Does God Exist?

This is a trick question.

Suppose God made everything that exists. If He then Himself exists then he must have created Himself. But if He created Himself then he must have existed forever otherwise who made Him in the first place. And if he lived forever then he wasn't created. Which contradicts the idea that he exists.

Now perhaps God doesn't obey logic, but then we know for sure he doesn't exist since everything that exists obeys logic.

So which ever way you look at it God does not exist. And this must be true to put Him in a position to create everything. (This incidentally is SRH in action.)

But this is not the end of the story because there is a lot more to this world than just existence!

Of all Mankinds achievements Buddhism provides the best and fullest theory of Existence. Konadatta's insight is that everything that exists must have been created and so everything that exists did not exist at some point and had to come into being. It also says that everything that exists will one day cease to exist. This is because the process of creation is actually a process of change, and it never stops. To go from not existing to existing is actually just a change and rearrangement of the world. There is nothing present after creation that was not there before. This also leads to the realisation that nothing real is actually created in existence. What is created can then be seen as illusion and not entirely real. This is one way of looking at sunyata (translated as emptiness or thusness). So in fact nothing is ever really created. This is codified in Physics as the 1st Law of Thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed. So the West already knows that existence is an illusion. So how do things come to exist? Buddhism explains that the illusion actually arises in the mind. The West would say that it is the result of brain processes. (However this is a limited view as brain processes are themselves existing and so this only converts mental processes into brain processes but doesn't do anything to investigate them).

So we see that existence is not really as significant as we like to think. Indeed existence is just what we think.

So the question "Does God exist?" is not that significant a question. Existence is not the main issue in the spiritual universe. It is just the issue for minds.

Buddhism does not have an opinion on God because Buddha pointed out that God cannot actually save you. While religions often appear to put the power of salvation in the hands of Gods you will notice that gods cannot save by themselves. Gods save in proportion with the devotion and dedication of the practitioner. The person who spends much time and effort doing many sacrifices will be more favoured by God than the one who does nothing. It is down to the practitioner not God!

This is why I think the Jews rather have this wrong: the idea of "being chosen people" is entirely meaningless. You can see in the Bible what a nonsense this is. In Genesis 27 Isaac (and so apparently All-Seeing-God) is fooled into giving the birthright to the younger son Jacob instead of Esau. Esau biologically has the birthright but we see that even in the eyes of God if you are fooled bloodright means nothing. So the Jews claiming they have a birthright to God's favour by virtue of their blood line is worth nothing if you think otherwise. And sorry to always pick on the Jews but they are the most significant people in Western history so naturally fall under the greatest scrutiny. They also try and get aloof to scrutiny with this idea of "anti-semitism" but trying to hide from criticism is highly suspicious. I don't even think the authentic Jews would like being beyond criticism. In my view the idea of anti-semitism is just a political device wrapped up in the promised land saga via the (many if we include Babylon and Egypt) Holocaust(s) which it will be noted was not uniquely anything to do with Jews. It was to do with non-aryans and the Jews have politically hijacked it. Its a complex petty mess of identity, blood lines and who will inherit the Earth. And nothing to do with God at all I suggest.

So putting blood-lines behind us, God favours those who devote themselves to God best. And this is the key that Buddha observed. Worshipping God changes you, and that is the change that if often attributed to Gods power. BUT, and this is very huge but, you cannot get those changes without totally believing in God! So the idea that "if I worship God with full dedication the power of change is coming from me not God" doesn't work because we are not then really that dedicated to God, and rather created a religion of "Me". The whole point of religion is to undo this "Me" that actually limits our power. When you want a new car you ust throw the old one away and the same is true for ourselves. This answer here given here is just for the enquiring mind that seeks solid answers and cannot understand faith, but this answer will not improve you. Understand that, if you seek solidity and fixedness you will actually end up crushing your own power and ability to change. Faith is something beyond you that enables you to reach beyond yourself into things you cannot yet understand. It fosters growth. I'm always reminded of the David Beckham statue in a Hindu temple. David Beckham isn't our typical image of God. But for people who aspire to achieve what he has achieved, to represent their country in sports or simply just be the best they can be he is exactly the god they should worship. Without a mentor or role model like this, how are we to possibly fathom the potential that we have? David Beckham is a relatively small god as his achievement is graspable. Other "gods" like Isaac, Jesus or Buddha have attainments that we cannot even grasp. But they all represent potentials that we don't even know we have.

So does God exist? It can be seem that it is a complex question with no simple answer. Looked at one way no. There is no thing out there called God. You can search far and wide and you will not find Him. But logically this must be the case as God created everything. Looking deeper we see that everything that exists is actually an illusion created in our Minds. So we then conclude that God is our Mind.

You cannot find a mind anywhere in the universe because the "universe" is created by the mind. I say "created" in a similar sense to the fact that Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes. Our mind creates the "real" universe in a very similar way to how it created the Sherlock Holmes universe. It is this power in fact that enables fiction. This is how we can change our mind about the world and suddenly it all looks different. Some days the universe looks amazing, other days it is full of trouble and seems unpleasant. Some days it is completely full of the person we love, other days it is completely full of the enemy we hate. Some days Newtonian physics explains the movement of the planets, some days when our computer isn't working the only thing that matters is electronics. Certainly the universe 400 years ago wasn't controlled by Newtonian physics as no one knew it. Perhaps it was there to be discovered, but whatever we discovered--that we call Newtonian physics-- made no difference to the planets! Astrologers watched the planets 1000 years ago just as they do today. The only difference is how we think about them!

After we conclude that God is our Mind, we realise that we cannot grasp that... certainly cannot grasp it within our mind. And this is where religion comes in and a million versions of god to give us a way of reaching beyond ourselves and growing. It may be our parents who inspire us, and show us how to feel and behave, or a teacher who inspires us, or a movie star or something we see for ourselves in a vision, realisation or inspiration. This is the world of faith which is beyond that of existence and in which anything in fact is possible. What may have looked bleak above, to discover that the thought world of existence is really an illusion, turn out to be beyond magnificent as we realise that with faith we can reach our far beyond the limits of the existing world our minds have created. This is why they talk of Karma in the East - these are the apparently real physical obstructions to our path to a greater self. They can be anything from troublesome people, to troublesome emotions and disabilities. We have the power to beat them all, but as we are now that is incomprehensible and we need faith in a larger self to do this. This faith is not an egotistical battle of "I will win" but rather a humble dedication to what we have not achieved yet, an acknowledgement that other people are better than us and that we can improve. What dualistically looks like success and failure from the perspective of our small current self, is really just what I can do, and who I am yet to be from the perspective of our future greater self.

So God definitely exists, in that we have endless potential to be what we are not yet.

What is Evil?

There is such a thing as Evil but it is probably completely different and initially counter-intuitive compared with the common view. Recent posts have been heading to this:

Evil is the belief that one side must prevail

How aburd that seems. Surely Good must prevail and Evil must be defeated. Those that allow Evil to prevail are themselves Evil. Sure you are either with us or against us. But as I hope to show this is actually the mentality used to spread Evil not Good.

Consider Jesus at the outset of this blog. We are told that he could have summoned armies of angels to crush the Romans but he never did. Instead he forgave those who tortured and killed him and died on the cross. Not your typical version of prevailing. Now the story continues that he rose from the dead and in time ascended into Heaven. So he did triumph in the end, but not by defeating the Romans in a pitched battle, but much more profoundly by defeating Death itself. Not getting into theology yet, but there is something odd about this story from the common perspective of winning a conflict. Jesus appears to have won by losing. He appears to have overcome Evil, not by resisting it, but rather by submitting and accepting it. How very strange.

We have had the original Star Wars trilogy on the TV over Christmas. "Give into your anger Luke" says the Emperor. But how in the traditional view can righteous anger to support the Good and destroy the Evil not be itself Good. How can refusing to feel hostility at Evil be itself Good?

So there is definitely something weird going on.

For me the obvious place to start is in the great battles against Evil we have really witnessed in History. The battle to conquer the evil dictators like Saddam Hussein, or Hitler. We note that the Evil Dictator Stalin was an ally during this WW2 period. He also invaded Poland at the same time as Hitler, but we only chose to attack Germany I presume because we could not defeat Russia so worked to form an alliance with Russia. We even formed an agreement with Stalin that USSR would add Eastern Europe to its Empire while the US would add the East. First lesson here (of common Goodness) is that for Good to win we sometimes have to side with Evil. Something very weird going on here too.

Another odd thing about Common Goodness is that everyone thinks they are fighting for the good side. For the vast majority of people the main thing which determines which side you fight for is not Good or Evil but rather where you are born. If you are born in Ethiopia chances are you will fight for Ethiopia. If you are born in Eritrea you will fight for Eritrea. If you lose to the Romans or the American you will end up fighting for them. Even the UK, which (is allowed to) think its won WW2, actually fights for the American (or "US led coalition" as its PR gurus have named it). So it is simply the roll of teh dice of which parejts you had, or what your country history has been that decides which side you are on. After that we think the enemy is the evil one. This really isn't a very satisfactory view of evil, that everyone has a different view of who is evil! A big problem with the common view.

To deal with this problem we are led to believe that soldiers who fight against the "Good side" (that is our side) are doing so against their will. For example Hitler's armies were being forced to fight, while the Allies fought willingly against Evil. Too much unreliable information has been spread about WW2 to be sure what people were thinking. WW1 is more clear. The famous Christmas Truce, initiated in fact by Germans, does seem to suggest they had a lesser heart to fight. But Entente troops like Britain were very happy to join the truce and enjoy comradeship rather than hostility with the enemy over Christmas. And it is simply not true that Entente troops were there willingly. Many were conscripted and the options available were periodic suicidal charges of the enemy lines or execution for cowardice by their own side. It would be fair to say no one wanted to be there. It would also be fair to say in this mother of Imperial battles that both sides thought the enemy was Evil. What was at stake was the continuing supremacy of ones Empire. If the Entente lost then Britain's Global Empire would fall, if the Axis lost then the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and German empires would fall. In the end it was the latter who succumbed and the great Evil of Western supremacy marched across Europe and the middle-east. At least that is how it must have looked to those who were defeated.

Good/Evil battles are a murky world. Alexander the Great was the first real master of having a poplar image. When he took over Persia he spread the story that he had come to liberate the Persians from the dictatorship of the Persian rulers. They were indeed powerful and brutal dictators. But this always disguises the fact that for the Persians, like any conquered people, they were now ruled by a foreign Macedonian who did not speak their language, share their values and who would try to rule his empire from thousands of miles away. And no matter how benevolent a ruler may seem, try and rise up against them and see how benevolent the Imperial Army is. The only time being conquered seems like the Good guys is when life before was more brutal. But as the US is always reminding people freedom is the best, and that means winning battles and not being conquered. Its a very confused and mixed up thing.

Its an odd thought then that in fact patriotic Iraqis or Germans may have fought for Saddam Hussein and Hitler with the same passion as British or Americans fought against them. For me they probably fought more passionately because in all the cases of "Evil Dictators" being crushed it is actually the West invading. Blitz, Battle of Britain and Pearl Harbour are the only times in over a hundred years when Britain or America were actually attacked by enemy and these are small skirmishes compared with the epic battles that have played out overseas in other peoples' back gardens. If the West really are the Good Guys they are the ones who have brought war to almost every place on Earth except of course themselves. It would be easy to wonder how selfless and giving they really are when faced with a history of almost exclusively seeking to prevail over everyone else.

So that is the complex and twisted history that we have recieved of the common battle of Good and Evil. And in all this history one thing is common whether it be Macedonians, Romans, Jews, British or Americans fighting the battles: a lot of human misery. History never records the tears wept by mothers and sisters over the bodies of mutilated husbands and sons. The hundreds of millions of people cut down and murdered in warfare far exceeds the death tolls of all other human violence. Only disease is a greater threat to mankind. One has to wonder over the millennia what all this blood has achieved. One side winning, and then the other as arbitrary as rolls of a dice.

When we think of Evil what we tend to think of is a victim. Someone who's voice has not been heard. Dictators are so hated because they do not listen to the will of their people. They do things by force, or by fooling people with lies and propaganda. They have secret organisations to spy on people to ensure that they are not planning to resist their power. Indeed they do all the things required of State Craft to ensure that society does not oppose them. In fact what a Dictator goes is no differemt from any individual or organisation that seeks power.

To seek power is to seek support from others.When people chose a leader to listen and marshal their wishes harmoniously, and that leader is a servant to the people, submitting themselves to the will of the many, then one might say their Good. It is very much the common view that leaders who conversely twist matters towards their own ends are Evil. In this the common view is the same as the one I propose here. Good leaders are sensitive to victims, and Evil leaders lack compassion for victims.

Now what do we have in the situation of war? We have one side seeking power over another, where the death of those who support the cause is a tragedy and the death of those who oppose the cause is unfortunate. Suddenly all leaders who lead their people into battle becomes Evil because they no longer have compassion for the enemy. It doesn't matter some may argue, because the enemy did not elect the leader. However if the enemy are beaten then they will have have the leadership forced on them. War always creates victims. Suddenly War appears to be only Evil. When the US openly states that it works towards US interests we see Evil in action. The US operates for its own interests, and that means against the interests of those who oppose it. It creates victims. All countries do this in fact, but it is surprising to see a country that thinks that it is Good openly admit the priciples of Evil.

And this problem spread. Any conflict that seeks to subdue an enemy is actually Evil because it creates victims, and seeks to impose the will of one side upon another.

Conversely then Good is not about opposing an enemy, but rather listening to them. Forgiving them, suffering them, laying down ones weapons and accepting them. This way the enemy is no longer a victim. But a new problem occurs because the enemy may themselves victimise others. However a victim with the mentaility of tolerance and acceptance of the Enemy is no longer a victim. Imagine if the Germans in WW2 had sought peace. Imagine if they had laid down their weapons, but not because they surrendered and accepted the Allied Victory but simply because they did not accept violent resolutions to conflict. What a transformation they would have undergone. No longer would they be victimising minority races. Instead they would have an open society where every voice would be heard. Oddly this is similar to what has happened but with a big difference. The path the German's took was to be destroyed, lose millions of lives and be rebuilt not as a free country but as a vassal state of the US empire. Had they downed weapons at the start, and sought peace even before WW1 how different things would have been. But there is a reason they did not. That reason is that if they had not fought they would have been invaded by Britain or Russia. In the final days of the Great Imperial Battles of the 20th Century every country had no choice but to join an empire and fight of be an empire and fight. Every country had no choice but to be Evil.

But I am thinking in terms of the recieved History. In fact no one really belonged to an empire or a country any more than they really belong to a football team. It was just paperwork and alliances and agreements and beliefs. In fact no one really had to fight. Had the Germans or British just laid down their weapons at the start Napolean would have invaded and taken over the leadership of Europe, or perhaps Catherine the Great of Russia. And the people who lead these invasions would have been the Evil ones if they did so from their own interests creating victims as they went. But were people to stand up to the Evil ones by imposing their will instead then a war would escalate and quickly we arrive at a situation of creating victims.

So we realise that when Evil people rise up and seek to impose their will on us, it is a mistake to do the same. The Good choice is to accept their will and try and work with it. Applying ones skills in greater understanding of the situation to arrive at a solution that benefits all. And if no such situation exists like Jesus hanging on a cross then we must accept this unfortunate situation. The Devil or Emperor may well dangle options like anger, fear, resistence, hatred and dreams of victory in front of us but if we take them we too move over to the Dark Side. Indeed it is by snatching these apparent fruits of the Dark Side that our adversary ever got into the situation they are in. Lead by example and stay true to the Force is the message written loud in many ancient and modern stories.

While the Children of Israel complain loudly at having lost the Kingdoms of Israel, they must also acknowledge that they were regarded as being very troublesome in History. Jesus was born right in the middle of Roman anxiety about Israel. Not satisfied with killing off Israeli prophets like Jesus they eventually stormed and destroyed the temple and eventually the Jews once again lost their kingdom. It would appear the Jews are rather repeating history given current relation in Israel Mk IV. By contrast the Etruscans were not great empire builders, but they paid their taxes, kept their heads down and went on to colonise the Mediterrean and pass on their knowledge to the Romans. History doesn't have much to say about the Etruscans but I'm beginning to think that is a good thing. History likes to record battles, victories, crushing defeats, and great figures who sought to impose their will on others. History essentially records victims and perpetrators. It records the evil that mankind has dealt to itself. If you are not well recorded in History you are likely to have lived a Good life!

So in this view Evil lies in the very desire to overcome Evil and to have ones own views and wishes prevail. Goodness feels unusual at first, but it is more interested in the wishes of others than itself, and seeks to approach situations with both eyes open, seeing all sides and not creating forgotten victims hidden in the shadows of narrow minded, blinkered views and bigotted thinking.

Raider of Lost Ark significance of 9906753

So the Ark ends up in crate number 9906753. Now we know that Hollywood is built on Jewish money, and the film is very much Jewish (obviously anti-German and pro-American tho one wonders if G-d has such a partisan view of the nations of Earth). Anyway its probably better to see this in Hebrew (read right to left)...

In Hebrew this is :

ט‬ט‬-ו‬ז‬ה‬ג

Now I have no Hebrew so am fishing here. Throw that into Google Translate we get "Tet-and-Zohar." Zohar apparently is a central book of Kabbalah. After Madonna's dabbling in the same we know this is the occult branch of Judaism. And one assumes that the ceremony in Indiana Jones is a Kabbalah ceremony and much of the film alludes to the black-magic of Kabbalah.

Obvious reference to Tet in Hollywood is the alien-ship in Oblivion. But I'll ignore this.

But not so fast - perhaps Zohar is a joke in Google Translates as Zohar is actually written as:
זהר
So it doesn't match exactly. Perhaps to Hebrew readers this number will look like a series of puns all jumbled together. I do know an ancient Hebrew reader I will ask him some time.

Anyway the last three characters:
ז‬הג
do translate as Gold. (Strong's #2091)

And the 4th ו appears to do the same job as 'and' in English. Bit of reading reveals that it is added as a prefix in Biblical Hebrew. So
ו‬ז‬ה‬ג
certainly seems to mean 'and gold'. So the remaining mystery is the 990

On an aside if we transliterate the 0 as an 1 (aleph א )then

ט‬טא ו‬ז ‬ה‬ג

Translates as Tom and Jerry!

...shall leave this till later...




Resources:
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/dictionary/ancient-aleph.html
https://translate.google.com/

What can Meditation do?

Meditation is an enormous world, greater in fact than anything we can think or imagine. This is because the mind that does meditation can make anything the subject of its meditation. It makes the mind in its very nature beyond the grasp of anything other than direct experience.

It is bewildering to try and grasp this without become acquainted with actual meditation practice. The tools at our disposal developed from schooling like thinking and imagining are not powerful enough. It is rather the other way around that through meditation we can get a grasp on what thinking and imagining are. We can ultimately get a grasp on what "we" are, in our entirety with no gaps and no mysteries. Well no mysteries other than the extraordinary fact that it is all just happening.

There are many, many types of meditation each strengthening some part of the mind, or elucidating some part of the mind. A meditation guide explained that after his experiences in America he thought that the West should put Metta meditation at its heart. This meditation aims to uncover the deep sense of connection and fondness we have for each other, breaking down barriers, liberating warmth and care into our relations with others. It is no less valuable than any other, but especially valuable in the West where competition, privacy, selfishness and distrust have rather soured over these connections for many.

I wanted to write this blog about a very specific fruit of meditation which is freedom from thoughts. Until we start to get a grip on thoughts we cannot imagine how much they control our lives. Literally every worry we have, every bad feeling, and every suffering and trouble begins with a thought. The real world does not have these things. A lemon is not bitter until we eat it. A thing is not how we think it until we think it that way.

Vipassana meditation is best for developing this clarity on thoughts.

The first thing to do is to focus the mind. Anything that draws the mind's attention will do and it will take work and effort. When I am tired I use a ticking clock and try to be aware of each tick for 1000 ticks. It sounds easy, but is very hard to do well. And when our mind begins to settle we can follow each tick in an unbroken chain then can go deeper and explore the sound of each individual tick, seeing how each is different and then keep decending into the experience as deep as we want. This is the mental equivalent of a zumba class. It isn't beautiful or pretty but it forces the mind to go deep into something. Usually focus is done more gently with anapanasati which is the most common yoga of simply watching the breathing.

In fact Anapanassati is a good starting point of any type of meditation, including viapssana, since mental focus is the brightness we need to achieve anything. It can be effort to start with, but once we get to a certain level then mental focus starts to become very natural and simple. It is the same kind of thing we get when looking into a lovers eyes, or deeply engrossed in a book of film. Time changes, we forget about the outside world and we absorb effortously and without even knowing we've done it into the object of interest. We need to be pure hearted, good willed and full of pure energy to achieve best results. A genuine vow of purity and good will from the heart, a promise to do ones best and be good and to forgive both ourselve and others for the past is a great booster.

So we have attained some energetic focus, now comes the vipassana. It is simply the practice of noting things. So we hear a sound we simply acknowledge the sound, perhaps have a thought that it is a sound, give it a label and then let it go and move on. We can anchor on our breathing like in anapanassati so we return to this as the core when nothing else is being noted. We can see the breath come in and go out and we can note that this is what is happening. Nothing more. But we can then start to look deeper at all the things going on, just watching them. The most intriguing is the thoughts.

In the modern multimedia age we have lots of metaphors for thoughts. They are like voice overs in films, or cut-aways to little clips within a film, or pop-up notifications on our mobile phones. The world is carrying on and then we get a pop up that tells us something. It can be "I don't like this person", or "I am afraid of that", of "this feels bad" or it can be the opposite and positive. It doesn't matter, but it is fascinating to watch these things actually happening. Philosophically we can ask where does this come from, what is it, how does a thought enter the world in a way that only I can see. They turn out to be fascinating things, like we never really looked at them before, we aren't actually very familiar with what thoughts are at all. But questioning is not the point, it is enough to watch them and get a feeling for them. We are already far beyond Descartes "I think therefore I am" when we start to observe thoughts just as things that come and go like clouds across the sky - albeit very interesting clouds full of juicy details like pictures, feelings, attitudes etc that we must ignore in Vipassana.

Now why do this and what is the point of the blog? Well with practice we start to see thoughts happen quite discretely. It is obvious really. We can use Kondatta's insight from Buddhism. We don't think the same thing all the time, so thoughts must start some time and end sometime to allow new thoughts to come along. So we know that thoughts are made and are not permanent. This is why we are able to watch them come and go.

But when thoughts are gone what is left? Well that is actually a question. We can watch the arising of that question also, the feelings of excitement and curiosity associated with a juicy question. Just watch how the mind works, that is the whole point.

And when we get a more solid grasp of all this thinking mental activity we start to see that it is only a small part of the world. The breathing that we were concentrating on goes on all by itself even without us labelling or thinking about it. Indeed the world spins all by itself. Whether we start to think about that, and whether we get up and do anything about that are very much secondary things. So we train ourselves in meditation not to think or get up, but just to watch very closely. And we start to see how huge the non-mental world is.

One obstacle that may emerge is unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Habitually we run away from these. But this is as unhelpful as running toward interesting or nice thoughts and feelings. We need to be firm here and just watch things as neutrally as possible. With practice it becomes easier and easier. We find untilmately that both nice and nasty things are the same, and we can just let them come and go with complete freedom.

What we see of this non-mental world that is beyond thoughts and feelings is that it is completely free. It is not full of good and bad, likes and dislikes, must dos and must do-nots, it is not even full of neutral thinks like clouds and stars and breaths. It is just what we experience when we meditate. And when the thought "oh that is an in-breath" occurs that is just another thing... and thoughts come quick and fast sometimes... "oh look I just had a thought"... "That thought made everything seem great"... "Damn that one just spoiled it". This is what the world of thoughts is like.

Once we are strong in separating thoughts from the world we gain complete freedom. Nothing can touch us, because everything is just thoughts. Someone we were expecting to be nice is rude to us, we see the impact on us, the disappointment the hurt, we then start to think about it "I don't like that", "how dare they make me feel like this", "I want to attack them back". But if we see that in reality it is nothing like this, these things are just what the thoughts have made of the situation. We could have a completely different set of thoughts like "I wonder why they were so rude", "I hope they are alright". "Is there anything I can do to help them". "No, oh well I hope they feel better soon". But the point is that the things that are happening are free from thoughts, perspectives and attitude.

Dorothy Rowe I believe says that all mental illness starts in unhelpful thought patters. I can completely believe this. Thoughts are incredibly powerful, and for almost all of us are completely out of control and they totally control our lives. Buddha says "with our thoughts we make the world." It is true. If we think badly of something it will be bad, and vice versa. Now I always thought the solution was to think some more in the hope of fixing it. But I never thought that maybe before using this wonderful thinking tool I should first master it so I can put it down when it isn't needed. The more I study the mind the more I realise that the things we really want like Peace, Tranquillity and Happiness are not the products of thinking or mental attitude. They are quite the opposite. They are the freedom when we get outside our thoughts and mental attitudes.

It has been thought many times in history in both India, China and Europe that meditation is clearing the mind of thoughts. What I have said above might be seen to say this. We certainly can as we enter the Jhana where discursive thoughts stop. And in there we find the pure peace and tranquillity of which I speak. But we don't need Jhana for what I'm saying here. Thoughts are here, they are a fact of the mind, there is nothing wrong with thoughts. But the point is to be acquainted with thoughts and know the difference between what is a thought and what is real. When I am breathing that is real, I can watch that without a thought. But when I think "oh good look I am breathing" that is a thought. I can watch that thought also! Thinking is a real thing, but the thoughts themselves are not. Or more obviously when i think "what shall i eat tonight" that is clearly not happening right now, it is an imagination and thought. Realising that our world is entirely made up of these artificial mini-virtual realities inside our head frees us complete from them. What is really happening, if we stop and meditate is usually completely different.

European philosophy was right about one thing: all data comes from the senses. In meditation we turn our attention to these senses to check what is really going on. The feeling of breath on the nose, the colours in our eyes, the sounds in our ears. Perhaps a slight smell and taste also. And now we have discerned the existence and nature of discrete thoughts we have a new sense - the thoughts. This makes up the 6 senses from which the world is really made. Being fully acquainted with that means that no sense, especially the thoughts, comes to rule the world. And being acquainted fully with our senses we can start a new relationship with them in complete freedom, tranquillity and happiness.

That is what meditation can do.

Message for the NSA and other surveillance organisations

There is a class of people who assume for themselves extraordinary power over other people. Much like Capitalists this power is created by technology. In the case of Capitalists it was initially the water or wind powered mill and then steam powered. In the case of the NSA and surveillance organisations it is the telecommunications and data revolutions. When such power is created it is only a matter of time before people appoint themselves in charge of it.

Typically these people form into 2 groups. There are the people who think of themselves as "official" and competing groups that the "official" class as criminal. But it is important to note that they are indistinguishable, both having assumed power for themselves. That would be a sociological view of crime in general.

But hold on: the NSA etc will say, we represent the State and we are democratically elected... oh yes they realise no we aren't. The only thing democratic about us is that we pay ourselves from money extracted from tax revenues paid by a voting public. In other words there is no difference between the NSA--and the people working for them--and say the Stasi or Nazi SS. While people in the Stasi had the motto 'shield and sword of the party' people in the NSA may as well have a motto 'Shield and Sword of State' or 'Shield and Sword of the Free World'. But it is all just words (or s-words), and there is no difference.

So we are in the situation where there is a class of people in any system who think that that system needs them to assume extraordinary power enabled by technology. This is not a judgement, it is just a fact. But they should realise that they have assumed this role, it is neither necessary nor required.

And now I can enter my favourite discussion of Dualism versus Dialectic and the Jews. There is a peculiar flavour of the old testament that With-God-On-Your-Side you are invincible. This is actually a sentiment of much of the ancient world not just Judaism. When God favour you then you will be victorious. So people do lots of offerings and sacrifices to keep God on their side. But the Jews made a deal with God which cemented this relationship so that even if they no longer made sacrifices or did any offerings to God, He would remain on their side. They became the "chosen people".

The relevance of this is that members of organisation like the NSA and Stasi or Nazi SS all have something in common: they believe they are the chosen people also. They don't need to be good, or democratic or have any evidence in fact that they are special and worthy of this power. They de facto have the "divine right" to act as they want without judgement. This is how the US can drop atomic weapons and still walk away thinking they are the Good Guys. And yet obviously it is pure evil and psychopathy in fact. In a movie the person who turns his back on a massacre with a smile on his face is either a cartoon bad guy like in Tarantino films or they are the psychopath with pure unfaltering self-belief and narcissism and no compassion for others.

So the secret undemocratic power exercised by the NSA and other surveillance organisations around the world are performed by people who very much fit the psychological type identify in ancient Jewish thinking. They believe they have a special unbreakable covenant with God that makes them special and justified in what they do regardless what it is they actually do.

Of course the Democratic West has long criticised this kind of behaviour in the East. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely as the First Baron Acton once said. So all Statist systems are doomed to failure as the huge power wielded by the State becomes a corrupting influence of those who wield it. But of course with the Narcissistic mentality of the NSA they can wield such huge power without it corrupting because they have God on their side and they are in their DNA the Good Guys. Sadly this is a myth that they can cry themselves to sleep with just as many a Stasi and Nazi SS officer must have: it is sadly not true.

No one is made a Good Guy it is something that everyone works on. The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that the saint never gives up trying. It doesn't matter whether you are born American or Jewish you are just as corruptible as anyone else. It doesn't matter whether you work for the NSA, Mossad or the Stasi you are capable of exactly the same evils.

So my message to people working in the NSA and the other surveillance organisations is to follow the advice once given to Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran: Stay Good. We have seen Google fail its motto of "Don't be Evil." They were doomed anyway with a motto like that: imagine someone with a motto like "Don't Smoke" it already tells us they have a weakness for Smoking. We should remember that temptation and corruption is around the corner for all of us and working for the NSA or being Jewish doesn't make us any more special than anyone else. If we find any Good within us keep it there, nurture it and try and make it grow. That is the best we can hope to do and it doesn't matter whether God is on our side or not.

A few keyword for the bots:

jihad, terrorist, bomb attack, knife attack, suicide bombing, Nazi, Holocaust, revolution, Communism, uprising, Arab spring, ISIS, destroy America, Caliphate, Anti-Capitalism, New World Order

Addendum to Blog on Dynasties, Meat Eating and Vampires

In the previous blog I observed that the animals in Dynasties were surrounded by grazing land and that the spread of cattle farming was the cause of loss of habitat. Furthermore 30% of the Planet is dedicated to cattle farming. If we switched from eating meat we could return 25% of the planet back to wildlife over night.

An argument that might arise is why should I give up eating meat so that I can give the land back to lions and tigers so they can eat meat. A Human's wishes are greater than an animals, so it should be humans enjoying the meat not animals. If anyone doubts this then put a human and a tiger in a road and drive at them with a car without breaks: which one do you hit. We value the human life more. So naturally we say that the human should eat cattle and not the tiger.

But there is something wrong with this argument. Humans are not Tigers. Tigers don't have a moral consciousness, and they don't have freedom of choice. Or they might, but it is not dialectic like humans. You cannot sit in negotiation with a tiger, or discuss the plan. It is these qualities of moral judgement and freedom which make Humans so different from Tigers. Indeed it is these types of qualities which means that we chose to drive into the tiger and not the human.

Man the Hunter.
This is not to say that human's don't sometimes behave like tigers. I call this behaviour our animal side and referred to it in the blog on Little Drummer Girl. Human's can hunt just like animals. They can even hunt humans just like animals like in war for example. But no-one suggests that a hunting human is displaying any qualities that distinguish them from an animal. When humans hunt they are just being animals.

Man the Human
However Humans have an extraordinary side to them which is the ability to step outside themselves and look at things from the perspective of another. Some animals show basic abilities to do this. But, humans can really do this. They can completely replace their wishes with those of another, fully empathise, even become another like an actor. This leads to extraordinary behaviours like sacrifice. It is Jesus' birthday soon and regardless whether the story is true he was destined to die a brutal criminals death in place of us. Even if it is not true, we can experience the love and sacrifice of this and cannot fail to be deeply touched because we do understand sacrifice and this kind of humility.

So what does a humble, empathising human do when they meet an animal that wants to eat meat. Do they eat the animal or they do let it go an feed itself. Its easy to empathise and not wish to harm the animal, and a bit more difficult to empathise and support it when it goes and kills to feed itself.

So as an animal yes we kill of the tigers and put cattle on their territories to make burgers out of for the BBQ. But as a Human we respect its needs and give the tiger what it wants, and we are happy in this and marvel at its strange existence so different from our own. When it comes to feed ourselves we as omnivores luckily have hundreds of food items we can eat, and that choice makes our moral judgements very easy.

Imagine we were like Vampires and needed to drink human blood. Now that is a difficult moral decision. Do we kill the living and turn them into vampires so that we can live on a vampires or do we not feed and die. We actually its easy isn't it: we are already dead so we should just accept the inevitable and stop feeding and die. Most moral dilemmas in fact are very easy if you have empathy, humility and the ability to sacrifice.

Concrete Example of the Crime of Capitalism

Here's a great example of the corrupting influence of capitalism. A real tale from a few weeks ago. The landlord in the tale is a Mike Wallis (so you can avoid him) and he owns flats in Reading. He even owns a company offering Project Management and Surveying Services so either never use this company cos they are incompetent or never use this company because they cannot be trusted to do a good job.

So Mike is the incompetent landlord of top 4 flats who is either incapable or unwilling to fix his plumbing, but regardless rakes in the rent. He is earning risk free cash from the situation and has total choice what he does or does not do. Typical perks of being an owner of things. His inability to fix the problem over several years means that the flats beneath are regularly flooded. In contrast to the Capitalist Mike, the tenants are losing money from the situation by paying rent but can't do anything about the plumbing.

An estate agents (Martin & Co) is now in charge of the all the flats. When I called to complain about the state of one of the flooded tenant-suckers below the otherwise very amiable and caring estate agent did 2 extraordinary things. (1) defended the landlord (2) blamed the tenant for not handling the flooding better!

She was seemingly oblivious to the fact that the tenant was paying for a product which she was not being delivered. A problem already in any transaction. But also oblivious to the fact that the landlord above with +ve balance and freedom to chose what he does was in a totally different situation from the tenant who was powerless and paying for that privilege.

So the once humane Estate-Agent has become brainwashed excusing the crimes of the capitalists and rejecting the plight of those in the service of capital. Multiply this type of situation up across the Capitalist world and you have the biggest crime against Humanity conceivable; one eclipsing the Holocaust and one that our children will be astouded at after the Revolution unbrainwashes the pro-capitalists like this lost cult-following estate agent.

Can you also believe there are even people who think Capitalism and free-markets are the cure of all evils rather than the cause!

What the BBC series Dynasties misses

Twice in the new BBC series Dynasties do the animals encounter humans and in both cases they are hunting cattle.

But while Sir David Attenborough is blaming humans for the loss of habitat it is clearly not humans but cattle that is the problem.

This is made more obvious when it is considered that 1/3 of the surface area of the planet is set aside for cattle pasture! Once that is understood it puts Dynasties in context. All the animals (with the exception of the Antarctic Emperor penguins) are hemmed in and surrounded by cattle pastures.

And what is worse, and where the BBC and ever other information source should be ashamed, the loss of habitat that so threatens the world's wildlife is directly and simply due to the creation of cattle pasture. And yet no one is making this clear to all the people who so wish to help.

Once the link between loss of habitat, global warming and pollution is made with cattle the solution is suddenly very simple: Mankind must lose its dependency on cattle.

If tonight the cattle industry collapsed we would be able to return 1/4 of the planet back to wildlife immediately. The land that currently used to grow cattle fodder is alone sufficient to support the human race, releasing all the land and chopped down rain forests and cleared scrubland and savannah straight back to the wildlife from which it was taken.

It really is that simple. I composed a simple presentation to illustrate this and include the two BBC Dynasties clips where the truth of the dangers of cattle farming are rather well hidden, but clearly obvious when you know what to look for.

Cattle have a long history in the West including Cowboys in North America and Gauchos in the South. The extermination of American Indians was done to clear land for cattle. That extinction continues in the south with the rainforests being cleared for cattle. Elsewhere across the planet the same pattern is repeated. Quite who all this meat and dairy is farmed for remains a mystery to me. But some of the worlds biggest food producers like McDonalds have a beef based menu and the huge amounts of meat processed must have a source. It may indeed turn out on deeper inspection that the Beef Burger has single handed destroyed this jewel of the known universe, this planet upon which every living thing that has ever breathed has lived and which hosts the greatest miracle known to man namely that of Life itself. The original inspiration for this blog which admittedly has turned freely in all direction but which remains rooted in that awareness.

Its a peculiar thing about the BBC that while it is owned by the British People and funded by the Tax Payer with mandate to serve the British population the British people do not have rights over the content that is made for them with their own money. This is a classic example of how Capitalism corrupts and pollutes every aspect of a society. While masquerading as a public service provider, the BBC has become a privately owned and profit driven organisation for whom standards can only fall as market forces begin to dictate the content. Ironically the same market forces that stand to destroy the very life on this planet that the Natural History unit at the BBC is in a race to record before it is destroyed for ever. Anyway the result here is that the specific details of the series Dynasties upon which this blog entry are based will have to be viewed privately by anyone so interested.

I have managed to upload the full presentation here. For how long I don't know...

Tragedy of the Commons

I heard today of an interpretation of Tragedy of the Commons which made out that the tragedy lay in the idea of Commons themselves. That is to say when things are in shared ownership then no-one feels responsible for them and no-one takes care of them. The obvious conclusion from this interpretation is that Commons should be owned. Now I wonder who came up with the interpretation, given that only a certain class of people are in a position to buy and own Commons, and who will benefit there after from renting the land out. Capitalists?

An alternative interpretation is less ideological. It's the problem captured by the Prisoners Dilemma well studied in game theory. Even when everyone does best from co-operating, often there is an immediate benefit from cheating. Catalytic Converters is a real example, and Network Effect is a another modern example. The cost of a catalytic converter is quite high, and the benefit for the first person who buys one is zero - they are not going to purify the air they breath so it is money wasted. However when everyone is using catalytic converters there is a benefit from the money spent.

This is a demonstration of the problem with the concept of discrete existence typical caused by adopting a belief in dualistic existence, upon which ownership and Capitalism is based. I have some money, and I am at liberty to spend it how I like as I am the benefitter of what I do. However in the case of catalytic converters everyone must benefit before I benefit. So how I spend my money is not about me, but about us. It is how we spend our money. This is the deeper problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. It is not a problem with shared ownership: catalytic converters are something that only gains its benefit when everyone owns one just like rent free Commons. But rather the problem lies in individuals appreciating that the benefit only arrives if they co-operate like the Prisoners Dilemma.

People are easily dispirited and a small amount of propaganda can easily lead people into private ownership and away from the Commons. But the tragedy then is that they miss out on a rent free existence and fall foul of Capitalism and a life lived paying for things that could have been free like common land.

Irrelevant to this blog, but the chief argument against shared ownership is corruption. Commons can never work it is said because to keep them Common you need to elect a Marshal to manage them. And once you give up your individual freedom to a central committee, the Common ceases to be a common and starts to be exploited by the member of the central committee or party. We have Wells and Animal Farm to thank for its brutal illustration of this. But perhaps this is just dispiriting propaganda by the Capitalists, because what happens instead of the Committee taking the Shared Property in Capitalism? Of course its just Capitalists who take over the shared property. So in either scenario the Ruling Class takes over. It is this assumption, and acceptance of the Ruling Class taking over in every situation which is the real message here. Animal Farm is as much a parable of the History of the United States as it is the Russia Revolution. The States began as a land of freedom where people were given land to farm without strings attached (well apart from the genocide of the people who lived there before). But even within the lifetime of George Washington it fell to cliques, secret societies and a ruling class. How many Americans now own any of that land first dished out to settlers? It has all fallen into the hands of the Ruling Elites. Now had USA been setup as a Common where people shared the land (more like the some of the tribes that inhabited before them) I have no doubt exactly the same fate would have awaited them.

The problem, the real Tragedy at the heart of the Commons is actually property by a select few, and this is the inevitable ratchet of any system that promotes individual ownership. Once individuals are given sole unlimited ownership of the state, then fish in a pond eating each other eventually you have just one big fish. Now laws exist to stop aggressive take overs, but people naturally die without descendants and suffer misfortunes and the path is always toward bigger and bigger individuals. At first the Laws are set up to protect individual property and keep property evenly distributed between people. But as the rachet cliks and property is lost by some and absorbed by others those laws quickly become a barrier to the disenfranchised and a protection for the wealthy. Property is theft is the slogan that captures the effect of property law in an unequal society. This is until revolutions come along and the balance is partly restored.

So sadky for proponents of the curret status quo, no property does nothing to solve the Tragedy of the Commons.

Update==9/12/2018
So there is work to be done on this. A paper questioning thelink between Prisoners Dilemma and Tragedy of Commons . Not read in depth but I think the problem is only being extressed in terms of optimal resource management. What is always forgotten is that once Capitalism is adopted then rents begin and on average about 50% of the productivity of the resource ends up in the pocket of the owner. This is finger print of Capitalism. So avoiding Capitalism doesn't change the total productivity, indeed it may make things less efficient, but it avoids the population being exploited by an elite. Indeed much more work to do.

Rabbit Flagging revisited...
This will link up with the rabbit flagging work done a few years ago on this blog, which identified gene mobility as a critical parameters. If populations are patchy (Tribes) and genes do not spread much, then the chance of genes meeting each other increases hugely which heavily influences the fitness of co-operative and non-coperative genes. It was found that while globally non-cooperative genes have higher fitness (reproductive success) than co-operative genes the actual population growth of co-operative genes was greater than non-coperative. Which sounds like a contradiction until it is realised that in tribes that are co-operative the fitness is much greater than tribes that are non-cooperative. So while non-coperative do best in all situations, there are not many non-coperative in a co-operative tribe so the non-coperative have little stake in all this success. While in non-coperative tribes no-one does every well and the co-operative do worst. So the co-operative have little stake in this failure. While non-coperative it is the other way around, they have little stake in successful tribes and majority stake in unsuccessful tribes. Left to its own devices gradually cheaters will come to dominante successful tribes and drag them down, and co-operative genes will never get a foothold unco-operative tribes so things look doomed. But a second linked gene that punishes cheating with ostracism will operate to stop non-coperative genes spreading. Now evolution of a counter gene that finds cheating sexy doesn't help if it will only lead to ostracism by association also.The only way to get cheating established would be to subvert the ostracising "moral" gene.

Little Drummer Girl, Psychopathy & Peace

Watching the BBC adaptation of John Le Carre's Little Drummer Girl helped developed an idea about psychopathy.

So we are told that the psychopath is a unique species of human that has profound lack of empathy. They view other people as shells with no-one inside and as a result other people are simply tools of the psychopaths world.

But i am suspicious of anything which is so black and white. It is almost psychopathic itself to absolutely classify a class of humans as inhumane. We are in Nazi territory here where they classified whole classes of people as inferior.

In Little Drummer Girl we have a character who is tricked into taking up a deep spying role for the Zionists against the Palestianian terrorists (not sure which group). In her deep role she essentially takes up the role of a trainee terrorist as deep as you can go, and the question was whether she would keep acting or start to play for real. During the course of the program we discover that the terrorists are real flesh and blood humans, and we hear about the atrocities they suffered at the hands of the Zionists. We are left in no doubt that both sides have a valid cause. At the end we have an exchange with the terrorist target where she confirms that unlike the Zionists or Palestians she does not have a cause and is simply acting. But in the end, despte all this, she remains true to her role and pulls out and continues working for the Zionists. All the Palestinian terrorists she was working with are killed.

Now this ability to work for one side, without regard for the lives of teh other side is exactly psychopathy. Perhaps I realise psychopathy is an essential part of human make up. We need it in order to form societies. In order to hold our own people close or superior, we must become indifferent to the interests of other people. She was recruited by the Zionists so she remained loyal and carried on working for the Zionists with apparent no deep feeling for the other side.

So perhaps the Psychopath is only special in that they have a mutation which means that instead of only being psychopathic to one side, they become psychopathic to all sides.

By contrast then what I term a Human does not have any psychopathy. If Little Drummer Girl was a human, she would have started to see the nature of the conflict as multi-dimensional with people on all sides and she would not have been able to take sides. Most people are actually not humans yet, I call them animals, because they are easily tricked, like the Little Drummer Girl, into taking a side.

But imagine a world where people made the full move to Humanity. Where people could not act with prejudice and disregard for the "other side". Where all lives mattered. No one would ever be able to level a gun at another persons head, even if they disagreed with them, because they would understand that this other person had feeling and wishes identical to their own.

In religious terminology God made all people in His image. If we kill any and we are killing God's own creations. We barely understand ourselves, how much less do we understand God, and yet some think they are in a position to exterminate another of His most extra-ordinary creation? Killing is clearly driven by the greatest delusion. The fact that Muslims and Jews, that in general Arabs have been killing each other for millennia is just testament to their collective ignorance, and in fact the ignorance of the books they follow which contain historical accounts, fake prophesies, and nonsense all mixed up with the genuine words of God that no man has a chance of being clear of the Truth. That Muslims think that the Koran was dictated to Mohammad in a cave by an Arch-Angel, and yet contains so much in common with the existing Jewish books around at the time is plainly ridiculous. It would be like a author suddenly emerging from a cave with Harry Potter, having changed the names a bit and mixed the stories of a little, and claim that they were the true author. A little realism and attempting to work out what God's real message is might be a way forward for these people. God most definitely did not tell them to exterminate each other. But of course the West is no better with an even bigger body count behind its ignorant armies and politicians.

In summary then we are all psychopaths, just some more psychopathic than others. But the goal is to rid ourselves of psychopathy and be able to respect all sides with love.

And so same question as in previous blogs. So what do you do if you have a gun trained at the head of a terrorist who is about to blow themselves up? Well what would the terrorist do? Do that. This way at least all the killers will annihilate themselves, and leave the peaceful people to carry the future.

Non-Agression Principle

This is a popular idea in America (indeed unheard of outside the country). I believe it was most famously expressed by Ayn Rand.

Non-Agression principle as expressed by Rand is not really a non-aggression principle however. While it says that aggression is wrong, it has the caveat that aggression is not wrong when it is used in self defence. And for this caveat to exist in has a belief in self and property. Indeed the weakness of Ayn Rand is that her whole philosophy is based upon a particular chosen ontology of selves and property. If you don't accept this ontology then you don't accept Rand. But I shaln't pursue that here.

In a nutshell Ayn Rand is expressing the "you started it" principle. In other words I wasn't going to hit you, but since you just hit me I'm going to hit you. Or this is mine and we were friends, but since you won't respect that its mine I'm going to attack you.

The problem with this is that while there are certainly cases where people over step their boundaries, in the vast majority of cases everyone who uses violence is using the Non-Agression Principle.

When your house in burgled you may use a gun to defend yourself, but the thief will use a gun to defend themselves also. You will say "you started it" by breaking into my property. And the thief will say you have an easy life you have a lot, I have a hard life I am defending my needs and I deserve this more than you. You will say well its still mine, go get your own. And they will say I tried, but I was raised in a poor part of town, was abused as a kid, I've got a drug probem, and I was never taught the skills or the education needed to succeed in this country. You have and that isn't fair. And you say, tough, pull yourself together and make a man of yourself. But the thief only sees the hidden aggression, exclusion and injustice that lies behind the aggression principle and pulls the trigger. He may be wrong but it saved no one.

The problem with aggression is that everyone can see aggression and need for defence in anything. You step in front of someone in a queue, it might be accidental. The person behind you sees a violation of their space and rights, and steps shouting and aggressively pushes you out of the way. You think they completely over reacted since it was just a mistake and you hit them. Then they thinking you're really are out to insult then pull a gun and the whole things explodes. Yet everyone was using the non-aggresion principle. Obviously in reality things escalate more slowly, but I've seen people come to fight for a lot less!

Non-aggression is a joke it really is!

I saw a wonderful example on the tube recently. A clearly mentally unstable person ran onto the tube throwing their sports bag in first. They then got very paranoid that everyone was looking at them, and started to shout that we were all laughing at him just because he went to the gym. He then started on an Indian guy who was near me, accusing him of laughing. Now I stepped in and said there's no probem here, relax we're not laughing, we think you're an okay chap, have a seat. But the Indian guy thought it  was a racist attack and started to defend himself. So you then have two people defending themselves. The gym guy thinking people are laughing at him, and the Indian thinking he's being racially abused. They were as bad as each other cos none of it was true. It was all just their own perception. I had to get off at the next stop so I left then exercising the Non-Aggression Principle at each other.

Its not a joke when whole countries get involved. Using the Non Aggression Principle the USA invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 because they had been attacked, and perceived a threat. But of course Iraq and Afghanistan must have been thinking we should have attacked USA much more massively at the start to defend orselves from all this. Clearly USA was a threat (with such a massive army and with bases all round the world - they are clearly on the offensive). 9/11 was conducted by people who perceived USA as a threat and enemy. I don't know their specific grievencies but you can be sure that somewhere in theorist heads they think they are attacking an aggressive enemy and not a harmless collection of good blameless sheep. Indeed every country is in a position to attack the USA by the Non-Aggression Principle becuase it poses such a huge military threat to the world (spending more on armaments than the rest of the world combined! That is a threat!) Imagine your neighbour stock piling weapons on heir property no matter how nice they are - at some point in the future you may end up disagreeing with them and then where do you stand. Time to invade now before it gets too out of hand. They may not be threatening us right now, but lets attack them defensively first to ensure that day never comes. "Pre-emptive Attack" the Pentagon calls it and it is Non-Aggression Principle and yet still reason to have a war right now.

Of course Christians know well what the Real Non-Aggression Principle is. Indeed some Indian sects do as well. It is called Ahimsa.

Jesus died on a cross not to show us he was powerful, but quite the opposite to suffer as man. He could (if you believe this stuff) have summond an army of angels to crush the Romans, but he did nothing and died in his own stinking blood, urine and faeces. All he did was forgive his persecutors. Now if you believe the story, he more than anyone on earth was innocent of sin, and yet he died a criminals death without trying to blame or wishing punishment, revenge or defence. This is the message to Christians who wish to follow him. And for those who wish to defend he said "let those who live by the sword die by the sword." In other words the sword achieves nothing but inevitable death anyway.

Some Indian sects likewise have an identical message. That in the face of overwhelming threat, danger and risk to life the only response is love and compassion. We are all going to die, but it is better to die with love in our heart, than to live by fear, aggression and defence. After all everyone bearing a sword is protecting something and feels justfied in using that sword. But if we win by using that sword (or gun/missile) we have to spend the rest of our life living with the consequences and the murder that we committed. American media is full of murder, so much so that we are noramlised to it - every US hero kills. But in reality it is something that no-one wants to live with. It is better to die in love than kill in fear

The most ridiculous thing about all this is what we ourselves think when we see a stranger with a sword. Do we feel at peace, or are we automatically suspicious and afraid of this person. Likewise what do we think other people think when they see us a sword. For sword read weapons or even aggressive attitude. If we live our life behind a sword we will be faced with very suspicious and fearful people which is going to set the world against us. Drop the sword! Obviously in many US states everyone carries swords (guns are the US version). So everyone I presume is a bit suspcious of everyone else all the time... is that person over there with the gun going to use it today? And am I a possible target? A lttle thought that most of the world doesn't have to worry about. In UK you have kids with knives, and when I walk past one there is the obvious thought I wonder if they are going to use it today and am I a target? What the kids don't realise is the impact they have on other people is quite the oppsoite of what they want: people feel aggressive to them when all the kid wanted deep down was respect which is really just defence!

Conversely what Ayn Rand and her one-eyed supporters forget is the inpact that the Real Non-Aggression Principle has. I use the RNAP and have first hand experience of what happens. I haven't been burgled at gun point tho this is just an example.

When you are faced with the burgular entering your property you are not afraid, and you do not defend yourself for you are not afraid to die. Everyone will die. At the end of the day property is inanimate and not worth anyone's life. Your concern is why is this chap in such a desperate situation to be entering people's houses with a gun. They must be in a bad place! So you naturally care for them and want to know. You want to, even if you can't, help your assailant. Chances are they have had a hard life, they are probably on drugs these days. As a result you do have a problem because you are faced with someone who has been neglected by the world for a very long time, and there is little you can do in the short window of opportunity. But thinking of defence is the wrong thing to do, because what looks like defence to you, looks like attack to other people and that is the problem: you must not look like attack to a lion else it will attack. Instead you look like the other persons defence in order to survive!!!! Which to you looks like attack. At the end of the day what do people want? They want someone on their side. If there is any chance to ensure to the other person that you are genuinely on their side you have a win. But they probably haven't had anyone on their side for a very long time, possibly ever so you have to dig real deep to play this game. You must be prepared to die for them! That is love. Love is what saves people and the world. Now you probably won't die, but if your love is anywhere near that deep you have saved everyone automatically.

This seriously confuses people (in a good way). A bit like a good Mel Gibson from Lethal Weapon you want to convince the other person that you are less afraid of death and suffering than they are. That their life is worth more than yours. That is love. In a tense situation where people seem the furthest apart, actually they are the closest if you can see the opportunity. But its very important not to be pathetic. If a lion thinks you are an easy kill, it might just kill you anyway. You must stand your ground solidly, like a rock not like a gun, but with compassion and the other persons defence in the your eyes. A flower that will not be budged. So you don't argue about their threats, yes I will die you accept, I'm not going to defend myself, but do ask them how they will benefit when you're dead. You see there is no benefit, except self defence and if you aren't going to attack and are no threat then why kill? Now they may kill for fun but actually there is no fun (or actually its a power trip) in killing someone who fully accepts death already. And if they ever do do this, its important to understand that they will be forever scared and harmed by the experience. It really is not a good idea to kill for fun! (its not entirely certain whether the Romans ever did this in the Colosseum or whether it was more complex) but its not ever a good idea to kill full stop! Nothing good ever came of a death (despite endless amounts of misleading Pentagon (US) and Whitehall (UK) propaganda.) an a million books and stories going back to the Bronze Age and the Battle of Troy and even the Bhagavad Gita (essentially the indian version of Homer).

However a caveat. It is possibly that we face someone who is not really conscious. Someone so badly damaged by drugs or psychosis that they are not really a person - more a zombie. What is the best thing for them? If we try and engage them meaningfuly we are wasting both their time and ours. If we do nothing then it is possible that they will commit crimes. So yes it is possible to be in a situation where "violence" is necessary but it must be very well understood what this means. It is violence that benefits the other person only!

The only time you can use harm against someone is in their own interests!

This is like an attacker cutting you with a knife, versus a surgeon cutting you during an operation. The harm lies not in what was done but why it was done. But this is complex as someone wakes up in a hospital with a leg shattered by a police gun shot, and then its discovered that actually the person they wrestled to the ground was a terrorist who then escaped and went on to blow themselves up and kill many people. Once we engage in any form of "harm" we enter a very complex and mirky world that may well result in real harm being done if we are not very careful indeed.

The only real test of our actions is that we did them with love. So in this way there is no such thing as violence actually. If what we did was done with kindness, compassion and love and it turns out that the result was harm then it was still the right thing to do. However if what we did we did with fear, anger, hatred and prejuduce then whatever we did was wrong. This is the only true law.

A common form of unexpected harm is people who are untrained trying to help. We see an injured animal and we try to help and it dies. We then look up how to look after it and discover we didn't treat it right. Our intention was good, but we were untrained. If our motives are good we will have learned that we need to be better prepared in future and next time we will research how to look after animals better... if not get training pre-emptively and perhaps even join an animal care centre. So what started off as harm, because our intentions were good has now grown into something very positive. However if we took the pet home to show off to our friends, and it died then we might be ashamed and be more worried about defending our reputation than actually doing anything good for animals. So it died in vain.

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Violence Thought Experiments.

The classic is the Nazi prison camp. A line of prisoners is formed and we are given a gun and told to shoot one otherwise the officer will shoot 3. We can shoot the officer, a prisoner, ourselves or do nothing and 3 will die. If we shoot the officer then at least 5 will die as he will die, I will die, and probably at least 3 prisoners will die. Shooting myself is an interesting option. It means that I will not play his games, and it means that shooting prisoners after I'm dead doesn't mean much. Plus if I'm in such a camp, its probably the easiest way out. I tend to side with this option. But I have expressed violence however. If I am a Nazi guard myself and the officer is testing my loyalty it is actually more difficult. I do have the option of killing a prisoner but being so sickened by the whole thing that I dedicate the rest of my life to becoming a Schindler. This in fact might be the right thing to do, I have to carry the weight and will be haunted always by killing an innocent person but can work to lesson that weight through fulfilling other good intentions. But I have played the game of the officer, and supported his world of violence which was not a good thing at all. The other option is just to do nothing and not play his games. He will kill 3 but in such a world life is cheap and I don't think anyone would blame you for an easy release. This last option has the beauty of involving no violence. Some would perceive it the cowards way. The real truth is we probably don't know what we would do until faced with such an unnatural situation.

Another situation was in the Tour of Duty TV series. A pacifist with a standard issue rifle was faced with a Viet Kong who was going to shoot someone. The pacifist did nothing and the Viet Kong killed an innocent woman. Was the pacifist a coward and to blame for not saving the woman? The problem with this scenario is that it is people taking sides and killing who they think is guilty which causes the whole problem of war. No one kills the "good" side in a war, everyone is killing the "evil" side. But because people's perceptions are different like this gym guy and the Indian on the tube we often end up thinking each other is evil and attacking each other. If the Pacifist had picked up a gun yet it would have been one less Viet Kong and the woman would have survived, but this is only the US point of view. From a Vietnamese perspective the Imperialists just killed one more and in a tiny way the murder just adds to the sea of revenge and hatred. The poor woman on the other hand clearly made the mistake of siding with the US and then getting caught by a Viet Kong. If she had sided with the Vietnamese then he would have protected her. So actually its not so simple an answer and depends upon your perspective entirely. When things depend upon perspective then they are no longer correct and we should not act upon them. That's why all killing is wrong, because it alwasy involves taking sides against the victim. Compassion and love have no sides. Really the pacifist did the right thing, altho it was virtually indistinguishable from the wrong thing. Someone was going to die. When we are faced with such sad situations it is because of a global break down in reason and ironically for Ayn Rand the adoption by too many people of the Non-Aggression Principle rather than a profound principle of compassion, love an sacrifice.

The Case Against Capitalism

Very much is said in favour of Capitalism, not least the military when they are opposing countries that adopt different economic system (e.g. Soviet Union, North Korea, 1980s Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela etc). But also the financial sector when they are seeking to profit. There are many people who benefit from Capitalism, and these people are made very powerful by it. Not surprisingly we are surrounded by the "case for." But what is the case against, and who is making this case if the powerful are making the case for?

Who is making the case?

In Marxism the case against is made by the working class. If the capitalists own the industry and profit from it, the working class are the people who the capitalists employ to operate their machines. Working class have little power, are dispensible and depend entirely upon capitalists to supply them a living. By contrast the capitalists get to make all the decisions, can protect themselves to the bitter end and always have the sale of capital to fall back on when they face debts, or when they need to raise money (e.g. share offerings). Creditors like capitalists, and capitalists have a lot of freedom. Workers have none of these securities and when they run out of employment and money the next stop is the street. It is a very unbalanced and unfair system.

But you don't need Marxist Class Theory to make the case against Capitalism, you don't need to be Marxist or Socialist to make the case against Capitalism.It is not a party political thing. It is simply a scientific and factual thing that Capitalism doesn't work for everyone, and anyone can make this case (even the Capitalists!).

Certainly though the Marxists have a point. Capitalism is about ownership and the benefits of owning lots of things. But we have seen very rich people lose all their wealth through extravagance and poor management. What sets a Capitalist apart is that they make their wealth work for them. I have heard it put like this: in capitalism you turn your liabilities into assets. And this depends upon the inequality within the system.

What is Capitalism?

To illustrate. If I have a car then I will be using it for the most part. It will cost me money, and I will need to work to get the money to run that car. However if I can buy a second car that I don't need then I can rent this car out to someone who needs it. This way suddenly a car becomes an asset and I can make money from it. But I am not actually "making money" I am simply positioning my capital in the market so that someone who needs it will be prepared to pay me to use it. But of course this depends upon the other person not having a car of their own. This may be because they are in town for a weekend and it's just convenient to hire a car. But it might be that they cannot afford a car, in which case I am expoiting their poverty. I have no figures on the relative balance of convenience to need, but in housing for example everyone needs a home. Certainly people travelling for work will rent just to be near work, but they will own a home somewhere. But no everyone owns, and I believe in fact the majority rent. Not for convenience but because they are too poor to buy. It means that the owners of those houses (the people with more housing than they need) are getting a steady stream of income from those who have less housing than they need. This at root is Capitalism: it is the movement of money from those who do not have to those who do have. It is the opposite of the myth of Robin Hood - and indeed this myth may well have emerged as an antidote to exactly this observation by the dispossed that the wealthy benefit from the poor, but not the other way around. In the example of houses of course, even those who own houses are victims of capitalism because most will end up paying back twice the cost of their house to the mortgage lender so the banks are getting a steady stream of income from people who were too poor to buy their property in cash (who is!).

Who benefits from Capitalism?

So we see that Capitalism in its very conception is flawed and built upon inequality. Now the "case for" spends a lot of time trying to instill in people's minds that really it is the poor who benefit from the rich. Ideas like "trickle down" have been invented, and the rich are always tasked with "creating employment" and entrepreneurs are applauded for creating jobs. But this is like the myth of gambling. If gambling really worked then the gambling halls would all go bankrupt. I always argue if you must gamble go to the poorest looking gambling hall, because they are ones who make the smallest profit, and so hand out the most money. Likewise if Capitalism really benefitted the non-capitalists then the Capitalists would all be poor monks in sack cloth. Well not quite: what if Capitalism benefitted everyone but benefitted the Capitalists most? This in fact is the argument.

Serfdom & Hayek
Capitalism we are told makes everyone rich. It just makes the Capitalists very very much richer than the non capitalists. For this reason it is better than any other system, all of which don't solve the problem of poverty. So essentially the poor are told by the Capitalists, don't worry about our extreme wealth and power, you are better off than you would be without us. A kind of catch-22 for the poor.

Well there is one profound piece of truth in that: we should always appreciate what we have. But the Capitalists don't like that! While they want the poor to accept their situation at the bottom of the pile, they do want them to strive to do better because this is the motivation that will get them into employment and turn the cogs of the industry that the capitalists own. If the capitalists aren't monks in sack cloth, the non-capitalists most certainly must not be else the economy would stall and the capitalists would lose their wealth. So Capitalism also depends upon the poor seeking wealth, but not so much that they topple the system (criminality or revolution). Of course this is another myth, the rich perform the majority of crime in the society precisely because they are more powerful. The poor simply don't have the power to commit much crime. I'm often putting the case against war in the blog. The poor can just about mount a bank-robbery killing a handful, while the rich (capitalists) can mount a full scale military invasion killing millions (World War 2 case in point)! I don't advocate any violence what so ever, since all action that seeks to harm is evil and can achieve absolutely no good. You cannot make gold from dung. You must start with gold.

But is it true that people are better off under capitalism? Common examples are the revolutionary communist countries Soviets, China, Cambodia and these are compared with the incredible wealth of the West. South Korea is compared today with North Korea as a archetypal example of the power of capitalism to bring prosperity. For many people case closed. But there are many problem here. Firstly USA is a global super power, inheriting a global empire from the UK, the world speaks its language and uses its currency. Whatever its economics was it would be very wealthy like Rome. We would expect US/UK to be wealthy on this ground alone. Add to this that the revolutions that founded US happened in the 18th Century around the time the French had their Socialist revolution. All the failed countries quoted as examples of what happens if you don't adopt capitalism had their revolution in the last century! This has a bearing on their prosperity too. Korea in particular was destroyed during the 1950s conflict that sort to recover the country from Japanese occupation and which turned into American occupation. The South has flourished under patronage from the American Empire including military support and open doors into trade with the Empire. The North by contrast has no open trade, and spends a vast proportion of its GDP on defence against the worlds top military Empire. The fact that North Korea has managed to become such a formidable military force by itself is surely evidence that its economics does work. And a country being able to defend itself from invasion is the definition of freedom. Nazi Germany is another example. Its system of Fascism and state run corporations with slave camps (sweat shops in modern parlance) was an economic miracle that the whole of the world was very happy to do business with. This all famously changed when Germany began to want greater control in Europe something other Empires were not happy with. Its a book s worth to discuss the releative merits of economic system, but I only wanted to illusrate that the story is far from complete, and the sources of Serfdom are actually more complicated than even Hayek is aware.

Machines
The big unwritten story in the history of wealth of course is machines. People are fools who would like to attribute all the wealth of the world to particular politics and economics. It is machines and technology. Whoever discovered fire changed the world. Whoever discovered the plough changed the world. Whoever thought to tame an animal and harness its power changed the world. Whoever invented the boat changed the world. Same for invention of language, time and many other incredible inventions that had nothing to do with either Capitalism or Socialism. And then the big one: the mill. Originally water powered and then steam powered. Proponents of Adam Smith would like to say that Capitalism was what designed his pin factory. But of course this pin factory was in place when he studied it. It is in fact a feature of the definition of tools and machines that they do the same task again and again and again very fast and accurately. As a result you build a factory as a sequence of tools with end products of pone process feeding into the next. Very naturally you get division of labour and specialisation. No economic system is different: this has nothing to do with Capitalism.

If you look at oil consumption versus food consumption in the UK you will see that 99.998% of all useful energy (that is turned into work) is consumed by machines and humans consume only 0.002% of the energy. After the AI revolution humans will be virtually irrelevant to the economy. This is not Capitalism, this is the power of machines to do work. This is what makes us so wealthy.

Slaves
 All civilisations have been built on slavery. We aren't often reminded of this but the Classical world of Plato and Socrates was supported by 10 slaves for every Athenian citizen. Roman empire famously was built on slavery - indeed part of the reason for its conquests and expansion was to supply the slave trade. British empire was built on Slavery and most famously the US empire was built on slavery. USA is not the result of Capitalism but of savery! What ended slavery in the West was the arrival of steam engines. It was simply more economical to set up a factory of machines than to employ slaves. And that trend has only progressed. Altho there is still a huge market for slaves because AI is still too expensive.

I wonder then whether the myth of Capitalism as the source of wealth, is a necessary myth because it can be used to hide the more murky reasons for our wealth.

Ownership causes Inequality

One problem with machines is that they are capital and are owned. At least humans cannot be owned (under the Geneva Convention of Human Rights at least). This means that they are perfect for capitalism. Why employ a human that you cannot own, when you can employ a machine that is yours and all that is makes is yours. Machines mean that capitalists are not just limited to owning houses and land like in the very old feudal days now they can own the productivity of factories. And when they want to invest they can build new factories and gain the returns on that.

The argument for Capitalism is that capitalists seeking returns on their capital are motivated to build factories and to supply more produce to market increasing choice and driving down prices. That is certainly a win for everyone. But of course this is only necessary because the system gives them the wealth in the first place. It is the same as someone with an extra house putting that house on the market and a homeless family moving in. That is great for the family, but only necessary because the capitalist ended up with more houses than they needed in the first place. Equally if the capitalist has too much money and they build the unnecessary house and rent it out to a homeless family, an apparent win for everyone but only possibly because the capitalist had too much money in the first place. And with the rental set up they will gain even more money so it does nothing to stop them having too much money. Its a system which gives people with too much, ever more and the apparent win is that it forces them to share this excess but at a cost so that those without much pay them and reward the capitast for their excess. This is the source of inequality.

So far from generating wealth, capitalism ensures that this wealth falls into very particular hands, and the everyone else much pay the wealthy rent to get access to this wealth.

Cost of Inequality and Relative Wealth
Now we come to the crux and the social costs of capitalism. It has been said already that people are given an argument (unjustified like all the pro-capitalist propaganda) that: all people do well under capitalism, even though some do much better than others. From this we are expected to conlusde that everyone is therefore better off. But there is a spanner in the works here. Wealth is actually relative not absolute. What this means is that if you pay everyone less they will be happier than if you pay everyone more but make it unequal. This was even demonstrated in a study on Capuchin moneys by Dr. Sarah Brosnan.

As an aside I wondered if there is a limit to this. At some level surely people will be just uphappy even if they all have the same. Well actually no. If everyone is going to the gallows together then it is tough but they are happy. Absurd we might think. But we are all going to the gallows right now since everyone dies. And if you study your religions properly you will see that there is nothing to be unhappy about in this. But imagine that a class of people could afford immortality: suddenly how pitiful the rest of us would seem! This is relative wealth.

So suddenly Capitalism turns out to be the very worst system possible, and the arguments we have been fed are exremely dubious.

Suddenly a whole wealth of data makes sense.

From a World Bank report on Crime & Inequality

Gini measures inequality. I did this research myself some years back and found that Gini coefficient correlates better than any other metric against social ills. Poverty does not correlate at all well. It is not whether you are poor that makes you mentally and phsyically unwell, it is that you perceive yourself as poor relative to others that does the damage.

Our World In Data has a graph of changes in global mental health.

This is showing global mental health from 2016. What is most striking is that the countries which stand out are the English speaking British and American Epire countries. These are the countries of Capitalism, progressive economics and politics so what could be wrong? Well if this analysis is correct it makes sense. People might be most wealthy in these countries, but more people feel poor and that is what counts.

It also makes sense of the Easterlin Paradox. Indeed many things which don't make sense when we try to force the world into the Capitalism dogma box suddenly make sense when we open our eyes to the truth of capitalism as I hope to have made a start at cracking here.

Social Mobility

Another myth is that Capitalism increases social mobility. I live in the UK and come from the generation who weredaily bombarded by Thatcher on how free market would increase opportunities and social mobility. A generation of people looked forward to getting their feet on the rungs of the wealth ladder and making something of their lives. But its not true, what happened is that the economic boom fell into the hands of a select few and the rest have ended up living in debt to achieve their dreams.

Great Gatsby Curve from Wikipedia artcle of same name

Countries with high inequality (capitalist countries) have the lowest social mobility. It is logical. If money is power, and the more money you have the more you can leverage to gain even more then the powerful, not the poor, will be the most likely to become even more powerful.

Conclusion
Not everything above I'm sure is correct, but the purpose is to show that idea that Capitalism is a simple closed dogma that mankind suddenly stumpled across like a nugget of gold is nonsense. It is a system like any other and needs proper criticism of its failings of which there are very very many.