Loch Lomond Rubbish

There is a lot of rubbish in the lay byes at Loch Lomond, Scotland. Astonishing for two reasons (i) Loch Lomond is a beautiful place to outsiders (ii) The rest of Scotland is remarkably litter free. I wondered who had left the litter and examining it I had my suspicions - how many American families do you see on holiday with 6 packs of Carlsberg in their lunch hampers? I made some enquiries and the blame was firmly placed on the Glaswegians from 15 miles to the SE. The locals called them "visitors" but a distinction had to be made because I pointed out that the average American, Japanese or even English tourist who has come here to enjoy the place is quite shocked by the litter. To me the Glaswegians were the locals relatively. It made me realise something that bodes badly for property.

The usual argument is that when we own something we look after it better. But this isn't the whole truth because visitors to Scotland don't own it yet they probably value it the most. It might be because they have spent time and money to get there and so they have invested something, but this leads to the more general appreciated of the area which is why they came in the first place. No! here you have people who don't own even a pebble treating it as well as their own. As that thought experiment goes - imagine finding the Earth wouldn't it be the most precious thing ever discovered yet we behave like Glaswegians here.

So why do the Glaswegians not respect it like the visitors from afar or those who live there? I thought it was because the idea of owning something means we look after it carefully, so automatically and dialectically the idea of not owning something means are more careless about it. What is the meaning of being House-Proud if you don't treat the land around you with disregard? How can we be more careful about "this" without at the same time and in the same mind be less careful about "that". So the property system seems to imply that while we look after what is ours we will mistreat that which isn't ours.

This seemed to rather open the hermetically sealed tin of property logic.

Do sheep have feelings?

A car raced past me on the Teesdale valley. Some miles later I came upon the body of a lamb by the roadside. A forlorn bleating on the slopes behind me alerted me to the presence of its mother looking onwards. As I stood there the bleating continued without apparent cause or end and seemed to carry the need to have something heard with in it. She started to make her way over to me, her pace and snthusiasm increasing. The bleating stopped and I felt that maybe, seeing me standing by the lamb, a flicker of hope had ignited that maybe her offspring was not dead. I stood aside and she wandered up to still, woolen mound and put her nose to it. A moment standing there looking into space and she wandered heavily off again onto the slopes without ever looking back.

At the time I had a simple narrative running in my head. I tried to imagine what it was like for this ewe having nursed this lamb from springtime until now, some 16 or 20 weeks, to suddenly be separated catastrophically this glorious sunny day the golden light from the setting sun casting a long shadow from the heap that had only minutes before been her companion and biological imperative. Tonight and for the rest of the year she had no-one to worry about or look after. It seemed to me at first that the bleating was an expression of this loss and confusion that must come from such sudden and deep re-orientation. As she nosed the carcass on the road it was easy to be moved to tears.

Yet a second narrative started to take form. The bleating was actually to warn me away from her child. In a state of some confusion the instinct to protect the lamb was still present and she was protecting it like she would have done an hour ago. Yet returning to the lamb she was reminded that it was dead and so cancelled that behaviour and wandered off. While I didn't want to accept it, it was easier to believe that she was devoid of emotions and simply acting biologically
than to suggest that there was some internal tumoil and process of separation occurring.

It has been noted before that we humans have a lot to learn from animals. Their living in the moment, the acceptance and management of events as they happen has long been the envy of philosophers and artists. Something I should learn from maybe also!

Rent and Spongers -> Property

Amazing that some tabloids keep going on about people sponging off the welfare state and living in government accomodation.

Quite contrary it seems to me that the landlords are the spongers. It remains absolutely absurd in my view, and everytime I examine it even more absurd, that it is legal to charge people for something that they don't consume. I live on someones land and I leave that land as I found it and so what has the landlord got to charge me for? Upkeep of the property, rates etc absolutely should be paid for but for physical occupation how can that be "costed".

Well the simple answer is that there is always someone who will pay for it and so the landlord will house them in favour of those who won't. So essentially it is a bribe to the landlord. In the same way we might give a bung to a doctor to give us treatment next. But why is it wrong for the doctor to receive a bung, but not the landlord? Maybe the landlord needs to pay himself a wage for the paperwork involved in maintaining a property. So at minimum in UK at the moment a small room is worth £70 a week excluding all bills, or £3500 a year. If a landlord has 10 such rooms his income is £35k/year. Suppose he pays contractors £200 a week for service and maintainance to those rooms - that is £10k. So he takes home £25k or a salary of £12.5/hour. Does this really cover the "work" he does in owning a property?

My only conclusion whenever I look at this situation is that the real spongers in society are the landowners - indeed the owners in general - who take a hefty slice out of the productivity of this nation and damped economic productivity heavily. Supporting a Capitalist class is what is really happening in society, but the Capitalists twist the idea to make the poor look like the spongers - guilty conscience maybe ;-)

=== Further to above === 6/8/10
The system of rent begins with invasion. Kings and Queens own land by virtue of conquest and then only by their consent is it parcelled out to people they like and trust. Thus in a monarchy the monarch effectively liberates those in favour from labour by giving them lands from which they can take a percentage of the produce and so not work. In turn they supply produce to the monarch to ensure the running of the monarchy.

The argument usually put around is that the serfs who paid rent did so in payment for military protection. As argued here before - protection from what? another land-lord! Battles are only between land-lords for right to control the productivity of lands. A visitor centre at Hadrian's Wall runs a documentary which explains very clearly the reason for castles and big building - they are symbols of power and thereby reinforce the control of the ruling elite over the locals just as much (if not more) than defend them (who?) from external invasion. The traditional argument seems to imply that the invading people are going to kick the locals off the land and do the farm labour themselves - hardly!

Rent was established then as a means to avoid working and to support a system of control that ensured freedom from labour. Upper classes have always been idntified by their freedom from economic concerns achieved by rent.

The protestant work ethic is a very smart achievement by which those who pay rent, and who the establshment rely upon for income, are given the false consciousness that to not work is a sin. Even my mother who is from borderline aristocratic stock has this mentality. It is more of a joke hearing the down trodden working classes speak with anger of people not working - I imagine this is simply resentment at so much of their life having been taken up with work. Yet all around the workers who hold these ideas the rich avoid work, especially those who take rent for doing nothing. This is a spectacular false consciousness!

In the medieval world wealth was measured in gold. There was as much wealth as gold and that was it. Smith changed that for good with his "Wealth of Nations" where he argued that wealth as created by labour.

Now the stock markets do not create any wealth - they are simply exchanges where wealth changes hands. The same is true I argue for rent. No work is done on land to make it "rentable" - it is rentable simply as it is. Nothing is taken from the land that makes it unrentable. The landlord thus creates no wealth but never-the-less takes a share of the wealth created.

Average house price is about £225k and average salary 24k. A couple will pay £450k for their house over 25years with an income of 24kx2x25=1200k. So 37% of their income will be spent on land-rent effectively (altho after that they own the house). This figure is similar to what I experience with about 1/3 of salary being spent on rent.

From the above analysis this "tax" is payed in return for no value added labour from the land-lord. The land-lord thus gains effectively 1/3 of his salary free (if he has two houses) or maybe all his salary if he has 4 (1 for him to live in). It means that he does no work, and contributes nothing to the economy. He therefore has exactly the same economic impact as a "sponger" on benefits - the only difference is that he is left in peace and is socially accepted while the "sponger" is hounded by the DSS and the society as effectively a "thief". All this while the readers of the tabloids in question pay rent quite unawares. Remarkable state of affairs it seems to me.

What is more damaging is that the land-lord takes salary from workers who would have spent it in the market place and stimulated jobs. The probability with Capitalists is that the returns on capital and rent are reinvested making the situation worse. I keep coming across the economic argument (not of my creation, and attributed oddly to Einstein amongst others) that the gradual ratchet of money flow being restricted to a smaller and smaller group of elite individuals actually contracts and collapses the economy. "Bernanke's Helicopter" - the claim that money will be flown to people to increase liquidity and money flow in US if necessary - is only the desperate attempt to correct a fundamental flaw in the system that wealth in the current economy gradually trickles upwards. An article I read today said that the fault lay in the extreme salaries of the elite business world. I would say it lies in the very structure of ownership and "rent" - which is effectively salary for nothing.

It occurs to me also writing this that the system of "rent" (or salary for nothing - SFN) has other impacts. Taking people out of the workforce by making them capitalists (general term here for anyone who gets money for renting or lending something out) reduces the workforce and increases the value for labour, which is then discounted by 1/3 of that salary being taken by capitalists in rent. This is isomorphic with the welfare system - I don't therefore understand the difference or the reason why the rent system is considered good and the welfare system seen as bad... except obviously the owners of the country and the press are capitalists!!! There is my answer!!!

Of course it is not just where we live that is taxed. Everything we buy has to support land-rent (shops, factories etc). And it is not just land-rent. Every penny borrowed is taxed also. It would make an interesting calculation to find out what percentage of the wealth of workers changes hands for nothing in return. It could be startlingly large.

Now this analysis was based upon my limited understanding of Classical economics. Yet this blog has already noted that wealth is not created by labour. A particular stone that we walk past every day may suddenly become the latest fashion and suddenly when everyone wants one it may become scarce and then valuable. What was under my feet suddenly over-night gains value. This is not because of any "labour" but because value (like meaning) is created by social structure, custom and more. I forgot to note when last mentioning this that just as we might wonder what worthless thing now may become valuable tomorrow like Tracey Emin's bed, what indispensible valuable thing now may become worthless tomorrow as fashions and lifestyles change.

Now if labour is not the primary source of value and on top of this the rent system has always been staring people in the face as evidence that we don't need to work to get a salary - why for all these centuries have people frowned upon people who do not work, and more recently are on benefits? The answer has already been covered.
(1) People who do work are resentful of those who don't precisely because they don't want to work themselves!
(2) The Capitalists would have to work if they lost the power to take SFN.

Now I am not against work. The upper-classes devoid of work to do were very adept at creating diversions, ettqiuettes and light tasks to pass the time of day. It is human to be creative and to work I would say you simply cannot stop people from doing things. The problem lies in the social system of inequality that seeks to partition resources so that some are forced into positions of control and some are placed in to positions of authority. Now I must have analysed why this happens in my year long discussion of social structure... but i forget at this moment... shall look up...

So what alternative is there. Well a simple alternative is to keep the rent system but have the state own everything. Rents are then returned to the system and the people - may be not evenly as corruption will exist but more evenly than in the current multi-tiered system where everyone from land-lord to pension scheme holder tries to be a sponger.

On the subject of ownership picked up a book while shopping for my sisters birthday present which was basically a page by page apology for the right-wing. It explained for example why the Caspian sea is unpolluted while the Mediterranean is polluted. The reason is that the Caspian falls within one government jurisdiction while the Mediterranean is bordered by many countries. The rest was Prisoner's Dilemma - which would have made the whole book much shorter if he had noted that - why keep your bit of the Med clean if your neighbour just dumps rubbish etc etc... ergo it is best to have one person rule the whole world (essentially the weakness of Right-Wing thinking in a nut shell). He neglected while he wrapped up the pure logic behind Totalitarianism, to note that he was dealing with different sizes of the same thing - states. At no point did he actually question the notion of property.

Interesting other case study was the American Indian of the Plains and the West coast (I think). The Plains Indians famously don't/didn't have a system of property while the West coast did. The reason (which I accept) was that the Plain's Indians lived off a mobile mass resource - the buffalo - which could not be broken into territories, while the West coast lived off small game which fitted into territories. Exactly I would notes as we see in the natural world where territory etc is based upon resource distribution and genetic relatedness between individuals. What he neglected to make a big deal about was that there was a society that operated without property - the relative, conditional nature of property systems should be an extra-ordinary observation for those Fascists who still dine on a diet of 18th Century libertarian socioeconomic politics, like the writer of this book.

But I will concede that it got me thinking about the wealth and scientific knowledge and progress that has occurred in our civilsation in the West. It is not because of anything intrinsic to the West - it is a natural process as occurred in Ancient China, Ancient Indian, Babylon, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and the cities especially of Athens, Alexandria, Rome etc - but it is due to a fixed, enduring social order. As I realised in that musing regarding my lost letter, the delicate webs of knowledge can only be crafted in systems of exquisite stability and order... what creates those and must they always be based upon property, hierarchical and unfair to lower classes... does fixed social order always carry the cost of injustice... regarding property I believe no - as Reading Council have started to realise on their bins "Keep YOUR Reading Tidy" - how can it be MY reading when I don't own it ;-) Why can't we share everything? Regarding injustice I don't know... but this is another way in on the analysis of "employment" which seem to be less and less relevant with every technological development.

=== Further to this - Brambles

Eating blackberries yesterday I noticed an odd contradiction. On the one hand the bramble produces a delicious fruit, but on the other hand it has aggressive thorns that seem designed to cause injury to everything.

That contradiction seems of fundamental essence. If the bramble didn't aggressively protect itself from herbivors then it would be eaten before it could amass enough nutrients to create the blackberries. The blackberries are especially delicious because they provide the second essential feature of sex (which is distribution of the young i.e. genes). Leaves on the other hand are not designed to be eaten, they simply happen to embody nutrients as matter of necessity. So if we play things the bramble's way we get rewarded!

This seems to parallel the observation that the beauties of human meaning can only flourish in societies that protect their growth and wealth aggressively, and the wealth of nations is enjoyed by those who play things the society's way.

Some appeasement to the right-wing position here.

I would say here that to correct ones course it is often better to oversteer onto the correct track and then continue on that correct track, than to simply find the correct destination on the horizon and stear toward that making the route as one goes. The analogy being that to correct the errors in society it seems necessary to explore the forbidden territories in order to find oneself back onto the true path. Is it possible that I have explored too far into unnecessary territories?

Does Success Exist?

Am slightly torn on whether to become a success. I can see that I have everything I need to be successful, I simply need to do it. I think I have a good understanding of people now, a good understanding of how the world works, of how to get the best from people, on how to survive failure and build from it, on how to be positive and constructive even when times are negative.

Yet there is one problem: how do I measure my success? It occurred to me that I can create any measure I like. I just cycled to the Isle of Skye and back 1600miles in 23 days. Not an amazing feat but for my first long distance cycle ride one that I a few times doubted I could achieve. 70miles the longest I had ever cycled before that. On the last day I did 160miles so it was easy in the end. Now that was success.

I could have chosen to climb Everest. I could have chosen to swim a whole length of the pool underwater (achieved that a few years ago). I could have chosen to become a millionaire or billionaire. I want to be enlightened - that is my measure. The point tho is that success is relative to our yard stick - there is no absolute measure.

People say "oh he is a success" but by what and whose measure? A millionaire I don't consider a success, a wise person I do consider a success. For many it is the other way around.

What is worse is that a success can suddenly change their measure and instantly not be a success anymore! A millionaire can see a billionaire and instantly feel like a failure.

So this really and finally puts the last nail in the coffin of "success" - not that it was ever an issue but i was thinking about becoming successful for a change yesterday.

Stuff from holiday on "my muse"

Once again my holiday found me ruminating on "my muse". This cow has far too many stomachs!! In note form and hopefully an end (again).

> Watching the sunrise from King Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh I reformulated the reason why I was trapped with "my muse". She gave away the only thing i ever wanted: herself. She made cheap what for me was the most valued. Maybe this was deliberate because it is a great responsibility being valued that much - she was young, I put a lot of pressure on her, this is my mistake. But basically she couldn't perceive herself as being that valuable - in her own eyes she was cheap. Now I went into this situation because I doubted marriage. Was there a force that makes one person more special than another? I chose her to prove this. That moment of decision was mathematical in its precision: when asked to rate her I had a literal vision of a meter in my mind's eye that rose above the critical 95% level - my soul simply said "yes". I never took an exact reading it was somewhere at 97%/98%. That was the form that certainty took for me. I have never said "yes" to anything before or since and I know I never will - I know there is only one "yes" inside - everything else is full of doubts and imperfections. There are others more perfect scoring - I saw two yesterday - but she was "the one". Now if i chose another to love then at the same moment i chose her, i also prove that there was nothing lasting in my choice of "my muse" and I prove that "yes" is only conditional and so lasting unbreakable marriage vows are impossible - things are proven to be conditional and temporary, to be based on nothing but choice. We can always chose and so marriage lasts only as long as we chose it, which means that the vows we make in the past have no bearing on the future. It destroys the whole of reality. So to continue to believe in the possibility of marriage, ironically I have no choice but to remain faithful to my unfortunate choice of "my muse" and so not get married. But this is the risk I knew I was taking that moment I said "yes" - the whole of existence drawn up in the palm of ones hand in an instant. Anything less than this is cynical. She will never know I did that, altho I felt at the time and feel now this wasn't the first or the last time we would be doing this. But for me it is better to dream in hope that live in despair: I am an idealist and always feel those practical individulals who settle for the contingencies of life rather desperate like rats. We will all die very soon so why the great struggle?

> On Helvellyn mountain as I slept one night I found a power within myself. I had lost her and lost control of the only thing I ever really wanted. This I saw had a catastrophic effect on me destroying access to control. The OCD I speak of became very disabling after I walked out because I realised losing control of her brought into question the issue of controlling anything. I constrantly felt like losing control of myself. Helvellyn made me realise that while I had lost her I still had myself, and more I could see that controlling myself was actually different from controlling her. Failure to be an effective part of her life didn't mean the same as failure to be an effective part of my life - even tho she had apparently meant everything to me. Afterall whatever she was it still required me for her to be it. This small seed is the way out I felt.

> Similarly the failure to achieve my hearts desire made me fearful of the world and I lost trust in what lay outside me. Has taken a long time to be able to look someone honestly in the eye again.

> Something I had a sense of before but came again was that everything that I thought unobtainable and beautiful in her was really a projection of those things I had to find in myself. Seeking her was really seeking myself. They say that a good relationship is one that encourages you to be the best you can be - indeed this is actually a main quality of what we find attractive in a partner the promise of what we can be. Often a girl makes me feel that it is worth trying to do my best - working for her makes sense of the daily grind. This is actually a misplacement it seems because 'the daily grind' isn't the point and ultimately I feel makes people bitter if the 'girl' ever falls in their estimation and they wonder why they wasted all those years working for her - my father for example. I became my best simply for its own sake when I was 14, maybe inspired by my father being town mayor and wishing to be the best, but ultimately seeking perfection itself - no girl was involved. Finally I believe I am gaining the qualities that I so admired in "My muse".

> The Capon Tree is the only remaining tree of the ancient Jed forest. Standing next to it and placing my hand on it I had a great sense of the age of this creature. 500 years old they said in the plaque. Standing there I was liberated of one thing to do with "my muse" - the zenith of the situation came when she spoke of someone she had just slept with saying how large he was and how small she had been next to him. The image captured the physicality and rawness of the sexuality of their liason and removed any sense of "love" from my relationship with her. Such strong feelings I had to escape from. Standing next to this ancient tree I felt small and this is what reminded me of her words regarding that sexual encounter. But I felt small in another way - the sheer age and wisdom of this oak dwarfed the age and wisdom of her sexual partner who was at most twice her age and not wise at all. Rather than inflame my desires this oak placed everything in context and showed the triviality of the tiny things we each get so troubled by - in 500 years I'm sure this oak has seen it all. There was "great peace, silence and respect and wisdom, coolness and watchfulness." [from notebook]. This encounter diluted, washed away and cleansed that painful encounter over 10 years ago now. We do share this planet with some extraordinary other organisms.

> A sleepless night on uneven surface and after intense day and evening of rain had me sitting awake in the early hours in a very clear state of mind. "my muse" was young and excited about sex, that is all she wanted. Deep down me too. But the sense that I must be loyal and caring which led me down this road (maybe because of the experiences in my youth where I had hurt girls). Also I am pursuing a much more complex agenda of spiritual attainment and also am shy of getting involved in worldly affairs that seem to tedious and unfruitful.

4 prayers for 4 directions

Got into a very good habit on holiday.

As I left to begin my day I would turn right to an imaginary East. In this direction I wished peace to the people at the end of their lives, who like to sit and talk about the past. I wished myself the patience to sit at length and hear all their stories. I bowed.

Then I turned right again to an imaginary South. In this direction I wished joy to the young children at the start of their lives, who like to get absorbed into fantasies and adventures. I wished myself the good humour to get absorbed and play along too. I bowed.

Then I turned right again to an imaginary West. In this direction I shared the joy of couples as they explored love for each other and the excitement of setting up families. I bowed.

When I turned right again it was to an imaginary North and the direction of my day. In this direction I wished that I should bring peace and happiness to everyone that I met.

This was a very good practice that made my energy with everyone that I met very positive. The bit I liked the most was that it trained me to share what other people had rather than to seek it myself. Too much time is spent going through these stages oneself, and too little time being a part of other people.

Self is just a natural process and so not a self

If we rightly understand this so-called person, or being, soul or self as just a natural process of mental and physical phenomena, then we do not take them to be a person or a being, a soul or a self, an 'I' or a 'you'. [Sayadaw U. Janakabhivamsa]

Reading some more the technique is to comtemplate the body in terms of its elemental qualities ... that is to see the body as composed from natural things rather than things that are built upon a notion of self.

What has been occurring to me thinking about the film Inception is that there is a very big problem in my thinking. I still don't know how to understand "action" itself. It seems to me that regardless of how we understand the body as elements there will always be a difference between myself and someone else in that I can decide to do something which someone else cannot. In there lies the seed of my misunderstanding of self.

Zhuang Zi once woke from a dream thinking he was a butterfly to disover he was a man. he was gripped by the thought that maybe he will awake from dreaming he is a man to discover he is a butterfly.

The problem with this is that hearing some one else say this doesn't make me think "they" are maybe a butterfly dreaming they are a man. It ONLY works for oneself. In our dreams "other" people don't exist... except in Inception where he considers sharing dreams.

Yet this raises the whole issue of self/other yet again ad nauseam... this is the crux of this blog now it must get resolved... it is linked to SRH too but I'm wondering now as I look deeply at SRH how important it is.