Guns aren't lawful. Nooses give. Gas smells awful. Might as well live.

Vignettes On Anger

***

Reticence

There is no place in the world quite as lonely as a shopping mall and there is nothing quite as distressing as the people in it. Chasms yawn between my notepad and the next table. The nearest distended white face is hundreds of yards away across the aisle. The features are blurred together from here. Chins invade cheeks, tits declare war on each other and start spreading across the chest, guts declare “Westward ho!” and charge forward ascendant under polyester. Legs flop like errant tentacles, carrying forward amorphous glassy-eye’d sacks which gently bump around in consumption lockstep.

These people are not even greks (pr. grk: prole, plebeian, scum; exclusively derogatory) – greks are cavemen, apes hooting and laughing around a fire. For all their shortcomings, Greks are alive, even vital at times. Yes, they are throwbacks to an earlier era before things like evolution and hygiene became popular and they bring literally nothing to the figurative table. Yes, I have spent substantial portions of time trying to escape their influence. Yes, I would rather boil myself than have a conversation with most of them.

But for their glaring flaws, at least they are whole animals. These people are not. These are cellular automata in a resource redistribution matrix. They are worker bees, or termites, or flywheels and gears. I feel unpleasant in their machine, a meated interloper caught in the clicketty-clack of an unfamiliar mechanism. It reminds me far too well that truth I might seek is their truth, bought and paid for by their world.

Their world, damnit. I walk their streets, dodge their cars and pavement crawlers, work in their industries, buy their food, unwillingly dip my toes in their culture, search through their women looking for one I don’t want to skin and gut, and sitting here in their huge plastic doll’s house I feel the pain that they don’t, the great rolling expanse of pure unadulterated vacancy. Can this space be filled? Is there some kind of eminently sensible process of maturity that I have missed, which will let me see this whole business as something other than an abomination against everything worthwhile?

Can I ever forgive the vast majority of the Earth’s broken, stupid, horrible, mean, petty, wretched biomass?

***

Harmony

Few books offer significant insights into the human mind. Many books try too hard to do so and end up being moderately bad in the process as the effort to produce something original often overtakes the effort to produce something good. An average book will manage a few new or interesting ideas around an uninspired central thesis. A select few offer the kind of searing truth that is immediately recognisable and requires you to sit down immediately and think about it for a while, as it ploughs through the corridors of your mind, slamming doors open.

To that end, read and re-read Arendt’s The Banality of Evil.

With my massively reductionist hat on, this book is about the trials of Eichmann at Nuremberg. Arendt was initially puzzled by the fact that the man was essentially an actuary of genocide. A component of a big Jew-killin’ machine, he never considered the actions outside of the end of his desk. He was just glad that he got to sign papers and didn’t have to smell the gas and fear himself. His evil, his palpable hatred that the world was waiting to see, was entirely absent. His monstrosity was not in his wild emotions, but in his lack of them. He did not do evil for evil’s sake, rather evil for accountancy’s sake.

And that was the really scary part. The last sentence of the book is the first mention of the phrase it immediately popularised – the banality of evil. It turns out to be nothing special, acts done by ordinary people with extraordinary justifications, with all the concomitant emotional involvement of putting on a hat.

Somehow Stalin’s snaggletooth’d Red Army shanking peasants in the neck, Genghis Khan’s hordes blasting arrows through ancient Chinese, monstrous acts of savagery and torture by African warlords and visions of wild-eyed terrorists in Baghdad streets seem more acceptable than the clinical precision and order implied by the construction and systematic usage of a dedicated human extermination facility.

It is much easier to believe that the former are aberrations, brutish sub-humans duped by power, ideology or religion. But a modernist genocide reminds us very rudely that the amoral is a human faculty like any other and people are perfectly willing to dive hips-deep into cruelty with the appropriate validation, and no amount of Beanie Babies can change this.

Hate is a small emotion. It swings fists, throws words, flings feelings. Petulance swollen, grown large. It does not usually move countries or give armies the order to advance. Perhaps it can be harnessed or directed en masse, controlled to some degree, but it is essentially a private matter. In the abstract, it’s merely cute. Overused. Somewhat tired. A word that plays outs its possibilities with incorrect usage and the absence of a substantial target.

Obedience and stupidity, especially together, are far more dangerous... and far more common.

***

Resolution

I always liked to write angry, and about anger.

I want the words to some flying off the screen, cranked-up pixels swinging billhooks and broken whiskey bottles, burning through into the retina, hacking their way into the brain and chewing sides off the cortex.

I want to feel the reader sharply draw breath as the reflection on the words makes them sneer and stamp across their face kicking hobnails about them, sinking cheeks, shattering cheekbones, crushing septum.

I want the page to snarl and spit, for the paper to grow teeth, for the ink to bubble and turn poisonous, for the book to snap its own spine and hurl the pieces like a javelin.

I want to be able to translate how much our collective meat experiment should mean to you, morons, livers of the unexamined life, bottom-feeders. I want to teach you how to feel and why you should learn to justify your chemistry. I want to twist your rubber smiling mask into a rictus of fear, hook your eyes open and feed your brain with images of new moon haunts and the wraiths of nightmare.

I want to jam the fork you use to backfill your maw into a mains socket, rub broken glass across the inside of your empty skull and pour boiling lead on your feet to get them moving.

I am the Doctor, and I freestyle blowtorch discourse hoping to hit a mode of expression that will stun you rigid under your blankets and make you cry for the Mummykins that doesn’t love you.

Bury your face in her skirt, you halfwits, you nematodes! Show me when I’ve cut you so I can throw sulphur and bile in the wound. Show me where you hurt so I can jab the bruise. Show me your secrets so I can jam them back into you.

I want to burn out the impurities and clean you, and I want to rend you down into lard and remould you a grand homunculus, and I want you to realise that beaten and defeated is far better than the dirty, empty marionette show your tired fingers command. You are jerking strings with no puppet, you fucking brute.

Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and Fuck All His Clones

In preparation for this article, I went back to amazon.com. Of all the places I hate on the internet – and mark my words, I fucking despise almost every cyber-inch of this place – I might hate it the most. The imdb.com new section comes in close, but it’s fairly small. So I went through and was exposed to the people who think that Objectivism is a valid philosophy and not the solipsistic raving of an inverted Stalinist, that literature’s had enough of this gull dern fancy writin’, that scientists just operate out of a ‘naturalist’ paradigm that acts as a bias that dictates the results of their experiments, that a movie is bad because its story isn’t ‘believable,’ that it was a cop-out that Alice turned out to be dreaming, that Ann Coulter is actually a good example of a conservative and a credit to them, and so on. I’ve obviously been given no dearth of execrable human beings, and an incredible number of the merely annoying. However, in looking through all this I found the people who made me the angriest.

I thought the worst would be the Objectivists, as I despise Ayn Rand and the kitsch empire she stands for, but as I was looking into that with all the pleasure and gusto of a gynecologist examining his third gunt-bearing, Sao-Paolo-slum-filthy yeast infection of a Monday morning after a Vegas weekend with an almost-married friend left him in that state of hangover least amenable to any kind of concentration, I read a comparison between it and Scientology, worth quoting here in full. The following is from Jeff Walker’s (not that Jeff Walker) The Ayn Rand Cult:

Ayn Rand was not the first to propound an ethics for the masses based on survival as a rational being. That honor goes to fellow novelist and cult leader L Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), the science-fiction writer who founded Dianetics and the Church of Scientology. Dianetics preceded NBI[the Nathan Branden Institute]’s start-up by eight years and the Objectivist ethics by 11 years. Dianetics groups formed on campuses during the 1950's, much as Ayn Rand clubs would in the 1960's. Many who flocked to Objectivism in the 1960's had previously had some contact with Dianetics or Scientology. Dianetics used reasoning somewhat similar to Rand's about the brain as a machine. Hubbard's 'analytical' versus 'reactive' mind has its equivalent in Rand's system. Both have a higher mind reprogramming the rest of the mind. Hubbard and Rand were both extremely intelligence- and survival oriented, in the interest of a rational man. They counseled the uprooting of irrational premises (or 'engrams'). Both contended that the resulting enhanced rationality leads to greater capacity for healthy emotion. Perceptual data is immaculate for both. Both regard our often being unconscious of incoming data as the real problem. After many years of working at it, the student of Dianetics becomes a 'clear,' while the student of Objectivism becomes a full-fledged Objectivist...Both Dianetics and Objectivist psychology draw fire from the psychiatric establishment. The philosophy of each relates immorality to decreasing one's survival potential. Each claims to be science- and logic-based. Both share a benevolent universe premise...Hubbard and Rand are very much against all rule-by-force. Both assert that rational men have no real conflicts of interest. Each deplores social complexity being wielded as an excuse for introducing government regulations when it is the latter that generates the former in a vicious cycle...Each was lambasted by biographers for serious personality problems. And both figures have been denounced by former associates who claim that the leader had feet of clay and the doctrine is detrimental to its adherent's health.

As I found this on wikipedia, I decided to follow the link and read about L. Ron Hubbard, and I have the following to say: there are few people on this earth more contemptible than this man. I thought Ayn Rand and the Objectivists, with their stupid travesty of philosophy (a field I know better than the fields Hubbard pretends to play in), her bullshit personal problems, and such ridiculous incidents as the Ellen Plasil therapist one, were as personally infuriating as possible, but Hubbard quickly surpassed them. Some trite saying like ‘If you look in a dictionary under “contemptible” you’ll see a picture of L. Ron Hubbard’ doesn’t even approach the truth of the matter. Think of the most scumbaggy pseudo-science not even worthy of the name, taking advantage of the fact that almost anything in which somebody earnesty believes to be helpful will be helpful in dealing with certain mood problems for immense profit – not the worst one existing, but the worst one that could ever exist on this or any other possible world. Got that concept in mind? Name it ‘The Church of Scientology.’

We all know the Xenu incident thanks to our friends Trey and Matt, so I shouldn’t have to go into that. But what they didn’t say, among certain other idiotic details, is that this story is only available to people who have attained, through years of costly audit therapy, the title of OT III (Operating Thetan Level Three), paying $20,000 for the pleasure. That’s $20,000 in addition to what they’ve had to pay for the audit sessions and for every other level they’ve advanced – and you have to advance through the Body Thetan levels first (Lengthy Aside: For those not in the know, ‘thetan’ is Hubbard’s word for the causa sui spirit that, due to something like hundreds of billions of years of numbing, has lost its awareness of its own ability to create worlds and bridge universes and has become trapped in this one, becoming the souls of the humanoid aliens who wore clothes that ‘looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute (i.e. 1963),’ overcrowded Xenu’s galactic empire, and had to be killed off by being frozen and loaded onto spaceships that look like DC-8s, ‘except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't’ (nevermind that DC-8s have turbines and not propellers), and finally by the explosion of H-bombs dropped into various volcanoes that actually hadn’t formed 75,000,000 years ago. After the thetans escaped their bodies, they got even more numbed and started to clump together in confusion, these being ‘body thetans,’ and only then were associated with Man. These clumps cause all of our bodily and mental problems, and Scientology claims to have cured all these problems through audit therapy (nevermind that Hubbard continued to collect disability checks from the U.S. Navy long after having found the cure to all ills). An ‘operating thetan’ is a thetan who has, through years of audit therapy, become aware of their own possibilities for being and begin to control themselves and confront Incident II, the Xenu episode, and Incident I, when, four quadrillion years ago (nevermind that this is approximately 300,000 times older than the universe is calculated to be), the thetans got trapped in our universe and were subjected to the horror of a loud snapping noise and a bright light, followed by a chariot ridden by a cherub – ‘confront’ by telepathically taking the thetan clusters through these incidents step-by-step in a paid session of audit therapy. The OT III is given, in exchange for his $20,000, an envelope discussing all this in Hubbard’s inimitable style and told not to tell anybody, since anyone who learns this too early will potentially die of shock from the information. So, whatever you do, don’t read the preceding parenthetical.) before becoming an Operating Thetan.

Now, Incident II is one of the stupidest stories ever written. As far as science fiction goes, it sucks. It sounds like it was made up on the fly with whatever happened to be nearby thrown into the story when the teller got lost because he was too stupid to follow a narrative thread. It does nothing worthwhile even as fiction. A child wouldn’t accept it, though it seems to be written for somebody with that condescending and erroneous adult fantasy of a child’s intellect. Nobody would accept a science fiction story in which everything is obviously taken from the present-day world – out of laziness rather than in an attempt at social commentary – with no excuse but ‘we subconsciously built things according to that model because we all remember the Lord Xenu Incident somewhere and are continually imitating it due to the psychic damage it caused to our thetans.’ Bullshit.

But, even as really, really bad fiction, written with prose that sounds like an asshole teaching children about the Titanic (‘it was really big. Really big. Think of something big. Our house is big, right? Well, it was much bigger than our house! Much bigger than our house combined with the houses next door. Even bigger than the Wealthington’s mansion, where daddy’s employed as a living statue.’), it’s no more than an insult to fiction and our language. And, while that’s pretty goddamn bad, it makes him no worse than any number of hack writers who try to pass off their manglings of creativity and language as shining examples – Dan Brown, for example, who’s launched an all-out attack on the detective novel – and merits no special consideration.

Where Hubbard, and all of his clones, cross the line is when they try to pass this stupid bullshit off as a religion and get people with serious problems to ‘deal’ with them by paying them thousands of dollars. Separating idiots from their money is the cowardly, ultimate act of cowardly, ultimate men. Nothing is more scummy than taking advantage of the people who most need help and an honest, not a convenient, answer to difficult problems that every human being has to deal with or live as a mental castrato. Life is hard and complex; being unhappy about it is natural and to be lived with. It is better to confront this fact than to confront clusters of body thetans. It is also much cheaper. Somebody with a problem needs this knowledge the most. He does not need one bullshit story and confession/psychotherapy sessions attached to a modified lie detector. That is not how you assert yourself and become a person. It’s how you turn depression into debt.

For showing less respect for human intelligence than Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined, and for charging the gullible and hurt obscene amounts of money for the right to be a member of the church (that is, to express faith in Scientology), for violently assaulting man’s reasoning capacities and my treasured English language and using said assault to take the money the depressed should be using to buy things they like, for exploiting the placebo effect and the power of belief in anything, so long as it’s belief, to degrees no other human would attempt, L. Ron Hubbard and every Scientologist who’s followed in his footsteps despite knowing how incredibly full of shit he was has earned a hefty FUCK YOU. Scientology is to Christianity, a big joke in its own right, like heroin is to children’s cough syrup. There is no science and no logic. That it’s in control of much of our entertainment industry is just depressingly scary. If you hear this shit, run from it, laughing like a madman, to find a rifle and a clear shot.

Jesus Loves You, But Everyone Else Thinks You’re a Cunt

Well, where do I start? I’m tempted to begin with the whole “rise above it, don’t let them get to you” spiel but where’s the Goddamn fun in that? The truth is, if I was willing to let my anger walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand with my ire and my hatred as bed buddies in a twisted ménage à trios of Biblical brutality, I would’ve turned to the priesthood years ago. As it is, I’m sitting here now quite literally wetting my pants with excitement at the multitude of bastards, cunts and twats wandering aimlessly into my crosshairs. The only dog collar to be found ‘round these parts can be found on the two-bit hooker currently locked in my cellar.

So what makes me angry? It’s reasonably safe to say that my anger-list is extensive and ever-expanding. In fact, it’s expanding quicker than Eddie Van Halen’s spandex leggings if he were to sit atop his feedback-drenched, turned-to-11 amplifier. I honestly couldn’t say for certain who or what resides at the apex of said list, but it’s probably a toss up between Gary Neville and Alex Ferguson, those stalwarts of Manchester United’s, now crumbling, empire. Trivial, I know, but my blood is presently bubbling away somewhere near boiling point and is only prevented from evaporating completely by virtue of me not being able to see or hear the cunting bastards.

Scratch the oozing sore and burrow a little a deeper into the flesh and I’m ready to explode with fury at those two arrogant, puss-filled arse fiddlers. We (the rest of the UK, that is) hate them, they hate us and I’m fine with that arrangement. It’s just a damn shame that two of humanity’s most obnoxious examples happen to live a mere thirty-five miles from me.

I also – and please forgive my rather angular change of subject – abhor people who know that “uncopywriteable” is the longest word in the English language that contains no repeating letters. How does one find these things out without being a monumental drain on social services? Do something worthwhile with your time, for Christ’s sake. [I found out through the media of television, before you wonder!]

And now for something completely different. Again. The somewhat jovial beginning to this piece must be succeeded by genuine causes of antagonism, and I’m sure you can all relate to my main chosen area at which to vent my spleen: Animal rights activists/terrorists/idiots/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. Quite simply, anybody who values an animal’s existence above that of a human needs a succession of punches to the face carrying such ferocious force as to knock sense into their hazy, dream-like glade of a brain.

These people get my goat. Not only that, they get my goat and return it to its natural habitat to “set it free” of my imposed life of agony. How they can campaign against a worthy cause such as medical testing, which concerns the furthering of the human race, is beyond me. And for all their protestations of how barbaric these processes are, I don’t see many of these self-righteous bastards refusing treatment tested on the very animals they claim to protect. Sure, there’ll be one or two weasel-faced wastrels that decline treatment according to their ethical dogma – good luck to them, the sooner they’ve departed this mortal coil to make daisy chains with the fairies in the sky the better.

A few months back, a couple of these new-age tree-shaggers thought it necessary to exhume the cadaver of the grandmother of an investor in a UK medical research facility and hold it for ransom, the ransom being the cessation of experiments on animals in said facility. At what point did they think that these actions would further their cause? It led to mass outcry among every person who possessed an ounce of common decency – I’m willing to bet that even ice-cold kiddie-messer and murderess Myra Hindley turned in her grave (without the aid of a new age hippy trying to unearth her, of course) – and prompted our esteemed leader, Tony Blair, to sign a petition in support of testing on animals.

I blame society. The same society that values the human rights of convicted criminals over that of the general public, releasing rapists and murderers because refusing parole would “infringe their human rights” only for them to murder, mutilate and massacre once more. The same society that has become so politically correct that the George’s Cross – the National Flag of England – Is viewed as an inciter of racial hatred. The British government panders to these people and tip-toes to their tune so as not to appear racist. I shudder to think how such shenanigans would be dealt with in the States. I’d agree with my Yankee friends, too.

Political correctness in general raises my hackles. I can already feel them tap dancing the fandango at two to the dozen as we speak. For instance, Christmas cards distributed by local councils have replaced “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Festive Period”. Whoever thinks of these ideas needs a rusty nail to the rectum quick sharp. They then have the gall to lecture the masses on how “Christmas is losing its true meaning.” Of course it fucking will if you haven’t got the brass bollocks to actually call it Christmas. What in the Lord’s rancid armpits did you expect, you enervated fuck-nugget?

That’s right, rank stupidity and limp-brained thought processes are as common in modern society as they undoubtedly were when man first began clubbing his fellow man over the head with mammoth femurs in order to scavenge his neighbour’s fetching leopard-skin jump suit. The difference is about 100,000 year’s worth of evolution: we now walk completely upright, our brows no longer resemble particularly crass golfing visors and we no more feel the need to walk among our fellow man with our wedding tackles clearly visible, swinging like a pendulum in a stiff breeze. Yet, idiocy triumphs! The class buffoon is a hero every time his two brain cells collide, yet answer a question correctly and derision is forthcoming quicker than it takes a whippet with an arse full of dynamite to run the 50 yard dash.

Somehow, over the course of mankind’s evolution, it appears that he who resembles Neanderthal man the closest is king. The Human race should be striving to better itself yet bottom-of-the-barrel cretins such as the animal rights activist, the politically correct lobbyist and the primitive knuckle-dragger are hauling our civilisation back to their own sludge-dwelling level. I hate the fact that there is very little we can do to halt this regression into primordial oblivion. I hate the scenario that good, honest, decent folk are being swamped by human-like creatures not worthy of the reproductive organs their genes afforded them. I try to find solace, I really do, but the best I can furnish myself with is Shakespeare – and more accurately, Lady MacBeth – with the words, “That without remedy should be without regard.” Wise words for such a scheming cuntflap as Lady M, yet little succour is derived by this writer. Those bastards make me angry. They always will. And we all know that anger leads to hate, which in turn leads to the dark side. See you there.

TOPIC - "They make me angry"

That crop of responses was considered and qualit-o-licious, without a doubt our best round yet. A pleasure to read and no doubt also to write.

So. Let's have a bit less structure and a bit more fist. I want to see blood, teeth and hair. Make the words burn like toxic VD. Hurt the page.

"THEY MAKE ME ANGRY."

Due 28/5 local time. Grand-and-a-half word limit. Get yellin'.

Real Life Fantasies and the Irrelevance of Skepticism

Recently I had a mildly disturbing experience. I’ll give you some background before starting the story: over the past year or so, the way I remember certain of my dreams has come more and more to resemble the way I remember my most drunken experiences. They have at the same time become less and less fantastic, and have a tendency to include the people I see and hang out with on an everyday basis. Occasionally I have to take stock upon waking up to distinguish the memories I have in my head of the dream from memories gained through actual, drunken experience. There is very little to guide me in this.

So when, around a month ago, I woke up with the memory of wandering around my neighborhood drunk with a girl I met at a party and climbing to the roof of a boarded-up mansion with her, I couldn’t quite tell whether or not it had actually happened. None of the friends I spoke to had seen me talking to or leaving with this girl. I never passed that boarded-up mansion during my sober walks of the neighborhood. I had forgotten this girl’s name and stopped seeing her around the neighborhood. After a few weeks, I was fairly certain I had dreamed it, which left me with the unsettling feeling that I nevertheless felt that I had experienced it.

Of course, it wasn’t a dream, and I eventually received confirmation of what I felt to be true. But that I couldn’t distinguish between dream and reality without external signposts brings up a question that is not particularly new, but has to be experienced anew in each person’s case to be well understood. It has been a long time since I believed in pure, or naïve, empiricism, but the jarring effect of not being able to tell the difference between the uncanny (unheimlich) dream-perception and the uncanny drunk-perception was still a shock to me. But these are exceptional states, as Nietzsche’s inclusion of them as the pure and creative state of the poet and musician should indicate, and it might simply be their exceptional nature that causes this phenomenon.

In any case, I will admit that I have to rely on outside assistance to determine what is real. I am extremely worried about this, as a great deal of what can be considered as ‘reality’ – namely virtually everything that is not a physical phenomenon – is determined largely by what, in Heidegger’s philosophical system, which is useful for this discussion, is called the ‘idle talk’ of the ‘they,’ and following this against my own experience is an act of conformity (for those of you thumbing through your copies of Being and Time, indignant at being forced to crack your unopened but conspicuously-placed copy of a book too thick for Jim to rip, by an internet article, this is traditionally translated as ‘distantiality’) of the worst kind, rather than just following a good rule of thumb in how to distinguish the real from the unreal. This has led to such thinking as Baudrillard’s and so on, and eventually to The Matrix, and so I’m fairly certain that everybody has a good idea of what I’m illustrating here, and how fluid the border between questions of physical reality and of more abstract mental constructs really is. We are being quickly led from a discussion about whether or not the world is real to one about whether or not the ideas we hold about the world are real, or just the product of idle talk.

More interesting, to me, than the question of whether we can trust what we perceive sensually is the question of to what degree we have constructed our perception using words. The former is ultimately unanswerable – there is very little to distinguish this real world from a perfect simulation of some other world. (In fact, this is aesthetically a more attractive situation to me, and the question scientifically irrelevant so long as the world continues to do its job.) On the other hand, if we can accept that human behavior is based on certain models, and that these models don’t appear to us a priori as though handed down by some bizarre deity, then it seems that there should be an investigation into how and why these models have been created, and how useful they are for our lives. That is, archetypes and models of behavior aren’t handed over to us by some conceptual Prometheus but rather developed by us and thrown into the Great Meme Race, eventually taking out all other competitors and taking on the appearance of something essential to the world.

A concept that makes this obvious, I believe, is that of romantic love. Most people have difficulty determining whether or not they love somebody, or are in love with them, and often confuse the two states. Just as often, a few months or years later, a new relationship makes them realize that the emotion they had felt in some previous relationship wasn’t ‘really’ love, but rather some simulacra of love.

It’s true that, much of the time, the genuine article is hidden by an obfuscating sea of words that must be swept away before understanding becomes possible. Is that the case here? Or is ‘love’ just a manmade concept, which in every case is ‘mine’ (that is, invented and possessed by me, whatever forces may have influenced my invention)? Are we confused because we’ve become alienated from some authentic phenomenon, or because we made it up and refuse to acknowledge this? Does this matter at all, considering the fact that we feel just as strongly in either case, are chained to our emotions, even if invented?

In this case, and in most that resemble it, I would argue that the concept is manmade and that we’ve obscured this fact behind the clouds of language, of palaver, of ‘idle talk,’ and that this is the cause of a lot of the unhappiness and discontent that surrounds our ‘love.’ And so, yes, it does matter if we know this, regardless of how we may feel in any given case. It allows the freedom to move away from the accepted ideas of love, and either form a version of love that works for me – in each case it is a ‘me’ – or reject the idea altogether as unworkable. In other words, to overthrow the tyrannus of a factitious emotion.

I chose love because it feels more primal and has a more tenacious hold on us – has caused more unhappiness and discomfort – than concepts like honor, pride, or heroism (it has yet to trump morality, but I feel justified in leaving off a discussion of morality until the future, as it’s bound to be assigned). Any discussion of Greek history will note how the concept of arête changed between that presented in Homer and that presented in Plato, but very few discussions of love, except on the highest, most pretentiously intellectual mo-po levels, will point out that it is an idea that has changed over time, and infrequently means the same thing to any two given people – including and often especially to two people who use the same words to describe their conception of love or their feelings towards one another. So I’m arguing here against this discrepancy of understanding, entirely based on how we have used words.

The issue is how we have constructed a world out of words, and how this word-world has obscured the other, ‘realer’ world in ways that cause us all grief. None of us can change the situation if it turns out that what we believed to be the ‘real’ world was a simulation; however, a recognition of what is a model of our own construction and what is not, and the freedom and control that this recognition can afford us, is worth pursuing. This I care about and find worth my intellectual effort. Determining whether the sunlight I feel falling on my skin when I step out of the shade is authentic or simulated is something I don’t find worth that effort. Ultimately those questions don't matter, don't have answers, and barely deserve to be considered as questions.

An anthropological study of the Grek: Or how jail-bait is a proof of reality.

Not too many years ago, I used to drift from place to place and party to party, and not always in the circles of the over-fiends I conspire with now. These sorts of parties were the standard kind you can hear on just about any suburban street on a Friday night – shitty music, hooting, hollering, screams and the sporadic sounds of smashing glass and upheaving gullet. Ever-present were the clutch of under-aged girls the hosts were trying to liquor up and impress with their access to booze and/or car ownership (that sacred thing to a fifteen year old – the internal combustion engine!), invariably in a single solid herd, tittering away and fortified in the ancient herbivore defence of Safety In Numbers. And the time would come in the evening when, having drunken and smoked much of the prerequisites for a free-flowing tongue and an “open mind”, several of the fellows would attempt a siege and assault on the fortress of feminine propriety with their most awesome weapon – their minds. Thus begins the Drunken Philosophy Hour – that obligatory time at any bad party when the Grek bang their rocks togethers and try to produce some sparks of enlightenment in order to light the tailor-made of the young girls’ passions and hopefully take a drag through the filter of underaged sex.

“Every so often”, a Grek much of this type spake unto me with ponderous wisdom born of age, “A video game comes along that will change the way mankind thinks.” Trying to restrain myself in order to find out the punch-line to this joke, I put on my best (terrible) poker face and held it just long enough to find out that he was talking about an X-Box game based on “The Matrix”. In my total inability to not react to this kind of stimulus I may have dreadfully offended the fellow, but it put me in mind of the arguments deployed in dozens of drunken sieges I have borne witness to over the long years.

Standard in the arsenal of the Grek philosopher is the idea that reality is a fantasy in one way or another. Actually, it’s pretty common just about everywhere, and to some extent just about everyone believes that some component of what goes on about them is complete fantasy (yes, I did write three hundred words just to segue to the question at hand). I’ve heard arguments for varying levels of unreality throughout my many years of undergraduate course barely-attendance, from a staggering array of people I’ve wanted to punch in the face. But the most clear-cut, honest arguments come from the Greks, and since I’ve always kept quiet around their philosophy groups (mostly because I don’t want to ruin their chances of picking up since I’m not in the market for girls much younger than me, and as Tess points out, I was generally with Tess already), I’ve gotten to hear much more of what they have to say without having the urge to step on their necks.

The most common argument of the Grek (and young men in general) is solipsism or some variation thereof, that idea that they are the only entity in the universe. In fact, the word itself is derived from the Latin, solus ipse (oneself alone). To the solipsist, the Universe is simply the machination of their own mind. It’s popular because it’s basically a clearance-priced, entry-level belief system that allows everything to be explained in a way that is hard for the layman to argue against. Nonetheless, it’s very easy to kick holes in once you detect that this philosophical wall may be made of plaster rather than bricks. The question can be raised as to why his mind would differentiate between dreams and reality – since they’re both products of the same mind, why do dreams not impact on what the solipsist’s waking world? Another question – if his mind is able to compute the position and convincingly keep up the appearance of complicated systems such as city traffic, not to mention the movement of every single atom in the known universe at all times, why does he keep drunkenly misplacing his keys? Finally, how does he account for the working of things that he knows nothing about, like nuclear weaponry or reading? The solipsist may answer these, and other questions, with the theory that it’s just the way his mind has set out reality, but he won’t do it very convincingly. Solipsism is such an unsatisfying way to view the universe because it essentially relies on this single article of faith. Since it flies in the face of pretty much all evidence to the contrary that things are actually going on that don’t involve the solipsist in any way (and the vast majority of it entirely without his knowledge), fails to predict any phenomena (and especially muddles up cause and effect, making him look and actually become stupid), and makes him very unpopular with his friends who don’t fancy themselves figments of a teenager’s imagination, the solipsist usually ditches this world view over time. Solipsism really is a form of madness, and anyone who is able to cling to this tenuous ground for more than a couple of years in their youth usually turns into an obese, forty year old, terribly single man wearing a foul-smelling wolf-shirt, posting smugly to dozens of internet fora. Luckily, solipsism turns people into fortresses of mad belly-gazing, easily bypassed, but if you’re particularly worried about a solipsist you know, I was told a tale of a sure cure. A farmer was troubled by a young solipsist as he walked through the forest at the edge of his property, and tired of having his arguments dismissed as the product of the young man’s mind, he seized up a pitchfork with the central prong missing and pinned the young man to a nearby tree by the neck. He simply left him there all night, and when he came back the young man, finding that no matter how he willed himself somewhere else, kicked, screamed or tried to use his mind to summon help, found that he could not control reality as he thought, and was ready to renounce solipsism.

The Matrix and related arguments are also popular. The proponent of this argument posits that there is an actual reality, just not this one. It’s a little harder to solve with a tree-pinning, although it may help anyway. It’s a bit of a post-modern hipster’s wet dream, until you point out that it’s very similar in principle to any religion that incorporates the idea of a soul (and therefore not much cooler than Christianity, really). It’s also not much more satisfying than solipsism, as it fails to predict any phenomena and is based on a completely untestable theory – an article of faith, as it were. There is much more evidence in support of a real world – in fact, the only evidence we have is based in the real world, and it seems to point out that the real world is- real. Matrix and religious arguments are pretty much based on speculation over what happens if you eat the red pill, or die. Whatever.

In support of the real world, and against the repeated maulings that the Greks, wide-eyed undergraduates and internet fatsos have worked upon it in my presence, I would like to posit my theory, for the first time ever. My belief is that there is an absolute real world, and therefore an absolute truth. This seems to be supported by some small amount of scientific evidence. This belief in an actual physical reality can be, and has been tested, and allows prediction based on my understanding of a few physical laws that, while outdated, seem to hold (I refer here to Newtonian mechanics, the extent of my knowledge of physics). It is my understanding that we are connected to this physical world indirectly through our senses, which reaches us through the filter of our perception. I believe that we are good to the extent that we are able to trust and refine our senses, and knowledge is only good to the extent that these senses are used in its discovery. This knowledge clears our perception and allows us a closer link to the real world – to truth. On the other hand, knowledge or belief gained by the denial of our senses is called solipsism and religion – it is a form of sickness that leads us away from our senses and away from truth. Because the real world is not only hard to discover through the fog of our perceptions, but also hard to bear in its lethality and seemingly arbitrary treatment of those that dwell on it, it is far easier to develop belief structures that deny the real world in favour of something else, be it the safe harbours of post-modernism or religion, or the sense of control that can be found by drawing reality entirely into the mind.

We, I am incapable of directly perceiving the real world. We have all been socialised from birth to perceive certain stimuli in certain ways, to pay too much attention to this while ignoring that, and so on. Perhaps Nietzsche was closest to the truth with Zarathustra. In Ecce Homo he gives a short, sharp definition of the Overman:

“The species of man [Zarathustra] delineates delineates reality as it is: he is strong enough for it- he is not estranged from or entranced by it, he is reality itself, he still has all that is fearful in reality in him, only thus can man possess greatness...”

Our senses are our only tools to delineate reality, and to the extent we can rely on them, we are healthy. To the extent they cannot be trusted, that our perception calls them into doubt, that we cannot believe our eyes, or ignore the whiff of gas on the air, we are sick. The most profound sickness is to cast aside the senses as worthless, to long for another world or withdraw from it entirely. So to those that retreat into fantasy, who despise reality, who wish to recast themselves as the central actors in a world based on their disease – who want to poison others- I say, Get a Grip! Open that window and let some air into your room! Rise from your deathbed, change out of that pall and start clearing the cobwebs from the senses! Go for a walk, and if your perception causes you to trip over and tear your clothing on sharp branches, it is part of the process that will help you start to open your eyes after all these years. Or, just stop breathing altogether, and finally test your theory of another world beyond this one. Only in these ways will the Overman become an inevitability. In other words, we must cast aside the clouds in our perception and become a lens through which the truth may pass and be magnified.

I feel that I have been unable to express myself properly in even this long an essay, and I beg your pardon if little is to be wrung from this work. But here I return you at long last to where we began, at the drunken party where the siege is starting to succeed. Cracks are appearing in the walls, here a child has been separated from the herd and is led away to “discuss” the Matrix Trilogy further, there more liquor is arriving and another girl slumps down, utterly drunk and hemmed in by a trio of solipsists, all agreeing amongst themselves that each other “would say that” even as they fiercely contest the carcass. Amidst their denials of reality they affirm – vigourously! – their true, underlying belief in the physical universe. In their clumsy and round-about attempts at reproduction, they act towards the great, overriding biological imperative – that ancient truth, shaded in the perceptions of the Grek by thousands of years of taboo and excommunication. In practicing solipsism and demi-religious beliefs as a means to reproduce, they bow before the force of reality at long last, and bring an unknown number of bastards into the world. Yes, this is the real world. No, it’s not fantasy. We’re just looking at it through eyes encrusted with the accumulated sleep of aeons.

It's both, you mustachioed faggots.

The idea that such a question should be cast upon these waters under the costume of a gay rock-opera band fills me with a strange unease. Cumboy, the Cumlord of Lower Cumthorpe-on-Sea raises the most powerful issues here, and so casually...

Where does perception come from?

How does a brain interpret the world? Is there a form of being which can be interpreted ‘as is’? Or does the act of perceiving change the form of an object from reality to neural representation, a kind of quantum mechanics allegory?

Can experience be represented as a sum of neuronal interactions?

Is the mind-body connection some kind of heady Cartesian masturbation or a question of the utmost importance?

Can the tools we have for revealing the activation patterns of a brain tell us anything at all about its action?

As a young psychologist, these questions were thrown at me like a shower of javelins. The answer eventually provided was, of course, “We don’t really care because we’re scientists... now get back to reading those journals you lazy little shit!”

Thank you so much, academia. You go a long way to fanning the flames of a young man’s flirtations with solipsism.

But the crusty nerd-elite have a point, and a perspective which continually manages to do small things like make diseases go away and build warm stuff to live in – if reality is an all-encompassing illusion, then it does a damn good job of being consistent. So good in fact that predictive laws allow us to understand and manipulate it with a relative degree of safety.

(This raises the question, if we have a ‘reality’ that is artificially constructed from another reality (a meta-reality?) and it is entirely consistent in construction, does it change the definition of the Real? Just... excuse me... sorry. Trying to prise my hand off my penis.)

One of the most interesting parts of the postmodern experiment is the focus on social construction, the idea that ‘truth’ should be understood socially, as a product of socioculturally situated perspective and its rose glass’d view of the Real. Frames and perspectives create different entities of the same object. It’s easy to dismiss as an idea (“We don’t have a social perspective on this test-tube, son! It’s TEH GLASS! NO SOCIALZ HER!! LOL!1!”) and most of my psychological colleagues hate it with a peculiar kind of fervour, thinking the charge of ‘being unscientific’ is the worst possible insult they could level at it.

What putrid shit-encrusted stupidity.

Anyone who has read an utterly convincing statistical analysis, only to read a follow-up article which completely debunks it will be familiar with a small and unassailable feeling that sometimes we have absolutely no idea what the fuck we’re doing. The fact remains that two highly intelligent and educated people, whose arguments are entirely quantitative, can disagree almost entirely on simple matters of easily demonstrable evidence... surely there is space in hard science for a relative understanding of their perspectives.

That is to say, a relative understanding. Not relativism. They are not both right and you can circumcise me with a bone knife, let me wear a burqa and sign me up to the Flat Earth society before you let me believe that particularly feeble hippy inconsistency. If we have moral and ethical constructs, we have greater and lesser good, and if we have a reality that manages to reproduce itself with such charming reliability, then we have a tail to chase. End of story, pomosexuals.

It’s not particularly mature, but this kind of truth-brawling always reminds me of the FarBeyondSane Experiment in Democracy:

• Give a large statistically significant number of very intelligent people, well-meaning and educated people a contentious issue for discussion.
• They will either almost entirely agree on an approach to the issue, in which case intelligence has no place in democracy as is washed out by the will of the stupid, the moralists and the emptiest heads with the loudest voices...
• Or our intellectual elite will remain as sulky, irrational and deeply divided as the population at large, in which case intelligence is irrelevant to democracy as the problem remains insoluble, a balanced switch waiting for a meme to throw it one way or another.

There remains only to tell you relevant things of which I am convinced before I fail to draw any kind of conclusions whatsoever.

* The structure of a brain is complex and ridiculously, even savagely, nonlinear. All such systems have a sensitivity to initial conditions which is so acute, the physical inputs and outputs are theoretically disconnected. The system is best understood as having an output (i.e. behaviour) which acts as if a strange attractor – typified behaviour which follows loose procedures with non-specific boundaries. Its measurement and understanding is tremendously problematic.

* By extension, brains of different structures interpret the same stimulus in ways which cannot approach being the same. The interesting thing about personality traits, political viewpoints, and moralities is that they all have a quasi-reliable pattern of correlates which assemble themselves into archetypes. The annoying thing about the same is that they’re fucking correlates and they don’t DO anything. They allow you to safely conclude 100% of stump-dick-all.

* Morality is a force which completely trumps reason and performs unnatural acts to the bullet wounds in its neck. Broadly, morality posits the idea of Greater Truth. Truth that is so true that it cannot be proven, and doesn’t need to be because it’s just so gosh-darned true. I know I am not the only one who finds this monumentally stupid. That is a great relief, a relief entirely outweighed by the anxiety created by the fact that we are an embattled minority.

* Many scientific types could not give two blowdried shits about the nature of truth. Considering their often cavalier treatment of experimental protocols, and pillaging of statistical procedures, it’s a wonder we feel safe to comb our hair without getting cancer. Like teachers or bankers, many of the truth-chasing fraternity think of their work as ‘just a job’. For shame.

* It is my firm belief that every intelligent person should experiment with drugs. If there is such a thing as a hegemony of perception, then a good dose of psilocybin, or even a greasy joint of White Rhino can give it enough of a shake to create some forward momentum. Not only that, but drugs should be free, legal and widely available to those with tested IQs above 140. Please?

* The Matrix got far too much press for being philosophically astute. Intimations of clever doth not a intellect make, you sandblasted cunts.

Now, I am going down to the yard to lift kegs until my head stops spinning on its axis.

Jack of All Existences, Master of None

The first philosophy (Metaphysics) is universal and is exclusively concerned with primary substance. And here we will have the science to study that which is just as that which is, both in its essence and in the properties which, just as a thing that is, it has. That among entities there must be some cause which moves and combines things. There must then be a principle of such a kind that its substance is activity.

- Aristotle

From Freddie Mercury to Aristotle: How’s that for a turnaround? What Aristotle lacks in the tight-trouser department he more than makes up for with philosophical musings, although I’m sure his tunic was just as ill-fitting as Freddie’s ball-strangling polyester efforts.

What I like about the above quote is it implies that nothing just happens, that there is an underlying reason to what we perceive as reality. What this reason is has been under discussion for the past two millennia or more, but, whatever it is, humanity has endeavoured to quantify its effects. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can pretty much explain the effects of all aspects of reality from the Planck to the inter-galactic scales in terms of energy, forces and mass. Why these properties of reality exist, or even if they exist at all outside of illusions of perception, will probably never be known.

So, what we have is a set of rules derived from first principles that exhibit a reasonable fit to empirical data. Some of these rules are hideously complex; some are elegantly simple. In fact, the simpler the equation, the more profound its connotations. It is thought amongst physicists that the Grand Unified Theory of Everything (GUTE) will be a one-line equation of immense minimalism, exuding elegant beauty in its effortless insight. Like the most beautiful woman in the world looking out from the page with come-to-bed eyes while revealing a hint of alluring stocking welt.

Needless to say, that’s a good thought (as is the GUTE), but why do these rules exist? Why is it that I plummet to the ground from the highest branch in the tree? Why is it that whenever I put my hand onto the hotplate it burns? Why is it that they don’t teach you these things from the minute you are born rather than waiting ten years? There are numerous schools of thought on this metaphysical conundrum, but one that intrigues me isn’t actually as far fetched as it first seems, mathematically at least.

What if we’re all an advanced computer simulation obeying a series of external commands that masquerade as our thoughts? And yes, I can hear your anguished cries of The Matrix. I actually didn’t mind the film too much save for Keanu Reeves' acting, which can only be described as mesmerisingly feeble, but disregard that two hours of Hollywood saccharine and think about what we perceive as our universe really being a simulation. It would certainly explain why everything obeys physical laws (even if we haven’t quite figured them out exactly yet) although I doubt why any “programmer” would create the French, even as a tool of torment.

The notion becomes more palatable when one considers the nature of infinity. Infinity is assigned its own subset of mathematics and can become surprisingly complex when one scratches below the surface. Everybody knows of at least one infinity – counting for eternity is a common example – but infinity is a lot more than that. In fact, it’s infinitely more than that. Literally. For infinity is defined as the infinite set of subsets that are themselves infinite, i.e. there are an infinite number of infinities. It gets worse, dear reader: Not all infinite sets are of the same magnitude – in other words some infinities are larger than others. For example, the infinite set of even numbers is the same size as the infinite set of odd numbers, but half the size of the infinite set of whole integers. It gets a lot worse, but that headfuck is for a dank corner of the Queens Arms whilst inebriated. If you’re lucky I’ll even try to explain what a blast beat is, including a poorly executed physical demonstration utilising pens half-inched from the bookies next door and a couple of well placed beer mats.

Anyway, my point is that due to the nature of infinity, it is impossible to discount the suggestion of our being a computer simulation. Give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time and eventually that little Frenchman, I mean monkey, will produce enough random keystrokes to replicate the entire works of Shakespeare. In order. So why is it infeasible to suggest that in an infinite universe with an infinite number of civilisations, that an infinite number of these infinite civilisations obtain a state of technological advancement that would allow the creation of a digital simulation that mimicked reality exactly?

Of course, mathematically speaking, it isn’t infeasible to suggest so, but what does this mean for our definition of reality? Well, it follows that there must exist a reality (or at least a perceptive interpretation of reality) somewhere outside of the simulation on which the simulation is based. This begs the question of being able to tell the difference in any case if the simulation mirrors reality so closely. I would imagine it to be akin to waking subsequent to dreaming; after all, our dreams feel as real as being awake whilst we are experiencing them.

Maybe we are real and our reality does actually exist, but on the other hand, maybe we don’t exist and we merely comprise an almost infinite array of zeros and ones. In either case, it feels convincingly good, so let’s just get on with whatever form of existence we are experienceing and quit the philosophical discussion – we’ll leave that for the academics that are too lazy to go out and get a proper job!

"Is This The Real Life/Or Is This Just Fantasy"

One of the most instantly recognisable lyrics ever penned, Freddie Mercury questions what is real and what is not real. Yes, gentlemen, it's a bit of a philosophical one this time, so get your best metaphysical hat on and discuss reality, perception and the possibility that our surroundings may not be as they seem.

And no more references to 70's rock opera bands; one is quite enough already.

I won't impose a word limit, but the due date is 14 May 2006 give or take a few days.

Post scriptum: I know a couple of you have not had your say on war, but in order to end the current status quo of inactivity I thought it best to crack on.