Let’s open some gates and windows

[araucaria]

Over recent weeks, this forum has been swamped with threads on a certain subject, which is entirely understandable and doubtless doing some people a great deal of good. But it does have a downside, which is that it is itself viral, having all the properties of the outbreak itself. It tends to spread, and while no one knows exactly how it works (it is horribly complex, and in some ways totally new), everyone seems to have thoughts, ideas, opinions, fears, and claimed knowledge – mostly contradictory and horribly jumbled when taken together. In other words, the noise-to-signal ratio has made the whole enterprise in one sense extremely un-helpful, definitely not what we want to be doing. Much of the good is coming from people sharing their experiences, but this can surely be better done by focussing on the positive, and maybe visualizing positive future outcomes.

In particular, the conspiratorial approach is ineffective, inasmuch as basically people are saying nothing new, they tend to bury any useful message while going round in circles and refusing to engage in dialogue with the very people who can actually do something about our current situation. This is not much-touted “awareness”, it is passive resistance. Awareness means being able to negotiate a situation where one is conscious of the danger, but overcoming that danger is not the end per se, it is to some extent just a side issue to doing what we are here to do, in other words a distraction.

Let me take the example of Bill Gates, mentioned in this context as someone who has been vociferous on the currently topical subject. When he airs his sometimes controversial views, he speaks not as a medical doctor, philosopher, politician or sage, but as someone who made a huge fortune selling people multiple versions of a lousy computer operating system they cannot do without very much more than they can do without food. When they change their car, they have lots of makes to choose from if they didn’t like the last one, but for decades Bill Gates cornered the market for an affordable operating system. So Bill Windows is not very popular and needs to be more careful about what he says. But is this the whole story? I think not: while it certainly doesn’t sound very good, it may not be as objectionable as it sounds. Sometimes choices do have to be made. If you could save one of two lives, you would probably save a child, because it saves a whole life, not just the tail end of one.

Reasons to like the man? He likes tennis, and he likes Roger Federer. And he likes the Roger Federer Foundation enough to contribute hugely to that cause. OK, he gets to play an exhibition doubles match with Roger and Rafa Nadal in a full soccer stadium. But the money went to educating the kids in the ghettoes of South Africa where Federer’s mother comes from. Roger Federer is both unlike and like Bill Gates, a leading world figure transcending his professional background. He made his fortune bringing huge enjoyment to millions of fans over an extended career. He is nearly forty and still training hard to compete (world n° 3 on Jan. 1st). Why does he give so much of himself? To win still more trophies and wealth? Of course. To please his fans? Also. To fund his charity? Naturally; because all three motivations – personal ambition on the one hand, altruism on the other, and the give-and-take of adulation in between – are inextricably intertwined and mutually stimulating. It keeps him young, it keeps us happy, and it gives the underprivileged a future. Exceptionally, I have to note that there was one recent criticism, that he had a sponsor who invested heavily in fossil fuels. Yes, he answered, but he talks to these people, using what small influence he may have to do what little he can. Meantime, they are also investing in his philanthropy. Likewise, it is counter-effective to demonize the likes of Bill Gates: you have to listen and talk to those in powerful positions. You may not get through to them, but you have to try. Total diehard opposition is not going to get anything heard or done.

Yesterday Roger Federer donated a million Swiss francs for “unbureaucratic” allocation to those currently in need, with funds available as of today, and with the idea that others will follow.
https://twitter.com/rogerfederer/sta...federer.com%2F
https://twitter.com/rogerfederer/sta...federer.com%2F
The question for readers of this post is to determine whether this Gates-Federer coalition is to be seen as the “bad” dragging down the “good” – many here might say that – or on the contrary the “good” dragging up the “bad”. Bad behaviour is infectious, but then good behaviour is contagious too; it’s called example. Good behaviour is your vaccination against bad. Title for a spaghetti eastern: the good, the bad, and the pretty.
This is why social distancing is problematic: the positive contagion is halted too. But the problem has to be overcome. You need to be able to live with the source of danger, like Anna Breytenbach with the wild leopard Diabolo. In her case, there was no need to bring down the fence or enter the cage, for she was able to communicate telepathically. Telepathy supposedly does not exist but the results are there for all to see. This is one example of novel breakthroughs. Roger Federer has another method: tennis. You don’t need to share race, creed, gender or sexual orientation to enjoy a game of tennis with someone, especially if they donate to your favourite charity. You can keep the social distancing across the net, play at weaponized conflict, and engage in communication, reach a degree of understanding, at some other level. This is all actually very basic stuff, but it needs to be taken to a new level, to create interactions among people who are otherwise seemingly too far apart.

Daniel Schmachtenberger of Rebel Wisdom describes how anything and everything can be weaponized, especially good qualities; and on another level, when weaponization is challenged, that challenge can also be weaponized. This is how we end up fighting a losing battle against masters of weaponization, since wielding weapons is not something we want to be doing. If we try to turn this situation around 180°, where no battle is fought, this would become: anything and everything can be pacified, especially bad qualities; and on another level, when pacification is challenged, that challenge can also be pacified. Quarantine is not the answer; we need healthcare staff with or without facemasks. Schmachtenberger talks about the need to disagree with one’s ingroup, engage with the other side, see why they are compelling even if you don’t agree with them. I suggest we try some of that here.

The current debate on the c-thing is all about dealing with a given source of “evil” which although a potential killer is not necessarily a weapon. Either way, we want to avoid a weaponized response as much as possible through evasive action. This virus crosses the dualistic line of haves and have-nots by introducing an intermediate category of healthy potential carriers, which includes everybody – except after two weeks of self-isolation. So, even if the rules are bad, don’t break the rules. But in any case, the majority are not directly involved in this crisis, and just need to steer clear of it. Meanwhile, they could be doing more emotional and intellectual distancing to tackle the broader issue of what is going on here, without apportioning blame. Let’s just say everyone is doing their level best, only sometimes that is simply not good enough. We need to break with old habits and find something new. To do this on this thread, we need some rules of basic hygiene. Distancing from the bad, also distancing from the good, more reliance on self to come up with answers. If the present is not an ideal time for a little reflective introspection, I don’t know what to say. And if you are living with someone, this is definitely not the time to get into arguments, so you will be finding fresh answers to that problem, avoiding the old button-pressing responses like… the plague. There will be a few divorces when all this is over, but hopefully many will have somehow reached a new understanding of themselves and their partners. This is what a forum like this should be doing on a community level: “increasing collective intelligence” (Daniel Schmachtenberger).

So what do we do on this thread? There is an interesting literary exercise in French called “j’aime, je n’aime pas”, where you list your sundry likes and dislikes, and optionally weave them together. What I am proposing is a kind of embedding of the two. Take someone or something you don’t like and search for something nice to say about them. Alternatively take someone or something you do like and search for something you don’t like about them. (I consider forum members should be strictly off-limits.) This is how a degree of objectivity, aka intellectual distancing, aka common ground, a kind of “everyman’s land”, is attained, and is surely where any nuggets of novelty are going to be found. Until we do that, humanity is fundamentally schizoid, which is not good for anyone.

[araucaria]

No takers? I’m not surprised – or bothered, to be frank.

Confucius he say

It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs.

This is my answer to a thought that often comes to me for one: what is a nice guy like you doing on a conspiracy forum like this? Yeah, think about it. What happened to social distancing? My answer (find your own): it is not so much in my blood as in my method. I have not so much engaged in “conspiracy theory” per se as investigated the subject, discovered how it works (serious research), how it doesn’t work (shortcuts) – in other words the usual mix. In other more respectable circles, you have the serious researchers and the cheats or the incompetent. The mainstream view of “conspiracy theorists” is that they take the shortcuts. That is not an acceptable view because it is in itself a shortcut: many do take shortcuts, but many others go into detail so painstakingly that few are willing to follow. And many mainstream thinkers take the shortcuts too. A whole swathe of data is dismissed out of hand as… “conspiracy theory”. Just ask them how a bullet from behind and above and to the right sent JFK’s head flying backwards and his brains onto the road behind him. And that is before we get to the magic bullet. That example was unnecessary here, but mainstream thinking does exist without shortcuts. This is good news because it means that there are many good people out there waiting to be convinced by arguments yet to be invented.

So what I have been doing for a decade is, to paraphrase our great old Chinese friend, “attempting to appreciate others’ abilities”. They have plenty, but if there is one that I find is somewhat lacking, it is perhaps… their failure to appreciate others’ abilities.

I have suggested on several occasions that we are facing a crisis of leadership. My opening post came somewhat in defence of leaders. Confucius has a cool sense of humour: Confucius he also say

I am a fortunate man. Whenever I make a mistake, other people are sure to notice it.

This is how a situation noted elsewhere comes about: we get the leadership we deserve; it reflects the society it governs, so in a sense it is democratic even without trying. But there is a dynamic to this; it follows a bell curve: every time someone notices a mistake, leaders’ reputations take a nose dive, and it is downhill all the way to rock bottom, when you get jokester journalists, reality show hosts etc. pretending to provide leadership in the very times when it would be best to have someone holding the rudder, some kind of helmsman. This trend can only bottom out when people begin to think that maybe there might be a decent politician or at least a better one to get us out of this mess. For example, if Johnson’s condition deteriorated only slightly – maybe someone can tweak this parameter – someone less totally unsavoury is in line to take over. And as improvements are noted, the standard rises once more. The bottom of a bell curve is a very useful point: sure, you have to build up momentum from zero, but for the first time there is no negative momentum to be overcome first.

In the case at issue, the negative momentum to overcome has been the total opposition to incumbent government by certain quarters, most notably conspiracy forums, who have dismissed our leaders as not only as eternal incumbents, but also incompetents, criminals, pedophiles, Satanists, reptilians, evil ETs, you name it. Note: I am not saying any of this is right or wrong. I am not speaking in angelic/moralistic terms, but in practical, mechanical terms. What do you expect: to walk into government advisory teams instead of the likes of Dominic Cummings? Time to get real, it ain’t gonna happen. If you are looking to play a responsible role in society, you have managed to jump to the back of the queue.

Back to Confucius:

Excessive detestation of men who are not benevolent will provoke them to unruly behaviour.

The thing is that (speaking for myself) the leadership qualities we find so abysmal in those in positions of power, we do not ourselves possess. Maybe we should cut them a bit of slack: try comparing your really really bad day at the office with par for the course in charge of a country with serious problems, as they all have. Sure, we are not getting the right people to the top, much of the time at least. But if this is to change, one of the things that needs to change is the idea that the job will attract more people than at present preferring “earnest endeavour” (to quote Daniel Schmachtenberger). In France at the moment, good local mayors have been walking out because the responsibilities far outweigh the incentives. This is not where we want to be.

Where is Confucius when you need him? Right here:

The Book of History says: ‘Simply by being a good son and friendly to his brothers, a man can exert an influence upon government.’ In so doing a man is, in fact, taking part in government.

That was a long time ago. Nowadays that process needs to inspire some good sons and daughters to step forward to positions of responsibility – people whom the current climate has naturally held back. The time is coming when they will be able to take us all into new territory. Which brings me back to Roger Federer, as a leading role model, able to reach out way beyond his original area of skill. Larger than life at every level – huge ego, big on family (when he has kids, he has twins!), big on his fan base, big on charity work. He is not alone, not in tennis, not in sport, not in society. The potential is out there. But at the moment, theirs are lone voices speaking to big business. All the same, their whisper is being heard. Time to turn it into a roar: the support is there.

Ultimately, what is needed to make things happen is not people sticking to their sacrosanct principles; it is people willing to forget anything so rigid and reach out to others – don’t be scared, they ARE going to be (very) different. Step out of your ingroup, that’s the message, the solution and the desired outcome!

[rgray222]

Posted by araucaria (here)
I have suggested on several occasions that we are facing a crisis of leadership.
we get the leadership we deserve; it reflects the society it governs

Regarding leaders, all things change, technology, people, leaders, power, countries, viruses,  even time and gravity change. But the one thing that has remained constant is we that we allow one strong leader to make decisions for the entire tribe. It has been this way since the beginning of time. In the beginning, a leader would claim his authority by imposing his physical brute force over the rest of the tribe. Yes, we have gotten a bit more civilised using the ballot box instead of a club but it is essentially the same.

Maybe it is time that we start to move away from how the world governs. Let's not think in terms of prime ministers, presidents, dictators, premiers or (god forbid) supreme leaders. Let's think more in terms of groups of elders that have no vested interested in getting rich or building power. I am not talking about one-world government but a  group of elders that serve a short (3-5 years) time and then move on. Once this practive gets implemented in a few respected countries it would probably sweep through the planet. When the time is right (probably 100 years or more) this same principle (elders) could be moved onto a world stage. 

So, I am not really sure where you are going with this thread so a little clarification would be helpful.

[DeDukshyn]

I generally despise politicians and "leaders" ... yes I have a problem with authority, and I see no hierarchies - just people. Flawed people, as we al are.

When we look out and imagine the elite, see the general ineptitude of our so called presidents and prime ministers, I am not sure we can expect or trust their ability to lead positive change in this world. From their view, too much risk is hinged on making changes that will disrupt the massive banking systems that control the global economies. So they stay in line ... whether they like it or not.

Ok, here's my flip side. These people are inept. So why do we keep getting so angry at them and critical when the act inept? They are no better than you or me, wading through the evil systems that have been established over the millennia - even if they have pure hearts, you can't express that within these systems. Higher levels control or buy out lower levels, etc.

I am willing to bet that the vast majority of our leaders, politicians, prime ministers, etc. don't have a complete grasp on the level of their ineptitude, nor of the motivations behind many of the systems that I previously mentioned. I believe many of these people, even through their sometimes apparent selfish actions, genuinely believe they are making a difference. They perhaps aren't thinking or seeing through the systems, but rather, how to make things better within the systems, and herein lies the main flaw. They are caught up within, and they aren't seeing things from the outside view -- because their job is to govern within the system .. they rarely think outside of it, as visionaries do.

Is there any world leader that would even try seek to completely dismantle the international banking systems? None. Not because none have ever thought of it, or didn't have a desire, but because the risk of collapsing the global economy is great - almost inevitable, if one tries to take that route and even partly succeeds. So they don't think that big or that freely, the way people like many members here do. They are blinded.

We, the masses, are more polarized than ever ... imagine running a country where half the people hate you and half love you ... what do you do? Tread carefully ... trading carefully though allows for little change or disruption.

My point?

We aren't going to get any further ahead by hoping, wishing or wanting our political structures to change, or by getting angry -- the masses turn on each other when they become angry at systems or politicians - so its not helping us to think that way. We need to let our leaders know that we understand the problems and complications of this world, far more then they could ever imagine that we do. We need to find ways to peacefully express our desire for better ways and promote them with logic and care - as Daniel Schmachtenberger is doing.

We need to help our politicians understand that we want new ways, that we are sick of the old systems. Most of them are doing their best to cope in difficult times just as we are, they aren't better than us, more intelligent, maybe they have more charisma, but that alone comes with no actual skill.

So let's maybe start seeing them for what they are instead of holding them on this pedestal, then ripping into them for not being worthy of that pedestal in the first place. They're just people, and they need our support to help guide them through a process of change. They can't do that for us. We need to set realistic expectations of our leaders.

We need to see them reflected in ourselves, and we must act accordingly.



Ok that was my attempt at seeing the flip side of my distrust of politicians ... heh. But its true, and I do have a strong sentiment that we expect way too much of them - they are even more tightly handicapped than we are in the ability to bring about change. We need to show them how it can be done ... somehow ... maybe create small communities (real or virtual) with different values, different structures, different ways of seeing things ... but then express this, not keep it.

[araucaria]

Thank you for your responses. Basically what we find is the idea of an ingroup, whatever it be, and an outgroup, in other words a partitioning. To see this as somehow desirable in the long-term is to overlook our common humanity. Many current critiques of the elite amount to denying their humanity: demonizing them. This is the historical backlash from eons of them divinizing themselves.

What we mean by humanity is two things: first, belonging to a physical species, homo dot x.y; and secondly the positive qualities associated therewith. The problem seems to be that humanity in the latter sense is somehow optional. So we may say that the overall quality of humanity is its humanity/inhumanity. This is where the work of Anna Breytenbach is important. She interacts telepathically with a leopard and reports back in English to her fellow humans. So, what would be the qualities of “leopardity” as opposed to humanity? Why is this animal aggressive? The “leopardist” response would be something like “I enjoy a nice juicy human rumpsteak now and again, why don’t you humour me?” But what we get is more like what we call… humanity: “I expect a little more respect”; and “I’ve been worried sick about the two little ones next door: are they OK?” In other words, a sense of worth of self and of others: charisma and charity, values in which humans have been found lacking, which is why he is as angry as hell, especially because he can’t get through to them. Then Anna comes along and shows that humans can hear him and understand him after all. His problems are solved when we realize that they were our problems all along.

Our problem then is in understanding that “humanity” is a pale copy of something bigger, let’s capitalize it as “Humanity”, which is an interspecies concept. As a result, non-humanity is not devoid of Humanity, although it may be devoid of inhumanity. So there would be no point in denying the humanity of the elite, since the notion extends beyond our own particular race. I don’t want to dwell on the issue of the cubs: concern for others and young ones is not too surprising in the animal kingdom as it is something we are totally familiar with in ordinary society (although possibly not so much among the elite). But before I come to the other point, let me emphasize that the leopard does not understand inhumanity, because it only encounters it in us humans. Angelic beings such as they are described DO understand inhumanity, but again only because they encounter it in us humans. The bottom line, then, is that when we encounter inhumanity, it is coming from nowhere else but ourselves.

Since we encounter inhumanity in ourselves and don’t like it, then my saying that humanity is somehow optional needs rephrasing: there is some unwanted thing sticky to our humanity that we can’t shake off. Something very like a virus. What we call evil is more like disease, the difference being that you want rid of the disease, not the person, who may be a loved one and is in any case someone’s loved one. (To reiterate: if there is something you don’t like about Bill Gates, it wouldn’t stop you playing tennis with the guy.) I mentioned elsewhere that the Bible story of original sin is a tale of infection: Eve fails to keep her social distancing from some snaky entity; she gets infected, infects Adam, and together they infect the entire race. That is definitely some kind of pandemic. The apple (sometimes it will be a lot of berries) is a pretty smart image for what is invisible: you ingest something that destroys you from the inside. God’s injunction in the Garden of Eden was no authoritarian command: it was an emergency health warning.

But the need to command respect is more germane to this discussion, for it is something this big cat Spirit (ex-Diabolo) rightly thinks we have trouble understanding. The existence of an elite is the result of a confiscation of this sense of self-worth among ordinary people. The problem becomes insoluble when viewed as species-based issue that has lasted for thousands of years. But it can be scaled right down to authoritarianism or paternalism at an individual level. It is an ineffective approach where the corresponding effective solution is education. It goes like this. You can’t do this properly (because I haven’t taught you). So I’ll do it myself. No one can do it like I can, so no one gets to do it and so no one gets to learn. This approach is ineffective because anyone who makes themselves irreplaceable is placing an intolerable burden on their own shoulders. When they are unable to go on, as inevitably happens at some point, there will be an awkward transitional period while others learn from scratch and get up to speed. This is how castes are formed, when one group’s self-worth is raised at the expense of everyone else’s. People who were simply leaders became gods and it has been one long downward slide ever since. In the 17th century, Charles I of England was still touting this divine right of kings nonsense… until he was beheaded. This problem is still with us to the present day, because as government becomes intrinsically ever more difficult, the need to pretend to have some control is ever greater, and in fact many are buying into the idea that the controllers actually do have what amounts to a stranglehold. It was always make-believe and the lie has only got bigger, along with the level of incompetence.

Hence history, which is supposedly records the magnificent deeds of kings and queens, is actually a record of successive epidemics. In her book, The March of Folly, Barbara W. Tuchman describes folly as the “pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest”. American independence and Vietnam are two later examples. Her first example is the wooden horse of Troy, which is perhaps not entirely legendary and would be another instance of a kind of infection: why did the Trojans allow this foreign body inside their walls, against the rules of common sense and the advice of seers like Cassandra and Laocoon, not to mention the sound of men hidden inside? Well they did.

Her second example is more interesting: the case of six powerful Renaissance popes, rival elite families like the Medici and the Borgias, who splashed their fortunes on making the Vatican the sumptuous place we know today, providing endless work for the great sculptors and painters of the day, Michelangelo and the rest. Except for Leonardo da Vinci, who gave them a wide berth and followed Francis I into self-isolation in France with his Mona Lisa in tow. This tiny picture was Leonardo’s monosyllabic answer to the Sistine Chapel and everything else: just a wry smile by way of social distancing.

(I have posted quite extensively on this subject notably here)


The Church, built up over a period of fifteen hundred years, was brought to its knees in half a century of corruption, depravity and paganism, and a total lack of real Christianity, with the sack of Rome and the Reformation, from which it never really recovered. Folly like this is also called “killing the goose that lays the golden egg”. The monopoly on religion of the universal (catholic) church was downsized to Roman proportions and the money-making operation had to make way for a degree of spiritual endeavour which more than ever before meant cutting out the middle man, the priest.

History is full of such self-inflicted disasters by people in power which are proportionately beneficial for ordinary folks. The story of Diabolo the leopard is the same: his career as a circus animal, even a retired one, is well and truly over; the spiritual reformation has begun. This is where the conspiracy narrative of increasing – soon to be total – control is so completely preposterous. It presupposes that every time one of these events occurs, everything goes according to plan, meaning that the real beneficiaries are always out of sight, behind the scenes. This opens the floodgates to all kinds of speculations and visualizations. Some depictions of St George slaying the dragon feature an animal no bigger than, and as harmless as a… pangolin.


The logical conclusion from this is that the evil at play here is, as it always was, at the threshold of visibility, and indeed reality. Thousands of years ago, it could be as big as a real-life pharaoh – or later a king – whom nobody really saw, except as an ordinary human: maybe you had to empty his chamber pot. Over time, royalty and presidents have become so insignificant that they have become fully human or nearly so, and powerless: if you are still squeezing toothpaste onto his toothbrush, you are the very last of the Mohicans. Nowadays, given the current state of our science, it would have to be something really small, like a virus. This is the good news: to make itself invisible, evil is getting so tiny that it has little room to manoeuvre. When it gets to the size of a quark, life will be largely free of the problem. And the really good news is this: whatever be the scale on which we are individually seeing this thing, WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME PAGE. And that page reads as follows: what is vanishingly small… vanishes.

[onawah]

It's not easy to know how to respond to your posts, Araucaria, other than just to thank you so much for your brilliant insights.
...For helping me to find a space where I can get calm, take a deep breath, and discover that all the squawking, dissonant voices in my head are suddenly silenced.
And the clear light of reason is showing the way through the smoke and mirrors once again.
I look forward to seeing the good sons and daughters stepping forward.
I think they won't have to tax their brains in trying to figure it all out; the necessary steps will be simple and clear to them.
It will be a whole new paradigm, and will come about as naturally as the sun and the rain.
We of the old paradigm just have to make sure that there is enough left for them to work with...

Posted by araucaria (here)
No takers? I’m not surprised – or bothered, to be frank.

The Book of History says: ‘Simply by being a good son and friendly to his brothers, a man can exert an influence upon government.’ In so doing a man is, in fact, taking part in government.

That was a long time ago. Nowadays that process needs to inspire some good sons and daughters to step forward to positions of responsibility – people whom the current climate has naturally held back. The time is coming when they will be able to take us all into new territory. Which brings me back to Roger Federer, as a leading role model, able to reach out way beyond his original area of skill. Larger than life at every level – huge ego, big on family (when he has kids, he has twins!), big on his fan base, big on charity work. He is not alone, not in tennis, not in sport, not in society. The potential is out there. But at the moment, theirs are lone voices speaking to big business. All the same, their whisper is being heard. Time to turn it into a roar: the support is there.

Ultimately, what is needed to make things happen is not people sticking to their sacrosanct principles; it is people willing to forget anything so rigid and reach out to others – don’t be scared, they ARE going to be (very) different. Step out of your ingroup, that’s the message, the solution and the desired outcome!

[Mashika]

I believe Bill Gates is both one of the best resources humanity could have and one of the worse

He is very very smart, way more than most people, he also cold and direct, and evil in his own way. For people like him, you feel like you are always a few steps behind and if you look into his eyes you can tell he has been talking about something as "part" of a bigger plan you are not and won't be part of unless you have something big to contribute, he has always been like that

I don't know about the other guy, but if you know Bill Gates just a bit you will know he talks about saving some specific resource (even life) just because he needs it for a bigger plan where that resource is essential, otherwise he would not bother as it doesn't make any sense to spend your time and energy on a resource you don't need. It's all about logic

[araucaria]

Thank you, dear Onawah, for those kind words, they are enough motivation to keep going. Sometimes I see good people here saying there is no place for mind and so on. I think they may be just a tiny bit afraid that if you start thinking too hard, something unfortunate might slip out. In my experience, thinking straight is just an effective discipline as the more esoteric ones; if you are doing it right, there is nothing to fear, not even fear itself. And if you are doing it wrong, not only will there be plenty of people to let you know, but the practice itself is the best teacher: it sounds wrong. If it makes sense, then it is probably good; similarly mathematicians and others have an aesthetic criterion to evaluate a theorem. And of course, it is not an either/or: you don’t shut down your intuition/higher self or whatever, you bring them into play as well. Which is why broadly correct reasoning will invariably lead to positive thinking. I take this to be axiomatic.
Mashika, thank you too, especially for this: “you can tell he has been talking about something as "part" of a bigger plan you are not and won't be part of unless you have something big to contribute”. This is precisely how I have been describing the situation with forums like this; we can talk away and it doesn’t really matter in the bigger scheme of things, until we have, as you say, “something big to contribute”. Here is a mentality to be avoided: to sum in two propositions: good leaders listen to the people they need to near; bad leaders don’t listen to me.

[onawah]

Most welcome, Araucaria! Your posts help to keep me coming back here for fresh inspiration.
You wrote: "we can talk away and it doesn’t really matter in the bigger scheme of things, until we have, as you say, “something big to contribute”
...or perhaps something small to contribute...the tiny home movement seems to be a good example of that, imho.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oJrrfcRdXCg

(Also posted here:https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1348755)

Posted by onawah (here)
I look forward to seeing the good sons and daughters stepping forward.
I think they won't have to tax their brains in trying to figure it all out; the necessary steps will be simple and clear to them.
It will be a whole new paradigm, and will come about as naturally as the sun and the rain.
We of the old paradigm just have to make sure that there is enough left for them to work with...

Posted by araucaria (here)
No takers? I’m not surprised – or bothered, to be frank

The Book of History says: ‘Simply by being a good son and friendly to his brothers, a man can exert an influence upon government.’ In so doing a man is, in fact, taking part in government.

That was a long time ago. Nowadays that process needs to inspire some good sons and daughters to step forward to positions of responsibility – people whom the current climate has naturally held back.
The time is coming when they will be able to take us all into new territory. The potential is out there. But at the moment, theirs are lone voices speaking to big business. All the same, their whisper is being heard. Time to turn it into a roar: the support is there.

Ultimately, what is needed to make things happen is not people sticking to their sacrosanct principles; it is people willing to forget anything so rigid and reach out to others – don’t be scared, they ARE going to be (very) different. Step out of your ingroup, that’s the message, the solution and the desired outcome!

Posted by araucaria (here)
Mashika, thank you too, especially for this: “you can tell he has been talking about something as "part" of a bigger plan you are not and won't be part of unless you have something big to contribute”. This is precisely how I have been describing the situation with forums like this; we can talk away and it doesn’t really matter in the bigger scheme of things, until we have, as you say, “something big to contribute”. Here is a mentality to be avoided: to sum in two propositions: good leaders listen to the people they need to near; bad leaders don’t listen to me.

[araucaria]

I have had difficulty continuing with this thread on the unexpected relationship between Roger Federer and Bill Gates because since I started it, the gap has widened with the latter being presented almost as the devil incarnate, while the former remains among public figures one of the most decent human beings you will find among public figures, let’s put it that way. Also, as time passes, the title of this thread sounds like an attempt to hasten an end to lockdown. That will follow its course, but certainly, we need an end to lockdown and to oppose anything that seeks to perpetuate the current restrictions beyond what is strictly necessary. I mostly wrote this piece over ten days ago, so the hard part has been posting it. I now think it is the right thing to do.

Why ordinary people should feel so strongly about their leaders one way or the other – for so long it was veneration, now it is aversion and disgust – is a question no one really looks into, perhaps because we feel we live in democratic times, and are loath to see a discontinuity between “us and them”. While the rulers are not gods, or extra-terrestrials, but just ordinary people, this does not necessarily mean that “we are all in this together” on an equal footing. It only takes an elite to think otherwise for their posture – however one wants to describe it – to become our reality to a certain degree. The problem facing democracy is that oligarchs can happily live with a bunch of democrats under them. Everyone pays lip service to democracy while enabling something rather different to occur. Life is a whole lot more varied that we can imagine as individuals. Democracy may slip into the illusion that everyone is just like me, or should be. On the contrary, it is a matter of looking after minorities. Oligarchy is merely one minority looking after itself at others’ expense, thereby creating a silent majority, which has strength in numbers and only needs to find its voice.

One sign that there is something amiss is the research of Dr Michael Newton into what happens between lifetimes. I am fairly agnostic on the issue of past lives, but am happy to examine how the work of a… lifetime by a serious researcher might fit into the bigger picture we are all trying to construct. What I find most interesting is not what he says, but what he doesn’t say. All his clients have a rest period, conduct a post-mortem inquiry, and work out a scenario for a next life, all within the overall framework of personal improvement. It is very striking how at this level, it is all about little me, granted working within a small group. For centuries, this consumer approach was fair enough for most people, but not any more. Increasingly, we come here to be confronted with global management issues that are frankly way beyond our pay grade. As I recall (from a few years back), none of Dr Newton’s clients have anything remotely to do with running the planet. His sample population must be too small. This would suggest to me that there is a whole separate scheme going on with a different group of souls assigned to these tasks. There must be a whole lot of other stuff as well going on in the world between lifetimes, and down here too, but let’s just stick to two programmes: the rulers and the rest. The longer we discover this negative agenda has been going on, the clearer it becomes that it is a legitimate component of the overall project.

What this would mean is that this planet of so-called duality is actually designed with two (actually multiple) layers: on the lines, say, of some kind of business with a front office and a back office, or maybe a school, where what we took for senior pupils are actually members of staff, not there to learn at all, but just the opposite, to teach. Or you might think of a rugby team practising alone at running forward while avoiding any forward passes to each other, because it’s against the rules. Imagine them suddenly thrown into a match situation, with these other guys who are running in the other direction and making what look like nothing but forward passes, and keeping the ball to themselves whenever they can. This is the kind of difference one sees in preparing a lifetime and actually living it with the veil of forgetfulness. The rules have not changed, but there is an extra parameter. Our leaders do not have our best interests at heart, at least not directly.

Perhaps the best illustration of this sort of coming and going is provided in the operas of Giacomo Puccini. In La Bohème he has an introverted couple, Mimi and Rodolfo, singing beautiful arias and an extraverted couple mostly arguing with each other. At the end of Act III, Mimi and Rodolfo want to separate, for while she thinks he is jealous she discovers he is actually being protective because she is seriously ill; he says he is killing her on account of his squalid living conditions in winter. So this would not be so much a real split as self-isolation, but (life is short and love is sweet) they decide against it until the spring (she dies in Act IV). Meanwhile, the other two are bickering away, which may on one level be seen as an annoying distraction, but is really just boisterous life going on as usual. From this other standpoint, it is the sickness and death that is the distraction, and a morbid one at that; but either way the music, taken as a whole, reflects the intermingling of both: not necessarily to say it is all good, but that it is all happening at once. The composer, as his title suggests, is trying to hold everything together under great tension, i.e. reach a composition. Even though what is more attractive is actually more unhealthy.

The lesson is that we find a bewildering number of things going on in the world, many of which we obviously don’t like, because it is catering for all tastes. We really do tend to think that the world should be more in line with our personal tastes, and run by like-minded people, but this is a totally unreasonable expectation, until of course enough people come together and put their differences to one side. The inconvenient truth is that the elite have been doing this better and for longer than anyone else. One reason why it is difficult is that it can be perceived as a restriction on one’s personal freedoms. Clearly the elite have overcome that difficulty. The difficulty now facing the elite is coming from the opposition.

What we are seeing at this time more than ever is the interdependence of two types of existence, tending towards and away from individualism. It is interesting to see the Republican Ron Paul denouncing the decisions of the current – Republican – administration as socialist/communist because they do not allow total individual responsibility for risk-taking: centralized risk-taking by risky individuals can of course be hugely dangerous, but so can millions of individual risk-takers doing their own thing. It is a two-way flow; the elite individualist concentrates a huge degree of power only by taking it from many others, with or without their consent. One term for this is energy vampirism; but to use it would be to tread over the many complexities of this issue. For example, it is not a suitable term for vegans to describe carnivores, nor is it the term used by carnivores to describe vegans eating carrots. Let’s stick to talking about energy sources. Other people can be a direct or indirect energy source, and it is not all bad: no one would criticize a baby for suckling its mother. Nor is it necessarily food we are talking about: more like fuel. An effective couple has an understanding of rocket science, where liquid fuel and liquid oxygen feed off each other to produce thrust: it works both ways.

Regarding consent, historically no consent was necessary from the ignorant masses. As they begin to wise up, the issue of consent is becoming crucial. I would suggest that things are moving a little too quickly for some abusers, who are now landing in jail for behaviour that until recently was considered normal in certain circles. We are not usually in a position to pronounce one way or the other. Unusually, the case of Roger Federer is massively consensual: people are only too happy to contribute since he has put so much back in such a direct and obvious way into the game of tennis, into society in general and certain poor children in particular. The case of Bill Gates is somewhat less obvious, and on altogether a bigger scale. The power of his grudgingly paid money is finding a more devious route to doing we are not sure what; but you would also need to factor in all the good that has been done on your computer, on mine and on billions of others. The fact remains for example that this post is being written courtesy of Windows7, and so the man is open to challenge by his own creature. Good and evil are rather inextricably intertwined.

While consent is not necessarily giveable by the poor at the level of this earthly plane, there seems to be no shortage of consent between lives to take on this type of role when choosing a lifetime. This would be how we become complicit: the huge population explosion is largely going on in India and China and a few other places. Soul evolution is taking place on a vast scale in this manner. We may be judging this situation undesirable from our present standpoint, the way we despise where we came from, like children looking down on the baby class they were in only last year. However, if we take the full spectrum into account, we see a bigger picture. The elites “feed off” the poor, energetically speaking, but at the same time, the poor “feed off” everyone “above” them (including you and me), in spiritual terms. So basically, the idea is to create a win-win situation, which may admittedly encounter periods of turbulence. The population explosion is uncontrolled by the elite, who are getting too much of a good thing, especially as many of the poor may actually be evolved souls teaching some hard lessons, such as learning what the word Win really means. The softball – microsoftball – is over: the Windoze CEO is learning some winning hardball skills with a real champion.

We read on another thread the connection between Bill Gates and the Nazis through IBM. Yes, the Nazis ran the labour camps (and lots of other stuff) using early IBM software – the Hollerith system. And yes, the Nazis ran America through the CIA. Now you have America running the modern labour camps on an unprecedented scale: the Chinese sweatshops set in place, according to Clif High, by the Bushes to replace the American working classes back in the days when world population was rising from 4 to 5 billion. It is now of course 50% higher.

What is interesting here is how these labour camps are run. The Nazis brought in criminals and resistance fighters in sufficient numbers to be able to work/starve/shoot them to death until they discovered they were losing the war and needed an effective labour force. The situation in China is the reverse, since the labour force has had time to increase and multiply, which is another way of cheapening it. But again, things have got out of hand, only in the opposite direction, and what has happened is that the obvious solution, forced population control, is now also well past its democratically acceptable sell-by date. The Bill Gates solution would appear to be the next worst American solution to this American-made problem. The German situation was only solved following international wartime and postwar intervention. The Swiss approach being applied on a small scale by the Roger Federer Foundation in South Africa suggests a way forward: financial aid to provide education and better living standards, and presumably no unwanted interference and no exploitation. In other words, when you have a qualitative, instead of a quantitative approach to humanity, the money flows in the opposite direction.

Let me make a neutral statement about the two gentlemen involved: there is nothing terribly democratic in this: you buy your Microsoft license and the money goes wherever; you pay to watch Roger Federer, and you conceivably do not like where the money goes. The odds are much higher that you will, but no democracy is involved. Or maybe, very precisely, there is. It may be safer to say that no economic equality is involved: either between us and the millionaire or between us and the underprivileged, where the ordinary person acts as an intermediary. This is the sort of relationship in which the “middle-class”, the “silent majority” or whatever you want to call it, can be mobilized “with extreme advantage”, a phrase you may not have heard before, because I just made it up We don’t have the cash, we don’t have the need for cash, but many of us can contribute in a small way to getting the cash to where it’s needed… via where it’s not needed. The middle class as the middle man. It doesn’t actually cost us anything: we get to watch some top tennis; and our own game may improve considerably as well. It doesn’t actually cost the super-rich anything either. If philanthropy doesn’t kick in when you everything you could possibly need, then you are truly lost. Just hand over the surplus to those in dire need (cf. the New Testament story of Dives and Lazarus).

So why does Dives have such trouble helping Lazarus? The advantage of writing as an intellectual exercise is that you write things down which can then be picked up again. I wrote earlier that from an inter-life viewpoint, the system was designed as a win-win situation. At some point, it would seem that the economics of human interaction flipped over into a win-lose scenario. My credit is your debit. How did this happen? It didn’t have to be some diabolical plot. It may have been a tiny, silly glitch. When as a self-employed person I do my personal accounts using the double-entry bookkeeping system, my revenues become negative sums in order to balance the books with my expenditures. It is only when I reach the famous “bottom line” that the negative balance is posted as a profit. Now just suppose that some distracted entrepreneur got it into his head that every time he made some money, it was a negative amount, so he needed to do better. And that he raised six sons to take over his business… Several generations later… It might be something as silly as that. Which means that it might be an equally tiny realization of that nature that turns the tables.

You begin to understand why a simple thing like – for example only, we can all do it – Bill Gates talking to his friend Roger Federer exposes the entire world to the flap of a butterfly’s wings.

Here is a concrete illustration of how this book-keeping thing would work. Take a “not-for-profit” “religious” “charity” such as David Wilcock’s. The copious use of quotes suggests that everything is back to front. Money comes in, but the bucks stop there: there is no needy beneficiary to pass it on to. The supposed outlay is reversed into income. The Roger Federer Foundation (links below) is the exact reverse of this; or to put it another way, it starts where Wilcock leaves off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fODc...ture=emb_title
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKSA...re=emb_rel_end
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mVscVVFWRg
The incoming money is not the problem; no donations are actively sought after, the basic idea being to spend the income from an honest, lucrative tennis activity. It is genuine giving, not taking, and the real-life beneficiaries will see this as some kind of angelic intervention. Sixteen years after receiving the first preschool aid (and the subsequent education), the older kids will now be in their twenties and making this generous investment in human resources begin to pay several times over in self-sustaining ways. That is how charity is supposed to operate and is often being hijacked. Being so huge, the Gates Foundation is probably a bit of both; I don’t really know and don’t really need to know. Roger Federer pays tribute to the Gates Foundation but as far as I can tell (and he is pretty transparent), he is totally doing his own thing with no contamination of any kind. I think he is seeing the good in himself in Bill Gates, and maybe Bill Gates is seeing Roger as another Bill Gates. Oil and vinegar don’t mix.

But of course, oil and vinegar (or lemon juice) do mix very nicely when you add an emulsifier such as mustard for French dressing or egg yolk for mayonnaise, always provided you don’t overdo the acidity. I find this culinary metaphor very useful in understanding the world. Einstein’s equation is a recipe for combining energy and matter with a lot of light. Our bitter-sweet vinaigrette of an existence holds together for the most part. The postwar Nazis working actively towards nuclear warfare never succeeded, when normally speaking it was all but a done deal, and in fact it is a scenario that appears to have been played out in the past. This time something miraculous happened to prevent it. Read Daniel Ellsberg.

The current viral attack is more of the same, and will not work either. A pandemic is a similar type of destructiveness requiring a critical mass to be reached in order to produce a runaway effect, again on human life. A virus is a parasitical form of non-life that relies on life in order to exist and paradoxically has killing life as a byproduct of this existence. It is a kind of vinegar that can only survive when mixed with oil. Viruses are an integral component of life on earth. In other words, we are like oil that cannot get away from vinegar. The emulsifying medium is light, love and light if you will, or acceptance that it takes a bit of both. The Roger Federer charity operates on the basis of accepting that beside wealth and comfort there is poverty and hardship in the world and that the two need to interact, including in Switzerland where poverty also exists, only not so conspicuously.

The same goes for the incipient pandemic. You have two kinds of humans, the infected and the healthy, with a doubtful middle group, people seen either as healthy carriers or as painfree sufferers. Finding a cure is not totally necessary since, as with seasonal flu, people usually recover anyway, unless already very ill. On the other hand, immunity, whether natural or by vaccination, is the way to confine infection to acceptable numbers. As I said earlier, confinement is another word for lockdown. The ultimate aim is confinement in the nuclear energy sense, i.e. confining the disease itself, not the people. I read on this forum people saying there is no safe vaccine. I posted elsewhere how the principle of a safe-as-can-be vaccine was discovered centuries ago by the Chinese. The trick is to use a vanishingly small (homoeopathic) dose of as dead as possible virus. Obviously, if you don’t respect the protocol, then a vaccine can easily become lethal. Interestingly, they used to make vaccines with egg yolk, a bit like mayonnaise…

The final twist to this story is to view the world of charity work as being itself an example of this process. If there is too much acidity, the only solution is to increase the oil, which has the overall effect of increasing the quantity of French dressing: you may end up with more than you need, but it is all good. Runaway overpopulation is not toxic like a runaway virus. But it does need to be stopped, and the way to achieve that is to stop adding more vinegar. The miracle that we saw (or rather didn’t see) in the nuclear holocaust scenario will kick in here when it becomes totally clear that the flow of oil will always be too strong. The elite are the cause of the overpopulation they are fighting. The controllers are not in control, and never were.

What we are seeing is a deep state, evil force, I’m not terribly interested in names, “adding more vinegar”, which is what it does, unstoppably by the other side, which can only “pour more oil”. Why this should be is because the proportions are a law of nature. Going back to Einstein’s equation, light is more than just an emulsifier, it also determines the precise dosage of matter to energy needed to keep this part of the universe together. The sheer folly of destructive breakout would seem to be not an option this time around; I guess it never is, until it happens: let’s say it is needless. In the historical study I mentioned earlier, The March of Folly, Barbara W. Tuchman writes:

The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness, and this underlines two characteristics of folly: it often does not spring from a great design, and its consequences are frequently a surprise. The folly lies in persisting thereafter. With acute if unwitting significance, a French historian wrote of the Revocation that ‘Great designs are rare in politics; the King proceeded empirically and sometimes impulsively.’ His point is reinforced from an unexpected source in a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, ‘in analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.’ This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings of power deceive us, endowing the possessors with a quality larger than life. (p. 19)

Which is precisely where this post started. Folly as persistence cannot persist indefinitely.

[araucaria]

Concomitance. I am repatriating the next post after this one, which in its later section covers three major issues occurring together in the mid-sixth century: plague, earth changes and political upheaval. Correlation is not causation; concomitance is not even correlation. It is germane to this thread in that the puzzling interaction of Bill Gates and Roger Federer I believe is an example of concomitance rather than something else.

I use the term concomitance to describe events that are neither causally related nor acausally unrelated. They simply accompany each other, with the degree of chance left open or unknown. When we say for example, there is no smoke without fire, one is not the cause of the other, but they tend greatly to be concomitant. The y have the same cause, e.g., someone striking a match, but actually, very often the more you have of the one you have the less you have of the other, the one being a combination of fire and water, the other a combination of fire and air. So multiple causality makes for complexity, just as we all have two causes (each parent) as well as a single cause (their union). Also individual causes can have multiple effects. Say – avoiding stereotypes – your father gave you blue eyes and a gift for embroidery, your mother large feet and a taste for weightlifting. So we are visiting this grey area between total causation and random coincidence.

Concomitance is so universal that we don’t see it. Correlation and a fortiori causation are like crumbs of food the goldfish comes across in its bowl, the rest is just the watery medium through which it travels. Not much of a life perhaps, but the analogy can be scaled up to the world’s oceans with their globe-trotting species such as whales. Quite a bit can happen outside of mealtimes: things we witness, others in which we play some part.

The term we would use with regard to political leaders would be to say something happened “on their watch”. This is a bit like being at the scene of the crime in the company of bandits. You may just be an innocent brother or girlfriend, but the police will round you up with the rest of them. Here in France, former prime ministers have received suspended jail sentences for this sort of thing (contaminated blood during the HIV scare, fictitious jobs for political advisers from the public purse), denying guilt while admitting responsibility; while these politicians were not ostracized, this did fall from grace somewhat. As with (un)lawful killing and everything else, there is a whole spectrum of situations for which too many keyboard judges fail to make adequate allowance. There is one counter-intuitive reason for this, namely that the huger the event that has taken place, the more horrendous the crime, when it is judged to be a crime (see next post). However when, or to the extent that, culpability is taken out of the equation, the huger the event, the harder it becomes to apportion individual blame beyond a flat-rate responsibility.

There are other ways of exploring this spectrum. An artistic montage, assemblage or “installation” brings together items that have no causal connection, in other words it creates concomitance with a view to producing meaning. You can do it with language: a successful pun creates new meaning by bringing together two separate ideas on the basis of concomitant vocabulary. So these are mechanisms with positive potential. Meanwhile, these same procedures are also the basis of sloppy logic and downright lies. The reason for this is easy to understand: a tool will do the things it is designed for, but also things it is not designed for. You use a rolling pin to make a pie, but we know that in the wrong hands or in the wrong mood it can be used for all manner of mischief. There is a relationship of concomitance between the two situations due to the object’s shared property with a particular category also including baseball bats, policeman’s truncheons etc.

In chemistry you have two basic situations when two things come together. A mixture is when two substances cohabit in the same space. A solution is a mixture of a particular type, where a solid is absorbed by a liquid without undergoing any other change. The second class is compounds, where for example chlorine, a gas, reacts with sodium, a metal, to form common salt, which is a crystal, neither gas nor metal. The recent episode where Trump reportedly recommended using detergent (or bleach) to treat coronavirus, is an example of the confusion. I have no inclination to try MMS, but it is not bleach, and it is not a mixture containing bleach: it is a compound produced by bleach reacting with citric acid. Like common salt, MMS has two parents and is like neither of them. It is altogether something else.

There is an interesting piece of information to be derived from this story. Trump focussed on just one ingredient, which is what others have done to denigrate the whole idea. But Trump was supposedly trying to promote the idea. Why then did he not say, Try some lemon juice with a drop of bleach added in? If he had put it that way, maybe someone would have listened. Lemon juice is good for you, and vitamin C is being touted as a valuable supplement anyway. Not to mention that there a drop or three of bleach in our drinking water supply is supposed to be harmless. So what is going on? It would seem – not for the first time – that Trump is playing stupider than he is. Always supposing that there is some value in MMS: otherwise why bother? It remains debatable whether stupidity in high places is the lesson, or whether, adding an extra degree of subtlety… stupidity in high places is the lesson. In other words, Trump in government is manifesting how trust in government is misplaced. Don’t kill the messenger: the messenger is dumb, but the message is smart. And on this second level: Don’t kill the messenger: the messenger is actually pretty smart, but the message is dumb, or rather about dumbness. Message and messenger are an instance of concomitance: they happen together, but you need to work out their exact relationship if any.

I mentioned in my previous post the irony of the Republican Ron Paul denouncing the decisions of the current – Republican – administration as socialist/communist because they do not allow total individual responsibility for risk-taking. Demonizing Marx is not a good idea. He wrote, ‘the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations’. I think is closer to normal presentday human values than Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’. Marx goes on to say, ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Conservatism is resistance to change through contentment with the status quo. Trump is a Marxist because he wants to change one or two things. Ron Paul talks a lot of sense, but such extreme immobilism will literally get us nowhere.

The Mediterranean, the massive work of ‘human geography’ or ‘social history’ by the great Fernand Braudel, looks at an entire region in the late 16th century in terms of ‘structure and conjuncture’, i.e. ‘the slow-moving and the fast’; as opposed to events, which ‘are the ephemera of history’ and yet they are the stuff of ‘traditional historiography’ (III. 3) , ‘pieces of flotsam I have combed from historical ocean the ‘headlines of the past’ (III. 335).

What is more, this method of reconstructing the past would have been most disappointing to Philip II’s contemporaries. As spectators and actors on the sixteenth-century stage, in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, they felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were participating in a mighty drama which they regarded above all as one personal to them. Possibly, probably even, they were under an illusion. But this illusion, this feeling of being an eye-witness of a universal spectacle, helped to give meaning to their lives. (Intro. to Vol 3)

Braudel is willing to talk about chains of events, provided we accept that there is more than one such. But when we see how the above quote still applies to 21st-century man, we see how the headlines get ever more ephemeral, but the underlying structure is pretty stable. However, regarding the role of the individual and individual freedom, this ‘Olympian view’ of the ‘collective destiny’ of a whole region also defines the ‘narrowness of the limits of action’ for the individual ‘fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long-term stretch into the distance both behind him and before.

I introduced the word concomitance ‘to describe events that are neither causally related nor acausally unrelated’. (I believe the medical term comorbidity covers the same sort of idea.) With this view of history, it would appear that true causality rarely comes into play at all, if we mean by that purposefully doing A in order to cause B. This may of course happen from time to time, but only amid a whole alphabet of unforeseen consequences and side-effects.


This is a good place to pause to present my response to a video by James Corbett (next post), which I am transferring here from another thread. More on the other side.

[araucaria]

Posted by araucaria (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
This 8 minute video by James Corbett makes the simple point that there's all the difference in the world between someone personally choosing to self-isolate (or wear a mask) — and being legally obliged to do so.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lmHRYzF0dyQ

OK James Corbett is looking for a debate, so let’s take a detached look at what might be debatable; I have no ready answers. His thinking is perhaps fairly unimpeachable at the highly theoretical level at which he is operating, but all kinds of things may be going on when the rubber hits the road, making his indictment of world leaders depriving us of our personal freedoms possibly not proven at this stage. For example, he strings together a whole series of ‘mights’. The more there are and the lower the probability of each, it is true that we soon get to the normal circumstances of a normally dangerous world. But it begs the questions: Did we like last year’s normal circumstances? Were we that much freer than now? All I can suggest is that we look at some concrete data that I haven’t seen mentioned before.

I have been rereading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which is fiction (he was there, but only 5 at the time) but meticulously documented fiction that gets to places no official report could ever reach, you will find that the author has an excellent understanding of everything we talk about today, things like in-your-face infection, lockdown and self-isolation, the mechanisms of spreading, cabin fever, the importance of timing of escapes to the country or second homes, the risk of outlying clusters, issues of providing care to the sick and material help to the healthy, the effects on employment and trade with the outside world, quarantines (40 days) extended into soixantines (60 days). It is all there; he even knows about things like asymptotic carriers and the evolution of an epidemic: all this applied to the bubonic plague of London in 1665. What is different, apart from it affecting a restricted, highly built-up area, is the value to be placed on some of the probabilities, where ‘might’ can stray into ‘almost certainly’. Quantification of these things makes a huge difference.

This is where politicians need to listen to experts: probability theory is one area in which the average layman is notoriously bad. Corbett seems to be saying that listening to experts is somehow a dereliction of politicians’ duty. This is the one point where most people would disagree with him. On the contrary, they would – and do – object if there were the slightest hint of making a political issue out of this medical scare, and of course conspiracy theorists claim that it is all political and not really a medical issue at all. The second layer here of course is the independence or otherwise of these experts, if one is expecting criminal behaviour, or more simply the healthy divergence among scientists and the difficulty of coming up with valid consensus. The trouble is that the natural tendency to err on the side of caution convergences with possible criminal interests seeking greater control. What James Corbett is saying is that ordinary citizens are mistaken to follow their own natural tendency to err on the side of caution. The issue here, discussed below, is the clash of individual versus collective actions.

One thing Defoe notes here is the way infected persons tend to throw caution to the winds: no longer worried about infecting other people, being themselves already doomed, or nearly so, they almost seem to be doing the virus’s job for it. He also notes the hostility of the healthy towards the sick and carers, much as today, people will clap the carers at 8pm and yet invite neighbouring carers to move out of their homes. Lastly he describes as correct the administrative decision to board up houses where a single case had been reported, along with the other healthy members of the household. A watchman was placed at the front door, who did the shopping. Correct from a collective standpoint, it was all too inhuman at an individual level and the measure became increasingly ineffective as more and more people started escaping out the back door, by which time some of them would be infected.

All in all, A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is an invaluable report on a large-scale real-life experience – not a simulation – of a killer virus with no known cure, with recovery rates varying as the event proceeds, describing not just the medical facts but, importantly, how humans will react to the whole gamut of situations created thereby. There will even be a James Corbett in there somewhere. Erring on the side of caution seems to be the moral of the story. The only possible reason for not applying that to the present day would be proof positive that the Covid-19 is massively overblown; whether it be for dark motives or by… erring on the side of caution doesn’t really matter.

That personal freedoms are not always compatible with collective action is where the war analogy comes into play; it is somewhat unfortunate, but regardless what one thinks of war in general and this ‘war’ in particular, it is wise to accept some of the implications. Mr Corbett being the citizen of an enemy power would suddenly become undesirable in Japan: he and others like him would lose at least one of their freedoms. Or, do not go for a walk in the park: it is a minefield; spend the evening in the basement or get bombed. Danger levels tend to soar. I have said elsewhere that with everyone in lockdown together, collective action of an unusually contemplative, introspective nature ought to have a beneficial effect on the population. Certainly it could be seen that way by the spiritually-minded who have been calling for years for people to slow down. But it’s going to take a great deal of calming down for people to agree about anything, still less approach a collective resolve about where humanity wants to go.

Collective action is unavoidable when an issue goes global. Disease travels; it used to be via rats on ships, nowadays it goes wherever passenger jets take us. But it may be even more global than that. Defoe mentions a comet appearing for several months before the plague (and another the following year before the Fire of London). While he reserves judgement on what it means, beyond the ‘universal melancholy apprehensions of some dreadful calamity’, and while correlation does not imply causation, it might be possible to take this further. Some eminent scientists are indeed doing so. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe is by no means a nobody in astronomy, having worked extensively with Fred Hoyle, the man who derisively coined the term ‘big bang’. The thing is, in addition to the plague of London, the massive plague of 542 AD, a European pandemic, was also preceded by a couple of comets and a long period of earthquakes ensued.

This happened during the reign of Emperor Justinian. The contemporary historian Procopius was a yes-man churning out boring official history, but turning posthumously (fearing for his life) into a whistleblower, with his Anecdota (The Secret History). Whistleblower or unreliable conspiracy theorist, we really don’t know: Edward Gibbon’s comment ‘a part may be true because probable, and a part true because improbable. Procopius must have known the former, and the latter he could scarcely invent’ is just an elegant way of deceiving himself. All he is saying is Maybe. The power of ‘might’. Justinian has a good reputation as a pious Christian who built the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul). Procopius describes the emperor and his wife Theodora literally as shapeshifting demons, citing reliable eyewitness accounts collected firsthand. Justinian himself caught the plague, and was even reported dead before making a miraculous recovery.

(…) Such were the disasters which in the time of this demon in human form befell the entire human race, disasters for which Justinian as the reigning emperor must bear the responsibility. The immeasurable distress which some hidden power and demonic nature enabled him to bring upon his fellow-men will be the next subject of my story. For while this man was at the head of affairs there was a continuous series of catastrophes, which as some maintained were due to the presence here of this wicked demon and to his machinations, though others argued that the Deity, hating all that Justinian did and turning his back on the Roman Empire, had given the avenging demons licence to work all the mischief that I am about to describe.
To begin with, the River Scirtus inundated Edessa, bringing on the inhabitants calamities without number (…). Next, the Nile rose in the usual way but failed to sink again at the proper time, bringing upon some of the inhabitants suffering which I described earlier. Thirdly, the Cydnus poured almost all round Tarsus, inundated the city for days on end, and did not subside until it had done incalculable damage there. Again, earthquakes destroyed Antioch, the first city of the East, Seleucia, which is its nearest neighbour, and Anazarbus, the most famous city in Cilicia. The number of lives lost in these cities it is impossible to estimate; and we must not forget Ibora and Amasia, the first city in Pontus, or Polyborus in Phrygia, and the town which the Pisidians call Philomede, or Lychnidus in Epirus, and Corinth, all of which had huge populations for centuries past. Every one of these cities has been overthrown by an earthquake during this short period, and the inhabitants almost without exception have perished with them. On top of the earthquakes came the epidemic which I mentioned before; this carried off about half the survivors. On such a vast scale was the loss of life, first while this man was acting as head of the State, and later when he reigned as monarch.

Apart from any demonic powers Justinian may have possessed, the mechanism for spreading the plague would have been the influx of soldiers in all parts of the empire due to incessant warmongering. However, the link with comets and earthquakes is more tenuous to say the least. The bigger the disaster, the more we seem to be dealing with one ever-bigger picture where correlation takes over from causation. Apportioning blame on this scale on the leader simply because it happened on his watch requires an explanation of cosmic proportions: a real demon capable of genocidally moving the heavens and the earth.
Edward Gibbon devotes a section of Volume 5 (/8) of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to this plague, after a lengthy description of the earth changes. He is bemused that the ‘fellow-citizens of Procopius’ had no understanding of contagion, with unrestricted mingling of nations due to wars and emigrations, long-distance imports, the plague always spreading ‘from the sea-coast to the inland country’: ‘it is singular that the existence of a real danger should have been denied by a people most prone to vain and imaginary terrors’. Note the underreported scale of the plague: ‘I only find that, during three months, five and at length ten thousand persons died each day at Constantinople. That many cities of the East were left vacant…’

Robert Graves’ historical novel Count Belisarius (1938) based on Procopius tries to establish a ‘close connection’ between war and disease. In his character’s opinion, ‘It is not merely that the pollution caused by fighting – corpses unburied, aqueducts broken, public sanitation neglected – breeds disease, but that the emotions which war excites weaken the mind and make bodies susceptible to every evil physical influence’. (ch.20). One might add that hand-to-hand sword-fighting and widespread rape as the reverse of social distancing would lead to a huge exchange of bodily fluids. But all this is a little too obvious. We know that war kills civilians, often by pillaging and damaging crops and causing famine, and in the twentieth century actually started targeting civilians in increasing numbers.

The last piece in my little puzzle is the 1999 book Catastrophe by the science journalist David Keys, which situates this plague within an overall worldwide situation lasting most of the century, where the trigger, he surmises, was an explosion of the Krakatoa volcano in 535, recorded by Procopius and others as a disastrous yearlong dimming of the Sun, tying in with the history of south-east Asia, and notably the separation of Sumatra and Java. Hence the unverified demonic version of history would have Justinian not only responsible for the orbits of comets but also interfering in what was going on on the opposite side of the globe. But Keys explains how, on the contrary, the climatic disaster caused hordes of central Asian barbarians to invade the Roman Empire. So maybe after all the climate event was bigger than the emperor, and the tail wasn’t wagging the dog.

David Keys makes a few predictions about a future event:

Climate chaos could still lead to the disease breaking out of its wild-rodent pool into the human world on a substantial scale in Asia, Africa and South America if the medical infrastructure collapsed there. Refugee flows would serve to further spread disease and provoke conflict. (p.413)
Any future super-eruption would potentially end our western-dominated era and usher in – in embryonic form – the geopolitical shape of the distant future. (p.416)

What this fails to take into account, just twenty years ago, is the ‘end-times’ factor; by which I mean the fact that all the things that were beyond the means of a Roman emperor are no longer simply forces of nature. An epidemic can be artificially induced – whether or not that was the case is not relevant here. Earthquakes can be artificially induced (see this post, and this thread where it is explained how the effects of scalar weapons can be converted to the Richter scale). And debatably, there is a threat from outer space from an array of 5G satellites. Demonic forces for the scientific age. The controllers are in control, because that is what they do. Maybe so, maybe not. The herd is under control because that is what happens to herds. But maybe there is a kind of ‘herd immunity’?

It may yet be a virus from a comet: there were a few decent candidates late in 2019. Some NASA scientist has proclaimed the idea debunked, but that is maybe wishful thinking. I didn’t see any evidence. When, perhaps only for fictional purposes, someone like Arthur C. Clark imagines deep-freezing astronauts and thawing them out when they arrive somewhere, you have precisely this mechanism on a comet, which is frozen until it approaches the Sun, where it melts. If the process is at all feasible, then viruses would be the first things to show the way. Now what are the chances of finding viruses on a comet? According to Van Flandern’s exploding planets theory, virtually certain. This theory takes the orbits of comets and asteroids back in time until they all find themselves at one and the same spot ten million years ago, where they must have formed a now missing planet, surely a home to viruses. This ‘new’ virus may be a very very old one come back to haunt us.

If so, then for the controllers, a returning comet would be their worst nightmare come true: reminding them of the time when they totally lost control, to the point of blowing up a planet. We are told that the Georgia guidestones agenda involves killing off all but a 500 million elite to have the planet for themselves – the opposite of destroying it. If so, that would merely prove how hopelessly useless these so-called global controllers really are. It is beginning to dawn on them that the Tom and Jerry ‘Foiled again’ scenario is playing out once more. This pandemic may be turning out to be a damp squib only because everyone is pulling out all the stops to avoid total disaster.

Moving this post from a thread about face masks

[araucaria]

The individual/collective issue raised in the previous post ties in with concomitance, which is the recognition that life is woven together with many strands; a fact that anything peremptory in tone is going to miss. One such is the relationship to the environment. The following example seems obvious, but is way too simplistic. “'We did it to ourselves': scientist says intrusion into nature led to pandemic”.

I am going to quote again from Fernand Braudel’s study of The Mediterranean, in which, almost from the outset, on page 40 of Volume I), he establishes, in order to overcome the ‘Mediterranean pathology’ of swamp fever, i.e. malaria in the widespread coastal marshlands, the NEED for human intrusion as a major element in a complex package (the expression ‘drain the swamp’ comes to mind):

In order to conquer the plains, then, the unhealthy water had to be dealt with and malaria reduced. The next task was to bring in fresh water for the necessary irrigation.
Man has been the labourer of this long history. If he drains the marshes and puts the plain under the plough, if he manages to produce his food from it, malaria retreats. The best remedy against malaria, says an Etruscan proverb, is a well-filled pot. But if the drainage and irrigation channels are neglected, if the mountains are too quickly deforested, altering the conditions of the flow of the streams, or if the population of the plain falls and the peasant’s hold on the land is relaxed, then malaria spreads again and paralyses everything. The plain will soon be reduced to its original marshy state; it is an automatic counter-improvement. This was apparently the case in ancient Greece. It has also been suggested that malaria was one of the causes of the decadence of the Roman Empire. This theory is perhaps somewhat exaggerated and too categorical. Malaria progresses when man relaxes his efforts, and its dreaded return is as much a consequence as a cause.

Things work both ways, or rather multiple ways. Causation is not everything, since it has consequence to come and bite it in the rear. We only understand a fraction of what is going on in the world, and for that matter in any one person. Concomitance covers everything we don’t know; we have an inkling of some of it, but don’t know where it fits in with the bigger picture. There are two diametrically opposed attitudes to this, and numerous intermediate ones. The Live-and-let-live attitude takes what is positive and runs with that. This is also known as pedagogy or training. With a schoolchild, you don’t dwell on their mistakes, you pick out what is good and build on that. When you bath a baby, the important thing may be to clean the dirty bits, but only from the viewpoint of hygiene; from the viewpoint of everything else – bonding, discovering, learning, enjoying… – it is nothing but a minor chore to be got out of the way quickly.

With an awkward friend, you avoid pressing their buttons and try to find common ground. With people in power, this gets difficult, notably because their power acts like a shield, and a weapon. This leads to constant mistrust, and democracy becomes increasingly all about removing the incumbents, who become increasingly incompetent and in need of removal. Eventually any public figure becomes fair game, and the good is contaminated by the bad. This is the ‘curate’s egg’ (a polite priest given a bad egg says it is delicious in parts). There are many other alternative analogies where the good and the bad are easily separated. An effective society is one where each gets to contribute what they are good at and avoid having to bungle things there are not good at. Our current society is not very good at making that happen; it is good at enabling interference.

Dr Thomas Browne (1605-82) in his book Pseudodoxia Epidemica, commonly known as Vulgar Errors (i.e. the debunking thereof), makes two comments that complement each other:

a testimony is of small validity if deduced from men out of their own profession. (…)
For the Wisdom of God hath divided the genius of men according to the different affairs of the World: and varied their inclination according to the variety of Actions to be performed therein. Which they who consider not, rudely rushing upon professions and ways of life, unequal to their natures; dishonour, not only themselves and their Functions, but pervert the harmony of the whole World. For, if the World went on as God hath ordained it, and were every one imployed in points concordant to the Natures, Professions, Arts and Commonwealths would rise up of themselves.

Obviously, the first reaction here is to check one’s own praxis for alignment with this precept. For myself, as a practised writer trained in matters pertaining to language(s), critical analysis and thinking, and having experience, though no formal training, in a wide range of subjects to which such method can usefully be applied, I feel that as an anonymous poster mostly in a quiet corner of someone else’s perhaps unusually broad-minded and tolerant website – with the attendant risk of being unkindly or incorrectly labelled – and trying to avoid rudely rushing upon professions and ways of life unequal to his nature, while far from perfect I am maybe not falling too far short of Browne’s ambition:

We are not Magisterial in opinions, nor have we Dictator-like obtruded our conceptions; but in the humility of Enquiries or disquisitions, have only proposed them unto more ocular discerners. And therefore, opinions are free, and open it is for any to think or declare the contrary. (To the Reader)

My next posts will look at a few examples of these various aspects that have come to my attention of late.

[araucaria]

What would happen were everyone to stick to doing what they are good (or maybe not too good) at? You would need to pay particular attention to how they interacted with others who are good at other things. Take the case of Brexit leader Dominic Cummings advising on Covid-19.

The government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir David King said he was “shocked” to discover there were political advisers on Sage. “If you are giving science advice, your advice should be free of any political bias,” he said. “That is just so critically important.”

In chemical terms, it is, passing off as a harmless mixture, a potentially explosive reaction producing a potentially dangerous compound. Why then do scientists not come down like a ton of bricks on Bill Gates meddling with vaccines? Is he not a political/technical adviser to the WHO? But that is not the point I want to make, which is rather the opposite: not so much that politics is messing with science as that science is getting too involved in politics, with not enough checks and balances from other quarters.

I have no idea of the correct procedure for interfacing medical science or anything else and politics. Cabinet meetings seem a good idea because they enable the fallout for every different aspect of government – economics, health, education, culture etc. – to be taken into account on a given topic. The problem people generally have with the current situation, when they have one, stems from the lack of this complexity. Medical science is being injected intravenously in massive doses, so small wonder if the whole country is like a hospital, any whole hospital like a Covid ward, and a Covid patient like just a Covid patient, namely with no comorbidities ,nothing else wrong (or right) with them. This is monomania on an unprecedented scale.

You don’t need to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to recognize the role of politics in causing ‘vulgar errors’. Thomas Browne wrote this back in the 17th century:

Statists and Politicians, unto whom Ragion di Stato is the first Considerable, as though it were their business to deceive the people, as a Maxim, do hold, that truth is to be concealed from them; unto whom although they reveal the visible design, yet do they commonly conceal the capital intention. And therefore have they ever been the instruments of great designes, yet seldom understood the true intention of any, accomplishing the drifts of wiser heads, as inanimate and ignorant Agents, the general design of the World; who though in some Latitude of sense, and in a natural cognition perform their proper actions, yet do they unknowingly concur unto higher ends, and blindly advance the great intentions of Nature. Now how far they may be kept in ignorance a greater example there is in the people of Rome; who never knew the true and proper name of their own City. For, beside that common appellation received by the Citizens, it had a proper and secret name concealed from them: Cujus alterum nomen discere secretis Ceremoniarum nefas habetur, saith Plinie; lest the name thereof being discovered unto their enemies, their Penates and Patronal Gods might be called forth by charms and incantation s. For according unto the tradition of Magitians, the tutelary Spirits will not remove at common appellations, but at the proper names of things whereunto they are Protectors.
Thus having been deceived by themselves, and continually deluded by others, they must needs be stuffed with Errors…

This was published in 1646, the sort of thing that later earned the good doctor a knighthood. The current ‘common appellation’ for this kind of stuff is ‘conspiracy theory’, for he is describing the relationship between ‘the powers that be’ and ‘the sheeple’. Forty years ago, when Marxist thinkers used to talk about ‘the dominant ideology’, the corresponding insult was ‘socialo-communists’. Nowadays it is ‘far rightists’, which violent swing of the pendulum would suggest how mainstream the whole thing has become. The terminology may change, but at last some of the vulgar errors are being corrected.

The obvious worry with all this listening to medical science is that serious economists are not getting a word in edgeways. They are being told that beyond some immediate emergency measures, their problems will be addressed once the medical crisis is over. We are governed by people who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. But they can do magic, namely find billions that weren’t supposed to be there to throw at the medical crisis, and more billions that weren’t supposed to be there to throw at the ensuing economic crisis. People can be forgiven for confusing cause and consequence. Some say that the virus is not causing economic hardship but that a slump was the goal and the virus is the logical consequence. At the planning stage, chronology can be turned upside down, with the cause occurring after the effect. What can safely be said is that too many people both in the public and also the decision-makers in government are drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence. The way forward is to find ways of processing information from a broader range of data points, much as an array of smaller telescopes is more effective than one large one.

At the moment, the language that doubtless best describes how these multiple instruments are to be interfaced or synchronized is the woowoo language of love and light. However, we are wary of religious leaders straying into politics as for example the Dalai Lama, whose job description includes both forms of leadership. Someone has just revived a thread called ‘Re: Dalai Lama is "personification of evil"’, on which I quoted the alleged personification of evil as having said:

'If you feel loving-kindness is useful, then you can try to increase it as a counter-measure against hatred and anger. If the number of these thoughts increases, then the number of their opposing thoughts will be reduced. That's the way to train your mind.
Without such a training, everyone has negative thoughts and has positive thoughts, and both are equally strong. Certain conditions provoke positive ones. However, by making a conscious effort we can change that pattern, and this is what we mean by transforming the mind. It is a way to improve ourselves. I think that irrespective of whether you are a believer or a non-believer, the more you nurture a feeling of loving-kindness, the happier and calmer you will be. Your basic outlook will remain calm, and even if you hear a disturbing piece of news, it will not disturb you too much. So this is a very useful approach. On the other hand, if you are predominantly unhappy on account of hatred or certain negative thoughts you harbor, then even when good news comes your way it might disturb you even more.' Transforming the Mind, p.164.

I don’t need to look into the Dalai Lama’s politics to suspect that the above must apply to that part of his life too. He will have had more than his share of disturbing pieces of news to deal with, but of course if his reaction has been not to be disturbed too much, then that positivity in itself may well be seen by those who are easily disturbed as something negative. Say he has had dealings with the CIA and remained unruffled: he sounds like a good spy! A good religious leader should be blowing the whistle and causing a rumpus? Increasing disturbance, perhaps not. The real issue is ultimately one of trust/mistrust. Mistrusting people is itself one of those negative thoughts you harbour. This is why I say that the elite have converted the conspiracy theorists to their own advantage: in-your-face negativity. When you trust someone, the gray areas tend to clear up.

[araucaria]

Journalistic interference. This is the story of another tennis champion, the Serb Novak Djokovic, being taken to task because he refuses to submit to vaccination, which is totally unacceptable for such a role model.
This journalist has his own belief system that is getting in the way.
It does not seem to matter that this decision regarding his physical wellbeing is his own to make. Or that it is being made at huge personal cost. Djokovic, currently the best in the world, has maybe five more years in him and reasonable ambitions of becoming the most successful player ever: that is what he would be throwing away. He should be getting on with that rather than exposing his young fans to the notion that vaccination may not be such a wonderful idea. We have been here before: Mohammad Ali gave up a career and went to prison because he considered killing Vietcong dangerous to his and other people’s spiritual (not to mention physical) wellbeing.

This journalist may one day discover that in order to hold down his job he has to hold to a belief system that doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. He may discover that he is a role model of a sort to the extent that his newspaper is a megaphone taking his possibly poisonous writings to a wider audience than he perhaps deserves. He may even find that he has to give up his nice job rather than put up with the ongoing inoculation that it entails. He may discover that he has a little of the artistic temperament after all, by which I mean here the ability and the desire to explore the unknown, takes things beyond the accepted safety limits without getting overly disturbed, to use the Dalai Lama’s word. A true artist is someone who is disturbingly undisturbed.

Which leads me to another Serb, the performance artist Marina Abramović. People who only know her through Wikileaks and the Clinton emails know very little about Marina Abramović (born 1946), and maybe nothing about what it is to be an artist. An artist operates in a fictional world, meaning things are not real. An actor playing say Brutus, may ‘stab’ ‘Julius Caesar’, but the artist has no blood on their hands. That is a pretty basic example, and people can be forgiven for not following when things get a little more complicated. Also, they will not know about Abramović’s significant other, the performance artist Ulay, since they separated in the late 1980s, before many of her critics were born.

If you didn’t hear about Marina Abramović as a performance artist in the last century, then there has been an opportunity to catch up, owing to the recent death of Ulay. The two decided to tackle the Great Wall of China from opposite ends and marry in the middle, but by the time Chinese bureaucracy let them do it, five years later, it ended in divorce.

If you follow the link you will see a photo of a life-threatening performance called Rest Energy (1980). The photograph is deceptive in two ways. First it is a snapshot, suggesting that the pose lasted barely longer than the exposure time: not so. Secondly, the poses have been seriously watered-down: in actual fact, both are leaning much further back, showing just how much the tension in the bow is produced by the tension in the two bodies. The pose is much more radical, and it seems impossible that it should be held much longer than the two seconds it takes to take a photo. It turns out that the ‘performance’ lasted 4 minutes and 10 seconds.

In ‘Ninety’, a bilingual contemporary art review published in Paris, which also provides this more realistic photo, we read back in 1999:

One and the other both off balance – Ulay pulling on the string of a bow with Marina bending the bow, the arrow pointed at her chest, they held out for 4 minutes and 10 seconds, up till the moment when they were on the verge of losing control… (Catherine Flohic, p.10)
Ulay stretches the bowstring, aims the arrow at Marina as she bends the bow. If either one of them were to let go, who would be more the object than the other? The one who would be killed by the arrow or the one who would have to live with the responsibility of having caused the other’s death? So this shared action does raise the question of the “subject” in the philosophical meaning of the word. (Denys Zacharopoulos, p. 12)

Suddenly art interfaces with life – and death. It poses the question of female responsibility in what would be feminicide. It poses the question of different degrees of culpability: if the shot were fired, would Ulay be guilty of wilful ‘homicide’? Maybe not, owing to victim compliance. Of manslaughter (homicide without intent)? Well, he did aim an arrow at a vital organ, so there was some kind of intent… In the space of 250 seconds, every possible reason to love and hate this person, to end it all or carry on, must have been played out in their heads, until the itchy finger/cramp scenario intervened and stopped the performance. The bottom line is that Marina Abramović risked her life for her art. That is the difference between an artist and the ordinary person: they go, not the extra mile, but the final mile. They reach the near-death experience. They go all the way to hell, like Ulysses visiting the underworld, and come back thinking Live and Let Live.

Now factor that into your appraisal of the Clinton emails. Notice the importance of control: they stop on the verge of losing control. Contrary to the elite/herd paradigm, control is NOT the enemy of freedom, it is an enabler paradoxically by placing bounds on individual freedom.

Abramović and Ulay may have separated long ago, but in such matters it is never advisable to take sides; especially when a spectacular reunion can take place years later (in 2012):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlf68X2qEpM

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xlf68X2qEpM

The performance with the bow ended well: no blood spilt. But during those 250 seconds, either their minds went totally blank or every thought and temptation occurred to them. Interestingly, we have an exact opposite of this scenario with Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. Berg was just an honest musician, but his music was both banned in the Soviet Union and outlawed in Germany as Cultural Bolshevism. So what conclusion can be drawn from that? Honest endeavour (here in music) is undefinable in belligerent terms. As I suggested earlier, labelling people is so easy to get wrong.

Lulu ends up a prostitute and one of her first clients is Jack the Ripper, who naturally kills her.
That is until the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan comes along, and transforms her murder into a suicide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AhnOFwfBnM

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6AhnOFwfBnM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bLS5_Kg77A

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7bLS5_Kg77A

The exact opposite, or mirror image, to two lovers on either side of a bow, with no thoughts of her death, is two lovers on either side of a knife, with no thoughts of her survival. Here, rather than play the innocent victim, the woman prefers to take charge of her own death. The difference between the two art forms is that in the latter case, the fictive Lulu dies, the real-life soprano not quite; whereas in the former, the real-life Marina survives, but the fictional confrontation very nearly kills her.

To conclude: while I honestly don’t recall what role Marina Abramović plays in the Clinton emails, I do think that she needs to be judged, or better, simply accepted, through her status as an artist and her entire oeuvre, of which I have only cited three examples. The premise of this thread is that the same applies to the likes of Bill Gates. I may be wrong. From a given viewpoint, I am definitely wrong. But there are others. The jury is still out.