The totalitarian within us

A recent Sunday found us walking the hills above Matlock. For some reason lost in the mists of time, Matlock attracts hordes of motorcyclists, especially on a fine day and especially on a Sunday.

The rumble of exhausts seems continuous. Even high up on the hill it was loud. Low frequency sound carries and motorcyclists seem to love it. At street level it can drown out a conversation. Looking down on yet another stream of big blokes on big machines it momentarily seemed ridiculous, excessive in the something should be done sense...

...but not for long. I was once a motorcyclist myself and even now I fancy a ride on a big beast of a bike. Not through Matlock though. Yet the worm of intolerance was there right enough, poking a scowling head out of its little hole when the rumble became particularly loud.

All of us seem to have these worms of intolerance, the inner totalitarian who would ban even the most innocuous activity. Politics thrives on it, but where does it come from, this totalitarian worm? Why has it become such an integral feature of modern life?

A fundamental aspect of human behaviour is the way we follow whatever path seems to lead to the minimum number of surprises. It’s a survival trait. When confronted with a range of possibilities we seem to be programmed to seek the safest and that is the one with the lowest likelihood of springing surprises. We minimise the number of situations where we may have to adapt in unexpected ways.

It’s why our ancestors formed tribes, worshipped gods, built castles, made laws, formed treaties, developed medicines and generally tried to insure themselves against all manner of eventualities. It’s why we are suckers for an infinite number of promised lands where punters supposedly live in a state of bliss and perfect safety.

The sinister link with totalitarian government is obvious. Totalitarian madness  is what we get when ruling castes rigorously root out potential surprises as a key element of their political schema and their own survival. That’s the problem, when our leaders and their senior functionaries aim to minimise surprises – all surprises - everywhere.

Doesn’t work forever of course. With totalitarian government we lose the ability to adapt and surprises become more dangerous to the rigid structures built to keep them out. Eventually a fatal combination of surprises leads to collapse, we have to adapt all over again and in so doing we pave the way for another bout of totalitarian control.

If so, then the most interesting question is where are we in the eternal totalitarian cycle? Pretty obvious I’d say.

We are on the that part of the cycle where totalitarian plans, schemes and laws are spewing all over us until we don’t know if we can get through a whole day without breaking some law. It may be a long climb to the peak though. That pesky adaptability keeps us going for a long time.

The key point seems to be that we can do nothing about it, nothing whatsoever. The ebb and flow of totalitarian rule is a feature of our mental biochemistry. We may have big brains with amazing capabilities, but the inexorable logic of personal safety always seems to screw us up.

It appears that we are unable to choose a path which is likely to lead us to more surprises than the alternative. Our biochemistry just doesn’t allow it. How could it? This is the totalitarian within us and until we untangle it, understand it and learn how to veto its imperatives, until we learn not to seek safety at any cost then the cycle is bound to continue.

In short, we sample the world to ensure our predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy and surprises are avoided. In this view, perception is enslaved by action to provide veridical predictions (more formally, to make the freeenergy a tight bound on surprise) that guides active sampling of the sensorium. 
Karl Friston

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The natural indifference of men

Most men — and certainly I could not always claim to be one of the exceptions — have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our selfish existence.

Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, we really have no tenderness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Blithedale Romance (1852)

Was Hawthorne right? His was a much harsher world than ours, one where those who couldn’t hack it were faced with the most miserable destitution and even starvation. Somehow we have drifted into another world where a grey official version Hawthorne's tenderness may be offered to strangers on our behalf via social institutions. We may or may not approve - the institutions are indifferent.

It is as if the concept of ‘stranger’ has become much more tenuous in our connected world. As if the horrors and tragedies of the twentieth century have squeezed out much of what Hawthorne calls the natural indifference of men by downplaying our notions of 'stranger'.

Ironically the notion 'stranger' changes into the strange one who lives within but does not conform, does not emit the right signals. The internal stranger who deserves no sympathy, support or friendship, who may be abused with impunity.    

Indifference though – it feels natural to me. An aspect of survival perhaps? A natural suspicion of strangers, indifference to their needs or their fate. It seems to go hand in hand with assessing the outsider without any confounding assumption of emotional ties, no attachment to their claims, their stories or their demands. It seems to remind us that people we don’t know are indeed strangers, that strangers still exist in this joined up world of ours.

Our world may be kinder in this respect, but also more superficial, bound up with social approval and the role of the state in setting personal standards to which we must conform. We have become enmeshed in a network of norms to which we are expected to subscribe. Or we don’t subscribe, emit the wrong signals, attract disapproval.

If we don’t subscribe then perhaps Hawthorne’s natural indifference hides itself behind a common enough type of conformity which is visibly reluctant, which conforms only outwardly and makes it obvious that this is so. None of which can be healthy.

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Assange update

http://www.executedtoday.com/2014/09/06/1771-matthias-klostermayr-the-bavarian-hiasl/

Following our London visit and walkpast of the Ecuadorian Embassy last month, where perhaps the most famous victim of the abuse-inviting European Arrest Warrant is besieged by the British Government, and where the (sole) Met police guard slipped furtively round the corner when we spotted him, it has been decided:

(a) to remove the guard, after spending 10+ millions of pounds allegedly securing this fugitive from dodgy justice - and I'd really like to see the accounts for that thoroughly audited;

(b) to deny Assange his right to medical assessment - with potentially lethal consequences.

How does this look to fair-minded people? Perhaps HMG is unselfconscious - or is it simply thundering arrogance?

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.

 

- Robert Burns (1786)

 

"History has taught me, that RULERS are much the same in all ages & under all forms of government: they are as bad as they dare to be."

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a letter to his brother George (c. 10 March 1798)

It's odd, but in various ways - e.g. reflections on national constitutions and the abuse of State power -both sides of the Atlantic seem to be revisiting the late eighteenth century.


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Spivs to right of them, Dorks to left of them

A few days ago I read a piece in The Engineer about various alternatives for UK nuclear.

The situation over Britain’s proposed fleet of new nuclear reactors can charitably be described as a mess, and it isn’t one that looks likely to be tidied up any time soon. 

An interesting start but painfully familiar. Further on there is a mention of Liquid Fuelled Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) and opportunities for the UK to involve itself in what may turn out to be an important nuclear development.

If it’s true that the UK is incapable of developing a fighter jet on its own (and we gave our opinion on that a few months ago) then it must surely be beyond our capability to sort out all the problems with LFTR development. But there are interested parties in the US and thorium research is underway in China: this sounds like a prime candidate for a multinational research effort, something which would probably be more palatable to many than the current proposed Chinese investment in UK nuclear.

What struck me was not so much the content of the piece, but the political realities illustrated by the above photo. These two guys are supposed to have our hopes for the future on their shoulders. 

We must be mad.

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More things in heaven and earth, Horatio

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

- Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

In the DM today, an account of how the SAS used the occult after WWII to find the victims and perpetrators of war crimes:

"On one occasion they even called upon the spirit world, setting up a Ouija board on a table in Villa Degler’s candle-lit drawing room. Numbered playing cards were laid out, and the letters of the alphabet. An upturned glass was placed in the middle.

 

"Suddenly the glass spelt out a name, ‘F-o-r-d-h-a-m’, followed by ‘I was killed at Cirey’ - a village in the Vosges. The ‘message’ revealed that he was an Allied airman whose bomber had crashed. He and another crew member were captured and made to dig their own graves before being shot.

 

"The next morning, the team sped off to Cirey, where locals took them to an unmarked grave. When they dug, they turned up two bodies.

 

"The Ouija board also identified the German responsible for the shootings. The team ran him through a registry of suspected war criminals and discovered a man by that name had been in the Gestapo. He was arrested."

 

When I was a schoolboy, some friends experimented with Ouija. They came back terrified. You may be as rational as you like; I'm not messing with it.

 

 

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Spiderman the fraudster

We took the children down to the library to hear a storyteller enact a West African tale about the trickster spider/man, Anansi (converted to a rabbit in the U.S. Uncle Remus stories).

The story roughly paralleled this one:

Anansi heard the birds talking about the Dokanoo tree in the river. He could only get to the tree if he could fly. The birds gave Anansi some feathers so that he could fly.

Anansi flew to the tree. He was greedy and the birds took his feathers away. Anansi was scared to be in the middle of the river.

Alligator came by, and Anansi asked him for a ride. He took Anansi to Alligator’s home. Anansi was scared to go to his home.

Alligator liked to wash his eggs in the river. He told Anansi to help him wash his eggs. They went down to the river and Anansi ate an egg. He passed an egg to Alligator and said “One.” Anansi ate another egg. He passed an egg to Alligator and said “Two.” Anansi ate another egg. He passed an egg to Alligator and said “Three.” Anansi ate another egg. This happened until Anansi had eaten eleven eggs and there was only one left. For all this time it was the same egg passed to Alligator! Anansi would rub it in the river and pass it back to Alligator.

Now Anansi took the egg basket back to Alligator’s home. Alligator’s sons gave Anansi a ride back to the other side of the river. By the time Alligator knew what Anansi had done, he was gone.

It was great. The children learned some gestures to go with it, and a little song, and a fair bit of Jamaican patois (the teller was made up as a "traditionally built" mama).

Then came a question for the children: what was the moral of this story? And they said, don't steal.

Perhaps it's because they're young. Or maybe even at that age, they know how to give the expected answer.

For obviously, the lesson is exactly the opposite. Waking up hungry and unable to access food on his own, Anansi has used his ingenious brain to cheat the birds and Alligator, returning home safely with a bellyful of fruit and eggs. Like "King Rat" and "Ivan Denisovitch", it's about survival and ruthlessly ditching conventional mores that are likely to see you stay poor, or even starve to death.

"If you can let us have a handling fee and your bank details, we can transfer a large sum into your account..."

Meanwhile, a group of fervid little minds has filed away this experience to puzzle out its deeper meanings over the years to come.


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Evans, it's another black box

Sackers recently sent me a link about David Evan’s climate theory.

Dr Evans has a theory: solar activity. What he calls “albedo modulation”, the waxing and waning of reflected radiation from the Sun, is the likely cause of global warming.

A summary of his initial work can be found here and later work is here - far too much to summarise in a single blog post. The work is certainly interesting, but as with many climate claims the first issue is whether or not it deserves attention. The second is how much?.

The basic problem is that there is no such thing as climate science and no such tribe as climate scientists even though we use the terms in order to take part in the debate. In reality there are many specialist climate areas and many specialist scientists but unlike more established sciences, climatology hasn’t yet reached a state of overall coherence. There is no climate equivalent of the periodic table.

An alternative to absorbing the minutiae of Dr Evan’s approach is to treat the whole thing as a black box. This in no way implies that the Evans theory is not worth studying for anyone so inclined. The black box approach is merely a practical way to tackle the incoherence problem for those of us with no strong allegiances to any particular theory. Each climate theory is treated as a black box.

It doesn’t matter what is in the box.

It doesn’t matter who built it.

It doesn’t matter who endorses it.

Predictive performance is what matters.

So Dr Evan’s black box passes or fails its first test between 2017 and 2021. Even if cooling occurs on cue, this black box has only passed one simple test. A coin toss could do as much. It doesn’t follow that the Evans box will pass any other tests.

This testing process could go on for decades, but so what? Science is merely a complex way of saying “if you do this you see this”, so that’s how we test assertions about the future. We wait. Scientists may prefer us to admire their lovingly crafted box before it passes any test whatever, but that’s another and much older story - human behaviour.

Having said that, Dr Evans is in my view an interesting chap. I've been following his posts from the beginning because we need such people if we are to make progress. We need to find the climate equivalent of the periodic table because as yet we don't have it. 

Perhaps 2017 will give us our first clue but don't bet on it. 

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