew) does thought need no ‘I’, but also, it merely exists as an incidental dimension to itself. It is a thought irrespective of existence (independent of whose imagination it is, be it mine or God’s).

The problem is, as with all cankers, the I that claims to be in thought is either benign, in which case it is merely a noisy nuisance, greedy in its desire to be, and yet not actively harmful; Or alternatively it is a malignant force desperate to sweep up everything, and bending all it can to its strident will. A will that is prepared to change all the rules, and pay every price merely to be.

The thing about the free market is that it dances on the head of a needle, caught as it is at the vanishingly small rational point between rational individual and collective interest.

Perhaps the peril here is not that such a point does not exist (although the least gust of wind makes such a balancing difficult), but rather that it is crowded with other angels of the mind. For religion is also there, balanced between the individual and the collective.

No wonder then there is the current ‘war against whatever’. Each side are aiming to pitch the other into the void.

A Freudian might say that the problem with biology is that it operates as the baby’s dummy of desire.

A structuralist would claim that a Freudian has lost sight of the fact that truth has nothing to do with simple experience. Memory is not enough to make the mind.

A free marketeer would claim that the structural approach forgets the fact that the collective is dynamic (even if that dynamism can not be caught by memory alone).

The biologist’s would claim that the market was merely an expression of biology.

And so

we loop the loop of loopy being

If one claims to be master, one has a rather horrid habit of tumbling into being a slave after all: The sole real use for Hegel.

The problem after all with mastery is its necessary amnesia: it starts to believe the lies it tells others and is lost in that belief.

History does not really respect ‘masterhood’ very well…

Molecules are a strange creation. We create them in order to be the world’s master, but all they really do is change the game of mastery.

All they really do is change the game of chance. The world of omens is replaced by looking for far more elusive signs and symbols, which are known through their little but direct acts of destruction.

The problem I suppose is that we have replaced single Gods (or at least Gods which are focus of many things) with far more complex collective shifting little souls.

The Problem of materialism is that It has a soul.

The Problem with the soul is that it demands the world is itself.

The Problem of demanding the world is ours, is that that claim cannot survive materialism.

Oh well – I suppose this is body-soul loopism.

A Sequence of Bon Mots and Aphorisms loosely following different Rants (and Partially Summarising them)

                                                            Notes on Lifestyle

It is an old adage that Philosophy matters because it charts the way a language changes. Arguments are never simply correct or false but rather chart points of transformation.

Or better, they define new points of disjunction and conflict. That is, they define the sense that a demand to reconcilability is opened up between dimensions whose only relationship is in fact conflict. They therefore inaugur whole new ways in which the world is creatively both right and wrong, as these conflicts develop.

  And ideas’ role is therefore to create through language an axis within which the very demand for reconcilability can be serve as the trigger (or justification) for an evolving exchange.

In this, history is often initially important, - history allows one to freeze ‘time’, and thereby to develop the rules for conflict, which will subsequently be unwound.

In short, if an argument is at once hopeless flawed, and yet appears still to resonate, start to become suspicious that something rather odd is afoot.

It is of course the case that if there was ever a person to whom one could posthumously attribute making drugs illegal, then they ought to be awarded a medal for services to Capitalism.

The trouble is of course that such an individual never existed. And in their lack of existence the complexity of the problem is revealed.

Drugs by themselves might be okay (and not so very different from wanking really), the trouble is, in a move worthy of philosophy itself, that onanism is too readily mistaken for ontology.

It is therefore very hard to be genuinely revolutionary, so long as one is also fighting for the right to be doped up….

That is, for some, a no handed wank, and love making, can be so hard to tell apart, much to the glee of the ‘repressive-titillation entertainment’ industry.

  It is of course an old adage that a lesser evil is a good. The problem with such a truism is that each individual evil is sealed within itself alone, and so very rarely serves as a counter point to another evil.

  It is perhaps in this regard one that needs to understand the complexities of the relationship between the ‘war on terror’ and global warming. Each sees a collective ‘enemy’ (be it a number of humans or humanity as a whole), and a partial remedy in science (spooks listening or trapping carbon). And yet each divides partially over the issue of trusting the non-western world. The war on terror looks to ‘westernize’ the world, while it is that westernization which those who are concerned over global warming, fear most.

  The battle of evils, is therefore, at its most constructive point of engagement, a contest of whether or not a global world needs to be western.  

  Plato was an expert mythmaker. That is, he knew that the only way one could communicate experience was through stories, and therefore the choice was always between stories that supported ‘reason’ (as he understood it), and stories which did not.

The problem was, as he also knew well, that the Devil has most of the best tunes. That is, a story which flies in the face of the reasonable, it likely to have more influence than any story or parable which is cooked up to support the rational.

This is of course why the education of his elite was so very very austere. It is only in austerity, and when individuals have been taught to despise diversity, that reason can guarantee its hegemony. Hence the paradox, that once one is in a reasonable state, one can remain in it in perpetuity, but one can never actually reach such a state.

   The problem with experience is that it is too damn convincing. One must argue from experience, and ‘learn’ what it teaches.

   And yet one must be clear that to learn by experience is utterly different from ‘learning from history’. History’s lessons are all too easy, and so at once invariably wrong, but also always uncompelling. But to learn from experience is, by contrast rather more difficult, and yet remains in the mind the longest.

   However this breeds another problem. One must be careful that learning from experience does not simply trap one in past experiences. One must therefore be open to the emergence of new principles, and new ways of thinking.

   The experience which one thinks with, must therefore be kept apart from the simple set of events which gave one the experience itself.

There is an irony, in that the attempt to ‘escape history’ is very likely to mean that history will forget you (or marginalize you) as much as possible. The game here is of course to ensure that later, you have to be remembered.

  It is an odd fact that when a philosopher really stands out against his times it is not his theories so much as his example which are condemned (think Nietzsche). This is no coincidence, for ‘an example’, the attempt to grasp at other futures, other realities which lie within its orbit, is clearly a mad enterprise.

It is also however a deeply philosophical one…

The trouble with working out what ‘to do’ with pollution is that ideas about pollution need to make active what which is pollution’s most intractable problem; that is, that it at once is caused at a certain point in time (and by some process and therefore individual), and yet is collective in its effect. The problem becomes then about how to relate these two together.

Trouble being that most solutions are likely to be slippery. The Polluter might often gain from the exchange (rather than paying), as they use the very collectivity of polluting, to their own advantage.

The odd thing here though, is that although this is reprehensible in itself, it might allow other odd moves, and the polluted find rather different ways to cope with their predicament.

It is always the ‘trouble with morality’ that none of our ideas appear subtle enough to grasp it fully. We preset morality and ‘wham bang’ everything changes, and we need a fresh code.

Kant’s razor is therefore a brave attempt to escape this problem by finding a rather different basis for the moral.

Our question is always whether we are brave enough to follow him.

If the media love a theory, that alone does not make the account suspect. It merely makes it restricted: for you can be sure the media will not see further that its own nose. They will therefore present great philosophical theories as if they were an account or critique of the media itself.

  The problem is of course that the logic of journalism prevents the media from ever reading. Thence they remain perpetual undergraduates, who stretch what they have read (and understood) a very, very, long way.

  It goes without saying that it is often the ‘cultural commentators’ who have had least time to actually read; I mean to read anew to read something different into a text. Trouble is, the same can be said for academics.

  The thing about power is, that it is seldom clear whose it is.

The same power is usually serving many, many masters, while its own name is also legion.

  This is why being an executive and claiming the right to power is so very very tricky. It is no wonder then, a politician’s face gets stuck while pulling the one expression.

  It follows of course that to possess is always a sham. One can never be too sure exactly who is possessing whom.

  Perhaps this is one of the joys of the peasant lifestyle. It is not that one side possesses and the other is possessed, so much as that the rules of change and switch over, are themselves clear - or at least they feel clear from the outside.

  But one must remember that everything is always so very clear from the outside, so even this could be elusive.

It is no scandal or even no great matter that neither society nor the environment actually exist. On the contrary their very power lies within this lack of formal being.

Not to be, is to be unknown in the inverse, in the mistake in the first instance. And yet it is known to be that which is endlessly creating through its mistake. That which makes the mistakes matter.

Creativity becomes eruptive, as these mistakes spawn across the world.

The problem is then that this spawning is so unpolitical. Or better, one cannot ever give it a name and a sense. One can never admit that it was the mistakes that did it!

The best politicians are the ones who can most nearly say this unsayable truth.

The worst political systems are those that for whatever reason can no longer cope with their own errors.

The trouble with a people is that they always contain other people.

The trouble with a land is that it has no special people of its own.

The trouble with us, is that we endlessly confuse these two, and endlessly claim that being a people is only held together by having a land. That way, of course, great madness lies.

There is something so very reassuring in the word molecule. One gets the idea of something there, something present, some truth beyond mere perception. There is something, albeit inert matter out there, something that we can really rely upon.

   Each molecule’s power lies in its being the bridgehead to the certain. It is the point where we know where we are at last.

  Except of course the problem is that we do not. The lesson of ecology is that molecules are far from being ever predictable  - for their unique journeys matter quite as much as their formal reality. A facet of the molecule that opens up once again to the complex world of chance.

   Perhaps indeed the death of the molecule as prime or at least simple servant of man is a death every bit as traumatic as the death of God.

  In both cases, humans lose their right to suppose the existence of an agent capable of really making the world ‘be’ as it seems to be. That is the world they have promised themselves, is. In both therefore, humanity confronts the fact that the world really does not care for it (and would do rather well without us, or our thoughts – molecules have a life of their own, and perhaps so do Gods)…

   This is where nation states and money come in.

   The nation state amounts simply to a demand that a piece of the world really does belong to a people, come what may, and irrespective of rhyme or reason. Actually, given the arbitrary nature of this all, I suspect the dafter the claim of the nation state, the more its truth.

   In contrast money is informed by a wonderful shotgun marriage of local greed, and global confusion. The one feeds into and attempts to (bizarrely) comment on the other. The problem is, for the world, that this commentary all too easily pulls one way rather than the other - global money market or local greed. The game is surely to makes it balance in the middle, and do so while the balancing point itself is in motion – which is perhaps an impossible trick…

The trouble with cause and effect, is that there are too many causes for the number of effects we have. Each cause is its alone, but can have any number of effects.

Trouble with cause and effect, is that it allows one to apparently irrevocably conjoin order with control. It is surely the deep lesson of society that if one is in control, one often lacks order (dictatorships are on the edge of chaos; while many orders (such as the ant colony) lack any real control. Cause and effect can at best therefore only relate to a small piece of creation (and then usually the least interesting parts).

  Trouble with cause and effect is that everything is a cause of everything else. Any gimcrack particle of matter (God, money or gene) can thereby assert control. It is the worst sort of democracy, one which is still a tyranny, with the novelty that everyone is always also a tyrant!

Ambiguity is the stuff of capitalism. It works by doing good and it does bad as it does good.

The point perhaps of environmentalism is that we at last unambiguously get to say that ‘capitalism – it stinks!’

Which is very very nice, except that we are likely to need to subvert capitalism to do anything about the world we live in now.  Shit!

Perhaps one merely needs to take a long spoon, so long as one assures that one poisons the devil by dining within him.

Subversion – the clue is in the name. Who needs to be tripping something up, not merely attempting to destroy it violently.

  Revolution was never about spectacular acts (which only serve as another’s ‘wake up call’): it rather involves a gas mask, and a steady eye, the one to cope with the stench of carrion capitalism, the other, to watch it for traces of what it could then become

Towards Philosophic History

History is not so much about the past, as the doubling up of the past.

One is always caught up in studying history (and therefore caught up in the arguments which led to the future). But also, one’s present itself is caught up in being historic, in that one’s being is still a part of those argument of yester year: indeed, its direct consequence.

History is therefore truly reflective, as long as one allows for that reflection to shard reality between two mirrors - which creates between them an infinite number of reflected pasts.

Virtue cannot be power and cannot become knowledge, and self reflection cannot simply compose the self, without one needing to show that there was something else to reflect upon, or to know.

The problem then is to hold this other at suitable arm’s length, whether that arm is composed by heaven or practical engagement with the world.

Trouble though, is that in each case, there is a suspicion that this other is merely a dressed up justification of the rights of one group to govern.

It is so hard not to answer to the question ‘Who should govern?’ with ‘Me and my mates’.

Well does anyone else know anyone better to govern than themselves and their friends? Or anyone worse for that matter.

Perhaps Epicurus is right in insisting on the merits of gardening, bread and self cultivation rather than self reflection.

If History is never about the past but the future, this of course raises the problem of whose future is it anyway?

Here the hard facts about the future kick in:

The future is by definition what everyone claims as their own: Your hope is therefore also my hope (or I will know the reason why not).

The future is also that which no one owns. In our hope, both of us are therefore in error, and mistaking the nature of what we are likely to become.

And yet this latter thought is so very scary it is likely to make us insist all the more on the former, and do so in the face of history itself.

History is therefore at once a critique of what has been; that is, the history of past histories – the science of why lessons were never learnt.

But at the same time a new history of history is being written. That is, a new way to compel clouds, towards a future to come, whose runes are engraved across the past – as an advent to come…

The problem with unity is that it is everywhere.

It claims too much therefore, and wants to be what it has not yet become.

The problem here is not that it is not this other, for on the contrary it is, but rather that it cannot make this claim without destroying numerous elements which it also is.

Unity therefore creates anarchy, while anarchy is already serving a unity, merely not one expressed by the current system.

This is perhaps the problem of the anarchist. They are all too easily the apostles of what they hate.

This is certainly the problem of the unionist, for they are always also the disciples of anarchy (or at least its agents).

Trouble with conscience is that it only has a value if it is tender.

Trouble with being tender, is that it is tantamount to hypersensitivity.

Trouble with hypersensitivity is that it loses the ability to tell itself apart from the world, and therefore always risks a double anarchy of world and spirit.

History is Horrid.

Ideas of the past, be they the Crusades or Jihad or just wars, lie dormant together in the mind. Once one occurs, others spring forth, and we are all caught up in the politics of the past: A nightmare of mediaevalism.

Or at least we are, if we are lazy.

The problem is of course, that the past makes such very very good rhetoric, and it is always rhetoric, the appearance of doing things, which wins elections.

All the more so as the past is gloriously lazy. I mean to be old fashioned or to adhere to a morality of the past is beautifully unchallenging, and so encourages one not to think.

It is this conniving with ignorance which is always the best vote winner of them all.

Trouble with reason is that it does not belief that it is a lie.

Trouble with lying is that it assumes that it is not the norm (and is rather outraged to find out that it is).

The trouble with the world is that it does not care about the previous two troubles.

To send one’s mind off on a virtual journey, is always to find something and to go somewhere. The problem is always exactly where.

That is has one simply tumbled into a nether world of realized desires, or has one slipped into the otherside of the mind, the world that could be.

The problem here is that the forces that might allow one to stay in this otherside (to allow the virtual its actualization) might be too extreme and too dark to allow one ever to stay in situ. One tumbles to somewhere, because it easer to enforce…

Abstraction’s danger lies not in being true, but rather in being inescapable.

A good abstraction works by creating its own truth. That is by ensuring that everyone can only think in terms of itself alone; and that they can only act to create it (and it alone).

To be abstract is therefore to ab-stract from reality, to thieve those elements which allow that abstraction to be at all. MAN or ANIMAL (understood in their basic biology) is therefore the biggest thief of them all.

The trouble with law is that it cannot leave its people alone. Law wages then a low level war on the population (or at least always has a tendency to so do (although this low level war is better than the real thing, or possibility better than a higher level of monitoring) .

The trouble with war is that it breeds more war, and more law. War leaks out then into society, and demands new ways to be fought.

The trouble with terror is that it is the direct bastard of these two elements, a breeding that tears the gossamer threads which keep them both apart, and creates a botched

I ache and therefore I am, has more wisdom in it than one might suppose.

It leads to the demand to ache.

And yet perhaps it would lead to the demand not to be, or at least not to be an I which does the aching…

The thing about absence is that it itself has a power.

Almost all the great changes in the world are made in the name of what is not there (Marx understood this point very well, the future always dresses up as the past).

Our world is very much the legacy (or perhaps absence) of past absences. But our problem is that if we do ever realize this, and realise that the emperor really is naked, then there is no telling whether the world will get an awful lot better, or just mind crushingly worse: Remember economic collapses (and ‘the credit crunch’) are the products of just this ‘realization’.

The problem with absence is that it creates abstract presence, that is, laws.

The problem with laws is that they always allow an element that is ‘real’ to defy them, and be other than law. An element that then becomes unthinkable within the very abstractions to which the law based system points.

The problem with anomalies, is that they all too easily abrogate all law, and then all reality to themselves. They become what is real. That advantage of law, that it is impartial, is lost, while its disadvantage, that it renders something powerless is kept. A very modern problem.

A good Mystery is one that no one wants to solve, and yet one that everyone ‘knows’ there is some solution for.

That is why good mysteries are historical ones. The Civil War is an axis of different solutions set within an anarchy of problems.

One is therefore really free to resolve it any way one wants to: that really is its mystery – or power (a fact that Winstanley for one, knew).

Perhaps one needs though to be suspicious of those who want to impose single solutions. They are often merely eulogizing one aspect of a system which they hold up as its explanation.

   One certainly needs to be even more suspicious of those who solve a problem by pitching themselves up within it, and quietly transmuting it into another problem (according to the solution they have at hand).

   And also never trust an enemy who takes up your policies. When all is said and done they are very likely to still be your opponent - they are merely being cunning!

Trouble with rebellion is that it produces anarchy.

The trouble with anarchy is that it produces violently enforced orthodoxies.

Trouble with orthodoxy is that it instigates rebellion.

Oh well…

  Humanity of course loves its abstractions (this is itself an abstraction).

  Perhaps it is then better to say that humanity loves feeling itself to be in the right, and the joy of an abstraction is that they make one always in the right (for who can gainsay them?)

This would be rather innocent onanism, if this pleasuring oneself in the abstract did not have a violent underbelly!

A Codex of all too common cowardice, runs:

“I want you to be just like me…

  At least I want you to be my immediate inferior, my near equal, my perpetual younger brother

And perhaps I should warn you I am prepared to take any and every action (including thought) to ensure this is the case.”

The problem with anarchy is that it cannot be defined.

The problem here is not that it cannot be defined in itself, but rather that it can be defined in a large number of ways, all of which will claim their own exclusivity to it.

The problem then is that all kinds and manners of poison can hatch out from the most innocent of anarchies.

The problem is as ever, were to Begin. Does one start with the basic unit, and hope that reality can be made to conform? Or does one start with actual complex existence (which might be saying ‘sod it’ to the simple).

If one starts with the former, one needs to hope (fingers crossed) that every thing adds up. If one starts with the latter, one knows it cannot (and must not).

For the former, anarchy is the place in which simple orders compete with one another (and therefore is itself fine). While in the latter, order is what always emerges from an apparent anarchy. There is no guarantee however that these two anarchies are united in anything other than occasion.

The real problem, is then, when these rather different explanations cross fertilize.

At this point one gets avowedly simple citizens of the complex, who are after making a good thing out of other people’s complexity.

The problem is of course that if this doctrine took over, the very rich complexity that breathed life into this simple individual would be removed. Government becomes then either about secretive complicating factors, or the interests of particular individuals.

The problem with masses is that they loathe there own predictability.

The problem with predictability is that it is self defeating.

The problem with this defeat of the self, is that it allows other  far more poisonous selves to bubble up into consciousness

Miracles are as much about the suspension of temporality as anything else.

We call it a miracle if it was either too quick to be seen or too slow, or if we found ourselves already assuming it (without ever knowing why)!

  The mystery one needs then to grapple with is that this suspension is not something that can be explained, it is rather almost endemic to our nature.

A miracle is really the possibility that we can re-throw our own nature again.

It is a matter of taste or judgement whether one feels this throw to be constant or rather punctuated by voided times.

Or perhaps it is a matter of politics - or where one wants one’s politics to be and what exactly one wants it to say. Should it be about building a new country or merely managing or re-managing the world we are in?

The trouble with a miracle is allowing it the space to be unexpected, and unexplained.

The problem with the unexpected is that we always want to claim that we really did know that it was the case all along.

The problem with the unexplained is allowing it its own uniquely problematic dignity.

The joy of relativism is that it turns my doubt into a universal truth.

My doubt then straps on marching boots and demands to unravel everyone else’s mind.

My doubt creates a world where I am again powerful.

  The game is then to pretend that power is not one’s own, (as if I admit it, that power is lost).

The game of the good empiricist is therefore one of diversion. One might distract the audience as one occupies, or at least claims to occupy their mind.

Perhaps then this is why it talks in terms of the camera obscura. It is the role of the projector, the cinematic, to hide the hard corrosions which are seeping in.

The problem with truth, is that it is necessarily beyond me, and so either divine or if it is mine, I must step beyond myself.

The Problem of the divine is that it necessarily ignored the human at all. The jilted human therefore will always look to other Gods.

The Problem of truth being mine, is that I mistake myself for the divine, and so gain the right to jilt others in the world - a right humanity seems to delight in.

It is all about me – but I might allow that you also have a role in it, to many seems the most delightful of creeds.

It is after all the one that allows the world pretty much to be as we see it. That is, which allows for the fact that the world is ours in the seeing and the doing: That allows for the fact that we must (apparently) matter in our own world at least.

The trouble of course that this simple claim to own a peace of mind of one’s own which nonetheless allows for others is far from simple. For that peace of mind is criss-crossed with the thought in which one’s own peace is made. Patterns which might be invisible to a single soul, and yet are all too evident to everyone else.

  Herein lies the mystery of collectivity. Others can see things about yourself that you can never see

  Human’s problem is then how to understand this externality. Do they ignore it? Do they externalize it in their own mind, as an ethic of greed or human nature? Or do they seek to allow others to speak it to them? But if they do what follows then?

An agonizing if quite unresolved choice.

The trouble with Me is You.

The trouble with You is that I am not sure which bit of you is Me.

Which brings us back to Me again (whom it was about all along!)

It is an old adage that the joy of tradition lies in its certainty.

There is never a better place for a radical to pitch up, than this certainty, for people will allow you to do such odd things with it, and the way that it’s defined.

One can then quietly blow up all of being and all standard thinking and no one will care or even for a generation or more really notice!

IF I possess something but do not own it, I need always keep one eye on the mortgage provider - for they are likely to treat me as an acceptable casualty of whatever war they are fighting.

The game must be then always to read the signs of that war. To attempt to know what it is and what it might be.

Here we are clouded by both our belief in the reality of normality and the general ideas of inner fairness which we have formed about the world. The former is of course always justified and yet unjust. The latter however might be just, and yet it cannot be justified.

The Trouble with perception is that I mistake it for mine.

The trouble with this mine is that I think I own it as mine.

I Forget then that the lesson of perception is surely that the Mine exists within someone else’s property – our problem is of course whose?

Oh - and it is surely the oddest thing about the normal that the entire world might be someone else’s fiction, and yet my normality remains intact. Now that is a certainty to conjure with!

The trouble with looking after Number One, is that Number One is so difficult to keep in the forefront of the mind.

They forever slip into number two (or three or four), and only the torrent of feelings are real. And they are of course only real because it is in their nature to change all the time.

Number one therefore vanishes into a sequence of fetid feelings and a set of whines.

It is an old adage that humans would trade any amount of certainty for the right not to have a doubt.

The trouble is that the forces of certainty know this, and as certainty is political useful, it wages a long war against the desire not to doubt.

What is so interesting about that war is the sheer lack of conscience of the certainty wallahs, who gradually ’peddle doubt’ to have the argument go their way.

Any amount of war or any amount of hatred is Fine for such crusaders (ancient and modern) so long as humans do not relax into merely not doubting.

The problem with causes is that they only give one a limited right to possess what appears in one’s mind. One becomes then the peasant farmer of thought.

Trouble with being a peasant farmer, is that one is prone to the vagaries of climate, and therefore can never quite know what will happen next. One is prone then to doubt.

And it is this point of course certainties muscle in!

One of the odd things about being human is that our feelings and our world complement each other without synthesising into one another.

We feel, we are, and the world feels and the world responds, to each of us in its own ways; and without the two elements nothing could be effected.

Perhaps our real trouble is however, that we resent the position of the world (and its independence from us). We demand then that what it lends us is naturally already our own. Nor does any divinity rule out this assumption, even though disaster usually follows on from it!

The game of owning feelings is complex, as one has to initially admit that they are the ones doing the owning.

The problem with this move is that it is so horrid to human pride. We therefore invent a maze of circumlocutions designed to convince ourselves that the feelings are really ours and ours alone.

The problem is then that in these weasel words, we actually loose sight of how we can be truly proud of what we are, a pride that needs to be contained within what we already are, and not game of dominion.

The Game of morality is problematic because like the game of life it takes a while.

The problem here, is that even more than the game of life, one never has the patience to let anything resolve.

  Or perhaps the resolution is actually impossible, as the world will always have changed and re-changed before a code of morality is created. Our Morality will therefore end up needing to comprehend its own history, and yet it does so at a speed which is slower that than that of history itself. The Possibility of having a moral world moves then further and further away.

  Our problem is then, what does it mean to be the apostles for this impossible morality, whose horizon line we might know so well, and yet whose presence we can never experience?

There but for the grace of God go I, is no doubt a noble sentiment, so long as I remain in my own shoes.

That is so long as pity remains the battle cry. A pity that will allow me my distance.

The problem though is of course (as Spinoza noted) that this pity cannot easily hold the distance. It would be so much easier you see if I was you (or at least could pretend to be you). Then I really really could sort out your problems (and so get to ignore my own!).

Everything has its price, is such a maligned sentiment.

But the real problem is that the phrase can be read in two rather different ways.

Everything has its PRICE. So only price matters and everything else follows…

Or everything has ITS price, and therefore is a consequence.

The problem is hat these two readings are so very difficult to match up….

Judgement is so very easy, from a moral point of view, so long as that morality allows one to forget one’s own humanity.

And yet the real problem here is that humanity itself is not fixed, and therefore never something that one will simply forget. It will rather already be present in the one who attempts to forget it.

It will animate that forgetting, haunting it and forcing it to be the worst of Daemons.

The Problem with Utopia was that it was no place. That is, it was lost in the ocean of mystery and therefore hermeneutically sealed off.

Utopia therefore was defined once and for all by an accident of history, and once defined was finished, its history over for all the rest of time.

The Challenge is not then now to understand how such a use-based society might function (that much has been obvious since Moore) but rather how it might be created without such an accident of history, and how it might then be kept open for subsequent development. That is, how it might come to be, and recreate itself across time.

Every generation will of course naturally throw up fools who claim to be at the end of history.

After them the deluge! The problem of course is that on a personal level that is no doubt right. Their world does end when they die.

The problem modernity breeds for itself is that it needs to make this death not matter. Or rather it needs to ensure that people’s interests stretch beyond their own demise. That they allow other peoples their own utopias….

The trouble here is that in the interests of greed we have bred a human which is very unable to pose or even worry about this problem.

Humans are at once called on to allow the system to be eternal (and therefore to change) at the same time as each human is locked into their own finite nature. We are called to care just at the movement that caring seems not to matter.

It is at this point that meta-individuals be they nations or climate intervene. They provide a purpose beyond personal death, a means to live by, and a paradigm to allow others life.

To be free is only worth a candle if one knows what to do with that freedom – otherwise it remains just a name (as of course slavery is also just a name).

The problem is then whether freedom is bound only by knowledge. In knowing of is free. A freedom which would be powerful and yet limited – it would be free necessity.

Or whether freedom is the main spring of something else – the fountainhead to the knowable.

The problem is that the first type of freedom will certainly be as slavery to the ignorant, whilst the second might be nothing but another word for oppression.

What is of course so odd about the free market as it lies glistening, in the pretence that it has no history, and yet its history is everywhere, and constantly articulated.

Its history becomes then merely another element within its process, something to be recycled to make money.

And we are caught up in the legacy of the injustice created in this articulation (here think of Zimbabwe – the former colonial grain basket of Africa, whose leaders now make the people starve in the interests of defying colonialism…)

The trouble with us is that we are prepared to transmute everyone else into ourselves, by a cunning use of selective hearing and abject violence.

The trouble with everyone else is that they will become other-us-es, happy in the end to beat us at our own game and unable to think of another.

The trouble with the ‘another’ is that it is so hard to think: Is that the paradigm that impels us to want it is always created by the system it wants to reject. An old problem. Indeed.

‘I need to be free’ means two things: Both ‘I want you all to sod off’, but also ‘I want to be Me’.

The danger is that we cannot tell the two apart.

This problem is all the more critical as to be Me might very easily be confused with getting you to Sod off!

The trouble then with freedom is that defying it is so very difficult.

With my philosopher’s hat on that is brilliant. It keeps me employed!

The trouble of course is that freedom needs to be transliterated into actual politics. It needs then to be sold to others. It needs to be thought in the language of politics and politicians. It needs also to be easy.

It is this paradox between ease of application and difficulty of thought, that many a terror lies.

The problem with a Clique is that it must be them who are Right, by definition.

The problem then is that this rightness is something which can radiate out, catching up others, so that they too accept it in some way or other

The Clique therefore marches into provenances that are not its own and it becomes all too difficult in terms of both politics but also thought, to stop them!

  Origins are slippery fish, because one is never sure exactly what one has found the origin of.

It is local phenomena or deep historical truth?

And the problem is, that if one makes a blunder here, all of history will laugh in one’s face: one will become its accident and not its master.

  This of course takes one very close to the paradox of the other.

To understand an other is to say or invent a dimension of non-understanding even as one understands.

The problem is, that in this dimension of non-thought many a poison might live, and take the name of tolerance.

It is very nice to say that everyone is me all along, even if I have not to be me to do it.

Even more fun is, if all my odd thoughts and strange communications become the ruler by which Others can be judged,

I gain the right to indulge myself but also to judge others though my own titillation.

Kant is certainly right in that being grown up is a perpetual revolution. One endlessly invents new ways to be childish.

  The problem really starts when one suspects that the ethic to grow up might itself be childish or at least problematic.

  Being grown up in oneself might be more about confessing and allowing oneself to be a partial child (and yet for that child not to matter nor to infect or destroy everything else): but the question still remains what does it mean to be grown up for others?

  Laziness as an idea is a delicious drug, as it allows myself to relax into an I.

  I want this, I want that, I want my enlightenment.

  Which is why Kant’s profound statement that enlightenment is public is so revolutionary.

  The trouble with trust is not you, but Me.

  In being a Me I cease to be trustworthy, and so lose any possibility of your trust.

  For trust is ideas which necessarily must share themselves or it is nothing; and it really really could be nothing…

It had seemed so easy: Reason=Law=Justice=Morality. Here was an equation to conjure up divine thought.

The problem was of course that the world refused to concur. Initially this was no problem, all one had to was make it agree (by one means or another).

  However the real problem of extermination crept in the minute that the apostles lost faith that such a conversation was possible: at this point hellfire in this world and next, became the only possible option.

  I know what I know and I know what I like also, feels a simple claim.

And yet what I like is not simple, as it has already to allow for the fact that that liking needs others to allow it to be at all. My desires, my tastes are therefore never simply mine.

The problem is then that these others have a habit of invading any simple set of knowns one might want for one’s own, and riding them quite elsewhere.

The trouble with place and history are that they exclude in the oddest of manners. They excludes by including.

  Not to be a part of a race be it Celt or anything else slips into a matter of choice, and ultimately taste. One invents then an axis to punish others with a degree of justification. That is, we can punish them for actually choosing not to be like us – an unforgivable sin.

  In a stroke, justice allows an articulated injustice, and does so collectively and with justification – which is no doubt a relief for all those who show concern; a pretext to no longer worry.

  We can all so easily scream – an end to privilege, an end to its abuse. And it is true that its abuses are legion.

  However all those abuses radiate out from a point which is quite otherwise to the political system itself. It is something apart.

The question then is always whether the price from this otherwise is worth paying – a genuine problem.

  Another self evident truth is that there are problems with no solution, and solutions with no problem.

  Indeed at times it is better to simply allow the two to exist in rather differing spheres, as any rushed-in conjoining is worse than disjunction. This is of course not to say that the two never meet up, merely that one must have a care that the meeting is not a shotgun one.

The Problem with people is themselves. That is, that they want to both be an I and a We, and have no need for consistency about which they are.

  The Problem with government is itself. It is caught between being a necessary abuse of itself, and others, and it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

The Problem with liberalisms is freedom. It comes in many sorts and forms, which are only related as a star is to a barking animal, by name (and abuse) alone.

The easiest way to pedal modernity is by counting beans.

  That is by a solution through mass production. This has the great comfort that we can all relax and get on with our lives, we have a government to sort out these things, and to guarantee us our wealth levels.

  We become so liberal, so kind, because we have a government to do the dirty work.

  The problem is of course that in the tales of effectiveness the government hides an awful lot of cock ups.

  The problem here is not that these cock ups are bad, in a sense they are inevitable (and possibly desirable), it is just the system by its own logic, cannot admit them.

  We become caught then in a myth of progress linked to mass production, which alters reality in such a way that the old order is not just obscured but also obliterated.

  That is, in the name of avoiding local embarrassment and much heart searching, we gut the nature of our own reality, and force it to dance to other tunes.

  That is in the name of our and our ruler’s vanity or perhaps peace of mind, we allow anything and everything to change.

That is, in the name of our own parsimony, our wanting to have liberalism (and attendant standard of living) on the cheap, we claim the right to change everything,,,

  No wonder we get scared when things other than ourselves and our intent also change, as such changes which might need us to spend money (or even worse to spend time thinking!).

  If poverty was simple it would be easy to solve with oodles of money. The problem is of course that it is merely a star in the dark matter of wealth.

  But more interestingly, if poverty were devoid of ideas of its own, it would be easy to understand. The problem is that it creates its own way of thinking, a way that then runs into and takes up any means by which that poverty is alleviated.

One cannot therefore tackle poverty without already being pulled into its orbit, a move that need not be bad in itself but must certainly be grasped.

  The thing to remember about simple solutions is that if life was easy we really would have solved it already.

  If something is too easy the best thing is to mistrust it.

This is a paradox, as the best ideas are always the simplest.

The problem with factions is that they think they might become states.

The problem is then that they really might do so, and therefore a state always needs to worry about them.

The problem though of course then remains, that once the faction becomes the state, it suddenly discovers factions of its own, and so the entire process starts again.

Humanity has to be so careful with history. It is very easy to manufacture a sense of belonging within the tribe of one’s long past.

  One’s ancestors do not seem to get a choice about whether they accept one’s presence or not. Or perhaps one’s very interest in them means that the poor blighters have to accept one’s presence amongst them.

  The problem is that in a lonely age, the comforts of the past end up stopping any one acting in the present, by unpicking the glue of loneliness that can so easily blight us all and yet which is far from necessary. That is, the past becomes an opiate which relieves the pain and stops an action.

  One’s problem with following one’s feeling is that it is never clear exactly what one is following.

  Are one’s feelings one’s true master? In which case it really is them that are calling all the tunes to which humanity then must be made to dance.

  Or does one hope that humanity is itself great enough to contains its feelings, and do so in spite of evidence to the contrary?

  Or does one treat feelings as heralds of other humanities yet to be conjured around them and through them?

  The problem with failure is that we are so worried about it that we forget what is so great about it.

  Perhaps is forgetting failure we also forget death (or at least hope to do so). Be that as it may, failure and death ought to remain things part. The one is a boring end of the matter, while the other treated aright, is a provocation to be otherwise.

  It goes without saying that the problem of confusing failure and death is that it risks making failure a natural state, while properly understood it is that which keeps us from ever truly being natural.

Good thing too!

The real problem with failure is that it is imperceptible. I do not know that it has happened until I am caught up in some disaster.

The real problem with redemption is of course exactly the same. Redemptions happen when one least expects them to…

The real problem of politicians is that these two things in their imperceptibility are almost indistinguishable from one another.  

One might be the problem and yet feel oneself to be the solution and vice versa.

Words cost truth. Or better, merely saying a thing is usually enough to change it.

A fact that can be good as well as bad.

But also (in spite of what the mere reporters say) cannot be ignored.

Some problems need not be solved (and some answers require no problems).

The problems in the first instance, function an a locus point within which positive strategies and responses can be formers.  

These positivities are not solving the problem as such, but allowing one to change one’s world nonetheless. Useful elements are the spin off of such complex problems, which might well remain unsolvable in themselves (Fermat’s last conjecture is less interesting than the maths which its solution seems to spark).

The answers in the second case are little bits of transforming positivity, little nexi which pass between people, and allow them, in an expression, or a smell, as much as a word, to understand their world rather differently than before. To think of friends is to be caught in an axis of answering…

Power itself is merely the name for that which is pitched in between the ‘vile multitude’. The problem of the ruler is that they need to direct this power as if it were their own, when logically it has no owner.

Ideas and laws are then the tool for the direction of such a stream (but so is finery and tradition).

The problems start when those laws start to think they are the power, and not merely its tools.

This is the point when the high ideals become caught up in low politics, were everything is up for grabs, to define the entire system of power.

On the one side is a corruption which will allow the system to continue, and yet compromise it greatly.

On the other, dissolution and the challenge to choose a new system.

  The problem is of course that for humanity this is a no-brainer: one chooses the corruption and not the dissolution.

Better a murderous and unjust war in a distant land than the mere threat of an anarchy at home (no matter the body or plausibility count).

Better a corrupt series of concessions to feather the nests of the rich, than risk the system as a whole.

  Better extend the current system which caused pollution to make that cause itself a commodity, than challenge the system itself.

At least we can do it (and do it without anarchy) is our prevailing battle cry.

Is my future yours?

  If so is it still mine?

  For how could it be ours?

  The strangest thing about confidence is that it appears to be buyable and sellable, and the open market.

  It is then the ultimate resource for a government to buy: the commodity that one cannot have too much of (or pay too much for).

  That is, as long as no one mentions that the entire thing is merely a trick anyway.

  Or is the future something which jars into us, from unconceivable and profoundly othering collectivities?

  If so what does it mean to only relate to the collective as the perturbing?

  Or better how does one stop the fascism this feeling provokes within one mind?

  A real question.

  The deep problem is, it worth being me at all, if you have to come along for the ride?

Perhaps ‘we’ want to be neither?

  But if that is so where could we find the neither, if not in me or you?

  A Nietzschean problem.

  If politics equals change, and a state is the locus in which all change can be frozen, then are we not buggering up everything?

  That is, is not the very essence of modern politics to destabilize the series of dialectics within which we find ourselves?

  If so can we define a self who is able to do anything about this act, and keep that self within the political orb?

  The problem of whether the world is a perception or reality, ultimately comes down to the problem of who or what is driving the process forward.

  Is it relations within our minds which are coming into play with one another in complex evolving strands.

Or is it something utterly beyond us all, which we cannot ever fully comprehend?

  And if it is the latter, what for God’s Sake can one do about it?

Kierkegaard is certainly right. The problem of history is that it is lived forwards but written backwards. One always knows what will happen and acts (or writes) accordingly.

  Trouble is that philosophy tends to compound the problem. What else is time but the idea of going backwards and forwards at once in a spurious unity?

  And all Philosophy tends to do at this point is to choose whether one wants the forward or backward movement to prevail.

  If ideas and history run together, then surely ideas are not what we thought they were.

  That is, their history in our minds and our books, a history where they are self evidently on a page, is rather different to what they are in history itself.

  To think with them becomes to be caught up in a doubling of history, one is at once a part of their history, but also a part in making history.

  The problem once again is simple - are these really the same ideas?

  Trouble is, it is by no means clear what one means by the same, or even ideas at this point.

  And there in lies the rub, of philosophical history.

History is really lived in three directions (and not as is commonly thought two).

One lives it forward. The world is constantly changing and one clutches at ways to explain that change.

One lives it backwards, in that one looks back into the past to find pretexts for what one is now.

One lives in a diagonal space, as little elements of the past are built into actual individual actions in the present, and little actions in the present are installed as the consequences of small motors of the past.

  It is of course this last one that makes history so very difficult. It also makes it matter.

The history of a history is a complex affair.

Layers of pretexts and arguments lie on top of one another, wrenching thought one way or other.

The exhilaration of history lies in freeing one’s mind from this dragging weight. However one must always bear in mind that this act itself might be valueless. Maybe the dragging weight really is the history?

The problem with the past is that there is so much of it.

This mass is made critical less because of events, and more because of ideas that mismatch those events, and confuse then deeply.

  The entire problem of history then comes down to what one dos with this necessary confusion.

Does one add to it, or attempt to resolve it?

Both a scholar’s and a politician’s question.

Empiricism’s great legacy is that we use the past as our role model for what must come.

  We are therefore are politically always a few years behind (or a few centuries).

  The problem here is then, not just that the world changes, but rather that it changes in the face of this application of history.

  To repeat history is therefore never to repeat the same. The history of that history sees to that.

The effect of this last point is that history moves in great revolutions.

  Each revolution presets a new history, in which we are caught, and to which we add.

  The problem here is then, that it is by no means clear what element or part of that history is the history of the history, and what is genuinely relevant to the present (or the past).

  The rule must be that if one ever one treats the past as a comfort zone – be concerned.

  If one ever treats the past as a locus for perfection, worry.

  If one ever wants to dissolve one oneself into one’s own past, panic.

  But if one ever wants to forget the past – commit suicide, as it is quicker and easier.

To abandon sense is to pose a problem.

  What does one replace that sense with? Feeling or Belief?

  It is usually better although less stirring to modify one’s sense and not seek merely to leave it.

  It is the trouble with belief that it is very different when practised by the lone individual, than when it is practiced by the mob.

  The lone thinker believing in the face of the world, has a beautiful charm.

  A charm which is quite lost when the everyone takes up the thread.

  It is easer to resist than it is to define what one is resisting.

  ‘I am at odds with the world’ is the great cry.

  The problem is that that begs a question - what world?

  Therein lies the rub.

There is a real oddity in taking a system to create gentlemen and using it to create a mass gentry.

We all become like Pip in Great Expectations. We are all gentlemen now.

  And like him we gain the effortless prejudices and foppery of the gentlemen. We assume that we have the right to what someone else has given us. We assume that it allows us airs (and fantasies about our value).

We only wonder what we will feel if our mysterious benefactor ever did show up.

  Collective greed is social aspiration.

  That is a passion which might be horrid in the individuals is somehow more acceptable en masse.

  We are all greedy now, and feel good about it (even if we cannot actually state the fact)

  Look how society has changed we say.

  But what do we mean by this?

  That society has really changed?

  A moment has changed the thread of history?

  Or merely that we have confused a momentary collective act for the dream of history itself?

  Or rather we have conjoined a collective dream with knowledge as if it was merely a Guinness of Book of Records. We are claiming then to be the first to do something (akin to the first four minute mile).

  A claim which has in a nerdy way a validity, but I doubt it changes very much in itself…

To be finite is to be political: there is only a certain amount of…(money, jobs, happiness, life) is the great claim of all political parties.

  The problem is then that this finitude is rather complex.   

  Humans are of course finite (and therefore feel a deep affinity to the limited), but there is no need to suppose this limit is the same as that which a technology might face, or an environment impose. It is just that we are not very good at understanding this fact.

  We tend to want to drag everything into our own very personal histories (or at best to the wider tale of human History) and so ignore these differences.

  Capitalism’s great power is in its monopoly of neuroticism. It claims to have the sole right to paranoia as well.

  The trouble with the second of these claims is that it is right! Better a paranoid market and a hopeful state than the other way around.

  The trouble with the first is that it is greedy. It does not allow anyone else their worry. It screams its own problems, and so ensures that other’s problems remain hidden and secret.

  Is it not a paradox, that some of the meanest (or most prudent) housekeepers are left wing (and champagne socialists ought to be condemned), while the right is characterized by conspicuous consumption.

  Each grouping appears to use their politics to express what they are not: the right preaches prudence and practices extravagance and vica versa.

  It all comes down to on what level one chooses to deploy hope or management. Does one relate it to one’s own life or merely to the wider economy?

  Leaving the unknown an unknowable, is of course too worrying to consider.

  Better a tautology devours the unknown rather than it remain hidden.

  Better a past includes the unknown rather than it is allowed to be.

  Better the hand of history is forced, and made to be worse than it need be, than we simply accept that we do not know.

The deep worry about the unknown is therefore contained in the endless cancers of modern life.

  It is expressed in the demand to be a race or a nation. We wonder why we spend our entire time worrying! The point of being a nation is to contain a much deeper worry. Nations are born to be paranoid.

Alternatively we simply demand the future behaves itself, and gives us our right to do whatever we want in the present. It is simply our desires manifest in the world. We then become horrified when this is not the case.

The problem with reason is that it invents cause.

The problem with inventing a cause is that it allows other dimensions into the unknown. The unknown thereby comes to include pretty much what we want it to.

The problem then, is that as one desire is allowed for in the unknown, it is also taken beyond us, and transfigured by the unknowable into something extreme and horrific

  ‘Change is the only lasting philosophy’ is at once a platitude and a threat.

  On the former level, any politician can say as much (or any Dickensian matron). Of course this is true, and this truth is very comforting, as long as one assumes that change is going one’s own way. That is as long as one assumes that that change will include oneself and one’s own power within in.

  The problems really start of course when that change has the audacity to hint that it really doesn’t need to include any one individuality within its locus.

  The power of me lies through changing a you.

  The problem is that I am not sure whether that you is in me or not?

  All of bullying, but also all of teaching lies in the fold of this doubt.

  Why would an ‘I’ really want to claim existence?

  Why pose such an empty individual position between a powerlessness in the now, and an absolute destruction in the ‘to come’.

  This problem is rather a deep one, as one must ask in whose interest this I has been foisted upon my life, as the one way that it can be understood.

  The problem with words like evil, is that it turns pain into a force.

  It becomes a power, which one finds in the world a power which one relishes the discovery of.

  All the desperate world of suffering and real pain, is then turned into an enjoyable romp (for external observers) of spotting and thinking about removing the evil one.

  These observers will then talk big about removing the source of the trouble and yet not have any real strategy beyond that removal (or even necessarily a way to achieve it).

  What is at issue with the moral majority, always comes down to a debate about tense. The problem is where is this majority to be found?

  Is it in the past (in which case it had better conform to the precepts of that past, laid down by whatever prophet)?

  Is it is in the present and so the preserve of the smug Daily Mail reader?

  Or is it in the future, and erupting upon us? But then how can we  witness that which is not yet to be?

  This last was Nietzsche’s problem.

  Critique never changes anything, and so always faces the deep problem about what to do about this impotency.

  Does it turn its lack of power into a code? It might abstract a virtue from it (and even claim that this lack makes the critique itself better, as it has time to think).

  Or does it seek to look for new ways to act and create individuals and societies, and thereby cease to be a real critique of what is at all?

  A real problem

The hardest thing to do in the world is, no doubt, to murder the echoes of Me that are everywhere.

  You know the ones, the little shards of lives I could have had, dreams I did have that I see reflected in the world and the lives of others:

  There but for the grace (or curse) we all go: A sentiment to found a soul but destroy a life. One needs to murder these others to be oneself.

  Why should passion always be right? Why should I feel appropriately?

  Or perhaps better, who would I know if I was?

  This question would be meaningless but for the fact that those who so enter the path of feeling wrong, slip into a nether world of madness, where all of living becomes tricky and problematic.

  There is nothing odder than to govern a freight of adolescents.

  On the one hand they are always stroppy and wilful. They always want to do what they want to do.

  On the other hand, what they want to do is usually rather petty and easy to provide for: A few illegal drugs, a fag, a shag, and you are there.

  They might all ‘rebel’ but one can so easily ensure that that rebellion is valueless…

To be caught in a society is to have the weight of the every in one’s mind.

   Even a walk in the natural environment, even getting back to nature, is merely to find another ‘them’ which then preys upon our thoughts

  The rub is always to allow society to be powerful, and to use that power, those others, because to blindly resist is simply to render the trap opaque.

  To govern statistics as your citizens is a thankless task.

   Figures are rather unruly citizens. They have a habit of doing their own thing (and always doing it).

  One will therefore be reduced to merely jumping on any good news one can muster, and desperately hoping that no one notices that the eternal verities of social facts have carried on pretty much as before.

  That is, one has to hope no one notices exactly how powerless a government is.

  This power is Mine cries the state, even as it fires the nuclear weapon, or allows the environment to crumble.

  It will always be mine, it says as it silently watches the powers that make it dissolve.

Because I am the only safe power that can wield it, the whining voices echo across a waste.

Rationality does not need or appear to need individuality.

  It opens out a territory at odds with anything I or you are. It is merely worried about how we behave when we operate according to its plan.

  However its weak point lies in the fact that it of course needs to assert its own individual elements: There in lies the rub of externalizing one aspect of humanity (thought)…

  The joy of living is that things never go where one thinks they should.

  Subsequent generations come along and everything is changed or better, warped and rendered other than one might have hoped.

  The art of being truly human is to love this change, this being endlessly misdirected.

  The Problem with order is that it is ordered.

  The worry with history is that in the past everything is always too simple, too historical.

  The problem with planning is that every plan is only good on paper: what it will look like somewhere else is always the problem.

The distant past exists to be plundered by the opportunists of the present. All manner of selfish acts of oppression lie there, awaiting to be conjured into the present.

  The real oddity of this process is never the past, so much as the present, which will without shame take up what was, and combine it with what is.

  If people really want to live according to God’s pattern, perhaps they really ought to be stuck also in the technology, and political realities of the Iron Age too (like the Amish).

  The fact that they do not want to be, merely shows the problem.

  Governments claim authority because of the murmuring will of the people,

  However the problem is that ipso facto, those who claim this authority are removed from the people who give it to them.

  The result is that politicians end up sitting in their castles built on democracy, claiming to represent the people, while the people are busy doing other things, which the politicians themselves do not hear.

  They are therefore in spite of their claim, curiously at odds with the world they would seek to represent.

  The problem with the past, is that it never stays locked in the ‘then’.

The problem of the now is that it shamelessly misuses the past.

The problem with the ‘what is to come’, is that it is only known in disruption, and so cannot ever be made simple or politically acceptable.

  Is what I am simply what I do? In that is the case the First World War showed just how horrid ‘I’ can be.

  Perhaps it would be better to cling onto individual life. That at least is clear enough (it was what was lost on the bloody fields).     

  But life in itself, by itself, becomes very easily caught up in rotting bloated living bodies, kept alive beyond sense or reason.

  Perhaps then I am a perception, a set of eyes and dreams. Is that enough to make me noble?

The advertiser says yes.

  It is a deep question as to whether medicine stays medical when it turns itself into a widespread philosophy.

  That is, once it intervenes everywhere, then it merely becomes normality. But does this mean that disease is the new normality as well?

  But then again, once one starts to use apparatus to act by, then in a sense one is already caught up in a medical (a health life assisted) world.

  The problem of states is they always are caught between a necessary gamble, and the urge for caution.

  What makes this gamble so hard, is that it is bound up in a world where the dice are apt to change even as they fall.

  No wonder the state’s instinct appears to be to police that one element it might keep easy – that is its citizens.

  Perhaps as they police our actions we should be moved to pity?

What technology undermines is of course trust.

  It places us in a world of conspiracy.

  We ask –

Somewhere out there if there is really the gizmo to do a thing – why is it not here already?

OR we ask

What is the hidden cost of the gizmo here already? Where will it lead and who knows?

  The problem technology poses is that we cannot drag the technological into our world without becoming paranoid.

.

  It is of course at this point that one makes the conspiracy real by turning to something or someone else to sort out these problems.

  Professions be they the great leader or finance or larger companies take on the burden of solutions.

The problem is that they do not solve so much as dissolve the problem into various often rather random actions.

  But then how else does one solve a paranoia but by giving it something to do?

  The problem  with the plan is the world.

  A plan assumes that one has just the one world, and can structure it accordingly.

  The problem is that the world, as it is revealed in the technological does not know this fact and refuses to lie down into a single unity: it has a habit of inventing new micro worlds and spawning across itself and so upsets everything

The problem with our past, is not that it is a straightjacket, so much as it is a toy yard.

  Endless memories and open evocations exist in our pasts, waiting for any infant to plunder for use.

  The problem then of the past is to sort through this junk, while allowing for the fact that it might really all be as junk.

  The problem with the future is that it is anywhere.

  The future hovers like death over us all – grinning slightly.

  It becomes then very difficult to allow that future into a mind: that is, it becomes difficult to define how it might tumble in and why. This difficulty in a sense is the very paradox of the future (that is, it allows other futures, other things that could not have otherwise been, also into a mind).

 

  The task of modernity is to allow others element in the world to really be.

  One need not merely talk of machine’s rights (for a right remains a human concept).

  But rather one must at least wonder whether rights (and their responsibilities) are really the way to grasp reality. But if not – what do our ethics then mean?

  To not be you – what a dream that is. The dream of the artist.

  But what if we all share that dream? What if it is rendered plastic and mass produced?

  The mass production of hopes and fears and dreams, a domain of the endlessly echoingly possible. A domain where presentation and possibility outstrip and warp all reality.

  Welcome to modernity.

  To mass produce Nietzsche, is to make a world either of gauze and film or terror and blood.

  Not a choice one might wish to make.

  But perhaps it the power of Nietzsche that one needs to make it none the less.

  The problem of dreams is that they are never my own.

  Many share the dream, and make it real.

  But do you think anyone has told reality that?

  It was not me – it was….

  Well it was not us it was….

  It is always them.

  But that is the magic of the Nation.

  The problem with gambling is that one can define games which one does not lose in.

  That is one can constantly warp the rules to avoid the moment at which the system collapses.

  This was the dream of bankers and the dream of states. The former dream was a delusion – and our problem is now really where the latter one will take us….

  The problem with us is that we are right.

  The problem of being right is that it insists it is always true.

  The problem of course with that truth is that it is really another name for ‘us’….

  Follow me – I know where I am going – and you really ought to want to get there as well.

  Follow me I say, and I will devise a world good enough for US all.

  All you will need to do is trust me and we will be there already.

  Why and where have you gone to?

  The game of expectation becomes a game of poker. I cannot tell you my truth in case it stops being a truth.

  Trouble is, you know I might be bluffing, and act accordingly.

  We neither then can trust the other, even though the entire game we are playing appears to be called trust.

  The problem of course of money is that it has little or nothing to do with people.

   It comes from nowhere and drains out to nothing. It simply vanishes from time to time.

  The problem then is that it is more a mood than an actuality – and how can one allow for or even understand the moody mind?

Why have people not always been good? Why are they not already good? It is an innocent-seeming question.

  And yet a question that discovers the hard way why things are as they are.

  More councils and more countries have been bankrupted by the unintended effects of an all too universal good than almost any other force for change on the planet…(think bus passes).

  We are good, we are interested in you, in all the world: let that be our battle cry!

  Except of course, we then add that we cannot always interfere, we cannot actually stop wars or can only sometimes.

  In a stroke then, our partial goodness (we certainly are not all bad in the West) is lost within the accusations of hypocrisy that rip off of the very claims to be absolutely good.

  It would probably have been better to keep our gobs shut…

  The problem with absolute good is that it is always pitched beyond expectation.

  One looks to a country to be more than they are, and fumes when they are not.

  That is, the problem is that it turns relative politics into an absolute of evil: We are merely helping ourselves (as we have always done), but now stand condemned for our innocent greed.   

  Even worse of course, we condemn others on the same absolute axis for their own greed.

The game of politics slips into a game of somewhat pointless insult.

The joy of the moral high ground is that it allows you to see what is over the horizon.

Whatever comes therefore, what the shit of history throws at you, you will be able to chance around our position (slightly) and come out smelling or rises.

Or at least you would be, if others were not also rushing for their own moral hind grounds, and therefore never listening….

Oh Bugger!

The problem of society is regulation.

The problem of society is the wrong type of freedom.

Perhaps we should face it, the problem with society is us….

The thing about we is that I am a free thinker.

The think about me is that I am an idealist.

The thin about me is that I am the exception.

This is not true of us all?

  It is all about me you know.

  This IS my life isn’t it?

  You are just bit players.

  Hang one though, I need you in the plot – do not leave me…

  Perhaps it is less about me after all?

  Nice gestures need to be other than reality.

  One might treasure such gestures for ever or for never.

  But they are still not actually going to help in any way or do anything.

  They need not then to be understood as actually present or real.  

  They need not to replace all meaning and all value.

  The problem with you is that you might restrict what I can do.

  The problem with me is, I  need you to do anything.

  Oh well – what now?

I am my brother’s keeper.

  But does that mean the man is mad?

  Or perhaps it is just me.

  I am a good Samaritan.

  Fine, but do I stay a Samaritan who always helps, even if helping means walking on the other side?

  And but what I do then ? How does that one challenge the parable?

  I might be a saint – but then does the world really want saints?

  Worse than that, when you are not saints yourselves what should I do?

  Is in the end goodness the most manipulative and warping of things?

Perhaps

We, if we speak the same, then surely we must dream the same dream?

Maybe, but what is to guarantee that that dream is not a nightmare for us or for someone else or somewhere else?

  Is that basic sameness always to be trusted?

  If you and I are forced to trust each other by whatever circumstances can we really do it?

That is, is coercion enough to force us to trust?

Or is trust more spontaneous and complex than that? But if it is, how can it fit in a society that is ace at obliging action and not very good at anything else?

Not to speak the same language might be refreshing.

  At least we know we have a problem communicating!

  Perhaps the real problems come when we assume that we do understand each other…Or worse when I think I understand you but that you do not understand or even comprehend

  I know what you are - for we are the same.

  That means that all I have to do is look at a bit of me to capture you, and once caught I have your nature frozen in a me for all of time.

  What do you mean that you might then change your nature?  

  Surely I am the only one allowed to change, aren’t I?

  Sometimes it takes the ability to destroy each other to invent the myth of certainty.

  It takes a risk to the world therefore to make everything seem easy. Our morality is that insipid.

  The problem of course is that if that certainty collapses, then one is left with the risk and not the framework in which it is held.

   A pretty problem indeed.

  The managers want the world to be so easy.

  The manager wants always to have already solved it, to already be the solution.

  As such they express a problem with democracy. We always need easy solutions which are ready to hand, and want them irrespective of whether they have much chance of working or not…

  Like God you are really out there -  look at me.

  I am caught in your gaze

  This much is certain but my problem is that I am never really sure where this ‘you’ actually is, and what it might mean.

  Science is not about certainty but doubt. To advance doubt and wage war on its behalf, to allow for it, is of course to extend exactly what we can do in the light of that doubt.

  That is, to make new places where one does not quite know what is happening or what will follow, is to have opened out new options on the world. The only problem of course is, that that doubt might well now include new ways that one might also be destroyed - by the very forces of otherness that created or allowed for the doubt in the first place…(eg; the Nuclear Bomb).

  The trouble with us, is that we endlessly lose sight of ourselves and in losing sight of ourselves confuse what we are with others.

  The trouble with others is that they exist in two ways. As an actual external person, beyond us and as the perception of them in our minds.

  The game is to keep these two elements of difference different, and allow one’s own individuality to exist in the space inbetween them.

It is perhaps no surprise that we think of children in terms of either innocence or amorality.

  The former conjecture allows for the fact that a child as they are still developing lacks the overarching series of rules which we have. We see their acts as therefore something blameless. The latter of course assumes pretty much the same as well (but merely focuses on the blame).

  Our problem is however is how do we respond to ourselves if technology now is making children of all of us?

  Not to know something is paradise. But –

  What if one knows one has to act, and act in the absence of anything clear to do, or even in the absence of any real ability to respond?

  To be forced into a something…This is a modern dilemma. Our politics is therefore the mass production of something for us all to do!

  I have a dream of equality. The problem is, that that dream might just be that we are all the same in our prejudices and our assumptions of what others are.

  Or it might be that we are all caught together on the same highway to nothing…

  The dream itself is seldom enough!

  It has of course always been clear enough that meaning lies between the pair of us.

  None of us is worthy of knowing the truth or holding meaning to and for ourselves.

  The only problem is then exactly where does this meaning flow from? Is it God or the other ? Is it actually truth in reality? Or is it language?

  A question which is of course unanswerable.

  Opening one’s mind to other societies is of course a noble thing.

  And yet it comes with a problem. One might in this opening out, not produce anything of any validity. That is one might come to question one’s own mind and the mind of those other peoples  without producing anything of value as a result of that questioning.

  To look to other peoples is therefore always to risk losing sight of everything – that is of what you and they are and can be.

  The problem with language is that it is too powerful.

  It provides a too easy one size fits all solution to difference.

  The problem of course with difference is that it always ignores such readymade solutions.

  The problem with the media is that it feels itself no longer at the hub of things. It knows that rumours and gossip elsewhere are usurping its power.

  The trouble is of course that it still has money and resources to drive stories onwards. It still has power, even if it is not the power it once was.

  The temptation is therefore to use this capital to make up stories, on the grounds that if one is raising up the mob, then one is in control of it. That is, by making up the stories one remains at their hub.

  It has been an easy assumption of states that they matter.

  The news then, that they do not, (or do not matter as they thought they did) has been rather late in coming to them.

  Our current problem is that now we have broken the news to them, we are not at all clear how they will take it!

  The problem with the state is the people.

  Of course one knows this but perhaps the problem is really that the people have fallen into endless virtual sieves and into other worlds.

  One is no longer governing the citizens of this world therefore. The people one wants to govern are members of endless virtual communications and endless extra worlds. Worlds where only advertisers reach and politicians are powerless. Worlds which have a power nonetheless…

It is a mistake to think that a cabal is a secret. More often than not, they are a pin-prick of another state or another organization, which knows what it is doing in creating this group.

  Cabals are therefore the natural product of excessive attention to one particular group or grouping.

  Leaders under such a light grow like mushrooms. The problem of course is exactly like mushrooms, there is far far more under the surface that would otherwise appear. A fact which the state always wants to forget.

  Let the revolutionaries into government and what changes?

  One does not really get new government so much as the endless watering down of the revolution.

  It and the government appear to grow together until the two become as one.

The problem with change is that it is of course meaningless.

  Or rather it means too much. To change a person is usually much easier that changing a policy.

  The premise of course of all democracy is that any change is nice: as if government and painting one’s house were one and the same…

If I be then I must be free. The two rise and fall together.     

  Why would I want to be me, if not to be free/How can I be free if I am not me?

  The problem is that neither side of this equation holds water in itself.

  To say I am simply free is to ignore the inconvenient truths that tie me to the world and everyone else – likewise to claim absolute individuality is to forget that our being is based on perceptions, and brains that are never purely ours alone.

  The two fall apart then when not together. It is no wonder then that they rely upon one another - as it is only in appealing to the other that they survive at all.

  This mutuality is of course sweet, but no place to base a government!

  We want more choice even if the act of choosing destroys the system.

  We must have more choice even if the regulation necessary destroys all planning.

  We must provide choice because it is cheap and easy.

  Which of these claims made by government and people is likely to be the reason for advocating choice?

 

  Change we can believe in – an oxymoron.

  Change we can trust in - a parody.

  The age of change - a fiction nearer the truth…

  One knows that there is a problem with society when hindsight and leadership are practically synonymous.

  Too many Chiefs and no Indians creates a problem for those chiefs that are perforce elected, from their number.

  To be a chief of chiefs is to be in a perilous position as everyone is always sure that they would have been better (for are they not also chiefs?)

  My money is of course an oxymoron. Money is a global commodity. It is then only as a part in a wider system.

  But likewise a global international credit system is also an oxymoron. This system is only really as good as the individuals which it is lending to and the people who are making good these loans, and the appeal to the global (like appeals to God) do not make this any different.

  The deeper problem is then that this is an impossible conjecture. Money is only defined in a negative theology: it is neither this nor that: no wonder then that it needs a faith to work.

  Events tumble into a mind.

  Or better, a life is that which manifests around events for they are the true outsiders, they come ‘first’.

  Our problem is therefore always to work out how to be worthy of what happens, and not the other way around.

It is then in the end the claim runs, the outside that predates the inside: Events make the  human and not the other way around.

Well perhaps….

  It is the prerogative of events that they are powerful in their virtuality and not in their actuality.

  An event matters therefore because it is felt to be true. That feeling is enough to spark powers in the mind and force a reaction.

  We are endlessly gathered therefore towards truths which fragment, and which only have reality in our belief of them.

  Events have their power in their ability to gather us in believing - a virtual power but power enough to make or mar a world.

  However actual events do have their own domain.

  They mark the point the world changes at: The point that certain things become unthought or unthinkable and new ones clarify.

  An epoch therefore is composed by those events we all hold self evident; and the game of history is to add to or obscure this self evidence.

  The problem with the present is that we think we understand its nature. Its complexity is hidden. The problem with the past is that we feel it to be plain and simple, when really we are constructing it and in the process of it. The problem with the future is that it is endlessly telling us lies about what it will be, in order to change its nature. That is, it works only by falsifying what we are, and what we might one day become.

  To be myself is a tricky affair – there are so many others in me.

  The only real voice that is clear is the one that shouts ‘do this then do that’.

  It is then this marching feet of identity that sizzles into the self.

   I am what exactly?

  A system of knowing myself as a part of things (as agent or locus or node),

  Perhaps. But what I am very clearly is a thing to govern.

  Matter is transected by knowledge and power. Each lie one side of it, and each reach across it.

  It is the stubborn stuff of reality which therefore makes the world what it is.

  That is, it is it, and it alone which warps the relations of powers and thoughts, and in making them re-throw themselves, creates new possibilities for them.

To step beyond myself is not the result of drug-induced mayhem or mystic experience.

  Rather it is clearly the case that to perceive, I am already in a sense to beyond myself.

  The problem is rather, how does one allow for or respect such a beyond?

  Can one understand it?

  That is, can one create a thought beyond oneself, which lacks an author, a thought which has power across many differing minds, and which one can never fully master?

  Powerful thoughts indeed, but also always Frankenstein’s monsters able to devour their thinkers once those thinkers lose sight of their nature.

  Alternatively can I base the beyond on the journeys of thoughts and feelings go on. That is, on the galaxy of those ‘me's that are always crowing a ‘me too’, and calling towards other times and other places.

  If one can quieten the babble, this is great palace to think from, but the trick lies in making some quiet…

  The power of the past lies within us.

  That is it is the power to make us always think differently.

  It is the power therefore to make the world not be as it seemed to us. The power of another to also own those thoughts one thought one owned.

  The task of history ought to be the most generous of disciplines. It is after all returning to the past those thoughts in the present which belongs to it.

  Unfortunately this return is more than most of us can bear… with the result that history becomes a horrid pastiche of itself.

  To return to the beginning is usually a cop out.

  But sometimes it is only by ducking that one can avoid been caught in a perpetual spiral.

  One needs then to loop back on one’s self, and hope that the experience of the travel will make that loop worthwhile.