An Elephant of One's Own

In the old Spanish blog, one of my most popular posts was an interview I did with an unusually articulate grey-cheeked parakeet, in which the bird in question patiently explained what he saw as the flaws in human social organization, and recommended a social outlook more like his own, on the basis that widespread adoption, by humans, of this alternative system and philosophy (in which communal nest-building played a prominent part) would dramatically reduce intraspecific conflict, as well as freeing up valuable time and energy for more productive and interesting pursuits, such as chirping, or looking sleek and dapper. For this blog I no longer have a parakeet, so I will instead go for a Pre-Columbian Granite-faced Person (PCGFP). We have them here in Ecuador, you see, so it's convenient. ME: Making big stone faces on Easter Island wasn't a great idea, was it? PCGFP: On reflection, no. I think we got a bit carried away there. It was like one day someone said "Hey, ...

Quicko. There's this dead good story in the Bible somewhere, called "The OK Salvadoran". It's about this bloke who is set upon by Trump supporters, gets mugged and beaten up and is left for dead in a pool of blood and vomit near the entrance to the men's restroom in a shopping mall in Baltimore. Well, after about ten minutes a Nobel prizewinning economist with a recessionary chin and anti-austerity beard comes along, glances at the bloke and makes a mental note to mention him in his weekly syndicated column as an example of the failure of current government policy to stem the rising tide of social unrest. He then disappears into the gents. A few minutes later, a Social Justice Warrior with green hair and gender-fluid eyebrows happens past on the way to the Preferred Pronouns' Toilets, which are next door to the Gents. Seeing the half-dead man lying on the ground, one is immediately triggered, as the sight reminds one of a dee...

OK, I haven't got very far with it, but at least I'm trying. The thing about John Rawls is that he writes like a convalescent Mantovani strung out on Valium in a Llandudno retirement home. I can just about manage two or three paragraphs of A Theory of Justice at a stretch without drifting into catalepsy, but that's about it. This looks like being a long haul. But hell - I managed Atlas Shrugged last year, so I should be able to cope. In fact, this ought to be child's play in comparison. At least Rawls doesn't try to pretend he's a novelist. And no, don't take my word for any of this. Have I already mentioned I am in the early stages of premature senile dementia brought on by chronic oxygen depletion? I think I have. If I was a young man with a normal haemoglobin count and fewer work responsibilities, I daresay I could rip through Rawls in an afternoon. Being terminally degenerate isn't pretty. But I am resolved not to go gently into that ...

I mentioned it earlier, in connection with the Kafka's Crap Friend test. The latter, as I say, is a good way to find out if you have any friends or not. The Cow Test, on the other hand, serves the purpose of determining if a given person, friend or not, has the sort of dark authoritarian streak that you would do well to be forewarned about before getting too involved. I first heard this story from Rossana, a Uruguayan acquaintance I knew briefly in Granada. She had a degree in Cultural Mediation from the U. of Seville, but I didn't hold that against her. Not initially, anyway. Admittedly, nothing says "I am an interfering busybody" more than those two words "cultural mediation" in juxtaposition, but well, let's face it, most people don't choose what their degree is in, it just sort of happens to you, you just wake up one morning and find you have a degree in something crap and borderline unemployable, which you accidentally studied while in a deep ...

All right then. But I have a ton of work to do, so this will have to be long. The irritating thing about the Need for Power (nPower, in the cute jargon of psychologists, but see below) is that the people who suffer from it think everyone has it. Ghagh. Yesterday, for example, in my Saturday morning class, there was a text on the wolves/sheep dichotomy accidentally popularized by Schultheiss back in the noughties. Rather stupidly, I chose myself as a clarifying example of that type of person misleadingly referenced in the text as a "sheep", remarking that not only did I not want power over anyone, but that I have always felt that wanting it constitutes in and of itself a serious mental disorder, and have to keep reminding myself that not everyone sees things that way. This was when everyone in the class simultaneously directed at me that "Teacher, you have just sprouted antennae, a proboscis and compound eyes" look. I should have known better, I know. Anyway, t...

This was always one of my stalking horses in the old Spanish blog. I mean, really: "liderazgo". What a turd of a word. They take an English word, misunderstand it (probably) by an angle of about 10deg, small but significant, badly adapt it to the Spanish phonetic system, add a silly suffix, and (this is where you want to scream) turn it into a cardinal virtue, the attainment of which requires you to read three self help books per month (check out your local supermarket, just past the turnstile and before you get to the apples and tomatoes). As a teacher, I have a particular aversion to "leadership", for the simple reason that it's one of those things, usually the main thing and in some cases the only thing, that my job description and the mission statement of whatever institution I am working for tells me I have to instill in my students, irrespective of the subject taught, and which I have neither the inclination nor, probably, the means to instill. I don...

I used to do this a lot, back in the old blog. Just chuck in YT videos where I felt like it, partly so I could find them easily, and partly because I felt that anyone who hadn't heard them was missing something. These two have in common the fact that I would happily put them in a space probe, set to autoplay upon receipt, as a calling card from Homo sapiens to any aliens that might be out there. Of course the aliens wouldn't get them initially, not having their ears tuned to the same frequencies and all that, but that's why you have video, see, so you can see the faces of people who are getting the music and hopefully figure out that there is something important to get there. Both these pieces do quite efficiently what music is supposed to do (among other things): enlist the support of certain internal sense receptors in your thorax towards the project of flooding your consciousness with emotion, hopefully lifting and shifting some of the entrenched stuff, the worries and...

Do you have any real friends? There are certain simple tests you can apply. On my old blog (the one in Spanish), which I have been increasingly tempted to revive over the past five days, I described one of these, the Cow Test, which, like this one, also allows you to determine whether a particular person is an individualist or a collectivist. I might get on to that later, if I can stay awake long enough. But the Kafka's Crap Friend test is, to my mind, the definitive one. It's also a reason, if you want one, to feel extremely lonely, since if you are anything like me you will find an approximate total of 0 people in your own social circle, with a small margin of error, who pass the test with flying colours. It goes like this. (I am quoting from Wiki simply to save a few keystrokes): Kafka's unfinished works, including his novels Der Process , Das Schloss and Amerika (also known as Der Verschollene , The Man Who Disappeared ), were ordered by Kafka to be destroye...

It had to happen. Apple has finally released Version One of the iConfess, a sophisticated hi-tech gadget aimed at Catholics. Worn on the wrist like a watch, it automatically records your sins as you commit them, storing the details in a database in the Cloud. When the user wishes, he or she can press the Confiteor button, whereupon the sins are sent to a Virtual Confessional, which is basically an interface with the iAbsolve package (whose sysadmins are exclusively drawn from a pool of registered online priests). The iAbsolve groups incoming sins into "sin clusters', via a sophisticated algorithm, and matches each cluster with an appropriate Penance, such that, say, carrying out an Ethnic Cleansing program in Bosnia and then forgetting one's wife's birthday would return a Penance of five Half Arthurs, ten Hail Marys and two Glory Be's. These prayers are then sent via secure connection to the user's iConfess, where pressing the appropriate DoPenance button will ...

Emphysema update: I mentioned early in this blog that I was turning into a barrel (come to think of it, I may have sent that post to the Draft Limbo). If you can recall John Hurt from the first Alien , you'll know what a "chestburster" is. Well, when you have this, your lungs are the chestburster. The interesting part is what happens to your arms. They sort of slide outwards to accommodate, rather neatly considering: there are various frictions and creakings, but on the whole, the bones cope rather well, or have done so far. Sleeping is a bit of a problem, and has to be accomplished via a strategic arrangement of pillows. The main thing about having only a tiny, residual lung capacity is it forces you to avoid anything that might raise adrenaline levels or pulse rate. Also, your thinking becomes woollier by the day, due to long term oxygen depletion. Whole branches of logic become closed to you, and you have to keep going largely on random associations of ideas. That'...

I have met a lot of people who are permanently on the defensive. Sometimes about their competence at work, other times about their appearance, other times about their ideas. Once or twice about other aspects of their alleged "identity", e.g. national or ethnic origin, or more strangely still, the presumed fidelity of their spouse, or the sacred put-uponness of their entire gender, or some such thing. It makes me sad. I should be permanently on the defensive. After all, whatever angle I hold the mirror at, whatever aspect of myself I choose to look at, what is reflected back is a vulnerability, a potential source of shame or embarrassment. There's nothing about me that strikes me as good enough: nothing I can be proud of or assertive about. But I'm not permanently on the defensive. I have the instinct, all the wiring is there, and sometimes it seems to quietly hum to life in the background, just to show it's still operational if needed. Its presence allows me to ...

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I once, over a period of a few months before hitting 40, committed myself to twice-weekly visits to a psychoanalyst, at what was it, maybe 40 euros a throw or thereabouts.  My motive, announced during my first visit, was bafflement and frustration over my own behaviour, in particular my manifest inability to extricate myself from a relationship I was in at the time, a relationship that clearly had no future, and was maintained on the basis of studious, calculated insincerity. My question was fundamentally “why can’t I just come clean and tell her it’s over?”, or alternatively, “why am I such a coward?” I never got an answer. Once, only once, my analyst reflected the question back to me in a different form. “Why,” she asked me in a tone suggestive of bemusement bordering on incredulity, “are you so afraid of a woman’s tears?” That was, and remains, the real question. All my "committed" relationships with women, from the first to the last, wi...

To recap and extend, then. One. When you routinely slag off your intellectual opponents, you are buying into some tribal discourse designed to stop you leaving the village and going out and, you know, exploring stuff. You are playing it safe. You are also exhibiting a raideur mecanique which would have made old Henri Bergson chortle shamelessly. Two. Since most people do this, to slag someone else off for doing it kind of misses the point, as well as taking you back to square one. Do not collect two hundred pounds. And to pretend that, rather than obeying a perfectly natural tribal instinct, your opponents are merely and frivolously being "stupid", is probably a bit frivolous and a bit stupid. The existence of a tribal instinct more than adequately explains how we approach our differences. Dullness is just the extra oregano. Three. We can be very different in what we think about things, yet remarkably similar in how we react when a kitten falls onto our head f...

I hate to break it to you, but the fact that it is now Insert Current Year, and that we are in the Age of the Internet an' all, doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of Bad Ideas floating around. Now, the official line on this, and it's one of those rare things that we seem to all agree on regardless of whether we are theists or atheists, Labour or Tory, pro or anti-Marmite, is that Bad Ideas are a kind of magnet that attracts Bad People. If I'm a Selfish Rich Git, for example, I will naturally, perhaps inevitably, espouse a political ideology and an economic theory conducive to the continued pursuit of Selfish Rich Gittery: I will probably end up as a Conservative, a Free Market Capitalist, a Libertarian, a Monetarist, maybe even a Fascist. If I am a Straight White Male, the headlong flight from the burden of my inherited guilt will naturally drive me towards the fold of White Nationalism (whatever that eats in winter), Men's Rights Activism, or some kind of...

Before you say anything: yes, of course I know that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience. (Sometimes I think science is a pseudoscience, but let's not go there today.) So no, you won't catch me believing in anything, other than people, for which I do make an exception. However, as I already pointed out with regard to Christianity, you don't need to believe in stuff to find it interesting. And what I found interesting about the psychoanalytic method is that there seems to be something alive inside it. I mean, if you take the box and shake it, you hear a faint, plaintive squeaking from inside. Which is more than most pseudosciences will give you, let's face it. In my case it happened like this. A friend recommended Merce, who was reputedly good at fixing broken children. I wasn't a child - must have been getting on for forty by then - but whoever recommended her to me must have thought I was, or that I acted like one, or something. Anyway, I had never been to a shrink...