inconvenient truths – Traou an Dour

Cause & Effect, Climate Change, Karma, Musings, Satire

Escapism and the Saviour Fallacy

Rather than confront inconvenient truths there is a human tendency to engage is escapism. This may be entertainment, politics or a simple refusal to look at and/or accept truths.

“If we carry on just like we are, a fairy godmother will appear. At the swish of her wand the climate crisis will disappear and we can carry on raping the planet and shitting plastic into its oceans.”

—-

The kind of escapism, where only the bearers of good, upbeat news, get voted into power. Is dangerous and myopic.

“There is no problem with climate change, the coronavirus is just like a cold and the Swissies have bailed us all out in CHF, there will be no more repercussions.”

But people will over promise to get into power and then blame someone else when they don’t deliver.

“It is all down to that fairy godmother, she promised she would save us all. She has gone back on her promises, she even wrote a spell on the side of a big red bus! What a cow!”

This onus on some external “saviour” to put everything right, to conquer evil and save our souls aside from being ultra-passive negates our responsibility. There is a chance that Greta Thunberg is seen as a diminutive saviour and an IKEA prepacked answer to climate change. Because she is in the news we can relax and do sweet fanny Adams.

Really?

It is always some bugger else’s job to fix stuff. We can sit here and point the finger wisely and do jack shit.

The idea that Christ came to save our souls, to redeem us from sin, is both convenient and a cop out. It is a fallacy. He came to show the way and not to let us off the hook and do the job for us. The notion of a carte blanche slate wipe is the stuff of lysergic acid induced unicorn dreams. There is no get out of jail free card. It is a justification and an escapism.

Sooner or later the scales of karma await. Place your bets if you do not believe me.

“I know there is a financial crisis. Let us borrow money we don’t have so as to keep the level of services we have become accustomed to. We can always ask Acme Monopoly Inc. to print us some more currency, it is even more environmentally friendly these days. We have computers, there is no need for killing trees to make banknotes. Printing money is eco-friendly. Are we not wonderful green warriors? Don’t worry about the interest payments we can always borrow some more money to cover them.”

Putting stuff off until Monday next week when we can then re-schedule it for the next quarter is unwise and not timely. Of course, we can then reschedule until the next financial year, if it seems convenient so to do and we can thereby avoid any nasty decisions.

“In the context of inflation let us put off HS2 until next year to save money, when due to inflation the prices will be higher…Genius at work!”

The thing is the fairy godmother does not exist. I am sorry to piss on your fire / burst your bubble…

We cannot pin our hopes on a saviour to get us out of this mess, we as a humanity have to change…and swiftly so.

Philosophy and Buddhism, Quotations

Alternatives to the Ten Commandments

This from Wiki…

Bertrand Russell (1951)

—

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. He formulated these ten commandments:

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Karma, Musings, Questions

Offering Alternate Hypotheses

I like to offer alternate hypotheses to people from time to time. It has been my experience that people will “take” the hypothesis which most closely matches their prejudices and maps onto their confirmation bias.

For example, if I was making a complaint say to a former employer and I offered “you could if you wish think of me as a disgruntled former employee”. People would be very likely to pounce on this hypothesis so as to discount and down value any complaint that I was making. If I said that I could get an Asperger’s diagnosis and then suggested that my words therefore are more likely to be true than someone trying to protect a reputation. Who would you believe, your famous pal or the person with a personality disorder?

I like this kind of question.

I have joked about delusion and insanity in this blog. I have offered the notion that I am a burn-out. I am far more comfortable discussing madness and illusion than many who imagine themselves sane and upstanding.

Over the last few days, I have outlined one meditation from 2009 which was a verbatim account from my journals. I did indeed write that in my journal. There are two simple ways of looking at this. One it was brain memory of a genuine subjective initiation process. Two it was a complex thought form built by my highly visual mind having taken various elements from the blue books opus.

There is no way you could prove which from wherever you are reading this.

I will just interject that I used to teach group theory and molecular symmetry which can have very image focused ways of working. Some do it mathematically I do it by visuals.

If indeed I have taken the Third initiation, then treating me poorly has wide and long lasting karmic implications.

If I am simply a burn-out who does a lot gardening and too much reading, the karmic implications are of a much more local scale.

Here is an interesting question.

If you were offered two hypotheses concerning a situation. Would you take the one which was the most convenient for you at least at first pass?

Musings, Quantum, Questions, Satire

Are you a Bit one Dimensional?

Many people focus their attention on a fairly small part of the perceptual hyper-surface, a local potential energy minimum if you like. As a consequence, they can get stuck or trapped in the box of their own thinking. They can find it hard to think outside the box.

—

Only certain beliefs are allowed or accepted by their minds. Inconvenient truths do not commute.

Some do not have the potential or ability to imagine ideas outside of their comfort zone and religious, political or scientific dogma.

There is a danger that the UK is lurching towards party gate groundhog. This will be a shame. I suspect that the UK government is trapped deep in a trap of its own making. It cannot choose between the devil or the deep blue sea.

I have a cunning plan. I know, let us dream up a catchy three word slogan where each letter of the slogan starts with the same hypnotic letter.

Bring Back Boris…that mantra should hypnotise…

buddhism, Cause & Effect, Juxtaposition, Philosophy and Buddhism, Quotations

Alternatives to the Ten Commandments and Diamond Sutra

This from Wiki…

Bertrand Russell (1951)

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. He formulated these ten commandments:

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

——

Climate Change, Musings, Questions

Is Knowledge Fixed and Rigid?

The answer of course is a big fat no.

But people who subscribe to the current fashionable world version are adamant from time to time that the current world version is the only explanation. They will not accept things that stray from the “accepted” dogma.

I just found this on the BBC web site:

“The cultural changes that took place following the Neolithic are huge, but we don’t know a lot of how those changes happened,” she said.

However, even in the hands of such experienced archaeologists, one AlUla discovery has continued to elude explanation. Spread over an area of a staggering 300,000 sq km and built to a fairly consistent type, are 1,600 monumental rectangular stone structures that also date to the Neolithic period. Initially named “gates” due to their appearance from the air, the structures were later renamed “mustatil”, which translates to “rectangle” in Arabic.

“It makes the mind race that we have structures as big as five to six football fields, made of thousands of tonnes of stone, that not only cover such as massive geographic region but that also are 7,000 years old,” said Dr Hugh Thomas, co-director of Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Projects (AAKSAU). He has been working alongside McMahon for the past two years conducting aerial archaeology surveys and targeted excavations to understand the mustatil’s purpose.

New discoveries are being made all of the time, yet people can be very insistent. There are loads of theories about the past, we may be interpreting the past through transference from today. We pooh pooh the flat earth hypothesis and that the rotation of the universe is about the earth. What will future humanity pooh pooh about our times? Are we the only ones {ever} in history that are getting everything right?

I’ll suggest one thing: mobile ‘phone blindness, and in the context of climate crisis.

How many mobile phones have you had? I am on my third, which I share, having purchased my first one in the late nineties.

The above data are in tonnes of CO2

Have a look at these carbon footprint data. I weigh 94 kg, so a new phone produces nearly as much carbon dioxide by mass as a middle aged welshman weighs! That shiny thing to which you have an umbilicus, does that!! If you have never been to a semiconductor fabrication plant, it may surprise you how high the footprint of a ‘phone is. Silicon is made from sand; how hot do you think you have to heat sand to get it to melt?

Many bang on about climate change and then upgrade their ‘phones…There is a blindness to inconvenient truths.

People are lazy they tend to speak about evolving knowledge as if it is fixed, absolute and true. They don’t say things like the current socially accepted view is… I have heard scientists speaking as if the model is the reality, rather than in the context of…blah,blah, blah.

Do you think it is possible that we might discover things archeological which we currently rule out as myth and fantasy?