Born Vienna, Austria, 28th July 1902, cabinet maker apprentice, worked with delinquent teenaged boys, tramped the hills, taught himself maths and physics, became an active socialist educator, cracked a #PhD in Philosophy in 1928..

It was Popper’s practical and political interests that first directed him to the philosophy of science, because he realised that it was vital to be able to tell genuine knowledge from pseudo-knowledge and superstition.. continued at base here in screenpic text

The Poverty of Historicism is a 1944 book by the philosopher Karl Popper (revised in 1957), in which the author argues that the idea of historicism is dangerous and bankrupt.

The Poverty of Historicism was first written as a paper which was read in 1936, then updated and published as a book in 1957.^[1]: iii It was dedicated “In memory of the countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.”

Synopsis:

The book is a treatise on scientific method in the social sciences.^[2] Popper defines historicism as: “an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim…”.^[1]: 3 He also remarks that “[t]he belief … that it is the task of the social sciences to lay bare the law of evolution of society in order to foretell its future… might be described as the central historicist doctrine.”^{[1]: 105–106}

Popper distinguishes two main strands of historicism, a “pro-naturalistic” approach which “favours the application of the methods of physics”^[1]: 2 and the “anti-naturalistic” approach which opposes these methods. The first two parts of the book contain Popper’s exposition of historicist views (both pro- and anti-naturalistic), and the second two parts contain his criticism of them.^[3] Popper concludes by contrasting the antiquity of historicism (which, for example, Plato is said to have espoused) with the claims of modernity made by its twentieth-century adherents.^{[1]: section 33}

Popper’s criticism of historicism[edit]

Popper’s criticisms of the poverty of the idea of historical prediction can broadly be split into three areas: fundamental problems with the idea itself, common inconsistencies in the arguments of historicists, and the negative practical effects of implementing historicist ideas.

Fundamental problems with historicist theory[edit]

i) A description of the whole of society is impossible because the list of characteristics making up such a description would be infinite. If we cannot know the whole of the present state of mankind it follows that we cannot know the future of mankind.

“If we wish to study a thing, we are bound to select certain aspects of it. It is not possible for us to observe or to describe a whole piece of the world, or a whole piece of nature; in fact, not even the smallest whole piece may be so described, since all description is necessarily selective.”^[1]: 77

ii) Human history is a single unique event. Knowledge of the past therefore does not necessarily help one to know the future. “The evolution of life on earth, or of human society, is a unique historical process… Its description, however, is not a law, but only a singular historical statement.”^[1]: 108

Study of history may reveal trends. However, there is no guarantee that these trends will continue. In other words: they are not laws; “a statement asserting the existence of a trend at a certain time and place would be a singular historical statement and not a universal law.”^[1]: 115

In addition, given that historians are interested in the uniqueness of past events, it may be said that future events will possess a uniqueness that cannot be known in advance.^{[1]: section 30}

iii) Individual human action or reaction can never be predicted with certainty, therefore neither can the future: “the human factor is the ultimately uncertain and wayward element in social life and in all social institutions. Indeed, this is the element which ultimately cannot be completely controlled by institutions (as Spinoza first saw); for every attempt at controlling it completely must lead to tyranny; which means, to the omnipotence of the human factor – the whims of a few men, or even one.”^[1]: 158

Popper asserts that psychology cannot lead to a complete understanding of “the human factor” because “’human nature’ varies considerably with the social institutions, and its study therefore presupposes an understanding of these institutions.”^[1]: 158

iv) A law, natural (i.e. scientific) or social, may enable us to exclude the possibility of certain events but it does not allow us to narrow down the range of possible outcomes to only one.^{[1]: section 29} This follows from Popper’s theory of science: a hypothesis is proposed (it does not matter how the hypothesis was derived) and is then subjected to rigorous tests which aim to disprove the hypothesis. If no tests disprove the hypothesis it may become known as a law but in fact remains simply a so-far-unfalsified hypothesis.

Equally, examples of where theories are correct are useless in proving the validity of the theory.

v) It is logically impossible to know the future course of history when that course depends in part on the future growth of scientific knowledge (which is unknowable in advance).^[1] preface

Common inconsistencies in the arguments of historicists[edit]

i) Historicists often require the remodelling of man to become fit for the future society or hasten the arrival of this society. Given that society is composed of mankind, remaking man for a particular society can lead to any type of society. Also, a need to remodel man suggests that without this remodelling, the new society may not come about, and is therefore not inevitable.^{[1]: section 21}

ii) Historicists are bad at imagining conditions under which an identified trend ceases. Historical generalisations may be reduced to a set of laws of higher generality (i.e. one could say that history depends upon psychology). However, in order to form predictions from these generalisations we also need specific initial conditions. To the extent that conditions change or are changing, any ‘law’ may apply differently and trends may disappear.^{[1]: section 28}

iii) Historicism tends to mistake historical interpretations for theories. When studying history we can only examine a limited aspect of the past. In other words, we must apply a ‘historical interpretation’. It is necessary to appreciate a plurality of valid interpretations (although some may be more fertile than others).^{[1]: section 31}

iv) Confusing ends with aims: historicism tends to foster the idea that the aims of society are discernible in the trends of history, or what will inevitably come to pass becomes that which should come to pass. The aims of society may be more usefully thought as a matter of choice for that society.^{[1]: section 22}

Negative practical effects of implementing historicist ideas[edit]

i) Unintended consequences: the implementation of historicist programs such as Marxism often means a fundamental change to society. Due to the complexity of social interaction this results in many unintended consequences (i.e. it tends not to work properly). Equally it becomes impossible to tease out the cause of any given effect so nothing is learnt from the experiment/revolution.^{[1]: section 21} ii) Lack of information: large scale social experiments cannot increase our knowledge of the social process because as power is centralised to enable theories to put into practice, dissent must be repressed, and so it is harder and harder to find out what people really think, and so whether the utopian experiment is working properly. This assumes that a dictator in such a position could be benevolent and not corrupted by the accumulation of power, which may be doubted.^{[1]: section 24}

In addition, Popper rejects the notion that history cannot be subject to experiment^{[1]: section 25} and that any ‘laws of history’ can only apply to a particular historical period.^{[1]: section 26} Both of these ideas are treated as typical of the anti-naturalistic historicist approaches by Popper.

Popper concedes that historicism has an appeal as an antidote to the idea that history is shaped by the actions of ‘great men’.^{[1]: section 31}

As an alternative to historicism, Popper puts forward his own preference for “piecemeal social engineering” whereby small and reversible changes are made to society in order to be best able to learn from the changes made. The unpredictability of the future makes the effect of any larger changes random and untraceable. Small changes enable one to make limited, but testable and therefore falsifiable statements about the effect of social actions.^{[1]: section 20–1}

When published as a book in 1957, The Poverty of Historicism was hailed by the anti-communist author Arthur Koestler as “probably the only book published this year which will outlive the century.”^[4] The libertarian theorist Tom G. Palmer has described the work as “brilliant”.^[5]

Popper’s usage of “historicism” has been criticized as differing significantly from the normal definition of the word.^[6] That is, amongst historians themselves, a historicist is normally someone whose methodology is cautiously hermeneutical and exegetical, rather than predictive and speculative. This is perhaps closer to what Popper calls “historism“.

The Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík criticizes Popper’s statement that “All knowledge, whether intuitive or discursive must be of abstract aspects, and we can never grasp the ‘concrete structure of reality itself”.^[7] Kosík refers to him as “a leading contemporary opponent of the philosophy of concrete totality”,^[8] and clarifies that, “Totality indeed does not signify all facts. Totality signifies reality as structured dialectical whole, within which any particular fact (or any group or set of facts) can be rationally comprehended”^[9] as “the cognition of a fact or of a set of facts is the cognition of their place in the totality of reality.”^[8] He considers Popper’s work to be a part of atomist–rationalist theories of reality.^[10] Kosik declares: “Opinions as to whether cognition of all facts is knowable or not are based on the rationalist–empiricist idea that cognition proceeds by the analytic–summative method. This idea is in turn based on the atomist idea of reality as a sum of things, processes and facts”.^[8] Kosík also suggests that Popper and like-minded thinkers, including Ferdinand Gonseth of Dialectica^[11] and Friedrich Hayek on The Counter-Revolution of Science,^[12][8] lack an understanding of dialectical processes and how they form a totality.^[13]

‘The earliest written records of identifiable predecessors to modern science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia from around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped the Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes.^{[3]: 12 [4]} After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age^[5] and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek manuscripts from the dying Byzantine Empire to Western Europe in the Renaissance.

‘The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived “natural philosophy“,^[6][7] which was later transformed by the Scientific Revolution that began in the 16th century^[8] as new ideas and discoveries departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions.^[9][10] The scientific method soon played a greater role in knowledge creation and it was not until the 19th century that many of the institutional and professional features of science began to take shape,^[11][12] along with the changing of “natural philosophy” to “natural science”.^[13]

‘Modern science is typically divided into three major branches:^[14] natural sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics), which study the physical world; the social sciences (e.g., economics, psychology, and sociology), which study individuals and societies;^[15][16] and the formal sciences (e.g., logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science), which study formal systems, governed by axioms and rules.^[17][18] There is disagreement whether the formal sciences are science disciplines,^[19][20][21] because they do not rely on empirical evidence.^[22][20] Applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as in engineering and medicine.^[23][24][25]

‘New knowledge in science is advanced by research from scientists who are motivated by curiosity about the world and a desire to solve problems.^[26][27] Contemporary scientific research is highly collaborative and is usually done by teams in academic and research institutions,^[28] government agencies, and companies.^[29][30] The practical impact of their work has led to the emergence of science policies that seek to influence the scientific enterprise by prioritizing the ethical and moral development of commercial products, armaments, health care, public infrastructure, and environmental protection.’

With thanks to Wikipedia and particularly to the writer

We neede to talk, urgently.

John Blundell

South Australia

Weather Systems Disruption/ The Microgrids Revolution/ Philosophy of Science/ New Age Neurolinguistics

..his influence on literature, philosophy and the visual arts

Warning: This Short Essay Contains Acid Humour, Millions of Dead People and Abundant Authentic Non Machine-“Learning” Non-fascist References

Wilhelm Richard Wagner

[Wagner’s] protean abundance meant that he could inspire the use of literary motif in many a novel employing interior monologue; … the Symbolists saw him as a mystic hierophant; the Decadents found many a frisson in his work.^{[223] [..cwoarrhh].}

^{…an old white genitalman, location & provenance uncertain}

Wagner’s operatic works are his primary artistic legacy. Unlike most opera composers, who generally left the task of writing the libretto (the text and lyrics) to others, Wagner wrote his own libretti, which he referred to as “poems”.^[152] From 1849 onwards, he urged a new concept of opera often referred to as “music drama” (although he later rejected this term),^{[153][n 16]} in which all musical, poetic and dramatic elements were to be fused together—the Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner developed a compositional style in which the importance of the orchestra is equal to that of the singers. The orchestra’s dramatic role in the later operas includes the use of leitmotifs, musical phrases that can be interpreted as announcing specific characters, locales, and plot elements; their complex interweaving and evolution illuminates the progression of the drama.. @Wikipedia

The Master-singers Story: “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg occupies a unique place in Wagner’s oeuvre. It is the only comedy among his mature operas (he had come to reject his early Das Liebesverbot) and is also unusual among his works in being set in a historically well-defined time and place rather than in a mythical or legendary setting. It is the only mature Wagner opera based on an entirely original story, and in which no supernatural or magical powers or events feature. It incorporates many of the operatic conventions that Wagner had railed against in his essays on the theory of opera: rhymed verse, arias, choruses, a quintet, and even a ballet. The story is set in Nuremberg in the mid-16th century. At the time, Nuremberg was a free imperial city and one of the centers of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. @Wikipedia

“The story is set in Nuremberg in the mid-16th century. At the time, Nuremberg was a free imperial city and one of the centers of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. The story revolves around city’s guild of Meistersinger (Master Singers), an association of amateur poets and musicians who were primarily master craftsmen of various trades. The master singers had developed a craftsmanlike approach to music-making, with an intricate system of rules for composing and performing songs. The work draws much of its atmosphere from its depiction of the Nuremberg of the era and the traditions of the master-singer guild. One of the main characters, the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs, is based on a historical figure, Hans Sachs (1494–1576), the most famous of the master-singers.” Again, courtesy @Wikipedia

“Friedrich Nietzsche was a member of Wagner’s inner circle during the early 1870s, and his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, proposed Wagner’s music as the Dionysian “rebirth” of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist “decadence”. Nietzsche broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner’s final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties and a surrender to the new German Reich. Nietzsche expressed his displeasure with the later Wagner in “The Case of Wagner” and “Nietzsche contra Wagner.^{[224]” @Wikipedea}

This was of course the neoclassical Romance & Rhetorick Era when Ruling Caste European & East Coast USA men bestrode the psycho-sexual landscape like titans and selected womenfolk supplied modest quanta of theatrical noise, colour, inclusivity and ethnic diversity, much as Marie Antoinette’s costumed dancers on the lawns at Versailles.

“The poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine worshipped Wagner.^[225] Édouard Dujardin, whose influential novel Les Lauriers sont coupés is in the form of an interior monologue inspired by Wagnerian music, founded a journal dedicated to Wagner, La Revue Wagnérienne, to which J. K. Huysmans and Téodor de Wyzewa contributed.^[226] In a list of major cultural figures influenced by Wagner, Bryan Magee includes D. H. Lawrence, Aubrey Beardsley, Romain Rolland, Gérard de Nerval, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rainer Maria Rilke and several others. ^[227]”

Whoops, there goes the twentieth century Rather Naughty European Men neighbourhood.

“In the 20th century, W. H. Auden once called Wagner “perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived”,^[228] while Thomas Mann^[224] and Marcel Proust^[229] were heavily influenced by him and discussed Wagner in their novels. He is also discussed in some of the works of James Joyce,^[230]as well as W. E. B. Du Bois, who featured Lohengrin in The Souls of Black Folk.^[231]Wagnerian themes inhabit T. S. Eliot‘s The Waste Land, which contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung, and Verlaine’s poem on Parsifal.” ^[232]

Whoops there goes the twentieth century European Flaneurs & Tormented Souls neighborhood.

“Many of Wagner’s concepts, including his speculation about dreams, predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud.^[233]Wagner had publicly analysed the Oedipus myth before Freud was born in terms of its psychological significance, insisting that incestuous desires are natural and normal, and perceptively exhibiting the relationship between sexuality and anxiety.^[234] Georg Groddeck considered the Ring as the first manual of psychoanalysis.”.^[235]

Oh my giddy Oscar Wilde aunt there goes the genitally overwhelmed primitive psychiatry & John Maynard Keynes/ big-time stock market trader’s animal spirits neighbourhood as well.^m

If perchance your appetite is whetted for more sex, dear reader, though I cannot for the life of me think why: the violent genocidal thrusting and parrying of post Otto von Bismarck vs Napoleon III warfare between jumped-up trumped-up regional mediaeval principalities of blood, conquest and really-excellent-paintings become the grandly named Nation States of this calamitous day will indeed put us all off sex permanently (by 2032 according to my own guesstimate of 2003 – Atmospheric and Weather Science advocates rarely if ever pass up an opportunity at self-promotion – the money’s lousy and publication moments are few and far between because the entire intellectually, cognitively, spiritually and morally bereft 20th century political class, numbering say three-million wordwide, fears, hates and dreads economic reform and seeks to persist with the complete demolition of liberal democracy for heroic gerontocrat Wagnerian fascism – with which cockamamie political outcome the others of us, some 7,000,000,097, disagree vehemently), try this: Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey’s Theory of Biography Martin Kallich Vol. 15, No. 4 (WINTER 1958) pp. 331-370 The Johns Hopkins University Press

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26301654

I’m John Blundell, global ecosystems, economic redesign, the teaching revolution, neurolinguistics, cultural hegemonics, human health and Philosophy of Science.

J

This essay is dedicated to Em Prof Barry Boettcher Univ of Newcastle notably on his neurology work & advice to me circa July 1969 Flinders University of SA

Readers are advised this short essay is awash with Neoclassical Rhetorick. It conveys imagination, humour and literary flair such as characterise intelligent human discourse.

Readers are advised they really must try this at home, work & play.

AS SOON as he drew up a plan for his first quadratic equations calculating machine Charles Babbage insightfully and cleverly named the Difference Engine being fast on his feet like all polymaths (errors & omissions excepted) he figured the thing would destroy what was known in those days as Western Civilisation – in those heady times of Jeremy Bentham, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall and jolly Lord Palmerston who legislated for companies, that is to say legally and lawfully incorporated bodies, to enjoy all of the civil and human rights embodied in British Common Law of citizens around 1870¹.

Those City of London days..

Then 104 years later – in 1941 – Konrad Zuse built the first general-purpose computer, the Z3. Alan Turing completed the design for an electronic serial stored-program computer, called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) by late in 1945.

..if you are bored out of your tiny brain or an Australian Year 4 through Yr12 student required to do this stuff all day (eek), you could search it out on the interwebs which is rewarding if the information has not been ejaculated by a sausage machine that generates/ produces/ artificially constructs deracinated, culturally-, spiritually- or psycho-emotionally- unanchored mathematical object-feeling-evaluation syntax/ synthesis 4 set (initially called “SS3” superset (valid) or subset (invalid ≈ erroneous) circa 2001 but this usage I dumped because of cultural incongruity – which is of course that subsets are not ipso facto or by virtue of their appellation/ name inferior or incorrect and simply convey objects or subjects or concepts under. or devolved from, some categorical rubric, umbrella or Model or other)) quadratic equations and therefore means nothing for human society: no history, no culture, no ecology and apocalyptically no vision for regenerative unfolding enduring life on Earth Full-stop.

Now Some Notes Towards the Definition of Culture..¹

¹ Henry Giroux, Prof for Scholarship in the Public Interest @McMasterU, recent @truthout “US Fascism is Spreading Under the Guise of Education: Republicans are Rallying Behind Racist Pedagogy as an Organising Principle,” on Backgrnd Briefing with Ian Masters

..well everybody’s doing it, they ‘go’ in twtchy, if not palpitating and increasingly ill acutely neuro-degeneratively challenged Australia.

² The Hollow Men, Thomas Stearns Eliot, ‘modernist writer’ 1925… “Like much of his work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary, concerned with post WWI Europe [subject to] the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised, see his “Gerontion”), hopelessness, religious conversion, redemption, and, some critics argue, his failing marriage..” @Wikipedia ..intellectually challenging sure but we now look around ourselves to a nether world of #SocialMedia “influencers,” vapid deracinated techno-utopian Know-nothings & Care-less’s at least figuratively pumping their personal celebrity $100m vanity projects, promotional marketing videos or anodyne prime ministerial announcements, ludicrous unself-examined and largely unselfaware Dunning-Kruger narcissism befitting men who bestride the earth like Titans, though occasionally horned by dilemma or at large risk of getting rocked in one hard place or another – while we their variously earnest, conscientious or scurrilously crook psychiatric bomb-sites, the working folk who pay same 70% of the federal tax take in all neoliberal countries, all tricked-up with our phones, lunatic Musk-Gates-Bezos-Branson satellites above turning the sky to rubbish, endure an unrelenting barrage of pest calls from fraudsters and quite tragic under 45s who can find no better job than in the terminally de-skilled cultural morass of socially re-engineered middle class aspirational customer-relations consumer-schmoozing and downright lies flogging stuff, in the employ of (bizarrely and without the hint of irony or sober reflection

.. pubic-subsidy and tax-lurk funded ‘enterprises’ passing themselves off as public services that sadly suffer the highest rate of bankruptcies in the industrialised world – when it was commonly said during the Paul Keating recession 30 years ago that 1 in 3 start-up #SMEs only lasted three years – so there could be some teensie-weensie intergenerationally persistent education, training, people-skills & Year 10 level General Knowledge issues at play there hmm

..let’s talk about the Not-for-profits, the philanthropic Foundations, the #RedCross, Ita Buttrose’s & Scott Morrison’s Oi-oi Land Broad & Bloke Neofreudian Casting Corporation, the #RFDS, the Sierra Club of High Nevada, Greenpeace, the sparkling career of that fat bloke, ad nauseam, of @ProfBrianCox, Geraldine Dougue or the Australian Conservation Foundation

..now we’re all hearing voices because the boys & chicks in Marketing have seized upon that quintessential Ockerism to the effect that talking or watching Jarjums, Eurovision or fireworks displays beats the Bakers Delight Muffin out of doing any work, let alone listening to children

³ https://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-kevin-rudd-faith-politics–300. This quotation is inserted because it represents the conversations and maunderings of erroneous pre-pubescent globally catastrophic Monist (“universal one-ness as opposed to Pluralist literally meaning the contemporary Cooker or ideologically neofascist term Woke(ist)) masculinist Cartesian-dualist anthropocentric European belief-systems – in neoclassical terms the Patriarchy

⁴

..eeyaghh.. real bullets, unprecedented road mayhem, rape culture and at least one murdered woman a week in my country.. Two now? Oh.

John Blundell

Economics, Sociology, 21C Neurolinguistics, Human-health, Philosophy of Science

South Australia

Could it be Post WWII Fact & Value Social Science now become Material Descriptor + Social (affective, transactional or economic) Identifier dialectics or in discursive popular-culture terms Quantum Logic^ after Geoffrey Hinton’s and Harvard University’s MPA + MBA – although the historical sequence was the other way round – you’ll maybe know from what you have learned so far about my independent home-grown out of vicious dispossession & bewildering exile deliberative Object-Event-Fact-Opinion (value/ discussion/ evaluation/ discourse/ popular or social narrative) quantum logic how frankly exciting and contributory simple maths 2 to 5 part interdependent sequentia are for students and researchers – swept up and embraced by mainstream formal natural and social science, in all their notional (Life, Earth et cetera) divisions and branches..

I readily concede that the introductory paragraph is a little haptic, murky and ‘random’ but this document has grown a little Topsy-like over 18 of the most epoch-smashing weeks in the non triumphant history of the human race, now literally destroying its own habitat AND future viability, so there’s overwhelming urgency and extraordinarily useful study material here, so please don’t fool yourself into dismissing, let alone publicly condemning any part of it. It’s a huge and vital public service so out it goes.

Of course I shall review, revise and update its content DAILY. Without our learning in the micro, like the mental constructs of iOS & Microsoft keypads, like ‘ and ’ or ’ and ‘ or ‘ and ‘ or ’ and ‘ in order to, and VITALLY for our own learning and mental health as individual adults, dialectically complement the gargantuan phantasmagorical and “infinitely” expanding toxic waste dump of global media product we know as “the macro” and make robust dialectical sense of the world around and OUR parts in it. Or shall we all go to our beds “tonight” – it’s 24 hour night in #Antarctica hmm – if not dumber then having learned nothing? Forgive me for advancing CCEc again but Centre Circle 1 or ⭕️ 1 is every adult. We do not address horrifically alienating and culturally subversive ancient bucket-filling pedagogy, carrot & stick behaviour therapy or allopathic medicine for anyone on earth, let alone children and adolescents.

The ontological poverty of human languages is such that we with wide eyes and open mouths call a rolling exponentially increasing number of humanly crafted audiovisual & textual display product burning up vast person-power, resource & costly energy as if it were nothing (no thing/ no object/ no FACT) but a bunch of numbers,” but nonetheless Infinite – in whose mental nether world would this be a valid proposition? – They wish & they mean to take us all out with them when they go

This is not a game: this is our grandchildren’s lives. Insanely overcompartmented (helplessly blindly moronically siloed) overcodiified Nineteenth Century CE Euro-American neoclassical Fact & Value and Object & Affect dialectics was a game.

– wanting to add what I imagined to be at this stage of my study the only four valid statements available to discourse and pin a name on, or suggest an identifier or descriptor for, each of the 2,3,4 & five sets in those statements, thus..

SS1 Object – Affect. SS2 Object – Fact – Affect. SS3. Object – Fact – Event -Affect. SS4 (the 5-set/4 conjunctor series or sequence) say Object – Identifying Data/ Fact – Descriptive Data/ Event – Value/ Appraisal

And a final fun note for tonight is that this system of logic has some of its origins in Human Resource Development Carkhuff & Berenson 1975. Secondly although neurolinguistics is my major study in these essays on human explication my work owes nothing to a pop psychology type of publication around 1979 of the same name – except an investigative jumping-off point on left and right eye-movements (now hugely developed and taken up by others since the turn of the century).

The three Romance/ Enlightenment/ Modern Neoclassical Era divisions of the sciences:

• Natural sciences: the study of nature in the broadest sense, including biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy and Earth science.
• Social sciences: the study of people and societies, including psychology, sociology, economics, history.2
• Formal sciences: the study of abstract concepts, including mathematics, logic, theoretical computer science.

Here’s another merry band of hopefuls, the systems folk. We alas were swamped by functionalist behaviourism and all those politicians who thought politics was the art of whatever one might possibly1 get away with powered by the world famous depressive tit Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s triumphant Will to Power over other humans, beginning with chicks of course – I mean seriously, where else would you start? These young women make themselves meat for the plucking. Thank goodness Brit Higgins has gone off to Washington to tell the blokes of this world what floppy useless things they are. Thank you Brittany.

So there you go with those bits and pieces of who we indeed are, or thought we were: a human culture that can’t explain itself to itself is not a culture at all but a business model for rich old people to fool with. You knew that.

John

Economics, Health. Neurolinguistics, Philosophy of Science

South Australia

This is a radical critique of globally culturally hegemonic neoclassical scholarship and the religious belief-system that has at the beginning of the 21st century – in the common era marked historically as beginning with the birth or nativity of a Middle-eastern religious seer, worker of “miracles” and prophet with omnipotent “temporal” powers and omniscient metaphysical knowledge – by direct result of its own erroneous ethnocentric misogyne fantastical beliefs about the illustrious mastery of the post 1509 Hernan Cortes (finds Darien, now a popular holiday spot of course), post Italian Renaissance, post 1729 English Industrial Revolution ruling-class Remittance Men in the colonies global playground: the explorers, adventurers, warriors, discoverers and lifters of young women’s dresses (who made copious notes and journal entries about a rather pathetic backward world peopled by indigenous traditional folk who hardly ever got out except to scratch about in their gardens and who plainly needed taking in hand, as for example by Lord Byron with his 12-year old Greek gells, James Cook RN’s crew roving the Pacific or Paul Gaugin managing his Tahitian lovelies..) beliefs it promotes.having become a major, if not the principal, contributor to the destruction of Earth as a fit place for habitation by animals, birds, waterway & wetland fish, pelagic & benthic (oceanic) marine life, microfauna (especially insect pollenising species) an utterly vast panoply of nutritious and medivinal plants every single species and sport belonging to a specific small ecological community – perhaps as tiny as one square-kilometre – whose unique terroir gave definition identity and futures to that particular piece of country in perpetuity, soil fungi & mycorrhizae, microbes, micro-organisms and enzymes vital to immune protection for all life..

Bogus, fake and bad #Science of siloised compartmentalised billionaire-cabal and laundered-money, non-tax-paying funded bogus research and studies conducted in secrecy or effectively under guard of private armies (the proceeds of absent-government ‘gangsterland’ trafficking, terorisation, slavery, quasi-slavery, drugs of psycho-emotional dependency, coercive or brutal sexual trade in human bodies, child violation and killing, femicide, random incarceration, capture by stripping of civil rights and freedom of movement OR associaion or murder of civilians by police, authorities and governments, body-parts for “medical tourism,” regional or international, and last but by no means trivial – in fact the greatest assault ever, we can only imagine, on the pecuniary savings and household security of middle income working people by a multifarious array of expropriation or theft-of-funds modalities, devices and mechanisms) criminality.

They’re always throwin’ goodness at you
But with a little bit of luck
A man can duck!

With a Little Bit of Luck, My Fair Titillation_¹ as it were,

The Lord above gave man an arm of iron
So he could do his job and never shirk
The Lord gave man an arm of iron-but

With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
Someone else’ll do the blinkin’ work!

With a little bit… with a little bit
With a little bit of luck you’ll never work!

The Lord above made liquor for temptation
To see if man could turn away from sin
The Lord above made liquor for temptation-but

With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
When temptation comes you’ll give right in!

With a little bit… with a little bit
With a little bit of luck you’ll give right in

Oh, you can walk the straight and narrow
But with a little bit of luck
You’ll run amuck!

The gentle sex was made for man to marry
To share his nest and see his food is cooked
The gentle sex was made for man to marry-but

With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
You can have it all and not get hooked

They’re always throwin’ goodness at you
But with a little bit of luck
A man can duck!

The Lord above made man to help is neighbor
No matter where, on land, or sea, or foam
The Lord above made man to help his neighbor-but

With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
When he comes around you won’t be home!

A man was made to help support his children
Which is the right and proper thing to do
A man was made to help support his children – but

With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
They’ll go out and start supporting you

Oh, it’s a crime for man to go philanderin’
And fill his wife’s poor heart with grief and doubt
Oh, it’s a crime for man to go philanderin’-but

With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
You can see the bloodhound don’t find out!

It is precisely the charge that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor levels against Christ

Inequality and Power: Theory and Practice

Examining the angry junk of Judeo-Arabic & Christian (in French Chretien/ derivative term cretin) belief with RV Sampson 1965 Heinemann..

As noted at the beginning of this long essay the content is all in draft and is distributed before completion as a student – and “world” leaders’ – aid or helpmeet.

Money for nothing and your laughs for free: For example, one of the interpretations for “help meet” proposed by 18-century biblical scholar John Gill was that a woman’s purpose as a “help meet” was to make man “comfortable … to dress his food … be pleasing to his sight, and … be in all respects … entirely answerable to his … wants and wishes.”

John

The argument has so far been conducted in terms of human psychology and individual character. We noticed in purely psychological terms the [propensity] of human beings to enter into relations of dominance and submission with one another. Confident egos expand their field of effectiveness and weak or diffident ones comply with them. The fact of power even at the personal level is, then a very pervasive element in the comon experience of daily life. When we turn from the individual to look outwards at society, the presence of power as an element in our experience immediately looms much larger. Large numbers of individuals acting in concert begin to generate power on a vastly increased scale. Given the age and ubiquity of inequality and power as factors of social experience, the development of an elaborate metaphysic of justification is to be expected. Indeed, it is a truism that that political philosophy has traditionally concerned itself with the serarch for some kind of moral justification for the power and coercion of governments The arguments to justify State power have been many and various. It is frequently defended as a necessary evil, although some arguments, generally associated with the Right in politics, aim to defend power as a good in its own right. However reluctant people may be to defend the use of force or power in purely personal relations, they experience no such reluctance in finding rationalisations to justify its regularised use in the community’s public life. De Maistre [offers] perhaps the most forceful and uncompromising statement of the claims of power:

Ther can be no human socity without government, no government without sovereignty, no sovereignty without infallibility, and this last privilege is so essential that its existence must be assumed even in temporal sovereignty (where it does not reside in fact) as an esential condition for the maintenance of society (Du Pape, 1821, Bk. I, ch. xix).

De Maistre is unusual in the candour with which he makes explicit the assumption of infallibility which is latent within the concept of sovereign power. Power is necessitated because of the incorrigible waywardness of man; but since power is wielded by a few people over many, the logic of justification requires the assumption that the few be less wayward than the many. At the outset we find ourselves therefore committed to the principle of inequality and the proposition that power and virtue go hand in hand. The basic assumptions of authoritarianism would seem to contradict the facts of man’s religious and moral experience. And this relates significantly to the idiom and manner of much of conservative political writing. Conservative writers themselves have been quick to detect the significance of the querelous assertivenes or stridency of much of the writing of their pokitical opponents. It is only fair to mark that theirs too is a characteristic and not fortuitous style. The general tone is one of scepticism well-bred to the point of rather weary worldliness. The accent is one of urbane, secular pessimism, a thinly veiled impatience at the necessity of reminding the public of facts so obvious. Negatively, the style may be expected to betray symptoms of suppressed irritation at the first signs of moral earnestness.. But their deepest distaste is aroused by any form of moral enthusiasm, which will be put down as ‘high-minded,’ ‘priggish,’ ‘canting,’ or ‘holier than thou.’

Even a superficial reading of conservative writing will reveal the touchy preoccupation with the phenomenon of ‘moral earnestness’ which would seem to irritate, trouble, or even frighten them. Such people are thought to be dangerous since the established order is thought to depend upon the maintenance of ‘a due sense of proportion.’ The moral aspirant, ‘hotfoot for certainties’ is liable to disturb the peace or the slumber of the quiescent conscience. Shaw’s Inquisitor expressed the feeling well in describing the social function of the Holy Inquisition in the trial of St Joan. ‘A gentle and pious girl, or a young man who has obeyed the command of our Lord by giving all his riches to the poo, and putting on thye garb of poverty, the nlife of austerity, an d the rule of humility and charity, may be the founder of a heresy that will wreck both Curch and Empire if not ruthlessly stamped out in time.’ The Church is right, since it is accommodated to the needs of the great mass of ordinary men, sinners all perhaps, but whose defects and shortcomings the Church understands and charitably tolerates. The point is again vividly illustrated in a German cartoon on the subject of the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication against Tolstoy (It is reproduced from the Bettmann Archive in G Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 1960, p 255). The cartoon depicts the giant Tolstoy, a rugged heroic figure, struggling under the weight of a cross so immense that it is bursting asunder the roof and portals of the church. Outside the threatened walls stand the outraged [miniature] figures of the clerics of the Orthodox Chhurch, expostulating in impotent fury. The caption reads:’Hinaus mit ihm!.. (Out with him! His cross is much too big for our Church) On the conservative view of the matter, it is Tolstoy who is in error, because he cannot cut himself down to life-size and is accordingly unable to understand normal men whose problems he can neither diagnose nor prescribe for.

It is precisely the charge that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor levels against Christ in that most influential of modern parables from The Brothers Karamazov. During the Inquisition Christ returns to a Spanish town, is arested by the Inquisitor, and indicted on the three counts of his answers to the question put to him by Satan on the high mountain. The first temptation was that he should prove his divine power by changing the stones into bread. Christ refused on the grounds that he had come to give men the gift of freedom. Obedience so bought would be morally worthless. Man does not live by bread alone, but his appetite must be satisfied before he is asked to consider the claims of virtue. And even so, only a very few will prove capable of seeeking the bread of Heaven. Man craves not freedom but someone to worship. His purpose is far from being the freedom of conscience to choose between good and evil. Most of all he wants peace; he would prefer death to the suffering inherent in the responsibility of moral choice. Anyone who will relieve him of this burden he will readily worship, and once he has found his god, he will tolerate no dissent. He demands community of worship, and will persecute furiously those who threaten his security.

The vain offer of power by miracle is followed by the second temptation, that he should consent to rule by mystery. Again, the Inquisitor does not deny Christ’s wisdom, acknowledging that had he consented to tempt God by casting himself down, his faith would have dissolved,and he would have been hurled against the rocks. But again, he asks, does Christ not know men and their weaknesses? Without miracle and mystery they cannot live. Or is it, he asks ironically, that Christ has come not, as he professes, for all men, but only for the elect who have strength enough to bear the Cross? In the great crises of life, mystery is indispensable to man. If christ denies him mystery a well as miracle, then he will have recourse to mysteries of his own invention, to witchcraft and sorcery. Ultimately it is power to which men respond. Characteristic of their weakness was their demand that Christ should ‘prove’ his credentials by stepping down from the Cross. Again Christ refused to meet such a challenge. The only love that he could accept was a love that was freely given. ‘Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave … But thou ddidst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature’ (Everyman ed., Vol. I, p 262).

Finally, in the third temptation, Christ banishes Satan altogether by rejecting his last offer, the offer of power and dominiion for their own sake. For there were shown unto him ‘all the kingdoms of the world [in a moment of time‘ .. (in the most common textual reference)], ‘and the glory of them.’ All these things I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’ The acceptance of this gift would in itself have brought man’s willing and absolute worship. The striving for universal unity, in which all men will live in harmony characteristic of an ant-heap, is the third of the abiding urges which dominate men. Even the cconquests of the Timours and the Ghengis-Khans were an unconscious expression of man’s urge to achieve by force the peace of universal unity. By refusing the sword of Caesar, by declining the weapons of authority as welll as those of miracle and mystery, Christ turned away from the last opportunity of bringing the heartts of men under his sway, His alternative, the gift of freedom, can bring men only to disater and ruin.

It is an astringent portrait, not untuched by Dostoevsky’s own self-hatred. Its force lies in the consistency with which it hews close to the view of man’s nature necessary to justify the right of Power to rule, the power in this instance being clothed in the authority of the Church. The balanced and ‘mature’ view of the human situation is that which sees man as inescapably bound to inhabit a universe where pain and suffering, a measure of injustice, of imperfection, of human fallibility, and absurdity are enduring. There is nothing that can be done to alter this basic condition of human life. Inability to do so is a sign of immaturity. Rigorous resistance to evil in all its forms wherever it raises its head, smacks a little of hubris, of arrogance and impiety. Since evil is a necessary part of the great scheme of things, its elimination would threaten the whole mysterios balance of the divine cosmos. Without evil, freedom would be impossible for man; and freedom is his highest vocation. ‘In this light, evil itself becomes a necessary adjunct of human freedom,’ writes Professor Steiner. Professoe Oakeshott says much the same thing when he echoes FH Bradley: ‘We live in the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.’

It is not a novel metaphysic and has rarely been better expressed than by the ancient Psalmist. The author of the 73rd Psalm, however, only reached this position after a powerful inward struggle to overcome his initially lively sense of injustice. But then who is to know what internal anguish our contemporary pessimists and realists have had to surmount before manfully resigning themselves to the imperfections of the world? tHe Psalmist’s lamentation is ocasioned by his bewilderment that thye wicked should prospper in the world and the seekers after power inherit the earth.

They are not in trouble as other men; neither are they plagued like other men. Therefore pride compasseth about them as a chain; violence covereth them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness; they have more than heart could wish. They are corrupt, and speak wickedly concerning oppression: they speak loftily.

The ungodly increase in riches, while the Psalmist, conscientiously cleansing his heart, is chastened and plagued for his pains. In his ansguish he tries to convince himself that reality is ‘really’ otherwise. The candour of the original analysis is undermined by self-pity; and the process of self-deception starts. The truth, he acknowledges, is ‘too painful for me.’ Unable to deny the evidence of his eyes, he calls theology to his aid to redress the balance of a world intolerable to his sense of justice. The apparent triumph of the power-seekers is short-lived and illusory, and ultimately God will ensure that they will be humiliated and brought low, ‘Surely thou didst set them in slippery places; thou castedst them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! they are utterly consumed with terrors.’ Then quickly recovering himself, he recognises the futility of a wish-fulfilment grounded ultimately in chagrin and envy. ‘So foolish was I, and ignorant.’ Acknowledging his error, he returns to the problem. And his ultimate solution is one of acquiescence in a reality which, however painful must express the the will of Him, who is set over all. In revolt lies madness, since God must be his strength at all times. Difficult it may be to understand a wisdom so full of paradox, but we must rest confident in the ultimate goodness of God. ‘Ihave put my trust in the Lord God, that I might declare all thy works.’ Reconciling ourselves to the inexorable fact that evil has its place in the world, we must learn not to question the mysterious and inscrutable ways of God. However repugnant to our emotions, they will be seen on reflection not to offend our reason. The idiom today, as befits a more secular age, is not always couched in theological terms, but the accent has not changed much. ‘The highest and most easily destroyed of human capacities,’ Professor Oakeshott tells us, is what Keats termed negative capability and defined as as that condition ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysterious doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ The nostalgia is unmistakable. It is the longing of the true romantic for an ill-defined, twilight world, a world of intimations, where we are secure in our acceptance of reality, unditurbed by any tetchy, awkward hankering of unsettled and unsettling men.

The emphasis is repeatedly on sstyle and method, on guidance by intimations emanating from unimpaired traditions, on conversation rather than argument, while reliance on general principle is suspect as a symptom of rationalist politics. the intimations are frequently so elusive and phantomlike that it is not easy to come to grips with the content of the argument. For there is an argument; and if the original premises, sometimes made explicit, are examined, they will be seen to derive from a simple metaphysic, the metaphysic of human egoism. Granted that, morally speaking, we ought to be unselfish, the argument runs a condition of survival is that we are at least sufficiently self-regarding to ensure the continued autonomous activity of our own ego. Unselfishness presupposes and rests upon selfishness, which is thus the predicate on which the entire moral argument and the possbility of moral behaviour is raised. Thus it is inevitable and in the nature of things that the hand of every man should always be to some extent turned against the han of every other man.

The urge to dominate is, then, inherent in the necessity of the struggle to survive. But security and survival are specific attainable goals within the reach of the determined man. With sateity might not the urge to dominate wither? Unfortunately not, since in the necessity of the original struggle man ha learnt to acquire a taste for domination. And this continues, after security has been achieved, to find an outlet in the quest for power, prestige, status, wealth.¹ Since these are appetites which feed upon themselves and are insatiable, we may safely conclude that the urge to dominate others, to manage men in fact, is natural to man in his present circumstances. Nor does the evidence suggest any flexibility or susceptibility to modification of these fundamental human drives. The notion that by greater understanding we may achieve greater powers of control to redirect is pure myth. Accordingly the first act of realism in politics is to accept without repining these inexorable facts. True, there are other sides to our complex nature; the urge to dominate does not exhaust our attributes. But the other qualities are more precariously based; and wisdom in politics consists of building upon that which is most dependable rather than that which is possibly most elevating to the soul. Successful adjustment to the restricting circumstance of any human society will require a thorough understanding and acceptance of the supremacy of the law¹ of human egoism. In Oakeshott’s words, ‘The enterprise of these politics will be to make use of the strongest, and not merely the highest, human impulses in a continuous attempt to correct ascertainable mischiefs and to suppress actual malpractices in society…”

Policy, to be viable and practical, mustnbe based on a capacity to observe accurately men as they are. If we do this, we will see that they are most readily stirred to exert themselves on behalf of themselves, their kith and kin, and their friends.

Thus is the moral argument stood on its head, and tailored to everyday use. The idiom is contemporary, but the argument has an ancestral lineage.. When men act justly, either they have not been put in the way of temptation, or they do so under compulsion out of fear of the consequencves of acting otherwise, never willingly

page 147 bottom

John Blundell neurolinguistics human & ecological health philosophy of science

South Australia

^ LF Crisp, Australia.. Even in the second half of the 19th century as the six Australian colonies were still acquiring internal self government and a significant measure of political democracy they sought ‘despite their lack of international status’ to influence such aspects of foreign relations as, for example, immigration policy with the avowed intention of preserving the racial homogeneity of the population mix. By the beginning of the 20th century this posed particular difficulties in their relationship with Great Britain, a problem which intensified when the British entered into the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902 and obviously wished to restrain potential racial slurs inherent in the so-called ‘White Australia policy’.

2Social science is the study of people: as individuals, communities and societies; their behaviours and interactions with each other and with their built, technological and natural environments. Social science seeks to understand the evolving human systems across our increasingly complex world and how our planet can be more sustainably managed. It’s vital to our shared future.

¹ It is vital readers seeking adaptive change in the behaviour of Australian parliamentarians understand the powerful trope from the 1960s, produced in the name of political science and seized upon by ambitious men and women, on both sides of the law, “Politics is the art of the possible”

² masculinist lore, bullying, coercive relations with women, male-chauvinist police-culture, suborning & genital mutilation of girls, and right along the continuum towards random ‘rape-culture,’ bodily mutilation and femicide of course

The ontological poverty of human languages is such that we with wide eyes and open mouths call a rolling exponentially increasing number of humanly crafted audiovisual & textual display product burning up vast person-power, resource & costly energy “inas if it were nothing (no thing/ no object/ no FACT) but a bunch of numbersfinite,” indeed as if it were nothing“nothing a bunch bunchbunch weremerely by a bunch of numbers a a bunch of numbers

3 .Sheldon’s mother .. Leonard here thinks you might be pining for a young lady. And you’ve got cats with Jewish names

as if it were nothing (no thing/ no object/ no FACT) but a bunch of numbers