Empires, Wars and Conflict

Some basic rules of conflict

Wars are between sides. When you fight you must chose a side. Even if you defect you are thinking in terms of sides.

Sides can be small as in terrorist, guerilla, mafia or criminal cells right up to massive empires.

In each group there will be a heirarchy and a leader or group of leaders for whome subordinates fight in return for protection, rewards or favour.

When one side loses the leaders of the vanquished are executed and the sub-ordinates are either enslaved as sub-sub-ordinates even below the status of the winning sub-ordinates. Either that or for loyalty to the new rules they are shown mercy.

War today

The significant battles of the last few centuries have been between empires. In particular the British Empire has been at the heart of most battles.

One misunderstanding of World War 1 & 2 is that they were moral crusades against evil regimes. In fact they were a final battle between British Empire and 3 old adversaries: The Austo-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the threat of a resurgent German Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire was the winner when the Germans defeated Rome 476 and they maintained that empire for 1330 years until 1806 when the Napoleonic Empire defeated them. A century later Germany was trying to rebuild its empire and influence in Eastern Europe against British wishes. Anyone who is against the British becomes Axis and all that was needed was something to light the touch paper.

By 1815 Napoleon had been defeated by the British Empire at Waterloo. But that left the other ancient empire the Turkish Ottomans. Founded in 1299 it has always been a target for the Britsih Empire and naturally became Axis as well. World War 1 gave the British the perfect cover to deliver the final fatal blow and it eventually collpased in 1922 to be taken up not explicitly by the British Enpire but by a new confederation of countries loyal to the British named the League of Nations. This was the predecessor to the United Nations fomed after World War 2.

As the British Empire grew it became too large to run for an imperial centre. Just as Rome had to split into 4 separate capitals so the British divided the empire into the new structure of teh United Nations that assumed the legitmacy of a global democratic government but which was in reality governed in such a way that it would never rule against the interests of the British and always against the interests of the Axis.

During World War 2 Britain was usurped by the expanding American Empire and since 1942 London has been entirely subsumed by Washington.

Empires and Conflict

Rory Stewart makes an interesting observation of conflict zones that they are not composed of people particlarly war like. Rather these people are the victims of the opposing political forces that meet at borders. The conflict and social breakdown is caused by the conflicting power structures.

As we look at the world today and history and we see people fighting and turning violent invariably because of competing power structures in their region.

Absurdity

How odd it is then that empires pretend to help by sending weapons to war zones with the official intention of ending the violence through superior fire power. What is actually happening is that empire seeking to gain control over their neighbours create tensions in border regions that cause the fighting. As Rory Stewart says the people become victims exploited in proxy wars.

Peace

For peace to exist this absurdity of feeding weapons into border regions with the self-serving goal of winning influence must end. Peace in border regions is only possibly when powers find agreement, and that depends upon politicians doing their job. And for politicians to do their job, the people who tolerate those politicians must hold them accountable.

When internal politics breaks down, as it has in the American Empire, and before it the British Empire, and politicans are free to expand the empire then conflict in border regions begins and conflicts start.

The American Empire as I write is in the middle of taking this spark of conflict along the borders of its empire and fanned it with huge military investment under the label the “War on Terror.” The ultimate goal is a global empire ruled from Washington. The dream of every empire from the Babylonians onwards.

Personal Responsibility & Consciousness

Ultimately conflict depends upon weak individuals joining in the conflict. But as we saw in World War 1 & 2 there are many tens of millions of weak individuals who are happy to beat each other over the head on the border zones without any apparent awareness of what is going on. A broader consciousness of the nature of warfare and conflict is desperately needed throughout the human race. Hopefully in the future people will start to seek to extinguish the causes of conflict rather than join in and make it worse.

Modernity and Progress are irrelevant

Let us assume that Progress is a real thing and the Modern world is "better" than what came before.

If there is a Modern, there must be an Ancient and also a Future
Progress says that the Modern world is better than the Ancient. Can we also propose the Future will be better than the Modern? Progress would certainly suggest this, and the idea that the Future will be better than the Present is what motivates Progress today.

Progress is Altruistic
Will we live to see the Progress in the Future? Most of it no. First thing to observe then is that Progress is an altruistic act that our children and their descendants will benefit from. In the same way as Modern people believe they have benefited from the Past and enjoyed things their descendants made possible but never realised themselves.

An Endless Progress, Relativity and One Myth Of Progress
Will there be a point when we can't improve on things any more? In other words is human desire satiable? This question is more complex. People today are not happy until they have a mobile phone. A generation ago people were not unhappy with not having a yet-to-be-invented mobile phone. So desire changes, and Progress actually creates desires as much as it satisfies them. This is the essence of Economic Growth; to keep growing an economy must discover and create new markets and desires for people. This is obvious looking into the Past. In the Past people were satisfied with acquiring stone tools; it never crossed their mind they didn't have power tools. This is one of the key misunderstandings of Progress: people in the Past didn't want what we want. But it is argued that is because they didn't know about what would become available. Luckily Satisfaction is very trivially met. We can be happy with something like a precious gift for ages in ignorance of some fact that it was stolen. But were we to show stone age people power tools they would be instantly hooked because we can argue there is an unchanging law that people want to get things done easily. In the Past we got slaves now we get power tools. But then what to do with power tools? Ancient people would continue to make wattle and daub round-houses and live like they always did. Their culture and "ethnotechnology" would need to change for them to develop a taste for new things for example stone houses (odd that stone age people never lived in stone houses? -- it's cos they didn't have a concept of fixed territory so never settled in one place for long enough to make permanent settlement. That is a desire that has developed!). Desire and Progress are complex things. For this reason you can't actually say of people in the Past: they were impoverished compared with the Modern day. For this reason we don't need to view ourselves as impoverished compared with the Future. Each age defines its own goals and provides the means to achieve them. So while Progress may or may not be endless, it is irrelevant to the people of any age because they do not yet know what the Future holds and work within the confines of their own age.

Progress has an Evil Twin
If we argue that the people of the Past were poor and unhappy compared to ourselves, then we must also argue that we are poor and unhappy compared to the Future. To Proudly stand above the Past, is to be Proudly stood upon by the Future. This clearly isn't true. While we may work for a better future we are at the moment happy. Likewise our ancestors may have unwittingly worked toward a better future--discovering language, cooking, agriculture, wheels, maths, money, &c--but they were happy within their technology, knowledge and existence.

Absolute Progress
But there must be absolute desires that all people have. All people want to live and be healthy so medicine has to be an absolute Progress. That is true until we think again that in the Future people may not get old or die at all: how impoverished we and all our Modern progress now seems. When things becomes spread across an endless line of time they are relative and there is no absolute. If there is anything absolute we know that it isn't spread across time: it is true in each age. Progress by its nature s relative. Indeed the central argument of this blog post is that the relative is irrelevant, what we should seek the absolute.

Political Modernity
The story of things getting better also has a political element. Each ruler, in order to encourage support, has always rewritten history to make his predecessor seem vile, villainous, dishonourable and their times as ones of poverty and oppressive. Most famously when the Tudors took the English Royal lineage from the Plantagenets they completely rewrote history to make the mediaeval period seem one of abject poverty. This is a complete fiction. Mediaeval times were ones of great literacy, social cohesion and prosperity. They were of course blighted by the infamous plagues and ended with the bloody civil war (one of the most bloody conflicts on Earth) and came from the oppression of the Normans but compared with Tudor dictatorship people had considerably more freedom and self-determination. History however thinks of "Mediaeval" like Monty Python incorrectly records it in Search for Holy Grail (except for the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune bit... Particularly if we think of Watt Tyler leading a revolution to overthrow the ruling elite in the C14th foreshadowing revolutions 400 years later.) Progress also inherits from Christian piety and evangelism being seen as a justification for political expansion to "undeveloped" or "primitive" (read Pagan) parts of the world. Flying the banner of "Progress" modern armies feel as justified as Religious Armies feel when on Holy War. It has a very dark underbelly justifying any amount of excess and brutality.

Meaning of Life is The Present
What if the meaning of our life becomes Progress itself. I live my life in the service of the Future, ensuring that things get better but never sampling that myself. We might say this is noble, but what if Progress is Endless. It means that Humans stop living and become slaves to a Future that is always out of reach. Indeed when Progress itself becomes the meaning of life we stop living. Altruism is very noble, but what do we teach the future if all we did was work for the Future? Don't we just teach our children to work for their future? If we all copied Jesus exactly we would all just commit suicide by cop (or Roman Authority). This was not the teaching. Helping others at its root is to bring people, who are lost, toward Life: not toward empty doctrine, or hypothetical Progressive Future, or imaginary Shangri-La but toward Life as it is: as God made it and rejoice in what God has given us. This indeed is what people did before the invention of Progress and Modernity.

Conclusion
Yes Progress exists. Yes Modernity exists. But they are irrelevant to us because the basis of life, that which we must teach our descendants is to be happy with what they have got, to appreciate each day for it is all they have. If we teach that to the Future then the Future will be far richer than if we hand down the roots of a new ever changing technology. And in that we see the dissolution not of Monasteries this time but of the whole Modern Project. Finally Modern man can rest from chasing the carrot and join arms with the ancestors and their progeny to sit down and appreciate the simple fact of the world as it has been, as it is and as it will always be. Although the search for Progress is actually an illness that may indeed cost us not only our happiness but our world.

War is Nonsense

Hard to believe that something that millions of people have given their life to is complete nonsense. But sadly for them their life was wasted. It only take a small bit of thinking to save oneself from this folly. Sadly millions never stopped to think.

Firstly for a war to occur you need someone to fight. So before you even take arms you know that someone disagrees with you, and you with them. As you fight know that you are simply mirroring their actions. If you don’t like what they are doing, they won’t like what you are doing. If their aggression is making you fight more, yours will make them fight more. It is no different from an animal fighting its reflection. Those who seek peace actually stop fighting. If our enemy stops fighting and shows us kindness then so do we. If we stop fighting and show kindness so do they. But it takes real bravery to stop fighting, and actually fear and cowardice to fight.

The most trivial start of war begins with “they started it.” History is regurgitated to prove some grievance that needs revenge. Of course if the soldiers stop for a second they will realise that this grievance has probably been around for centuries and is only being brought to life now because one of their leaders wants a war. Smart soldiers who value peace won’t look at the history but the person who is raising it. War raises history, history never raises war.

More complex starts to war are that we are being threatened and need to fight. But if we look these are almost always exactly the same as above. You should never look at the reasons for war but the politician who is raising those reasons. Churchill is the most famous war mongerer of recent times. A million reasons have been presented why WW2 was needed – most of them invented after the war! But in the beginning it was that Churchill engineered the idea of the “Threat from the Hun.” Of course we remember this threat never materialised and the “Phoney War” lost much credibility for his war machinations. In the end the Hun cost the UK a total of 10,000 casualties. To put that in context that is far less than a single allied bombing raid against Germany toward the end of the war. In reality there never was a threat from the Hun but Churchill still fooled millions into dying and killing 10s of millions more. Iraq war is similar. There was no clear reason to start the war, but books have been written to invent reasons afterwards. Hitchens paramount in this post-match analysis to rewrite history and pretend that it was a reasonable war. Again millions died but again not from reasons, but from war mongers who fight first and look for reasons second. I can think of no reason ever for any of the modern wars.

History books say that the real reason (not so popular with the people who aren’t so motivated to waste life for bits of paperwork) was the German violation of the Versailles Treaty. Britain made the arbitrary decision to protect Poland. And declared war seemingly reasonably when German broke its borders. But it’s considerably more murky than that. Russia broke its borders and took the other half of Poland at the same time. If Poland was the point why not declare war on Russia also? And if Polish freedom was the point why give all of Poland to the Russians at the end of the war? The reason here was that Russia was too powerful to argue with, and the Versailles agreement with the Allies was the point. 80 millions people died not for freedom but to enforce a piece of paper limiting German power. Perhaps behind closed doors the Allied strategy was to break the Russian treaty with Germany and make Russia a valuable ally. Certainly Russia as an enemy was unthinkable. The goal since before 1914 was always to remove German power from the European map. So “reasons” for war usually become very murky and rather arbitrary in the end and get replaced with propaganda and myths by politicians to actually motivate people to war.

Perhaps the only real reason for war is when you are actually invaded. When an army like the Normans lands its ships at your shores and you need repel them. People like to mythologise now that this will be the result if we don’t have a war abroad – a pre-emptive strike. Again this is Churchill’s Threat from the Hun: if we don’t invade Germany now they will invade us. But of course people forget that we are then just becoming that invading force our self. Not much good asking other people not to invade us if we are going to do the invading our self. We see that with the Terror threat in UK now. Had to ask people not to invade us when we have military operations in half a dozen countries at the moment. When you get seen as an aggressor your call to Peace becomes meaningless and you will attract aggression. As Jesus put it ‘He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.’
The problem with the “invading force” argument is that for a war to start you need only one unjustified invading force (or coalition) and one justified defending force (or coalition). A war can be started unilaterally since it takes only one side to invade. Thus anyone who invades, even for the “reason” that they are pre-emptively striking, is actually starting the war. The other side is thinking exactly the same of course and they may actually invade not for invasive reasons but simply to defend themselves from yourself. The US and Allies always say that their invasions are pre-emptive defence and their enemies are offensive attack. But in reality I think all attacks against the US in the last 100 years have been pre-emptive defence. Who has ever actually planned to conqueror USA except the British? There have been few recent attack but the most famous, Pearl Harbour, was clearly a Japanese realisation that war with US was unavoidable and their best strategy was to strike first. Japan would never have attacked US had peace been an option. Likewise when Hitler declared war on US it was after years of direct (illegal) US support for the UK. He realised that the US was as good as in the war and Germany could never win with US support for UK so there was literally no choice but to declare war in US even if it sealed their destruction. Indeed some argue that Germany would have signed for peace after 1941. Peace was never an option in Allied minds. But none of these famous “attacks” at the US started a war, they simply defended the Axis from Allied manoeuvres. The start of the war - when the world went from Peace to War - was Germany invading its neighbours.
My father used to argue that the war would have been avoidable had we armed ourselves to deter Germany in the 1930s. But I think WW2 actually was not the real start of war. That began in 1914 or even before. WW2 began with Germany rejecting the WW1 peace agreement – that everyone at the time agreed was inevitable – Lloyd George came away from Versailles saying that there would be war in the next 20 years. Peace was only temporary either deliberately or through French stupidity and vengeance. Before 1914 there were continual battles with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Prussian Empire before that, the Ottoman Empire over the thousand years before. In the bigger picture WW1&2 should be taken together as the culmination of centuries of battle for power in Europe and the Near East. Put this way when did the war start? The actual problem we can crudely call Imperialism. I won’t handle that here, only to say if soldiers wish to fight to develop the borders of an empire that is a different question and one I will leave them to decide on for now.

IS Imperialism inevitable? There are a number of options.
(1) Pax Romana. During the Roman Empire there was considerable peace because Rome crushed any rebellions. There were no power struggles in countries either internal nor external because Rome was the power.  Its not really peace tho but fear to argue. This is what the US is working on at the moment: Pax Americana. We saw in Iraq what happens when power vacuums occur. The moment ruling powers like Hussein are gone every local war-lord who fancies their chances gets their mates together and fights for a patch. You have civil war. Civil war ensues until there is agreement on a leader. This is how the English Civil war ultimately ended when after Cromwell died all sides decided that a King was better than entering back into civil war. Hobbes writes Leviathan to express this fear of the horror of civil war and that the brutality of a Monarch is far preferable. English civil war was the bloodiest conflict in history. 5% of the entire population were killed in just one battle. Whatever England has today it was bitterly fought for. Something I think all countries should remember. If they want to avoid Pax Romana and want a strong internal system they need to undergo the process of inner transformation that requires incredible resolve.

(2) Like the British accepting a King eventually in favour of fighting the world has accepted the UN. But the UN must be strong else you end up with member states like US acting like an Empire. A “US coalition” is a violation of every UN principle, and ever principle of civilisation. A US Coalition is simply an empire. It must be a UN coalition and the US sadly must tolerate the decision of the UN – where it sits in on every council anyway and effectively governs.

(3) Education. The thoughful have concluded that there is never a reason for war. Even if there is, it is a choice whether we fight or not. You can always chose not the fight. War can only happen when people chose to have war. No war has ever been inevitable. The problem is that society is historically geared up to fight, there are deep problems with the way people think so that the person who seeks not to fight may actually be attacked by his friends and family. If you will not attack the enemy then you are our enemy is the common logic used by everyone from Lenin to Bush. As mentioned before the choice not to fight and seek peace is actually the hardest. To become Peaceful may indeed mean that we are seen as an enemy of all sides. To be Peaceful is actually the walk the hardest and most courageous path of all. But realising this we then realise than when we actually meet the enemy landing on our shores the chances are we are simply meeting a coward who was too weak to say NO to battle.

And then there is Evil. At root we think we must defend ourselves from evil. People are always tempted to be greedy, to be hateful, to be selfish. We will always meet those people who want to take from us, who want to hurt us, and who will trample over our wishes as they seek their own. But when we handle them we must first be sure we ourselves are not being tempted by greed, hate and selfishness. Too often what starts of noble as an attempt to right a wrong becomes a wrong itself. The Devil is exceptionally cunning. No matter how noble WW2 may have started out as, in the end it itself was the greatest evil the world has ever known and that evil was committed as much by Allies as it was Axis – it was all committed by ordinary soldiers.

So when we meet a greedy person what do we do? We can be generous at first. It is hard to teach a greedy person what a generous person is like unless we can do that ourselves. And when we see the greedy person not learning and getting more greedy we can point to ourselves and say do you see I am being generous. And so the education begins.

And likewise when we meet a hateful person do we hate back? If so we can be sure they will get more hateful. They need to see a loving person who can absorb that hate and help them learn love. If ever war was a folly it is here.

And when we meet a selfish person with no regard for others this is the one where war has some value. A selfish person often doesn’t notice until they have reason to. We can remove what they want by sanctions. We can obstruct their progress by threats of power. But most importantly we can isolate them until they join in discussion. But this is the most tricky of the evils because who can operate without thought for their own gain? The US has emblazoned across its departements “Working for US Interests.” The US by its own admission is a selfish organisation committing one of the 3 evils. For this reason it cannot lead resolution to this international problem. Again we are left needing a coalition of nations committed and strongly working in a global interest with mutual support, generosity and kindness both respecting the coalition and respecting each other.

For this reason no person should ever put on the uniform of their country when they are fighting for their country alone. This is the old imperial system. When your country has UN authority then you put on the uniform and fight for UN interests. Fighting with UN backing has its advantage because it means that were you in need of defence you would have the world behind you. But who would ever need to fight in such a world? Who would be able to withstand the wishes of an international community like this? Pax United Nations was the original goal.

The problem has been the rise of a single global super power -  the US. They had/have a think tank called Project for the New American Century which explains the problem. The US has seen the chance for global supremacy, to mould the world in its interests. As a result the world has lost the model it had of mutual respect and cooperation and replaced it with US interests. The fault has been a series of weak nations forming a coalition not with the UN but with the US to form a break away Empire that has continued the old Imperial goal of global domination that the British began in the 17th Century. British had gained control of the seas by the 18th Century which meant it controlled global trade. This gave it enormous power which it held onto until WW2 destroyed it and the US took over. Now the US continues this goal of controlling global trade both at sea, but now the air and also space. This is in direct violation of the principles of Peace. It is greed and selfishness at least 2 of the evils.

The only way to return to Peace is to reject the US as an independent authority and force it to rejoin the UN. But this will require generosity from its coalition partners who will have to lose some authority themselves. It is of the nature of politicians that they do not relinquish power. Instead it falls to the people who ultimately will be carrying the weapons to achieve political aims. And so we return to the folly of war. There is no actual reason to fight beyond the myths of politicians. There is no reason to attack if you are not being attacked yourself. And when you face an invading army is the most part the people you meet do not wish to invade but are too weak to stand up to their own politicians. If we could educate them to lay down weapons then we ave achieve the same goal as fighting them. So pre-emtively before it gets to air drops of hostile troops the goal is to educate people globally of the folly of war and how avoiding war at any cost is brave and noble thing to do.

Meaning of Life

Misunderstanding the senses leads us on the wrong path in life. Many who have followed this path have not seen the falasy and have ended up wasting their entire lives.

The Senses

The senses create a powerful illusion if we don’t understand them. Naively we think what we experience is what is there. Only partially correct. When our senses are intact we get an experience. So the experience depends upon our senses and so it’s not just the world straight and simple.

Eyes create sight experiences, noses smell experiences. We are well familiar. But its wrong to say the world is actually made of the things we see or smell. The sound of a tree falling in a forest with no-one to hear it obviously doesn’t make a sound. You need ears to get a sound.

If one doubts whether the tree needs hearing to make a sound we need only ask a deaf person what sound it makes. However the deaf person may well feel the vibrations. They may also see it, which a blind person won’t experience. So the tree falling creates many experiences in many senses, in many people. There is no single *experience* of the tree falling. Each person not only has multiple experiences themselves like seeing and hearing, but each person has a different experience. This is the source of the Great Illusion because we know in truth there is just one tree falling.

In the East there is a 6th sense in addition to the normal 5. This is the sense that experiences thoughts. When we experience something we may have a sight and a sound but we will probably also experience the creation of a thought about it. This is a source of much confusion. In the case of the tree falling the thoughst will be diverse. But in the context of this discussion one of them may be what is the Truth? What is the correct true thought? Did a tree really just fall? Arguments may break out as people challenge their various experiences. But it is really helpful to see that these thoughts are created by the events as much as the sights and sounds. Less mentally strong people may, like blind people, have duller thoughts but at root thoughts are just part of our experience.

The Way To Freedom

In our thoughts we may pursue this now self generaing snow ball of what “really” happened if our senses are interacting with the tree falling and creating lots of different experiences. What does a tree falling “really” mean. What we conclude after much thought is that a tree falling has no quality of itself. It needs to interact with the world to take on a form, and the form created depends upon what is there. The sound of a tree falling in a forest with no one there, like Schroedingers Cat with the box closed, is what is called Sunyata in Buddism. It can be either, but itself it is neither. It doesn’t mean that it switches between states, or that it is confused about what it is, it IS Sunyata. The confusion only occurs in our thoughts which by definition deal with things that are this way and that. Sunyata can’t be thought. Sunyata is the cause of thoughts! To the wise however they can see that the manifestation of concrete things is itself Sunyata. They are not to be separated. As the Heart Sutra says: Form is Void and Void is Form.

One doesn’t need this level of wisdom however to steer in the correct direction. Mistaking our experiences to be Real and Truthful, rather than created and relative we often attribute far too much importance in them. In particular we pursue a particular aspect of experiences which is whether we like them or not. A person who has not understood that their experinces as just their own, small, local, temporary and created puts a wall around themselves. They become trapped within their senses. In philosophy this position is called Solipsism. How do you prove that anyone else is real? The problem with this is that if start from the awareness that there are other people then how do you prove that your experience is real! If we become attached to our senses then we end up owning them. We are fully trapped and end up believing in a single observer and self experiencing these private phenomena and we end up reject the existence of others.

It is interesting that as a kid I ended up proving the need for Sunyata. But because of a fundemntal attachment to my senses I ended up believing in a personal space in which experiences arose with indefinable sunyata on the outside. Only half correct. I couldn’t see the attachment to my senses that was driving this bubble, private cinema view of life.

Once attachment to senses is gone we live in a world finitely larger than the bubble of private experiece. It means that the worst experiences, while they are indeed happening to us, lose their finality and permanence, and are seen as just a part of the great world. When we see someone else having horrible experiences they are as important to us as our own. Even tho when we have an experience it is real and solid, we understand it in the context of the Great Infinite World of which our tiny bubbles of created experience grow and pop endlessly. We become truly freed from the trap of ourself. Some will say that we lose the intensity of pleasure and indulging our own likes. But do you prefer a comfortable prison or the infinitity of freedom? Red pill or blue pill. Although its not a fair comparison because expanding beyond the senses delivers us into a world without the pressing concerns for like and dislike.

So What is Reality?

So what is out there? The key thing is we uncouple from the endless drive for like and dislike. It is still there but isn’t totally absorbing. Instead we begin to switch to a more universal point of view. Other people become as important to us as ourself. Intellectually we’ve always been able to see this: what in reality actually separated us? Despite thinking we know, no one will ever find an answer to that question cos there is nothing there!

The Meaning of Life

So the Meaning of Life reveals itself outside our sense. It isn’t the endless pursuit of pleasure, or escaping the suffering and troubles of our life. It is freeing ourself from these concerns by letting go of the importants of our senses and putting them in a proper perspective of just momentary creations in a vast boundless universe full of endless beings and even more endless experiences. Once we begin to let go, then we will start to experience the fullness of existence.

Practically it means being brave, being bigger than we think we are, being a Hero and achieving what we think is impossible. Faced with difficult situations, or being blinded by bad experiences, we have that faith in the Bigger Thing, the thing beyond our apparent senses and thoughts. Doesn’t matter what that thing is, the issue is unattaching from the specific here and now that has us trapped. Each time we do this we become bigger, or more accurately we let go of the smaller self that has us trapped. Practically it means paying more attention to others, and learning to consider them as much as ourself. If we can serve another then we have truly unattched from our own senses. Of course we can do this too much, their senses are also not to be take too seriously. Perhaps if they are demanding we can help them serve more and unattach from the demands and perspectives of their own sense and thoughts.

What is interesting about this analysis is that it agrees completely with the wisdom of every age and time. Whether it is Jesus or Muhammad, or Krishna, or Buddha the core teaching is to avoid the small of Evil and open our hearts to the big of Good. It means being humble not arrogant, it means subservient not in command, it means listening not commanding, it means being a carer not a warrior. Those who get trapped in the senses gradually get cut off from the world, and while they may feel that they are large, it is because they have forgotten what is really great. By contrast those who know what is really great no longer get impressed by their own tiny existence and become very simple and straighforward. It is sad how often this is misunderstood. The Glory of God so often associated with triumph and success, and personal gratification and winning. You know when you have God on your side, and when you are a truely Great Person not when you win and celebrate, but when you lose and are content with that, because what can we ever gain that is even close to the grandure of the infinite reality that hosts our every experience and thought? When you see people celebrating victory you know you are in the comany of the small people, the servant of the Devil, the victims of the Great Illusion, too foolish (as yet) to escape the trap of their senses.

Fixed Points and God

A Fixed Point is like that point on a map of England that is right over the place where the point on the map is. Easy to see that the operation making a map (which is shrinking and moving it around) has a fixed point for any location of the map within the map area.

Fixed points remain invariant under an operation. Some geometric operation have one like making a map. But due to Kleene there is a proof that all logical systems have a fixed point. I believe a Turing machine has a fixed point. And since a Turing machine can perform every computation possible, and can emulate every computable system possible it means that every system must have a Fixed Point (that argument needs serious work).

It means that every system has an invariant. ow suppose there are systems we make which are designed to discover points of invariance. They cannot discover their own points of invariance because they cannot operate on them. Fixed Points represent “meta” data about a system. Possibility the basis of the proof I need to show that systems cannot be total, because they cannot encompass their own meta data.

Bt vast analogy Religions speak of the invariant nature of God or True Self. And also that this invariance is beyond the power of individuals. It is the given. The presence of Fixed Points in out Existence would provide exactly this experience. The discovery of the Fixed Points that Religion speaks of is not a process that lies within the system but is a feature of the system itself. Human Being may be systems but they belong to a world which ha just one Fixed Point. It is the invariance of that which enables the world to see that it is not a particular System as is the view point of Human Beings. Seeing the meta data releases us from the common system of being a Human Being. We are not ourselves in the system, but rather the whole interconnected system itself. That was the original insight anyway. But back to something concrete and intellectual.

A quine is a fixed point of a computer program. You input the text of a particular program to a computer and it generates the text of that program. So if this (SRH) hypothesis is true then a program cannot find its own quine. Well obviously. A quine must output the program itself. But a search is a program that goes through all options until finds something matching a criterion. So if the output is just a list of possibilities until matching a criterion then so must the program be. But is that a search. Anyway try to write a quine that is both the output of a search and a program at the same time… something obvious I’m missing here?

PI does not contain itself

If PI contains itself then its decimal expansion is a repeating set of digits. Lets just look at the fractional part.

So pi = PI - 3. And pi(i) represents the ith digit of the fractional part of PI. 

pi = 0.141592654...

so pi(5) = 9

Now if pi contains itself then at some value of 'n' it follows that pi(i) = pi(i+n)

pi = 0.pi(1)41592654...pi(n)pi(n+1)41592654...pi(2n)pi(2n+1)41592654...

Such a sequence can be expressed as a fraction:

For example:

0.12345612345612345612345612345612... = 123456/999999

So pi would be:

1415926..pi(n)/9999999..n times

But Pi is irrational so we know that Pi is not built from a repeating finite sequence and does not repeat after a finite n.

This leaves 2 options. Either Pi repeats after a countably infinite n, or it does not contain itself.

Let us supposed that pi repeats after a countably infinite n.

This means that:

pi = lim(n->inf) 1415926..pi(n)/9999999..n

As I understand it all Real numbers can be expressed like this so the question of "contains itself" starts to get rather ambiguous. Repeating after an infinite sequence of digits is the same as not repeating it seems. To be confirmed.

Death

This blog was an investigation of Life. My life. My disaster of a Life and questions that it raised. It is 11 years since it started and I realised today that almost no progress has been made. Blundering around wondering whether to form sexual relationships, whether to work, buy a house, become a monk, abandon myself to pleasure, find some magical Enlightenment that would lift me out. What?

But realising that almost no progress has been made is the result of considerable progress. I realised that I need go back to Death first to see what is this Life. So what is Death? I shall present some ideas, none better than the rest, but all insufficient to capture the miraculous nature of Death.

A common view is that it is lights out. Game over. Oblivion. But consider the smaller death of closing our eyes. The world goes out. There is nothing but blackness but we don't for a minute think that the world has ceased to exist. We can think ourself into confusion here, but that isn't productive, so lets step around that quagmire. With out eyes closed we know the world carries on as usual. Our body is still here, our heart keeps beating, the sun keep moving through the sky. So when we die what makes us think anything changes then? Obviously our heart stops, and our brain shuts down and lots of other changes, but nothing actually changes. The world goes on. So what is this "oblivion" people speak of in this view of Death?

Another view is that we remain aware and while our physical eyes shut and our mortal body shuts down our hidden eyes are able to separate and travel to other places unseen by the living. This is a comforting thought. I have witness from several people on their death bed of being visited by people to take them away. Near death experiences are scientifically recognised. There is much mystery here. But like Oblivion it doesn't quite capture the whole mystery. If this "spiritual" body is always there then there is no real Death so we haven't got any closer to Death.

A common problem with ideas of Death is focus on the time and the body. We say of a child when they die what a tragedy that they didn't get to live their whole life. We know they are a child because their body is young. Older people look in the mirror and know that Death is approaching and accept it much more readily - I am satisfied with my life, or I have regrets. Although I know of some elderly who at Death were afraid by it, and others at younger age who were not concerned by it. We worry also about health and whether this body will last or give up on us. But our bodies, like our age and time, is not really connected to the question of Death. All these concerns are a side show to what is really going on in Life.

The key to the mystery of Death is linked to the mystery of Life. When do we Die is like the question when do we Live? Do I live yesterday? No. Do I live tomorrow? No. I live right now. In fact if I look at it, I always live right now. There has never been a moment in my life when I haven't been alive right now. And, I have never been alive yesterday, or tomorrow, only ever now. That sounds weird because I remember being alive yesterday and I expect to be alive tomorrow. But the point is those are only a memory and an expectation. If I had lost my memory it would be clearer: I am alive now and only ever now. That is where life happens. Our common view of Time is exactly like a wall calendar... it isn't time as it happens as we know it.

It's an odd way to see things to begin with, this "Present Moment" as it is usually called. But with practice we start to get the hang of it. We have many movies playing in the theatre of the Present Moment carrying all sorts of memories of the past, plans, thoughts. Often like with TV we get stuck watching them. But if we step back and survey Our Life as it stands we see that it is only what is happening that is Real. Everything else is a movie we are playing ourself along side what is happening.

So what of Death? If we look in the private movie theatre we see pictures of us as kids, and sketches of us as old people, and then perhaps brief glimpses of a funeral or grave, or perhaps a disaster where we die, or a peaceful scene with our loved ones around. Perhaps we play a film of us floating off to Heaven and being in the company of ancestors and God. But from the perspective of My Life this is all movie, a piece of entertainment. It isn't Death at all.

What emerges in the Present Moment of Life is that actually there is no exact thing called Death. The nearest thing to the opposite of Present Moment is day-dreaming on auto-pilot and we do that all the time. Indeed most of us spend most of our lives not in the Present Moment. We spend most of our lives not aware of Life, not actually Being Alive, and so in a way we are Dead most of the time! Ironically particularly when we are day dreaming about death!

If we return to our bodies for a moment. Or great fear is that the body will fail. But if we look at the body we have seen lots of bodies fail. It is on the news all the time. What we mean is that "our" body will fail. That is the one body amongst all the others that is our major concern. And now we enter the rabbit warren of the actual cause of the problem that Death poses. It is not Death itself, that happens all the time, it is "our" Death.

If for a second we ignore "our" Death and look at all the other Deaths. It is quite remarkable that they don't really make much difference. 80 million people died in World War 2. It is totally incomprehensible but every one of them was a person like you are I worrying about their Life, trying to stay alive and live a happy life. And all of them perished in a way we cannot even comprehend. And yet today for all that tragedy and disaster it makes no difference at all. The Sun still rises each day as though nothing had happened. Planet Earth is still blue. Its almost as though Death didn't exist!

What is surprising is the observation that a life ending is quite natural and normal. It is no great disaster. Every living thing will end its life at some stage. It is not really an event worth mentioning. Yet when it happens to us, or our loved ones then it is a matter for profound concern. I won't complete this now but I shall leave it here at the glaring contradiction between seeing so much death and destruction in World War 2 and it leaving almost no trace on the world, and the feeling that our own Death will be some cataclysmic event that will knock the stars out of the sky and cause Game Over or perhaps a celebration in Heaven.

Perhaps I will add one note that while I push toward a balanced and simple view of Death, this does not distract from the fact that in its reality it is a very traumatic experience for most, and thus always demands our deepest sympathies and support.

Death is certainly a mystery. One as great, deep and unfathomable as Life itself.

BBC Salaries do follow the market

BBC salaries follow a perfect inverse square root. This is what you’d expect from a pure free market. It seems unless they deviously had this is mind, they are simply following the market rates.

The take home from that this is that people compliaing about the salaries, are really complaining about Capitalism and Free Market valuation. Which interestingly is why the BBC was set up, and why it is wrong to force the BBC to start competing ina free market.

Load of nonsense isn’t it.

Deep Ecology vs. Human Progress vs, Interconnectedness

An interesting article at least raising the central points of Human Ecology.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/philosophic-roots-paris-agreement-deep-ecology-vs-human-progress/

However like so much in the modern press it only does enough to raise and problematise an issue.

Deep Ecology is more than just a reaction to Capitalist Economics. It is based upon this idea of "inter connectedness" that is raised in the article. It is not a simple idea, but one of such deep importance that Western Civilisation can be characterised as having developed without it.

"Inter-connectedness" changes the view of reality from "bricks" to the "whole" wall. As can be seen it challenges the basis of the Western civilisation and science as composed from discrete things, atoms, things, individuals.

"Deep Ecology" is not discussing "Human vs Nature" as the article instructs its reader but rather looks at the "whole" picture of Human And Nature.

Ideas of "progress" have no place in this view. How can you progress from point A to point B when A and B are part of the whole. You can only progress from point A to point B when you are stuck at point A.

"Deep Ecology" is "deep".

Anarchism, Alt-Right, Molyneux, Government, Freedom and where it is all Wrong

It is a very American thing not to trust the Government. The 2nd Amendment is justified by the fear of allowing an armed Government to exist unchallenged by a disarmed People. And, of course as with everything there is A Truth to this. But, it is not the Whole Truth. The key problem is this "straw man" thing called Government and People.

Politics is the process of creating divisive ideas and then working to get support for those divisions. The general process is to cause a division and then get people to support one side against the other. Classic divisions/dualisms we have seen are Roundheads/Cavaliers in English Civil War, Loyalists/Patriots in US Independence War, Communists/Capitalists in Cold War, Socialists/Imperialists in 18/19th century revolutions, Collectivist/Individualist or Group/Individual and we have Government/People.

What is Government? The extreme view is that it is a Closed group of super powerful people who are unified against the rest of Humanity. In the most extreme view they are not even Human themselves, perhaps Aliens like in the Carpenter film "They Live". Perhaps they are humans but are racially insular like Jews, perhaps they are like "us" but are just super powerful like Bilderberg or Illuminati. But in reality no "group" is really like this. And of course as soon as we take sides in a division like this we join a group and become collectivist ourselves. This is a logical problem with dualism itself.

I'm no expert on the widely read and deep thinking Stefan Molyneux, he certainly seems to have risen to prominence in the Anarchist movement, but from what I hear from supporters he must be misunderstood. Ayn Rand also runs into a similar problem with the concept of "group". Perhaps easier just to do a straight paragraph on that.

ANARCHISM AS I UNDERSTAND IT IS THE TRUTH. We are all always free to be whatever, whenever. Even if I am imprisoned by a powerful state I am still completely mentally free. I just have some superficial limitations to my physical movement and circumstances. Even in a perfect world I can get a stroke and get locked in syndrome. Has my "freedom" really been taken by the stroke or state? The TRUTH is always true and ANARCHISM is the truth that we are always free to chose. But we must accept the situation before we chose in any world. I may chose to save myself, but I need to know what I am saving myself from first else I will fail. The Anarchists are quite rightly reminding us this: WE MUST MAKE WISE CHOSES. It is the same message as all the Religions: we will be judged alone for what we do. Sin is ours and ours alone. We must therefore chose well. It is the foundation of Protestantism and Western ideas of Individuality and Democracy. It is an old and very important idea, simply being rehashed.

So far so good. So how has it gone wrong. The problem is that Alt-Right Anarchism has become politicised and has formed into Groups. A person who choses to work with government or socialism or communism or anything that is deemed "anti-anarchistic" is viewed as not-Anarchistic even if they have made a well reasoned decision. Yet the whole point of Anarchism is that we must make a choice for OURSELVES. Some people think that government is a good thing. As Anarchists they must chose that. So there is a form of Anarchism that has arisen that is deeply ANTI-ANARCHIC but believes it is true Anarchism. Ayn Rand and Stefan Molyneux seem to be the worst offenders here. The argument is that a member of a political party has lost all freedom to chose. But this isn't true. They chose whether to follow party line or risk their carriers (I'll deal more with compromise below).

Ayn Rand knew this problem. We must be extremely careful as ANARCHISTS not to become influenced by the group. Our choses must be OURS and not the GROUPS. Anarchists will argue that being a member of a political party will compromise ones choices and therefore cannot be allowed. But what if I chose compromise? Reality is actually all about compromise. I consider a stupidly simple example of a compromise we all make.

I want to go on holiday with my partner and children. This means I must  chose a time which is convenient with them and they with me. So we work together and pick a suitable date that works BEST. "Best" might not be "my" choice were I holidaying alone. But since I want to spend my holiday with my family the parameters change and I chose a different date that suits that wish. There is no absolute "right" answer. Anarachists seem to think there is a single "true" choice I will make when unhindered by "The Group". You cannot escape "the group" to make "free choices". Even if you buy something a group made that.

Obviously there are times when "The Group" seems dangerous. Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia with the mass killing. How is it that a mass of people can be organised into a killing machine that terrorises the country like this. The panic answer is that people must realise for their own good not to organise into mass movements that can become unstoppable killing machines. But wait a second, this conclusion is based upon complete bias. The Allies were an even greater killing machine than the Axis powers. The American War of Independence where the American's fought off British rule and the English Civil war where we fought off the King were achieved by mass killing machines. War is about matching mass killing machine against mass killing machine. And the bigger killer wins. This is why the US currently spends more on weapons of mass destruction than any other country. They understand that "freedom" depends upon punching harder. So Anarchism must be saying if we want Peace then we must not organise into government, nations or even armies. There is great sense to the last one. I no one ever joined an army or picked up a gun then war is over. But we have the contradiction now: what to do with people who use the 2nd Amendment. If they think this is correct then as Anarchists we must respect their decision.

And so it goes for government. There is an argument that government is both unavoidable and essential. I may as well make that now.

How did government arise? There is the Feminist argument that Patriarchy is a conspiracy of men against women. But how did *that* arise? A few options: If they were never equal it is not a conspiracy. Men are just more powerful. If they were equal then women allowed men to conspire against them. Either way there was a due process. There was no "unfair" conspiracy. The anarchist argument is the latter. People were all equal and the mass allowed an elite to conspire against them. This is the call to arms for the mass to rise up against the elite. Ironically this is exactly the process of Socialist Revolution; an uprising that the elite are genuinely afraid of, which is one reason why Communism is so hated in the West. The problem with this view is that it is once again part of the truth. Some history to illustrate.

In Ancient Greece the highest level of organisation was the city state (Polis). An Anarchist utopia where every city state of a few thousand people had its own rules, customs, economics. Some were Oligarchies, some Democracies, Theocracies, Plutocracies.. the Greeks had names for all the ways of organising a city. One thing that was constant tho: there were hereditary families of great power that could travel freely between the city states and mess up the politics. Alcibiades is a famous character of noble background who had constant changing allegiances between Athens, Sparta and elsewhere. This money class had their good uses as well as bad. Athens used to tolerate them because they were forced to pay for the many public festivals that were held. But occasionally this relationship turned sour and the Aristos would rise up and take over. But before long power shifted and the Demos would wrestle back power and castrate the power of the elites. This constant battle between oligarchs and people is as old as Humanity.

In Britain we have one of the world's worst class systems that goes back to the invasion of the Island by the Normans. The Saxons were put into slavery and the Nobles developed the class system we have today. This is the typical way in which inequality is generated. The reward for victory in battle is supremacy and the vanquished are subjected to the power of victors. The series of victories that the US has enjoyed over the last 100 years means that many countries including Britain are now subjects of US power. Britain is only granted so much power to deal with trivial local matters. Important matters are decided in Washington. This kind of process is the key structure across all history.

On a small scale you see it with gangs. You are not in a gang. You get threatened so you either agree to join, or you go and join another gang that you think will support you. By doing this you make the gang stronger and you increase the problem for people who want to avoid gangs. England could have remained in defiance of the Normans, it could defy the Americans. But would it benefit or is it better just to accept the situation for now. But by doing this it must fight in US Led Wars and so makes the problem harder for countries that want to avoid being in the US Gang. This is the problem.

Power is the name of the game. Power exists. If I can't do something by myself I will ask a friend. Together we are stronger. But by doing this people who disagree with me must join forces also. This is the nature of things. It is called Politics. Even many fake Anarchists, as already said, have joined forces now against government and supporters of socialism and government etc. This process of actual political alignment is the process to watch, not the divisions in some intellectual argument.

Can we--like Ayn Rand and Molyneux argue--all join together to reject this "evil" tendency to gang up against each other? The problem is that this is really hard to define. I want to build an oil pipe line so I form a company and contract out skills and everything seems fine. That is until a bunch of people say that I am building on Spiritual Land. I have no idea what they are talking about, I never even thought of it. Suddenly my innocent collective of people bringing needed oil to market has become an offensive force against some people. Naturally they see us as a powerful force so they gang together to attack us. What did we do wrong? People must work together, and when they do this they will necessarily work against the interest of some people.

The solution is called Politics. This is where we don't try to kill off power (baby and bath water) we simply accept THERE IS SUCH A THING AS POWER, but we argue out who is going to get this power. Sometime it is around a table, sometime it is by force. These laws are bigger than any social organisation. Anarchists are RIGHT in that we must always remember around that table or in that army that we are making choses for ourselves and not to live unthinkingly. If we obey the orders of our Sergeant we do so willingly because we think it is best, and if it turns out he was an idiot and we made a mistake to trust him that is our responsibility. If we are told to shoot on protesters this is a decision we must take for ourselves. No one in Nuremberg should have been able to say they were "following orders". But obviously no army would operate with people disobeying orders so people joining an army need understand that the Army is fundamentally opposed to freedom of thought. This is something for their consciences to work out. No blog entry or you-tube channel can replace a person's conscience.

The problem for anarchists tho is that most people are too busy earning a living to really have the time to think everything through. Only the elite like Plato and Molyneux have the time. I call Molyneux elite because he lives through a You-tube channel discussing philosophy. Traditionally this was the lifestyle of highest elites. It is the main fault of Capitalism ironically-- the thing championed by the anarchists--that having to depend entirely upon ourselves for our income we have very little time for higher thought. Even the elite Aristotle argues free time is essential for politics. But historically Free-time has always been bought by slavery and elite power. The rise of Capitalism has destroyed politics and with that the elite have been able to take over in a way never seen before. In the Middle Ages, despite the Tudor propaganda, people were highly literate and fully engaged in politics. The Peasants Revolt led by Walter Tyler in 1381 gives some idea the political intelligence of the "peasant". Equally the ignorant mass of the French Revolution were actually an intelligent politically engaged peasantry. The irony is that the modern industrial worker has no political capability. We are the drones and zombies that Anarchism is riling against. But we are the product of industrialisation, mass production, machine labour, TV, internet and electronic progress. It is not a simple disease that the Anarchist argues against. It is not something with a quick fix. It is certainly not a political debate with sides.

What we are seeing is just the ancient battle of Good against Evil, or people's hearts, souls and consciences. Sadly it appears to me a political popularist dogmatic consciousness had crippled any meaning, intelligence and debate in the always present issue of how we live.

Proof that you can't have an Emulator

This is an odd recent result that makes no sense.

(1) List all one argument functions so that each function has a number.

f1(x) is the function on the 1st row where n=1
f2(x) is the function on the 2nd row where n=2
etc

let #f be the notation that gives the row number of the function so that #fn = n

(2) Suppose there is an emulator function E(#f,x) which takes the row number from (1) and provides the result that f(x) would provide so that:

E(#f,x) == f(x)

(3) For each particular value of x, lets call it 'a', in (2) there is a function Ea(n) such that:

Ea(#f) == E(#f,a) == f(a)

In other words for every value of x there is a corresponding function fx(n) which provides the result of the function fn(x) on x.

(4) Each Ea(x) if it exists must have a row number #Ea. Substituting in 3 gives

Ea(#Ea) == E(#Ea, a) == Ea(a)

Therefore:

#Ea = a

This means that the row position of each Emulator of functions on value a is 'a' itself.

This is clearly a problem already. The following is simply looking for a contradiction in this statement:

But f5 is the name we have for the function at row 5, and 'fa' for the function at row 'a'

So:

fa(x) == Ea(x) == fx(a)

The function at row a applied to x gives the same result as the function at row x applied to a.

This is clearly nonsense as the order of function listing at the start was quite arbitrary... but how do we prove it.

Proof of God progress

If a(b(x)) = f(x) and b(a(x)) != f(x) then there is no a(x) nor b(x) such that a(x) = f(x) or b(x) = f(x)

Basically the existence of "meta information" i.e. order of operations is outside either operation a or b. Thus a() and b() cannot be equal to f(x)

This is a concrete example of the SRH which states that self reference is impossible. If self-reference means more than simply self-naming which is trivial, but a computational function e.g. with self-knowledge or self-consciousness, then we are saying that bcos the Total system has components that are structured then the components cannot be both components in a structure and also represent that structure. Structure is a concrete example of the more general "meta" system. Originally it was awareness that text itself is meaningless, it needs a language user.

Equally computer code is meaningless it needs a CPU. Thus the CPU can never be expressed in code. However emulators exist, and emulators of Turing capability can emulate anything. But at root the emulator must run on a CPU that is not itself emulated. You cannot have M.C.Eshers hand drawing a hand drawing itself, it must have basis outside the system. This is because the emulated entities while homomorphic with the "real" CPU can be "necessary components", and thus there must be the possibility of information that is outside the emulations.

Definition: "necessary components" are components whose structure is critical to their compositions of the entity. A grain of sand in a bucket of concrete is not a "necessary component" as the grain of and can be swapped with a pebble and it is still a bucket of concrete. There is no structural information. However a strut in a roof frame is. The roof frame fails if the strut and joist components are swapped.

There is an exception to the opening statement.

While a(b(x)) != b(a(x)) across most values, there may be a Fixed Point value.

Since a(b(fp)) == b(a(fp))

Fixed Points were central to earlier exploration of the SRH. Godel Statements lead to contradictions and so incompleteness which breaks systems and allowed statements to exist "outside" systems, or the boundaries of systems to be broken. This is SRH, in that systems are forced to acknowledge an "outside". A truly self-referential statement would reference itself within itself, that would be a statement that would need no "outside", one that depended only upon itself. "Myself" is synonymous with totality and exclusion of "Other". This is very much the Dark-Tetrad problem discussed in previous post.

The negation of a tautological statement is a contradiction.

Similarly it was theorised that where a fixed point in a system like: x = "x is True" cannot be false without contradition, its negation x = Not("x is True") is a contradiction and Godel uses this structure to break Principia. x = Not(x is in Principia)

This is very loose logic, probably a lot of nonsense, but broadly sweeping out over the mental possibilities.

So it is interesting that Fixed Points that were the focus before, and which we thought provided the mechanism to break any system and point "outside" defeating any Totalising project like Russells. Now they are the unique cases that break my proof that meta-data, or structure must exist in the order of operations that cannot therefore be grasped by those operations.

If we rewrite f(x) == a(b(x)) as f(x) == {a,b,ab}(x) meaning that we have a, b and the order ab.

If A(x) == {a, ab}(x) i.e. somehow it was able to contain the structural info so that when combined with b there is "nothing more" and it is then equal to f(x) so that:

f(x) = A(b(x)) = b(A(x))

we would need to show that whatever {a, ab}(x) represents is always a chimera.

Tentative steps forward. It is encouraging that this looks like nonsense. Either it is madness, or it is pushing against something (to me) new.

Note on the madness of Capitlsim

A war is excellent for Capitalism. It causes a lot of destruction and so a lot of jobs in the construction industry, in medicine, in counseling: it is good for the economy. But it is bad for the people. How is this contradiction possible?

When my house is destroyed and I must pay for a new one. Through the lens of economics this is good it increases the circulation of money and provides jobs, income and livelihood for people. But through the lens of common sense it is bad. This is the madness of Capitalism.

Buddhism and the Dark Triad/Tetrad

Have done a bit of reading about the Dark Tetrad. This seems like a very important classification in psychology because it identifies the key qualities surrounding what has been broadly called before Evil.

It is the battle against Evil which is at the centre of Human Life. Enlightenment more than anything is the defeat of Evil. Traditional stories of Evil include the creation of suffering through evil acts and the entering of Hell for those who become controlled by Evil. Both these remain sensible. The nature of Evil (and of the Dark Tetrad) is isolation and this is the opposite of our True Nature which is universal, total and unified. The obvious proof of this lies in examining what barriers really exist between people, and of what those barriers might be made of?

It is fascinating to me that the qualities of the Dark Tetrad include misunderstanding of True Nature.

The Narcissist is actually a paper thin version of a Buddha. It is appealing to our Narcissistic tendencies to feel we are a Buddha - superior, complete, indestructable, perfect, universal. The irony of course is that we are almost perfectly the opposite. When we face their own death and the humiliation and shame of sickness and old age like Buddha we will quickly realise we have only achieved a shell from reality: one that must be broken before even starting on the path to Buddhahood. Shame and humiliation is the key to the Narcissist but also the path to Enlightenment: the totally crushing realisation that we do not stand alone but are made by our parents and the universe around us and we cannot exist without other people and the world.

The Machiavellian which I cannot relate to at all, must be very stupid. For them life and other people is a game to be won. But they measure the winning only upon their own status. Thus a win-win is of less value than a win-lose because the latter enables them to defeat the enemy, while a win-win strengthens the enemy. But when we realise like above that we did not make ourselves, we have arrived mysteriously upon this planet by forces other than ourselves: our parents, the health care workers, teachers, farmers and everyone who has made and supported us and actually there is nothing about us that will survive death the idea of "winning for myself" appears ludicrous. We are the fool, and the irony is that our chosen target in the game like money, or sex, respect or whatever is only ever increased at the expense of everything else we don't measure. Like economics that while the money and wealth may increase the environment is destroyed and we are ultimately the poorer. The devil is very good at using fake goals to tempt us to the pit of destruction.

The Psychopath I can identify with because for my whole life I have seen feeling as useless. It is a primitive part of the brain and a vestige of our animal past. It makes us weak because people can emotionally blackmail us, and we are vulnerable to animal instincts. Like the little mermaid accepting feelings also means we have to accept pain so is it worth it? (This is all a wrong view btw). I neither want to feel in myself nor feel in others. The rational by contrast is the pure, it is universal, it is the correct. the Vulcans of Star Trek embody this view. Indeed Buddha as desireless and indifferent seems like a cool Psychopath at first look. But there is a problem with the real Psychopath actually they are not entirely honest with themselves. They do have feelings but "only for themselves". So the psychopath will get angry, and they will want love, and they will get hurt so they are firstly dishonest - feelings are centre in their life. Now they say that there are genes that make people into psychopaths so that they have no mirror neurons and they actually cannot feel what other people feel. They end up faking interactions with other people their whole lives so they can fit in, and they know its a fake. They are like blind people but it is others feelings they cannot see rather than their faces. But does this make them Evil? Like a blind person it means that life is different, and living with sighted people is difficult because sighted people themselves tend to not understand blind people. But inside they are not Evil. A psychopath will want to help themselves when they suffer. Thus a psychopath once they discover suffering in another (harder because of their blindness) will want to help another. Suffering is after all something we seek to tackle. Compassion is not affected by psychopathy. I read that empathy is something we learn and get better at as we get older. Looking at children there is a huge range in the development of empathy but at the start kids have none. Obviously developing empathy is a much bigger mountain for a psychopath with their partial/total blindness. The brain is plastic and changes as we learn. Can a psychopath learn to grow mirror neurons, and is the lack of mirror neurons simply a result of them not exercising empathy? And genetics can only give us the tools, it doesn't dictate whether or how we use them. My genes give me hands, they don't dictate whether I use them for good or evil. Evidence of epigenetics exists also so that "we" can even turn genes on and off! Genes are not the point. So what is the psychopath's real problem? I suspect they are more likely to end up as criminals because they are not encouraged by their peers to think about other people. They need to do this a lot to overcome their weakness. A physically weak person may want to visit the gym to develop their muscles, so it is with the Psychopath but it is the much more useful feelings they are need to develop, experience and understand rather than just the physical (for which we can hire body guards and machines). Any negativity, shyness, sensitivity to pain, hatred is going to send a person with psychopathic tendency in the same protective shell as the narcissist. Being cut off from the world around once again is the Hell to be avoided. When this shut in Hell gets out, that is when other people around suffer also.

Finally the Sadistic. I had an experience of Schadenfreude for the first time recently. It is a very strange occurrence because rationally you know there is simply no reason for this. How can someone else's misfortune possibly achieve anything good in the Real World. But if I look more deeply I had a grievance against the person so their misfortune was like payback and I realised I had harboured a dislike and hatred of them for ages. But the misfortune was way in excess of any negative feelings I had, it was nasty. So where does the pleasure or satisfaction in being nasty come from? The projection of negativity? Lets try the universal test of goodness: Would I be nasty to myself and enjoy it? Most likely I would end up hating myself as I do people who are nasty to me, so I would both hate myself and enjoy it. Perhaps hating myself is itself a form of nastiness so I could get caught in a loop or hating myself, enjoying that, but then hating myself more for being so nasty to myself. Normally we do this via projection to hide ourself (as being both the victim and the perpetrator contradicts the belief there is only one of us and spoils the fun of the perpetrator and the anguish of the victim) so we find the outside world nasty and hate that instead, even while all the badness is actually our own choices. So actually sadism to the self causes a contradiction that splits the self. The key to this is that with Sadism the belief is that the victim and the perpetrator are separate. Here we go again, the apparent pleasure is at the expense of being alone and in isolation. Like all the above. And why would we give away the negativity if we liked the negativity? We push negativity and hatred onto others precisely because we don't like it. I saw Slavoj Zizek recently trying to argue that people like suffering. Worth noting that man himself is overrun with suffering. I think perhaps when we cannot overcome our suffering we try and save face and pretend we like it. To suffer appears like failure, so better to say like it. But we lie to ourselves: our every thoughts and action is ultimately to be free from displeasure, discomfort and dis-ease. We can give positivity to others and see them flourish. But when we give negativity they whither. When we have negativity we whither. Negativity is suffering, we don't want it, but we take command of it by giving it to others which gives us apparent relief from our own suffering. But it is a fake, cos we haven't mastered the horrible negativity at all and in fact make it worse by becoming isolated. Our victim is actually the winner because while they may suffer at our inflicted negativity we must give them it for them to suffer. It is ours, and we cannot escape that. We are the loser. Any Machiavellian instinct should fight the sadistic instinct to win over our negativity! The devil once again gives us a fake goal to lead us into the pit of isolation and desolation.

So all this points directly at Buddha's teachings which are much simpler and less infected with materialism and empirical evidence than the psychological world, which is flailing around thousands of years after the subcontinent clearly wrote it all down. The key point is Anatta and the illusion of self. All things are non-self : that includes other people, but also everything is in our own heads! It is ALL not-self. The mistake in the Dark Tetrad is that we can attach to things like feelings and thought and believe they "belong" to a mythical self which we have never even seen! As greater fantasy even than Father Christmas but one propagated unquestioningly by Western culture. Actually there is nothing to separate people, or things - there is just One World with everything side by side. The One World is both composed of individual (Democritus) and the complex interaction and unity from which those individuals emerge (Parmenides) "we are all individuals" - where there are individuals there is also necessarily a group! The ultimately irony of that is usually missed by much of the Monty Python community who uses it only as a criticism of group thinking. So the Dark Tetrad are the collection of mental processes that have deep effects on our body and brains that lead us into isolation - which is the diametric opposite of the truth and the darkest of the Hells. It is the new word for what was called the Devil. The cure is to reject the Devil which is the same as to reject these thought process - tho we may not realise how dangerous they are until damage is done. The goal is to seek integration with the world and other people, and to challenge our negativity when we find it and ultimately to turn energy that is negativity around into positive.

For the Narcissistic tendency we accept shame, and those who humiliate us and show us as mundane we can thank for breaking the shell. Even Superman loses his power when he falls in love - and love and the abandoning of the cold isolation of the Fortress of Solitude makes us ultimately stronger and more truthful! For the Machiavellian tendency we replace loss with giving, and thank those takers for breaking the shell. For the Psychopath tendency we allow the full experience of painful feelings and gradually seek to observe that everyone must have them equally - they don't belong to us. For those who hurt us we can thank for breaking the shell. For the Sadistic tendency we take all the negativity in ourselves and the world and we seek to make it good - however doing this gently, as we will exhaust ourselves if we do more than a step at a time. We don't need to die on a cross, we may even accept Him who did that, if it is our path. For all those we have negative feelings toward and who inspire nastiness we can thank for making us aware of the things we must make positive. When we fail we can use that shame and humiliation to check our Narcissism.

Ok I didn't think this through too well, I'm no expert, and as with everything else on this blog its just a regurgitation of current thought processes.