Local elections

Strange people keep bunging leaflets through our letterbox. One even knocked on the door but I waved him away in a lordly manner.

Their miserable lies go straight into the recycling bin, but a quick glance told me that local elections are in the offing. Who’d have credited it? I thought local elections were obsolete, but apparently we still go through the motions every now and then. Something to do with the climate or China I suppose. Most things are these days.

So what’s the best strategy for voting in a local election, should the day be fine, the memory still functioning and a desire to vote still faintly discernible within my cynical core? It’s not as if they have much to offer is it? Not even a free glass of wine at the polling booth.

Firstly, I think it’s worth pointing out that the most interesting candidate would be one who understood the need to oppose the Bureaucracy. There aren’t any of those, so it’s a rather frivolous suggestion, although it does highlight the fatuousness of it all.

This is a post-political age and our enemy is the Bureaucracy, national, EU and UN. Forget the politicians – they aren’t in charge of anything and there is no point voting for them in a post-political age. Not unless you know one personally of course, and are in a position to exact some favours for one measly vote. Seems unlikely doesn’t it? 

That's why we don't get that free glass of wine I suppose. One miserable little vote isn't worth much is it?

The trouble is, mainstream politicians are part of the Bureaucracy because it offers them status and a career beyond politics. As far as local elections go, the Bureaucracy has it all sewn up, so there is no real point voting for anyone, although insane candidates may be worth a punt.

Insane candidates are often unpredictable – a valuable commodity when fighting the Bureaucracy, although one can never be sure of these things. After all, the Bureaucracy appears to be quite attached to inanity. Global warming and so forth.

If there are no obviously insane candidates, then my next choice would be to look at a single issue candidate promoting the release of wolves into Sherwood Forest or whatever. Something interesting and distracting at any rate.

Whatever one thinks of their politics, they may at least be a headache for the Bureaucracy and where else are you going to find that?

Morning in Pyongyang

Autopilot

Autopilot "Otto" in the film Airplane!
from Wikipedia

Ironically, this issue has fascinated me for ages. Ironically? I'll get to it eventually.

I know I’ve mentioned this notion before, but I’m sure many of us have arrived at work one morning to discover we don’t remember a single thing about the journey. Nothing, zilch, nada, zero, a total Cameron. It certainly happened to me.

If nothing out of the ordinary occurred to disturb my tranquility, then I’d arrive at work with the journey a complete blank. All that driving, the traffic lights, gear changes, stopping and starting - none of it had registered. My tranquility remained unmolested by other road users. 

It's quite a helpful start to the working day, but that's another issue. 

So how do I know nothing out of the ordinary happened during that unremembered journey? Hmm... Could be the tranquility I suppose.

Anyhow, this kind of experience always sets me wondering about our ability to run on autopilot and I’ve never really dropped the idea - which is another aspect of running on autopilot - hence the irony.

One question I mull over is - how common is it to run on autopilot? For example, when you roam around the internet, are you mainly  doing today pretty much what you did yesterday? Do you visit the same sites and read the same blogs? I certainly tend to.

Do you eat pretty much the same meals, have fixed routines, react in a standard way to similar questions, jokes, arguments, requests and frustrations? Do you react in a standard way to the weather, shopping, burnt toast, wine, a bad cold or your neighbour?

Are we on autopilot 50% of the time? Is it more than 50%? Or less? Is it possible to live almost your entire life on autopilot - say 98%?

To my mind, the tricky and uncomfortable issue is that we don’t really know how to tackle the question. Many aspects of human life do not present themselves in a handy quantitative way, but many more do not even present themselves in an unambiguously qualitative way either.

The autopilot question may be qualitative to some degree, but not in a particularly satisfactory way. We can't realistically claim to be hardly ever or sometimes or usually on autopilot because life isn't that clear cut.

Yet I still see the question as real enough, but it has to be tackled loosely via metaphor, simile and language which may as well be frankly literary as anything else.

So what’s the answer? Is it possible to live entirely on autopilot?

I don’t know, but I think one problem is time. It takes time to switch off the autopilot and back into independent thinking, but even then there is the autopilot waiting in the background, ready to take over the controls. 

So we don’t so much switch it off as turn it down. If we have the time to turn it down that is. The time to meditate, ponder or muse.

Time - that seems to be a key point.

Often we don’t have the time, especially in an environment where the autopilot is not necessarily a disadvantage. So why not extend the metaphor.

Work for example. The work of a senior civil servant, EU bureaucrat or UN committee trying to make the whole world run on autopilot. Because that appears to be the ultimate aim - a global autopilot where nobody has to think because there is a rule for everything and everything has its rules. 

Suppose the world tries to run itself on global autopilot, building systems and processes which also run on global autopilot because that is what bureaucracies expect and aim for.

My guess is that global autopilot is a worthwhile metaphor for globalisation. Something big which runs itself apart from an elite class of stakeholders to reap its benefits and a vast class of factotums to keep it those benefits coming.

It's only a harmless metaphor of course. Isn't it? 

Blogging along

A small selection of posts which survived the vagaries of my memory...

Demetrius on Ivar the Boneless, a gruesome tale if ever there was one.
Demetrius again on Mrs Thatcher.
Dark Buzz on the origins of e=mc2
Macheath on hubris and celebrity antics.
Macheath again with a great post on changes to early parenting.
Woodsy on the fate of the dead tree press.
NoTricksZone with a long list of false winter predictions.
Ross on Margaret Thatcher's legacy
James on the paucity of the soul.
David on being cruel to Lefties.
The Chiefio on approaching instability in the UK grid.
Mark Wadsworth on privatising roads.
Sackers' World Voices blog on Oz Alternative Economics

The Welsh Chekhov

Rhys Davies (1901 - 1978)

For something different, try The Welsh Chekhov, a review of Welsh writer Rhys Davies by Theodore Dalrymple.

For devotees of literary nooks and crannies, it's well worth a read.

Parallel Parking

Chains of unreason

If we accept that reality is so complex that it is not fully susceptible to rational analysis, then what is the rational person to do? 

It seems to me that we have two approaches to the problem, one rational and one irrational.

The first, irrational approach is to ignore the limits of rationality by adopting a covert axiom that reality is entirely accessible to rational analysis. We might call this the over-rational position.

The second, more rational approach is to see treat first approach as irrational. We might call this the nuanced rational position.

It isn’t difficult to see the value of the nuanced approach when we consider what rationalism has delivered, from antibiotics to traffic lights, from the theory of evolution to nuclear weapons, from clean water to chemical warfare, from money to taxes.

It’s a mix of solid benefits, mixed benefits and things we might be better off without. Rationality has not been a universal blessing.

However, an over-rational approach to political and social issues has also delivered numerous malign political inventions. In particular, via impeccable chains of reasoning, it has delivered endless state interference in all aspects of our lives.

By the way, I originally wrote almost all aspects of our lives, but deleted the word almost to better represent a complex but generally threatening reality. Not quite as accurate if one is over-rational, but possibly more apt if one has a nuanced view of these things, being concerned to highlight a genuine threat to rationality itself. 

This highly pervasive example of over-rational policy-making derives from an official presumption that we should all live our lives in complete safety, free from all anxieties, risks, threats, discomfort, illness and even personal responsibility.

Surely such nonsense is a result of a narrow, over-rational calculation, a desire to maximise the mechanical security of human life? Surely it is being done at the expense of everything we once valued, from personal freedom to spiritual consolations, from a personal philosophy to the simple joy of living? 

Yet many of the modern world’s problems seem to be due to over-rational chains of reasoning without a single mitigating nuance to stem the fanatical, controlling tide.

In fact many would-be rationalists appear to be part of some kind of rational crusade where the enemy is anyone who might possibly be sceptical of their brand of over-rational dictatorship. Especially unwelcome are those naughty souls who toss nuance-bombs into their neatly painted trenches.

Their perceived enemies are legion, from religious believers to environmental sceptics, but essentially it is any form of scepticism they deplore with a fanatical hatred which at times seems to verge on madness.

Not quite madness perhaps, but there does appear to be something a little unhinged about over-rational folk. Something excessive and lacking in humility and humanity. Lacking common sense too, but we never had a surplus of that.

The real danger to our very concept of rational thought is the incessant tendency of the state to sponsor over-rational solutions to all problems. Even where their supposed solutions are nothing but fantasies – clouds of over-rational nonsense worked out in exact detail by narrow, blinkered and fanatically over-rational minds.