Monday, 27 September 2010

My mum & accounting + SRH

I'm beginning to give up on criticising Capitalism it is so ostensibly nonsense that it's not even worth it... but another silly case just popped up...

My mother has started to charge me £20 rent each time I pop home, to cover costs mostly.

Had the wicked thought just now that I do work for her in the garden. Just spent 4 hours this w/e and about 5 hours last weekend. My cousin has a gardener who charges $15/hr and I could quite reasonably charge £8 so mum owes me £70 against her bill of £40. So really I should be asking her for money if we are going to start accounting...

But it gets silly because she can charge me for my share of the washing - she washes the house clothes in one go at w/e's and I often throw some things in the load. It's just practical rather than running the washing machine 3 times for each of us in the house.

But then she can play the trump card and charge me for the 18 years she and dad brought me up. Think that runs to about £180,000. Plus she could charge me for the lost income she could have got if she had worked instead of bring me up so that is more like £400,000.

But my argument against this has always been that she owes her parents the same so we are quits. Actually this isn't true because parents spend more on their kids each generation. The very ancient ancestors of the human genetic line didn't even have parental care - things like fish and reptiles.

Anyway even if my argument fails it would mean my parents would have the right to charge me interest on that £400,000 which would ensure that I never got out of debt. Even at 5% per year that sum would be 560k by the time I was 18 which is a further 28k per year. Then I would have to have children and pass onto them not only my parents debt but my own charge as well. But when my parents die I would inherit the debt, which if they lived another 35 years after I was 18 and left home would mean I would owe myself £3million. It is a strange thing property that when we owe ourselves money actually we suddenly don't owe anything. So it would never work.
So it all falls apart and no-one ever gets paid (sound familiar, viz recent credit crunch ;-).

So accountancy can't ever totally invade human interactions, it is impossible. Some kind of formal proof available here and like all things the formal system of money and exchange only works because of the informal system of "giving" that props it up and from which it steals (using the word from the formal accounting system, since in a system of giving there is no stealing).

Accountancy was the origin of counting and maths. Only through people trying to make equal trades were the scales created and the concept of equals and congruency created and then addition and subtraction properly formulated then debt and negative numbers and then fractions, ratios and percentages and only then did its branch into maths and real numbers and complex numbers. And, now with computing we are back to counting and natural positive numbers and I reckon all the contradictions and problems that arise in computers exist equally in accountancy and trading. The "real" world, as the SRH assures, is always outside any particular paradigm we may hold and of which it mocks loudly for those who will hear!

I've a growing boredom with logical systems and sensible things. It seems all the rules we humans manufacture and fight to conform to are all easily subvertible. Even the powerful formal logical systems, designed to be water tight, turn out to easily punctured; all that power being used by Godel et al. like skilled martial arts fighters against their opponent. It is the SRH belief that this is always true. Humans, like Icarus, will always get burned when they try to approach the sun.

In the Enlightenment period science was discovering the absolute truth that God had laid down. But as we looked we found that it was not so clear after all. Revolutions shook Aristrocratic society, Heisenburg demolished the idea of every knowing the exact place and speed of a particle, Godel turned over Russel's search of formal mechanical proof. Nietzsche won over where Kant and others had sort to lay certain foundations. God indeed seems dead. Yet by irony it is his death and the loss of certainty which is the SRH. God would never allow himself to be held onto as a fixed image, as a mere creator of Order. What a trivial being that is who eschews Chaos. God is Transcendent what does he care of order or chaos? This is patent the thought of man, and worse man who is fearful of losing his possessions and himself - that is the worst kind of godless man! So the Godless, by irony, have had it proved that god is dead and are thrown into uncertainty - where actually certainty never lay cos why should God be synonymous with the certain? Was the Certain ever the God of God? No! God doesn't need to be certainty at all.

I am beginning to make sense of the Jewish conception of Yahweh. The Being beyond human understanding. The fearsome being beyond reason, rationality and certainty. I say being in the loosest sense: who ever would say that they "knew" God. And I only say fearsome because we see in God our own fears. If we are afraid of losing certainty then God will be exactly this
and when we want God to be certain we will be shown uncertainty by the Being beyond all comparison and accountancy. It is our limitations that we will always find reflected back on us until we finally have the bravery to step beyond ourselves into the meta spaces outside our own trivial world beliefs. This is the teaching of All religions that I know of: each one implores us to reach beyond ourselves in Love, Kindness, Generosity, Compassion, Bravery and Selflessness. Yet each one of us does the opposite seeking our own place in Heaven and seeking comfort by the fire of Gods generosity.

"Eat, pray, Love yourself" the new film by Julia Roberts is excellent because it shows us exactly how not to live. Not seen it, this opinion is based upon the Review Show on BBC TV. It completely negates what God teaches us. I suppose for the religious it is the closest thing to the devil's teaching yet. An interesting point was made that we all pursue "self realisation" while actually the religions teach us "self abnegation". I am certainly guilty of not seeing this contradiction. Enlightenment is often viewed as self-realisation. It is not. But at the same time it is realisation of our True Self, that is realisation of God. Yet God is always outside ourselves. The religious path is finding the way to step forever outside ourself. A difficult undertaking since we always create a new self when we grow and so a new Diagonalisation or Godel statement needs to be made. What it is not however is aiming for a self that is truer or better than all the others! True-Self is an oxymoron - the Godel statement of Godel statements only true when you are outside the system and never derivable from within the system. Of course we are already outside the system it is just that like Godel (maybe I'm, not sure) we can't see that yet.

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