This article is meant to be taken with a pinch of salt, preferrably delivered from the battery opeated and light powered russell hobbs salat and pepper mill set featured below..

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In my day, there were (for the most part) guidelines for your behaviour as a terrorist. This would encompass a phone call to the authorites for example to warn of a bomb that that had been placed, or in the case of a plane highjacking, the tense negotiations followed by the killing or capture of the terrorists, hoorah!

Along with the decline in moral standards visible across the western world, the eastern world has entered the fray fuelled know doubt by MTV Baghdad and Macdonalds Kabul burger specials into the soundbite terrorism we see today. The only graceful and elegant thing about all this it seems is that terrorists are increasingly exploding themselves during the act of terrorism itself.

But even that, doesn't it feel like a bit of an anti climax. I mean, there's no joy of hunt in going out and finding these people or eliminating them in some sort of dawn raid after a stake out. They're even taking the drama and newsworthiness out of the aftermath, bounders and cads the lot of them.

And so, to a new reality tv series.."I'm a terrorist, meet my conditions or else!", this show will centre on brining aspiring terrorists into the spotlight, given them time to ari their views and allowing us, the victims to decide on the best and most effective terrorism to be inflicted on us in the coming years.

After all, these people need a hand, here are just two reasons that constantly come up in conversation with other non-terrorist acquaintances who bemoan the lack of skilland foresight of the recent "New Terrorism" age.

- Blowing up a plane with liquid explosives is just plain stupid. Walk on to the New Work subway with some mad bacterial agent and you could kill thousands more and case more disruption!

- Why fly your plane into a building, fly it into the nuclear power plant 5 mins away, destroy the whole city, kill more people, cause more distruption!

No class, tch

In the beginning there was process. Intentionality is not how the world works, it’s how our mind works. Switching off intentionality (the environment for the symbol and it’s reference) is the goal of spiritual enlightenment.

What are the causes of intentionality, Desire? Whatever that means. Are there perhaps good (or more accurately, useful) desires? Do we cease to be human without desires and passions, or are we closer to fulfilling our destiny?

Reality appears to me as a pact of biological convenience. The ultimate hypnosis, the unbreakable denial. The cave without entrance, nor exit.

For what would it benefit a man to gain a soul but lose the whole world. Ah, transform these crumbs of truth into loaves of bread for my dreams.

Try to relax your mind. Try to put away all thoughts. Don’t think about trying to relax your mind. Don’t think about the memory of the last time you tried to put away all thoughts. Think of nothing. Think of emptiness, space and light. This may take some time. If you feel irritated, strange or stupid, try not to giggle. You are reacting. Reacting to a situation like you would the next time and the last time. Try not to react. Remember you do not exist. Do not attempt to establish the validity of the assertion at this point, you may reflect on this later.

Ultimate freedom lies in the conscious recognition of destiny. The inner plan revealed to oneself acts as a guide fomenting all action. Without destiny, freedom is an illusion cast ever deeper through the repetition of inconsequential acts. Variations of inconsequential action reveal to the conscious mind a sensation of freedom; of opportunities taken, movements made, situations avoided. Without destiny, freedom is deterministic freefall, at best a probabilistic carnival. The raindrop on the window pane, cast down under its own weight.

Destiny is a flame of purpose for each life. Freedom lies therefore not in isolated acts of a disembodied self, but in the all-consuming course of right action, as revealed through a singular process of acceptance. True acceptance of destiny requires the re-emergence of primal considerations of the heart, and a temporary rollback of the acting mind.

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” Anton Checkov

‘Being who you really are’ is often attached as a goal or outcome of the ‘authentic transformation’ of the individual.

However, being true to oneself and reducing self-deception wherever possible can be seen as laudable even from a purely rational perspective outside of any spiritual or moral import the process might invoke in some people. Better decisions are likely to emerge from a clear-minded, confident and focussed individual.

Individuals who think and act ‘from the heart’ it could be suggested, are more likely to be believed and trusted, which is a good thing for that individual in terms of getting what they want, and for others wanting to associate themselves with warm and trustworthy people.

Authenticity therefore represents a conscious process of rigourous honesty with and a desire to follow one’s whole-hearted intent.

However, there is a mistaken assumption that being more authentic means being a nicer or better peron, whatever that entails. Certainly, the outcome of any worthwhile process of inward re-assessment can be a more contented, focussed, driven, dare we say it, happy individual; but only on the terms through which that individual experiences happiness.

We may not like a dictator’s strategy, but we surely can’t blame everything we don’t like about people on their parents, or look for that repressed period of child abuse that would cause individuals to become ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘deviant’. The point being, that if we can’t condone or explain someone’s actions in a moral context, our only option appears to be to condemn.

Arguments which state that something (e.g. authenticty) leads to good/bad behaviour because humans are essentially good/bad in nature are an example of reasoning which succumbs to the moralistic fallacy.

As Stephen Pinker says in The Blank Slate (1): “The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature or “What ought to be, is what is”. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem. It also lies behind the romantic belief that humans cannot harbor desires to kill, rape, lie, or steal because that would be too depressing or reactionary.”

Indeed, could it be the case that at least some of the people we don’t like from a moral perspective are equally as authentic or inauthentic as us, but just believing in different things. Of course it is one’s duty to stand up and say “this is what I believe in, join me” if one truly believes in one’s beliefs and wants others too as well. What happens when the authentic actions or beliefs of two or more individuals clash? Wouldn’t things just get more, well, noisy?

So, it is dangerous thinking to assume that authentic action implies action which is for example socially and environmentally positive. This is not part of authenticity, but of a wider belief in what constitutes ‘right action’. To invest the term authenticity to this extend involves investing a moral import to the term which is surely not justified.

It can be suggested then that we would not necessarily be nicer towards one another in a world of ‘authentics’. Indeed, authentic behaviour could have overall negative consequences if more people acted authentically using violent or anti-social behaviour than using co-operative of non-violent strategies.

If we wanted to reduce levels of violent competition (2), what we would need to do then is to discover ways of developing more non-violent co-operative behaviour between people alongside helping them become more authentic. Authentic action as realised through a process of individual self-discovery by itself is not enough.

We must not ignore, underestimate or take for granted the complexity and beauty of the human animal and its nature, however uncomfortable that may be. This includes the part of us descended from the millions of violent, inauthentic thugs who enabled me to write this article.

(1) The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker (2002)
(2) The Evolution of Co-operation, Robert Axelrod is an excellent place to start in this regard.

We wanted more co-operation
A new alliance, a modern claim
The flickering light we tried to protect
With too many moths and not enough oil

Yet you don't know who I am
And i can't explain your pain
It was on that day I realised
You can't escape the game

i've been thinking about how to change the world for a number of years. i think a lot as you might imagine. unfortunately, i haven't quite managed to come up with anything you might call clear cut as yet, however i thought i'd share some of general observations.

decision making and the vacuum of blame

I've realised that some problems are fundamentally about the difficulty of making decisions because those making decisions don't have all the information necessary in order to make a good decision, particularly about the decision-making of other people. The term 'the tragedy of the commons' was coined as means to describe scenarios like over-use of a natural resource which is utilised by everyone. A good example is a fishing area which fisherman fish until there is no fish left, not because they individually want to run out of fish, but because the benefits of fishing sustainability are so diffuse and the benefits of taking as many fish as possible each time they fish, so immediate, that they act in a rational manner and heavily discount the future in their decision-making.

I have come to believe that such fisherman are not necessarily to be scolded as bad examples of human beings, as greedy or as lacking virtue. Indeed, i believe there to be a certain inevitability about these scenarios, unless information can be provided, and crucially 'trusted', amongst all participants.

I've become very interested in the applicability of game theory in explaining what look like irrational and immoral outcomes for collective groups, but what instead turn out to be simply the outcome of individuals or small groups acting in a way with reduced knowledge and/or trust in the behaviour of others.

i tend now to look at decision-making failures and don't immediately assume there is someone or something blame. For example, the capitalist system, corporate greed, bad government, lack of confidence etc. If some of our problems are fundamental to our ability to process information and make decisions for the group as individuals or smaller groups, we should acknowledge that, and attempt to address without necessary recourse to a moral reckoning for the participants.

Of course, sometimes there are culprits! It's just useful to note in my book that sometimes it's not useful or helpful to think in terms of blame.

Prisoners Dilemma and Theory of the Bomb

incentivising co-operation

one of the most important things we can do then is to incentivise co-operation between individuals where the value to the group exceeds that of the individual. note that i say incentivise rather than enforce. Depending on your view of human nature and your political persuasion, you are likely to either favour enforcement, gentle incentive or a complete lack of any attempt to control or incentivise other individuals. This is my problem with political persuasion, you have to stick to your guns, when in fact each major social or environmental problem benefits from a different analysis being in a different context.

Sometimes a gentle incentive might work best, sometimes we need to punish cheaters and show them who's boss. Maybe we should be voting for policies and not parties? www.simpol.org.

Note that i don't really care about co-operation because it's nicer, but because it's better for more people to be better off than less. Survival of the fittest implies not the strongest or the greediest, but the fittest, those most adaptable to change. Often, and increasingly in human history, co-operative behaviour works best for survival of individual organisms.

Axelrod in Evolution of Cooperation mentioned ways to improve co-operation, including making the future more valuable (get rid of short termism) through people interacting together more often so that they will have to deal with the consequences of their actions with the people that are affected by their decisions. The example of the behaviour of soldiers from Britain and Germany in Great War is testamount to that fact. They organised signals to each other for dinner and recreation time and resumed fighting using dummy shells to make their captains/generals think they were fighting. What we're after here is encouraging reciprocity of behaviour which helps the individual in ways which help the group.

evolution and politics

I've heard it say that Marxism is a great theory, but simply that it was suggested for the wrong species. For those of a left-leaning disposition, the notion that there are aspects of our human nature which unalterably lead to certain outcomes or pre-dispositions within individual behaviour is anathema. We idealists would prefer there to be a blank canvas on which to inscribe the future of humanity. I think one of the most important things the left needs to do intellectually, is to acknowledge the fundamentals of evolutionary biology and seek to address the limitations (and therefore the true potential) of what it means to be human.

Darwinian Left and The Blank Slate, both great books in highlighting the challenges we face in uncovering and dealing with fundamental issues of human nature and how this affects social policy formation.

so what?

Well, i guess i'm thinking right now of some specific solutions using the above insights. They are business solutions, or at least commercially driven and socially motivated which is why i think of myself as a social entrpeneur. I hope to meet people here in NZ who i can discuss these things with. I should say that i believe in specifics. We're only here for 70 odd years if we're lucky and i'm not interested in just positing another interesting theory about why we are the way we are. I'm interested in making something that demonstrates possibilities and ideally, that make peoples' lives better whilst allowing me to live.

nice nice nice

i must apologise to Ben, for whom my blog is 'too nice'. As i am no longer in Britain, i have obvously lost all trace of cynicism and bitterness behind in old Blighty. Not so, i'm simply experimenting with having a Positive Mental Attitude ™. Look, i know i'm going to die, you know you're going to die, there's no point getting too upset about it. Perhaps that's the only reason we laugh (no-one's ever really worked that one out either). Who was it that said 'every laugh is the sound of an emotion dying'.

Till next time.