Another Little Internet Gift from The Marginalian

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it,” the great French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote in contemplating the rarest and purest form of human thought. A generation later, Hannah Arendt cautioned that “the basic fallacy … is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.” How to bridge the gap between meaning, which is the human interpretation of truth, and that naked truth itself is perhaps the most abiding challenge in reconciling the human intellect with the human spirit.

That’s what the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher and astronomer Moses Maimonides examined centuries before Weil and Arendt in The Guide for the Perplexed (public library) — a masterwork of philosophy and rhetoric, dedicated to those “lost in perplexity and anxiety,” so enduring and influential that it has inspired works as diverse as E.F. Schumacher’s magnificent 1977 collection of essays on the meaning of culture and Werner Herzog’s compendium of meditations on creativity and life. A conceptual predecessor to Rilke’s indispensable Letters to a Young Poet, the book was written as a three-part letter to one of Maimonides’s students.

In the prefatory remarks to the original edition, Maimonides points out that he “hesitated very much before writing on the subjects contained in this work, since they are profound mysteries,” and considers the three primary ways we see truth:

Ignorant and superficial readers take them in a literal, not in a figurative sense. Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain the figure, or merely suggest that the terms are figurative. For this reason I have called this book Guide for the Perplexed. I do not presume to think that this treatise settles every doubt in the minds of those who understand it, but I maintain that it settles the greater part of their difficulties.

Centuries before Michael Faraday lamented our remarkable capacity for self-deception, Maimonides addresses the “errors which give rise to fear and anxiety, constant grief and great perplexity,” and writes:

At times the truth shines so brilliantly that we perceive it as clear as day. Our nature and habit then draw a veil over our perception, and we return to a darkness almost as dense as before. We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night. On some the lightning flashes in rapid succession, and they seem to be in continuous light, and their night is as clear as the day… By others only once during the whole night is a flash of lightning perceived… There are some to whom the flashes of lightning appear with varying intervals; others are in the condition of men, whose darkness is illumined not by lightning, but by some kind of crystal or similar stone, or other substances that possess the property of shining during the night; and to them even this small amount of light is not continuous, but now it shines and now it vanishes, as if it were “the flame of the rotating sword.” The degrees in the perfection of men vary according to these distinctions.

Our self-deceptions, Maimonides cautions, can warp what we impart on others — a tendency merely personally tragic in the context of one-to-one human communication but civilizationally menacing in the context of today’s one-to-many media, which didn’t exist in Maimonides’s time and which frame the basic realities of ours. He writes:

You must know that if a person, who has attained a certain degree of perfection, wishes to impart to others, either orally or in writing, any portion of the knowledge which he has acquired of these subjects, he is utterly unable to be as systematic and explicit as he could be in a science of which the method is well known. The same difficulties which he encountered when investigating the subject for himself will attend him when endeavoring to instruct others; viz., at one time the explanation will appear lucid, at another time, obscure; this property of the subject appears to remain the same both to the advanced scholar and to the beginner.

But Maimonides argues that the responsibility to counter untruth lies equally in writer and reader, in media-maker and media-consumer — a sentiment triply timely today. In admonishing his reader against skimming and the unconsidered snap judgments it invariably seeds, he presents a timeless micro-manifesto for the intellectual responsibilities of all information-consumers in any medium:

Do not read superficially, lest you do me an injury, and derive no benefit for yourself. You must study thoroughly and read continually… The reader must, moreover, beware of raising objections to any of my statements, because it is very probable that he may understand my words to mean the exact opposite to what I intended to say… Let the reader make a careful study of this work… Should he notice any opinions with which he does not agree, let him endeavor to find a suitable explanation, even if it seem far-fetched, in order that he may judge me charitably. Such a duty we owe to every one. We owe it especially to our scholars and theologians, who endeavor to teach us what is the truth according to the best of their ability.

With this, he arrives at what should be the credo of every respectable and self-respecting purveyor of information, knowledge, and wisdom — a credo just about diametrically opposed to the one driving today’s media economy of catering to the lowest common denominator. Maimonides reflects:

When I have a difficult subject before me — when I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools — I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude; I prefer to extricate that intelligent man from his embarrassment and show him the cause of his perplexity, so that he may attain perfection and be at peace.

The Guide for the Perplexed goes on to explore the path to truth, reaching which Maimonides argues is essential for attaining such peace from perplexity. Complement this particular portion with physicist Lisa Randall on the different paths art, science, and religion take to meaning and Hannah Arendt on the crucial distinction between truth and meaning.

donating = loving

“Remember that the Gazan economy is relatively small with a limited capacity to absorb investment.. من المهم أن نذكر ان الاقتصاد الغزي صغير نسبيا وقدرته على امتصاص الاستثمارات محدودة.”

Puzzled by the document title? See the Nineteen twenty-eight (published as the first Pelican paperback in 1937) reference in footnote¹. I might add we should learn modern rhetorical neoclassical history before it hops up and chops all our proverbial heads off. This entails not any English language philosophy tutorial ‘deconstruction’ or fanciful ‘unpacking’ of post 1789 ‘enlightenment’ political-arena terminology – no mechanisms, no navigation and no epic Oxford Union debates as Germaine Greer vs Norman Mailer dec’d.

And alas love was not even the question let alone.. Where’s it at then? It’s the meaning of words in the macro. Do you recall prime minister PJ Keating’s Big Picture? NOT merely the fight-f..k-feed-flee-flummox the young, the cowed & the female 1930s Oswald Mosley Great Britain, Racial Hygiene, later Mothers & Babies Health Association, Social Darwinist or Abrahamic religious faiths’ micro power-over-others ideology.. no Machiavelli, no raison d’etat sociopathy. Perhaps look up explication de text, ratiocination and John Locke’s 1700 argumenta. Sure in a figurative ‘flooding river of human & animal sewage, corpses & chemical sludge as we unmistakably are, then at least the readers, professional journalists and ethical film & television writers, must strive to better understand human culture, society and real economy.

But the mental challenge is great, as we see by the hundreds of terabytes of histrionic turning hysterical if not headbanging hogwash, angriness and frankly pernicious oil-corp Hillary Rodham Clinton You-can-make-adifference greenwash swirling about the planet daily – in a publishing industry which will by a reported estimate amass $1T of expenditure & useless churn in 2025.

Rage, Year 9 #science-denial and violent attack on those who might help us get a better grip (first and foremost on our own lives – psychological anguish is real pain and can make you as dead sick as Oxytocin or alcohol) are evidence of 1) criminal intent to harm others³ and 2) a public mental health concern.

There’s such urgency on human ignorance, folly and businesssman’s knavery at this time as a public educator I’m inclined to say try to forget everything you’ve learned about the supposedly magical qualities of knowledge, reason and rationlism.

There aren’t any and so called civilisational techno-triumphalism, including tosh about digitalised production values in the arts have exploded in our grandchildren’s faces and are catastrophically driving them to depressive mental illness – that’s overwhelminngly not a ‘DNA,’ congenital or organically caused condition but entirely learned, social and ecological in nature: essentially powerful others telling you how to behave but not bothering to ask you..

Now it’s rationality, the words to say it, not c’est, it or in any sense objectify it. This macro “stuff” is ideas not things. Ideation is the physiological process that goes on in the non-executivec culminating in mid 2023 micro -macro dialectics now point our way ahead in political thought, Now this morning i wove our use of the internet these twenty-five or so years into the discussion about world as a vast phantasmagorical social mechanism extending even unto the “Universe.” – This was being looked upon excitedly by our fully manipulable Gutenberg Galaxy people so they apparently disappeared it from my screens. Well, the @Microsoft one. But it was @Google-A’bet I think – as the comprehensive master of the proverbial temporo-spatial Einstinian domain it’s got the skills (not to say the limited view) and in fact only this morning I HAPPILY ENOUGH signed up for their GPC. Self-interest yes: as a journalist it’s important i can see stuff but even greater than that (seriously) I’ve been fighting fiercely for internet apps for grownups who feel and act on an obligation to communicate with each other – if we can’t even acknowledge others let alone answer their questions we’ve signed up for tyranny & demagoguery and WILL get hurt by them.

“The document containing a hyperlink is known as its source document. For example, in content from Wikipedia or Google Search, many words and terms in the text are hyperlinked to definitions of those terms. Hyperlinks are often used to implement reference mechanisms such as tables of contents, footnotes, bibliographies, indexes, letters, and glossaries. ..Wkpd

“The effect of following a hyperlink may vary with the hypertext system and may sometimes depend on the link itself; for instance, on the World Wide Web most hyperlinks cause the target document to replace the document being displayed, but some are marked to cause the target document to open in a new window (or, perhaps, in a new tab).^[2] Another possibility is transclusion, for which the link target is a document fragment that replaces the link anchor within the source document. Not only persons browsing the document may follow hyperlinks. These hyperlinks may also be followed automatically by programs. A program that traverses the hypertext, following each hyperlink and gathering all the retrieved documents is known as a Web spider or crawler. ..Wkpd

And where I am it’s Thursday and twenty-five thousand 700 dead غَزِّيّ – ghazzii people. Oink,

~ ”Liberty, equality, peace, justice & a free enterprise way of life” – in the Latin language, the classical foundational Romance language¹ Way of Life (remember the 1950s Bernays Rand Branden Greenspan mega-trope Peace, Justice and the American?) was modus vivendi, not meaning an economic culture of lightly state-regulated or dysregulated trading and commercial-for-profit) enterprise:

~ three very useful paragraphs from Wkpd on Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance – essentially the SOCIAL phenomenon of autosuggestion self decepotion or confirmation bias to reflect faithfully erroneous belief on behalf of coercive pedagogic schooling, cultic ‘programming, ‘brainwashing,’ psychological torture or highly prized and valued personal group or ‘tribe’ membership norms.. were excluded for focus here on the mental construction of macro as against self interested ideation

~ rigorous microeconomic theory Pre-fascist Supply & Demand Rewards Consumerism goes to Societal Collapse

~ Family and Society: Beyond Max Weber and Into Our Futures What’s Left of Them

~ Patriarchic – meaning not of any family’s male ancestors but of all of a society’s political, cultural & legal powers being crafted, shaped, manipulated and perpetuated by rich old men and transferred to rich younger men – is the critical adjective in my Community Economist newsletter terms ACUP, ECUP & HCUP of 1996 precisely germane to the South Australian Police assault on my life and property at that very moment of history. These sociological functions and political operations by men (not to be trite but to be necessarily explicative in a world of men so inured to societal chaos, devastation and killing that they refuse to listen, have “no ears” and will not let up until politically quashed or extirpated) were artificial compartmentalisation, excessive codification and human commodification under patriarchic fiscal elites.

Economy, ecology and viable society are coterminous under the demesne, or rule, of mentally ill old men impelled by hatreds and “inspired by” lust, greed and laziness.

You all knew that. – Peel me a grape. – In Australia it’s Munchkin Day or some national government bullshit. – Love is sent to North Queensland.

Friday 26th Jan 2024

John Blundell

..the new neurolinguistics, the new new maths, health, energy and philosophy of science Australia

¹ TIWG.. written by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. The book employs socialist and Marxist thought. It was written in 1928 after his sister-in-law, Mary Stewart Cholmondeley, asked him to write a pamphlet explaining socialism.^[1] The book was later re-released as the first Pelican Book in 1937.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Woman’s_Guide_to_Socialism_and_Capitalism

² ‘The Romance languages (also sometimes called Romanic languages) are a language family in the Indo-European languages. They started from Vulgar Latin (in Latin, “vulgar” is the word for “common” and so “Vulgar Latin” means “Common Latin”). The most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.

‘They are called “Romance languages” because they originate from Latin, the language spoken by the Western Roman Empire. Their grammatical inflection system has been simplified and lost most of the complex case structure of classical Latin.

‘The area that the Romance languages are spoken in Europe is mostly extent of the Western Roman Empire. The Greek language superseded Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire. Latin survived in Romania, whose language, Romanian, is a Romance language. In Moldova it is sometimes called Moldovan.’ PER COURTESY @Wikipedia

³ .resulting in not tens, not hundreds, not thousands but tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings or police-backed murders by gangster-farmers around the world, always directed at the young, the Muslim or both (or the non ethnic Burmese in Myanmar, for example) – but what would the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney – or any of bastions of insular provincial ex British colonial or ex Holy Roman Empire political privilege – know or care about that when so preoccupied with saving Western Civilisation with coal and cotton exports and foreign ‘investor’ cash?

..being a massive contribution to conversation no-one in public life in Australia including parliamentarians allowed to be had for the eighty years since World War II – on pain of brutal punitive extra-judicial reaction in the breach, generated by Thomas Reis, communicating with the world on the e-comms app ‘X’ as ‘at’ peakaustria.

“Dryland salinity in Western Australia’s agricultural areas is now estimated to directly affect up to 2 million hectares and cost over half a billion dollars a year in lost agricultural production. With few exceptions, the south-west’s rivers also suffer from increasing salinity levels and much of the wheatbelt’s remaining biodiversity is being severely damaged by the spreading salt.

“Yet between 1948 and 1969 successive Western Australian governments sold off an average of 400,000 hectares (a million acres) of land for agriculture every year, and the issue continued to be denied and suppressed
“In the mid-1960s Dorothy Hewett wrote in ‘Legend of the Green Country’ about her father’s efforts to tackle salinity on their farm, near Wickepin. At this time, the Minister for Agriculture said it was likely that more than 50 per cent of the native vegetation would have to be retained to prevent water tables from rising. He thought it was illogical to stop clearing, as some salt encroachment would most likely occur anyway.

“But of course it wasn’t his property being affected. In 1974 an Ongerup farming family sought to have the saline country they had been allocated replaced with farmable land. The Under Secretary for Lands, writing to the Minister, said:
it behooves us to be very careful indeed as surveys in 1955 and 1962 show that the used farming land which had become salt affected amounted to 186,000 acres and 305,000 acres respectively. The situation after 12 years will be appreciably worse. Yes, I am most concerned over the precedent, which will be established [if we agree to replace saline with arable land].

“In the river catchments of the wetter south-west, where government had a direct economic interest in protecting its potable water supplies, it still took 25 years of internal pressure from Public Works Department scientists and others before rigid clearing controls were introduced, from 1976 onwards.

“In a reprieve and return to business as usual it would be the mid-1990s before government started fully acknowledging the extent of the problem. By then the science was well accepted and the predictions of ongoing damage frightening. The Decade of Landcare had seen farmers mobilised like never before, and the early 1990s saw a flurry of reports and strategies. In 1996 the Court Government declared ‘War on Salinity’ and agency budgets were increased. A Situation Statement and Action Plan were developed, refined and actioned. When the ALP came to power in 2001 they allocated additional funds to salinity research and remediation. Soon after, the federal government launched its National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. Western Australia was a significant beneficiary.
For a while it appeared that the tables had been turned and there was real political will to tackle the creeping menace. However, the change was short-lived. Under Kevin Rudd’s ‘Caring for our Country’ program, federal funding for salinity declined steeply after 2008, and in Western Australia Colin Barnett’s new coalition government dropped salinity from its list of priorities.

“Departmental hydrologists who had been focused on solutions to salinity were diverted north to search for potable water under pastoral leases, and the state progressively withdraw agency support for local landcare groups. Advisory and consultative bodies, who had driven development of the earlier ‘war on salinity’, were closed down, and the Commissioner for Soil Conservation, who in the early 1990s drew on the work of 24 staff, was left with two. Not surprisingly, the number of landcare groups in farming areas has also declined.

“Despite being left effectively stranded by this wholesale withdrawal of government support, individual farmers, and those landcare groups who survived the cutbacks, have continued to undertake some excellent and innovative work in tackling salinity and other severe degradation problems. There has been widespread adoption of higher water use farming systems, big gains made in development of saltland pasture systems, and many farmers have invested heavily in relatively unproven drainage systems.
But overall, we don’t know what’s working well and what isn’t. The Auditor–General found that ‘The last satellite imagery analysis that mapped salinity was in 2000 [when] severely salt affected land was increasing by 14,000 hectares per year.”

– TR

per JB energy global heating weather systems health the new new maths the new neurolinguistics and philosophy of science Australia 🇦🇺 🦘

Saturday 20th January 2024

The Marginalian by Maria Popova Unsubscribe	Jan 10, 2024, 7:44 PM (19 hours ago)
to me

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. View it in full. If a friend forwarded it to you and you’d like your very own newsletter, subscribe here — it’s free. Need to modify your subscription? You can change your email address or unsubscribe.Hello john! This is the midweek edition of The Marginalian by Maria Popova — one piece resurfaced from the seventeen-year archive as timeless uplift for heart, mind, and spirit. If you missed last week’s archival resurrection — resolutions for a vibrant and rewarding life borrowed from inspiring humans (James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Bertrand Russell, Rilke, and more) — you can catch up right here. And if you missed it, here is the best of The Marginalian 2023, in one place. If my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation — it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.FROM THE ARCHIVE | An Antidote to Helplessness and Disorientation: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Our Human Fragility as the Key to Our Survival and Our SanityTo be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but that the choices we make can impact the outcomes. Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.How to harness that uniquely human paradox in living more empowered lives in even the most vulnerable-making circumstances is what the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in the 1968 gem The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (public library), written in an era when both hope and fear were at a global high, by a German Jew who had narrowly escaped a dismal fate by taking refuge first in Switzerland and then in America when the Nazis seized power.Erich FrommIn a sentiment he would later develop in contemplating the superior alternative to the parallel lazinesses of optimism and pessimism, Fromm writes:Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason. But the nature of hope is often misunderstood and confused with attitudes that have nothing to do with hope and in fact are the very opposite.Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene made his poetic case for our sense of mortality as the wellspring of meaning in our ephemeral lives, Fromm argues that our capacity for hope — which has furnished the greatest achievements of our species — is rooted in our vulnerable self-consciousness. Writing well before Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant unsexing of the universal pronoun, Fromm (and all of his contemporaries and predecessors, male and female, trapped in the linguistic convention of their time) may be forgiven for using man as shorthand for the generalized human being:Man, lacking the instinctual equipment of the animal, is not as well equipped for flight or for attack as animals are. He does not “know” infallibly, as the salmon knows where to return to the river in order to spawn its young and as many birds know where to go south in the winter and where to return in the summer. His decisions are not made for him by instinct. He has to make them. He is faced with alternatives and there is a risk of failure in every decision he makes. The price that man pays for consciousness is insecurity. He can stand his insecurity by being aware and accepting the human condition, and by the hope that he will not fail even though he has no guarantee for success. He has no certainty; the only certain prediction he can make is: “I shall die.”What makes us human is not the fact of that elemental vulnerability, which we share with all other living creatures, but the awareness of that fact — the way existential uncertainty worms the consciousness capable of grasping it. But in that singular fragility lies, also, our singular resilience as thinking, feeling animals capable of foresight and of intelligent, sensitive decision-making along the vectors of that foresight.Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. (Available as a print.)Fromm writes:Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision making which replace the principles of instinct. He has to have a frame of orientation that permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger that is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind. The human being, born under the conditions described here, would indeed go mad if he did not find a frame of reference which permitted him to feel at home in the world in some form and to escape the experience of utter helplessness, disorientation, and uprootedness. There are many ways in which man can find a solution to the task of staying alive and of remaining sane. Some are better than others and some are worse. By “better” is meant a way conducive to greater strength, clarity, joy, independence; and by “worse” the very opposite. But more important than finding the better solution is finding some solution that is viable.Art by Pascal Lemaître from Listen by Holly M. McGheeAs we navigate our own uncertain times together, may a thousand flowers of sanity bloom, each valid so long as it is viable in buoying the human spirit it animates. And may we remember the myriad terrors and uncertainties preceding our own, which have served as unexpected awakenings from some of our most perilous civilizational slumbers. Fromm — who devoted his life to illuminating the inner landscape of the individual human being as the tectonic foundation of the political topography of the world — composed this book during the 1968 American Presidential election. He was aglow with hope that the unlikely ascent of an obscure, idealistic, poetically inclined Senator from Minnesota by the name of Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with the infamous Joseph McCarthy, who stood for just about everything opposite) might steer the country toward precisely such pathways to “greater strength, clarity, joy, independence.”McCarthy lost — to another Democratic candidate, who would in turn lose to none other than Nixon — and the country plummeted into more war, more extractionism, more reactionary nationalism and bigotry. But the very rise of that unlikely candidate contoured hopes undared before — hopes some of which have since become reality and others have clarified our most urgent work as a society and a species. Fromm writes:A man who was hardly known before, one who is the opposite of the typical politician, averse to appealing on the basis of sentimentality or demagoguery, truly opposed to the Vietnam War, succeeded in winning the approval and even the most enthusiastic acclaim of a large segment of the population, reaching from the radical youth, hippies, intellectuals, to liberals of the upper middle classes. This was a crusade without precedent in America, and it was something short of a miracle that this professor-Senator, a devotee of poetry and philosophy, could become a serious contender for the Presidency. It proved that a large segment of the American population is ready and eager for Humanization… indicating that hope and the will for change are alive.Art from Trees at Night by Art Young, 1926. (Available as a print.)Having given reign to his own hope and will for change in this book “appealing to the love for life (biophilia) that still exists in many of us,” Fromm reflects on a universal motive force of resilience and change:Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society… One cannot think in terms of percentages or probabilities as long as there is a real possibility — even a slight one — that life will prevail.Complement The Revolution of Hope — an indispensable treasure rediscovered half a century after its publication and republished in 2010 by the American Mental Health Foundation — with Fromm on spontaneity, the art of living, the art of loving, the art of listening, and why self-love is the key to a sane society, then revisit philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and Rebecca Solnit on the real meaning of hope in difficult times.

• Patriarchic¹ Pre-fascist Rewards Consumerism goes to Societal Collapse

• Family and Society: Beyond Max Weber and Into Our Futures What’s Left of Them

The following is excerpted from a Wikipedia entry last modified at that moment in “His Story” by “Me, Myself, and I are Here” on 13/12/23..

“ Social comparison theory and cognitive dissonance have been described by other psychologists as “the two most fruitful theories in social psychology.”^[62] Cognitive dissonance has been variously described as “social psychology’s most notable achievement,”^[63] “the most important development in social psychology to date,”^[64] and a theory without which “social psychology would not be what it is today.”^[65] Cognitive dissonance spawned decades of related research, from studies focused on further theoretical refinement and development^[66] to domains as varied as decision making, the socialization of children, and color preference.^[67]

“ In addition, Festinger is credited with the ascendancy of laboratory experimentation in social psychology as one who “converted the experiment into a powerful scientific instrument with a central role in the search for knowledge.”^[68]An obituary published by the American Psychologist stated that it was “doubtful that experimental psychology would exist at all” without Festinger.^[69] Yet it seems that Festinger was wary about burdensome demands for greater empirical precision. Warning against the dangers of such demands when theoretical concepts are not yet fully developed, Festinger stated, “Research can increasingly address itself to minor unclarities in prior research rather than to larger issues; people can lose sight of the basic problems because the field becomes defined by the ongoing research.”^[70] He also stressed that laboratory experimentation “cannot exist by itself,” but that “there should be an active interrelation between laboratory experimentation and the study of real-life situations.”^[71] Also, while Festinger is praised for his theoretical rigor and experimental approach to social psychology, he is regarded as having contributed to “the estrangement between basic and applied social psychology in the United States.”^[72] He “became a symbol of the tough-minded, theory-oriented, pure experimental scientist,” while Ron Lippitt, a fellow faculty member at Lewin’s Research Center for Group Dynamics with whom Festinger often clashed, “became a symbol of the fuzzy-minded, do-gooder, practitioner of applied social psychology.”^[73]

“ One of the greatest impacts of Festinger’s studies lies in their “depict[ion] of social behavior as the responses of a thinking organism continually acting to bring order into his world, rather than as the blind impulses of a creature of emotion and habit,” as cited in his Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.^[74] Behaviorism, which had dominated psychology until that time, characterized man as a creature of habit conditioned by stimulus-response reinforcement processes. Behaviorists focused only on the observable, i.e., behavior and external rewards, with no reference to cognitive or emotional processes.^[75] Theories like cognitive dissonance could not be explained in behaviorist terms. For example, liking was simply a function of reward according to behaviorism, so greater reward would produce greater liking; Festinger and Carlsmith’s experiment clearly demonstrated greater liking with lower reward, a result that required the acknowledgement of cognitive processes.^[76] With Festinger’s theories and the research that they generated, “the monolithic grip that reinforcement theory had held on social psychology was effectively and permanently broken.”^{[77] ”}

We thank you for your kind attention and good offices as you, your friends and indeed all of us get to grips at a proverbial 30 seconds to midnight with a world that tried to run itself on ludicrous barbaric religious slogans, proverbs and rhetoric but may only succeed in destroying itself.

John Blundell

The new new maths, the new neurolinguistics, human health, energy & weather systems, philosophy of science

Australia

¹ Patriarchic – meaning not of any family’s male ancestors but of all of a society’s political, cultural & legal powers being crafted, shaped, manipulated and perpetuated by rich old men and transferred to rich younger men – is the critical adjective in my Community Economist newsletter terms ACUP, ECUP & HCUP of 1996 precisely germane to the South Australian Police assault on my life and property at that very moment of history. These sociological functions and political operations by men (not to be trite but to be necessarily explicative in a world of men so inured to societal chaos, devastation and killing that they refuse to listen, have “no ears” and will not let up until politically quashed or extirpated) were artificial compartmentalisation, excessive codification and human commodification under patriarchic fiscal elites.

No planet B

I WILL remember 2023 as another year of sadness and anger, and not just because of my personal loss. Constant alarming news on the environment coupled to a political class still largely unable or unwilling to heed the warnings from scientists frequently make my job a [gloomy situation]

This is especially so in the UK, where our shopping trolley of a government has veered alarmingly to the right on a lot of what exprime minister David Cameron – recently resurrected as foreign secretary – once called “green crap”. Pledges to max out North Sea oil and gas; motorist-friendly policies; row-backs on net zero; crackdowns on environmental protesters. Those in power obviously think these are vote winners, showing a depressing eagerness to seek short-term gains by dismissing or denying longterm problems. One of my big hopes for 2024 is that they are proved wrong at the ballot box. Fighting back against the green crap is all part of the war on woke, another thing that has made me despair this year. Somehow, attempts to make the world a fairer place for everyone and a greener one for nature have been weaponised by those for whom the status quo is just fine.

Iam a white, middle-aged, home-owning, heterosexual, able ‐bodied male (he/him), so the war on woke rarely touches my life directly. But I’m also a cyclist and a tofu muncher and I live in north London, so anti-woke politicians really wind me up. But that is what they are trying to do, so I will try to be zen about it.

I have learned, though, how casual, careless use of language can offend. Iam also a SOBS – a survivor of bereavement by suicide. There is a trigger phrase in that community: “committed suicide”. This is a throwback to the time when suicide was a crime. It isn’t any more, but the phrase has stubbornly stuck. When I hear people say my wife committed suicide, I have to bite my tongue and then gently point out that many SOBS find it offensive. Completed, please. Or just plain English: she killed herself.

Some people will probably regard this as “wokeness” and yet another example of how “you can’t say anything these days”. But I hope it demonstrates that being anti-woke can be unnecessarily hurtful. It doesn’t cost anything to be sensitive to others’ feelings. It is a small thing. But it gives me a taste of what LGBTQ+ people, those with disabilities, ethnic minorities, environmental protesters and other marginalised groups must feel when their hard won gains or lifestyles are smeared as “wokeness”.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m privileged to do the job I do and I will keep on doing it. And there have been highs among the lows. I travelled a lot this year, though narrowly avoided a few hairy situations. I was in Morocco just before the earthquake, Israel just before the Hamas attack and Iceland just before the volcano. I recently spent a few days in Dorset. My advice: avoid this English county, something bad is going to happen there.

On top of that, I think our rivers campaign helped move the issue up the agenda. Our Rewilding Weekender was great, not least because I got to meet so many of our wonderful readers. Ditto New Scientist Live. And I landed a prestigious journalism award.

I write this as COP28 begins in Dubai. Hopes aren’t high, but they spring eternal. There is still time to avert a triple catastrophe of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Just don’t get me started on the US presidential election.

Graham Lawton, in New Scientist last month

Yippenoody and thanks bro. I do believe good humour is the flipside of enormous mountain-shifting fight and excellent. Openness is not an interview moment for a gruelling hackneyed How-do-you-feel-cub-reporter or Quarter-million a year TV anchor – well it is in fruitloop Paint-me-a-picture Tell-us-your-story Anything-but-real-human-macro-industrial-and-social-and-ecological-policy-concerns-our-sponsors-hate-that-shit-so-stay-with-the-Christmases-Brthdays-Easter-Eid-Duwali-and Fireworks-displays-highly-derivative-politically-filtered-vetted-and-sanitised vaguely-cultural-effulgences-ceremonies-and-stuff-tah

The above end of year sentiments were published along with those of two of his colleagues at #NewScientist 16-23/12/2023 by Graham Lawton.

Just today @greeneconomyact @X has finished a 6 set summary of the New Scientist end-of-year piece on bone-jarring and blood-curdling early nineteenth century Northern England ‘dark satanic mills’ or turn of the 21st century Brazilian favelas pentacostal wealth ministry extreme/ ethical/ or was that effective altruism, and also on @X re-supplied an entertaining readable article by Graham about high (if daffy) hopes with Iceland magma to produce power, which appears in the fresh out 4/1/24 edition

via John Blundell Maths Neurolinguistics Energy Health Philosophy of Science

Australia 🦘🇦🇺

..zany Twentieth Century Paranoid Moments with Ernst Shacklegruber – or as Community Economist worldwide newsletter wrote with just a touch of exasperation over the fevered deliberations of all of the brain-dead 1890s English provincial South Australia’s members of parliament, grandiose Supreme Court pomposities and surviving gentlefolk of the late Sir Thomas Playford’s Church of Christ at Norton Summit down the road from Blundell Orchards Ashton farm who quite naturally and understandably believed that fresh & ‘dry’ toxic-synthetic-chemical-free food was the work of the Devil: ‘get two mirrors and look up your own arseholes.’

The following note arose from a completely turgid and bewildering ABC Australia 🎭/ Drama & Comedy moment in my local library as a retired cop sat himself down next to me and pretended to read @DailyMail crap on a screen. This is bizarre, I thought. But you take care of yourself or you’re dead, Jimmy.

“Readers will forgive that this essay is jarringlly incomplete and a bit of a dissequenced jumble but there’s a situation arisen/ kindly see 5 paragraphs down.

“So if the piece isn’t sorted out to our mutually expected, stratospherically – at moments like this the writer is allowed to blow his bags – well, a little – high journalistic, sociological and philosophical standards by say 3PM Friday I’ve been arrested and would appreciate any national if not international uproar you might be able to swing on my behalf. John”

“But make sure you pray istikhara^1,2 and see how you feel before jumping into anything. In the end it’s all with Allah, right?”

‘Of course, Ahlam nodded with fervour. She believed in the power of istikhara to steer a course of action, as they all had been instructed to. But Abida was sometimes unsure if she referenced him with real feeling or because the situation seemed to necessitate it.

‘..She said insha’Allah³ when making any statement pertaining to a future event

‘..masha’Allah when cooing at someone’s baby or sharing a photo of a sunset online and

‘..alhamdulillah⁴ for any crisis averted, no matter how minute

‘She had chosen to dress this way, and with this choice came expectations of behaviour. She could swear and laugh and rage, she could be inappropriate and wild, but to the world she would still be defined by this cloak, this fabric.’

..from Zeynab Gamieldien The Scope of Permissibility 2023 ⁵

The road to both a genocidal and an ecocidal hell-on-earth is literally paved – by double-mouthed shysters, advertising copywriters, city lawyers and consultants to government, these last supplying members of parliaments and congresses and neoliberal business cabals trading in human bodies and landscape (as they call it) in 193 countries because they need to be told what to think, say, write and do to ensure their re-election. How else would they know in a world where all electronic communications have been turned over in toto to marketing mostly not-ecologically-sustainable for more than another 2 or 3 years of junk consumer and self- and other-harm product and intelligent leadership everywhere has been siloed away from the public eye, marginalised, these hard-working people’s contributions magnanimously trashed, and its inspirational frontrunners and great teachers commonly wasted-away by security-services caseworked with bad diets, childish play therapies, pharmaceutical drugs, years of imprisonment or immediately killed?

(2) Soft words – hard questions.. Robert Fisk The Independent 8 July 2006

“When I worked at The Times – in the free, pre-Murdoch days – I enjoyed life as Middle East correspondent under the leadership of a bearded foreign news editor called Ivan Barnes. This brilliant, immensely humorous man – blessedly still with us – was a connoisseur of weasel words, get-out clauses and semantic humbug, and one of his favourite questions was this; What do you think of a man who begins each statement with the words, ‘To be completely frank and open with you’? You can see his point. ‘If someone promises to be frank with you – completely frank, mark you – then what is he being the rest of the time?’ Barnes would ask. ‘As for completely…’ On balance, I agree that the key word is ‘completely.’ It reeks of 100 per cent, of totality, of black and white. It is also, I notice, one of Blair’s favourite words – along with⁷ ‘absolutely.’ Blair is always being completely and absolutely honest with us. He is always absolutely convinced he was right to invade Iraq (even when the rest of the world completely realises the opposite).⁸ He is always completely and absolutely certain of his own integrity. I call this the ‘Ho-ho’ factor.

“So all the Fisk radar warnings went off this week when Blair told us that ‘we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West’ felt by Muslims. Completely, Muslims’ ‘sense of grievance’ – fury might be a better word – is ‘completely’ false. Is it? We are screwing up Afghanistan, destroying tens of thousands of lives in Itraq, and America now has a military presence in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman – and Muslim grievance is ‘completely’ false. No, look at Blair’s statement again. He doesn’t suggest there is even a grievance. It is a false ‘sense’ of grievance. Anyone who understands mendacity knows exactly what Blair comprehends all too well: that Muslims do have a ‘sense’ of grievance and that it is not false at all.

“It’s odd, though, how folk think they can get away with this stuff. Take my old chum Professor Alan Dershowitz, who announced on the evening of 11 September 2001 that I was a ‘dangerous man’ because I asked the question ‘why’ about the international crimes against humanity in the United States. This week, in an article in The Independent, Dershowitz was at it again. I especially enjoyed his description of a standard US military torture, ‘waterboarding.’ He described it as a technique that produces a ‘near-drowning’ experience.’ Ho-ho. You bet it does. He says that this is torture. But why the word ‘technique?’ Why does it ‘produce’ an ‘experience?’ Actually, the experience is one of drowning, not ‘near-drowning’ – that’s the point of this vile practice.⁹“I love these key phrases which are littered throughout Dershowitz’s article, so soft and gentle: ‘the nature of permissible [ hey Zeynab 🙂 ] interrogation,’ ‘questionable means,’ ‘latitude’ (as in ‘should more latitude be afforded to interrogators in the preventive (sic)¹⁰context’), ‘sometimes excessive efforts’ and so on. All this, mark you, is premised on one totally misleadistatement. ‘Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists with no fear of death and no home address have rendered useless the deterrent threat of mass retaliation.’ True – if such people existed. But there simply hasn’t been any suicide terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction¹¹– not ever…

“The whole torture fandango gathers weasel words like moss. Take a reference in the Wall Street Journal to torture last month as ‘aggressive interrogation techniques.’ ‘Technique’ again, please note. I suppose that’s what you can claim the US soldier was applying when he last year stuffed an Iraqi general upside-down in a sleeping bag, sat on his chest and killed him. Take again Çeku, the brutal KLA leader who has popped up as Kosovo’s prime minister, but is still wanted for war crimes by Belgrade. The Financial Times did a wonderful portrait of him,, in which he was described as a ‘slim and youthful .. Mr Çeku, 44, exudes an effortless authority born of long experience as a military commander.’ Ho ho. You bet he does.

“Chris Hitchens got in on the act last month when he tried to explain why the slaughter of twenty-four Iraqi civilians at Haditha didn’t mean a return to the days of My Lai massacres.¹² So here we go. ‘Unjust though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that on November 19th, 2005, US Marines of Kilo company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha…’ Get it? Their comrades had just been killed by insurgents. So the Americans may have ‘cracked up’ and ‘cut loose.’ Later, Hitcens describes the massacre at Haditha as ‘a white-hot few minutes,’ and later still he talks of a ‘coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip.’ A few seconds later and he is is going on about the ‘alleged rampage.^’13 Rampage! Ho ho. The point, of course, is that it takes much more than a ‘clip’ of ammunition to kill twenty-four civilians. And it takes a long time – not a ‘few’ miniutes.- to go from room to room, amid the shrieking children who are being slaughtered and the women who are trying to protect themselves from murder, to blast that many people to death. Some rampage.

“So what does it take to run the earth these days? Effortless authority, I supposed. A little bit of ‘excess,’ plenty of ‘technique’ and a mere clip of ammunition. Completely and absolutely.”

John Blundell 🦘🇦🇺

Economy, Sociology, Human Health, 2-5 set Event Fact Object Affect Call Quantum Maths, Learning-, Healing-, Growth-, Upskilling- & Living Culture Neurolinguistics, Philosophy of Authentic Ecologically-anchored 21st Century Science

.¹ at tail-end of Essay Heading (1) at this difficult time في هذا الوقت العصيب

² Salat al-Istikhaara (Arabic: صلاة الاستخارة), which translates to Prayer of Seeking Counsel, is a prayer recited by Muslims who are in need of guidance from  God Almighty (Allah) when facing a decision in their life. The prayer, known as salah in Arabic is performed in two units of prayer or raka’ah followed by the supplication of Salat al-Istikhaara….

³ إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللّٰهُ‎ • (ʔin šāʔa llāhu) God willing; inshallah, if it is God’s will (literally, “if God has willed [it]”

⁴ Alhamdulillah (Arabic: ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ, al-Ḥamdu lillāh) is an Arabic phrase meaning “praise be to God“,^[1] sometimes translated as “thank God”.^[2] This phrase is called Tahmid (Arabic: تَحْمِيد, lit. ‘Praising’).^[3] A longer variant of the phrase is al-ḥamdu l-illāhi rabbi l-ʿālamīn (ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَالَمِينَ), meaning “all praise is due to God, Lord of all the worlds”, the very first verse of Surah Al-Fatiha, the opening chapter of Al-Qur’an.

⁵ https://ultimopress.com.au/products/scope-of-permissibility

^{6 Robert Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was an English writer and journalist.[1][2] He was critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians @Wikipedia}

⁷ [the near manic or at least feverish usage by contemporary Australians apparently in fear of assault, public ridicule and/ or summary dismissal from their jobs by politically powerful others who may be watching or at least listening in]

8 My italics & bolding - who in this country particulary atm with any grit, laughs or recent history in them could have resisted that?

⁹ Readers will forgive me inserting another Australian cringeing pusillanimous journalism Reality Check at this point – the more you study up on our putrid history of supposed professionals on $250k salaries doing the absolutely unquestioning bidding of any psychopath who happens to be passing by seeking donations & assorted ideologically fascist shysters from the USA – or, Heavens, Great Britain, whoops ‘the UK,’ Old Chap, the easier it is to see why we have a Prime Minister who figures Mr Assange should be killed because such barbarity will please the variously demented or otherwise seriously unwell old rich people whose electoral support he’s himself thick enough to believe his party needs to win re-election. Yes, this federal government amongst its other achieves is of course doing flying motorcars, exciting new coal mines and, curiously the ploughing in of the entire top one-third of the Northern Territory on behalf of the 1965 Norman Bourlag’ Green Revolution

¹⁰Oh Australia – oh Australian Labor Party federal ministers O’Neil, Giles & Watt – you Mark Latham 2004 aspirational KPMG people may choose to discard your language and culture for a mess of e-commerce Start Up high national inflation-rate/ big alpha imvestment returns but don’t you dare lay a finger on ours

¹¹New era mathematicians and lethal student-enemies of military-industrial-scientific era false-eqivalences mechanomph-geomorph cartoon graveyard econometrics immediately spot this as an erroneous almost certainly neurodegenerative (in this instance delusional or hallucinogenic) Scale fail. Happy Moses Maimomides/ 9th century Islamic al-Khwarizmi Algebra Day cum ‘World Mental Health Day,’ team الحمد لله رب العالمين : alhamdulillahi rabbi al alameen

¹²Comparisons are odious – since 1440 in England so they say but for goodness sake don’t waste precious study-time reading up on the malodourous plethora of essentially idiosyncratic, discursive, derivative a-historic post-fact fictitious & phoney ‘literary’ internet read-outs on the aphorism. – though you could maybe find out what Oscar Wilde had to c’est about it (?) – myself I say We don’t have time for any personal vanity-project self-indulgence – above all when so much of this Gates-Bezos-Bannon internet junk is tailored by ideological totalitarian DOGS, contrived for the twin-towering purposes of getting consumers to pay for it and to ACCELERATE Big Oil’s ecocidal AND genocidal fossil-fuel burning orgy as TENS of millions of otherwise decent middle class people hop along like play-bunnies, pre-schoolers or lewdly, obscenely deranged proto-human cartoon characters themselves, streaming, binge-watching & chilling out after ‘Workin’ for the Man’ kidding themselves it’s authentic research and ‘good for’ their Bertrand Russel, HG Wells & George Bernard Shaw 1920s minds for Christ’s loving sake.. Go Here: make a quick study on odious comparisons AS false eqivalences – this time it’s reminiscent not specifically of the Algebra Algo man Al-Khwarizmi 780 – c850 but of he who put metaphysics way down the list of Learnings for Humanity – last, wasn’t it?

¹³ my italics