Traditional Story- What is the 4-letter word that rules the world??

In a remote mountain village, the head of the village died and leadership was passed onto his son. Now the people had lived for many years under the control of a huge monster who loomed like a huge shadow over the village. Whenever anyone tried to find freedom, this large shadow appeared with a loud voice echoing through the mountain. The villagers always retreated at the sight of the dark image.

The young man who was was now the leader realised the time had come to confront this monster. He went out with a group of villagers and as soon as they appeared at the edge of the village, the huge shadow appeared. They stepped back in fright. 

The young man observed how the shadow became bigger and the voice louder as they retreated. He paused and then bravely took a step towards the shadow. It seemed to become slightly smaller. He stepped again and his view was confirmed as the shadow became less and the voice less powerful.

He continued moving towards it until the source of the shadow was at his feet. He plucked up this small ephemeral object in his hand and asked 'Who are you?'

'Fear' was the weak, feeble reply. He closed his hand and it disappeared entirely. 

How Far Could Persuasion Go?

In my twisted mind, I wonder how much the general public could be persuaded to buy things that they don't need. Following on from my post about advertising, I''m reminded of an experiment I saw conducted by a local shopkeeper, who was a rather eccentric chap and clearly a free thinker.

We've all seen the special offers in shops, such as 50p each or 3 for 1.40. A quick add-up of course reveals a 10p discount for buying the extra items that you may or may not actually want. The shopkkeeper unveiled his own special offer of 80p each or 3 for 2.40. Of course elementary mathematics will tell you that there's no discount here at all, but he took it one stage further and came up with 60p each, 4 for ONLY 2.50. Yep, this was a new revolutionary use of the 'anti-discount', and people actually went for it! I suppose this reveals a combination of the public's deplorable adding skills, their blind faith in the potential of getting something for nothing and the power of the word 'only' in a shopping context.

On this general theme, my friends and I were outside a pub in Italy on St Patrick's Day this year enjoying a Guinness and musing on the whole idea of paying exorbitant prices for a celebration that has essentially been invented for marketing purposes and bears minimal relation to the actual source of it. We wondered whether it would be possible to invent our own celebration, St Brian's Day for example, and actually convince people that the man had actually existed and so persuade them to part with their hard-earned cash so as to not be left out of the festivities and branded a 'killjoy' or 'non-believer'. If the local media championed the idea without a trace of irony and a certain number believed it, I think we could pull it off. Or would we even need to pretend it was true?

The previous paragraph seeks to highlight the idea of how the belief of a majority can effectively distort even the most obvious of realities. I read about another interesting experiment done in a school. First of all, would you agree that the school system doesn't exactly encourage individualism? Basically they did an experiment with a bunch of around thirty 10-11 year olds where they had them at one end in a sports hall and told them that they would be asked a simple question and had to run to the left corner if the answer was A and to the right for B. They were then asked a very simple question such as 'What's the capital of England? Is it A) London or B) Moscow, so no chance that they wouldn't know it. Well, 29 had been told previously to run to the right and only one hadn't. The one kid started running to the left and then out of embarrassment and fear of being left alone to possible ridicule changed his mind quickly and ran with the others. Afterwards, the experimenter made no reference to which was the right answer and didn't tell the boy about the experiment, which must have confused him greatly. This may seem quite innocuous but the psychologist writing about it believed that these and other similar kind of experiences train people not to stand out, and people can be easily made to question a very obvious reality and do things they wouldn't believe were possible, through coercion and fear of ridicule and being left-out. In my humble opinion, this never leaves us and is not something that we simply disregard as we move into this mythical new world of  'adulthood'. I urge you to think about that for a moment and how it might play a role in how much or little we question some of the insane things perpetrated in our collective name.

Reflections on 'Down And Out In Paris And London'

This is not a formal review as such but just a few thoughts on a valuable book which makes telling observations on the underclass (and sometimes merely the unlucky) of society. This book was published in 1933 and is apparently based on Orwell's real experiences living on the edge of poverty in Paris and London. Taking the narrator of a book as a character based on Orwell, we don't find out a lot about whether he has a family who could act as an escape route from the life he finds himself in but we know that he has done some journalistic work and been an English tutor. The impression given is of a man of some means who is experiencing the discomforts of the life for real but is perhaps also a voyeur of sorts. Knowing Orwell now as a writer and not just the protagonist of the story, the book could be read with the impression of one gathering experiences as possible material for a book. Orwell had not been published up to that point, however, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt on that score. Interesting to fast forward 60 years to the 1990s and the rise of the backpacking culture. Many backpackers are middle-class and of means but willingly plunge themselves into a period of survival on a limited budget and some degree of spontaneity when compared to the 2-week holidaymaker. Some make genuine changes to their life both in circumstance and general values while knowing that there is a safety net to catch them if it all becomes too much.

The 'plot' as it is finds Orwell working as a 'plongeur' (essentially a dishwasher in a hotel kitchen) in Paris and then doing the rounds of doss houses in London for around 2 months while waiting for a promised job to become available. In Paris, he writes of incredibly long hours of work in hot, cramped and stressful kitchen situations, where workers seem to be in character and take out their frustrations on each other as a means to survive and preserve their sanity. He meets all manner of characters with all manner of life stories and writes largely without judgement, one of the common themes of the book. The tramps who dominate the London segment of the book have their own hierarchy and values while seeming to naturally think as one in certain situations, not surprising due to their sharing of a rather extra-ordinary (in the literal sense of the word) station in life.

This is what they do, but what impression does Orwell give of the life itself and the people who populate it? Among few positives, Orwell writes that 'poverty annihilates the future', written in the sense that it eradicates the worries that burden those with the financial means to have a discernible future of choices and possibilities. He writes of 'relief of being at last genuinely down and out. You have talked often of 'going to the dogs' and, well, here are the dogs and you have reached them and you can stand it.' Personally, i think there is something to say for living on your wits and having few possessions, which are actually precious to you and worth defending. Disposable income so often means filling your house with useless trinkets and objects saved for the proverbial 'rainy day' which never seems to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4

We buy 100 books, CDs, DVDs etc…, always meaning to read/listen to/watch them, but inevitably find ourselves falling back on the few we really like and relate to and which give us genuine pleasure. We also have a tendency to glamorise poverty to some extent, perhaps sensing that we would like to own less and have less to defend.

Having said that, this is just a short paragraph of the book and simply serves to show that almost any situation can have good and bad aspects in comparison to another. Nothing is black-and-white. This solitary paragraph is to life on the edge of poverty what Trainspotting was to heroin. There's a glimmer of relief in an otherwise desperate and often frightening existence. The difference of course between life as a tramp, or a virtual slave doing a job of back-breaking, badly-rewarded toil, and a heroin addict is that the latter at least has a recognisable high which can generally be relied upon to deliver. Other than the afore-mentioned calming effect of no burdensome decisions to make about the future, there is no high in the life that Orwell lives and observes in Paris and London. There is release of pressure of course, and this comes out for the majority in generally rude behaviour and verbiage towards those around them and for some in violence.

What might be surprising to some is the importance given to the role of boredom in this life. Before the modern world of endless possibility for distraction, boredom must have been a fact of life for those in all sections of society, but for the down-and-outs it is all-consuming and debilitating. As a 'plongeur' in Paris, it is not such a problem as his/her life consists of time-pressured marathon shifts, so most downtime is taken up by catching a few hours of precious sleep. In the various levels of lodging houses, tramps' hostels and Salvation Army shelters of London, however, there is intolerable idleness to be suffered, without even one's personal space for comfort.

Above boredom though, the two biggest 'great evils' in a tramps's life are hunger and its accompanying malnutrition, and the lack of contact with the opposite sex. So, in essence the tramp is deprived of food, sex and usefulness, and Orwell attempts to use this deprivation to explain away certain myths about tramps somehow being characters disposed to nomadism, drunkenness and criminality. Orwell argues well that the first of these traits is entirely caused by the laws of the time not allowing tramps to stay in the same place. Of the latter two, Orwell doesn't find these to be essential parts of the tramp's makeup at all. The author sees the tramp as a person forced by his circumstances to play out an essential role for survival and to find relative comfort whenever he can. It is alarming to read of the laws of the time, and how society seems almost to want to make the tramp's life as hard as possible and keep him down. Orwell often wrote of this need to keep the underclass down, which by the time of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was apparently 99% of the population, in order to stop them having time and space to think about the realities of the system they live in and are brought up to accept. It's interesting at this point to compare Orwell's later vision in '1984' with that of Aldous Huxley in 'Brave New World'. In the former view of dystopia, people are kept down by intimidation and the ever-present threat of violence while in the latter they are subject to prolonged suggestion by 'sleep teaching' and then dumbed-down by simple pleasurable distractions. In any case, as a first novel 'Down And Out In Paris And London' sets the scene for many of the themes and general outlook of Orwell's later, perhaps more polished, books. 

In conclusion…instead of my own, I'll simply quote the final short chapter of Orwell's book, which needs to be read in its entirety to understand the main things that the author gathered from his experiences. 'I can point to one or two things i have definitely learned from being hard up. I shall never again think that tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when i give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.' 

Travelling Light

Sometimes our goals are achieved in spite of ourselves and our actions.

When i was in my mid-20s, i went backpacking round the world for a year. The core differences between backpacking and holidaymaking are basically that you use a backpack instead of suitcases, you live on a modest budget which enables you to travel for sometimes far longer than the requisite two weeks, you try to be spontaneous and integrate with the local culture rather than experiencing a comfortable 'home-away-from-home', and you travel light with the bare minimum of 'stuff' to weigh you down. I certainly satisfied some of these criteria but in my preparation i failed miserably on the final point mentioned. I had read a 'Before You Go' book, which was very informative in a lot of areas but seemed to have been written with the presumption that every backpacker was travelling to very remote areas. The upshot was that i arrived in my first stop in South-East Asia with a backpack so crammed full of 'vital objects' that my fragile back could scarcely support it. It had a handle on the side so i ended up, rather ironically, carrying it in the manner of a suitcase. When i arrived in Thailand, my first destination, and discovered that i could easily buy most of what i needed, i managed to 'lose' a few items out of my pack. I mean, did i really need 8 pairs of socks in a country where the temperature is virtually guaranteed to be 30 degrees every day and, believe it or not, the shops actually sell socks? Deep down, the Englishman brought up on a history of colonisation can never quite believe that those in the Third World can supply him with what he needs in as efficient a manner as back home in the mother country. It's not genuine racism, just a conditioned sense of superiority hard to shake off. I embarked on an overland circular tour starting and finishing in Bangkok and taking in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos in that order. The trip was wonderful, and the moments of discomfort which were anticipated and in fact encouraged did indeed increase my tolerance and resourcefulness. Highlights included an 8-hour journey in Cambodia on the back of a pick-up truck without benches. Next to me was a large tyre, presumably being transported from one place to another, and as we hit a large crater in the uneven dirt road at speed, the tyre was jolted directly into my ribs. With something between a smile and a grimace, i continued the journey without complaint. Later, i pulled out my guitar and an American friend and

i serenaded the locals in the truck with a smorgasbord of 90s rock hits, including our speciality, 'Aeroplane' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In Vietnam, i gritted my teeth through a 14-hour overnight bus trip, bolt upright on hard seats with little chance of substantial sleep, on sometimes treacherous mountain roads. I'd like to mention at this point that these kind of conditions were not always the norm and this story is not presented in a spirit detrimental to the locals. This was their land and i accepted my humble status of temporary visitor with appropriate respect. Having said all that, the main event of this tale involves a trip along the Mekong Delta in southwestern Vietnam. The tour involved a combination of bus and boat travel, and to cut a long story short some of the bags somehow got loaded onto the wrong boat belonging to a completely different company. We didn't find out until the boats were long gone, the chances of their recovery being almost nil and involving a potential wait of many hours or even days. My large backpack and smaller daypack were gone, and all i was left with was my bumbag, which mercifully still contained my money, passport, travellers' cheques and copies of important documentation. My immediate reaction was desolation at the loss of all my travel possessions, which included clothes, books, fake CDs, a music player, all manner of trinkets and also my as-yet-unused water purification tablets. My head fell into my hands at the loss of these items and the subsequent stress, hassle and inconvenience that would be involved in replacing them. I had been lucky to have met a very nice group of backpackers, with whom i'd had a lot of fun and some great conversations, including one about our huge and densely-loaded backpacks. From the group came the helpful remark, 'Well, you DID want to travel light, Antony.' And it hit me. I was travelling light, lighter than i ever could have imagined or would have dared!. I was free! I had nothing to carry and nothing to defend. My new friends immediately offered to lend me clothes and let me borrow their music equipment, and all manner of consolation and friendly offers came in my direction. What's more, i was finally 'in the moment', thinking on my feet instead of making provisions for every eventuality. From memory, i think i rebought some of the items but generally travelled light from there on in. The moral of this story? Ah, f*** the moral and enjoy the story!

The Way Of The Nervous Official

subtitle- : A Tragi-Comedy About Table Tennis. 
The following story requires no particular knowledge or love of the sport of Table Tennis, but a general sense of humour is advisable...

'Ladies and gentlemen, we just wanted to let you know that some of tonight's finals will be umpired by Mr Peter Goatly, who is being assessed as part of his Level 1 umpiring certification. We would like to wish Mr Goatly luck.' 

We're at the Maidenhead Closed Table Tennis Championship (ok, i mean tournament!) on a Sunday night in February and it's the final stages, encompassing - in this order- the Girls and Boys Singles Finals, the Mixed, Women's and Men's Doubles and the Women's and Men's Singles finals. The event is being staged at that hotbed of total Table Tennis, Altwood School, and the atmosphere is electric (as are the lights, despite the suspect wiring!). Mr Goatly is a locally-known league player and one of those curious oddballs that seem to inhabit the world of Table Tennis. He tends to say strange things, but as far as anyone knows is not prone to handling pressure particularly badly. He is observed to have not eaten or drunk anything for a few hours before the match and he fidgets slightly as he sits in the chair waiting for the first event. So, the Girls Singles Final starts, contested by Anna Graham and Emma Thomas. As well as having by far the most generically-named competitors, this final is also one of the most spectator-friendly, both players having fast attacking styles and with no need to employ the between-points delaying tactics of other players. The warm-up goes well for Mr Goatly and after the correct amount of time he calls them to start the match. The coin is tossed and called and away we go. Now, one of the rules of Table Tennis is that the ball must rise 6 inches during a player's service. Miss Graham has a slightly suspect action in this regard, though not as obvious as some non-competitive 'ping-pong' players who serve almost directly off the hand. She raises the ball but it is often debatable whether the throw reaches the requisite height. Most umpires in the pre-finals don't pick up on this or take any action, but the esteemed and impressively-bearded umpire Robin Lockwood, who is assessing Mr Goatly, is something of a stickler for rules and has been known to call fouls on services in the past. Anyway, Miss Thomas is serving first so the first 5 points shouldn't cause any problems, time enough for Mr Goatly to get in the swing of things.

The first point is an exciting one and a taste of things to come. Miss Thomas wins it. 1-0. Second point to Miss Graham. 1-1. Miss Thomas's ball-toss is higher than most and clearly adheres to the six-inch rule but Mr Goatly, perhaps with this general issue on his mind, inexplicably calls 'foul' on her third serve. There's a moment of puzzlement and a feeling of slight unease at this inappropriate call which reverberates around the room, rather like that which would happen if someone had suddenly let out a loud burp. The assessor Mr Lockwood, despite his officious tendencies, decides to give the assessed the benefit of the doubt and the call is not reversed. 1-2. On the 4th point, Miss Thomas tosses the ball higher than normal, no foul is called and a collective sigh of relief is heaved. Miss Thomas wins this point and the next with impressive forehand drives to the backhand of Miss Graham, clearly her weak spot. The service changes to Miss Graham but unfortunately Mr Goatly calls the score as 4-1 instead of changing the order of the scoring to server first, which would make it 1-4. Mr Lockwood graciously declines to make a correctional call himself but whispers to the by-now-clearly-flustered Mr Goatly the correct score. The umpire calls 'err sorry, 1-4'. Was the apology appropriate? I know for a fact that train announcers, when doing their training, are instructed never to say sorry when they announce stations incorrectly as it seems to show vulnerability and lack of confidence, qualities which shouldn't be displayed by a person in authority to those he is serving. The next point goes to Miss Thomas. 2-4. Oh dear!, it should be 1-5, and this time Mr Lockwood does intervene. The next 2 points go to Miss Graham and are scored correctly. 3-5. Miss Thomas wins the next point against the serve with a quite stunning backhand winner which draws applause from the 60 or so spectators, who sit rather like an audience in a small theatre, occasionally reacting to moments of interest but mainly sitting attentively. This theatre metaphor is quite appropriate as the match, or more specifically the scoring, begins to take on the qualities of a tragicomedy. After the applause for Miss Thomas's fine winning stroke dies down, Mr Goatly calls it 4-5. Mr Lockwood corrects it to 3-6, professionally refraining from any show of exasperation in his voice. If this were a comedic play, it would be written in such a way that Mr Lockwood's voice would gradually show a build-up of annoyance with each bad call, the scene probably ending with an uncharacteristic explosion of emotion and perhaps even a punch directed at the nose of Mr Goatly. But in reality, Mr Lockwood's experience and professionalism prevents anything of this nature. It is easy to tell from his poker-faced demeanour and his impressive beard with its Father Christmas fuzz that he won't be letting emotion take over. It should also be noted that the Maidenhead Table Tennis fraternity, in common with many other small-town sporting communities, takes itself rather seriously. In the eyes of many stalwarts of the local leagues, the finals of this tournament are a big deal, the showpiece of the season. The match goes on and unfortunately so do the bad calls. At 8-6, Miss Thomas produces a clever serve short to her opponent's forehand and punishes the high return with another sweetly delivered winner, this time on the forehand. The point is called for Miss Graham! Lest these bad calls be considered some kind of conspiracy against Miss Thomas rather than a result of the pressure of the big occasion, Mr Goatly later makes 2 outrageous judgements against Miss Graham, almost as if to balance things out. Without going through the painful details, suffice it to say that the umpire continues to flounder but not enough to make his removal from the umpire's chair a serious consideration. He tends to call the shorter points correctly but becomes nervous if the points go to more than about 10 strokes, and seems to forget where he was before the point started. There is a flipchart being used so that the spectators can follow the score visually, but Mr Goatly's attention is squarely focused straight ahead at the match so he doesn't think to utilise it.

The spectators by this point do not know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, they feel genuine embarrassment for both the umpire and players and the need to restrain themselves from overly emoting, while they are also gripped by the rather heartless human tendency to laugh at others' misfortune, probably fuelled by too many British sitcoms and the national tradition of the celebration of failure. Gradually some sniggering and giggling intrudes into proceedings, and the atmosphere becomes rather like that of a school classroom where all the pupils have suddenly realised that the teacher has his flies open. At this point, i am reminded of an incident that happened when i worked in a nondescript office in Reading some years ago. One of the newly-appointed executives of the company, Mr Roberto Pozzi, came to the office to do a slideshow presentation and 'meet his people'. He was young and very personable with soft features and a pleasant, non-intimidating smile. He was genuinely liked by all but also respected and slightly feared due to his position of power. His English was excellent, but in common with non-native speakers who have never lived in an English-speaking country, he made occasional common mistakes and was not in full awareness of the subtle nuances of the language. His presentation was the usual mixture of business cliche and relevant information, but the big finale came when he told us that the final slide outlined his entire philosophy, that of openness and transparency. He pushed a button and on the screen came the words, TO SUCCEED AS A COMPANY AND A TEAM, WE MUST EXPOSE OURSELVES!! A quiet but palpable gasp came upon those in the room as their minds involuntarily conjured images of long raincoats, boiled sweets and inappropriate behaviour. This was followed by a peal of childish laughter, not callous but obvious. Mr Pozzi looked rather bewildered but perhaps told himself that the underlings were laughing at what a wonderfully fresh approach he had.

The Girls Singles Final comes to a conclusion with some of the most free-flowing rallies of the match, with Emma Thomas triumphing in 2 close sets, 21-17, 21-16. For the last part of the match, Mr Lockwood is observed slipping a piece of paper and a pencil to Mr Goatly, presumably for the umpire to write the scores down as he calls them. He looks relieved but forlorn at the end of the match, his hands wet with sweat as he shakes those of the competitors. However, a lesson has been learned and the spectators smile with amusement and their own sense of relief that no real damage has been done. It is not clear how many matches Mr Goatly is required to officiate as part of his assessment, but for the next match he is mercifully relegated to the flip-board, and Mr Lockwood takes the chair for the Boys Singles Final.

Now, let's look at the phenomenon of nerves. I remember hearing about a drummer from a Welsh rock band who was talking about his experience playing at a Summer music festival. His band had previously played to a maximum audience of around 500 but were now given the opportunity to play to over 20,000. They weren't headliners so no huge focus of attention was on them, and they would enjoy all the benefits of the collective energy of thousands of music fans. The band were all geared up, sounding better than ever and totally ready to take this wonderful opportunity. The soundcheck went fine and backstage they were all geared up when suddenly, in the drummer's own words, 'we started to approach the stage and i heard the roar of the audience, and the enormity of the occasion suddenly hit me. I hit adrenaline overload and suddenly felt tired, very tired. My arms, so vital for a drummer, lost strength and at that moment i remember thinking that i just wanted this to be over and i wanted to be at home resting in a comfortable chair watching the festival on the telly. The flood of chemicals to my head made my mind fuzzy and i couldn't remember the parts for the first song or any of the others. Thank god our singer and frontman was a calm sort of guy and we changed the order of the songs so we could do the slowest and easiest first until my nerves settled. Luckily, i recovered my composure and the gig went off ok. I've never really suffered from nerves since but that's still a sharp memory and i suppose a nice reminder in case i ever get too complacent and over-confident.' Anyone having to make speeches, teach classes or give presentations will recognise this feeling, and tennis fans will probably remember Jana Novotna's famous 'choke' in the 1993 Wimbledon Final, when she surrendered a 4-1 lead in the final set to lose 4-6. Although she didn't fall apart completely and was still hitting some nice strokes, when it came down to the big shots she started hitting the ball directly into the net or sometimes hitting wild shots way past the baseline and sidelines. In 1985, Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor played the most famous World Snooker final ever. The 35th and final frame of their match was undoubtedly great television and high drama, but the snooker itself was comically bad, the frame taking over an hour to complete. Both players later admitted that 'my mind had gone', and only instinct and sense memory was telling their bodies what they had to do. As Steve Davis got out of his chair to try to pot what would normally be a routine black ball to win the championship, 'i realised that my legs didn't seem like my legs, and my arms the same, and it wasn't even my cue, i was playing with a different cue and a different body and i cracked up and missed the pot and then sat stunned in my chair as Dennis potted an even easier black to win.'

Back to The Maidenhead Closed. It's the Boys Singles Final and Peter Goatly has a fairly simple task operating a flip score board while Robin Lockwood does the umpiring. All goes well until the score reaches 13-11 in the first set. The next 5 or 6 points go by but some of the spectators start to notice that the flip board hasn't changed and still reads 13-11. This continues until someone makes a gesture to Mr Goatly, who appears to be in some kind of trance, perhaps dwelling on his previous troubles. The sniggers of some of the spectators start again but thankfully Mr Goatly manages to refocus himself on the fairly simple task in hand and after that match is over his work for the evening is done. 

Why exactly did Mr Goatly's misfortune happen? Why do the pressure situations cause our head to flood with chemicals and our pores to open up, allowing sweat to engulf our body and our formerly lucid thoughts to fall into confusion? Basically, it comes down to the fight-or-flight mechanism honed in the hunter-gatherer days of perpetual danger from wild animals and other potential threats. When we get nervous or scared, our central nervous system goes into high response. Our heart starts beating faster as well as our breathing and the sweat glands secrete more fluids in order to cool our body. This of course affects performance, but another thing which happens is that the performer of whatever task it is, if he is normally skilled at it, actually has to switch to a different brain system, and often the greater the expertise the bigger the switch, hence the greater the potential for disaster. If you have practised a skill for hundreds of hours, it becomes effortless and becomes encoded in your implicit memory, causing what is called 'expert amnesia'. In pressure situations, the performer often seems to forget what normally comes naturally so he/she suddenly has to switch to their explicit memory and relearn the highly sophisticated skills encoded in the subconscious, using neural pathways last used as a novice. In the most basic terms, we have to suddenly start learning again what we haven't had to for years, including how to construct sentences when we speak! It is quite rare however that these implicit skills are totally forgotten, so most top sportspeople, for example, will still know how to do the basics. However, at the top level where margins are so small, it only takes a small performance drop to completely lose a gained advantage.

You may be wondering what became of Peter Goatly after this evening? Did he give it all up and run away to the circus? Throw himself off Beachy Head? In fact, the truth was nothing as exciting as that. He took some time off to regroup and then successfully completed his umpiring certification, always remembering that February night in Maidenhead.

JFK 50th Anniversary

Today is 50 years since arguably the last free-thinking President was removed from office. I could go on and on about this and detail all my evidence, but i wonder how much difference it would make to those who don't want to hear it. Instead i've copied my ironic and rather sarcastic response to an article about 'Protesters at Dealey Plaza'.

'Keep those dirty protesters away from our view of history. I wonder if they include:
-the more than half of the American population who in the most recent survey said that they don't believe that Oswald acted alone.
-at least 50 eyewitnesses who testified to hearing a shot coming from the Grassy Knoll
-James Teague, who tried to tell the Warren Commission that he was injured by a fragment from a bullet coming from the G.N.
-the book researcher who somehow managed to get onto the floor of the Book Depository and swore that you couldn't even get a shot through the trees. (Interesting that they have an assassination museum that the public has to pay to enter but they're not allowed to see where the shot actually came from)

Of course we all know about the single bullet that made 7 wounds and emerged pristine, the fact that JFK was trying to pull the U.S. out of Vietnam and that Johnson signed a declaration of their involvement the day after the funeral, his head going back and to the left from a shot apparently coming from the back, the hole in the back of his head which was found to be an exit wound, various suspicious deaths of people trying to give alternative evidence, the fact that a New Zealand paper printed a biography and article on Oswald at almost the same time he was arrested, Oswald himself stating that he was a patsy, that fact that Oswald's killer Jack Ruby knew his victim, worked for the C.I.A. and died prematurely in prison...
But, who needs facts, eh??? Apparently the people need to be protected at all costs.'

Interesting that the only coverage given to any explanation of the killing other than the official one is some crazy story about an agent killing him by accident from the car behind. Since every alternative explanation is lumped together as 'conspiracy theory', this theory serves to discredit other credible research and obvious research. Obvious and cheap. 

Further Thoughts

In the wider context, it's a myth that the President actually has much power. Powerful lobbies such as the Israeli lobby, which covers both sides of the political spectrum, and Wall Street are already firmly in place when the new guy, who is there due in large part to massive campaign funds from corporations, steps in. He can't dictate to them because he is in debt to them for getting him there in the first place. Obama has done none of the things he promised because those promises were part of a very slick marketing campaign (which won an award as 'Marketing Campaign of The Year 2008', i might add) and he didn't and doesn't have the power to implement them. Whether he knew that when he came in or realised subsequently is debatable. Mind you, Obama's first job was working for war criminal Henry Kissinger, so he must have known that he wasn't getting into a clean business. My personal theory about JFK is that the 'military industrial complex' knew his weakness for the ladies and figured that they'd give him a cushy life with plenty of females on tap in exchange for compromising his instincts. He rebelled and as i wrote earlier tried to change the Vietnam agenda and curb the CIA (he fired the director Alan Dulles) and so he was taken out. Ask anyone why they think it was Lee Harvey Oswald on his own, or Bin Laden for 9/11. Other than 'i heard it on the news so it must be correct', they won't have an answer, i guarantee. Corporate media is a business, clear and simple, and those who try to speak out generally get gagged, discredited or sometimes killed. There are hundreds of examples that don't get on the news so they may as well not exist. Do you think the media would ever give airtime on prime time to a researcher who really knows his stuff without resorting to ad hominem verbal attacks? No way because the world would change overnight.

Advertising- Brief History, Techniques and How to Resist It

Introduction

(some of the content of this post, outside the introduction and conclusion, regarding advertising techniques and solutions is adapted from a you tube video by Edward J Harshman, but passages expressing opinions and giving comments on the bigger picture outside advertsing are my own.)

Advertising in its infancy was simply designed to make people aware of a product's good points. Without advertising, consumers are unaware of any product's existence unless they happen to come across it by chance, something which is true of a particular new type of soap or the greatest album ever produced. It is wrong to say therefore that all advertising is bad and harmful. Balloons and signs strategically placed to indicate a local birthday party aren't bad or misleading. However, through the 20th century and into the 21st, advertising has introduced, adapted and expanded greatly its concept of linking products to aspects of a person's life.

It seems natural now to see television adverts of people with beautiful big smiles using this product, usually amongst lots of friends, giving the consumer the impression, or more accurately planting it in their mind, that this product will make them happy and popular. Both men and women can, for different reasons, enjoy watching an attractive woman applying shampoo to her silky-smooth hair with a look of ecstasy on here face in an exotic tropical setting, perhaps with the cleanest of clean water cascading down a waterfall in the background. However, the sophistication of this strategy has been enhanced by the fact that the target emotions and instincts that the advertiser is attempting to tap into have moved from the conscious to the subconscious and then into the unconscious mind. Adult consumers are given credit for not being gullible enough to immediately buy a product simply upon seeing a poster for it. But planting a seed of awareness of the product in the part of the mind that most people generally disregard but which is the majority and most powerful part of it is hugely effective. There's pride involved in people not wanting to admit to being malleable, but if they are following desires that they are not even aware of at the time of pursuing the product, they don't have to and won't feel ashamed at being led by something other than total free will.

The most significant individual in terms of these developments was Edward Bernays, a man generally lauded in the mainstream for his cleverness and success in his field. He is popularly known as 'The father of P.R' (public relations), the latter term conceived as a replacement for the word 'Propaganda', whose meaning had morphed into something negative and exploitative. As Sigmund Freud's nephew, he took his famous uncle's ideas of subconscious and unconscious desires and applied them to advertising, some of his breakthroughs being the rise in women smokers, the mass acceptance of bacon and eggs as a breakfast staple and, rather more sinister, the successful overthrow of a democratically-elected leader in a CIA-engineered coup in Guatemala in 1954. Bernais' work is very effectively detailed in the first part of Adam Curtis's documentary 'The Century of The Self' and in an audio series by Guy Evans of the Smells Like Human Spirit Podcast anaysing Bernays' 1928 book 'Propaganda' and skillfully linking it to the present. Both of these offerings are free to view online.

https://archive.org/details/TheCenturyOfTheSelf

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=deconstrusting+bernays+propaganda&sm=3

Another frightening and cynical development is the targeting of children as a mass market, hardly new but now more and more unscrupulous and again growing in sophistication. This particular aspect, including the idea of babies as young as 6 months old being consideredand targeted as 'consumers', is well dealt with in the film 'Consuming Kids'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_95AoBkphQY

Many trace the success of advertising to the fall of home economics, or home management. Not taking care of our own home and affairs has left us vulnerable and malleable, and the idea of money-saving skills as a good thing handed down the generations has changed to being a symbol of being 'tight-fisted' and too 'careful'.  Advertising and general influence of the masses extends out to TV shows and films. Marketing invents needs, especially needs which are unlimited, elusive, with no endpoint and ultimately unreachable, such as a perfect body or total happiness and/or popularity.

T.V. programme makers clearly have to recoup their costs, and they do this either through license payments or advertising. It might be useful to consider that both newspapers and television stations get more revenue from selling advertising space than from the price of a newspaper or television licence, so who are they more interested in pleasing? An important case in point:

In 2003 Michael Meacher MP, a former member of the Blair administration who resigned in protest against the illegal invasion of Iraq, wrote an article in the London Guardian called 'This war on terrorism is bogus', containing facts that would be popularly considered to be 'subversive'. It is reckoned that the newspaper lost up to a million pounds in advertising revenue due to publishing said article, and an advertising boycott was threatened, the thing that newspapers and T.V. producers most fear. The stakes are high!

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq

The genius of television in promoting products and attitudes is to catch us unawares, in a docile state, and open to (mis)direction. The relationship between the advertiser and programme makers isn't limited to the sponsorship of shows. The content of the shows caters to the advertiser; for example, if Coca-Cola sponsor a show, no one in the show will be fat or diabetic. You won't see a sewing machine in a programme broken up by ads for clothes. Ads for new cars won't be shown during a programme which includes scenes of people fixing cars and giving good advice as to how to do that. People don't act normally on TV shows. Their tone and behaviour are generally conservative, and any who seem different or have anti-establishment views are portrayed, sometimes subtly, as weird and quirky. These 'weirdos' and 'eccentrics' are, interestingly, the kind of people who do engage in critical thinking and are less likely to fall for consumerism and manipulation. Free, out-of-the-box thinkers may have noticed that T.V. shows and mainstream media promote and depict a tame world where it doesn't take much for a view to be controversial. The Daily Mail newspaper in England has traditionally sensationalised events which actually are fairly commonplace to those paying attention - celebrities who appear wholesome actually indulging in cocaine use and excessive drinking behind the scenes - and this serves to shelter citizens and heighten the disruptive effect of ugly truths about important people who citizens tend to want to believe are on their side. Thus, truth becomes subversive and something to be feared and mistrusted, and you never really find characters in the more popular prime-time shows saying anything in particular substance.

Hypnotism

The popular stereotype of hypnotism involves a man swinging a watch from side-to-side in front of your eyes as you slowly drift off into unconsciousness, and he will then either do something horrible to you or more likely make you appear stupid, as in hypnotist stage shows. What is never addressed in the media is the mildly hypnotic state in which most of us live our lives, unable to give attention to 'the big picture' and acutely vulnerable to anything subliminal. Comparison of TV shows from the past with those of the present day show obvious differences, one of the most striking being that the previous steady camera and longer scenes have been replaced by quick edits between shots and a moving camera constantly panning and zooming, which leaves the viewer disorientated as we have to change awareness and constantly readjust our focus. Quite often, a scene will start with a close-up, and in our minds we will immediately try to guess the surroundings. We are usually wrong, and this has the effect of putting us on the back foot as we have to change awareness. Studies have shown that if you take a ritual such as a handshake between business people and change it somehow, for example suddenly moving your hand up their arm, at that moment, the other person is disorientated and vulnerable, and if you wanted to plant an image in their mind or influence their behaviour, that would be the time. The producer of a programme is in effect leading you, like our friend the stage hypnotist entertaining his audience, who are actually enjoying being led and vulnerable by a master. As well as fast edits, multiple voices being heard simultaneously is also confusing, as well as the mix of truth and lies used in advertising. The images go by so fast that when a few known truths are heard, we may believe the whole to be true. If we can turn off our preconceived ideas about what's coming next and be passive in the best sense of the word, we may avoid being led into unwanted purchases.

Peer Pressure & Associations

As children, we desperately want to be accepted and to belong to groups. As adults, we still have the same yearning but are less direct and more inhibited in our pursuit of it. As the human condition therefore seems to involve regular bouts of loneliness, we are vulnerable to those 'pretend friends' we see in TV ads. They seem so happy and so genuinely on our side that they give us a relaxed feeling, all too rare in modern life, and we are subconsciously ready to submit to their genial persuasion. Anyone in the advert resisting will be made fun of or gently chastised and alienated. Associations are made between warm friendship and the product being hawked. Sex, celebrities and music are very effective weapons of advertising, either on their own or together, and there is also a general emphasis on being modern and 'moving with the times'. Older people are mocked, leading us away from a time when people had more of an attention span and were more rooted in core values and respect for the elderly.

Partial Satisfaction

As mentioned earlier, the goals that ads lead us to aspire to are unattainable, and this links to the idea of partial satisfaction. You can get to a point but can never reach the ultimate, so you come back for more. We buy a hamburger, the MSG and other chemicals do their job to give us a high, then the low eventually comes and we realise that we only got halfway to satisfaction, almost like wearing the left shoe without the right. We can either ride it out or have another to try to reach the unreachable. The realisation that junk food and material goods actually bring sadness in the end paradoxically helps to ensure that most people go back for more rather than reach the logical conclusion that they should look elsewhere for fulfillment.

Solutions

Thankfully, there are some quite simple steps to take if you want to stop or at least control this outside influence and start making your own choices.

-Create an association of your own. Put a 20 dollar/pound/euro note in your hand and close your eyes. Imagine you saw or watched an advert and it made you buy something, so now you've bought something but it doesn't do exactly what it said on the box. Imagine that you really want to be compensated so you go back to the shop and no one wants to or can help. You call a helpline number and get redirected to lots of different people and departments with no result. You decide you actually want to take the product makers to court and so you have to spend time, money and energy on a process which is constantly being delayed with no guarantee of a positive outcome. You now don't want or like the product you bought and you desperately wish you could go back to the beginning, to before you spent the money. Now open your eyes and look in your hand. Create the association in your mind of spending money on consumer items with potential stress, sadness and disappointment.

-Make a list of things you really need/want, and do it at a time when you're both alert and relaxed, and not watching television. Watch an advert after this and see how many times your brain is alerted to the prospect of buying something that's not on your list. Chuckle to yourself at the fact that the messages are not getting through to you anymore.

-Dissect advertisements. Now you've got the upper hand, watch ads carefully, as well as TV programmes and films, and try to see what kind of subliminal messages and suggestions are contained within. You might lose count very quickly. Realise that the people in the ads are actors, simply paid to pretend and experts at doing so. This seems like an obvious and simplistic point, but in the hypnotic state we forget this and suspend disbelief, just like we're doing in the film/programme that the advertisers are sponsoring. Listen to the words carefully as well. Cereals and drinks are described as 'part of a nutritious meal', which doesn't mean that they are necessarily the nutritious part. If i sprinkle sawdust on a wonderfully organic and healthy meal, then the sawdust is technically 'part of a nutritious meal'. You can achieve wonderful deception with a few subtle turns of language that mostly pass by unnoticed, so notice them!

-Beware of Disclaimers (statements placed in advertisments to protect against liability). It is basically saying that there is or might be something wrong with the product. It will usually be rushed through by the announcer to keep you from understanding it.  

-Ask questions about products. If you see a new drug advertised by a large pharmaceutical company, ask your doctor what's wrong with the old one; he's unlikely to have an answer for you. If you really want to get his goat, ask him about dietary changes as a substitute for drugs. He will display, without telling you, the fact that doctors get minimal training about nutrition and are never told how crucial it is.

Limit T.V. use (or better still throw it out!) and try to develop a general questioning attitude, without becoming too paranoid. You may well find that as well as some inevitable negative feelings about the ugliness of the truth, you will also find some direction and will lose the constant disorientation that a t.v. lifestyle gives you. The feeling of liberation when you realise that you are suddenly living your life without the suggestions and opinions of people who aren't your friends and have agendas and sponsors to satisfy is hard to describe, but is rather like truly being born again.

conclusion

If i tell you that love is everything and that you should get back to the old, forgotten values of community, seek out and nurture real friendships, get out and enjoy nature, perhaps stand still in awe in front of a tree and consider its incredible longevity and the miracles of the earth, does it flash through your mind that i'm an old hippy? If it does, then you have proved my point because that's a stereotype constantly reinforced by advertising and the T.V., and mass media culture in general. There is another path.

Pretentious Poem!

With clothes on my back and a bag and guitar, i travelled one foot in front of another

Nothing more, comfortable with the feel of the clothes on my skin

Along an open road, cars passed, dust flew up in their wake, and a few particles arrested the progress of my eyes in their natural course.

I had left it all, given it all away, with little rhyme or reason

Just to feel this feeling for the first time in my life

To gather this illusion up and feel it in my palm

To feel how i used to feel as a young boy

I sat by the road, strummling my guitar, and made half-hearted attempts to hail passing traffic to take me wherever we were sent by fate

The notes produced by the guitar had their own resonance

I allowed them to sound how they would sound, how they wanted to dance together

Who was i but a vessel?

My hands were the mechanical devices to do the hard work while the music played out its natural inclination

As i carefully stood without ceasing the mechanical action, a vehicle approached, started to travel more rapidly

And as the last note rang out, the last note that this guitar would ever produce, the car suddenly veered off the road

It crashed into both me and my instrument, smashing both into many pieces and mashing my pretentious hand into a pretentious pulp

Thus endeth this most self-absorbed literary salvo....

Cynicism, Skepticism and Free Thought

Cynical? Realistic? Positive? Naive?

Though individual experiences and attitudes inevitably vary between individuals, it is thought that around the age of 45, our cynicism starts to grow. This creates great material for satire, but is it a positive or negative development?? 'Cynical' is a word which creates a trigger that screams of negativity as soon as you hear it, but upon further investigation it may be that in the right hands, which would be the hands of an open-minded and well-researched person prepared to research topics to build on information fed to him/her through the regular channels, a skeptical attitude borne out by a sufficient number of facts is a healthy thing. It can allow development of ideas without over-caution and the creation of self-censorship in the mind. It makes us question things and maybe even take action.

'Cynical' means believing that humans are 'motivated by base desires or 'selfishness' and being 'skeptical of the integrity, sincerity and motives of others'. More strongly, a cynic can be 'bitterly or jadedly distrustful, contemptuous and/or mocking'. If a cynic is jaded, they are 'wearied, exhausted, callous and/or insensitive', which seems to show a link between someone who has taken their knocks in life and with bitterness decided that 'life is shit and then you die.' The cynic isn't always fun to be around and if he's relatively famous might appear on television shows such as the BBC's 'Grumpy Old Men'. The cynic 'moans' and drags people down to their level of 'gloominess.' 

So, we have a picture in our mind of the stereotypical, world-weary middle-aged cynic. But the other side of the argument is very telling. For example, a cynic needs to have it proved that someone in a position of power isn't self-serving and manipulative. Of course, 'guilty until proven innocent' is considered very base and unfair in terms of the law, but with the steady and constant stream of verifiable stories of corruption and scandal among those in powerful positions, along with the now well-recognised psychological effects of giving vast power to certain people, an optimist seems to be willingly sweeping aside skeptical doubts without having to go to the bother of checking if they are well-grounded. I think that what we are really looking at is the issue of whether having a certain instinctive individual belief has come about through action and information-gathering or a lazy and perhaps fearful retreat to a fixed view. A lazy cynic and a lazy optimist are equally bad, as is a lazy sheep.

Any basic research about what appears to happen in the world simply cannot rule out the crucial factor of vested interests and the corruptibility of humans in power. This is not a slur on the human race by any means. At worst, it is a slur on a certain human instinct, and the good cynic/skeptic/realist with a decent handle on human nature is likely to also acknowledge the basic decency and generosity of humans. Very few people you meet are going to or want to do you harm. The toxic cynic of course may not believe in anyone at all, but what of the possible toxicity of the optimist? Their upbeat language could be chocolate-flavoured poison because it gives the impression that the system that runs the world isn't the problem, rather that it is something wrong with certain people's brain chemistry. Cynics, or non-believers, of the man-made global warming theory might concur with the similarity of blaming humans and their nature, quite a theme in mainstream-media output. So, humans cause global warming rather than the sun, a lot of humans react to a perfectly sane world by having negative, irrational thoughts due to something wrong in their brain, and of course some concoct wild 'conspiracy theories' due to their need for excitement in their lives. Ditto the global financial crisis, which started in 2007, which was largely blamed on citizens wanting something for nothing and over-indulging their credit options

The reality is that the afore-mentioned 'good cynic' uses a negative attitude as a means, a searchlight, not a lazy end, to cut through the crap and seek the truth. And they actually live a lighter life in the sense of a committed, non-participation in things which analysis tells you are absurd or even immoral. The utter folly of consumerism coupled with the known cynical and merciless treatment of humans and animals to produce certain items makes such non-participation an act of integrity. And it's nicer to have less pressure on yourself to follow all the things we are supposed to follow. The Olympic Games, and sport in general, undoubtedly reveal a dark side when analysed. The good cynic has probably taken more time than the optimist to think of how cruel it is for the poor of a city to see the apparently precious coffers being spent relentlessly on what is, deep down, an unimportant spectacle outside the world of P.R, which the public at large don't question thanks to the sacred 'feelgood factor' these events create. On the subject of the 'feelgood factor', society and the mainstream media seem to have a label, a tag or an angle that can be placed on a person who questions and which people tend to follow. So a questioner of the whole idea of the Olympics is a 'killjoy'. If you happen to be in your 30s or older, you are 'getting old' or 'growing cynical'. If you are very fortunate, you might even be called a 'nihilist' (definitions of nihilism include 'an extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence', 'a belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated' and 'a belief that traditional morals, ideas, beliefs etc...have no worth or value'. Note the subtle difference between the first 2 definitions and the 3rd, which focuses on traditional values rather than all values. Substitute 'traditional' for 'mainstream conservative' and change 'have no worth or value' for 'should always be questioned and never be blindly believed to be true' and you have a healthy skeptic. 

As far as things not having any meaning, there are a couple of things to say here. Anyone reading this can take 'The 10-Minute test', which takes a lot less than 10 minutes to actually do. Do it right now, this minute, here we go. Ask yourself- If you suddenly found out you had 10 minutes to live, how many of the things that are bothering you and holding you back now would mean anything at all? In particular, how many of the small gripes that are irking you about those close to you or in your acquaintance, and the small or large grudges that you are holding against people or the world in general, would retain their significance at the very end of your life? I fully understand that serious illness, extreme suffering and premature death are exceptions to this rule, but mercifully few of us have to encounter these with any kind of regularity. For the majority, life seems to be mundane and rather humdrum, giving us time to stress ourselves out about all manner of things that our creative minds care to invent or give significance to. These kind of thoughts have no real meaning. In addition, we live on a planet with a surface area of 510,072,000 square kilometres which is home to nearly 7,000,000,000 people and anything between 10 and 30 million different species of animals. it may seem like a small world if you travel to Australia and happen to encounter the person who was your best friend at school back in England, but would you want to clean it?! This is of course the tip of the iceberg. When you look at space, the numbers and proportions become staggering. Rather than give you all the numbers, i will let the following 1 and a half minute video illustrate the point very succinctly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e6xkrj8eKI

To say something is 'insignificant', 'worthless' or 'meaningless' is purely contextual as to whether it;s good or bad, and bear in mind that this kind of language manipulation is willingly or otherwise used to persuade and to invade our free will on a daily basis.

As life gets harder, faster and statistically worse for our mental health and happiness, which is itself a strange development as we 'evolve' and grow as a species and presumably as a society, the need for optimism and happiness seems to grow also. The daily grind of quiet misery means that we need smiles and positivity, even if it's just positive language without substance. But the good cynic, skeptic, non-believer, non-participant etc.. is perhaps more valuable and vital than ever, if he can prove that he's done his research and arrived at what appears a pessimistic conclusion through a positive quest for the truth, not a bitter need to spread his own negative psychology onto others.

In conclusion, spread love and happiness to your fellow man but also…question everything!!!!


An audio version of this post is available here

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJHwepa7LNQ1176rTFHnjnxqGdrKvX5Bm

Blog Intro

Welcome! This blog will cover my main interests, which include alternative politics, psychology, philosophy and general enquiry about the nature and essence of people and the world. If that sounds a bit heavy, i will also be including lighter material about music, films, prose writing and perhaps some poetry and comedy entries. In essence, this blog has no particular rules.

The first thing to say is that change is in the air in 2013. All the talk last year was of 2012 being 'the year', but on a global basis it didn't quite happen. I'm sure that for many people however, 2012 was indeed the biggest year in their own lives for reasons totally unrelated to the end of an age, as the Mayans may have predicted, or the London Olympics or any other media-touted event that we are all expected to show an interest in. And 2013 is surely having a big significance for some in their journey through life, as well as for the world at large with the Snowden revelations and the ground-breaking decision not to invade Syria - though i think we need to wait to see how that one develops.

A word about alternative politics. This means a view of the world that recognises politics, as seen in the mainstream media, as a rigged game. It could alternatively be known as 'deep politics' or an examination of the 'deep state', defined by poet and English professor as 'the myriad processes behind the surface politics purveyed in the corporate-controlled media which really dictate what is actually happening at the surface level'. In short, what you see and read in the popular press is misleading and a mere fraction of what goes on in this world and how it is actually run. A conventional political discussion will invariably end up with mutual criticism and name-calling by rival political parties (called 'ad hominem') and some discussion of broad left and right, conservative and liberal viewpoints. An alternative view -or you might call it anti-politics- realises the limitations of this approach, which serves, either consciously or otherwise, to curb any real progress, and sees the need to tackle issues which are never touched in mainstream media for a myriad of reasons (i will touch later on 'media filters') related to special interests and the real rulers of this wonderful world we live in. In debating, the afore-mentioned 'ad hominem' is frowned upon because it appears to reveal that the person using it is not and can not be fully confident in the merit of their own argument so must resort to trying to discredit counter arguments. Think about this when you watch clips, or god forbid an entire broadcast!, of Parliamentary debates. And how would Fox News in the U.S. ever operate without the safety net of 'ad hominem' to fall back on? They are fortunate in that it can lead to lively and entertaining exchanges, which pleases the mindless as they can absorb it without ever having the inconvenience of critical thinking. Some of the views i will express in these posts will seem to the mainstream view to be 'negative' or 'cynical', but i can assure you that i am full of positivity and love for the human race and i see it as the ultimate positivity to want to get under the facade and seek the truth. (My later post 'Cynicism, Skepticism and Free Thought' expands on this.) 

Around 4 years ago i had what is now referred to in alternative circles as an 'awakening'. I wonder whether some people reading this will know exactly what i mean as they may have experienced something identical themselves. Roughly speaking, it was a realisation -through exposure to alternative information- that nearly everything important i thought i knew and which i'd been fed all my life was, what's the word...oh yes...bollocks. Note that i said everything important, not everything. It would be extremely difficult to feed people all total garbage, so what happens is that most of what we are told is probably accurate but is largely inconsequential. The real fundamentals are in a part a deception and it all fits into a general mindset which keeps things the same, perfect for those with the real power in this world. Before this starts to sound like the paranoia of a conspiracy theorist who thinks that a few people meet in smoky rooms to plan world destruction, let me assure you that i believe that the vast, vast majority of people in this world are decent citizens trying to get on with their lives the best way they can. My substantial travels have shown me that although having diversity of culture makes the world infinitely more colourful and rich, it masks the fact that we are all deep-down extremely similar. The problem is that the system, or more accurately a vast array of systems, is a well-oiled work of utter genius in the way that it operates. It appears not to work but in reality is working perfectly. Not only does it rule people, the 99.9%, but it also manipulates them into policing each other, like sheep with no need of a sheepdog.

In my 4-year odyssey, i have read approximately 40 books, listened to around 500 hours of podcasts and interviews and watched about 50 documentaries- some many times- on the general subject of 'how the world works', so though there are many things that i don't know and have yet to research fully, i'm also fairly confident in certain things that have started to become obvious and very apparent. People have got angry with me, ridiculed me and sometimes acknowledged me but as you may know, the truth goes through 3 stages...

The purpose of this blog is not to preach but rather to share ideas and encourage investigation and learning. On the other hand, it's a free forum so i will be expressing things as i see them while reserving the right to change my mind as new observations happen. This would make me a bad person to 'follow' and 'believe', and it is not my aim to attract this kind of attention. It's all about learning. I would like to suggest that if anyone is already thinking about making lifestyle changes and trying to investigate new perspectives, experimenting with boycotting television and mainstream news will allow a greater opportunity for critical thinking, and a bit of reading on media techniques will make it obvious that what you see on TV is an illusion, sometimes a malevolent one and sometimes just entertainment.

The crucial question is - do we want to know the truth? Are we happy? I can assure you that if you are not happy with the way things are, and you believe it could be so, so, much better, there are steps that can be taken that do not involve protest marches. Nowadays it is very easy to spread awareness and information and even just having dialogues with people while negotiating the time-consuming business of tackling modern life is a useful step. Finally, although the rabbit-hole is deep and the truth is often quite ugly, there's actually not much to fear for most people because most of the fear is irrational and of our own making. You need far less than you think and are capable of infinitely more than you think. 

That sounds like a positive start.

A slightly more expansive audio version of this post is available here

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJHwepa7LNQ3_y899sL5ZVewFEAUvZmvy