At one of the much better schools I worked at (better by the measure the teachers were very caring and better by the measure the students  rather enjoyed their days as much as possible within a coercive system could) a well intentioned "service" reliably crushed the dreams of large numbers of teenagers on a single day each year. It was not the regular set of tests or assessments. Indeed the teachers had nothing whatever to do with this. In fact, it worked in opposition to those teachers' best efforts at instilling in students confidence, joy of learning and a sense of accomplishment and pride in themselves each year. The school administrators (because, presumably of parental demand) would go through one cruel ritual that undid for an entire cohort what was, I thought, otherwise less damaging work done over the previous 4 years of their schooling. Less damaging, as compared to almost all other schools. Schooling is compulsory in Australia - so it's important to choose a good one. But this is a tale of how even the best can utterly ruin what "good work" (or, as I say "less damaging work") was accomplished.

By “year 10” of high school this particular school had well qualified, kind and knowledgeable teachers helping the students learn, making it as fun as possible (and of course reliably failing - but they tried) - and helping ensure the “mental health” (psychological well being) of the students was, as far as possible within the coercive system, preserved or even improved. Teachers would do things like mark and remark and remark again assignments and essays and exams to maximise the performance of students. In short: the teachers were, broadly speaking *on the side of the students*. But the administration did one remarkable thing every single year to students in the 4th year (year 10) of their high school experience. This was the 15 and 16 year olds. And what was that? 

Contract an outside company of psychologists to come in and administer a battery of intellectual IQ type tests on these students.

The students would undergo a number of tests from numeracy and more advanced mathematics, “mechanical reasoning” (physics type questions), other kinds of science type questions, grammar and vocabulary questions and solving of puzzles and more besides. What united all these questions and tests were that they were on content “you could not study for” - they were utterly unknown. The claim was: these were testing inherent mental skills.

I had the philosophy of mind I do now. As often as I could I reminded my own students: you can do whatever you like and learn whatever you like. The only difference is interest. If somehow you can find it interesting you will want to go home and just consume it and become a little obsessed with it and it will not be difficult but fun because it will be interesting. The trick is to somehow find it interesting. I don’t know what the trick is beyond just trying for a while or finding a teacher who can make it interesting - or a book, or something. These days there must be Youtube videos about whatever you want to improve in, if you really do, to help you find it fun. 

So this is what happened: each year confident, joyful and bright students who I’d taught this lesson to year on year for many years and whom other teachers had likewise helped foster a sense of self confidence in and a “you can do whatever you want” attitude - were taken into the grand examination hall to undergo this battery of tests administered by “trained educational psychologists” - it was all very official and a little intimidating. It was said “the results of these tests have no bearing on your final marks” (relief - a little bit of fun indeed compared to those tests which did) and are more a test of your personality and might help with career choices later on (more fun! Just personality quizzes - and at that age, teenagers are passionately curious about things like their own personality and the possibility of careers are a major part of their dreams and goals - this would be fun!).

They sit the test and come out of it as they did any other test - though perhaps more dismissive, more smiles, less concern. After all “it didn’t count”. 

But then, some months later, the results would come back.

And this is when everything changed. And for some students things changed dramatically. These students were impressionable. These students were told over and again: psychology is a careful and precise science and psychologists are the people you go to for help should you need it. While the latter is a fine heuristic, the former is utter baloney. What happened was, the results of these tests were broken down into types of reasoning. I cannot remember the exact details and do not want to provide them anyway in order to maintain the privacy of everyone involved. This school was not unusual. This is now a routine practise, especially in so-called “elite private colleges” in Sydney (but I think this is far more broad than this).

Students (and hence their parents - and the school administrators) were given a breakdown of their performance on these tests across things like “Basic Numeracy” and “Logical Thinking” and “Mathematical thinking” and “Mechanical Thinking” and “Interpersonal Skills” and “Communication” and “Vocabulary” and many more things besides. And many did not score as high as they might have thought in mathematical or logical or mechanical thinking. And this upset them. But that was not the worst thing. No, they left the absolute soul crushing for the end of the report. At the end of the report was a list of careers and professions you are most suited for and then careers and professions less suited for.

And you can guess exactly what happened. Not always. Once would be too often. But it happened every year to some large number of students.

Those who aspired to be scientists or engineers and had hitherto always performed well in every science and mathematics assessment task given to them at school were, for the first time, assessed low on mathematics, mechanics and logic and told: you’d be well suited as a journalist, or politician or lawyer (they did better on the vocabulary and grammar portion of the test) while aspiring artists, lawyers or doctors told they were not creative, good communicators or sufficiently empathetic respectively and would be better suited to perhaps a trade like hair dressing or working outdoors or perhaps going into child care work.

But the report had great authority - it was administered with gravitas and the results delivered with great seriousness. The report was always excruciatingly comprehensive too: printed on high quality paper with graphs and high-sounding terms: it resembled some kind of medical or pathology read-out in places returning the results of a blood test where experts had to worryingly pour over the numbers to see what it all meant for the well being of the patient. The numbers were then broken down into fine detail for the layperson, of course, but the data always seemed terribly complex. The "easy to digest" simple summary though meant you knew what it all meant at a glance. You didn't need to really look at the numbers much less question their validity or meaning.

Some teachers complained. Of course I complained. But there was a market for this. Parents demanded this kind of thing because other schools did it and after all psychology is a science so perhaps we should take seriously the results of this test.

And yes, even most teachers took the test seriously too. “Well although X has done rather well on their mathematics until now, the psychological assessment indicates their actual native numeracy skill is rather low. Are we sure X can take on the higher levels of mathematics in their final year of high school, pre-university?”.

I got to look at the test once. It was nothing but a set of puzzles - questions phrased in a way deliberately utterly different to the way students were familiar with how questions were put to them in other tests on a day to day basis in school. The psychological test, not studied for, was assessing perfectly learnable material. A bag of tricks and bits of knowledge any of those students could have learned in a week to ace the test across all indicators. But they were told this was assessing their natural talents in certain areas. So there was no point studying. And of course the test was strictly copyright. No one was allowed to keep or make copies of the test and they were carefully guarded online. We wouldn't want anyone "gaming the system", right?

It was a soul crushing, confidence destroying exercise. I saw many students lose heart - aspiring engineers simply give up from that day on - no matter my sitting with them in their exasperation and explaining “those psychologists don’t know what they’re talking about - this test means nothing”. The students appreciated it - but one could see it behind their eyes “There’s Mr. Hall again, just trying to explain why some subjects aren’t as good as physics - or real science. Now is not the time, Mr. Hall. This is a little more serious. Actual psychologists have assessed my brain. Mrs so-and-so who has a PhD in psychology taught us in psychology class how reliably predictive these kinds of tests are. The school carefully chooses to do this year on year. Anyways, I’ve always thought maybe I actually could just work with my dad. He’s got an accountancy firm and they take on trainees each year…”

Summary

An older version of this piece was written in December of 2020. Recent talk of high inflation and forecasts of recession make it seem things have only gotten worse since "stagnations" were predicted some years ago. My own views have not changed on any of this but I thought it useful to update the article in light of what many people have been saying about the extent to which younger generations can hope their future will be as bright as those of their parents and grandparents. They can have this hope - and one reason is that economic indicators are but one crude measure of how things were, how they are and how they might be in the future.

In the Western World it has recently been claimed that so-called economic stagnation has not seen the middle classes benefit from the great technological boom in terms of real wage growth. This, it is said, goes some way to explaining the rise of "populist" politicians and economic protectionism. I use a personal anecdote to illustrate a refutation of these ideas and conclude we are, all of us, more wealthy than the economists, politicians and pessimists want us to believe.

"Stagnation" is a term used in economics to denote a period of near zero economic growth. This is to be contrasted with inflation (more precisely "price increases" or better yet: a reduction in the purchasing power of money) and deflation (price decreases - an increase in the capacity of the same amount of money to purchase more). Sometimes high growth causes higher inflation, sometimes not. Things get complicated: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/458/economics/conflict-between-economic-growth-and-inflation/) and while some are rightly interested in all this, I always find macroeconomic metrics (the numbers and rates and indicators of "positive" or "negative" signs - extremely crude when sometimes rather obvious real world physical stuff, rather than abstract measures reveal far more about what is, broadly, going on. Of course many things can be true at once: it can be there is high inflation and yet things are nonetheless getting better. All else being equal we should want everything to be getting better all at once: low inflation, low unemployment, high growth and increasing productivity - but when one or more or all of these seem to be pointing to "bad times ahead" let us keep in mind the things economists tend never to even consider. What is going on in the physical world of people and what they are creating? It will be my thesis here that when the news is "inflating" all the bad news and hammering to death the notion that various economic indicators portend something like a global catastrophe - turn off the television, pick up your smartphone (or turn on your television) and perhaps listen to a podcast or watch an interesting lecture and just reflect: when have things ever been better?

 It has been argued that much of the Western World, but especially the United States is in an extended period of stagnation-and now, as 2022 rolls into 2023 inflation is high and a debate rages over whether we are in a technical period of recession or not. Emblematic of this idea is the work of Economist Tyler Cowen, whose 2011 pamphlet "The Great Stagnation" argues that the causes of growth in America are largely spent and we are now in a period where there has been little "real growth" in wages for some decades and will be for some decades to come. My aim here is not as a critique especially of the work of that economist or even that pamphlet (which is worth reading) but rather the broader idea that things are not much better now than they were a decade or more ago as measured against the index of "real wage growth" or the thesis that is contained in the article already linked to above by Amanda Novello where, writing about the economic "recovery" that is discussed post the 2008 financial crisis:

"Digging deeper exposes that middle and low-income workers and their families in the United States have not reaped their share of the benefits of the apparent recovery, benefits that such a recovery should produce for all, and not only the few. Data shows that, in fact, it’s only wealthier households and larger corporations that have gained noticeably since the recession ended a decade ago. This is because long-developing trends of inequality have proven impervious to the decade’s economic growth."

Is it true that "only wealthier households and larger corporations" have experienced benefits over the last decade? Economists will say numbers speak for themselves. Look at "real wage growth", for example. Real wage growth is a measure of how much wages have grown as compared to the rise in the cost of living (or broadly the average cost of other things in life). Real wage growth is supposed to be a proxy for a quantitative measure of one's standard of living. So if there has been no "real wage growth" is it true one's standard of living has not improved? This is all a very abstract way of talking about people's actual lived experience: their work, their lives, their day-to-day activities (including, in small part, their spending habits). In particular we must consider actual individuals - not groups of people. People seem to think that if those on minimum wage have, as a group, not seen "real wage growth" that this is a cause for concern. But which person on minimum wage 10 or 20 years ago is still there, in the same role? Don't people change jobs - and, in part, because they no longer wish to be on the wage they were? Don't people take on other responsibilities (like study) in order to improve their lot? Economists are quick to define into existence something like a "real wage growth" metric and claim this indicates some deep truth about the lives of individual people. Rather than bring to bear various other metrics that might stand in contrast to this, I want instead to simply consider a narrow aspect of my own life and ask the question: am I no better off? Obviously a single data point cannot refute a trend, but I am doing this for the pessimists who are complaining their lives are no better off. Those who, at 30, 40 or 50 complain things are not much better for them now than when they were 20. I hope that any reader who persists with this piece simply compares my life with theirs. I note that my story parallels that of all my family and friends - many of whom, I would suggest, are far worse off and less mobile than I will demonstrate I have been.

In recent times there has been an absolute obsession in the western world with whether, how and to what extent young people can enter the housing market: https://www.afr.com/property/residential/more-difficult-to-get-into-the-housing-market-than-it-s-ever-been-20210205-p5702q​ Of course the real headline is: it's more difficult to enter the housing market where people have already built houses which they now own and have upgraded over time increasing the value of. Previous generations have sunk their long earned wealth into a single thing: their physical home. So, no wonder it is now so expensive in the most desirable places. The most desirable places become increasingly more desirable as they are constructed to be more desirable by those older generations who have continued to "gentrify" the already gentrified. The 20, 30 and even 40 somethings who complain their parents had it easier than they do in finding some vacant block of land, or "fixer-upper" house close to the centre of the city with a large garden for a tenth the price a similar thing costs today is rather like their parents complaining their great grandparents were able to purchase a 1 bedroom wooden shack without electricity or plumbing right on the water but with a beautiful view of the "city".​ It is hardly comparing like with like.  Technology means that those in the housing market today can indeed still buy cheap housing - just not where those of their parents generation already live. Sure, it seems unfair "I was born in 1990 and now there's only space far from the central business district where there is so little public transport and the restaurant scene is non-existent". Yes, how terribly unfair. But what of the argument "I was born in 1950, and though I live in a multi-million dollar home right in the city, walking distance from beaches, cafes and restaurants to my hearts content, my heart itself is nearing 80 years old and ​it seems terribly unfair I was not born decades later when, sometime during the next 50 years, there will be technology to allow me to live 50 more years and experience the joys of technology we could never have imagined when I bought this home." 

The property market is the one thing young people reliably complain about as if they have been particularly hard done by - as if "the boomers" are especially out to get them and ungenerously guard the very thing they were brought up to value almost above everything else besides their own family. Even "conservative" thinkers on the topic sometimes even agree with this millennial angst about not being able to find a 5 bedroom mansion on the water (or even an apartment in some tiny high-rise crammed into the tiny footprint of one of the few megacities around the world). Douglas Murray, of all people, bemoans "capitalism" as perhaps deserving of the blame for a "housing crisis" https://unherd.com/2018/04/talking-housing-crisis-means-talking-immigration/ linking it, dubiously, to immigration. But are unskilled and illegal immigrants buying up the best properties in San Fransisco and London? Is that really the problem? It is true many more people these days are renting. There is some argument that maybe for some of them it would be better were they instead mortgaging. And they could: if they made different choices. Generations that grew up in the 40s near the coast anywhere in the United States or Australia might well reflect "It's so unfair I could not get a waterfront property. Instead, here I am 2 streets back with barely water glimpses." It is simply reality that the beachfront is finite in length and not everyone can live there. Then, those who grew up in the 60s complain "I'm an entire suburb away from the beach. It's so terribly unfair that property prices where I want to surf, swim and walk my dog along the promenade means I need to take my car all the way down to the seaside. How unfair! I'm locked out of beachside property". And those born in the 80s. "I'm barely even in the city anymore. I'm so far out in the suburbs - it's unfair. All those people born before are so very lucky and now they are locking me out of city living." And so it goes. This fixation on one metric - how close your house is to the most desirable location and how big it is, while ignoring how wonderful the rest of life and the world has become is no indication that you are worse off than any previous generation.

Before I go on, and because I am about to say what I am about to say less I get flamed for being "out of touch" or some such, I will reveal just a little of my private circumstance. I do not own property. I rent. I have always rented. I have not bought. Perhaps one day I will. I made different decisions. I decided to plough rather a lot of my (rather meagre!) income as a student (and soon after) into paying for my studies. Perhaps too much. And then? I was focussed on travel. Whilst others did what may have been the "mature" thing and saved and worked and invested in property I did not know what I wanted to do exactly but high on the list never was: I want a stable job so I can have property as close to the city as possible. Of course, that's just me. Now I happen to also know there existed members of the generation before me, on relatively low incomes who managed to: both get a loan and purchase a comfortable home not far from the city and travel the world. But what they did not do, because they could not even imagine doing, was ​travel the world and work or move from job to job, having different experiences and sampling from the most diverse range of experiences because they needed little more than a roof over their head anywhere, a device and a wifi connection. 

The very generations doing the complaining about not being in the property market (well to be fair the very media doing the complaining ostensibly on behalf of these apparently "hard done by" generations) simultaneously are those also wanting and able to do almost everything remotely. "Why do we need offices?" they ask - and rightly so. So much of what they do can be done behind a desk anywhere - without the boss over their shoulder either leering, scolding or monitoring their every moment "on the clock". Their parents and grandparents were required day after day, month after month, year upon year, decade upon decade to go to the same repetitive, uncreative job, with far worse conditions and no expectation of doing anything other than that same job for all or almost all their entire life. Perhaps their "big dream" was to one day be elevated to the position where it was they who would be able to leer at the new generation of subordinate workers in their factory or office? This is the generation who had it easy?​ Their reward? They got to go home to a house of 2 or 3 bedrooms on a quarter-acre block of land with...a television that had a choice of 5 different stations where one watched whatever was playing at the time because not only was nothing on demand - nothing could even be recorded. Where the kitchen was the most comfortable room in the house during winter because that's where the oven was on. Where the car literally needed to be started on those cold winter mornings a few minutes before you wanted to go anywhere because you needed to "warm up the engine so as the carburetor would function". Economic metrics suggest high inflation - and I agree it's bad. Recessions are always and everywhere bad things. They are caused almost entirely by bad policies of governments - state intervention into the economy where the state has no business intervening in the first place. Simply "printing money" is a recipe for price increases and affects the worst off most of all. It is a form of taxation. It is an evil - literally - because it is due to a lack of knowledge by some about basic economics. And yet for all of this we should remind ourselves: people are fallible and so in matters political and economic - problems are inevitable. But what I want to say is that if we only focus on certain crude economic metrics it may seem that everything is getting worse when that is far from the truth. There are other ways of measuring progress and how things get better. So here's my story.

(What follows is a true story, and you may be able to predict where it’s going. So, if you want, skip straight to the final two paragraphs.)

My father was (and remains) what has become known as an “audiophile”. These days the suffix “phile” is added to just about anything one likes to indicate a passion for: numberphile (i.e: a mathematician), retrophile (one who loves cultures of the past), bibliophile (you get the picture). Anyways, before the term existed, my father was an audiophile of the kind that today is rarer than one might think. Or at least I might think. He used to obsess - during the early stages of CD audio - about whether the CD was recorded in DDD or some lower quality like AAD. The "A" was for "Acoustic" and the "D" for "Digital" and the three letters in a row told you something about each stage of the recording process. DDD was clearly "Digital recording" at all stages - so of the highest quality. I knew of no one else who cared about this. But today - I get it. So often I walk along a street to hear a person blaring music for themselves from an iPhone or some other smartphone. I mean - public music played from an iPhone speaker! Now don’t get me wrong - the latest iPhones have reasonable speakers given their size. But outdoors on noisy streets? Putting aside what I consider the discourtesy to fellow pedestrians and others to have their senses assailed by music they may not like following them to the train station, there are very very cheap alternatives that solve all the problems of: faster battery drain, annoyance to fellow travellers and chief among them to my mind: the quality of the sound. Any half decent (and cheaper by the week) set of ear buds or phones completely outclasses inbuilt phone speakers. If one can afford a smart phone, one can afford a reasonably cheap, reasonably high quality pair of earbuds. Whatever the case, I have inherited (ok, learned) this preference from my father. People who listen to the sound from the television’s inbuilt speakers rather than always ensuring it runs through their separate amplifier and high quality speaker system instead - a mystery to me. People content to remain using the included white wired headphones with their iPhone - I just do not understand. I also do not understand Apple's AirPods, period. Given the price - why is their sound quality so low? Why aren't they noise cancelling or at least noise isolating? Earbuds half the price do a far better job. But I digress.

When I was a child - under 10 - I really wanted some good, private set of speakers I could tune into a radio or - even better - play cassettes. I wanted to emulate my dad, of course, and be something like a connoisseur of sound. The first bit of tech I got in this regard was a little mono radio - and I was very proud of it. But within a year - I guess for a Christmas present - I was bought a portable stereo cassette player with radio. And that, to me, was simply amazing. Stereo I could carry around…and play cassettes on. I’m not sure I ever carried it far. It ran on something like 6 D-size batteries. It looked something very much like this.

But the problem was, it only played whatever the radio stations were playing. I wanted to be able to play my own cassettes. Back in those days, the technique was to wait by the radio station until your favourite song came on, and hit record. This way you could make your own "mixed tape". I wished I could play my various "mixed tapes" on some portable audio device. Alongside my love of portable audio, I had begun to develop a love of hiking. I lived in a part of Sydney surrounded by bushland (forest, in other words) - and in other parts quiet suburban streets. I could imagine few greater pleasures than walking, jogging or running and listening to music. The problem was, of course, the batteries never lasted long with these things. A few hours at most. And, back in the day, you really did stand out as odd wearing such a contraption as pictured above on your head. They simply were not that popular. Especially among people my age. Nevertheless I do recall dreaming of the possibility that I might be able to actually record my own favourite music rather than have to listen only to what the radio was playing at any particular time. This was something a walkman - with in built cassette - would allow me to do. But, again, they were for rich people…not children from the suburbs until, I guess, sometime towards the end of the 80s. By then, there were cheaper (Chinese, I guess) knockoffs. And so finally I was able to get a portable cassette radio. Now I was really cooking because I could record my own music, from the radio on my stereo system (no doubt in violation of copyright law at the time), onto a cassette and then carry it with me. This was the height of technology and personal agency. I think it was in 1993 I was able to ask for my first “digital” actual Sony branded Walkman. I say digital, because it had an LCD read out. It looked exactly like this: 

The absolutely remarkable thing about this walkman was that it could store in memory your favourite radio stations.  So by hitting the 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 position one could quickly switch from station to station at will rather than, prior to this, having to manually find the station by tuning using an analogue dial. I was able to record from CD onto cassette all my favourite music - and some comedy radio shows I enjoyed. The first CD player had arrived in our home in 1988 and so I was building a library of cassettes to carry about with me. The only problem with this procedure was that I would often hear a song on the radio and have no way to record it on the fly. I would either have to wait until it came on the radio when I got home - or (increasingly) buy the CD and then transfer it to cassette. I dreamed of the capacity for a walkman to record onto cassette whatever was playing.

When I left school I went to university - full time. By which I mean, 5 days a week, for 7 or 8 hours a day. Lectures commenced at 9am and finished at 4pm, except on Wednesdays when it was 5pm. Uni was located a considerable 90 minute journey away using public transport (which I did) and after university on some days of the week (especially Thursday) I was a security guard at the largest shopping mall in Sydney - and also on weekends. This left very little “free” time except travel time (which was around 3 or more hours a day), but a part time job did make me more wealthy than most of my friends - at least in those early years - because while they went to university as well, they did not tend to work jobs as I did to pay their own way and save a little. Or where they did work part time jobs, they chose to work in fast food or at a grocery store and so on. A security guard required a little training, and there were hazards, so there was a monetary reward for making that choice over some other kind of minimum wage position. Nevertheless it was never paid well (for example, in the late 90s, a weekday shift would be around $13 Australian dollars per hour. McDonalds paid something closer to $10 per hour. In both cases the evening and weekend rates were more (on Sunday, I got "double time"!).

So it was, then, in the late-90s I was able to upgrade my older “play only” Sony Walkman for one that could indeed record.  Not only did it have a record function it had so many other features (like a digital equaliser and “bass boost”). The great advantage now was that my journeys too and from work and to and from university could be accompanied by my favourite radio shows even if they were on whilst I was at work or in lectures…because I was recording them for my travel time. I absolutely loved train/bus journeys with music of my choice, or radio show of my choice while reading/studying my university notes...or rather more often some popular science book I had bought. I seemed to have reached the absolute zenith of what I wanted from portable audio. Although I did imagine the possibility of having a recordable CD. Whatever the case this walkman also accompanied me on long patrols of the shopping centre late at night (always at low volume, sometimes with one earpiece out so I could still hear if there was ever any broken glass. Only ever once did this happen - and the alarm system was loud enough that no set of earbuds at whatever volume would ever drown those out)

But, as the 90s rolled into the 2000s and I was merely a security guard on minimum wage in an unskilled job - I was nevertheless able to afford almost as much technology and creature comforts as my imagination allowed me. I was able to build my own PC from buying the best motherboard, CPU, RAM, Hardrive and so on I could find…and I could afford among the best portable audio.  Somewhere in the 80s the Sony “Discman” came out - it was a portable CD player…but it was never popular because it wasn’t really very portable. The slightest bump and the machine skipped making listening and walking (for example) an intolerable experience. In around 1999/2000 I did buy one of the first CD-walkmans which came standard with a RAM buffer which meant if it did get bumped, it was able to store about 30 seconds worth of audio on solid state memory rather than skip. But actually my top of the line Sony Walkman then had sound quality that easily matched the discman - because the earbud headphones had really increased in quality. One of my friends, who was also in a low-wage job, bought this for me for my birthday:

That walkman was set apart by the quality of its earbuds as well as its excellent record feature and pseudo-digital fast forward and rewind (it could tell where songs stopped and started again, making your favourites on the cassette easier to find). All of this made my life absolutely wonderful because…as I said, I loved walking. And the more I loved walking and hiking, the more I wanted to listen to music and other audio (like my favourite radio shows I had recorded). But the problem was, one had to carry additional casettes and each cassette was usually only 90 minutes or so. For long hikes that just really did not do. And during this time I went to Africa (Zimbabwe) on Safari which included lengthy hikes...and lengthy travel times and also South America for some months, even hiking the Inca Trail in Peru…a three night long trial at high altitude through the Andes. I think I carried 6 cassettes with me for that journey. There are only so many times you can hear your favourite hits over and again. If only cassettes were smaller…or could store more songs?
​
Now in truth the Sony Minidisc player had been out since 1992. But it was well outside my budget. So it was not until 2002 I bought one - and what an astonishing device it was. I still have it. It looks like this:

This was merely incremental progress in some ways, but seemingly revolutionary for my life. Casettes had improved in quality markedly over the decade, but now the option of a small optical disc - much smaller than a cassette - could store many hours of audio. Indeed one could choose the sampling rate - the highest selection meant your minidisc could store about 70 minutes of audio, while the lowest quality meant 4 times that amount. There were science, philosophy and other radio shows I could download/record straight from the radio in low quality and keep, while I could transfer my CD audio music collection to minidisc - all stored on generic branded discs which were very cheap, and getting cheaper all the time as competition entered the market. And of course, at this time, this was one of the first devices one could actually hook up to a computer and download songs and other audio directly to via USB. Now that, I guess, deserves the term "revolutionary".

Throughout this time I changed jobs - going from being a security guard, to a “science communicator” with the university (which actually was paid quite a bit less - but this was an exchange I was happy to make as the “confrontation” - physical and otherwise - which is the life of a security officer - had become something I felt I had outgrown).

In the early 2000s, parts of the education system in Australia permitted graduates with just a Bachelor’s Degree to work as casual teachers in schools - so I took on this while I completed a Bachelor of Teaching (which would entitle me to work in schools on a permanent basis, for substantially more money). This brought with it a real increase in my financial position - money like I had never had before and didn't even know what to do with (I should probably have invested  - but no, I was having too much fun travelling). But, once more, during this period I was working, then studying, working, then studying. Nevertheless I was able to save more. I paid my way through and completed two more degrees and then used these as tickets to travel for even longer periods. I had been to Africa, and South America and to numerous places within Australia (Tasmania was and remains my favourite. I agree with Edmund Hillary who described it as "the greatest hiking country on Earth".) After saving up from all those jobs, I moved to London and my minidisc player went with me - as I could download music from NAPSTER (which ages you, if you remember it) and radio shows from Australia to salve the homesickness as early versions of podcasts began to become popular. But, of course, the minidisc player still had the problem that the finiteness of the discs meant carrying quite a number of them, if one did not want to get repetitive with their audio. Solid state MP3 devices early on never had much memory - but were better for jogging (minidiscs were still liable to skipping). But the move to solid state seemed inevitable.

As I have continued to work, I migrated fully to an Apple device. At first it was the iPod nano - which was amazing - great for the gym and for jogging because it could store thousands of songs and podcasts in a device one barely noticed they were even carrying. But the first iPhone was for me also truly revolutionary because now, here was a device effectively with unlimited storage: the cloud meant that radio shows were there for download so long as you could find a WIFI or 3G signal. Especially for exercising and jogging this was a true game changer. Suddenly everything on the internet was accessible from my pocket for the first time - and streaming became a thing. The finiteness of the memory was barely a factor anymore.
And now we come to today -and on my wrist is an Apple Watch, as small as an iPod nano with so many of the features of an iPhone - and in my ears are wireless bud earphones. This is the stuff of dreams for my 10 year old self. Or my 20 year old self. Or my 30 year old self. 

If I had remained a security guard at that shopping mall all these years - I guess I would not be paid much more now in "real wages" than I was then. Indeed I know, because I can look up, what that job pays here in Australia. And given the rise in living costs - indeed, it’s not like “Security Guard” is a more attractive job now than it was then. Why should it be? Jobs like those, in the main, are not meant to be kept for life - unless one really wants to get into the security industry say and own their own security company. That certainly could be a reasonable ambition. But had I stayed there, in that shopping mall, wearing that uniform, I expect I would have been promoted to supervisor, then manager and so forth up into the corporate section of the centre (interestingly the rank-system in a large shopping centre like that was quite a complex affair!). So no one stays in an entry level job like that forever, that’s common sense. Unless they really try hard not to try to get promoted or find some other job more attractive. People do get promoted, they do gain experience and so are moved into “higher” positions of greater responsibility, or sideways into a position where the ladder is easier to climb. Or they do a course for some hours a week and retrain to take on a different, by their lights better, role that pays more (or is more interesting, more fun, less hazardous and so on). 

But say, for argument's sake, I never did any of that and remained a security guard in precisely the same position. Is the lack of increase of income of “security guards” relative to the cost of living - some sign of “stagnation” as it is often suggested to be? People say things like “real wages have not increased” as if people are stuck in the same job, forced to make the same choice day after day? Whatever the case - say I did make the choice to stay in that job and not made the choice to spend the rest of my time studying whenever I had the chance (when I wasn’t listening to recorded radio shows) - would it be fair to say I would have been “no better off” now compared to then? That because my "real wage growth" had been near zero that I was someone being "left behind"?

No. No way! Not by a long shot. Because today, even on that same wage, I could have afforded an Apple Watch and wireless earbuds. Which is exactly what I have now and the pinnacle of portable audio technology for me, so far as I am concerned. The Apple Watch I have comes to me on a “plan” via my mobile provider. It costs me $20 a month to pay off. I could afford that, even as a security guard. Easily! And yes, my data on top of that costs a little more (which I can share across multiple devices) - but the point is - the very best technology and access to the world’s information and music library - almost unimaginable technology to me 20 years ago - is available even to some of the least wealthy people in modern western societies - and soon to everyone else too! 

Wealth is not about how much money you have, or cash you can pull out of your bank account. It includes that - but it also includes all the many things that money can buy and which you already have. My Apple Watch - if I could travel back 20 years - I imagine would have been regarded as one of the most astonishing devices in existence making me one of the most wealthy people on the planet. By this measure: the technology on my wrist would have been bought by Bill Gates or some other billionaire - for many billions of dollars if I could have convinced them what it truly was. If you have seen the movies: it would have been like the chip from the first Terminator which, if you recall - was not destroyed when Arnold’s evil character was killed. That last remaining chip was used by a technology company to “go in directions they never could have imagined”. It was basically alien technology. So too my Apple Watch placed in 2000, or let’s say 1990

The Apple Watch really does confer wealth onto you far beyond what its price would suggest. If you own one, you are more wealthy than anyone living in 1990. In 1990 there was no way to get any book in the world fed wirelessly into your ears - read to you by a machine. To thus learn the knowledge that could, potentially, improve your lot so easily. There was no way to call overseas…all from your wrist. People are rather pessimistic about the idea there has been such astonishing progress and an increase in wealth over time. They point to statistics like: wages have not increased while the cost of homes has. Some use this to explain the appeal of particular political movements. The same house today in some town costs 10 times what it did some years ago while the wage for the same job has only increased by a factor of 2. Doesn't this mean society is "going backwards" in some way? Now there may be some legitimate concerns here: there may be government regulations making the cost of housing greater in some places and more or less appealing in others. But none of this is really about how "wealthy" one is. Or if it is, that is merely one metric: how big is the house that a particular income earner can purchase now?

The security guard that I was from 1996 to 2000 no doubt was right to think he was near the bottom of the “Australian” wealth pecking order. But today - were I in the same job, being paid the minimum wage today - I would nevertheless be far far more wealthy. Not because my income relative to other jobs would have been greater - it isn’t. And shouldn’t be expected to be. But rather that the “purchasing power” of that same amount of money is unimaginably greater than what it was in 2000. Namely it can purchase technology absolutely unthought of in that time and which makes any security guard today in Australia on minimum wage the equal of the most wealthy on the planet by the metric that they can buy the best of certain things. I don't know what Elon Musk wears on his wrist in terms of smart-tech - but I know it's not much better than what I do, if at all. And the quality of his earbuds and audio he experiences each day I can bet is not much better than mine. In many ways I am just as wealthy as Musk on a number of metrics even though I have but a fraction of his income. Yes: he can build rockets. But I don't want to build rockets. I quite like doing with my time...precisely what I do with my time, much of the time.

If I had been told in 2000 all the features of an Apple Watch and then asked to guess what it cost, I do not know exactly what I might have said. But given that the cost of the best Walkmans at the time were well over $1000, and the best earbuds (wired of course) some hundreds, I guess I would have thought $5000 would have been a steal. And back then I could not have afforded the best quality walkman with all the best features. But now - the Apple Watch I has does precisely what the best smart wearable tech can do for the wealthiest. Everyone now is far far more wealthy according to that standard: they can afford personal technology that is not super outclassed by people who have much more income. Wages have all gone up in the sense we can all buy more than we ever could because there is more stuff to be purchased - more innovation and creation and technology to make our lives easier, more interesting and more mobile. And by more mobile I mean both more portable and more able to move into other jobs or other interests. Because we can put on our wrists (you don’t even need an Apple watch - there's lots of "wearable tech" far less expensive with almost all the same features) devices that can feed into our ears lessons that can lead us down lanes that in decades gone by would have required us to enrol into university courses at great expense. Now, it’s so much easier. So much more fun, and all so liberating. So is there stagnation? Stagflation? Recession? Cause for pessimism? Whatever the technical definitions from economics behind these terms, it should not cause one to think it has any direct bearing on their own individual life (unless they lose their job, let’s say). Those terms are never about individuals - but groups. Individuals are mobile and move between jobs and thus income bands and, meanwhile, as they do - the innovation continues despite what the naysayers say. Because whatever the gross metrics happen to be, they tend never to account for all the other ways life has improved, individual wealth increased and our personal purchasing power so much greater. Those who claim you’re worse off or that things have not improved are trying to sell you something. Something political rather much of the time. The truth is rather different: wealth continues to increase - you can do far more for far less cost. David Deutsch says in "The Beginning of Infinity" that wealth is “the repertoire of physical transformations that one is capable of causing.” Now just consider all the ways in which your own life has been transformed by technology and ideas, regardless of your income having increased or not and all the ways in which you can, now, if you choose make choices to transform your own life through - for example - education at near zero cost by downloading anything you like - the knowledge - so you can make things better for yourself. By any measure, almost all of us are far more wealthy now than we have ever been before.

There is no perfect policy; there is no solution that will once and for all solve a problem unproblematically. This is to say: no solution, however good, will not open up more problems. And oftentimes our circumstance is worse than that, for while moving from worse to better problems is a virtue and indeed one of the joys of life - a beginning of infinite progress - there can be occasions where purported solutions turn out to be anything other than genuine. Some (so-called!) "solutions" exacerbate our circumstance: they actively make things worse. We cannot know ahead of time how things might fail or succeed. All we can rely upon at any moment are our best explanations and those can always be improved.

It is for this reason, that in the area of politics, our system cannot be designed to install the optimal solution or the best solution or the solution that will once and for all solve our problem(s). The world simply does not bend to the hopes of some that once the best policies are enacted that finally then, there will be relief from needing to continue to strive for something ever better or, in many cases, to undo an attempt to improve things that turned out only to make things all the worse. But people can and do become ideologically wedded to particular policies even in the face of failure and so this is why we need a system for removing those failed policies and people in power so wedded to them.

This is why democracy is about not installing the ideal or best leader who will do the thing that solves the crisis because they can no more foresee the future than any of us. They are guessing their way to a better future - but they, like we, are fallible. Their policies and plans imperfect and the world changes around them anyways in ways they could not have foreseen with political culture such that “changing ones mind” when new evidence is found is a virtue and no vice. We should expect our politicians and their policies to fail just as we should expect our scientific theories to eventually fail. Politics, to a large degree, is still mired in a philosophy of being deeply committed to one’s beliefs and for this reason punishes those who might try to adapt and change when the circumstances do. This is unreasonable. It is irrational. The eventual failure of any solution is the normal state of things and so being wedded to any particular solution is a recipe for disaster. We must always be willing to adapt, change our minds and perhaps on a dime turn around and go completely in the other direction. Or simply change tac so our progress can be far more rapid.

Our political system is not for answering the question “Who should rule?” so the answer cannot be “the most erudite; the most qualified, the educated and the experts” - for they are just as fallible as the rest of us. Plato’s mistake was not necessarily in thinking that philosopher kings were preferable to rule by the demos (the citizens) because the demos was a mob. It may very well be that the demos is a mob and should not rule over other minorities. It may very well be that philosopher kings would be preferable to rule by a rabble. Or it may be the opposite. It does not matter in either case because what Plato imagined was not democracy. And democracy is the only rational system for governing a group of people. So what is democracy?

Democracy is not rule by the demos. That is not what it is. Democracy is a system for removing the rulers without violence when those rulers fail. Whether those rulers are “the mob” or “philosopher kings” does not matter. It does not matter if one of them claims to be “a man of the people” or “the smartest person on Earth” - they are part of a democratic system if they can be removed from office without the use of force. Votes are cast and they leave with the traditional peaceful transfer of power.

In any modern democracy, the mob does not rule anyway, though their representatives may. And once in power they might try to implement the policies of the mob. And those policies may succeed to solve the problems that caused them to run for election in the first place - in which case one presumes they will be re-elected. Or, of they fail, they will lose the election and be removed from office. And the self-designated “best and brightest” can try their hand at fixing things. And when they succeed or fail, the cycle continues.
But what no one can expect is an unproblematic state. Because even if the very best happens: even if your favoured candidate succeeds and your party wins an overwhelming majority and all of their policy platform enacted with very little delay - those solutions reveal new problems not able to be seen before. Obscured, as it were, by the detritus of problems right in front of your face and only once removed is your view now clear and you are able to see so much more. And besides, our universe is in flux and at any moment the unexpected and inherently unpredictable happens to undo all of your grand plans for finally setting up society in a way that is better. And the existing policies will fail to make things better - to solve the new problem at hand. And creativity will be needed, and thus new policies. And if the existing people in power lack new ideas then the purpose of democracy is to remove them. Guessing a new answer and checking it against reality. Iterating by error correcting. Because problems are inevitable. There is no way of installing the best candidate because "best" is always relative to a problem situation and different people have different problem situations.

Civilization could well be regarded as the state of removing the initiation of force - of violence - from a society. It may well begin with knowledge - take no one’s word for it. The removal of “authorities” when it comes to “what one should endorse as true”. We rightly recognise now that religious zealots beating children into submission until they can recite pages out of some holy book is the sign of an uncivilised society. Learning through violence does not work. We rightly recognise now that commissars and barons who would by decree divide up the labor of the peasant farmers by sending soldier backed tax collectors to take all of the grain and the cattle - is the sign of an uncivilised society that has no learned how free trade can benefit both the baron and the peasant. And democracy is where not the will of a tyrant is imposed once and for all upon the citizens not even the will of the people imposed once and for all upon the citizens. But rather leaders and policies are tried and tested and when they fail, just as in science, they are discarded as not actually solving the problem after all.

We are part of an ever improving civilisation. Our institutions are a recognition of the fact there can be no unproblematic state.
Our education system, ideally, does not use violence or coercion of any kind to inculturate and teach those who come new into it, the lessons those who went before us learned over millennia. Violence is anathema to learning.
Our methods of research - in science, technology, art, the humanities, academia and industry do not use violence to insist that their way is the best way. We try, we fail, we try again and improve. We know this enables the most rapid progress. Violence is anathema to discovery.
Our business and commerce is predicated on the assumption that providing a service is the way to provide value to the rest of society. No one is compelled to purchase your good or service. They can walk right out of the store or not renew the contract. Violence is anathema to trade.
Our democracy is predicated on the assumption that no one has all the answers and no policy can provide all the solutions. Any actual solution will reveal more problems and any ruler will, eventually, fail to offer up something as good as some alternative. So we have elections - the purpose of which is to remove peacefully, without force, bad policies and bad rulers. Violence is anathema to democracy.

Becoming civilised is the state of gradually eliminating violence wherever it still lurks in our society. It is the incremental removal of authorities who can make and enforce rules or the adherence to ideas at every level in every place, where possible, and where we know how in such a way as to not make things catastrophically worse. (For example: eliminating police tomorrow in any major city would fail to make things better - the exact opposite). People are fallible and will not always be reasonable (including most especially people we are yet to encounter) and so a civilised society must also have at its disposal the option to use force where necessary and so it will need individuals especially highly trained in its use because a civilised society will not be civilised for long if it outsources all expertise in violence to the uncivilised - especially to vast uncivilised mobs.
​
But, as a rule, civilisation is where peace reigns. Swords and guns exist but they are almost all of the time sheathed and holstered because the business of civilisation is to peacefully keep on trying to solve problems that have nothing to do with violence as rapidly as possible. Because problems are inevitable. Happily they are also soluble. As people that is our very purpose of life: to solve our problems today so that new and better and more fun problems can be solved tomorrow. Civilization is what allows us to continue to do that peacefully.
Forever.








(Postscript: By the way so called “direct democracy” is not democracy either. It seeks to install, as a tyrant of a kind, the demos. Direct democracy is this idea that for any problem a particular set of policies are put forth (exactly by who and how, is another matter altogether) and then these are voted on by everyone. It has recently become popular with the advent of the internet and the real possibility of being ruled by some sort of technocratic voting system on…well anything people can think of presumably. But this is just to say: we can imagine a system where the majority can never be removed from power, by definition - because their votes on any given issue will always win the day and if you tend to disagree with their underlying philosophy the only thing for it is to leave that society or tolerate living subdued beneath it - for you cannot ever vote out those who rule over you and try out something different. Again: democracy, properly conceived, is the ability not to install any particular policy but to remove it. Minorities, outsiders and iconoclastic rebels need protection and representation too. A "direct democracy" is a direct path to their removal from a society and that would be the undoing of any such society because it is often those people who push genuine democracies forward.)

Some time ago I responded substantively to the content here: https://meaningness.com/ via a podcast-type bit of audio that can be found here:  
soundcloud.com/brett-hall-653181617/what-is-this-thing-called-cr
What follows is a supplement  to that motivated by some further tweets that came across my feed. Hence it seems to be worth emphasising the following if they were not clear from that audio:
“CR” is just an account of how knowledge is created. It is not an ontology. Realism is not a hugely substantive ontology either - it’s little more than the stance “reality exists” and CR says both “it’s knowable” (in the Popperian sense) and we can be wrong about it (which is “fallibilism” by another route and merely underscores what “in the Popperians sense” is getting at with knowledge and our relationship to it). a
Unlike with what is stated here https://meaningness.com/resolution and here https://meaningness.com/nebulosity and at the links one follows from those pages about “meaningness” and “nebulosity”, CR, fallibilism and realism are silent on *ontology* in a way “meaningless” and “nebulosity” are not.

The epistemology Popper and Deutsch among other - what we simply call “epistemology” (along with science & everything else) allow us to create knowledge about reality but are silent on what reality “really” is (which is to say “ontology”).

In other words what that reality is *ultimately* like (the ontology) is not knowable by fallible means - by any epistemological, philosophical, scientific or other methodology. And these (and related domains like mathematics, introspection and so on), broadly speaking, are all we have and the only means by which we imperfectly access reality - never directly - only through our knowledge - our interpretations of our theories which are themselves interpretations of that underlying reality which exists but in what form precisely we cannot say.

So it seems “ontology is nebulous” or meaning is, and so forth are far stronger claims than anything in CR, the work or Popper, Deutsch or other kinds of “vanilla realism” so to speak. Because we cannot utter perfect truth (which would require us speaking in perfect propositions - an impossibility) we cannot make claims about ultimate reality rather only claims about reality as it is known. So we stay silent on final reality aside from the rather prosaic claim that it - reality - exists and we can know it imperfectly.

Beyond that there are only faith claims and *no problem is solved* by conjecturing what final reality is like in any sense. So, instead, we just do science, mathematics and philosophy and create fallible explanations which are imperfect but somewhat accurate (they are not utterly false) accounts of what is out there and how it works. But whether reality is made up of “discrete” or “continuous” quantities, or only one of those, or some combination of those, a “third option” which is neither of those at all and entirely separate to them, whether is be something “nebulous” or something physical, abstract, physical and abstract or something stranger than all of these realism does not say. It - realism - merely says reality is knowable imperfectly. I raise all this only to highlight how far divorced from dogmatic claims, superstitious claims or faith claims this philosophy descended from Popper (and, say, Xenophanes) is. We only admit of what we know (in the Popperian sense as fallible conjectures) and remain silent on either statements or propositions about (ultimate) reality. Not because we know that reality is or is not nebulous or that it is in reality nebulous or not but rather because no such claim can be made. What we know instead is reality in terms (and via) of science, reason, philosophy, morality - explanations as a whole. What we understand at any given time are theories of reality - not reality itself. So we understand general relativity that describes a continuous spacetime and a (quantum) physics that in part describes discrete quantities and physical “stuff” as well as a continuous aspect of those things across the multiverse. So is reality nebulous or not? Again, that is not knowable anymore than “it is discrete” or “it is continuous”. Our theories now say of some things: they are continuous quantities and of other things: those are discrete. But is reality as a whole discrete or continuous? Both? Neither? Nebulous? Wait and see until we learn more? None of those as a stance (which “meaningless” seems to admit on one page: https://meaningness.com/stances-are-unstable only to make the substantive claim, and take the stance, “meaning is nebulous” https://meaningness.com/nebulosity-of-meaningness and reality is nebulous https://meaningness.com/countercultures. We are more modest in making no strong claims about “reality” in this way or what “meaning” or “knowledge” and so forth might represent in some “final” sense because all of these set the stage for answering the wrong question given how knowledge works and what we are as conscious explanation creators that only access reality only ever through interpretations indirectly - not “perceiving” the ontology directly.

But there is a sense in which none of these statements about “meaningless” or “nebosity” ever “land” so to speak as the philosophy does tend to hold itself immune from criticism by claiming logic does not apply to it as it would to other “stances” https://metarationality.com/formal-logic and can seem to say of itself - it is not a philosophy as such https://meaningness.com/complete-stance-appeal and the author claims not to be “doing philosophy” https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1258138059415019520?s=20&t=0ruRGIsW8vKtpYgt4ulMYQ

Which might all suggest that this is more akin to religion of a kind or as the author says “To help the reader…shift to a more enjoyable way of being (thinking, feeling and acting).

Which is great - but would also entail not engaging philosophically either. But its adherents do engage with those who want to pin them down on what is being claimed about reality exactly and those adherents do indeed defend the thesis as a substantive philosophy.

Of course saying it’s “not philosophy” can act as a way of holding the arguments made immune from criticism when “the mood strikes” so to speak. Very well. But here we might all do well to follow Wittgenstein’s lead and endorse “Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent”. In other words: we can take the author at his word: it’s not philosophy, it need not be regarded as being about anything but rather is more of contemplative, subjective tool of introspection couched in (at times) the language of philosophy. Which as hinted at already, is reminiscent of a more religious sensibility or, more precisely still: theology. This is not meant to be pejorative. Theology can serve a useful purpose. And what “meaningness” is, could be something more like an English translation of some of the central messages of a version of Buddhism. Personally useful and even, for some perhaps transformative - but, despite the superficial similarities: not a philosophy and not able to be understood as anything like a domain of explicit and explanatory knowledge as (say) some field of science (even a first person science) or philosophy might be despite what is claimed explicitly here https://twitter.com/JakeOrthwein/status/1386922593052094464?s=20&t=0ruRGIsW8vKtpYgt4ulMYQ

People have problems. If either (or both) the magnitude of any one (or more) of them becomes too great, or the total number of them too large is combined with rank ignorance - which is to say a lack of knowledge (both general and specific) - then solutions become elusive. It is then that those problems can become overwhelming and joy becomes diluted and suffering more concentrated. This happens throughout life - but particularly for many towards the end of their lives. It is then that, finally, the insurmountable problem is ultimately encountered. The health issue for which no one knows a solution either in oneself or in a loved one. Another time common to many, but not to all, when one problem after another can seem to be “overwhelming” are the teenage years - especially the late teenage years and leading into the early 20s. 

The reason, in epistemological terms, is that at this time there is a rather unique confluence of events. The number of new problems well outside the range of what has been encountered before in terms of emotional stress begins to maximise precisely at the time when one’s knowledge of “what to do” in such circumstances is at its lowest ebb. For most of us (though admittedly not all) this is a time where personal decision making becomes increasingly less constrained by the adults in one’s life. One begins for the first time to have all the thoughts that plague many throughout their lives (if they never learn the lesson in their teenage years): what should I be doing with my time? Am I wasting it right now? What is the point of this right now? This is not fun: why should I have to do it? X seems to be having more fun then me - but then X has more money than I do. How can I get more money? Y seems fitter, stronger, better looking, more intelligent, more skilful and more popular than me - what can I do to be fitter, stronger, better looking, more intelligent, more skilful and more popular? 

Problem after problem is encountered - but at this time for the first time and there is no background knowledge to call on. No “previous experience” and perhaps no one to ask in many cases. Or if there are people to ask, the responses given can seem - which is to say can be - unsatisfactory. There may be wisdom in the words of others, but in a cruel trick of logic, one might simply lack the knowledge to know wisdom when one hears it. One can be told “Problems are soluble” all day long or encounter The Desiderata framed on a wall every day or recite The Serenity Prayer each morning and not ever really get it much less get anything useful from it:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

Which is yet another way of saying: Either a thing is prohibited by the laws of physics and cannot possibly be changed - so accept that fact of reality or you cannot change the thing due to a lack of knowledge - so perhaps with some effort you can create the knowledge that will be the solution to your problem. In all other cases: you can change things; you can solve your problem.

The wisdom passed on through ancient traditions sometimes takes work to distill out from the noise - but it is there. We cannot blame the ancients who often got there first for having to dig the gems from out of the mud if sometimes those gems are not so perfectly polished. We can do the polishing now.

But back to our proverbial teenager (or indeed almost anyone) encountering problems at a rate exceeding their capacity to deal with and their background knowledge to - seemingly - help with. If one’s immediate social circle or even any larger concentric circle seems unable to provide the guidance needed it can feel an isolating time and in those situations many will turn elsewhere: books and the lectures or guidance of notable thinkers. Self help pop psychology books might be consulted, perhaps experimentation with religion - particularly any religion far removed from that dominating the culture into which one has been born. 

Sometimes these searches can bear fruit. And the problems begin to be solved. Peace and joy are found again. But this is rare. Often what is found is that much of the “self help” is of a nature so general (like The Desiderata) as to seem useless and is easily dismissed on that basis. Other times sources of self help seem to strictly contradict. Some will say suffering is a part of life that needs to be accepted because it is inevitable. “To be is to suffer” and so on. Others will say that suffering can be overcome and can be replaced with joy. So do I accept my suffering and meditate so as to be relieved of it - for all suffering is in the mind? Or do I avoid the suffering and seek out joy? Can I do both? Now one begins to be paralysed by indecision, confusion and some amount of skepticism. Perhaps none of these gurus has any clue? After all they’re not me and have not been in my exact situation (which can tend to seem more hopeless by the minute). One could very well become not merely skeptical of the “older and wiser” but cynical that any of them have useful wisdom to impart. Many of them seem downright depressed and confused themselves as if they’ve learned nothing of much use at cultivating joy in their own lives. Sometimes the problem is: why doesn’t he or she like me? One can quickly pursue entire courses on psychology motivated by: how to understand the mind of others. What are they all thinking? What is he, in particular, thinking? What is she? But none of the books seem to ever have the answer.

The truth is there can be no one size fits all self help. There is no universal theory of psychology unless it is so broad as to be of very little help in any specific situation. “Solve the problem” is indeed a universal claim that might be of some help to someone who is paralysed by complete inaction. Perhaps. But it does not say how. “Drop the problem” might be of use to someone who is in extremis and distress over some mental anguish. But detachment, mindfulness and even complete divestment of self will not solve any actual problem - it will merely alleviate the symptoms caused by the discursive thoughts for the short time one maintains that state. Perhaps it helps to declutter. But no amount of decluttering removes the tumour, brings back the dead, repairs the relationship, gets the job, finishes the work or improves the fitness.

Ultimately, we have to find our own paths and often the paths that lead to joy, greater enlightenment, fun and a fulfilled life of equal measure are wildly divergent - at least on the surface - so that for any young person following in the footsteps of one they admire (for example) who seems to have it together can be fraught with simply misinterpreting the wisdom they offer about how to replicate - at least imperfectly - what they have achieved in one’s own way.

Members of the same species are not identical. The differences between them are described by the term “variation” and it is variation between the members of the species that allows for them to evolve. After all, if it really were the case that members of the same species had “the same DNA” or something like that - if their genomes really were identical, then when the environmental change occured-when there was “selection pressure” (like a drought) then if one of them was to perish because of the change, all of them would. For example if there was some species of deer which, going 5 days without any water, would die and all members of the species lived in some area where all the water had dried up and no rain fell, then if one of them would die after 5 days, then so would they all. For they would all be identical and the one to survive longest would be the one who drank last of all. 

But in the real world, within a single species of deer there is variation. Some might only last 2 days without any water. Some might last 2 weeks, even if on average “a deer can go 5 days without water”. Not all deer are identical genetically. They are just more identical to each other than other species of deer and hence, they are (on at least one definition of the term) regarded as being of the same species. (There are other definitions of species like, for example: “two members are of the same species if they can mate to produce fertile offspring” - which is all very well unless they cannot “mate” at all because they are trees or bacteria).

Sometimes the genetic differences between members of the same species can look wildly different. Consider dogs. Dogs have remarkable variety - because of what we have done to engineer them that way through artificial selection. But even the genetic variety of dogs is nothing like the variation among people because the variation among people is not primarily down to genetic differences. The crucial differences between people are differences in their mind: not their bodies (or brains). The knowledge, experiences, dispositions, values and preferences of one person as compared to another is like the difference between one entire species and another. Or more than that: an entire kingdom of life (almost). People are wildly different one from another. Sure there are exceptions to this: people within the same family are quite close at times - but not always. Twins will often have completely different preferences for food or music or ambitions for life. One can remain within the same family and witness completely opposed political stances. Moving outside the family and people are just huge unknowns to each other - at times delightfully surprising and other times confusing. As Jaron Lanier observes in his book “You are not a gadget” words to the effect that people are infinite wells of mystery. We have no direct access to the mind of another person - we can only take them at the word (or their outward behaviour). 

People are minds and minds are a form of software running on the hardware that is the brain. That software is a unique algorithm (so far as we know) in the universe for generating knowledge: creative explanations of the world and renderings in the virtual reality of those minds. Those renderings evolve rapidly, changing and adapting to new circumstances, events and other inputs like the sudden rush of emotion that accompanies the unexpected. And this uniqueness - this differentness is uplifting at one extreme - you are entirely unique and therefore literally irreplaceable. Never mind your genome - your mind and your unique experiences and knowledge is the truly unique thing. And at the other end, we are apart and this can cause some existential crises in many and is also the reason why these crises: existential or just more mundane forms of worry - can be so difficult at times to deal with - most especially when the knowledge is lacking. 

As a much younger person I ran through the gamut myself of “self help” - beginning first with informal studies into psychology - reading what I could garner online before a brief (but formal) study of psychology. That branched into more “common sense” self help with people like “Dr Phil” whose plain talking “tell it like it is” approach was something I preferred to so much that (even then) cast a person as a victim of circumstance. Encounters with Eastern mysticism and contemplative traditions came and went once the central messages were distilled out. Eventually I found myself that Nike’s motto “Just do it” contained within it just about all that was needed whenever some crisis or life decision presented itself. The problem, rather often, was inaction. If you do something then there is no need to worry about what would happen: it would be happening and there would be no mental space left for worrying about what will be because one would be right in the midst of what is.
I still find much self help personally useful but I can also spot that which is of very little practical use. The first form of self help is the anti-coercion kind that one can distill out from the work of David Deutsch. If things seem difficult - that is useful information. If something has ceased to be fun and you need to really push yourself through: that’s useful information. It’s a red flag. If you do not want to do something, but you are doing it anyways: red flag. Bored? Red flag. Just not having fun? Red flag. Now none of those are disqualifying. I have been terribly bored on long international flights even though I can do just about anything I like within the limits of what is reasonably possible in the “culture of air travel”. But we just lack the knowledge of how to “have fun” even in a comfortable chair with the world’s entertainment at your fingertips. Because the chair just isn’t quite comfortable enough and, well, it was fun at takeoff but after 14 hours of roughly the same position - you have to just push through because there are few other options. The best one can do is minimise the unpleasantness by repeating the distractions from it. Those kinds of exceptions aside, if coercion can be almost entirely eliminated then that solves a vast spectrum of problems and when a problem does arise the question: am I being coerced here (by myself or others) - is a central one to be explored. 

Seemingly opposed to this at the other end of the spectrum, I find discipline to be another piece of “self help” that I have embraced. Jocko Willink the ex-Navy Seal who has been a guest on Joe Rogan and Sam Harris’ podcast posts a picture each day on Twitter of his watch upon waking up. The time is always around 4:30am. He works out - hard and posts the sweaty “evidence” on Instagram soon after titled “Aftermath”. The man is supremely disciplined. 

Is he coercing himself? Is he suffering through all this? At first pass it seems these worldviews: do not suffer coercion and: be disciplined are completely at odds. But they need not be. Sure: if you are taking orders from someone and obeying them this might be called “discipline” and you might hate each moment of it. Clearly that is coercive. But if you find that waking up each and every day is the very thing that brings you joy - you would be coercing yourself not to do that thing. It is a subtle point. I do not think Jocko is coercing himself in quite the same way (indeed I do not think he is coercing himself at all) as someone else who does not want to get up at 4:30am each morning and work out…before breakfast. Jocko’s personal recipe for success could be hell on Earth for others. But for him - it is the very thing that makes him himself. He is doing exactly what he wants to do because he is someone who can do exactly what he wants to do. He actively makes choices and he is something that happens to the world. The world does not merely happen to him. Jocko has said that the reason he gets up at 4:30am each day is because (1) That’s all the sleep he needs (2) To get ahead of the enemy - who will still be asleep. 

Now that last point is said somewhat tongue in cheek. Of course during his military service is could very well have been literally true. But now, speaking on Jocko’s behalf - a dangerous thing to do - we can actually interpret “enemy” as “all those unpleasant problems that would be encountered by sleeping in”. Namely the emails not answered because the workout was completed later and the opportunities missed and, as Jocko observed - having to have so many more encounters with other people and other conversations simply because almost no one else is awake at 4:30am. So it actually solves a bunch of his problems. The “discipline” of following this regular pattern brings joy and fun because it has eliminated many sources of potential suffering.

Jocko is disciplined in doing exactly what he wants. He does not let others dictate what he is doing. He chooses. And that takes discipline. It takes discipline not to give into coercion: either self coercion or the coercion of seeking first to please other people before you please yourself by doing just as you please. Far form anti-coercion and discipline being at odds: they can be in perfect harmony: if you’re playing with them both just right. 

There is much made in some (so-called) “rationalist” online communities about “just do what you like” - which is true. For many people. For some however it is a recipe for disaster unless coupled with an instruction to be disciplined: to pay careful attention to what one actually wants. And often what one actually wants is to solve specific problems that will take attention and effort. For some less effort will be needed. But the idea that one can live a life of “no coercion” without thinking further on it can lead to a kind of apathy. If one has not yet figured out what to do - what they actually like - then the instruction to “not coerce yourself” is of no help at all. One is still left with: so what do I do now? Which actually is the first and most important problem and remains the most important problem each moment, hour, day and throughout ones life. What now?

Once one figures out what is fun (often by a process of elimination: by trying and finding out what is not) - then one will find that Just Doing It is rewarding in and of itself. But how to go about doing it can be part of the process as well. Perhaps you find that working 24 hours straight really is the thing. You might not find out that it isn’t the thing until you try. It can take time to figure out you’re not a morning person. Or you are a morning person. Or you were for so long not a morning person - and now - you are. And so that can take discipline so that the experiencing self and the remembering self are aligned. This is why people can train themselves (which is to say learn) to love exercising and lifting heavy weights or running long distances or doing any kind of hard physical activity that they know is beneficial in the long run. But what if you’re not there? How can you pull yourself up by non-coercive bootstraps to begin exercising if you already hate it. Well: you don’t know you hate it and stop telling yourself you do. And why do you want to work out hard anyways? Perhaps just try for 10 minutes. Later try 15. And so on. Be disciplined in trying. Does this mean coercing yourself? No. Well: not exactly. Ah! You might think. Got him! He’s appealing to a form of coercion so that you can “find the fun”. Well no.

Words have multiple meanings and senses: they cannot be infinitely precise and many times words can have two senses that are even opposed to each other. Words that mean their opposite are called “Janus words”. A common one, more often used in military settings is “fast”. If a guard is told to “stand fast” - they are being told to go nowhere. The fast means “to secure in place” - as in fasten. But of course we all know fast can mean move quickly - rather the opposite of going as slowly as possible - moving nowhere. More classically “cleave” can mean both to split apart and to join together.

At the other end of the spectrum we have words that appear to be opposites but are synonyms. Flammable and inflammable is the go to example here. My only point is to illustrate that insofar as there is a science called linguistics: it does not have the precision of physics (which is not infinitely precise either - for one reason it needs to be expressed in ambiguous language). We simply cannot pin down perfectly precise definitions of words. That is the “Wittgenstinian error” and rather too much of what passes for “philosophy” is consumed by it. Debates about terms. Language evolves, can be quirky and is made up of words themselves “defined” in dictionaries using other words to label concepts which are not perfectly precise. All of that said: it is possible to be wrong and there is an objectivity to this. Black is not white. Tomorrow is not today. The existence of grey does not change that and nor does midnight. The thing is you can be disciplined and you can use it to find the fun you did not know was there to enter into a state of non-coercion. All this is possible. And at no point does any genuine suffering need to go on.

So there are, what I would say two quite distinct senses of the term “discipline”: an enlightened and a naive species. Discipline of the form “I am doing this because of someone else’s expectations” - is naive. And it is coercive. There may be no understanding of why you should or why it is best for you. But doing what you want and being disciplined in ensuring you’re doing just what you want is not a matter of coercion but its opposite. 

Discipline - being committed to getting something done - to getting something solved can actually be fun. For 25 years or so now I have witnessed people in the gym appearing to suffer. And some are. But others are experiencing the opposite. Same outward appearance. Two diametrically opposed experiences internally. People come to learn to love the pain they learn to love the struggle. It is fun to push through that pain and struggle not merely in expectation of the feeling afterwards but because “I did it - I set a new record” or whatever else it might be. In my case these days it’s rather often “this is amazing - I can multitask - I can get through a book or podcast while staying strong and fit. Life is truly brilliant.”

Sometimes from the outside the phenomena is the same but internally the experience is utterly different. And sometimes from the outside the phenomena is utterly different but internally the experience is completely the same. Jocko will yell and seemingly coerce and be disciplined! It will be testosterone to the maximum and for many this discipline and all the outward signs will make it seem like a kind of self coercion that might barely be possible to exceed. But it is not coercion in our sense. Because he finds joy in it and is doing it even though he has the option of doing just about anything else money can buy. Many can have fun doing what others would find hell. The human mind is universal. It can take any stimulus at all and turn it into almost anything one likes. 

These two ways to succeed in the world: being disciplined and not being coerced need not be opposed. One can live “to the full”  and experience joy, contentment and fun all the while improving yourself and the world by solving the problems you are interested in and perhaps only you are interested in. Joy through discipline and joy through non-coercive fun are both actually experiences in reality to be had and in reality there can be no contradictions. Both are paths to enlightenment and both end up in the same place. A person may walk one or the other or straddle both perhaps. But it cannot be the case that these two worldviews are in any deep sense in conflict. They may appear to be. But so what? Stars appear cold and dim even though they are the opposite. 

I explained earlier how Jocko has explained why he gets up at 4:30am each day. He was once asked on a podcast how he was able to get up at 4:30am each day. The listener wanted to know how he just did not hit the snooze button even if he was tired. He said what he said whenever someone asks him this. He said: “You know what I do? Get ready. So to get up at 4:30am each day I…get up at 4:30am each day.”

People who want to do that - or think they do but it gets to 4:30am and they lay in bed and don’t and go back to sleep haven’t coerced themselves to sleep. But if they get up - they just get up. But there is a strand of person who will think and think and think and perhaps coerce themselves up out of bed or rather try to. 

“Do or do not do. There is no try.” As Yoda admonished Luke. Rather: trying - trying to do something rather than just doing something (even if you fail) is the thing. If it’s a trial - if you’re trying and there’s no joy to be found - there’s your problem. But if you cannot wait to attack the problem even if you think you might fail then you’re not quite “trying”. You’re doing. And maybe you’re failing to succeed that time. But that might come with excitement, fun and learning - quite the opposite internal experience from “trying” and failing and suffering. 

So much of self help won’t be helpful because it’s not tailor made to you. You are utterly unique.  Things may seem gloomy at times and fun may seem to have leached out of life - but this is always a temporary situation because problems are soluble. Sometimes the most pressing problem is how to discover: what do I find fun? Not just now: but all the time? And “fun in the long run” - the kind of fun that is fulfilling - that brings joy in the moment and contentment on reflection. Once the fun is found then you won’t need to coerce yourself into doing the thing - you won’t require more “self help” to figure out “what to do next” - you’ll know what to do. But you just might need to be disciplined about how to go about it. Like Jocko. Because if you can make your life about something, it will be something.

Coming out of high school and entering university like many university students who take on anything related to the sciences from medicine to mathematics, metaphysics or meteorology - there is a sense of growing sense of scientific “superiority” which one may readily fall victim to or may resist (more or less well). One need not formally study the sciences, one could simply be "coming out" in a sense from forms of  "magical thinking" into a somewhat more rational understanding of the world they inhabit - but it can bring with it hazards as well as virtues.

For many it may first show up in terms of one’s atheism and how one reacts to others upon their new "discovery" that religion just might not be the truth and the whole truth. “With all the zeal of a convert” one rejects (if they ever had) their faith (monotheistic or otherwise) and they may begin to proselytise to friends, family and anyone who will listen about their new found arguments against faith. They’ll cite Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens (I know I did). Not long after, or perhaps in lock step, (sometimes instead of if those arguments were already had in high school) the same scientific mind grows into a vociferous anti-pseudo-science warrior. Michael Shermer’s work is consulted and Joe Rogan episodes one after another loudly debunked. One has no time for nonsense claims. One has become "a rationalist" - wielding “reason” like a lightsaber to cut through the metaphysical BS.

“Those crystals have no energy - they do not “vibrate” at the same frequency of the human body - the human body doesn’t even have a single frequency!” one gleefully tells their sisters and cousins. Brothers are told UFOs and big foot are absolute nonsense given the paucity of evidence. One loses potential dates or other friends because “the paleo-diet is pure pseudoscience. Those studies are bunk. By the way: weight training is better than running.” And so it goes as the growing scientific mind becomes a skeptical and critical one seemingly so bursting at the seams with knowledge it just has to come rushing out and spilling into every conversation about whatever the topic is. Worse are the online critics, of course. Sometimes anonymous - but not always. Deliberately wading in to discussions about religion - and yes the religious do too, but they always have. They’ve been proselytizing so long and so passionately some found “proselytise” wasn’t strong enough and so began evangelising and in the limit when words failed - crusading. Online the spectrum is found everywhere from the anonymous bot account simply spewing out talking points to the next rung up - the anonymous troll account doing similar with the a kernel of human creativity. 

But the critic can be as cruel - sometimes more so. And remarkably the so-called rational and reasonable are eager not to merely correct and eager to persuade but seem to want to ensure everyone conforms. The truth must be obeyed - just as in traditional religion. Some of the anti-woke become as dogmatic as the woke. Those who want to insist on the scientific sex binary will hurl insults right back at the gender-is-a-spectrum "experts" and the scientific minded might be found on both sides of that debate. Both sides will tend to agree that "double blind placebo controlled trials published in quality assured referred journals" are treated as (literally) more true than Gospel. And once you are in possession of the final truth, well, as Popper wrote “The doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny”. And that truth is manifest no more clearly than in science on this view. So what should we do about, let’s say, pseudoscientific medicines?

“This paracetamol brand is selling the exact same product in three different boxes on the shelves. This one says “For tension headaches” and this one says “For period pain” and this one says “For symptoms of cold and flu.” But it’s exactly the same chemical! Someone should do something! One is, therefore, rather eagerly today at this point (but not always, there are important exceptions) on the "liberal left" in these conflicts. “Why doesn't the government regulate the pharmacy industry? Why are they permitted to sell this homeopathic nonsense?” (And from here slide seamlessly into state intrusion into almost any conceivable medical procedure, personal choice, child rearing, education and so it goes.)

The early (or even late stage) "convert to critic" might even approach political activism on this front. “We’re surrounded by people ignorant of science. We need regulations to protect people! Sign this petition! Help paint posters! Here's a pin!"

The bias for any politician is towards "doing something" and although "not regulating" is doing something, it is never seen that way by the more vocal parts of the electorate. So it's usually a one way slide into regulations on any issue where people might otherwise be free to choose. No leader wants to be the one who "did nothing" or "didn't support the bill" and so on. For everyone’s safety we need to eliminate fossil fuels. We need to eliminate combustion of almost any kind. We must reduce sugar in drinks or smokers in public places or drinking alcohol at certain hours. It's for everyone's health. And everyone's safety. Not just yours. Everyone must mask up, sanitise, get the vaccination. Your mask does not just protect you - and it does not protect you enough. Everyone must mask up for it to be effective. And in many places - workplaces and spaces of learning - it is not enough to merely agree: one must be an enthusiastic supporter ​lest one be treated like Kramer from Seinfeld who (despite every other effort) did not want to wear the ribbon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iV8X8ubGCc​

Listen To The Science! Anything less is “lunatic libertarianism”. One is either on the side of informed compassion and life or ignorant cruelty and death. Never mind how much shouting, how many arrests or how much more violence it takes to get from here to the safe tranquility of a finally, once and for all more scientifically informed society that’s better for everyone - action must be taken. It’s almost moral that you take on the fight. So you do. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps you just voice your opinion whenever the topic comes up. Every time it comes up. It’s reasonable to try to persuade at least those around you. After all you’re the scientifically literate one. Lucky them. To have you around.

Indeed wherever you are on that spectrum between scientist-as-political-activist through to “I Believe in Science” badge bearer, you feel yourself preen at the many ears willing to listen to one’s passion and erudite enunciations about the world ignorant of science. One dismisses those who are bored with it all as unfortunate - missing the beauty of science. “The ignorant are so lucky. They’re at peace. Not plagued by deep thoughts of what is going wrong and how much worse it can all get”.

It takes time to realise one is tending towards being an authoritarian, dogmatic bore regurgitating the mainstream talking points of those who get the most airtime. Sure: almost always one is (narrowly) factually correct. [And don’t you know it as a science graduate? "Try me" you think “I’ve got receipts” (references to journal papers bookmarked).] But the thing is, as one comes out of any combative malaise, one can recognise it will always be the case there will exist people with whom you disagree. Right now it’s ubiquitous across societies no matter how “well educated” that some will use, and stand by in the face of all evidence to the contrary that, pseudoscientific nostrums “work” - in the sense they feel better when bought and used. And it’s also true some people disingenuously sell and hence profit from the ignorance of others. Pharmacists - who almost always know better - own stores that sell the homeopathic remedy (which they could also routinely mathematically prove in 60 seconds on a scrap of paper - has zero active ingredient and is therefore, mathematically, a placebo) right alongside the actual treatment with the active ingredient - and seemingly without compunction.

But there are some who never escape the “scientifically superior” mindset. Science informs what you should do and that’s that and end of story unless you do not care. It’s almost a Mandolorian stance on regulation: “This is the way”. If we’re not going to use science to do good then we are being as ignorant and careless as those who won’t continue to physically distance. “We need to protect “low information” citizens. I am a scientific leader - an authority. A superhero of a kind. I’ll look after them!” (grandiose Avenger’s theme plays in the background. Lab coat flutters in the wind as spectacles (or lab goggles) are removed and the Sun comes out from behind a cloud.)

But there is another way. And you see this too. Others who have moved beyond all that. And it has nothing to do with “the older you get the wiser you get”. After all, if being “at peace” in life is some measure of wisdom then some of the least wise people online are some of the elder statesmen and women of science. So it’s not age, it’s a certain lesson in humility. Or rather fallibility. One can be passionately pro-science and agree with all the facts but realise coercion creates more problems than it solves in the long run in any society. Hence: regulation here is not the key. No one convinced the nostrum works is convinced by the law that says you can no longer have the nostrum because government regulators say it does not. Instead what happens is they source it on the black market where now there’s not even any recourse should the product never arrive…or not be what was paid for. So: everyone loses. Yes: except those who always do exactly what their parents and teachers tell them to. Whoops, I mean what government tells them to.

What works better than regulating every single scientific truth as a moral imperative is allowing people to make their own mistakes and correct them. Or simply learn from the mistakes of others. Indeed we can admit: people have died because they did not treat their cancer with the chemotherapy recommended by the oncologist. They decided to go on a strange diet. Or take colloidal silver or something else equally useless or actively harmful. But there is not a pandemic of this. They are the exception to the rule and it would happen regardless. What is the alternative? Strapping down those afflicted with tumours and curing them for their own good? Sometimes the utopian vision of society looks rather a lot like its complete opposite - which is no accident. All of this was true before the pandemic and truth be told I wrote all of this without thinking once of COVID. Until I did and had to go back and edit it with comments like this one: there will still be people who say pandemics are the exception here. And what would you do IF questions and they will fall immediately into “I’m going to persuade you” mode of the worst kind. “I would force you if I could” mode when it comes to it and I will vote to ensure that if I can’t, someone damn sure will. Those tendencies have seemingly always been in the memeplex - the desire to control and coerce because the chief and the medicine man know best. And it might be tempting to argue vociferously back. When it’s lives and liberty on the line, who wouldn’t? And yet, in the “interglacial” pandemic time - the peaceful interludes between civilisational catastrophes (like, right now, once might say) - it can be useful to fall back into that other mode. One doesn’t need to exist in persuasion mode all the time. One can be persuasive, sure. But that’s a side effect. If one is explaining a worldview and the worldview is correct, then that in and of itself will be persuasive. No additional work needs to be done. The work of persuasion is all done for you, ahead of time. That’s the advantage truth and reality have.

We are all fallible or “equal in our infinite ignorance” to quote Karl Popper. And as David Deutsch gently suggested to me once, himself also channelling the spirit of Popper with words to the effect: you don’t need to aim to persuade - you’re explaining a worldview.

So to me it has always appeared to be that the step beyond mere scientific literacy and critically and skeptically minded is: live and let live. This is not to be uncaring. It’s the opposite. If someone wants your advice, give it. If someone seems to need your advice and hasn’t asked, offer it. But the caring thing to do is to allow others to do as they wish (with all those caveats about swinging arms and lengths of noses). We have to allow others to make their own mistakes too if they are to learn as we have. That may mean correcting what their sources of information are rather than actually going on the grains-and-berries-only diet. Not everyone has to make the mistake of getting infected first before being convinced vaccines are a fantastic innovation. But the lesson of accepting you too are fallible, even on all that is perhaps a lesson we all need to learn. Right or wrong, you should not coerce anyone else into your way of thinking.

And there’s the rub.

“With all the zeal of a convert” the scientific skeptic then runs head first into fallibilism and anti-coercion. For many it then becomes seductive and even important to proselytise not so much the science and rationality but fallibilism and anti-authority, anti-coercion liberty centred lives. One becomes a zealot for anti-coercion! And of course that is the same kind of error. It’s a better error. But an error nonetheless.

The Emergence of an Enlightened Epistemology

There is a step beyond even that - beyond being a philosophical activist; beyond the conscious attempt to try to persuade. It’s just to explain a worldview. It is to relax into the truth of fallibilism: you are not in possession of a final truth, or rather you cannot know that you are. It’s always the case you might be wrong: so don’t get pushy. Realise and sense how much better things quickly become when you’re not trying to persuade but to explain. The difference can be subtle from the outside: but inside, it’s a universe of difference. Every interaction one goes into is genuine. Trolls and terse Trotskyists alike might be convinced by what you say - persuaded if you will. But not because you were ever aiming for that. You were playing and having fun throwing ideas around in such a way as to clarify them to yourself as much as anyone else. There are no losers because there are no winners because it was never a competition. The abstract truth won out - as it necessarily does in time, under the right conditions where coercion just isn’t a part of the picture. And by coercion here we do not mean simply “the application of force or the threat of violence” we mean also the emotional impact of words said in such a way as to berate or scare off or silence under the intellectual glare of one apparently so deeply knowledgeable and qualified. That sort of coercion is a maelstrom of self-coercion and the coercion of the expert onto the layperson. No hands ever have to be placed on anyone. It’s the “Sit. Stay. Rollover” of the dialectic.

Have fun, be excited and passionate and curiously interested. Just don’t berate, be mean and badger. You’ll be surrounded by errors. Most of them your own. So don’t be so sure - even of not being so sure. Don’t be so sure of fallibilism. Don’t act like you are. Don’t fall into relativism. You know a lot and it’s right for you to state your view clearly, forthrightly and passionately. But - when you’re asked. And politely. You’re in a civil society. Most people most of the time, for the rest of your time, won’t agree with you. But they might if you seem like an attractively persuasive person. Because you were never trying to persuade them so they never felt that repulsion one feels when they’re being sold something. You’re not selling something. You’ve got what you want when it comes to all this and you’re looking for more wisdom and knowledge still.

So take it all seriously the science, philosophy, morality and life lessons — sure. Explain yourself clearly for as long as the other person wants to engage - or so long as you do. But relax and have fun.

There may be steps to epistemological enlightenment beyond even this. Again: never to the point that none of it matters - because it clearly does. But where it doesn’t matter if the other person is convinced or not - so long as the conversations can continue. As long as life goes on, then so can the explanations. You’re explaining a worldview when someone asks. You’re not trying to persuade them. And it's not as if I sit now cross legged atop the mountain. There is no mountain - but there is a journey. And one is always at the beginning - always learning with an infinite more to learn about everything. But there is progress to be made and errors to correct. Including better and worse ways of approaching knowledge like cooperating with others in order to bring brighter kinds of enlightenment to both yourself and to them.

And even all this, here and now - this very post - is not intended to persuade anyone. I’ve written it for me, in my way, repeating myself and editing to standards internal to me without thought of what the reader might prefer. This could contain a serious error because perhaps to be persuasive at all one must first hone that skill soit may be that one must try to persuade before one can cease to chase the dragon of persuasion. I leave these words here for the reader to contemplate; an aspect of a worldview that may or may not appeal, be useful, seem true and allow a path towards kindness. Or it may do none of those things. Eventually one just writes because they want to - not because they want to be read.

Yes, I think in part it does. This needs unpacking because it's not like people are (therefore) inherently anti-innovation. I'm about to use the word "inherently" a lot and that's because it's the best one without any accurate synonyms in this context. It means something stronger than "characteristically" but less than "essentially" (which has mystical overtones) and rather more like "necessarily" because, so far as we know, people are explained as entities that create explanatory knowledge so they bring new stuff into the world; they innovate. So they can't be inherently anti-innovation but rather they're more the opposite: sensing from birth a desire to solve problems. One response to this is manifest as attempts to innovate (solve problems for which they (or no one) yet has solutions for). 

By "innovation" here we just mean a solution novel to them. It need not be a new piece of technology or a whole explanatory theory - it might just be a positive increment on how to have a better relationship or a faster route to work. So, once more, people cannot be inherently anti-innovation nor more generally  inherently pessimistic either. I don't think they are inherently anything negative at all (besides mortal!). The opposite! If people (or humans more specially) are "inherently" anything at all, they are inherently problem solvers which makes them inherently optimists (of a kind). So what is going on? Are they being persuaded out of it by culture? Culture being memes causing people to behave alike in some ways like. In this case alike in their overt response to certain kinds of problems. I have written and spoken about versions of pessimism many times  ToKCast. Eg - writing here: https://www.bretthall.org/blog/pessimism and lengthy comments in this 3 part mini-series.

And see what Naval and I had to say about it here (it's only a 2 minute listen or else you can read the transcript also posted at this link  https://nav.al/pessimism

So evidence seems to be that pessimism arises over and again as if it's a ubiquitous feature of us. Again - what’s going on? Well, some religions do teach that human beings are born inherently flawed ("born sinful" in Saint Augustine's explanation of our "inherent" human nature or "fallen" as protestants/evangelics may prefer to couch things from that Christian perspective. Other ancient religions have equivalent "people are inherently evil/need fixing" so tend to be also skeptical about whatever people actually do or tend to do or are capable of doing and so their products are evil too. Judaism tends to emphasise the divinity of people somewhat more (as least on the surface) as well as their base animal urges that are in constant tension. Note how these monotheisms do contain accurate wisdom hinting at our modern understanding of people being unique creators of knowledge that sets them apart from all other things in the universe. We are special. Religion not only gets this right, but even hints at why. It's far from all being nonsense. Sure, we can do without the supernatural appeals to a miracle performing God, but as has been said by some atheists: so much of the wisdom in religious holy books can be consumed with little awkwardness by an atheist if only one replaces every reference to "God" or "The Lord" or so on in those ancient texts with the word "truth". Try it! Here's a few random examples I found in a 2 minute google search of The Bible:

Ephesians 5:17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
Proverbs of Solomon 10:1  The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked.
12:2 Good people obtain favor from the Lord, but he condemns those who devise wicked schemes.
12:22 The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.

Christian-atheists could even consider the entire Jesus story as a story of people escaping tribalism only to attack and try destroying the truth ("crucifying Jesus") through lies or relativism (denying truth by embracing either evil itself or just denying the objective good) which has terrible repurcussions. Unless you accept the truth will win out (believe he rises again - so believe in him/the truth). But before I begin to channel Jordan Peterson further, let me return to the main matter at hand: the answer to Vincent's question up there at the top of the page. Anti-innovation may stem from a broader, perhaps deeper memes that foster pessimism. They can come from religion - but this does not mean the non-religious are especially immune to religious ideas (as I have written before: https://www.bretthall.org/blog/mainstream-morality

So there exist “atheist” versions of pessimism which are very similar and focus on our "sins" of polluting and causing hurt to all other life on Earth as well as each other and argue that humans seem to only ever - or at least mainly - cause problems. Just yesterday (!) as I write this, astrophysicist and science populariser/communicator and documentary maker Neil deGrasse Tyson quipped

My own reply is there in full beneath his which is here at the following link:
​: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1507514587041746944?s=21 

And in "reader form" my reply thread becomes:

What motivates Dr. Tyson's tweet is that atheist version of pessimism (which I suggest stems itself from religious memes). But why does it just keep cropping up - this notion people are inherently problem-causes and not problem-solvers? Why do we get that message that we are cannot or do not in the main make things better? It's because the message “Rely on yourself: *your* mind - you can create solutions and understand stuff. You, like other people (individuals) are amazing. Especially when freely cooperating!” has been crushed for almost all our existence as a species. That’s *tribalism* - collectivism. Defer to authorities/the collective it implores us. So it appears to be that version of “anti-humanism” that is the deeper of the two doctrines motivating us for so many millenia. Other stuff like a broader pessimism about people and the anti-tech, anti-progress, anti-natalism, anti-innovation stuff are the modern manifestations of a deep cultural idea about who can (or cannot) make progress, to what extent and how.

So my contention is that meme has mutated a little & evolved. Fundamentally it's the same outcome (perhaps somewhat worse) but it has competed with reality and loses battle after battle. So we exist, make progress and multiply still! In spite of the pessimism we make progress anyway and that's the best refutation of it.

On May 23, 2019 the first round of Starlink satellites were placed into orbit by Elon Musk's company SpaceX to much public fanfare and excitement. Fanfare that was rapidly deflated by not the usual billionaire bashes but by the space-sciences natural allies:  the community of astronomers. Why would astronomers complain about satellites? There were already thousands of satellites in space - why were these such an egregious error? Online the complaints were vociferous from prominent and well qualified astronomers and astrophysicists across the world fearing the impact of the satellites upon ground based observations. Musk's attempts on social media, like the above Tweet, to allay the fears and problem solve have had little effect in the years since. My contention here is that the criticism of Musk over Starlink's effect on ground based observations was less about the impact on science and more about a very modern malady: a personal dislike of the man that many astronomers today harbour.

What is going wrong with the culture of professional astronomers?

There is nothing new about ill-feeling towards the wealthy. An entire side of politics (indeed sometimes all sides of politics) seem devoted to fomenting feelings of envy for anyone, or anything, successful. Starbucks was a celebrated progressive counter-cultural startup in Seattle. But with success comes a certain kind of critic - which is all very well except that the criticism is often of the success. Why would anyone want to be seen praising what is popular? It’s not enough to support the struggling competition - one must actively campaign against the market leaders. After all, on this view, the size of the pie is fixed. There is only a certain size of the coffee market and any success Starbucks has must come at the expense of “mom and pop” corner store operations. It’s not like Starbucks actually created coffee culture and massively increased the size for the pie for everyone, right? Well, wrong: https://www.drivencoffee.com/blog/coffee-waves-explained/

Market success should be celebrated. There are insights to be learned. Anyone inside business knows this. But I am not from business. So I have some sense of what people outside business “know”. And what they know just isn’t so rather often. If one spends their school and university years almost exclusively taking sciences and mathematics subjects (and perhaps philosophy) while looking down their nose at anyone diving into marketing, business or economics degrees a vast (and even outrageous) blind spot can tend to open up. The two cultures end up speaking different languages. It’s almost as if the science types cannot imagine there is even a thing as “expertise in business”. Business is seen purely as some combination of luck and perhaps grift - a form of dishonest misrepresentation of the product or service being offered. 

The professional scientist, like everyone else, visits businesses every single day. They encounter advertising every single day. Sometimes they even have family and friends involved directly in business. Ipso facto: the scientists, like everyone else, has expertise in business, right? But if your main or indeed only real encounter with “business” are the advertisements you encounter and visits to the shopping mall, the idea you have genuine insight into “how to succeed at business” can be very skewed indeed. Aren’t most of those businesses being run by the kids who never quite qualified for the top mathematics class in high school? Weren’t subjects like “business studies” and “personal finance” what you did if you couldn’t handle the actual tough content of chemistry and physics?

Ok, so not all science minded types think like this. But there is some kind of symmetry between how so many scientists on social media feel when a non-scientist butchers a scientific explanation in the media somewhere and how a business person must feel when a non-business person opines about how their profits must have been ill-gotten, easy to come by and should be invested not back into the business but back into “the community” from which they were stolen or coerced in the first place. The rank ignorance about the virtues of profit and how difficult it is to turn a profit at all in the first place let alone large profits is what drives so much of this ill feeling towards the wealthy on full display on social media. In particular, on Twitter.

This dislike spans a spectrum from outright (perhaps only nominally) murderous hatred to a more vanilla non-violent disdain or aloof indifference. It is as unfashionable as it ever has been to speak of self-made millionaires and billionaires as being anything like heroic (as scientists, medical professionals, veterans and first responders are). Praise for hard work, brilliance and society-serving contributions is reserved for those professions - but perhaps even teachers and those working in trades. Anyone BUT the businessperson and entrepreneur. The wealthy (or not even wealthy: simply those who own a business) are almost always and everywhere cast as the villains and therefore most of the essential means of becoming wealthy (such as any profit motive) need to be hated too. Being “self made” makes no difference to their critics: wealth, according to their dogmas, is never created. It is confiscated. And it can be confiscated for the greater good, or confiscated and hoarded by the few. “Record profits” are a pejorative term in the media. Why aren’t those profits being shared out among the deserving workers? Nevermind that profit is precisely what is needed for innovation, creation, research, development and further investment in the business or new businesses to generate more progress more rapidly from which everyone benefits. What exactly is funding the innovation to create the technology to allow many scientists to do their work with more efficiency than ever before? Even the purely theoretical physicists or pure mathematician these days spends much of their time on their computers and the only reason that computer is not the same as the one from 1995 is because “record profits” from the technology sector continue to be reinvested in the businesses rather than siphoned off into the pet projects of politicians and community organisers and so on.

But the tin-ear of those who have absorbed the messaging of academia on matters of business is immune to arguments of that sort. Hence the fact billionaire-bashing is a pastime of mobs online can in many cases be made sense of: we are saturated in messaging on social media about how they are “grifters” and their wealth the ill-gotten proceeds of theft. These are tropes that have always been at the vanguard of collectivist movements – whether political (the communist tendency to cast the wealthy as undeserving not merely of their wealth but – if history is a guide – their very existence) or religious (the Christian tendency to cast the wealthy as especially compromised in life and so unworthy of any “good place” in what comes after it either). 

The Soviet Union put “Huge obstacles and the threat of harsh penalties”  in the way of anyone trying to generate wealth. Whether late 70s Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, or the modern day Kim Dynasty in North Korea - regimes remixing and riffing off Maoist China share an anti-individual-wealth character (which, for reasons beyond the scope of this piece is necessarily anti-wealth, period).  All collectivist coercive “economic systems” degenerate into some form of tyrannical plutocracy where government leaders become the actual thieves and beneficiaries: they do not produce anything themselves – there is no innovation by those with the most wealth inside such a system - but rather individual wealth is accrued only ever by a process of taking directly from the productive for the purpose of lining the pockets of the politically powerful. An elite echelon of those sharing in government largesse in some systems might ostensibly be elected politicians, but many more are bureaucrats and “officials”: those providing the necessary cover and “legal” sanction for those who, in turn, award them with relatively lucrative positions of authority. When meritocracy and democratic institutions are replaced by a culture of quid-pro-quo favour-doing then political loyalty up and down the chain and to the very system itself becomes a moral and legal imperative. 

The history of each of these versions of collectivism of the last century (which all trace the ancestry of their ideology to some version of Marxism) begins with the denigration of the wealthy. It begins there by misunderstanding (or perhaps outright lying) about the causes and hence the source of wealth: it says all (or almost all) the wealth was stolen. Once this is established – the wealthy can be called out as literal criminals – so it becomes virtuous for their ill-gotten gains to be taken from them and (in theory) for the purpose of it all being returned to its rightful owners: fairly and equally to all citizens. The government is Robin Hood – the ethical thief - righting wrongs allowed to go on for far too long. As dystopian as it may seem, history attests to fact that events rarely end with the mere confiscation of property from the well-off when and if ever allowed to go that far. When wealth confiscation fails to improve the ills of that society immediately (and of course this social technique always fails) more severe measures are demanded. Government takes complete control of businesses “nationalising essential services”, communication and media “to curb misinformation” and individuals “to keep the nation safe and protect lives”. State violence continues apace and culminates only in the nadir of horror: actual extermination of the rich and then, if not simultaneously, then soon after, the extermination of the educated too. The Khmer Rouge murdered en masse intellectuals, artists – basically anyone with a post secondary education as a danger to a system which lionised what it regarded as the “base people” – the foundation of the nation: those engaged in physical labour. Anti-intellectualism is a hallmark of Marxist-style collectivism – the Khmer Rouge was not an outlier. Whether it was true that for good measure they took out anyone wearing glasses or not just incase the “intelligent” was not captured by any other category is a fable or not https://www.shadowsofutopia.com/blog/did-the-khmer-rouge-really-kill-everyone-who-wore-glasses the fact remains that what counts as “the elite” tends to broaden out so as to include anyone suspected of not likely to remain fiercely loyal for all time to the new order. Being broadly supportive is generally in itself not enough. North Korea (https://www.dailynk.com/english/north-korean-intellectuals-oppress/) and China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinking_Old_Ninth) both turned on their intellectuals - even if the intellectuals leaned left. (For example North Korea even turned on Marx and Marxists but not Marxism. With a thin coat of paint, almost all the content and consequences of Marxism or communism have been incorporated into “Juche” the “self reliance” doctrine of The Kims.)

The fact collectivist systems which denigrate the wealthy so often also denigrate intellectuals has meant that, until recently, there was more affinity in the west, under capitalism, between the wealthy in that society and its intellectuals. Philanthropy has therefore been an important mainstay of the income of many members of the western intellectual class providing more freedom and greater security when engaged (most especially) in open ended research. State-run funding models with their mandated policies and outcome-driven expectations are simply less lucrative and more intolerant of “risky” research – research that just may prove a complete dead end. Individual philanthropists rarely require vagaries such as proof of constant publication or a detailed proposal for success or profitability - let alone the filling out of time consuming, lengthy grant applications. The successful entrepreneur can eschew all of that and streamline the process of money-granting simply through word of mouth recommendations and objective look at successes so far and perhaps some subjective criteria no “objective” government bureaucracy would dare take into account for fear of being accused of a lack, in our modern world, of meeting so-called diversity, equity and inclusion criteria.

But hitherto there remains a (pun intended) rich history of western intellectuals – especially those working in science– being supported by generous endowments with few strings attached granted by patrons: sympathetic, curious, “scientifically literate” and charitable individuals with great personal wealth. So it makes perfect sense that partnerships have arisen historically between scientists and those of “independent means”. It is well known (or at least should be) that astronomy in particular has a history of patronage. The very origins of modern astronomy (and science) grew out of partnerships between such luminaries as:
Charles Montagu and Isaac Newton
The Medici Family and Galileo Galilei
Peter Oxe and Tycho Brahe
And this is just to name but an early trio of couplings in the lineage of astronomers who upended our understanding of the “system of the world”. Behind almost all the big names of astronomy prior to the beginning of last century were patrons – philanthropists – funding pure research. And throughout the 20th century philanthropy from successful entrepreneurs not only continued as a cultural force in astronomy but gradually became ever more generous and general in the form of, just for example:
William Keck – an oil magnate who funded what at the time were the world’s largest reflecting telescopes – the Keck Observatory consisting of two 10m telescopes that today remain among the most powerful on Earth.
Fred Kavli whose foundation has funded things at every scale from nanotechnology to astrophysics 
A 40 page report by Fiona Murray in 2012 details many partnerships and concludes that even today philanthropy and patronage in the USA still contributes some $7 billion a year to science performed in American Research Universities - some 30% of the overall funding https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18146/w18146.pdf
Murray seems to be writing in a tone that suggests regret that Federal science funding seems to be declining as compared to private philanthropy. Whatever the case individual gift giving to research in the physical sciences is indeed, according to her report,  a very tiny fraction of the overall philanthropic donations received by “the sciences” broadly (see the final page of the report).

Government funding for pure scientific research (via committee-controlled bureaucratic application processes) is a rather new factor in “knowledge creation” alongside the existence of peer review through publications in journals. Many may well see this duo as the very means by which scientific knowledge is generated: government grants funding research intended for publication and review in prestigious journals. Or if it is not the sole means of making a breakthrough in pure science then it is, at a minimum, the gold standard for being taken seriously. But even were that true, it does not show that the history of science prior to this recent taxpayer funded “industry” of scientific research and publication was especially worse at making progress. Indeed all signs are it was not: there is something to the scientist working in relative solitude funded through the generosity of a patron and therefore there is something to that relationship between the wealthy and the intellectuals*. It has been shown to achieve great things not merely of mutual benefit but of benefit to everyone.

*(insofar as these represent distinct categories - there exist a not insignificant number occupying the intersection of these sets, of course.)

What entrepreneurs have tended to do, and no government seems able to emulate much less manage, is foster a funding model in harmony with pure scientific research: open ended, subject to sudden u-turn changes in specific aims and not accountable to periodic assessments of how they are “meeting KPIs” or otherwise demonstrating “good progress toward the stated goals”. Governments by their very nature should be bureaucratic: the money they spend should (i.e morally must) be adequately accounted for and explained to the tax payers. And so it is we have a system in place that all scientists who have ever been involved in a race for research funding are familiar with: administrative hurdles consuming the time and energy of scientific minds who must turn colleagues into competitors for a very limited pool of resources. 

Governments and electorates rightly demand specific and worthwhile aims be outlined and, in time, some demonstration of progress towards the stated aims anytime money is awarded from the public purse. But as we have seen: this is at odds in many ways to fundamental science. An “aim”, if it is not going to be so general as to be synonymous with a “hope” needs to be specific. It needs to provide some vision of what the conclusion will look like. It is the “point” of things. But for many scientists working at the very fringe of what is known, “the point” of their work is often only honestly explained as satisfying their own curiosity: solving a problem they personally find interesting. This is not going to wash when it comes to politicians and bureaucratic committees much less those engaged in the daily grind of tedious labour to pay the taxes funding the whole system. 

“But I’m not interested in physics – let alone working in part to help pay for someone else to sit on their backside making up more of it” – they might innocently conclude - as is their right. And these days who can blame the broader population of those not fortunate enough to have found their own way into some kind of creative enterprise where they build a personal body of work that might reasonably be described one day as a “legacy” for not wanting to pay taxes to fund those who have? For anyone not so fortunate, the idea any amount of tax money is used to fund research not directly related to life saving essentials (like medical research) seems like government grants for academic vanity projects (for those already occupying some of the desirable, privileged positions in society). That may all be unfair of them: but plumbers, builders, miners and hair dressers exhausted on their feet at the end of hour 12 of day 6 of the week from hell would be saints not to begrudge the lifestyles of most knowledge economy “workers” such as research scientists. Such a system is obviously ripe for the historic communist critique of it: just why do some seem to be trapped working (in part at least) so some others can be paid to do exactly what they want? If scientists are going to be paid with tax money they had better tell us exactly what the point is – and the point had better be able to describe the obvious practical applications that will follow.

Which would seem to rule out the most fundamental and pure scientific research. At a bare minimum. And yet – the most historically important discoveries come not from groups deciding what seems practically important now but rather it comes from scientists free to work on problems they are personally interested in. And it should be completely fine for others to say: good for you. It’s wonderful you are interested in that. But I don’t think I should have to help fund it.

Alan Turing was personally interested in the esoteric foundations of mathematics: what could and could not in theory be calculated. It was a side effect and not “the point” of his work that in retrospect his discoveries laid the foundations of an entire discipline: computer science - and so illuminated the way to the technology of the information age. Astrophysicist Martin Ryle wanted to improve the resolution of radio telescopes to see distant galaxies so he proposed and demonstrated the efficacy of “aperture synthesis” which upgraded interferometry techniques. Presented to a government committee today he may have been knocked back: no one could have known that very same technique would be used to improve images from magnetic resonance imaging devices used in medical diagnosis. 

Granted, it is no simple thing for a curious, energetic and brilliant scientist to find a sympathetic like-mind in industry to fund their research which has no obvious technological application.  All the arguments about “spin offs” and leaving a legacy are well known – and may work as well on an individual millionaire as a committee of government bureaucrats. Scientists – especially physicists and perhaps especially astrophysicists have a particularly difficult road in this respect exceeded perhaps only by theoretical physicists (or pure mathematicians). “What is the point of this?” or “Who cares?” or “How will this help us solve our most pressing problems on Earth? There is enough to worry about here with viruses, cancer, climate change and other disasters. Black holes and quasars are, by your own admission far too far away to affect us here at all.”

The point here is: astronomers like many intellectuals have interests but their interests seem to the man-on-the-street rather like the interests of the philosopher, painter, playwrite or poet: luxuries of the privileged. Never-mind the fallaciousness of the argument, never-mind the often barely concealed internecine war of aggression by the pure physicists upon the philosophers and poets. To the plumbers, police and even politicians – these areas of human diversion are just that. They are not pressing. And we may ask: why can’t they just be hobbies? What are we paying these people for? Reasonable questions with completely reasonable answers that are often utterly unknown to those doing the paying (the tax payers).

So one would expect that out of self interest, scientists – like other intellectuals (poets and philosophers alike) would be rather more eager to keep on side all those with the means to really boost and broaden the impact of their work. Which is why today it is so bizarre when we reflect upon some intellectual cultures, just how the wealthy are spoken of. And not merely in confines of private grumblings around a workplace lunch table – but publicly – in full view and seemingly with pride. The wealthy are reviled by many as it is but astonishingly in many respects and so sadly many who might otherwise benefit from their largesse. Intellectuals, the dominant part of academia are politically active socialists. Of course this is uncontroversial. Almost all who have any connection to academia know this. And it makes sense: the university sector is far and away in many places heavily funded by the state. So praise for state bureaucracy comes easy to those who benefit from it. Why should it be otherwise? 

The most wealthy among us have accomplished things in recent decades (as they always have done) that their own governments make lofty promises about and almost never deliver. Governments promise improvements in systems of schooling and education. But it was the technologists and entrepreneurs who actually delivered a global revolution in learning through an almost universally affordable means of educating and improving everyone no matter their age through free video content, podcasts, books, courses and free or near-free audio books and other technology. Designed and delivered not by government committee but by Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon (to name just the prominent few). Traditional schooling and university is rapidly becoming redundant – a relic, a centuries old system serving now solely (in many ways) as little more than a formal culture of credentialing where (despite their protestations) so much educational ballast is utterly superfluous to the process of learning. In many cases the ballast is completely antagonistic to the ostensive purpose of it all. The technology and content now freely (or near freely) available allows engagement coupled with “just in time” rapidity that means the schooling and university systems taking advantage of the internet revolution is rather like having a modern fully functional Airbus jet used solely for the purpose of ferrying passengers from one terminal to the other, on the ground, at the same airport.
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As we have seen, historically there has been until recently a tradition that fostered an affinity, if not friendship, among scientists and the wealthy. Especially the inventor who became super rich because scientists, like inventors, innovate. They each share a love of technology and progress, knowledge and pushing civilization forward. There’s that and there’s the philanthropy. At least some (it could be most) of the super rich are super generous and keenly aware of the benefits and rewards of science. But rather often they focus on what they think they can predict is likely to be an investment that will turn a profit: cutting edge materials science, nanotechnology, fusion technology, quantum computation, medical science of any kind and so on. So scientists can suddenly find they can help to create wealth personally, corporately (perhaps for thousands of small time shareholders) and even to the level of civilization. So the wealthy and the scientists have had a polite agreement of sorts. Financial fuel exchanged for the fruits of the research. Natural collaborators. 

But there are unfortunate exceptions in the modern day. One is astronomy and one reason may be that astronomy of the observational and theoretical kinds is near to pure mathematics: exploring a space of objects and fascinating truths in reality applicable no doubt to radical changes in our deepest ideas and possibly affecting even distant fields and a crucial part of some radically transformative future technology but never able to show any *immediate* way that what it provides is something to “productise”. It’s super refined techniques (like Michael Murphy’s way to measure fine structure: https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~mmurphy/research/are-natures-laws-really-universal/) should be expected to one day - maybe years but maybe centuries from now - be vital for the operation of what is then a household item. But no one can know that today. Whatever the case astronomers miss out on the best funding and have little reason to meet with venture capitalists and investors. 

So over time: they’ve taken it personally. And it may not be a quirk of astronomy (it may be the same with chemistry and zoology too…though I doubt it) to have public disdain for the prominent wealthy but they have a particular bee in their bonnet and it’s doubly strange because it has infected one thing especially: what used to be their enthusiasm for everything space science.

I am not an astronomer. I am not part of “the community of astronomers”. I don’t publish papers, I lack a PhD, I don’t work in any allied technical field and cannot even say “astronomers” form any significant part of my own social circle. Which all needs to be said before I stick my neck out on the following: 

As little more than an enthusiastic amateur for the last few decades who took an undergrad degree focussing on astronomy and later a Masters in it, I have an arms-distant familiarity with the field – less than any actual astronomer – but more than most lay people. I am an enthusiastic follower (and generally a fan) of experts in the field and the public facing social media “community” of astronomers. Before, since and during formal learning about astronomy, I’ve read (& collected!) many of the popular science books published by astronomers – those few in “the community” who are able to do so after gaining prominence among their peers. Astronomy, as a rule when compared to most other sciences, seems to attract “a type” that *also* often *likes to lecture* and so many astronomers can become in short order confident media performers. Two reasons astronomy is unique in this is:

1.             The media likes astronomy news as “fluff” pieces. They are rather like those “human interest” stories used to break up the bad news. If there have been one too many stories that week about fire fighters rescuing a kitten from a drain then it can be the turn of the team of researchers finding another “Earth like planet” not so far away to be cut and pasted between covid updates and the UN’s latest sanctions. 
2.             The tradition of prominent astronomers-as-voice-of-science. Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” was not just science through the lens of astronomy but reason and rationality itself. When there is a panel discussion involving politicians and businesspeople, the “token scientist” is rather often (though not always) an astrophysicist. Less contaminated, perhaps, with an obvious political ideology they can still be relied upon for the standard intellectual takes on climate change policy, the (anti)facility of religion and necessary role of the state in science education, funding and innovation.

Now it is true that few of these “voices of science” become, somewhat poetically, “stars” in their own right. Perhaps the only descendants of Carl Sagan to rival the great astronomy communicator himself today would be Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox. Though the former is from astronomy, the latter is actually a particle physicist but one would barely notice from titles like “Wonders of The Solar System” and “Wonders of The Universe” among his oeuvre. If there is to be a “celebrity culture” at this particular epoch within our Enlightenment, then if there are to be such people of disproportionate influence, astronomers are as good as any others perhaps and maybe even better than some within constraints set by a cultural paradigm with a deference to fame for its own sake. 

-------------------------

Once the night sky itself had me hooked as a child, it was initially books I turned to for understanding. Introductory books about astronomy never need to embellish for effect. Titles such as “The Solar System”, “The Universe” and in one case simply “Space” were enticing, mysterious and vertigo inducing. Astronomy tragics remember their first telescope, they remember those early read and read again and again and again books. And of course we remember our first encounters with one celebrity scientist or other who appeared on the television. I was just a little too young to be personally inspired by Carl Sagan. For me it was physicist Paul Davies who, when I was in my teens, was living and teaching in Australia and for a time our most prominent scientist and science communicator (Davies was and remains excellent, but “Australian Science Celebrity” could reasonably have applied to Davies at the time and perhaps only one other. It was a very thin bench compared to today). Like those who went on to be professional astrophysicists, I began by enrolling into a BSc (Physics and Astronomy) and if nothing else, learned how one could in theory keep up with the latest in astronomy, even if in practise one could not. Chiefly this entails keeping one distracted eye on “astrophysics news” by scanning abstracts of AJ and ApJ (The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal respectively) and of course by now and again checking in with the astro-ph arXiv of pre-prints (roughly: a repository of each and every journal’s published, submitted, draft and in some cases rejected papers. Roughly speaking, as I say: even the arXiv has standards (that in theory are set well below that of official journals much less the very top tier AJ/ApJ). All of which is to say I am a poor imitation of the real thing - nothing like a genuine professional astronomer/astrophysicist but with perhaps a passing familiarity of the fundamental content and state of play in the subject and vicarious “observer status” position in terms of astronomy outreach and online “astro” culture for what it is. On Twitter I’ve kept an alter purely for the purpose of curating a (private to me) list of astronomers as a means of following news updates in astronomy more effectively. That was the theory and certainly when astronomy makes the media, lists of professionals are an excellent way to check, criticise and correct bad takes where need be from talking science heads on television. But those times are rare. Astro-twitter is very “academia” heavy. Yes, there are excellent amateurs out there on Twitter. There are prominent astronomy-communicators working outside the university system. But the far more major segment of astro-twitter are Professors, Researchers, students and graduate students. Every subculture, by definition, has its own unique standout features to any outsider. What immediately is obvious to me – outside academia – are the complaints made about the job. This observation may simply be a feature of all academics with class commitments and have nothing whatsoever to do with astronomy per se. However, public complaints about emails appear periodically – often on Mondays. Always during holidays. This is followed closely by (legitimate) frustrated tweets about the process required to secure funding for a research project, complaints about the publication policies of professional journals and complaints about coding difficulties and software malfunctions - not to mention public complaints about their very own employers (the university administrators). This is all for the good, in my opinion. Youngsters passionately romanticising an academic career have a real-time insight into the psychological state of both junior and senior academics and what the job really entails away from university promotional material. But all of that is utterly orthogonal to a more important observation.


The politics. 


Putting aside the universal frustration about completing the administration necessary to justify their own continued employment (some version of which almost defines the term “white colour job” in all but the most innovative silicon-valley type institutions) astronomers on Twitter are an exceedingly homogenous culture of professionals. And while this may not be, by any means, unique to astronomy – it is especially pronounced within it. And it is, relatively speaking, new and notable. New as in: woke new. Astronomers on average are woke. It is not universal but it is not uncommon for astronomers, as of early 2022, to fully embrace the most trope and extreme of the woke signals: pronouns and diversity flags are in their bios are just the start. Their favoured political issues are, essentially, synonymous with those of most green parties around the world. Climate Change is a chief concern, followed closely by all things “diversity, inclusion and equity” and to complete the trendy trifecta: an economic perspective that embraces anti-capitalism and pro-socialism. Now some of this may have been there for decades in astronomy. I don’t know: but I didn’t notice (by which I mean: it was not noticeable) and that is the point. The astronomers who lectured me, broadly speaking, were, well: “professional” - on topic and seemingly apolitical. 

Whatever was trendy in politics at the time just was not on the menu during lectures, labs and tutorials. I wouldn’t have had a clue how a professor, lecturer or tutor voted or what social issues they were interested in. There simply was no time (much less any interest) during lectures, labs and tutes. And at first, online, it was not obvious that the community of astronomers was at all “just like you’d expect from university employees”. They posted about astronomy or other kinds of science. But something changed around 2016 like so much else. The online culture of astronomers became highly politicised. There was little debate from what I could tell among those who belonged because there was no one to debate. There was universal agreement. Some views were obviously simply wrong according to “community standards” in astronomy – like Brexit. The exist of Britain from the EU could only be bad for science as a whole and in particular astronomy. From there, as is now recent history, vocal (and in some cases vitriolic) posts from Professors and PhDs in Astronomy attesting to their feelings – about Brexit, then Trump, then Greta and swiftly the flood gates opened entirely. University employed astronomers (almost all of them) became champions for the new woke collectivism. And with that came something necessarily tied to all that but nonetheless new and jarring all the same: the anti-capitalism trope: a comfort in publicly professing one’s disdain or dislike of the wealthy.


What washed over online-astro culture? Why was the ground there so very fertile for febrile political posturing? Is astronomy special in terms of the sciences? It is – and there are many factors. Among them are: 


1.    Jobs are very hard to come by in astronomy and extremely precarious to keep hold of. The majority with formal training in astronomy will not be employed directly in research astronomy. They will work instead in physics education more broadly, education more broadly than that, outreach of one form or another (for a particular university, for a science foundation or government “STEM” program) or they will find more lucrative (but perhaps less fulfilling) work in industry where their coding, mathematical/statistics proficiency or possibly just impressive PhD in Astrophysics and other signs of technical capacity make them attractive as consultants, developers, advisors, venture development and strategy analysts and so on and on. If one manages to make it through the system that culls so many fellow hopefuls, one becomes a little fearful of the system itself for it is cruel.


2.    Astronomers online almost always find themselves comfortably taking on the 2020s version of “science communicator” – the social media science “influencer”. Gather a reasonable following, have a Youtube channel, or podcast, or blog or appear on some other podcasts and soon you may find yourself the go-to astronomer for the local radio station, then perhaps television station and perhaps a spot somewhere on a national broadcaster. You now have clout. People value your opinion. You should have one and it must be acceptable. As in business, promotions in academia cannot entirely ignore one’s social media presence. Taxation funds the university. It funds the better part of your research and all of your salary. Why would you ever support the side promising to cut it? (And why go to the hassle of social ostracisation by being counter-culture?)


3.    Related to “2” – as an astrophysicist you are by default an intellectual. You are part of the elite. Astrophysics in particular is very impressive in a way even geophysics is not – much less geology. Or anything related to biology. You know enough about quantum physics that to a layperson you may as well be a quantum physicist. Or a mathematician. Or a climate scientist. So you have informed, evidence based opinions on climate policy. And hence politics. So you know enough about economics. And history. And philosophy. And how to think logically and critically (so you’ve been told) – like a scientist. Of course it is to be expected you and your collegues agree on these matters for they are highly qualified astrophysicists too. Of course you will reach the right conclusions while “low information” lay people are going to make mistakes because they do not understand the science.

This explains the inexorable pull upon an entire culture of astronomers online who, seemingly in lock step, began to agree about next-to-everything politically. Everyone agreed about the importance of diversity. There could be no diversity of opinion on diversity. Astronomy rushed into systems of rectifying wrongs in proportions of populations “not identifying as males” working in astrophysics. Equality had to be enforced by ensuring some were given advantages when seeking positions or promotions which considered one’s cultural background or sexuality. And so it went as it did in many other disciplines and indeed many other industries outside academia and education. But none of this seemed quite so grating as the swift slide into cynicism about innovation…when it came from the wealthy. 

Now anti-capitalism is a mainstay of academia. Why should anyone be surprised at this? No doubt faculties of humanities, arts, social sciences, economics – even business (but not always graduate MBA programs) are going to lean left, even far left and green and woke. Where’s the mystery? There is no mystery but in astronomy somewhat more than perhaps elsewhere there has been historically a culture of patronage on the one hand and on the other a mutual respect for those entrepreneurs and technologists with whom they shared a “geeky” love of computers and rockets.

In this article I am taking a stance of not calling out any particular academic by name - ​although it is tempting to cut and paste some of the vitriol that is ripe for the taking out there from professional astronomers about Elon Musk. But it takes little time to compare Tweets made about the billionaire by some prominent gainfully employed academic astronomers in 2014 or thereabouts and today. They move very swiftly from the broadly positive (if they say anything at all) to negative. Musk earned more ire from the astronomy community than any other billionaire precisely because of his Starlink satellite project all because of an extremely parochial concern of astronomers and so, seemingly on a dime, the entire community (more or less) turned against this particular use of space science and technological innovation and indeed seemed to broaden itself out to target the billionaire space race altogether. The lack of love shown by astronomers today (broadly speaking) for the new millenium’s commercial space race is awfully telling of this bias against not merely the wealthy but business and free markets. 
 
Astronomers have traditionally loved rockets & space science. They will praise NASA for almost anything (and broadly speaking – rightly so). Kids who grow up looking at the heavens grow up loving rockets too. It must be confusing for children looking to their astronomy heroes to see them complaining about rockets and satellites.

Astronomers on social media now, if they are to mention Elon Musk at all (or the modern space race) conform to a unique social pressure: that which dictates the *politics* of their community: namely the wider dominant academic culture of our time. And the academic culture of our time almost never rises to praise the pioneers of space science *this time*. The normative response to any billionaire’s space-science project receives disinterest (at best) or denigration. It is sad to see. Even now, with SpaceX satellites providing additional capacity for the people of Ukraine to avoid being “cut off” from the world by Russian aggression goes unnoticed by the broad community of astronomers across the world. They still will not praise it. They have only complaints about the technology. The silence is not deafening as such because (fortunately) the attitude of most astronomers does not translate to the attitude of most people not indoctrinated by a reflexive skepticism of billionaires. They - the broader community - do see virtue and praise it when it happens.

One might object: well it is rather below the belt to criticise astronomers for not foreseeing peaceful virtuous applications of Starlink technology in wartime. But anyone paying attention knew that Starlink would be a method to deliver internet to people too remote to access mobile let alone cable or landline internet of any kind. Australia is a perfect case in point where vast emptiness and exceedingly low population density in some places means the possibility of satellite internet is an absolute game changer for isolated individuals and communities. Surely that alone is enough for astronomers to problem solve? And this too is a problem with pessimism. When Starlink was first launched the almost unanimous cry from the community of astronomers was how Starlink was destroying the “seeing” – or the clarity of the sky. Ruining long exposure imaging and just otherwise making the jobs of astronomers more difficult if not impossible. Again, I am no professional astronomer. I may be utterly ignorant of how certain physical laws do indeed mean that progress in astronomy in certain ways is now impossible given the existence of Starlink satellites. But absent that explanation I can only imagine the problem is soluble. Satellites have always interrupted the images taken by the observatories of astronomers. They have work-arounds – they have methods of subtraction. Yes, it’s more work, but the non-astronomers of planet Earth have been, from any reasonable perspective, rather generous in many ways in supporting astronomers. Keeping them, as it were in “refractors, reflectors and processors”. Astronomy is an expensive business. Some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are devoted to simulating astrophysical phenomena. At great expense we place telescopes in the most remote places where few other structures are built (see the aforementioned Keck observatory) and in some situations where no other structures exist (from Voyager probes now at the edge of the solar system to probes on Mars and recently space telescopes). There must be give and take. The pristine night skies of planet Earth cannot be expected to remain spotless forever, nor should it be thought that the best place to observe the cosmos is from Earth through an atmosphere. Hence the space telescopes. The James West Space telescope is said to have cost $10 billion. That’s a rather lot of a money to justify to a skeptical tax paying public who paid for it.

One wonders if the community of astronomers, instead of becoming a veritable cacophony of criticism, instead took the route of petitioning Elon Musk or Starlink with a proposal to fund another space telescope to make up for any interruptions to their work? Starlink appears to have gone to great lengths to reduce the impact of their satellites on astronomy to “preserve the night sky”: https://www.spacex.com/updates/#starlink-update-04-28-2020  

The online presence that represents astronomy and astronomers on social media does appear to any outside observer to be a close knit and rather unified culture. This may give some insight into the broader community of astronomers – the majority of whom may not have a presence on (for example) Twitter. Astronomers share information generously – research data, expertise, telescope time. They are, of course, collegial and professional and provide a wealth of inspiration to young people fascinated by what is still the king of the sciences: it is the most majestic. It is the most awe inspiring. It is both gateway drug to and stage for all other sciences. So astronomers have that advertising advantage: it is prima facie thrilling: something molecular biology, industrial chemistry and geology (even in the form of vulcanology) cannot approach. But what it has always struggled with is: practicality. And that means investing in it can be a challenge. So surely, as a community, astronomers should not want to alienate any potential sources of investment?

Does this mean astronomers online cannot be political? Of course not. The issue here is the quirky self-destructive niche area of politics astronomers seem to be captured by: disdain for the wealthy and in particular disdain for Elon Musk. But not only is criticism of wealth, business and billionaires against the very self interest of astronomers themselves: it’s against everyone else’s interest too. Alienation of potential investors in astronomy does not help astronomy. And astronomy really does help everyone. Criticism of technological progress like Starlink because of an exceedingly “inside baseball” inconvenience seems narrow minded. It is the worst thing someone actually concerned with the well being of the greatest number.

I considered for about 20 seconds whether or not to do a quick survey of a random 100 astronomers on Twitter by searching their feeds for references to “Musk” and graphing the results into “Entirely Negative” “Overwhelmingly Negative” “Predominantly Negative” “Even Handed” “Predominantly Positive” and so on – but this is less informative for the curious reader to try this themselves because the actual tweets from astronomers on Twitter about Elon Musk are revealing. As I hinted at, there is a category of (it must be admitted, older) astronomers who made positive remarks about Musk back when it seemed he was more focussed upon green energy. And Neil deGrasse Tyson – the world’s most famous astrophysicist has only ever said positive things about the Tesla billionaire. But with Starlink astronomers turned on Musk and billionaires broadly. They are relatively silent for now as the war in Ukraine rages. But the anti-wealth socialist memeplex that directs the culture in which astronomers find themselves will rear its head again. And that is a shame. Because the wealthy might like to support astronomers. But not if astronomers don’t support them. This is not an appeal for astronomers to “remain in their lane” by any stretch. It is a call for them to think more critically about politics. There are too many who have swung not merely left but far left. There have even been calls recently on Twitter for more astronomers to be “verified”. And why? They seek authority - they have bought into the “trusted sources” narrative and demand that they be trusted in particular as experts on science “for the health of public discourse”. This is not counter culture: this is straight out of the social media giant, left leaning political ideology playbook. Collectivists are concerned for collectives. But that is quite different to being concerned with the well being of the greatest number. Concern for the well being of a collective is not identical to well being for the greatest number. “Healthy public discourse” is something like: discourse that does not challenge the prevailing “official” (usually political) narrative.

What we need to preserve is a tradition of criticism. A way of holding up ideas to the light and finding fault with them so that we can move forward. We do not need experts in astronomy falling back on the authority of their credentials. We do not want them to be parochially concerned about whether one advance in space science (like starlink) is a solution that generates absolutely zero additional problems (like satellite transits on deep space images) - we want them to be champions of progress and champions of those who make progress. So it would be far better for them - and everyone - were they enthusiastic supporters of the Elon Musk’s of the world. Sure: criticise Musk’s ideas too if and when deserved. But not because of his politics or wealth or because his attempt to bring internet technology to places it could not be had before affects your narrow but personal research project. Astronomers and the wealthy have a tradition of working together as benefactors and patrons in large part because they share a deep similarity: they are radically transforming our view of the world and our place in it. Sometimes they are coming from very different places and it seems their goals are not entirely aligned. But they are the catalysts in culture for change and especially for change in the right direction which we call progress. It is time for astronomers to hold fire on Elon Musk and the other billionaires. Perhaps when they do they might be surprised at the dawning of a new age of patronage. But the patrons have to be met halfway: and not with brickbats.

There are "meetings of minds" one waits for. When Sam Harris chatted to David Deutsch. When Douglas Murray speaks to Jordan Peterson. It's where people align seemingly very closely and then we find those small places where they disagree. So I have hoped for the day to see Daniel Hannan in conversation with Yaron Brook publicly and, finally, it happened. Their conversation is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNgldAKAjUc but at 1 hour 45 minutes I guess many won’t persevere. So I took some notes. With them, appropriately, was the director of the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, Eamonn Butler.

My notes here are not quotations for the most part. They are a summary of what was said - and not all of what was said. Simply what, for me, constituted some highlights. The three speakers each take turns speaking and then there is a question time at the end where it was good to see, especially, Daniel and Yaron tease out some very minor differences. I have heard Yaron say before that he “was not sure” what to think about Brexit. I always found that curious given it was clearly, to my mind, about free trade *with the rest of the world* rather than being stuck inside the protectionist EU (putting aside issues of sovereignty with a supra-national government that devalued the individual). So it was good to see Daniel explain some of that here. 

Here are my notes:

Eamonn Butler

Tribalism is about being aligned with a group. Boris Johnson said that New Zealand and the UK are as close as any two countries. So it’s not about proximity anymore.

Eamonn speaks about different ways in which we can divide up the world into tribes: national, supra national, more local or more or less ethnic. 

Tribalism works against trade in examples like the EU blocking trade with the UK. Tribalism can be against trade. Comparing this to UK, Canada and Australia trade agreement - tribalism there seems to foster trade. It can make people open. (My note: is it “tribal” or is it a common system of similar institutions?)

Recently: France was quite visceral in its objection to the UK/USA/Australia defence agreement. That’s bad tribalism.

Daniel Hannan

Engels and Dickens did damage to the folk memory of The British about their economic history. The truth was and is that with development things get better. Always. Never worse. Industrialisation is better and preferable to agrarian societies.

Progress and steady improvement leads to transitional phases in underdeveloped countries that from our lofty positions may not always “look pretty”.

Hannan mentions well-meaning *altruists* at 27 mins 50 secs and you can see Yaron’s ears prick up in real time.

29 mins in: Hannan invokes evolutionary psychology and our “hunter gatherer brain” and “Palaeolithic instincts”. But does say all of that is exaggerated. But he continues to insist we are “designed for” tribalism.

Food security is best secured by buying from a variety of global sources. It is insecure to buy it from a single place.

Free trade and individualism have to be invented.

Maybe we are in an “interglacial” of free trade between two super long periods of tribalism and socialism.

Invoking Hannah Ardent: Every generation is invaded by barbarians. We call them children.

So they need to learn (he says taught) about the importance of reason and the individual.

Hannan calls the distinction between Ayn Rand’s objectivism and anarcho-capitalism “the narcissism of small differences”. (Cheeky!)

Concludes on a point that “woke” sensibilities like “white guilt” are not new. Look in the Bible: it’s full of examples of collective guilt of that kind. Most societies ever have acted this way: we should not be surprised (we should probably have better responses by now!)

40 mins in: we are not defined by ancestry in the West (or hitherto have not been). This needs to be taught. We need to do the job of civilising and this should be what schools and universities are for. But actually educational institutions are teaching the opposite. 

Most societies have not taught the elevation of the individual: it is therefore precious and worth protecting in the West.

Oxford University used to demand that you take an oath that transubstantiation was not real. That was 200 years ago. But today the unconscious bias test serves the same purpose. They are examples of intolerance.

We see personal autonomy receding. We will miss it when it’s gone.

Yaron Brook

Daniel gave a fantastic description of our material abundance. Other places around the world recognise this in us. It’s a tragedy that we here in the West do not appreciate it.

Why do we have prosperity and abundance? What are the causes? Why don’t other places have it? It is Enlightenment ideas.

Now we are teaching the opposite. But what are the key ideas in the Enlightenment? I agree with Daniel: what we have now is an aberration. It is not the norm. It is the thinkers of the Enlightenment to whom we owe the debt. What are the main ideas?

1. The idea that reason is our means of knowledge. We can explain the world through science. Truth does not come from revelation - either religious or Platonic. It is not wise men or books: but that the truth comes from a methodology. This distinguishes between truth and falsity and good versus evil. That we have the capacity to learn the truth is massively liberating. 250+ years ago you could not choose your job or who you married. Reason gives you choice.
2. The sanctity of the individual. The crucial importance of the individual as the moral unit. Decisions are made by individuals - and not authorities. We have individual rights. The purpose of government is supposed to secure those rights - but otherwise leave you alone to make your own choices. This is the achievement of thousands of years of philosophy and broke the chains of tribalism. Achievement is then to rise as an individual - no matter the colour of your skin or any other superficial characteristic.

Unfortunately since the Enlightenment these ideas have been under attack from - often German intellectuals (Marx, Shoppenhaur, the postmodernists). Even in the 19th century people were longing for little villages. And ideas that promoted the supremacy of the tribe and the leaders of the tribe lead to mindlessness. You don’t have to think - the leaders will think for you. And this is now promoted by university professors. And this is often written in sophisticated, but intelligible language.

It is not enough to explain to people economic theory. It needs to be rooted in deeper notions about the individual. People think now that the tribe can make decisions: but it cannot. It cannot think. Only individuals can. Our job is to defend reason and individualism.

Questions

Daniel Hannan - remarks on Brexit. People want Brexit to fail in Britain so they seem not to want trade deals. The Anglosphere has a way of looking at the world with shared institutions that raise the individual above the collective and the rules over the rulers - common law and so forth - are not predicated on tribalism or ethnic background. Common Law countries in the British tradition - including Israel, Singapore, Hong Kong (until recently) - have an easier time to trade because the same laws and accountancy and that sort of thing work to facilitate things. Hopefully Britain will raise is eyes once more to more distant horizons now Brexit is done.

Question: Where do your rights come from and how does it happen? Is it nationality? After Brexit some people wanted to rejoin Ireland so they could be in the EU. Thoughts?

Eamonn Butler: Yes, some people in Britain like to claim Irish heritage. These things can be important to people.

Yaron Brook: Yes, for most people blood is thicker than water. But what should be thicker is ideas. Trade agreements focussed on ideas are what is important: not heritage. I feel at home wherever I go. It does not matter where you come from. Individuals pursuing their own self interest is what America is about. Brexit should allow the UK to be more free. 

Daniel: There were no barriers in Europe with the EU but there were more barriers everywhere else. Let me defend the nation state. The alternative to it is not an objectivist anarchy capitalist paradise. There is no ideal - just as there is no pure socialist state. The most illiberal ideaologies - communism, religious fundamentalism - all believe they are bigger than the nation state. Why did Iran take over the US embassy that time? To send the signal that we do not recognise your world order: we recognise a higher cause beyond the nation state. It is worth making the practical case that - eg in WW2 -allied forces argued for all nations. Question: why isn’t Austria in a worst mess? It does all the bad things but it’s still doing well.

Audience member (Austrian) - I moved to Switzerland because statists are in control of 50% of the economy and the top tax rate is over 55%. Yet it’s still a sort of free market economy that succeeds due to small individual companies that manage to work within. You’ve heard of Red Bull, Glock, Schwarzkopf, etc. Some Austrian companies have 99% world market share - but some are leaving.

Yaron: Atlas holds up those economies. Same thing happens in California. I’m not opposed to the nation state and it depends on whether the nation protects individual rights. Rights come simply from being human. And whether nation states protect individual rights or not is the measure.

Question from the moderator about “buy American”. Is it as destructive as tariffs?

Daniel: Well it’s not as destructive but it’s still crazy. If you want to buy an inferior product but it makes you feel patriotic, who am I to stop you? As Yaron said: everyone seemed to “turn on a dime” over the incorrect notion that America was getting poorer just because it had a trade deficit. Economist are alarmed by trade deficits. But there is no correlation between deficits and growth. Hannan says he has a deficit with the pubs in his area. Sometimes they even dump goods on him: who is getting the raw end of the deal then? Why are low priced goods regarded as a swindle? Again: people in British parliament seem to want trade deals to fail just to show Brexit fails. Eg: some parliamentarians want the UK not to be “flooded by cheap food” by - for example - free trade with Australia. All these policies make countries more poor. 


Question from the moderator to Yaron: Is it harder to get rid of tribalism in epistemology because the expertise to judge the truth is not widely available? Eg: I cannot do the research myself - it’s too hard - so what I’ll do is choose which authority to trust? And maybe they make an assessment on the authority’s intentions?

Yaron: No - it’s not getting harder. We can get second opinions and do research on line. It’s easier than ever. It’s where politics intervenes that we start to think “Who thinks this?”. In the US some people ask their doctor how they vote. That’s really sick. There are food awards now that do not judge the quality of the food at the restaurant alone, but also how equitable and so on the food or the restaurant is. So everything is getting politicised and this is a consequence of big government. Why does a government have a position on covid? It should merely isolate people who test positive and protect us. Other than this: leave us alone. The private sector can distribute vaccines better: look at how amazon distributes everything else. And compare this to how government distributes one single thing: a few vaccines (my addition: and for free!). Why is social media politicised? Because government gets involved. It’s almost like we live in unlimited government: there are no bounds where government won’t go. So it’s not complexity but politics.


Do you think Trump has set a status quo for trade policy?


Yaron: Yes. The people who believe in free trade are largely silent in congress. Both the left and right in the USA are anti-free trade. Trump was pro-tarrif against everyone it seems: our allies as well as our enemies. You might not get elected today in America if you advocated free trade.
Daniel: It is good that the UK is dropping unscientific checks on travellers. The US is yet to do this. US has many prohibitions against countries travelling to them and this is because Biden, following Trump, realises that there is a substantial proportion of the population in the USA that doesn’t mind borders being shut as a general principle (not merely as a response to the virus).


A speech/meandering question about tribalism that was not clear from the audience.


Daniel: Again: we are the exception. Tribalism is the rule. But even in an advanced Western society if your relative is an accountant in many cases you’d still consult him. Do you recall the first line of The Godfather: “I believe in America”. In that opening scene the Godfather himself demands fielty to his tribe. The name of the person asking for help was called “Amerigo Boneserra” - which means “Goodbye America”.


Yaron: I agree completely. We have the rule of the law or the semblance of it but we are descending into tribalism. Let’s not go back to that: let’s not go back to a Mafia economy. We know the benefits of abandoning tribalism and we are seemingly giving that up. Financial markets are not a casino - they play a crucial role in our prosperity. None of our wealth would exist without them. 


A question about mandating vaccines. Does this cause suspicion?

Yaron: I don’t trust the vaccine because of what the FDA or any politician says. I trust it because the expert scientists say.

Daniel: If you’re mandating something for the health of others: that’s no good. The vaccines are good at keeping you alive and out of intensive care. But they do not stop you getting or spreading the virus so the argument for compulsion and passports seems to go up in smoke.


A tariff question.


Daniel: The most common trade barrier is a tariff. Uganda cannot easily sell to the EU because of tariffs. Eg: they cannot easily sell vanilla because France sets the “standards” but they are always about a cartel wanting to preserve a monopoly. I thought companies did not want regulation but in the EU parliament I was lobbied constantly. And it was always about trying to put rivals out of business - but they tried to sell it as protecting the public. 


Question: In New Hampshire they have a free state project. What are the chances of success?

Yaron: Zero chance of this happening. This “free New Hamphire” thing has been going on for 20 years. It’s a fantasy. The USA will not allow states to leave. Personal income is not taxed in one place on Earth and it’s Puerto Rico.

Daniel: Yes, no chance it will happen. But it’s always best to have more local decisions. We should devolve power to local self government as far as we can. Bring government closer to the electorate to make it more accountable.

The Kookaburra’s laugh and chirp of the rainbow lorikeet seem far louder as the sun rises these days: there is no traffic on the road to drown them out in the dewy morning. It is winter and the first light in the sky does not tinge the inky black of the sky until about 6:30am. Few are awake to hear or see any of this now. Sydney is in lockdown. It is the third week of the second lockdown and there is no indication when it will be lifted. The traffic is gone, a line of taxis wait at the rank outside the station for passengers that won't come: few are permitted to travel outside of a prescribed radius around where they live. It is 18 months since the pandemic began yet things are worse than ever. Everyone senses this lockdown is different because we were promised it would not - could not - happen again.

New South Wales, the largest state in Australia, weathered 2020 as well as any place in Australia which, as a nation, weathered the pandemic as well as anywhere in the world. It is an island after all and that offers some advantages; the sparse population offers still more. The culture of the place - the way backyards are often large and houses separated one from another by the “quarter acre block” coupled with how people tend to keep to themselves anyway (it is a dark but running joke that so many do not know their neighbours well) almost suggests that sometime in ancient history the people experienced a similar catastrophe and learned then to social distance. It is as if the echoes of that long forgotten lesson still reverberate in the memes that shape our society; as if all our systems and community structures have just been waiting, long in preparation for it to happen again.

But the modern Australia of towns separated by long thin roads and sprawling suburbs of brick homes with desert-red terracotta roofs bordered by head high wooden fence palings is not that old and experienced. It is young and only by happy coincidence is the physical and social fabric of the place almost intelligently designed for a pandemic. Socially many in the larger cities tend to keep to themselves anyway and physically have always been distanced by the luxury of vast open space. But as a young nation, perhaps peculiarly to outsiders, we seem to suffer from the unfortunate inability some youngsters are indoctrinated with: to look only to their elders for what is right and good rather than thinking for themselves. So Australia typically looks to…almost anyone else in the developed world. To the United States or to Great Britain or elsewhere for the “correct” thing to do. No matter that the density of Great Britain is 281 people per square kilometre (Australia’s is around 100 times less than that at around 3 per square kilometre) nor that the population of the United States sits at 330 million - with Australia less than a tenth of that at under 30 million. And never mind that there is little in China's means of socially organising that we should wish to model ourselves after. Australia is not comparable to many other places in the world. But it is, culturally and institutionally, sometimes overly uncomfortable in uncertainty and thus uncomfortable about making its own decisions. We need someone else to do it first or tell us what to do.

And yet, though this was the norm for most of my life, an astonishing thing happened in 2020 when this crisis commenced. In New South Wales, in particular, under the leadership of its Premier Gladys Berejiklian we barely locked down and when we did, for a brief time, she said it would be for the last time. We rejoiced and were even proud to some extent that our Premier, unlike so many others, was not reactionary and distanced herself from any odour of authoritarianism. And as recently as May this year she said again “'We made sure that we had the systems in place to be able to weather whatever came our way so that we would never go into lockdown again.” See https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/coronavirus-gold-standards-lose-lustre-in-light-of-human-error/news-story/e6d2786fee88b82e76b5bb240fd1280b for more on that. So: excellent. The reassurance of “systems” that had proven themselves robust in the face of a crisis: tested and passed.

And yet, we have locked down. Harder than ever. Though this time a significant number of the vulnerable are vaccinated (around 76% of the over 70s for example and climbing: https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/covid-19-vaccines/australias-covid-19-vaccine-rollout#daily-report ) and we have learned to social distance more than ever (like that was ever much of a problem) and mask up and wash hands and so on and so forth to “stop the spread”; nevertheless there have been collective cases of amnesia from the “leaders”, gas lighting from the media and broad panic by some in the populace who spend too much time looking at the globe and looking to overseas rather than looking to their locales. They become more interested in pushing a political agenda caught up (as too many are on social media) in hyperbole.

In Australia it is, perhaps, unfortunate that the conservatives are in power both federally and at the state level and that means there is now almost no opposition whatsoever in our Parliaments to authoritarianism. After all the other side - the ostensible opposition - would never say we need “less government intervention”. So it is the worst of slippery slopes. The “conservative” government takes away some freedoms, imposes some restrictions and the Westminster opposition says….? Do more!

Though now, in mid 2021 compared to early 2020 we are all in a far better position to each, individually, take care of ourselves and each other and though we have the knowledge and technology and health care capacity across the nation and in each state to ensure everything is better despite an “outbreak” of proportions no country in Europe nor state in America would recognise as anything but “good numbers and news” - we are told it is bad. Really bad. Terrifying. The worst. Each day at 11am the Premier flanked by the hectoring, overzealous and hyperbolic Health Minister Brad Hazzard (yes, really, the person responsible for the "health" of the state is called "Hazzard"), the (though I am sure she is a lovely person and no doubt competent, nevertheless) condescending Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant (or a subordinate) and at least one senior member of the now (sadly) frightening-to-the-average-citizen NSW Police Force, all stand before the assembled media excitedly for an hour or more like a religious ceremony and pontificate to the public about what they have or have not done correctly in the previous 24 hours - and how best to atone.

While the Premier and Chief Health Officer will give case numbers each day (there are rarely any deaths or intensive care admissions to report and when there are, no details are given beyond their age - we learn nothing about comorbidities - and of course we learn nothing about other numbers to put things in perspective and context like, for example any mention of the 400,000 or so who each year are admitted to hospital for other infectious diseases in our state alone), the Deputy Commissioner of Police will inform the populace about how many infringement notices and fines have been issued. The headline is always the numbers, but the real story is the rules, judgements, "breaches" and punishments. You get the message. Do what you are told. You cannot think for yourself. We do that for you now.

It is all too reminiscent of some parody of a school assembly in some modern retelling of a scene from a Dickensian novel. The Headmistress, tapping a cane menacingly and informing the all students the dance is cancelled, the chief disciplinarian by her side - veins bulging and bullying - telling the fearful but compliant they already had their last warning. This time everyone is being kept in. And there will be SILENCE!!

It is farcical and it would be comical if it were not so seriously dystopian. It is neither play nor parody. The Premier insisted people not socialise and not leave the house for any reason not essential. A day later she was herself photographed getting coffee with a friend, unmasked. This is completely consistent with her colleague to our north in Queensland where the Premier there made it clear there could be no non-essential travel to or from her state and within the week she was flying back and forth to the Tokyo games for a photo opportunity. Perhaps the pinnacle of all this, this time around, is our state Chief Health Officer telling us in sombre tones that even if social distanced, fully masked and fully vaccinated - if one should come across a friend in the supermarket while shopping for essentials on the “one trip permitted per day per household” - one should not, under any circumstances, engage in a conversation. Now is not the time to be friendly (quote:) “Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately, this is not the time to do that.” For curious readers here is a link queued to the spot where our Chief Health Officer has that "friendly advice" on how not to be friendly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVFLdnDEjaI&t=390s But is that true? Has there not been a better time to be friendly to the people so horribly affected by decisions they had no part in and have no power to do anything about? We all understand it. We all get it. But we also know that masked, social distanced, vaccinated people are safe. What is not safe is this kind of social experimentation. We are already seeing people insisting on masking themselves (and perhaps others) even when fully vaccinated themselves in a community which itself is highly vaccinated. There are people for whom the mere suggestion of being anti-social by an authority - especially a medical authority - will be enough to start them down a path towards not only severe psychological distress over time but physical ill health as they go to greater measures to avoid an infection they are unlikely to get from a virus unlikely to cause them much harm. 

For all other people they should, if they are afraid, stay indoors. But that is not most people.

Politicians and bureaucrats - especially in Australia but I guess across the globe - have been engaged for some 18 months now in single factor analysis (the number of covid cases) while hectoring people with basic stuff everyone already knows. The repetition of the same lessons that have been running for 18 months now mean that new information is lost in the noise and whatever scientific reasons there were for the medical prescriptions to physical distance, mask and avoid others now become signs of virtue and ways of deeming others as thinking or unthinking; caring or uncaring.

Everyone knows about masks and distancing and vaccines and we are still being beaten about the ears with the same thing by the same people day on day on day. There is nothing new and no one needs to now hear any of this. It is condescending, patronising and fear mongering and engendering in the population a suspicion that never existed before.  One opinion - the government opinion - is regarded as “official” and hence correct and so other opinions - even when coming from highly qualified experts are rarely heard let alone taken seriously, explored and debated. Any opinion outside the exceedingly narrow "advice" of the chief health officers are labelled either unscientific or uncaring. It is almost unknown to hear a contrasting view on the government channel ("Our" ABC) and extremely rare to hear it on any commercial network.

And yet it is now abundantly clear the governments of the world have been singularly ineffective and largely irrelevant to the case numbers and deaths no matter what their policy. There is no correlation between how hard a country locked down and how bad their case numbers. It is now thought that Florida which barely had any restrictions did better than New York which had heavy restrictions and "locked down" in terms of deaths and case numbers - including per capita. Some dispute the numbers. But even if it's close - no one argues New York did better. And yet on that other metric - the economic and well being metric - Florida is light years ahead.

The WHO Coronavirus “dashboard” provides up to date numbers in a convenient table for cases and deaths across the globe. See here: https://covid19.who.int/table  (It tends to take a while to load for some reason). By any objective measure the USA has performed worst with a mixture among the states of locking down hard vs barely at all with no clear relationship between states who did and did not lockdown. India, Brazil, Russia, The UK and the rest of Europe led by France, Spain, Italy and Turkey with much of Europe and South America not far behind. Whatever these governments did failed by the metric that there have been millions of cases and in many of those cases tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of deaths per country. Australia presently ranks 131 in the table of 239 rows and there have not even been 1000 deaths (and the deaths that did occur, occurred in and around Melbourne in the colder southern part of the country). The governments of the world, no matter what their policies, have seemingly had almost zero impact on the virus - except in some cases to make it worse by concentrating people indoors where the virus is known to spread more rapidly, and encourage people NOT to leave their homes and thus go into the outdoors where we know transmission is far less likely to occur. A "government" as a single entity acts like a single dictatorial person making mistakes but not just for one person: for everyone. The real effect their decisions have made, beyond that which has just been mentioned is not on the virus but to varying degrees on lives and livelihoods destroyed by policies of "lockdown". Lockdowns to varying degrees destroyed businesses and thus lives. We know suicide and depression has spiked but in Australia at least the government is not yet forthcoming with the numbers and the media is seemingly not interested in pursuing this line of inquiry.

Some nations went hard with these lockdowns. Some not so hard. And all of them have to one extent or another experienced terrible effects from the virus as well as the economic impacts which has exacerbated the former rather than helped it (and lowered our economic resilience in the face of future serious national and global problems). The governments have been unable to control the virus with their sledgehammers: the only thing that governments have had under their control are their economies - and control really is the word. When they have placed regulations on us via lockdown it has hurt people - individuals and businesses. It has done nothing for covid. It has controlled the ability of people to earn, flourish to some extent and build their personal resilience to the virus. And that resilience comes across a number of metrics: psychological by being able to go about their lives and rely upon themselves and not welfare cheques from government, financial: by being able to continue to earn for themselves and their families, physical: by being able to continue to participate in sport, go to the gym, remain active, social: by being able to go out and talk to each other in their own local communities and develop plans and strategies within their own local communities about how best to help each other in a time such as this - and in many cases to use local specialised and cultural "best practise" knowledge about what is to be done during an outbreak of a virus. I know my Korean friends had ideas early on and one needed only to do a little research about what other ​developed Asian countries do to know that Chinese-Wuhan style lockdowns were not the way to go and that inter-generational living such as in Italy, or the cooler air and limited sunlight of Britain or the high density social culture of Spain were all risk factors.

We know there are cultural and geographic components to all this. Living alone or with one other person is much safer than grandparents sharing homes with grandchildren. Getting out into the warm sun is better than staying inside a densely packed apartment building. Walking down a sparsely populated street is good. Fighting one's way through a crowd is bad. The virus spreads more easily in winter (like this is news to anyone with respect to covid and influenza viruses). Yet we are pretending so much of this knowledge is new to us: viruses spread, they spread among people living in close proximity, things get worse in winter and not allowing people to work is bad not only for the virus and economy but every single metric one can imagine from psychological well being, depression and suicide rates through to bad health outcomes with respect to every other disease or health indicator, not least of which is a person's ability to exercise and remain active and be motivated to do so and their tendency to consume a healthier diet. But this has all along been a single factor analysis (to repeat myself) with lip service only paid to economic and other health matters…or indeed any other important factor.

The Two New Classes

In Australia, as I imagine everywhere else in the developed world - among the most horrifying parts of all this has been the new class divide. For 18 months now there have been the people who each and every day have felt more and more important and critical to the good functioning of their communities as the pandemic has worn on over the last 18 months. The politicians who make the decisions and have experienced more time in front of the cameras and microphones than ever before. Everyone hanging on their every word. And upon whose word do the politicians hang? The health officials and bureaucrats who so often themselves now get to play politician, issue edicts, commands and orders of all kinds; who get to talk about "The Science which is Settled" and be "The Sole Source of Truth". And the media who, likewise, are the "real deal" (unlike all that "fake news") each day rising and ringing into work with the self important feeling of being the conduit to the otherwise uninformed masses. It is a perfectly self sustaining triumvirate of power and “essential” work: politicians, "expert" bureaucrats and journalists. No doubt their sense of self esteem, their feeling of self worth, the well being that must accompany all that, the veritable “standing up straight with your shoulders back” each morning as they positively leap out of bed to get to the next meeting or media appearance must be a truly wonderful feeling of grandiose significance to one’s own life and the lives of everyone in society. What must their family and friends think? How proud they must all be for the *important* work they are doing in these hard times.

And what about the other class? The “unessentials”? Those told their workplace and business and job is “not essential”? They are reminded each day that their work does not matter. They are a lesser kind of person. They are on a different tier in society. What they have devoted their life to: not important. Society can live without you, for now. Maybe in some weeks or months, when we’d like another night out at a restaurant - we’ll come to you. If you’re still around. And when that time comes the clothes shops that remain can open because the essentials will need a new outfit. And they’ll need their hair done. 

Many - and I count myself among the fortunate here - can indeed work from home. Essential or not we can at least feel like a functioning member of society even if “not essential”. But what about the others? The "underclass" of "unessentials"? Both not required right now and simultaneously unable to perform their duties from the comfort of their living room with fresh brewed tea and the radio playing softly? Where do they go, what do they do, how do they feel and what do they think?

How healthy is such a society when this happens? It's not happened before. This is one great sociological experiment. How can individuals affected recover psychologically from this lesson they are being taught? For those who can work from home, the more they work at home the more they feel at home. Very well. That is all to the good. One day may we all be able to do so when the world of automation really is upon us. But that day is still far off. Yet it is almost as if some already have one foot in a life inside a  simulation. And that might all be well if the mind could actually be uploaded into resilient hardware; sadly that is not our circumstance. We are, instead, plugging our all-too-human bodies into the global network with all of the pitfalls that entails and not enough of the benefits. People are trading their life not for an eternity in the Matrix but for one diluted of the richness of the physical world like some low resolution late 1920s “talkie”. There is no ludditism in these remarks: this is an admission that technology is amazing, but the physical and physically social world remains far more amazing still and we'll all be living in that primarily for a long time yet to come. Get used to it.

The day of working remotely for everyone and doing everything remotely is not here yet. Rather a vast number of us are still required to leave the house. To do manual labour. Some of us even choose to do manual labour - we enjoy gardening or building or cooking and serving and selling and so the list goes of people who are “people people”. Who live for the face to face interaction and the using of tools in the hand to craft the physical world around the rest of us. But, right now, all of those are told they too are “unessential”.

In some perversely inhuman and inhumane trick of our circumstance it is "the essential" ones who get to dictate who is essential. The essential get to feel they are truly “the essence” of society. The rest: easily discarded. Unimportant. Can we put a price on how unimportant they are? It turns out in Australia we can: $600 per week. The government will give you $600 per week. And that will form part of your taxable income. It’s not a gift. You’ll pay back a portion if you ever start earning again. And because of the tax you have been paying, you may not have much in the way of savings so that $600 per week you get while you are not earning had better go a long way towards paying your rent or mortgage (not to mention all your other expenses). If it does not: speak to your bank or landlord, you are advised. Your credit score will be destroyed, of course, and your landlord has nowhere to go if they themselves cannot afford not to have your rent coming in - but this is just the way it is for the unessentials.

I recently made a video about the clash of socialism with capitalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svXLkLzDwTA. I “defended” socialism but concluded that the best defence I could make was unable to stand against the refutations against it inherent in any reasonably good explanation of capitalism. So I am logically and broadly speaking always going to tend in the direction of a party that purports to be “for” the individual more than the collective. So I should be “for” our Premier’s side of politics - for “The Liberal Party”. The other side that tends socialist in Australia is The Labor Party. I could not have imagined under what circumstances come next election I would ever vote Labor over Liberal. What could make one choose the party that explicitly endorses the more socialist authoritarian policies if one is against socialism? Only this: that the party who stands in opposition to it proves to be utterly dishonest about their supposed principles and policies. When they fail categorically to demonstrate any principle guiding their decisions and instead merely react on the advice of bureaucrats. In Australia we have, unfortunately, a preferential voting system. And while I do not know who I will put first on my ballot: I know this. The Liberal Party who last time I put first, will now be last. They, and not the virus, have caused catastrophic damage to my community: the physical, psychological and even spiritual fabric of Sydney and specifically the suburbs I know well and the people in them. Businesses are closed, never to reopen, people have left never to return. All too many now are suspicious and cruel about regulations and supposed “health” guidelines. There is a divide there that was not there in quite this stark a contrast before. The virus did not do this: the government did. Had the Premier and her cabinet insisted on following their own advice from a year ago - or just a few months ago - they would have had the support of their supporters (they will never win over their political opponents). But now they have the support of neither, it seems. Moreover precisely because it is the government who has damaged business and livelihoods people now do need government support. And this is the problem with government. But logically and morally the thing to do is to demand the government pay the people they have put out of business and out of a job. We'll need at least a few years to make those repairs. So, why not vote for the side who are more likely to give the poor people the conservatives would not allow to work anyway a chance to demonstrate they can't make things much worse. I'm fine with giving them one term. 

Strathfield is a suburb of Sydney typical of the broader city but, perhaps, for the high concentration of Korean ex pats and hence Korean businesses. We chose to live here in large part for that vibe: we had some friends near here and made some more. It is as close to community as one finds in the otherwise “naturally socially distanced” culture that is greater Sydney in large part because of that influence. Weekends often involve a walk along “Strathfield Boulevard” to any of the many Korean restaurants. Our favourites are the BBQs and our favourite among those: “The Uncles". The manager and his wife always provide us with the house soup - which was a blend of superb consistency, identical each week of kimchi, pork and tripe. If that sounds unappealing (as it might have to me) it was a deeply flavourful affair not unlike what my own grandmother’s vegetable soup tasted like. But while hers contained vegetables and no sign whatever of pork, kimchi or tripe nevertheless they both tasted so alike: so homely. One reason among many we kept going back. We knew the manager only as “Uncle” though I am sure that he was not "The Uncle" of "The Uncles". We came to know many of the young waitstaff - almost all on working holiday visas with rudimentary English. They would practise English, we our Korean. An exception was “Aamie” a naturalised Korean with perfect fluency attending the locally prestigious University of New South Wales majoring in classical music and specialising in piano. She worked weekends and some evenings to help pay her way through a full time and rigorous course. So each week we would catch up at “The Uncles”. We got to know her as well as we have come to know many of the local casual and part time employees of the local restaurants and eateries. It is a social affair not only for us, but for many local to Strathfield and people who like Korea and want a taste of it from across wider Sydney. We know many of the managers and staff by name. You know: like a typical community which, as I say, is sometimes not so typical in "naturally socially distanced" Australia. When the pandemic began the locals of Korean descent were amused and bemused in equal measure by Australia shutting down retail and restaurants rather than simply protecting the old and vigorously testing, tracing and isolating. As many advanced Asian nations did. As so many epidemiologists suggested we should so early on. As I wrote about in March of 2020: http://www.bretthall.org/corona-podcasts.html The Asian nations had seen SARS before. Like so many other governments, the Australian Federal government and their state counterparts ignored the experience of the Koreans, and Korea being Korea (they have at times called themselves a “fast follower culture”) eventually lost its nerve too and emulated what China had began and what Europe slavishly followed with: compulsory and draconian lockdowns. As many know: this was never in the pandemic playbook of democratic nations nor even the World Health Organisation’s advice. Lockdown was to be a “last resort” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organization-coronavirus-lockdown-advice/12753688 Suddenly "lockdown" was among the first go to's and even more suddenly individuals could not be relied upon to look after themselves and their most vulnerable. They had to obey the central authority who made all the mistakes on their behalf. Indeed forget “relied upon” - even if a person cannot be “relied upon” to look after themselves best this is no reason to take away their individual rights to do what they think is best within the existing culture and societal structures.

 The Uncles is closed forever now: only the facade remains. I expect there are a few in Strathfield that are sad to see such a stalwart institution of the local restaurant strip gone. I recall birthdays there and it was often the first place I recommended when people asked where to go in Strathfield for Korean food. Their choice of Wagyu beef was second to none and they did sliced smoked duck with honey mustard sauce that now we cannot find anywhere else. We heard the manager and his wife returned to Korea. Like so many other businesses the lights of The Uncles went dark never to be turned on again and the hustle and bustle, the smoke and smells are gone. The once vibrant strip of Strathfield Boulevard is not only missing restaurants that stood for many years but it is quiet enough to hear the native bird calls from trees in nearby streets. Our friends who run one of the local hair dressing salons were, even before this latest lockdown, struggling to meet the lease on their premisses alongside the wages of their employees and despite providing face shields and masks to all customers (who also all signed in using the government mandated tracing app) it was, none of it, enough. Hairdressers are shuttered now too. Putting aside the lease on the business premisses, how the home mortgage or rent is paid by any of them and how many of the casual staff can be kept is anyone’s guess. Maybe things will come roaring back? Maybe the local economy is like a coiled tiger? But maybe also an economy is not just an average or a total: but it is made up of individual businesses and lives and dreams and creativity and effort. I have the luxury to sit and hope, comfortable in my optimism about those general economic trends. But what damage has been done to individuals and their capacity to think well of themselves and what could again happen at any moment? I care for individuals in my community more than I care about gross economic metrics. Australia might overall do very well but if my community barely recovers, or recovers in a way that makes things seem unrecognisable, that is no win.

Tonight the Tokyo Olympics begin and everyone across the globe is united not only by sport but by their awareness (to almost the same degree) of exactly the same things: the rules and mandates, the masks and the menace. New cultural norms have descended upon us: some of lasting benefit, some of lasting hurt and harm. But so often so many are just aware of the averages and totals: the numbers in aggregates. The individuals are lost in the noise, the trees are lost in the forest: lost not directly to the virus but to the fallout from the decisions. It was not their mistake to make. The government and experts wanted to keep them safe from a single factor that could possibly have directly affected their lives (or not) in a society driven by fear of a virus which has become a fear of one’s fellows. The collective now matters far more than individual choices. We’ll all know in retrospect, one presumes. For good or ill many now realise: what they want matters not just less than that of the elites: it matters not at all because you’re either essential or non essential. Important or expendable.

The kookaburras continue to laugh in the early morning from one of the trees overlooking the empty road on which the shell of The Uncles now stands. Beside it, another Korean BBQ has closed and is boarded up: moving to a new premise recently made vacant by yet another BBQ going completely out of business around the corner. Multiple restaurants are now closed never to reopen in Strathfield alone but this is a pattern repeated across the some 900 suburbs in Greater Sydney. While the owners and workers at The Uncles Korean BBQ restaurant in Strathfield were not close personal friends, as much as anyone in one’s local suburb - we came to know each other well. We talked almost everyday as we passed one another (I live just off the restaurant strip) and come the weekend we would catch up together on that week; I would get a free soft drink, they would get a tip. They’re gone now. Some have returned to Korea. Some line up to apply for government benefits. Many, on working holiday or study visas do not qualify for government help. I have the emptiness of the shopfront to look into as I listen to the kookaburras laughing. The now unemployed workers have, I suppose, a far darker void to fill having learned now how “unessential” this society has taught them they are.