PLANET ZHELANIE - NOVEL

I thought that I'd let my (meagre) audience that I have written a novel.

It is about a planet located in a parallel universe that comprised of the mind of a single individual. New space-time is created by 1) writing texts, 2) reducing the ego, 3) engaging with appearance in an objective way. The goal is to achieve one's wish, however the surroundings work against the individual realising his goals when those three aspects are undeveloped. As you can tell, it's a tad bit all over the place and confused.

I am sending them to some friends/acquaintances. I have two spare copies, however (I ended up with 17 copies, as opposed to 15). If you want a copy (yes, you! I don't know you, but you - vaguely - know me! unless my blog traffic is just comprised of bots!), just send me an e-mail! I can send it you via post and I won't charge you for it. If I run out of copies, I can just send you a PDF via e-mail.

The legacy of three generations

Generations are often categorised, which is not always helpful, as it is obviously a generalisation. Nonetheless, it does help us make sense of things. If there is any generation that we owe a debt to it, it is ‘the silent generation.’ This is the generation that roughly from the 1910s to the 1970s and fought in the Second World War.

This generation lived through the First World War, the Great Depression and witnessed the growth of fascism and communism in Europe, which threatened their civilisation and values. They fought in the Second World War and sacrificed their freedoms to protect the freedoms of future generations. Millions of people died to save Europe from degenerating into fascism.

Following this, they made a concerted effort not to go back to the rampant unemployment and poverty of the 1930s. Indeed, ‘The Beveridge Report’ sold 600,000 copies. The book aimed to tackle ‘squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease.’ The Labour Party was elected in 1945 and implemented Beveridge’s ideas by creating the welfare state. They also created the NHS, which was spearheaded by Anuerin Bevan as minister of health. ‘No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means,’ he claimed. The spate of reforms during this period did much to protect workers and for a long time we had full employment.

This generation also made a concerted effort to avoid another world war. The UN was created, as well the germ of the European Union - ‘The European Coal and Steel Community.’ The IMF was also created to prevent countries from sliding into economic chaos.

The Baby Boom generation benefited from the economic comfort that was bequeathed to them by their parents. There had never been a generation that was born with so much so security and so many opportunities. However, they were more prone to virtue signalling than their parents. At the same time, they were extremely indulgent. They indulged in heavy drugs and engaged in wild orgies. On the other hand, they waved placards and protested against social injustice and figures of authority.
The song ‘Taxman’ by The Beatles exemplified this very well. Ostensibly, The Beatles care about justice and world peace, but were still unwilling to do contribute back to society by paying their fair share of tax. It was bogus.

The activist Jerry Rubin is very representative of many hippies. He was active in revolutionary politics, but he really did nothing constructive to change society. He squawked about ‘capitalist pigs,’ ‘straights’ and ‘war,’ but really did nothing apart from indulging in casual sex and heavy drugs with free-spirited abandon. Ten years later, he became a clean-shaven millionaire stock broker in Wall Street. Really, there was not much difference in this career move – it was equally indulgent. Cases like this are legion.

The legacy of this generation is not good. They deregulated the financial system, which led to the financial crash. They voted for Brexit. There is little affordable housing, the NHS and other public services are creaking and there is low growth. They still have the gall to complain about millennials, which is a bit rich. We are the ones who will have to pick up the pieces.

Liberty/equality

Liberty

- We should have a free press where everyone can voice any views they like on society. Power must be scrutinised at all times and all individuals can voice dissenting views. No opinions should be silenced.

- Autonomy should be a human right. Most individuals want to choose what to do with their own lives - depriving them of that right deprives them of their humanity.

- Markets are usually the most effective way of allocating resources.

- There should be property rights - individuals should be able to start businesses and own their intellectual property.

- Society is more interesting when it is pluralistic and diverse, not homogeneous. Difference should be celebrated, not ostracised. 

Equality

- There should be safety nets that mitigate the excesses of a free-for-all market capitalism.

- Health care should be socialised. Health problems can't be predicted and are accidental - hence, it rests upon the state to provide health care for everyone, free at the point of use.

- Education should be a human right and quality education should be equally accessible to everyone.

- Markets should not be left alone - they should be regulated so that the public is not taken advantage of. There should be a minimum wage and some union labour rights.

- The government should control equality of outcome to some degree. There should be some redistribution of wealth to ensure that one segment of society is not exceedingly richer than the rest, as this creates inequality, resentment and it is unjust.

- There should be social reforms that tackle social injustices, unfairness and other forms of discrimination.

- There should be social programs that assist people and help them back to work.

- Utilities should be publicly owned, as they are something that people need and private companies should not ratchet up prices to chase profits.

Epiphanies

An epiphany is a moment when an individual suddenly realises something important and life-changing. It is an almost mystical experience – you encounter something and this experience changes your entire world-view. This type of experience has been recreated many times in art. The modernists, for instance, sought epiphanic experiences. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time starts when its protagonist eats a madeleine and he subsequently looks back on his entire life.

Many people shape their political world-view after such an experience. Roger Scruton became a conservative in 1968 when he witnessed radical leftists looting and pillaging the streets of Paris. He was twenty-four at the time, when his politics had been ‘vaguely left-wing.’ These leftist activists wanted to stage a revolution and replace it with something vaguely Marxist. Scruton said at the time: ‘I decided, yes, of course there is such a thing as the bourgeoisie and you are it, these well-fed, pampered middle-class students whose one concern was to throw stones at working-class people who happened to be in a policeman’s uniform.’ His politics underwent a volte-face and he has been an arch conservative ever since. The radical leftists were certainly twits, but Scruton decided that they were so bad that he would espouse a world-view that was diametrically opposed to theirs.

P. J. O’Rourke is another example. A self-styled ‘Republican reptile,’ O’Rourke is a libertarian. He believes that government invariably damages and stultifies economy and society and should be limited as much as possible. He claims that he used to be a communist in the 1960s. His own politics took a 180 degree turn when he started his first job, when his income had been taxed. Following this, he came to the conclusion that the U.S.A. ‘had communism already’ and he became an ardent libertarian. He really was a bit naive, since he surely must have known that his income would be taxed. 

Michelle Bauchman is a Republican congresswoman who underwent a similar conversion. She had been a Liberal until she read Burr by Gore Vidal. Vidal has always been on the left of American politics and has always criticised the wealthy, greedy and powerful. Bauchman claimed the following: 'Until I was reading this snotty novel called Burr, by Gore Vidal, and read how he mocked our Founding Fathers. And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, 'You know what? What he's writing about, this mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love, and that I would lay my life down to defend - just like every one of you in this room would, and as many of you in this room have when you wore the uniform of this great country - I knew that that was not representative of my country.’ So at that point she decided to become a small government, conservative Republican.

None of this makes sense. I, personally, correct my views over a long length of time. I read, learn and experience new things. I don’t have one sudden revelation that forces me to radically change my views. Maybe these people are exaggerating, but I am sure that they also form their views after long, protracted and careful consideration of facts and ideas.

Nature and stress

Nature is beautiful in the same way art is beautiful – it is pleasing to the eye. However, like art, it is has high utilitarian value. Walks in nature help us to cope with depression and stress and they also help us to escape problems.

There is mounting scientific evidence that nature does do these things. The reason for this is that urban environments are crammed with excessive information. People come to contact with constant stimulation, which is termed ‘hard fascination’ and this leads to cognitive fatigue. Meanwhile, in natural environments we deal with less information, which leads to ‘soft fascination.’ The environment that we process is also aesthetically pleasing, which leads to feelings of pleasure. There is also, of course, a sense of escape from the problems that we encounter in urban environs. Nature often makes us feel better, which is why they are called ‘restorative environments.’
Many scientists believe that our minds are not equipped to deal with so much information. The internet inundates us with multiples sources of information and we often access such information compulsively. Hence, these ‘restorative environments’ lead to a healthier state of mind, which help us to be more creative and also enhance our problem solving skills.

We lived in green, natural environments for thousands of years. Another interesting theory is that we feel less stressed in natural environments because our minds adapted to live in such environments. This theory holds that urban environments are unnatural and cause us to experience stress, depression and anxiety. Additionally, nature was crucial in helping us to survive. Plants helped us to find shelter and water and thus helped us to evolve our brains, which is an unnatural ‘mismatch’. Some of these mismatches were beneficial, such as sleeping on mattresses instead of the ground. Others may have contributed to disease and reduced our quality of life and these negative mismatches are termed ‘discords.’ Our brains are vulnerable to discords because they are complex organs that mature after birth and respond to external stimulation. Exposure to plants might have been what our minds were naturally predisposed to processing and the absence of this might have predisposed us to develop mental illnesses. 

There have been political movements that have revolted against technological progress and sought to return to a more natural mode of experience. The most notorious movement were the ‘Luddites’ during the Industrial Revolution. The Unabomber – otherwise known as Ted Kaczynski - was an anarchist neo-luddite who launched a crusade against technology from the 1970s to the 1990s. He was a formidable mathematician who left a comfortable job as a university lecturer and fled to the woods to lead a hermetic existence. He wrote works of political philosophy and, most disturbingly, sent bombs out to airports and universities. He believed that technology was unnatural and that a human society built upon technological progress regulates and stifles human freedom. Wild nature – that is, nature that is not regulated by technology – allows individual freedom to flourish. Unabomber said that ‘it is only necessary to get rid of industrial society.’ He did not think that it was necessary to create a new social order, as the French and Russian revolutions did. He wanted to eliminate ordered society and technological progress so that individuals could be completely free in natural environments.
Of course, this was psychotic behaviour. It is still vital for us to engage with nature, however, and it should, ultimately, be a vital aspect in our lives.

Let's all meander with Simon #5

Ahoy Facebook #10

This article brilliantly debunks some of the horrible thinkers that some lecturers foist on you at university.

https://areomagazine.com/…/how-french-intellectuals-ruined…/

Load' was my first ever album - I received it for my 10th birthday. It has been derided as Metallica's sell-out album, when they abandoned any semblance of their trash metal roots.

I hadn't listened to Metallica for years, as I had found better music which appeared to render it pointless. However, I have revisited their early albums and found that it actually is rather good after all. So, I decided to revisit their sell-out album, which does happen to have a lot of sentimental value to me.

Most of it is not very good, however it has two very good songs on it, namely 'Bleeding Me' and 'Outlaw Torn.' The latter track is made up of simple and slightly bluesy riffs, but they develop and build up, like their earlier music does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoQHRyh03_8

I was thinking recently about what modules I would like to take if I were to return to university. Hence, I have designed an imaginary ‘Simon King Studies’ course, which is wildly interdisciplinary. ALL post-WWII French intellectuals are proscribed from this course, however.

YEAR 1

FIRST TERM

Jazz and Democracy: Comparing the Form of Jazz with Democratic Principles (15 Credits)
Nascent Liberalism: Tracing Nascent Liberalism and Individualism in Ancient Antiquity and the Medieval Ages (15 Credits)
The Sublime in Cinema: Comparing Romantic Paintings with the Cinema of Herzog, Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Malick (15 Credits)
German Idealism: Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer (15 Credits)

SECOND TERM

Politics and 20th Century Classical Music: Comparing 20th Century Political History and Ideologies with 20th Century Classical Music (15 Credits)
Industrial Relations in Post-War Britain: A Comparison Between Trade Union and Financial Monopolies (15 Credits)
Croslandite Social Democracy: Its Successes and its Failures (15 Credits)
Social Contract Theory: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau (15 Credits)

YEAR 2

FIRST TERM

The End of History: Did Francis Fukuyama Get it Wrong? (15 Credits)
Transgression in Contemporary Literature: J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille and Bret Easton Ellis (15 Credits)
Paganism and Catholicism: A Linear Progression (15 Credits)
Southern Gothic: Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy (15 Credits)

SECOND TERM

Economic Decline and Cinema: A Comparison Between the End of Keynesianism and the Cinema of the 1970s (15 Credits)
Pre-Socratic Philosophy (15 Credits)
Post-War Paranoia in American Fiction: DeLillo, Pynchon and Joseph Heller (15 Credits)
Dream Interpretation: A Comparison Between Ancient Antiquity and the 20th Century (15 Credits)

THIRD YEAR

FIRST TERM

Unreality and Politics: A Comparison Between Magic Realism/Surrealism and Political History in 20th Century Latin American Fiction (15 Credits)
Nominalism vs. Realism: Plato vs. Aristotle (15 Credits)
Individuals who Change History: A Comparison Between Oliver Cromwell, Luther, Hitler and Lenin (15 Credits)
The Intersection Between British Socialism and British Liberalism (15 Credits)

SECOND TERM

Musical Cranks: Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa and Mark E. Smith (15 Credits)
Robotic Consciousness: 2001, A Space Odyssey and Robocop (15 Credits)
Post-War British Satire (15 Credits)
The Limits of Philosophy and the Limits of Science (15 Credits)

I had an interesting thought about a week ago. Basically, all life on this planet originates from water and can only survive with it. Indeed, it is assumed that life originated here around 3.5 billion years ago when water vapour liquefied.

Interestingly, all human knowledge starts with water, too. Western philosophy starts with Thales and the 'Milesian School.' Thales, the first philosopher/proto-scientist, claimed that all life originates from water and that all matter is comprised of water. So, yes, everything seems to start with water, even philosophy and knowledge.

I have chosen Carlo Gesualdo de Venosa this week. His music alone would have guaranteed posterity, but then he also has one of the most fascinating - and bizarre - biographies.

Gesualdo was prince of Venosa. He found out that he was wife was having an affair, so he murdered his wife and her lover. He looked at his child's eyes and thought that it was an illegitimate offspring, so he strangled it. He mutilated the corpses, as he wasn't sure if they were dead. He swapped the couple's clothes and dragged them out to the front of his house for the entire town to see. Italian Renaissance times had a peculiar law whereby the Italian nobility were barred from prosecution.

He fled to Ferrara and wrote his most innovative music during this period. In his later years, he isolated himself from society completely and he was wracked by guilt. He was a sadomasochist and he had a whole team of people who would torture him.

Gesualdo wrote as an amateur, not as a professional composer. As such, he had the freedom to write as he wished. (He didn't have to write to please a king etc.) His music, written during the Renaissance, even sounds modern today. He wrote madrigals, which were secular pieces written for voices and two instruments (usually a lute and a harp). He wrote chromatically, meaning that he would write musical voices which would use notes that did not belong to the diatonic scale that the rest of passage was written in. He would superimpose non-chromatic voices on top of these. His music is quite volatile and has abrupt changes in tempo. This music was written in the late 16th century and wouldn't reappear until the late romanticism of the 19th century or even the modernism of the early 20th century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZAs9LjJAHU

I love jazz and John Coltrane, for me, is the cream of jazz. I especially like the period between 1960-64, with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. They were all astonishing musicians and they clicked incredibly well. Coltrane practised insanely hard - he would practise until his gums would start bleeding (hence, perhaps, The Simpsons character 'Bleeding Gums Murphy). He had an incredible tone on the sax and his solos were insanely creative, beautiful and would go on for ages (hence perhaps why he never had any other wind/brass players in his band). His solos were very 'free,' but they were imbued with so much skill.

He also wrote some incredible tunes - and this one, Naima, is my favourite one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTMqes6HDqU

Fucking hell, Argentina, that was embarrassing! Awful, piss poor football!!!

A guy called Prof. Colin Talbot said the following on Twitter. It's both amusing and true: 'As I have pointed out before, if support for expanding markets signifies being a neoliberal, then Lenin and Trotsky were neoliberals when they introduced the New Economic Policy.'

Seeing this performed live in Sheffield was one of my greatest musical experiences ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTm_KdxqPPk

Spain, even at their peak, have always played such monotonous, lethargic, sideways-passing crap. Mother Russia deserved to go through.

It always does my head in when intellectuals complain about consumerism. They seem to ignore these five basic points: 1) They are also part of consumer culture, 2) They wouldn't sell as many of their books and lead a comfortable life it weren't for consumer culture, 3) consumerism has created all the wealth in their society, which means that they can enjoy a comfortable life, 4) If everyone consumes more, everyone pays more VAT, which means that governments have more revenue for schools, hospitals, roads, fire stations, councils, etc. Their ilk often lashes out against spending cuts, 'neo-liberalism' and similar nonsense. 5) It's smug and pompous to think that people are defined by the products that they buy.

Belgium vs. France should be the final. : (

Early jazz sounds so joyous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwkIZ_xGsiI

A few years ago I had a dream involving British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. I was completing my last year at university and my motivation/work rate had dwindled.

In this dream, Scruton was working at the School of Arts at the University of Kent. He came out of his office and went to his car to collect an essay of mine that he had marked, which had a score of 38%. When I asked him why that essay received such a low mark, he said 'Not enough of an original argument.' Following this, he returned to his office. (And indeed, my marks were free falling, but nowhere near as low as that particular score.)

Oddly enough, two nights ago Roger Scruton appeared in another dream of mine. I was at his house, he was very nice to me, he opened his fridge and he gave me some food. (That all I remember.) So maybe my mind is telling me that I should be a conservative, I dunno.

I've always thought that Jim Callaghan and Gordon Brown were very good prime ministers, given the circumstances.

https://amp.ft.com/content/759afbb8-8b4d-11e8-affd-da9960227309?__twitter_impression=true

This piece, for me, embodies what's exciting about so much modern classical music. It's fascinating to hear how these seperate lines drift off into separate directions and occasionally interlock. Carter wanted to capture the modernity of cities - and how they harbour so much activity. He cited Edgard Varese as a big influence (he saw a performance of one of his pieces in the 1920s) and, although they are quite different, both composers were interested in exploring aspects of rhythm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTR1vnBeXzA&app=desktop

I bought these three items with a cheque that my grandmother sent to me for my birthday. :)