January 2020

“Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” Isaiah 5:8

At the origin of every modern civilisation is always one book. Ideas are what civilisations are literally made of - all of their most important shaping beliefs will come from that one book. For our civilisation, it’s unquestionably the Bible. In this way I’m religious, though I don’t attend nor belong to any church. Pick any public issue even today and you’ll find the underlying ideas lead back to the Bible in some way.

Here’s a way to maybe bridge the gap between how we think about landscape and how aborigines do. Our agriculture sees soil, water, plants and animals as means to an end. To provide us with food. However plants, animals, water and soil have ends of their own, independently of us. Aboriginal landscape management works with everything as an end in itself, rather than as a means. They do everything to meet the needs of the plants, animals, water and soil, because in turn they know that they will help to meet our needs too. It’s not some New Age love of the land, it’s seeing the landscape as a whole collection of agencies that need to work together, for mutual benefit. It all comes back to how much we’re willing to grant agency to other things. Humans are very reluctant to do that, it challenges their sense of self to admit other things have agency. Try telling somebody soil, water, plants and even animals have intelligence, for example. Our ideas about agency are incredibly narrow.

Some possible hard lessons from the fires. My observations that I’ll post over a few days, I’d be very interested in what others have been thinking. #1 If we romanticise the landscape as ‘the bush’, and put our houses in it, they will burn down.

Possible hard lessons from the fires #2. In psychology a Madonna-whore complex is seeing women only as either saintly, or whores. This to me is exactly what our idea of ‘the bush’ is. It’s either rubbish to be cleared away, or sacred forest to be worshipped. The problem is us.

Straya loves heroes who mop up disasters. We did it with the Anzacs, and with every war since. Now we’re doing it with firefighters. Who are the heroes that prevent disasters? Straya sees those people as pains in the arse, who get in the way of drinking, gambling, sport, holidays to Bali, outdoor recreation and capital gains on houses. “But firefighters don't want us to see heroes, because calling them heroes overstates their ability to control fires and downplays the long-term psychological impacts of fighting fires.”

Monks once saved civilisation. In the Dark Ages their monasteries were what kept the ideas that are actually what we call civilisation alive. They were the only ones who kept the knowledge of basic things like agriculture and metallurgy. Ideas ARE society. What will today’s monasteries be? It sadly is unlikely to be universities, their descendants. They’re too busy ‘serving customers’.

Shall we have a new award? Idiot Australian of the year? A strong candidate here. Name unchanged in case you run into him and he needs help with his shoelaces.

Possible hard(est) lessons from the fire, #3. Disaster relief, appeals. The flood of emotional giving in disasters isn’t ‘the community coming together’. It’s not really about helping others. Most disaster relief is also a disaster, in practical terms; its main function is to give individuals a way to express their own identity in relation to a difficult situation. You can show this by listing all of the many social disasters that attract no attention at all - it’s a highly selective phenomenon. Like hay runners, bushfire relief points to how individual givers want to create an identity for themselves, rather than to any great community spirit.

Ethical vegans view life in the same way Right to Lifers do - I’m curious if they see that. Environmental and health-based vegans pay no attention at all to actual landscapes and how they work. These idealised views to me are even stronger evidence of how ideas are really what drive everything. Bad ideas drive bad things.

How about we make the bushfires the trigger for reconciliation? Reconciliation with the continent, with aboriginal people as key guides. We need them a lot more than they need us, that seems a perfect incentive to do it. That and the continent burning us to a cinder.

Penrith hitting 48.9 degrees yesterday made me think yet again - where we need to get to with climate change isn’t everybody who dismisses it suddenly believing it. We need to get to them saying ‘ok, maybe there’s a problem, let’s act as if it’s a risk’. Like they do when they insure their car or house, and with their health insurance. If they can’t say that, we’re dealing with fundamentalist terrorists, simple as that.

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. I don’t think we see our culture as a culture, we see it as just as how things are. Take the idea of ‘having a good time’. While nearly every part of the planet devotes some time to recreation, historically it’s one of the surest markers of wealth. It’s an invention of the aristocracy. When we disengage with the problems of our societies and focus on recreation, I don’t think we often see how much we are the world’s aristocrats.

Is it becoming clearer that the ultra-conservative forces in power in all the Anglo countries are only good at solving ‘spin’ problems, not actual problems? Problems they invent and manage as marketing events, like terrorism, the ‘economy’, freedom of speech, Brexit etc. When they’re faced with actual problems, they have no clue. They try to market the problem away, like ScoMo right now, even advertising during an actual crisis.

Do you know who funds firefighting in NSW? It’s insurance companies (about 74%), with local government (about 12%) the next biggest contributor. Together they fund nearly 93% of all firefighting.

When our collective orgasm of disaster and disaster appeals is over again, will we listen to those who say it’s all as simple as more hazard reduction burning? Or to those who want to lock up these spaces again as untouched national parks? Or do we go into these cleared spaces and create mosaic landscape patterns, of alternating thinned trees and grass clearings? That’s how they used to be. We could move earthmoving equipment in for example to start creating clearings, we wouldn’t even need fire for now. And when we do burn again, we don’t need ‘hazard reduction’ - our landscape isn’t a hazard - we need landscape-building burning, a vastly different thing. All very hard, all needs lots of thinking.

Maybe people can help me understand the appeal of Instagram. I’ve tried it a few times, and each time it seems to be the things I like least about social media - looking at other peoples’ pictures detailing their day, like I’m stuck at a slide night of their last holiday - magnified by 10. What am I missing? I know it’s probably miserable old bastard territory to say it, but I’m almost completely disinterested in other peoples’ personal lives. I don’t inflict most of my personal life on them through social media, for that same reason. (I actually don’t think people are all that interested in others’ lives, I think it’s a social comparison process, curation of a social identity, but that’s another topic.)

It’s apparently OK to ‘play politics’ in emergencies when it’s foreigners in boats, but not when the country is a smoking ruin. Strayans like to say ‘now is the time to act, to help, not to talk’. To know HOW to act, we need to think and talk at the same time as we’re acting. Straya *can* walk and chew gum at the same time.

The UK, which has a deeply conservative government, has gone from 75% of its energy coming from coal in 1990, to 2.1% today. That’s TWO-point-one. Those of you who get all excited over nuclear and ‘baseload’ - its use of nuclear has dropped as well in the same period. How long do we want to be the laughing stock of the world down under? Just long enough to be incinerated?

Here’s a question for anybody who says solar power is no good as a mass power option, because it only works when the sun shines. Who the hell uses much energy when the sun doesn’t shine? You’re asleep.

I think all civilisation is the management of one basic fact. Stupid people are too stupid to recognise their own stupidity. That sounds like some cheap shot or judgment, but actually it’s a deep reflection on how societies have always worked. Intelligence is what progresses all societies, and part of managing that intelligence is knowing how to manage the absence of intelligence too. Populism is what happens when this basic fact is ignored. Critically, no person gets to decide who is intelligent and who isn’t - we all collectively decide, based on what ideas actually work, across generations. Our institutions make that judgment, across generations, which is why populists destroy those first. Populists used to trash and burn monasteries too.

You’ll often hear people argue against renewable energy as being unfairly ‘subsidised’ by government, whereas existing energy generation isn’t. This is because the costs of carbon pollution aren’t included in the sums - the reason the lobbyists for the status quo so furiously opposed any sort of carbon pricing. Without a price, the market can’t calculate the cost. The IMF calculated the cost. Globally over 5 trillion dollars, and climbing. Fossil fuels are monumentally subsidised by government, subsidies for renewables aren’t even in the same ballpark.

This happens with EVERY disaster. We get an orgy of hero worshipping, followed by an avalanche of emotional ‘helping’, without thought. Lack of thought also causes the fires in the first place. There is a national emergency - a chronic lack of thinking.

I would say what makes a person smart is if the ideas they have capture and change reality in some powerful way. It’s the ideas that make them smart, it’s not them (ideas don’t belong to any of us, they can be shared by millions). How does a person come upon the best ideas? Ideas need a home, as much as me or you, without a home they don’t survive. Ideas live in institutions. Schools, universities, libraries, bureaucracies etc. Institutions are the past (memory) and future of society, acting in the present. Ideas are the eternal part of society, smart people inject eternity into social life, via ideas, via institutions.

I could kiss the man. Let’s add it to the long list of ‘emotional load of rubbish’ that infects Strayan life. “We've had fire down the landscape here that has had burns go right through it [during colder months] and it hasn't slowed it at all," he said. "The emotive argument is not supported that fuel reduction burning will fix all our problems.” "Some of the hysteria that this will be the solution to all our problems is really just quite an emotional load of rubbish, to be honest."

Thanks Peita for this quote: “Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” Laurence J. Peter

It’s war now. Let’s get a billionaire race to the top. I pledge $2 to the Relief from Bushfire Relief Fund. (Too Gervais?)

Unless it rains, this disaster could even top the bushfires.

This is a selfie. There’s no pic, just these few words. They’re me, right now, my ‘thoughts’. It’s strange that we’ve come to think of a selfie as a picture, how others see us. We define our selves through others.

More on selfies. Yes they’re a picture of ‘me’, but isn’t the ‘me in many (most?) selfies actually a copy or imitation of somebody else?

Bri trying to save badgers. An example for me how ideas matter more than anything. Animal ‘welfare’, ‘saving’ animals; if you frame it that way, you’ve already lost, animals are already seen as expendable. All that can save them is humans offering them ‘welfare’.

If we can make the human response to enormous disasters seem heroic, it feels like it balances it up somehow, like humans still have some control, by making them super-humans. It’s not a surprise to me that most modern-day fictional superheroes come out of the US, a nation that enforces a heroic individualism in the face of any event. In reality heroes are always a fantasy story, but they make us feel safer.

“Whatever terrifies always ends by being adored.” Gabriel Tarde

More vortex tubes. You can buy one for about $50. Nobody can explain how they work (I suspect Archimedes could, but nobody reads him now). They defy modern physics. Simple compressed air in the top, instantly splits into separate hot and cold air streams. Not one moving part anywhere, it’s literally just a tube. The temperature difference can be 3 figures. The cold can be cryogenically cold. Vortices are the key to the mystery. Archimedes put the vortex at the centre of all creation. All of the mysticism of our time I think comes from ignorance of vortices, of spirals. Did you know your body is a spiral? They don’t teach that.

My two cents again on why the world seems crazy. People seem ‘divided’ because we’re mistaking a battle of ideas (what’s really happening) for a battle between people. Like individuals, societies don’t like unresolved ideas, it makes them profoundly uncomfortable. But we’re not seeing it because we’re looking at the people who ‘hold’ ideas, rather than the ideas themselves.

Maybe this is the greatest illusion we live under. ‘The body’. When you use a straw, it really does feel like you’re ‘sucking’ that liquid up the straw. But you’re not, the Earth’s atmosphere is pushing it up the straw. Whether it’s walking, sitting, breathing, standing, lifting, getting fit - we don’t do any of these things with our ‘bodies’. All of them are relationships between our bodies and the planet. This is the reason I disagree so often with doctors, exercise experts and bodywork people, like Alexander Technique.

Testing a perception. Did anybody else find that the human interest side of the bushfires, with press descending on towns, only really took off when coastal towns were threatened? Minimal before then.

Tarde, Plato, Lippmann, Lawrence and others independently saw aristocracy as the mature state of society. They saw democracy as a transition state, when new aristocracies replace old ones. They both thought hierarchy in society is created by hierarchies of value, that the role of the aristocracy is to cultivate and protect the most valuable parts of civilisation, to be copied by others who in turn defer to the hierarchy for guidance. It’s a very difficult idea for our democratic age to think about, we’re so used to seeing imbalances of power and wealth in hierarchies, but we see less the hierarchies of value that create them. That’s because the job of our democratic age is to create the next aristocracy. That’s probably what populism is clumsily tapping into, peoples’ desire for hierarchy. Of value, not just wealth and power.

I’m going to talk about beavers here, so get your smutty little chuckles out of the way first. Australia needs beavers. On just about every other continent, beavers almost single-handedly do what we can only clumsily try to do with earthmoving equipment. They not only hydrate the entire landscape, they also filter the water and prevent it flooding. They’re geniuses of water engineering. And unlike human dams, their dams are constantly maintained and shifted as needed. This side of animals - their actual engineering of the landscape - is so often missed.

Cane toads scare people off from introducing species to Australia. But one of the main reasons we get these explosions from introduced species is that we don’t have enough of our own competing animals left. There are truck-sized holes in our own ecosystems crying out for animals. The answer might be to introduce even more animals and plants, not fewer.

Happy bday other RV :)

Try replacing 'Left' and 'Right' with 'fashion' and 'custom'. In history politics is always carried out between two parties, one representing new ideas (fashion), and one representing existing customs.

This current season of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is a cracker.

Texas. TEXAS.

Want action on climate change? Or anything? Turn it into a comparison, a competition.

Beavers did this. With their teeth. There are quite a few approaches now to how to shape landscapes. Almost none of them mention animals and plants. They mention tractors, bulldozers, chain saws etc. But animals are smarter engineers than us, cost nothing and do all the ongoing maintenance too.

Thanks to Sarah for these. Humour sometimes gets right to the important point. Also, something for your friends who say “the climate has always changed, nothing new here.” The Earth's oceans absorbed the equivalent of 394 million Hiroshima atomic bombs of extra energy last year.

‘Germs’. Has a negative ring to it, hey? I think we made exactly the same mistake with microbes - the micro landscape - as we did with the macro landscape. We isolated out a few species that are useful to us and slaughtered everything else. And then wondered why the landscape started to fight back.

You know I suspect some of the people who wear the original might not notice the difference. Thanks Ed.

We’re living in an aged care facility, run by the residents. All arguments: economic, climate change - whatever - really come back to ‘you young people are soft and spoiled’. This is what ageing societies look and sound like.

Both Proust and Tarde said people don’t fall out of love, they fall in love with somebody else. A desire is always overpowered by another new desire. You don’t stop liking vanilla ice cream, you start liking strawberry more. People still like free to air TV, but they like streaming more. Etc. Does it ring true? Does to me.

Really curious why if you offered that glass of dirty water to most people, there’s no way they’d take even a sip. But you can tell people air is filthy, even hazardous, and they’ll go jogging. In history clean air has always been at the front line of major social change.

Surely the greatest photo of all time.

It’s only day 1, I know. But a few days ago Lithgow was forecast to get 40-80mm of rain today. I doubt it got even 15. And now there’s a blue sky. More forecast for coming days but percentages already dropping, we’ll see.

I reckon you can trace most modern day problems, including climate change, to our inability to recognise the agency of anything that isn’t human. This planet has millions of other ‘agents ’ who could make our lives stupendously easy and our living spaces a true Garden of Eden. If we could just ditch our overwhelming arrogance in thinking we’re the only thinking agents on the planet, and can exist without our connection to other agents. Stop worshipping nature, stop shitting all over it, and focus on the connections.

Happy birthday :)

We’re still living the destruction of the world wars. Agriculture was even called an army in that war, and huge parts of the landscape were ripped up and changed to plowed fields, for the war effort. What we call ‘farmland’ today is directly descended from that war on the landscape.

What is freedom? This description of Spinoza might be the answer. Only thought tames ideas, and ideas determine reality. So only thought sets you free. “He was out to make a free man of himself...by thinking things through and connecting everything up”.

So all up there’s about $250 million of bushfire relief money to spend. That’s the scale of the emotional tidal wave that followed the fires. It’ll be a mess, it takes huge amounts of coordination to spend that sort of money. How did we become so American in our thinking, that charitable giving was considered the appropriate response to the fires? Once you gut the basic infrastructure of society (to fund tax cuts), all that’s left is millions of overly emotional citizens providing charity for disasters, disasters caused by the same gutting of society’s infrastructure. A tidal wave of more emotion over spending the 250 million is sure to follow, it’s the constant theme throughout.

I find it interesting that even in modern scientific agriculture, very few farms survive without an ongoing connection with the people who work them, across generations. A small remnant human-landscape link survives. Notice that a big reason the young leave the land is that the ‘land’ is now mostly ruined. If we reinstated connections to the animals and plants in the landscape, to go alongside the human-land connection, this wouldn’t have happened.

Elaine Ingham, soil scientist. The word soil comes from the Latin word humus, which is also the root of ‘human’. Our agriculture turns soil into lifeless dirt. Some facts about soil: - one handful of good soil contains more living things than all of the humans who have ever lived - soil holds over 80% of all carbon - increasing carbon in the soil by only 1.6% by restoring degraded farmland would remove the climate change problem, and - fixing the soil fixes water and fixes food production.

Australia should maybe do what Europe started years ago. Pay farmers to stay on the land. Not to farm, but to regenerate the land. Fix the soil, the vegetation, the water. It’s the obvious solution to the crisis, agriculture in Australia is mostly fundamentally broken and has little future. The food we need to eat should be grown on the remaining viable farms, which should also have strict soil, water and vegetation requirements. Fathers there can be subsidised too.

It’s a shame biology invented ecology. People tend to think of it as a biology thing, or a Greenie thing. Actually it’s a way of thinking. You look at how something only exists because of its connection to other things. You can apply it anywhere, economics, engineering, your friend group. Or bushfires - ultimately why did they happen? Because we don’t see the connections between the ‘natural’ world and ourselves.

Thanks to Janelle for sharing these. This is what happens when you turn soil into dirt. It buys a one-way ticket to NZ. All civilisations collapse when they destroy their soil.

Hugh discovered that if you say these obvious truths while the boomers still decide elections, you don't win the elections. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inequality-between-generations-our-children-deserve-mcdermott-mp?trk=d_public_post_promoted_post

Years ago already, Mike Archer (picture) suggested that Australia needed more mines, and far fewer farms. The mythology around farming in Australia masks the fact that it’s the single most destructive force in Australia, and in most other countries. It destroys entire landscapes. For a country that rode ‘on the sheep’s back’, this is an almost impossible fact to even talk about. People assume farming and agriculture are what feed us. They do, but most of it (nearly 80%) is exported. It’s basically soil mining.

Bushfire donations are now nearly $500 million. Stop?

Religion isn’t about a God in the sky. The origin of the word tells us what it’s about. It’s about what binds people together. I think our problem isn’t religion, all societies have an institutional religion at their very centre. It’s our ideas about religion that have gone wrong. Making it about belief in the supernatural. “Do you believe in God?” A stupid question.

Elton! What a great venue for it.

Ah, Straya Day. Where we celebrate the setting up of the world's largest offshore detention camp. A fine tradition we continue to this day.

Everyone should have the right to be an arsehole (my US constitutional law is rusty). There’s that pesky constitutional thing about not colluding with foreign countries for political gain, maybe that’s a ‘fake right’.

“Pater familias” was the Roman term for the father as ‘head of the family’. The father as authority figure in the family is still the foundation of our societies, the ‘State’ was modelled on the pater familias. Ultra conservatives never actually surrendered the father as the supreme authority in society, which is why they undermine governments (libertarianism), or have leaders who are ‘fathers of the nation’ (like China and other autocracies). It’s not exactly true that libertarians promote individualism instead of the State - they do that, but it’s an individualism based on the authority of the father. Most shock jocks are modelled on the pater familias, if you listen to them, they’re indistinguishable from a stern, lecturing father, attacking - you guessed it - government.

Big concerts now are sitting with lots of other people watching movies, while a band does the soundtrack. A bit like the old cinemas.

These always look scary. But it’s possible we misunderstand that viruses are active agents. It’s not in their best interest to wipe us out, we’re their hosts. They need us to survive. Usually pandemics arise in extreme situations, like the trenches in WW1, or the filthy crowding of medieval cities. [edit: our obsession with travel may end up being one of those ‘extreme’ drivers though, because it dramatically reduces the difficulty the virus has of finding fresh hosts.]

Overheard somebody saying that 'red tape' is slowing the handing out of bushfire donations to victims. That red tape is likely just working out some mechanism to hand the bloody stuff out, including figuring out who should actually qualify to get it, and how much. Straya can be such a stupid place sometimes, the almost total ignorance of how the place works is what drove the orgy of donations in the first place, often for things that weren't even needed. The same stupidty now wonders why it's so hard to spend the cash.

Look at this bullshit, now they're walloping the charities, day after day. Why? Because it takes the heat off their darling ScoMo. These charities are doing the work LNP governments at State and federal level should have done but didn't, and now the big fix is on to get the heat off the LNP. Absolute scum of the Earth, I'm already seeing others parroting this crap. Arsonists one week, Greenies the week before. Now charities. Distract, distract, distract from the fact ScoMo is an incompetent dickhead.

Teenagers. me: so boy, how about helping me unpack the dishwasher? son: dad, a family is a team. We work together. me: so you’ll help me unpack the dishwasher? son: my job in the team is to eat the meals, your job is to clean up.

I don’t think I’ve seen any concert described on social media as anything but ‘amazing!’ or ‘awesome!’

Know how dishwashers clean spectacularly without scrubbing? I use that for cleaning the shower. Mix a small amount of dishwasher powder with water in a spray bottle, and just spray it on the shower surfaces every couple of days. I add a bit of rinse aid sometimes to the bottle too. Seems to work, no scrubbing needed.

Our obsession with travel enormously increases the risk of pandemics. Once a virus knows it has access to millions of fresh hosts around the world through travel, its virulence can magnify hugely, because it no longer needs to be as concerned about killing the host it’s in, there’s fresh hosts easily available. People think I’m bonkers for being negative about travel, but when you try to live a life cut free from meaningful connection to space, here’s what can happen.

Happy birthday :)

I asked my son for a definition of ‘woke’, and he said “the opposite of you”. Burn. On Straya Day, why would somebody wanting to use a term like ‘Ms’ instead of Mrs be woke or politically correct, but somebody who thinks we should all be saluting flags isn’t?

A road is a nothing space. It takes you to another place, its purpose is always somewhere else, any spot on a road is meaningless for itself. Driving on a road makes you immobile with your attention fixed permanently onto that somewhere else. It’s why we travel, why our cities and towns revolve around roads and transport. The remnants of empire, the somewhere-else people. Anything that gets in our way of going somewhere else becomes roadkill. We never arrive, there’s always somewhere else to be.

This one is still a bit of a sleeper. https://ama.com.au/ausmed/algae-could-be-behind-deadly-disease-outbreak

There’s even a red hat. “No longer will you have to give in to toxic bullying feminist dogma and go against your ancient, biological nature as a woman, the men have arrived to help #MWGA”

What ideas are you a slave to? Wormtongue is I think a perfect metaphor for what ideas do to people, endlessly whispering in their minds and dulling their whole being, like the king here. Every tiny thing in your life is driven by some idea. It’s not your idea, ideas are separate to people. They’re active beings. You need to work hard, to think, to master ideas rather than have them master you.

I won’t get in a helicopter. Too many moving parts to go wrong, way too much metal flying around with high energy. Let this be a lesson to us all to keep our private helicopters well maintained.

I don’t think we often see how presumptuous and vain the idea of changing the world is. Only the privileged think of things in that way, as if ‘the world’ is something they have in their hands, to shape. As a concept, the world comes from maps. Maps come from empires. We come from empires.

I wonder how many lives and relationships are ruined by the idea that the secret to happiness is to do things that make you feel happy?

Hmm I tried to post happy birthday yesterday, it didn’t work. Happy belated birthday :)

I nearly didn't read this one (though Monbiot is generally good value), because it seemed ridiculous. But actually - much to think about here. The animals and plants we eat are all derived from microbes anyway, this takes it back to the source. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

In this excellent new Dracula, at one point there’s a chilling dramatic device where he says that people shouldn’t choose cremation because ‘it hurts’, and then allows us to hear people buried in a cemetery screaming to be let out. As I said, a dramatic device. But it made me think, because what we call ‘death’ is always shifting depending on current technology, how do we really know that a ‘dead’ person is no longer aware? We don’t even know that for a sleeping person (or in fact we do know now that sleep isn’t even unconsciousness).

Lots of ridiculous talk about arson in the bushfires. But there is another type of arson - social arson. People deliberately trying to inflame social relationships in society. Shock jocks are social arsonists. In the olden days they’d have been called whingers. Now Australia pays them multi-million dollar salaries to whinge 24 hours a day, lighting social fires repeatedly. Why do we allow this? I think because they speak for the cranky old man and woman demographic, the largest in society.

The great unthinking orgy of bushfire appeal continues on its wrecking ball way.

Democracy is often seen as the increasing freedom of individuals. But actually, that freedom is the increasing freedom to have others serve you. Under kings and emperors and tyrants, only they have the right to demand things of others. But as we increasingly imitated them, our societies are now places where everybody serves and is served by many others. That's all 'customer service' really means, and customers become more capriciously king-like every day. And the idea of 'public servants'. Democracy is really just distributed slavery or servitude. It's a society of mini-kings. (And this isn't just an analogy, it's how it actually evolved.)

When I was a kid Australia spoke about how clever it was, most people could list our famous inventions, like the Hills Hoist. Can you think of many great Australian discoveries or inventions of the past 25-30 years? Our society is ageing, focused on ‘lifestyle’ retirement luxuries funded by tax concessions, and not on new ideas. I don’t hate the boomers, I’m saying you can’t understand our country without realising there’s so many of them. The circle of life is broken, hugely skewed to the older folk. Our politics is the politics of the old: cranky, reactionary, conservative, and hostile to new ideas.

A few times here I’ve posted that there is no such thing as ‘nothing’. Some thought it was just a semantics thing, but I think it’s much more than that. For example, our idea of death is of it being a nothing - we simply cease to exist. But that’s not possible, you don’t even need to be religious to doubt it. ‘Nothing’ can’t exist, if you tried to describe it, you’d always be describing something. The alternative is that things are either actual or virtual (or actually both, at the same time). Science already knows this, and yet so many scientific people think nothing exists, and that death (for example) is us becoming nothing. Or they invent a separate spiritual realm to sit alongside our physical realm. All unnecessary, the ‘physical’ world is already actual and virtual/potential. Your actual self ‘dies’, but your virtual self is eternal.

I think people want something magnificent and glamorous. That magnificence is a scale of value. Royalty and the Church have been the historical answer at the country level. When replaced with secular republics, notice how the republics take on all the trappings of royalty. The US President has more pomp than the Queen. Outside politics the same process can be seen in the desire for luxury.

Have you ever been betrayed? The idea of betrayal is an interesting one. Like relationships are a contract. Proust said the essence of love is betrayal, not because people are bad, but because we love the idea of somebody, not them. Nothing else is possible. They’ll always betray that idea in some ways, because it’s our idea, not theirs.

How much of the misunderstanding in the world comes from dealing with other people one idea at a time, treating them as those ideas, rather than figuring out their entire worldview? Ideas are shared, people don't own them. But they own their worldview. I think if we spoke to peoples' worldview and not to the ideas that get sucked into that worldview, the world would change.

How ideas can destroy you. I’m almost certain Brian’s constant depression is heavily linked to his vegetarian (and now vegan) diet. It’s a studied connection. And the sinister thing is, the more he avoids meat, the worse he’ll feel and the more strident his vegetarian beliefs will become. It’s a vicious circle.