Readers will forgive that this essay is jarringly incomplete and a bit of a dissequenced if not discordant jumble_¹ but I’ll get back to work on it soon.

These are extaordinarily demanding and busy times for professional economics, decarbonisation and social policy writers.

John

The second part of this essay quotes RV Sampson. I gather he was a psychiatrist. These people last century produced some startling cultural historical observations. Who, with a penchant for acid sociology could forget the acerbic Ronald Conway from Melbourne, for one example? He thought we Australians were all rabbits, or bogans were. Had a point, there.. Had the book never read it. There’s been a thousand titles likje that in my life. They get nicked because some fool thinks you may have the Vatican secrets of numerology (I haven’t.. well hang on) and the situation with your doomed book is analogous with the purloined brain of Abert Einstein – some dude, possibly Elon Musk’s grandfather or the Unabomber – put it in his boot (trunk in USA) and drove around the backroads of California before suffering a psycho-affective episode.

I made that last bit up. The second and concluding part of the essay conveys the message of the Holy Father of the Church of Rome (last warning to the world on the now plainly apocalyptic ramifications of man-made global heating)… Science is vital to solving the challenges we face, from pandemics to climate change. Tonight we’re celebrating the heroes of Australian science. Congratulations to Professor Michelle Simmons AO, winner of the 2023 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, and all award recipients, some historical blip said.

The third part is three paragraphs anchoring the scientific responsibilty question in the socio-cultural bedrock concerning who the hell we Australians think we are at this pre-apocalyptic historical moment and just when do we fancy we can get down to work for our country and the kids, presently swamped from toddlerhood by the mental health and eating-disorders bomb of performative display suffused with coercion, violation, assault and sex-role stereoptyping. Some of us publicly stated 32 years that the @Nickelodeon thing was destructive. That was a simple case, but the cutesifying and putting on show of litlle kids is in this old social workers’ view reminiscent of the Judy Garland syndrome ‘child star’ mothers’ of last century is exactly in psycho-emotional synchrony with the unstoppable slough of phoney affective empathy for the ageing-and-slowing – the gauche method-acting stuff, high-brow English Anthony Hopkins included. It’s all Dame Edna deceased, Macca the Quacker on Sunday, Margaret Court, Ita Buttrose and Bronwyn Bishop kerosene baths to me. This area of social policy, where Australia is largely turgid, gross and stupored, is another where we’ve SO much to do! I was secretary to the SA Government Enquiry into Nursing Homes & Hostels in the year my dad died, 1986.

The Sampson – he was writing in the early 1960s

If philosophers nowadays must be philosophers’ philosophers, if the whole enterprise is an esoteric affair reflecting the peculiar interests of a tiny group, why should the rest of us care one way or the other? Let them get on with it. It is no concern of ours. A popular attitude of sceptical indifference may reinforce the professional pride of a few, themselves indifferent to popular opinion. This is a mistaken attitude. The role of the philosopher in society is always important. H[-is/ -er] influence, though intangible, permeates society and helps to shape the ideas of people entirely innocent of the original issues. The revolution in modern philosophy has had at least two important consequences.

It has almost certainly had a subtle effect on the respective influence of intellectuals an men [and women] of affairs. A theory of knowledge, validating moral judgments only in the limited sense of attributing to them intelligibility and coherence relative to their culture, is essentially pragmatic. Tests of value are pragmatic judgments governed by the facts. The facts are determined by the existing order of society:> the judgments by the theoretical framework underpinning the existing social order. To question that framework involves an alternative metaphysic. But since this debate has been discredited as logically bogus, the terms of political debate are restricted to the assumptions of the existing order. These have ‘reality’ status and constitute the essence of the pragmatic appeal. Me [and women] of action generally, when confronted by theories repugnant to them, are very ready in the absence of alternative argument to dismiss theory that is critical of their assumptions as mere theory as contrasted with something they call experience. In this sense, businessmen together with their military, political and ecclesiastical ancillaries create a conservative climate of opinion in which the theorising of the intellectual is at a discount. The world of getting and spending is inevitably fashioned in the image of those who get and spend. It can only be effectively criticised in the light of theory deriving from something other than the ad hoc experience of the commercial world. Intellectual theorising is liable to be regarded with distrust as something alien, threatening established power or acquisitive instincts. Theory as such may be condemned in advance as unpractical or the practice of an armchair critic..

“Copernicus did not dare publish his heliocentric theory until the year of his death; Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake; Galileo was compelled to retract the Copernican hypothesis. If our time [written 58 years ago,by RV Sampson] has seen the growth of a more tolerant climate, the scurrilous vituperation that greeted the discoveries of Darwin and Freud belong only to yesterday. When the object of investigation is the human being himself, resistance may be expected to be even more virulent than in the case of the physical world. “It is easy,” wrote Tolstoy in Kreutzer Sonata, to learn whether there is much iron in the sun, and what other metals there are in the sun and the stars; but it is hard, yes, frightfully hard, to discover that which convicts us of immorality.” But even more elemental and pervasive than the emotional resistance to truth deriving from the need to feel moral is the need not to appear different. The psychic pressure towards uniformity – what used to be referred to as the ‘herd instinct’ – stems from the basic emotions of insecuritygrinch. Contemporary sociological investigations have provided very strong empirical confirmation of the thesis so vividly embodied in Hans Christian Andersen in his story, The Emporer’s Clothes. Frighteningly large numbers of people will apparently deny even the elementary evidence of their senses rather than risk appearing to take a lone or unpopular stand. Even in the scientific world, persistence in advocacy of a hypothesis rejected by a majority of professional colleagues requires courage. But the difficulty goes deeper than that. The pressure exercised by a uniform, received opinion may be so overwhelming that no individual may be capable of emancipating himself sufficiently from a common delusion to bring his critical faculties to bear. The idea with which to challenge existing assumptions is prevented by unconscious resistance or defect of imagination from even arising in the mind..”

Culture What Culture¹

Our Aristotelian mission (to find out the existing means of persuasion, where a well-founded, methodically presented, logically coherent or soundly-argued proposition is presented in terms of the scientific norms and conventions of the day) may be thwarted by erroneous belief, by want of imagination or by lack of enthusiasm for the innovative proposition presented, perhaps not in fact even recognising it to be of legitimate academic, professional or personal concern and quite possibly, if these attitudes are on display, moral or mental laziness, defensiveness or even ‘pre-retirement’ fatigue and ennui.

It must be noted that in upper income or ‘managerial class’ Australia and the USA there is a norm to the effect that individuals in positions of authority & responsibility who are clearly neuro-cognitively slowing-down and must try to deal quickly, fairly and judiciously with personnel & technical issues arising amongst staff and suppliers, including many of those unheard of in their earlier lives as for example par excellence in frankly puzzled if not light-headed technophile Australia, affecting people of all ages, of course, especially the vulnerable deskilled young, the questions What are #ChatGPT, @AIOnlineStore or #LLMs are greeted with cheerful replies to the effect that they help people write stuff: creative arts who needs ’em in this zany post-fact, post truth wherever they can swing it – advertising and promotions dollars, government grants sure – big aeroplane rides world of theirs – should be allowed, no encouraged, to work until they drop off their perches.

My mother was Lois Blundell a nursing home owner whose brother said the above of her in response to my plea to him to help me persuade “the Matron” to retire before she killed herself or one of the residents of Warwick Nursing Home, Unley SA – “No, she’ll go until she drops off her perch,” he said, with an obvious snarl. The woman when she was around 75, an employer with a 2 1/2 inches thick abuse-of-staff compaints file (her first-born, me, a state union branch secretary and president 1980 to 1985) at the Nurses Board and was a well known SA Employers Federation later Business SA “dragon” was ‘spotted coming’ by both the ALP and the LPA in Adelaide who sought to punish me for embarrassing them electorally in May 1992, so the Dean Brown government abolished the Nurses Board and this utter moral grub with my younger brother contrived to defraud me of $500,000 of property – the lot, my vertically integrated businesses in the organics industry, my home, marriage and ex-family relationships. My total assets to this day are some $2,000. But i am, luckily, a total kick-arse politician of the as yet unelected variety and an internationally known scholar, so that’s fine. You would all have noticed there is so much intelligent and decisive work to do. Australia’s become, in the 27 years since the suburban Methodist lawyer, a Westfield full of imported junk thats being replaced by online shopping & bank account fraud on behalf of old folks’ investment and pension funds in North America or some shit. We’ve still got a fat and shiny Lend Lease Corporation. It’s a joke, Joyce. Eight million of us are in housing poverty and the environment is a unwatchable television panel show debating point, so it’s kind-of cool that the #Climate #Wars are, er, over. Ooooowhhheee, kids.

John Blundell

Neurolinguistics, Economy, Sociology, Energy Studies, Weather Systems & Philosophy of Science

Australia 19/10/2023

¹ ..alarmingly congruent with national affairs in Australia this morning Thursday 19th October 2023 as exemplified by the following two conversational linguistic atrocities – definitional malicious genocidal @Facebook mis-information – Clare O’Neil, Australian minister of Home Affairs does not dismiss emphatically the suggestion that Ed Husic, Minister of Science.. wants the colours of the Palestinian flag displayed on the roof of the Sydney Opera House + a tergiversatorial – look it up – I just did – it’s a scream – ideological NO-REGULATION neoliberal polemicist on the country’s premier conversational radio ‘octopus,’ Radio Diddly Squat I as a sociologist called it 26 years ago, my life & business smashed by gangsters and cops, says “if we stopped using paper and eating meat today,” [would that help?]

² Culture, what is that? Literacy, articulacy, professional-standard journalism not reading mind-numbing Switch-me-off bags of cliches and political slogans approved by @Harvard – Princeton – Standord – Yale – UCLA – MIT – Boundary Bend Indiana for Christ’s Sake – @GoldmanSachs.. Schwab, Soros, the Koch Brother (?), Sarah Palin, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, @RepMTG, Donald Take-a-dump, Stepen Bannon, Mark Zuckerberg and to cap all that in the Skip domain the ludicrous so-called BIG 4 who actually take care of the business of government @KPMG @PwC Ernst & Young and the estimable if doughty @Deloitte, more communications-crunchy (by a fine margin of one @X account) > than Bloomberg