Well they aren't known for their awareness

Starmer did not know about tweets by 'extremist'

Sir Keir Starmer was unaware of the “abhorrent” views expressed by an alleged Egyptian extremist before he welcomed him to Britain.

It is understood that the Prime Minister was alerted to “extreme” social media posts by Alaa Abd el-Fattah only after they began circulating online. He is understood to consider the content of the posts “abhorrent”.

Sources said Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, and David Lammy, the Deputy Prime Minister – who also welcomed Mr el-Fattah’s arrival – were equally unaware of the posts.


To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from the bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

A Headline and a Quote

 

 Trump and his media buddies are taking the muddling of reality to a whole new level

In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.

George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-72)

The mighty volume of the world

Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note: whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on the main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from that slavish subjection to our own self-importance. And I had the mighty volume of the world before me. Nay, I had the struggling action of a myriad lives around me, each single life as dear to itself as mine to me. Was there no escape here from this stupidity of a murmuring self-occupation?

George Eliot - Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)


We now have that mighty volume of the world before us, it’s the internet. In George Eliot’s day it was books, libraries, experience, an enquiring mind and the time and resources to nurture that enquiring mind.

Was there no escape here from this stupidity of a murmuring self-occupation?

Some escape and some don’t and the division isn’t new. Nobody has to join the internet, they can play with it instead, entertain themselves, imagine they are what they are not. Yet perhaps the division is much sharper and far less likely to be a matter of social class than it was in George Eliot‘s day. 

The division has become more familiar too - we constantly see the stupidity of a murmuring self-occupation portrayed in the shallow media as a Good Thing. We see it in celebrity culture, politics, fashionable science, sport and the arts.

Just be yourself

You are who you want to be

Own who you are

 
We have always seen this type of invitation to indulge in the stupidity of a murmuring self-occupation, but now we have dropped the murmuring in favour of something much louder and far more visible. It all goes to make the division deeper. 

Yet having that mighty volume of the world before us does appear to have raised a previously unknown problem for Those Who Know Best. They don’t know best and too many of us know they don’t.

Misplaced Respect

More than three out of five people think Starmer does not respect them – poll

While in opposition, Sir Keir sought to make the concept of “respect” central to his pitch to voters, and research from UCL suggested this played a key role in convincing the public to back him and the Labour Party.

But a survey from More In Common and the UCL Policy Lab, published on Tuesday, suggested 63% of the public now thought the Prime Minister did not respect people like them, almost twice the 32% that thought so before the 2024 election.

And while 41% of the public thought Sir Keir did respect them before the election, that figure has fallen to 24%.


24% think Starmer respects them? Good grief.

You find no difficulty in tolerating him then? - you have a respect for a political platitudinarian as insensible as an ox to everything he can't turn into political capital. You think his monumental obtuseness suited to the dignity of the English gentleman.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

A superior brand of urban myth

Even a brief survey of the UK political and media landscape leads to various conclusions, but there are two linked and unmissable aspects –

Imbecility - the UK has a major problem with influential stupidity. 
Intransigence – the UK has a major problem with influential blockheads.

Influential imbecility is not a few wrong moves which could be corrected, it is an intransigent shift towards what appears to be a significantly lower level of intelligence within governing classes, institutions and professions. It is not new and not restricted to the UK.

One possible route down the rabbit hole is fashionable elite conversation. However fanciful or absurd they may be, some memes seem to become particularly fashionable, rather like a superior brand of urban myth. Some myths have clearly evolved into official policy, perhaps because elite thinking must remain on a higher plane – or private jet to be more materialistic.

It is as if an important social censor has been degraded – the censor which should detect stupidity within influential social contexts. Not a surprising conclusion unfortunately, influential stupidity has always been a problem.

Yet something may have moderated influential stupidity in the past, and an aspect of that moderation could have been a sense of place, of physical belonging, an essential stake in what works and has worked in the past, socially and culturally.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)


Perhaps this is it and always was. Those who would rule our lives should be well rooted in some spot of native land. Maybe an international, globalist outlook hinders a grounded viewpoint because those who could easily be elsewhere are in a sense nowhere and not suited to rule anywhere.

In this stupid world...

In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.

George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-72)

Moving on from George Eliot's observation, we have Microsoft Copilot's answer to this question  –

"what is Karl Friston's free energy principle" –

Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle is a fascinating framework that explains how living systems, like the brain, maintain order and adapt to their environment. At its core, it suggests that organisms minimize a quantity called "free energy," which is a measure of surprise or uncertainty about the world. By doing so, they can predict and respond to their surroundings more effectively.

This principle integrates ideas from neuroscience, physics, and Bayesian inference. It proposes that the brain acts as an "inference engine," constantly updating its internal models of the world based on sensory input. By minimizing the difference between its predictions and actual sensory data, the brain reduces uncertainty and maintains a stable state.

The Free Energy Principle has been applied to various fields, including understanding perception, action, learning, and even mental disorders. It's a unifying theory that offers insights into how biological systems resist disorder and adapt to their environments.


As the AI system says, it is a fascinating framework. It may be a neuroscientific framework, but in practical human terms it is not dissimilar to the George Eliot quote above or B. F. Skinner’s outlook on stimulus, response and reinforcement. No doubt Socrates took a similar view of group rhetoric.

To take just one example, we see Friston's framework in our political parties where individuals from the governing classes place great reliance on measuring surprise or uncertainty via the approval of their peers, not the approval of voters. Collective responsibility they call it, but this is misleading. Instead it is the minimising of surprise or uncertainty within a government peer group, this being the group and the group rhetoric which count.   

Traditional political divisions ensure that the approval of voters has secondary significance at best, one reason why we cannot expect political parties to provide competent political oversight of the permanent administration - their measure of competence is not ours and as things stand, it often can’t be. A global outlook deepens the division with national voters.

It may be possible to remedy this by greater feedback from voters such as the use of a referendum to approve any significant government policy. This would involve voters in those individual measures of surprise or uncertainty within the political classes. The nature of collective responsibility would then be changed. Opinion polls achieve this to some small degree, but the effect is weak compared to what could be a simple 'Yes' or 'No' in a binding referendum.

Friston’s framework also explains the position of reality-bound sceptics who find themselves outside certain measures of surprise or uncertainty when reality provides more powerful measures. In the sceptic's world, scepticism does minimise surprise or uncertainty. Believers minimise surprise or uncertainty by simply denying it. 

A practical example of this is the recent failure of radical gender politics in the UK. The sudden legal clarification may have been a surprise, but the ultimate failure of radical gender rhetoric was probably not a surprise to a large percentage of the population. Most were probably sceptics on this issue, even if the consequences of open discourse were uncertain.

To expand the example of UK political parties, it is possibly too optimistic to see Reform as a powerful reforming political party. Its elected members will adopt at least some of the measures they encounter within the general government model used to minimise surprise or uncertainty. Compromise will be driven by the need for worthwhile communication between Reform and the government machine - compromise to minimise surprise or uncertainty.

 In this stupid world...

A variable mixture

Britain’s wind power falls to virtually zero as Miliband prepares to cut reliance on gas

Britain’s wind generation is set to plummet to virtually zero this week as Ed Miliband presses ahead with plans to increase the nation’s reliance on renewable energy.

Much of the UK has seen zero hours of sunshine this month, and the first part of this week will see already-light winds hit fresh lows in many areas, according to Met Office forecasters.


To my father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionary doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and the scoundrel.

George Eliot - Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

A pantheon of ugly idols

The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them—like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)


Ugly idols – yes we know about ugly idols. We also know about beings who are often virtually our interpreters of the world, or that's what they intend to be. A feather-headed government promotes itself to millions in our digital age of immediate communication.

Wind turbines obtrude themselves on distant hills, fields of solar panels are no longer fields, ugly buildings crowd ugly cities and ugly imbecilities degrade the language of public life. Everything we buy and numerous aspects of life reflect the ugly reality of central diktat.

It was just luck Joe, but it finally ran out

Biden: I deserved a second term

Joe Biden said his achievements “merited” a second term in office as he addressed the nation for the first time since stepping back from the presidential race.

The US president, 81, suggested his “leadership in the world” and “vision for America’s future” had given Americans reason to elect him again, but said he would “pass the torch” to a new generation to keep his party united.


Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

Fenced In

Grandcourt's view of things was considerably fenced in by his general sense, that what suited him others must put up with. There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to corresponding stupidity. Mephistopheles thrown upon real life, and obliged to manage his own plots, would inevitably make blunders.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)


It’s an interesting quote with a fascinatingly grim analogy - Mephistopheles thrown upon real life. As Eliot points out, there is a link between lack of sympathy and stupidity. A necessary link too, because lack of sympathy is also a lack of information about certain situations. It can be a lack of important and even obvious information, but that's where the stupidity comes in.

We often see leaders caught by this particular problem. On the one hand too much sympathy renders decisive leadership difficult or even impossible, yet every now and then a lack of sympathy is bound to leave some pitfalls uncovered.

Nicola Sturgeon eventually discovered this the hard way. Politically she cannot be stupid, her success tells us that. Yet she had a fatal lack of sympathy with those who are concerned about the excesses of gender politics. Which was a stupid political lapse because the gender pitfall was obvious. To adapt Eliot –

Sturgeon’s view of things was considerably fenced in by her general sense, that what suited her politically others must put up with.

Winds and currents

A little unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged under the stress of social intercourse. The talk even of an honest man must often represent merely his wish to be inoffensive or agreeable rather than his genuine opinion or feeling on the matter in hand. His thought, if uttered, might be wounding; or he has not the ability to utter it with exactness and snatches at a loose paraphrase; or he has really no genuine thought on the question and is driven to fill up the vacancy by borrowing the remarks in vogue. These are the winds and currents we have all to steer amongst, and they are often too strong for our truthfulness or our wit. Let us not bear too hardly on each other for this common incidental frailty, or think that we rise superior to it by dropping all considerateness and deference.

George Eliot - Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)


Imagine a test. Doesn’t matter which test or what kind of test, but suppose we begin with a medical test of some kind.

The imaginary test is a few decades old and one of the problems with it is that it takes days to perform, doesn’t work reliably and can be misleading. There are better tests around, but our imaginary test is part of a standard protocol and has been for years.

A committee exists which could propose but not decide that the test be discontinued in favour of something else, but what that might be is unclear. Nobody in the committee really supports the test, but it is part of a standard protocol, so they use it.

Nobody in the committee is prepared to bang the table and push hard for a replacement test either. In private, every member would say the test is obsolete and ought to be abandoned, but only in private. Some would say so more forcefully than others. In public, some would also defend the test more forcefully than others, but none would openly say that it should be consigned to medical history.

The imaginary test could be any one of many procedures in many fields, but collective dishonesty can prevail over individual honesty. Even in professional life, social norms may prevail. These are the winds and currents we have all to steer amongst, and they are often too strong for our truthfulness or our wit.

The illimitable range

As Tory conference looms, the PM cuts a diminished figure after squandering much of her political capital

The PM seems to be gradually willing to publicly accept a link between her policies and market turmoil - describing this overnight as "short-term disruption" - but there is no sign she is considering reversing any of the measures.

But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.

George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-1872)

To my mind there is no pressing need to take sides in the current turmoil over the recent actions of the Liz Truss government. We are in a position where there are no good exits anyway. It is more useful to take note of how the establishment trains all of its guns on any major change which appears to threaten its tottering comfort zones. We saw something similar with Donald Trump.

In these cases, and as George Eliot wrote, opposition need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge. The current storm of opposition may turn out to have read or manipulated the runes correctly as far as that is still possible. Yet Eliot was also pointing out how opposition can choose never to be wrong. As we saw and still see, Brexit opposition has chosen never to be wrong. We see it with climate change too. Liz Truss sees it now.

Stupidity has become valuable

Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-72)

Suppose we suggest that the great driver of human attitudes and allegiances is the search for security. Security is survival writ small but still survival, still a core part of what we are.

Sane people did what their neighbours did - they still do. There is security and satisfaction to be found here. What is Boris Johnson doing if it isn’t what his political neighbours do? What are those two lecterns either side of his if they are not his political neighbours? What is SAGE if it is not a political neighbourhood?

We don’t usually call them neighbours and neighbourhoods, but politically that is what they are. It leaves Boris and his government vulnerable to manipulation, but as we have seen, they don’t care. As for those who leave such as Dominic Cummings – others move into the neighbourhood so they are soon forgotten.

None of this is at all mysterious. What is mysterious is how certain people value a more dispassionate search for better information. Why is it that some people cannot simply adopt the consensus of their cultural neighbourhood – the mantras and clichés which nobody else questions? What keeps them on the periphery? Why are they apparently happy to be there?

Presumably these oddballs see greater ultimate security not just in better information but also in the pursuit of better engineering, better science, deeper understanding and better quality in its widest sense. This pursuit of deeper understanding covers anything from Shakespeare scholarship to bridge building to pharmaceuticals to pithy insights but isn’t the pursuit of consensus.

Yet if influential people pursue consensus too rigorously they cut everyone else adrift from the sharp stimulus of basic survival. They cut us all adrift from the need to pursue deeper understanding. There are still those with a hunger for better information, but the rest of society is cutting itself off from them.

In other words, it seems to be possible for us to lose the survival stimulus partly shielding us when consensus goes wrong and stupidity lends a hand. Ironically in a connected world, we cannot shield ourselves from stupidity even when it clearly threatens our cultural survival. That would be a culture of actively trying to avoid stupidity  - the one we used to value rather highly.

This seems to be where the urgency lies. In the age of the internet, stupidity is becoming valuable clickbait. In other words, stupidity has become valuable.

Until…

It has to be stupid

In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.

George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-72)

In our world of tediously progressive government it is necessary for an endless stream of new political measures to be handed down from the elite. However there is an inevitable catch quite apart from the incessant meddling.

Almost everything handed down by government has to be imbued with a certain mystique, a certain aura of superior necessity informed by arcane knowledge, particularly the knowledge of elite experts. Otherwise the whole business could come across as something anyone could do. Even a real expert.

It is almost always necessary that there should be no choice involved either. This strengthens that sense of superior necessity – it is for your own good and we know best type necessity. Childish perhaps, but in an informed world that is all there is left.

In other words it is usually vital that everyone should not say “wow what a good idea” when a new initiative comes along, although not quite sane people may be persuaded to say it anyway. See the coronavirus debacle for example.

If everyone did say “wow what a good idea” then that would be populist – or popular as we used to call it. No mystique there - so a degree of pointless compulsion has to be mixed in to sour the thing and tone down the popularity. See the coronavirus debacle again.

In other words, government initiatives which are clearly stupid often have to be stupid simply to maintain the mystique of government, however tattered and faded that mystique actually is. The mechanics of government may go on behind the scenes, but the public façade cannot be conspicuously competent. The incompetence inevitably seeps into what goes on behind the façade anyway.

In modern times with our rigidly collective political ethos, government initiatives cannot usually be anything sane people would wish for. They have to be stupid or at the very least significantly pointless. It’s in the genes of the process.

In this stupid world

source

In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.

George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-72)

Again and again it is made glaringly obvious to us that the political game attracts the wrong kind of people. 

Mediocre circumstances

Pre-eminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre circumstances.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

There doesn't see to be much confidence in Dave's latest attempt to disguise himself as a Prime Minister. Quite remarkable if one considers the amount of research, analysis and weighing of political consequences which must have gone into his recent reshuffle.

The obvious likelihood that Cameron himself doesn't inspire enough confidence - well presumably that is off the agenda. Too disruptive so other, lesser heads must roll even if they are not the root cause of the mediocrity which dogs his every step.  

Wisdom

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
George Eliot - Middlemarch

Whatever it is, there seem to be two oddities about wisdom.

Firstly, inspiring and insightful fragments of wisdom are often found in a single paragraph or even a single sentence. A patch of purple prose glowing with that inner radiance we recognise as beautiful sanity. Sometimes as with the Eliot quote above, it may take the form of a laconic truism, but for me it still counts as wisdom.

Secondly, one inspiring fragment is not usually followed by second, then a third. A gem of beautiful sanity tends to be a solitaire, the rest is elaboration.

Maybe gems of wisdom have to be set in base metal – necessary prose providing context, setting the scene. Example, elaboration, exploration, exhortation, none of which is strictly essential.

To my mind, books can be like this. An island of wisdom in an ocean of words which may be enjoyable enough to read, but don’t add much to that delicious core, that single paragraph of beautiful sanity. Those few vital words we savour, dwell on, weave into our personal philosophy.

Another aspect of wisdom is that by weaving it into our personal philosophy we may diffuse it to such an extent that the gem is lost from sight, at least in its original pristine form.

The first frisson of delight is muted, the pleasure of discovery lost, because wisdom has to be used. We mix, blend and refine it into our own words until all that remains is a footprint in the sand of our personal philosophy.

It's why we read.

Ugly idols

A sour view of social life from George Eliot. For me this is one of Eliot's most uncomfortable quotes, almost impossible to read through without thinking of real people one knows or once knew. 

The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them – like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else’s life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.

George Eliot – Daniel Deronda.

A curse on your generation

A curse on your generation, child. They will open the mountain and drag forth the golden wings and coin them into money, and the solemn faces they will break up into ear-rings for wanton women! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness.

George Eliot – Daniel Deronda

It's a bit Gothic, but I like this quote.

Fate my friend

Fate my friend, has made you the hinder wheel –
rota posterior curras, et in axe secundo –
run behind because you can’t help it.

George Eliot – Daniel Deronda