Of Numbers, Ratios, Fascism, Value

So the Greeks viewed geometry in terms of ratios of lengths and sides and stuff hence pythagoras's famous equality etc.

Ratios and equations are directly analagous to weighing scales. Sadly but true it was merchants and accountants whose trade necessitated and began the art of numbers and maths.

It occurred to me today that all numbers can be seen as ratios. Nothing new but never seen clearly to me before...

In elementary algebra we are taught to treat terms separately ... i remember as a kid trying to get my head around the rules : "3a + 4b = 7ab" seemed sensible that is 3 apples and 4 pears makes a pile of 7 apples and pears... not so. The point here is that numbers in reality are of "types" of things which means that we are comaring like with like! A pile of 3 apples is in a ratio of 3 to a pile of 1 apple. It is not in a ratio to a pear. The number 1 then arises through my old enemy of self-reference: everything is in a ratio of 1 to itself. But this is not a self-reference problem because the reference is external to the entity: when we say that an apple weighs as much as itself a priori we imagine an apple on both sides of a scale: but the scale is external to the apple. The self-reference problem is an entity which is by its own nature self-referential e.g. a scale which weighs itself. This annoying problem like a tooth ache still awaits solution.

When we measure the number of things we are not making any qualitative statement about the thing itself. 3 apples does not tell us what an apple is. To say that something is 100 miles long doesn't actually tell us how much space it occupies it simply tells us the ratio of this length to the length which we call a mile. We try to make sense of distances like a thousand miles by taking what we humanly know of a mile and do a bit of mental addition. Of course that mental addition is unrealilistic. 1000 miles is alot more than two 500 mile walks!

My criticisms of economy, employment, capitalism, politics have been aimed recently at the psychology of power and the misuse of people by one another. It is dawning on me that there is another illness in the system - a misunderstanding of numbers. I scanned a book a few weeks ago on this very subject and it has left an impression. David Boyle's "Tyranny of Numbers" looks at first scan as off the pulse but actually it explains more of the ills than my own analysis so far.

It is because we feel knowledgeable about things when we see the numbers, because we feel we know whales by a statistic of their size, or we know the sun by a statistic of it's surface heat, or know the concentration camps by a statistic of the body count. But this is accountant thinking. Does an accountant know an apple when we reads the receipt for 10 apples?

This is at the route of the old saying "knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing".

Value is Quality as Robery Pirsig would say (Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle maintenance) while Number of Quantity as we are familiar with.

You cannot know value when you have numbers, and judgements based on number are void of quality - that is disrespectful of the things being counted - that is in the terminology of this blog; fascism. It is not money that is at fault but numbers, and I propose experimentally that it is not Nazis at fault but numbers.

So far only Natural and Rational numbers have been discussed. A student of Pythagoras discovered - and was drowned for the heresay (Pythagoras in the midst of Nazi number madness) - a group of numbers that do not exist in a ratio to the numbers so far discussed. These are the irrational numbers things like e and pi. They can only be generated by infinite sums of the numbers so far discussed. Here my analogy between ratios and numbers collapses and numbers spin off out of worldly orbit.

Numbers are certainly an odd world, quite removed from qualitative value based reality: yet intersecting with this reality in qualitative concepts like ratio. You can use the methodology of ratio to get a number (more commonly called measuring e.g. 10cm is a length in a ratio of 10:1 with a cm i.e. 10 cm end to end) but you can't then measure the methodology. This has been my argument for many decades against science it doesn't have the tools for self analysis. It is the self-reference problem.

However I must add that pi cannot be measured since it does not lie in a ratio to anything: but we can determine an indefinitely accurate ratio which is as good as measurement. Somehow we have escaped the limitations of our human world of indefinite quality to postulate the existence of exact entities which lie in infinity - how Platonic is that! The mind is certainly greater than reality (greater in a qualitative not quantitative way - how could you measure the mind: What is the meaning when a ruler measures itself?).

Mind, Suffering and Reality

Having read that book by Ven. Walpola I think an important understanding has emerged. Consider this:

Have you a memory of something that causes you distress, worry or suffering? OK remember it now and suffer a bit.

Doesn't the argument go like this: I have remembered something that has really happened, or is really happening. Because it is real, it means that is exists whether I remember it of forget it. Because the memory causes me suffering, it means that the thing causes me suffering; and because the thing is real then the suffering is real, well founded and should remain with me.

What this line of reasoning hides from us is a very, very, very important fact: we don't suffer when we forget about it. When we are asleep the memory stops and we don't suffer. If we were to die; the same. Even if we are distracted by something else, the mind is no longer on the object of suffering and it stops.

What this should point out to us (when we are correctly alerted to it as Walpola does) is that the suffering is not created by the thing but by the memory, and the suffering and the memory (like the thing) are temporary things which arise and decay. They are not eternal.

There are 2 profound points here. (1) That it is the mind, not the reality, where the suffering is created and happens. (2) That there is a higher reality which transcends the separate arising and decaying moments of our minds.

Switching for a second to the Abrahamic view this parallels the difference between God and devil. God is the higher reality which transcends the momentary arising and decayings and exists at all times and in all places, while any particular devil comes and goes and is only ever causing suffering at one place and time.

The problem of sin then is no longer the view of absolute evils that have been committed either in our personal hisories or in world histories, but rather the attachments that caused those evils which persist through history as long as we don't learn, and the attachments to memories which do the same.

Wisdom saves us from wrong doing. Most importantly humility and acknowledgement of wrong doing and suffering (both our own and others) . Repentence and forgiveness being the way of the wise. Denial and justification the way of the ignorant.

Note

An old idea hatched with a friend was the realisation that capitalism was secretly designed to make you unhappy bcause if you were happy then you would not shop or work and th economy would collapse. I realise today that really a lot of hat has been argued so far is a version of that. Human Societies become self serving at the expensive of the human collective they are supposed to represent because people either come to rely upon the identity or power that they gain through heirachy within these societies, or in an economy the livelihood that it affords them.

The economic collapse is the greatest Christmas present we could be given because it relieves us of much of the burden of work. According to one tabloid large numbers of people are taking an unprecidented 1 month holiday this Christmas - why not take more there is no longer any ork to do.

But the catch is not a reality it is just an unfortunate feature of the current economy that if you don't work then the whole distribtion system collapses too and no-one can receive even the essentials. Thus because we aren't working on making x-boxes and interior decorating we must starve. This is the problem that the new economic theory that surpasses the antequated capitalist system must solve.

The problem then can be reduced maybe entirely to "attachment". It is the attachment of ordinary people to extra-ordinary social organisation and status that is the ultimate problem maybe. A new economic theory must offer people satisfactions and rewards separate from what they do! So that the "doing" becomes a means and not an end, otherwise people keep on "doing" beyond utility and even to disutility.

Consider the growing requirement to be economical with resources. Despite talk to reduce, reuse and recycle we are also expected to buy more to keep the economy running? The economy has reached a point long ago where its "doing" is becoming disutility.

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On subject of old ideas. Harmonic Structuralism seems to be returning into favour. It was a means of objectively separating Nazism from Democracy. The "good" is the largest harmonic group. Nazis are limited by their opposition to certain minorities and neighbouring politics. They are good for their limited membership. Democracy is better etc etc

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Progress. Qualitatie and Quantitative progress. Was trying to think of any qualitative progress. Do we yet eat anything that was not discovered long ago? Well to date there are no artifiial foods - i.e. artificial foods are just cheap copies of wild foods. There are no man made tastes or foods yet. Entertainment is not new and nothing we have developed is qualitatively different from sitting around the fire hearing a well told story (if you have ever experienced complete absorption into narrative so that it is as good as real). Even in medicine we have been operating and giving medicinies all of history. Genetic modification has occured in farm animals, wheat and dogs so even this cutting edge of science is just new tools for old methods. Is there anything new?

If not maybe it is simply because man-kind has not changed. We still have 5 senses and the same brain. This very much supports my argument for seeing through the aura that surronds all things modern.

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OK signing off. Hopefully in the new year I can tie up the negative analysis and start to synthesise a full working positive hypothesis of life - I need to ... somewhere in all of this I've got to live! Merry Christmas

Profit?

Profit arises when income exceeds costs. How is this possible however? Two identical companies competing in a true free market if they had surplus wealth would use this to increase wages or lower prices so as to attract better staff or more customers. Surplus wealth would thus always disappear.

Of course it is never a free market and this example illustrates this point most definatively.

In the jobs market a surplus of prospective employees in a particular market reduces wages. That is competition between people to get a job means that they will accept lower and lower wages even to the point of absurdity because being alive but exploited is preferable to being starving. In the case of skilled employment such a glut of individuals would cause people to reskill, but for unskilled labour there is no such escape from competition. A surplus of unskilled staff means that companies will always make profit on wages, and it also encourages companies to reorganise toward unskilled "division of labour" for this reason. This is quite a different explanation of profit from Smith's economies of scale in the famous pin factory.

Imagine pin making was broken down from 1 skilled task into 10 even more skilled tasks, maybe using highly complex machinery. Then while factory output might increase a hundred fold the supply of staff skilled enough to operate the machinery would vanish. They could then charge whatever they liked from the capitalists and the profit would vanish. Any company trying to cut wages would lose its precious staff to competitors.

The situation with prices is simpler. In theory any company with profit could reduce its costs and out compete its competitors. However as far as I can see there two factors which limit market freedom. Copyright and patents mean that capitalists can control production of products, and the odd behaviour of luxury goods where increasing prices can increase sales because the the increase perception of quality.

What happens to profit? As far as I know it is either invested back into the company, gets distributed in bonuses or is used to pay off the capitalist owners. So infact there is no such thing as profit anyway, it only exists because of the way that capitalists like to look at the system of production.

Bonuses aren't really bonuses they are just wages based on performance rather than on contract. It makes sense to me to have all wages based like this. When you work for a company you contribute a share of the labour and you get a share of the income - that is what actually happens, it just gets dressed up in meaningless rhetoric as a labour contract. If the company makes no money then you can't have a wage regardless what the contract says - it is just paper; reality is what we need to look at (seems to be linking into the previous block of posts on rules and laws). Companies then fail in a discrete fashion which is another falasy.

In reality companies ascend and decline gradually - but it is all hidden by creative accounting and the meaningless announcement of "profits" (which I'm arguing don't represent anything) and are unrealistic. It is only when the creative accounting can no longer hide the truth that the company seems to implode. If wages were represented as a share of income then wages would rise and decline (rather than profits) with the fortunes of the company, and companies would naturally shed staff and costs as they declined.

The real crime tho in profits comes from the capitalist skewing of business. The most important people in any company are the "staff" and the "clients". It is the relationship between these two aspects of humanity which determine success and failure. Afterall "staff" can be "clients" and vice versa - the terms denote not individuals but modes by which humans interact (wrt previous posts on participation and the nature of society). I notice a profound misunderstanding by many people on this point - that some people take their "position", "role" and "modus operandi" personally so that it says something about "themselves". (On going enquiry into "self" but I take Buddha's point that it has no reality.)

Material production can be viewed as the servicing of needs. But "needs" are mostly satisfied in all the worlds societies - without this people in these societies would have died out! Production in "developing" societies is not about needs. I've been enquiring privately into what it really is about and formed the current opinion - after much reading - that it is about culture. It is the culture of capitalist societies that people interact through the mode of production. An alternative culture is to interact through the modes of fun, festivals and family (to quote Charles Handy). Capitalist societies have simply adopted the culture of "work". All the rhetoric about progress and development is simply ediface to a culture, like tree spirits ediface to animist rituals.

I see this awkward post is twisting around as it negotiates the point. I'll have to refine these points at later stages...

Staff and clients are not the point of view of capitalists. Instead Returns on Capital are the point. Companies exist and indeed their existence depends upon the attitudes of the capitalists. It is the capitalists who buy a right to sit in on meetings not the people who actually make up the company or even the people who use the services. It is returns on capital around which the whole system is centred.

And, why is this? It is historical. The system in which we live has evolved out of the feudal system and the ancient system of taxation. Previously the people were taxed through land tax (rent). Now they are taxed through capital tax (dividends). It is the evolved inequality by which a very small minority continue to avoid work.

The avoidance of work holds a fascinating place in society and one that I am exploring in my book. Of note is the taboo and moralistic nature of avoiding work. The very people who live on capital income are the ones who preach about the "work shy" - not working is a privilage something that must be earned, and previous one that was given by Royal decree to the highest classes. By contrast Working, in its understanding as a culture that dictates human interaction, is simply a system which prolongs the oldest features of human society that it can't bear to deal with humans as equals and likes the existence of closed groups and heirachies.

A real nexus of ideas here that hopefully will tease out more coherently in the future (or even eventually into a book).

Idling... Tom Hodgkinson

Finally catching up with some stuff that maybe makes sense :-)

http://idler.co.uk/

Tom Hodgkinson my new hero and the first since Kierkegaard!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/tomhodgkinson

Blimey it makes sense!

Buddhism - "I" got it !!!!!!!!!!!!

Its not been quick coming that is for sure but two nights ago I finally got the key to Buddhism and the ending of suffering. [Still in beta though as it's not fully tested]

Verses 48 & 49 from the Dhammapada

The man who gathers flowers (of sensual pleasure), whose mind is distracted, and who is insatiate in desires, Death brings under his sway.

As a bee without harming the flower, its colours or scent, flies away, collecting only the honey, even so should the sage wander in the village.

Always it has troubled me quite what this means. How do you take the honey while leaving the flower?

It has always seemed to me that to want the honey means that one is drawn to the flower and only when one doesn't want the honey will one be free from the flower. Thus desire makes us slaves to passions and victims of suffering when our desires are not met.

But aha! I got it now :-)

The problem is the Ego. We can view ourselves like a ball with a copy of ourselves rolling around inside. The outer ball is really big and has room for everything. But the little ball inside has to be either here or there. We put a flower inside the big ball and the big ball is quite happy enjoying the honey and the scent. We take the flower away and the big ball has something else inside it which is gets on with. Thr problems begin when the little ball rolls over to the flower. It starts to enjoy the honey and scent but in a different way - it fills itself with the flower so that when the flower goes it is empty. It then struggles to get the flower back, rolling around the big ball calling everything not-flower and creating disharmony.

The problem is not in the desire of the pleasures or the sensations but in the taking sides. The inner movement whereby we say "this is mine", or "I am enjoying myself", or "this is good (for me)". Such rejoicing is the sin because it is not enough for it to be what it is and our enjoyment to be what it is, we add an extra imperceptible clause to the agreement which states that "it is mine". Which is great while it lasts, but then we get the "it is not mine" when the experience ends. Because we have taken sides we are faced with having to change sides, or live with the experience of "being without" or being with what "is not mine". This empty negativiness which is conjoured magically from nowhere confuses us, we can't understand where it has come from, our "taking sides" self then takes against the negativeness and it all kicks off and we are negative and miserable.

We were so confused and furious at the suffering that has magically occurred that we never read the small print of the contract we signed. It clearly states that what we are currently experiencing "now belongs to us" so that what happens to it happens to us also. When it goes, so do we. Ego's don't like this, the feeling of being destroyed is exactly what they are built to resist. What is an ego afterall this doesn't exist! That can't stand on a mountain and proclaim to all lower beings around it that - it exists and it knows this fact for sure. The mountain turns round and tediously says: yes you exist there at the moment, but I can assure you that later you will have wandered to the other side of me, and for a while you won't even exist. It is not you that is constant but me who is everywhere that you walk. The ego doesn't listen - everything is from its point of view, again, and again, and again. The mountain (which is the true self) on the other hands sees the many sides and the coming and going and doesn't grasp at one one of the many things that lie across it. They are all mine says the mountain, is any of them are.

Ego's are selective. This one, not that one. I take Your side, not your side. I will fight for you againt them. They are right, you are wrong. I like You, I don't like you. This one is good, that one is bad. Egos love opinions and styles and fashions anything that sets them on one side or another. It is not that all these sides and styles and fashions don't exist.. its not even that arguments can't be right or wrong it is the taking of sides, the claiming one side of Mine, taking it personally, and in rejection of the other that causes the suffering. It is the rolling around of the small ball into position and being so small not being able or willing to move off that causes the tension.

There are times as we have seen in the last few years when the whole society goes mad. When hundreds of thousands of people are killed unnecessarily and millions of lives made a misery in your own name and with your own money given in good faith in taxes. People you trusted have willfully abused that trust and lied openly without even taking the time to lie convincingly. A sham operation designed to obscurate and shake off all the responsibility that comes with representative power. People whose expensive and endless efforts to protect their pretence to good dismally fail to disguise the hidden and unilateral agendas of a ruling minority. People who have the nerve to blacken the name of goodness and religion by claiming authority over people who are accused of no greater crime than their own. And they have never commented it or apologised.

I speak obviously of the war in Iraq. Personally I believe that what is said above is true and it amazed me that there are still people who endorse the war in Iraq which unless they know something I don't, still remains to be justified in any way even as we enter the end game of the conflict. It was pure bloody mindedness.

Yet analysis of the argument above determine whether I experience any suffering from this situation. It all depends not on the reality, but whether I myself take sides. It seems a priori that we should take sides with what is correct and true, and hence the confusion and anger at those who take sides with what cannot be correct or true - even with the entire press at the feet and the money to fund any amount of propaganda they still haven't tried to justified the war. Yet it is a fact that people take sides and worse even take sides with what seems absurdity. Taking sides is clearly not the display of truth. Regardless the truth, different people take different sides. It can't be argued here that the war in Iraq was correct because it is so clearly incorrect. It is a fact that people take sides with the incorrect side - even after deep and reasonable debate.

The point for the Ego to realise is that the Iraq issue is clearly huge and covers many territories all the way from the clearly correct and truthful world, to hazy worlds of political and personal contingency. People have many things to gain by taking different sides, and not everyone is only interested in the "truth". Plus we know there are deep layers of secrecy that disguise the real motives and reasons for the war. And yes it is supposed to be a Democracy and these people are supposedly elected - but that is another many sided discussion.

If the ball of my ego rolls around into the shadows and the people who are not so free to observe from the touch lines like myself - suddenly the soup thickens , the light grows dim and the arguments less pellucid. My ego resists doing this for fear that it may lose membership of its side, that side it has invested so much reputation in supporting; for fear that it heaven forbid it might turn to the unpleasant world of shadows itself. These are the small minded fears of the ego which has no choice but to exist in one place at a time. If it goes there, it will no longer be here. If it explores the darkness, it will no longer be in the light. Yet unless it explores the darkness, it's light is very small and threatened. So it is bias that comes from taking sides - regardless the actual terrain that exist - that causes the suffering.

What Ego is not however is self-confidence or allegiance. We can quite aimeably support a football team, a company, a wife, a family, parents, brands, tastes, fashions, likes and reject dislikes, and incorrectness but the ball of the ego must not be allowed to get brought into the game. None of these sides are "mine" and each exists in dialectic and relation to what we in the same move reject. A wife will by definition always define the many other women who are not-wife. It is only a problem however if our ego aligns with her and she becomes "mine" - normalised in many cultures unfortunately - but not the foundations for happiness. When she becomes "mine" then the thought of losing her becomes painful, and the meeting of another woman who we like, if it attracts the ego, causes pain also. The key to "my muse" lies in that very name! My experience of meeting the "One" has an instantaneous subclause - she's "mine". In a Kierkegaardian fashion it was a "mineness" that I realised was shot through with imperfection and in a Kierkegaardian fashion (a man I forgot I modelled myself on) the justice lay in a spiritual world of justice so that she could remain "mine" even while the evidence of the world lay contrary.

I imagine Buddhga means that equanimity and middle-path is characterised by the stillness of the small ego ball. Its strict restraint so that it rolls neither to one side or the other. If we can keep it dispassioned and without claim to any parts of the stream of many sided happenings that pass through "our" (unsided ;-) ) minds and lifes then the mind is liberated and we are happy and without suffering. This way we can experience, but have no suffering. This way we can live, but have no survival.

Oil to run out 2020 -> the nature of the system

Just read an article by George Monbiot on the International Energy Agency's 2008 report on oil. Forget the details of the picture we can't do anything about that what is staggering is what I've come to accept about the establishment ... the IEA are incompetent. Yet the British government and governments around the world take what they say as gospel.

I was 9 when I realised we were going to run out of oil (and thereby plastic and fertiliser and almost everything). If we take something and it isn't put back then it will run out. Its clearly not the complexity of the picture which must be hampering people from seeing the reality.

The IEA presumably funds people to do a job. Apparently this year is the first year that they have actually done a study into oil reserves! Previous years are guestimates. What have they been doing!

Yet it is the same picture the world over from institution to institution. It is interesting to me that the much more complex global warming issue has managed to make it into mainstream politics. I admit I never foresaw global warming as a child, for me it was much more tangible stuff like population, land supply and food which were going to be the problems. Climate is a much less tangible thing. Yet some how the people with power have been persuaded down this road.

It does all seem very random, and the reactions of the institutions that we phantasmogorically believe run the show (when actually they don't even exist - they are just people) seem very random anyway.

As visitors to India often remark it's a country where one has to believe in God to explain how anything ever happens in such a chaotic world. Is the Human destiny one of luck, a continuation of the serendipity which originally produced us, or is anyone actually capable to steering the boat? During my short life I've certainly only seen evidence to contradict the last one.

Piece of personal psychology. I realise at this point that it is the hypocracy of power that riles me. Power expects diligence, responsibility and competence (especially in the employment system) - just listen to all the rubbish we have to pour out in interviews (I was honest once and the interviewer told me in these exact words: I should have lied!)- and we assume this is the nature of the system... or at least I have. I'm a slow learner it seems but actually it looks more like a process of self-delusion where we say these things to make ourselves believe them.

The system is not like this. All it demands is allegience to the System. In evolutionary terms the survival strategy of the system (how is has survived) is not so much because its inherent merits but because it selects for members who are loyal, and especially members who will work to destroy rival groups. Just look at the American's and Communism/Socialism. Thus groups and systems survive.

In this view The System is not an intelligent God given higher feature of Human Life but rather an emergent property. Modernism Enlightenment thinkers liked to think of the system in its positive light of co-operation, goodness, harmony, order probably because economically and politically it suited their place in the world - it was benevolent. I've always been deeply aware that where a system supports one person it is always at the expense of someone else. Only equanimity and complete egalitarianism can avoid this and this is not a system by definition.

Hmmm back to self reference - Egalitarianism is not a system because to identify any components and to place them in fixed relation in any way requires an order which must lie outside the system and so impose itself upon the system. It is non-egalitarian then. Only a self-determining order can be egalitarian but is this possible or even meaningful? Order is always one group imposing (maybe by invitation in a Rousseau like fashion) on another. Anyway order is always in dialectic with dis-order so there is no stable social system - all systems are temporary and conditional. Only systems which accept this have any chance of longevity.

Note on Progress: Occurred to me recently that maybe all systems track a parabolic trajectory - a rise and fall. Researching on Progress it has been astonishing the certainty with which European Enlightenment (and now American) thinkers seem to assume that progress is a constant vector. Even Dawkins accepts that evolutionary trends are temporary - adaptation improves within a context and then when the context changes it becomes mal-adaptation. We see that in the economic system at the moment. Companies which had tuned themselves to a world of cheap credit and even 18months ago were the most successful now find themselves maladapted and extinct. "The only certainty is change" goes the narrator of the Japanese TV show Monkey (Buddhist Monkey-King (Hsiyu-Chi) profoundly at odds with the Chinese hegemony of Confusionism and Cosmic Order). As Buddha says in his great dependent-origination teaching - external causes and conditions are solely responsible for the arising, sustaining and decay of all things. (the pattern of Indoaryan gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of Hinduism; God, Holy Spirit, Jesus of Christianity; maybe even Tiw, ?, Woden in NW Europe). Systems are really governed from outside themselves - what is not the System! No system can govern itself. I guess the Greeks profoundly realised this in tragedy, irony and hubris.

That links to the self-reference thing. I noticed recently that my challenge is not to self-reference exactly. Clearly a sentence can be used in such a way as to denote itself. Thus "This sentence is composed of seven words" makes complete and trouble free sense. And I can add some more interesting examples to this.

The next sentence is not being read. But while the last sentence is now not being read this sentence is being read. The references come into context and go out of context.

The problem is not with self-reference but maybe rather with self-identity. Something can't be itself. That flies in the face thousands of years of philosophy so I say it only tentatively. The problm lies in the way that you identify "itself". I've always had a problem with this notion - I'll explore it in due course [just noting it here].

So to summarise this regurgitation of recent ideas: the dawning realisation is that their is no goal to human existence. The belief that we can enter the world to make lasting changes for good is a profound misunderstanding of reality. Recognisable humans have been on this planet for a million years or so in that time we have each lived lives of value and satisfaction. Been faced with struggles, difficulties, triumphs and celebrations. We have all had life. The idea that one persons life is more valuable or better lived only makes sense within a context. Within the education system of Western society we can achieve great things - but cast into the arctic snow fields and we need other skills. Its all contextual. We have statues around London of great men - few women. Clearly in this omission alone we can see that they are not absolutely Great, simply successful within the rules of the game and the context of the time. To Innuit Indians they are not great at all. Their lives were not absolutely well spent in that sense. However they were well spent in the sense that participation in the world is the foundations of worldly life and worldly happiness. Be it leading a seal hunting party, or being project manager in a big company the essence is the same : of participating in the game. That is the value of life. It is not the system itself, or what the system does that matters but simply the taking part. Gordon Brown is having a great time because the economic downturn has created a whole new set of games to play. If other people start playing them better tho he might lose his place in the game and then he won't be so happy.

I still find this hard to accept absolutely tho. Is all life just a series of inter-personal language games and socially constructed opportunitiues for inter-personal participation. Is having a job simply the being part of the human race? The "doing ones job well" simply valued by the importance the game places on it?

Self-reference will blow this apart instantly. Is the meaning of this simply the playing the blogging game, and the finding a power and position in society by criticising it? Am I simply playing a game here? Well the sentence "playing a game" must be more than a game else it loses its meaning.... I must find a rigorous way of arguing this self-reference point...

In society I see most people admittedly just playing an interpersonal game. That is what I found so tedious in my last employment - it was just a toy company, taken out of the box and assembled by instructions to give the bosses something to play with. There was no heart in it, no sincerity and no real purpose. Surely these things are beyond the games and the systems? Surely running out of oil is actually a big deal? A realisation that the status-quo is only temporary and we should look a bit further than the extant system for our sustinence?

That article...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/15/oil-peak-energy-iea