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Sunday 22 November 2015

Not enough tedium say campaigners

From Tedium Central

Emergency doctors and safety campaigners are calling for a national home-visiting scheme to help prevent injuries to toddlers.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) say it would make a "huge difference".

Modern life is rather like aimless wandering through a strange mixture of fog and treacle, but wandering safely thanks to people such as the good folk at RoSPA. The obvious question is whether or not human beings are evolving a tedium gene. The extraordinary value of such a gene is obvious enough. 

A bureaucratic world needs people who are genetically adapted to a uniformly tedious life, a dreamlike state where nothing is ever achieved, where all goal-directed activity is frustrated by a plethora of intervening forces, but thanks to the tedium gene it doesn't matter. Fog and treacle are good, even doubleplusgood.

8 comments:

Demetrius said...

Especially treacle, real treacle that is. The Empire was won on treacle.

Mac said...

A K Haart,
"Once you understand that life is on auto pilot and free will is an illusion, you can finally begin to relax ever deeper into the enveloping present moment."
I go that from the link below that someone sent me and which is making me dizzy trying to get my head round....

http://www.truthcontest.com/entries/the-present-universal-truth/

A K Haart said...

Demetrius - treacle tart is the ultimate comfort food. Or one of them at least.

Mac - I shall use my free will to answer that comment. Spinoza had the best answer I know of - if we understand then the fact that we do understand has an effect on the world around us. In other words, free will is participation.

Sackerson said...

That's funny, I was just going to mention Spinoza. Wasn't his resolution of the problem to accept determinism? But in that case, there is also the paradox that one has a choice whether to accept.

A K Haart said...

Sackers - he did accept determinism but only in his particular seventeenth century sense. There are always loose ends, but the participation idea seems to be his solution. By understanding reality we are at one with it and in a sense the question of free will evaporates.

Derek said...

The Dinner Ladies at Clarks College made wonderful treacle tart. Mum was ‘char’ there, and would bring surplus of this delicacy home for immediate consumption.

Health & safety treacle on the other hand, whilst well intended, is crippling and inedible, but so loved by bureaucrats and petty officials. Fog, is the reasoning behind its deliverance. Little to be seen in it.

A K Haart said...

Derek - that reminds me of a kind of treacle roll we had at school. Served with custard it was probably the best pud on offer.

Demetrius said...

We had a Clarks College in my town when a boy. BTW, did Spinoza ever work in a treacle mine as an exercise in practical determinism?