Nick on flaws

Nick Clegg
"The House of Lords is flawed"

But not as flawed as you, mate.

Eponymous laws

Rogerh passed on this fascinating link - Wikipedia's List of eponymous laws, a treasure trove for fans of serendipity.

Leaders who follow

So, if we have this leadership/followership structure within society, where do weird characters such as Dave, Nick and Ed fit in. I say weird here, because although they aspire to leadership they don't aspire to lead.

Now we all know what rotten leaders we end up with, but political parties are not selecting leaders for us to put our cross against. They are selecting high-level followers. 

Followers of political fashion.

Followers of political correctness.

Followers of the EU.

Followers of the UN.

Followers of the BBC.
Followers within their own social milieu.

And so on and so on. Undermining the nation state has led to the undermining or nation state leadership. Or rather, it has led to the replacement of nation state leadership by nation state followership. Modern national leaders are not supposed to be leaders at all, but are supposed to follow a global agenda. And Dave, Nick and Ed know that perfectly well.

The modern world tends to be much more covert about leadership than in the quite recent past. Winston Churchill was a leader, David Cameron is a follower. Leadership now lies with permanent global bureaucracies, much of it being conducted covertly and away from public view. Leadership is being taken out of the hands of amateur national politicians and passed on to professional bureaucrats, oligarchs and wealthy business executives.

The point of becoming a senior minister or Prime Minister is not so much the role itself, but what comes afterwards, the chance of walking the real corridors of power. The point of so-called political power is that it provides access to real power, the covert leadership we rarely see, the permanent bureaucratic structures such as the UN, EU and the boards of major global corporations.

So we are not so much electing leaders as handing career opportunities to some highly ambitious flunkies. Flunkies such as Dave, Nick and Ed. We’ll never get leadership from any of them because they were never selected as leaders in the first place. They were selected as followers.

They don’t get to lead properly until they move on. Maybe not even then. The global pole is really very greasy indeed.

Unusually pleasant aroma

J R R Tolkien

I was just about to enter Sainsbury's, when I caught an unusually pleasant aroma and for once it wasn't fresh baked bread or coffee.

No, it was the aroma from a chap quietly smoking his pipe just outside the entrance, an nice old-fashioned briar with a curly stem. I was reminded of the Balkan Sobranie my father used to favour, but that was so long ago. Yet as Sam Vega pointed out just recently, smells can be very long-lasting in their evocative effect.

We're missing something - we really are.

Photographic memory

It was our wedding anniversary recently and my better half and I were trying to remember the hotel in Aberporth where we spent our honeymoon. We remember the honeymoon itself quite well, the places we visited, the things we did. Getting sunburned on the beach and having to spend the rest of the week covered up – we remember all that.

But we don’t remember the hotel. It was on a hill and lots of things on the evening menu were charged extra, but that’s all we remember.

Interesting though, is the fact that most of our memories are linked with a photo or two. In most cases we have photographs of the places we visited or connected with what we did. Not everything we did obviously.

Anyhow, it led me to ponder what exactly we are remembering in such cases. Are we remembering the photographs rather than the actual events? Are the photographs more than mnemonics – do they partly take over from the original memories? Do we anchor various strands of memory to the photographs such that one becomes indistinguishable from the other?

If we had taken one or two photographs of the hotel, then I’m sure we’d have remembered it, so what does that tell us about our memories? Does it tell us we have simply not had enough memory refreshers to keep the memory of the hotel alive? Or does it tell us our memories of the hotel would have faded anyway and the photographs would have taken their place as pseudo memories.

Obviously if we’d ever been back to Aberporth and that unremembered hotel, then we would have refreshed our memories. Now I very much doubt if we could find the place even if we wanted to.

Isn't this illegal?

I though we were passing climate laws to stop this kind of thing?
Or is it drought we've made illegal?
Or just weather?

It's so difficult to remember.

Huxley and followership

These extracts are taken from the first chapter of Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means. This early part of his book is one of my favourite philosophical expositions and in my view an interesting contrast with the previous post on followership.

It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. ‘Non-attached’ is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves. Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position.

The Gospel of Jesus is essentially a gospel of non-attachment to ‘the things of this world,’ and of attachment to God.

What Spinoza, for example, calls ‘blessedness’ is simply the state of non-attachment; his ‘human bondage,’ the condition of one who identifies himself with his desires, emotions and thought-processes, or with their objects in the external world.

The non-attached man is one who, in Buddhist phraseology, puts an end to pain; and he puts an end to pain, not only in himself, but also, by refraining from malicious and stupid activity, to such pain as he may inflict on others.

Of course Huxley’s ideal of non-attachment runs counter a social reality of leadership and followership. For how can one be both non-attached and a leader or a follower? It’s impossible in the world as it is and I for one can’t imagine a world without leaders and followers. 

Huxley’s view is an ideal though, as he well knew. A yardstick with which to measure our stupidities and wrongheadedness. It's an old yardstick but as sound as a bell and to my mind it applies mostly to followership. We follow too readily and too naively.