Fife Rant

Like most of my insights, the idea of being a hostage to fortune is not original, but it never hit me so hard before watching a natural history program where fish were spawning. Among the millions of eggs laid maybe 2 will actually survive to breed. The eggs are totally at the mercy of unforseen events.
In the same way it seemed to me that every action, every word is a hostage to fortune. No-one can know how an action taken with the best of intention may turn out in the long term, the action taken for intended benefit or intended harm can have consequences that cannot be foreseen. The child saved from the train wreck may become a hero or a doctor or an inventor that saves lives, or a murderer or war criminal that destroys them. And further, the murderer may kill someone who will commit terrible acts or invent terrible weapons or invent ways of thinking that spur people to do evil. The terrorist that you execute may have become an inspiration to a nation.
I do not know what will be the consequences of your reading these words. My intention is to suggest that people think about what they should do or say before they act.
How should we act or speak? Should we look to religion, philosophy or our peers for guidance? These may be places to begin. It seems to me that no answer is ever final. That every outcome needs revision and refinement in accordance with experience and result.
The time to think is not always available. Sometimes decisions have to be made before there is time for thought. Those who serve in places where there is not likely to be time for thought, who must react or die (or worse) act in accordance with what has gone before in their lives, so the soldier or firemen is trained to act by training so that reaction becomes habit. To act too slowly may end in death or severe injury for self or others.
Then does it follow that one should train oneself by repeating right action until it becomes habit and will be repeated under stress? Should kindness or toughness be built until it becomes unthinking habit?
Where does the responsibility lie for consequences of action? With parents, environment, with circumstance? Are we ever truly free to act given how our lives are shaped by the former? Without freedom can there be responsibility?
It seems to me that to do the best where we are is eventually all that can be done. To be fully adult and human is to take responsibility for your life. It is after all your life.
I cannot tell how these words will be received. They are indeed hostages to fortune.

I was recently walking through the city where I had spent most of my childhood and adolescence. I still think of the city as my home although I haven’t lived there for nearly 40 years. I wandered through places I had once lived. The only trace of the houses, flats and factories is the layout of the streets now lined with new houses that would now be beyond my income bracket to buy, and shopping and leisure complexes.
You know, the thought that hit me was that the developers have stolen my past as the bankers and other parasites have stolen my future.
OK, to be fair, a city cannot be preserved in aspic or any other jelly like substance for my benefit. It must move on or die. Becoming a theme park is not really an option. I have been fortunate in that much of the best still remains in spite of the combined efforts of the 60’s vandals in the local council and university.
I will in time become reconciled to these massive and ongoing changes. But they still leave a sense of loss like the death of an old acquaintance.
Bob Dylan said “Don’t look back.” This is a bit silly since identity is a function of memory. But I guess maybe it means don’t hang onto the past.
As for the financiers, I have already made my thought plain about them.
On a more philosophical note, since I can’t live in the past or expect much from the future, I must keep focused on the present which is the only place that anyone can ever be and where I write the past and create a future.
No point in shouting at the thunder.

This has been a very hard article to write and keep to reasonable length. I think I have failed. The ideas raise very strong feelings which fed into the text. Keeping away from strong language became quite difficult!

When I was young (long time ago) there didn’t seem to be any question about who and what to trust in. Banks, schoolteachers, religious figures, possibly politicians (if I had known what that was), doctors were beyond question. In fact, all authority figures. I just absorbed everything I was told. When I became a teenager, I rebelled against such figures as a matter of course without losing my trust in them. Strange but true. They were still people that I could rely on even if they were (in my eyes) wrong.

I have become more aware of how naïve that seems now. Newspapers and ‘the media’ (almost a pejorative today) inform us daily of greed and corruption amongst those who demand that we have faith in them. They demand it because without faith, these people and their offices have no meaning. Without trust, a bank or any financial institution or means of commerce becomes impossible. Counterfeiters were once hanged; possibly a bit extreme. But without trust, all interaction with other humans becomes impossible without violence or its threat.

So who should we still trust? The medical profession? I have seen reported many instances where such trust has been misplaced. Then again, maybe we expect too much.

The church or other religious organisation? The current crisis in the Catholic church is the most recent and public of scandals that have dogged religious organisations since time out of mind. Read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to see that this is hardly new.

Sales people? Many will recall how policies were sold to house buyers, and the resulting payouts forced by the government when it was discovered how these had been mis-sold.

Politicians? I recall many years ago hearing the phrase “As empty as a politicians’ promise.” and today’s round of disclosure upon disclosure of how our money has been stolen from us as the expenses scandals continue hardly gives credibility to these people.

Banks and bankers? These are the ones whose greed and arrogance has nearly destroyed the financial dealings of the entire world AGAIN (Yes! It has happened before and will no doubt happen again.).

So do we trust the media to inform us of wrongdoing? The phrase ‘investigative journalism’ comes to mind. A certain newspapers illegal phone tapping exploits hardly do credit to the industry. And how far can we trust the newspapers and other forms of news communication without fully understanding their agendas of making money or justifying their continued existence?

Who else is up on the charge of acting in a way that may abuse our trust? Well, I don’t trust any of the large Internet based organisations who have huge amounts of our personal data that can be lost, stolen or hacked into. And I certainly don’t trust the UK government after the the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Read them if you will and wonder that such pieces of work ever made it through the legislating body of a democracy (parliament).

What possible motive do the powerful have for this abuse? Well, I cannot be sure since I am not among the great, but I suggest several reasons, some or all of which may be true. I start with:

• The exercise of power for its own sake. “Because I can”.
• Moving right on to: “ I am afraid and controlling others makes me feel safe”.
• Next up: “ I want to be rich. Money is power. I want to do anything I want.”
• And further up there, arrogance: “I am cleverer than you stupid pigs.”
• Power as a basis for ego: “I am great! Worship me! “

I am sure that others will occur to you.

Now those who police our kingdom rely increasingly on CCTV to watch our every move and plot our courses through life (see RIPA 2000) and now we have Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Time for a VPN perhaps for all internet users? And/or TOR browser. (If you don't know what a VPN or TOR is you can google it. Remember you are being watched by people who are accountable only to the security forces as you do that!) Such public accountability of the masses to the forces of law and order have been accompanied by the reluctant opening up of government to public scrutiny. It seems this watching process can work in two ways, both up and down. How they must have rued the day! It was fiercely resisted by many politicians. Well, well! The genie is out and won’t be put back. Or maybe it will? Watch as politicians reclaim the power to rip us off secretly!

But not all powers are publicly accountable. The security services keep their work hidden. It makes sense, but to whom are they accountable? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? A problem that Plato mooted in his ‘Republic’ along with a solution that is no more likely than an incorruptible tyrant like Terry Pratchett’s ‘Vetinari’ of the Discworld novels. It works well in fiction and philosophy but not in the real world.

It is incredibly easy for folk to justify to themselves just about any corrupt, immoral or atrocious act they commit. Watch the Nuremberg trials or any of the war crimes trials and see the defendants argue that they did nothing wrong, or deny that they are answerable to any authority save their own.

So how are the powerful to be kept honest and yet reap reasonable rewards for their work and abilities? The re-election of politicians every few years must help. Maybe we should prevent any one who has held office from holding that office for more than a total of, say, 5 years? Members of QANGOS might also be changed every few years. Perhaps no public office should be held for more than 5 years? That might be a start, but ultimately, the only deterrent to criminal or immoral behaviour is the guarantee of exposure and retribution.

Maybe the biggest problem is that people who act unethically or corruptly are just people. Perhaps it is inherent in the ‘programming’ of humans to act in these ways. However, it is a tenet of most religions and philosophies that people have choice to behave in line with the commandments of their chosen religion or precepts of their philosophy and all reap the rewards of their behaviour at some time.

I am manipulated and lied to and controlled and watched by too many organisations and individuals, and I am not happy about it.
Freedom is not free. If this is the price of freedom though, are we prepared to pay it? It could be that those in power may well not give us the choice and thus apparent choice may be no choice at all.

And final words …?
Dante, the Florentine poet writing in the early 14th century reserves one of the lowest parts of Hell for fraudsters and thieves and the corrupt of all kinds. DL Sayers in her commentary on this part of Hell writes:

“… the progressive disintegration of every social relationship, personal and public. Sexuality, ecclesiastical and civil office, language, ownership, counsel, authority, psychic influence, and material interdependence – all the media of the community’s exchange are perverted and falsified, till nothing remains but the descent into the final abyss where faith and trust are wholly and for ever extinguished.”

and more particularly about the last ditch where the Falsifiers are imprisoned:

“… the corrupt heart which acknowledges no obligation to keep faith with its fellow men; …”
“Every value it has is false; it alternates between a deadly lethargy and a raving insanity … the very money is itself corrupted, every affirmation had become perjury, and every identity a lie; no medium of exchange remains and the “general bond of love and nature’s tie” is utterly dissolved.

I could not have put it better.

Could education be defined as the thing that gives sight to the unseeing.
Further education then gives vision to the sighted?

I don’t normally listen to religious programs having mostly had my fill of the stupidities of human beings. I didn’t realise that it was a religious program as the subject was the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Assyro-Babylonian civilisation. This is the oldest work of literature in the world; possibly 5,000 years old and based on much older stories. Anyhow, one of the themes of the poem is immortality. The hero spends the last part of the poem trying to get hold of something that will allow him to live forever. By the end of the poem he comes to the realisation that he will die since he is human. And he comes a realisation of what it is to be human.
Now at some level all of us realise that we also will die, though maybe many aren’t totally convinced of this.
So somehow you get to live forever. What might this mean? Would you live forever unchanged in a changing world? Eventually the world will cease to exist; everything known will pass; the universe itself will die as protons decay leaving only a flux of electrons, positrons, neutrinos and radiation.
What about the heaven, Valhalla or afterlife of the religions? An eternity of eternity?
To be human is not to be forever. What is this that would be forever? If that sounds a bit Zen, it is. Goes along with the question, what/who are you?
Yet the urge to seek immortality seems to be one of humanity’s great imperatives.
I think that we are afraid of death, or at least of dying. After recent brush with the grim reaper I know how hard I fought to stay alive.
Gone to a better place; gone for a long sleep; gone to heaven; we seek palliatives and euphemisms to soften it.
Even if you could live forever, how would that change this moment, the moment that this is read, the moment that you think this is rubbish? A life can only be lived now, in this moment.
“Quick now, here, now, always-” (T.S. Eliot _ Burnt Norton from Four Quartets)
To live like this, I think, would be to live without fear, without dread.