Thor's Unwise Ideas thormay.net

All opinions expressed in Thor's Unwise Ideas and The Passionate Skeptic are entirely those of the author, who has no aim to influence, proselytize or persuade others to a point of view. He is pleased if his writing generates reflection in readers, either for or against the sentiment of the argument.

Note : Thor's Unwise Ideas is now being duplicated on a blog of the same name at http://thorsunwiseideas.byeways.net (however it will take quite a while to copy all the entries to that site)

What would be the consequences, to follow a crazy thought experiment, if the Peoples Republic of China were to formally renounce all claims to sovereignty over Taiwan? Well, at first there would be a very confused Chinese public in the PRC and a desperate need for some inspired domestic persuasion out of Beijing. However, once that contradiction had been finessed (they've had tougher knots to untie), my guess is that within a short time Taiwan would become China's best friend and ally. They have so much in common. A free Taiwan choosing between America and China? No contest. Of course they would choose China. Taiwan has already shown the world what its enterprise can achieve under conditions of great handicap. Give its people back their hope and spirit, then Taiwan would be the best little brother that China could ever wish for. China would win immense international respect and trust. It truly would be on the fast track in that new Great Game, the contest for competence.

The more your spirit lives in a culture, the more you get what you pay for. After all, the culture has evolved, or perhaps been manufactured, to satisfy people just like you. Blessed are the average amongst us. Maybe your accepted culture has you salivating over a delicious dinner photographed on the plastic packet of a snap frozen supermarket meal. You will microwave the dubious mess inside the packet and suck it up. By the time you suck it up, your mind is on TV football or a soapy anyway. Such is one kind of happiness. If your culture is a millenium old and tells you that meat (or whatever) is unclean, you will smother some overcooked vegetables in curry and wash them down with a litre of Coca Cola to prove that you are up with the times. Such is progress.

These notes have not been written for average people in any known culture. 'Culture' is shorthand for a rough consensus on the grab-bag of events, habits, attitudes and actions that make up daily living. Once you start to ask questions about any of this stuff, you are stepping outside of the consensus. You are no longer average. You are alone in the big bad world, and there is nothing heroic about it because probably there is no one there to clap. So these notes are about non-average survival, specifically my own. Take what looks useful, ignore the rest. ...

The Invisible Hand has been having a rough time of it lately. This is very interesting. Since the management professional class was invented by James Burnham in 1941, this priesthood has claimed to interpret the will of The Invisible Hand for the unwashed masses. However, like most priesthoods, they soon began to invent a self-serving scripture. A major tool of the invented economic scripture, as played by the sect of Investment Managers, has been Invented Magical Markets, operating beneath the veil of Public Markets and known only to the chosen few. Pretty early in the game of modern capitalism, it was seen that insider trading (or what I have called an Invented Market) was toxic to Public Markets. Solemn rules were therefore promulgated against insider trading. Ha ha. What a forlorn exercise. The enforcers were that very class of the economic priesthood most likely to benefit from violation of the rules. The history of economic booms and busts for two hundred years now has been a tale of new ways to pull off insider trading in hidden Invented Magical Markets.

When Wendi Deng (邓文迪 ), from China magically fell into the pan-national world of international business and married the media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, (who had abandoned Australia for the same stateless realm of five star hotels), at once we recognized that age old story of the gold digger and the sugar daddy. Perhaps though our belief in a simple storyline was, if not wrong, at least incomplete. Origins matter after all.

As a teacher to young women in Zhengzhou, central China for three years recently, I could sense the conflicting currents of duty, ambition and the hope for love that tossed them about in relationships. The mix for each modern girl was individual, and Deng herself is a product of those choices. It is surely no accident then that Wendi Deng and another high profile Chinese-American transplant, Florence Sloan, were co-producers of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a film which deals directly, though often through a veil of tears, with just these dilemmas.

The film is a fairly free adaptation of Lisa See’s now widely praised novel of the same name. What follows here are some personal reactions to the film, plus a few references to the book, which I have not read yet (some published reviews about the book are pasted at the end of these notes). Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a film about relationships between women. It also highlights the conflict between feminine friendship and how each woman deals with the men in her life. Partly because of the Chinese historical context, the dimension of affection between men and women gets little attention in the film, which makes a jarring contrast with the world many of us like to think we live in today (even if we are deluded). However, the film’s director, Wayne Wang, has done a masterful job of bringing to life the relationships between two pairs of women. The first pair, Snow Flower (Korean actress, Gianna Jun) and Lily (Li Bing Bing), were both born in 1823 and tied into a lifelong feminine sworn bond called lau tong (老同), which may have been more emotional and stronger than the man-woman contract of marriage in 19^th Century Qing China. The second pair are two young and ambitious women in today’s Shanghai, Sophia and Nina, equally enmeshed in a lifelong but tempestuous bond of friendship.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is where we all hope to be on that expansive Friday evening when the curtain comes down for the last encore. There they are, that motley collection from history, lounging over their drinks, singing, weeping, roaring with laughter, for what else can you do when there are to be no tomorrows? So this, Earth Mother, is why we put up with those damned foreigners for countless millennia : the privilege of a seat in Luigi’s Galactic Cafe on a spaceship escaping to oblivion.

In the meantime, a few tens of millennia back in Milky Way’s time warp, you and I still have to scheme for tomorrow. This discussion paper is one Australian’s unvarnished view of his neighbourhood. If it wounds a tender spot here and there, call the writer a fool and chalk up a debt against him for drinks at the last gasp in Luigi’s. But try to find an idea or two in here as well, for if we stop communicating this vibrant planet will be a dead planet long before the musicians take a bow.

The letter following was addressed to Prime Minister Keating, 8 July 1995, and later posted on my website (http://thormay.net/politics/politic5.html). The reply to me from a minder was what you might expect: vapid. Nevertheless the points outlined remain germane to any Australian government. Why have I resurrected it here? Well occasionally web page statistics show up something interesting. Somebody has been accessing the article. Curious, I checked and was immediately struck by the relevance of “performance-linked micro-tariffs” to Australia’s economy in 2011. What do you think?

Imagine meeting a man who, without asking, gave you gifts of great value. At first you might be pleased, though a little embarrassed since you had nothing of obvious value to offer him in return. However, this man had no interest in whatever humble things you might proffer anyway, but each day insisted on giving you new gifts. Shortly you would probably begin to resent the fellow, and wonder if you were merely a vehicle for promoting his glory (yes, there are echoes with religion in this business too). The sullen students that I meet have had the gift of education shoved down their throats for most of their short lives. They are held captive to receive this gift, and are considered ingrates if they question it at all. The human spirit would be entirely dead if they were not simmering with revolt...

The internal rules in universities rules which define a PhD invariably say that it must be an original contribution to human knowledge. Ground breaking dissertations have indeed been written from time to time. In fact though, few PhDs amount to some grand, original contribution to human knowledge. Many dissertations do include fresh assemblies of data, which may or may not be useful to someone. However, the interpretation of the data found within these documents is rarely original, except in a trivial sense...

To those who wish to keep their "cultural operating systems", like the Korean or Russian or Thai or French, "pure", closed, proprietary, without outside influence, I say you are in great danger. Maybe your closed cultural system was elegant and refined. Maybe it has a glorious past history. But it ultimately comes from an earlier human civilization of small, savage tribal groups. Now we humans are many, crowded on a small planet, and communicating with everyone instantly. We need a different design, and that has to be an Open System. more

The Peoples Republic of China has many faces, and its inhabitants come in every imaginable shade of character. The seven deadly sins are richly represented, and a healthy bouquet of virtues can be found as well. There are however some constants in public life. Whoever the PRC belongs to, it is not Joe Wang and Molly Liu on Jiefang Lu in any of the 700 cities or countless thousands of villages. It probably isn’t the old men in Zhongnan Hai either, or even the Black Hands that shadow every lucrative trade. Perhaps, in the tradition captured so well by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the place is really owned by some prissy field mice wheeling a UFO above the Yellow River plains. In any case, it is totally predictable in every imaginable situation that in China nobody traceable is responsible for anything, ever. more

If some people don't break the rules sometimes, then a normal society will cease to function. Breaking the wrong rules for the wrong reasons is like breaking legs though. And if everyone breaks the rules, then a society will disintegrate. A paradox? Yes. See how this cake is baked...

So the crookedest brains in Moscow, Beijing and Washington didn’t want to make a system that worked for you or me. Has anyone managed to do it? Well, yes, more or less, for brief moments in history. Virtue, like vice, is a temporary affair with unpredictable outcomes....

All the world art mad but thou and I. So it seems. The collective mind of peoples as nations expressed either through the ballot box or by the voice of the emperor (L’Etat c’est moi) seems erratic at best in most locales...

Cultural patterns are often phrased as value statements. Ask someone what it means to be Chinese and they may offer you a list of virtues (this kind of response is the same in every culture). The virtues they state for you will be OVERT values — those actions and beliefs that are publicly approved in the culture. In practice the real shape of the society also includes behaviour driven by COVERT values. In fact, for several reasons covert values are usually a far better predictor of where a society is going than overt values... more

From time to time I have picked at CMS/blog machines, and wondered how to migrate the now denigrated "static" html of my sprawling site to the tidy content of databases. The main attraction has been the incorporation of some way to give readers a voice, assuming there are any readers left out there. A few years ago, they used to send a steady stream of e-mails, but now expect something more instant and public. The voices have fallen silent.... more

The dishcloth has landed. It was unfair, but the phrase kept nibbling at my ear, one of those ear-worms like an advertising jingle. Maybe that was the problem. I have never met the man, and the TV cut of an election victory speech is not the best way to get someone at their avuncular best....

Hey, will you be here tomorrow? Seg back twenty years and all the news was of a planet overrun by recklessly breeding humans. Today in the media of rich nations, the slightly hysterical whisper is that liberated women are on a baby strike and we’ll all be doomed to robot care in our old age. This downward spiral of fertility is an almost sedate affair in the grand scheme of things. Compare it to the supposed disappearance of dinosaurs after the nuclear winter from earth's traffic accident with a giant meteor. People though, count for more than dinosaurs, don't they...

My friendly neighbourhood supermarket checkout girl greeted me with a joke about emigrating to Australia. Geopolitics is not the currency of daily conversation in this small, sleepy city in central South Korea, so clearly something was up....

Long ago (1967) in a freshman literature class, in response to one of my jabs the tutor asked sarcastically if I thought I was an educated person. For her that meant quoting a canon of classic English literature. Even then I thought that like the rest of us, she was an 'uneducated person'. I was damn sure she wouldn't have a clue how to start her car with a wet distributor. I remain irredeemably uneducated in vast areas of human interest ...

I'm a veteran failed language learner, always a thousand miles from success, and an eternally hopeful beginner..

"Yeah, I've got something to tell you; listen up please. Yesterday, I went to Haeundae Beach. And I saw two foreigners kissing each other right in front of me... It was a real scene ^^ . I was shocked..." [student]

Of course, I have some sentimental interest in England, because that is where my ancestors came from, but I would never consider England to be my home. Ethnic "Koreans" born in Australia will have some sentimental interest in Korea, but they are unlikely to feel that they "belong" in Korea...

When a student asks my direct opinion, I try to give an honest answer. It is not always easy. Try this one...

..the Bushites were able to marry anti-intellectualism to a faith based movement. Faith corrupts, and absolute faith corrupts absolutely...

In 1945 the atom bombs used by Americans seemed to make any future atomic wars between states unthinkable (not that the leaders of nation states have ever stopped thinking about just that). Now any failed state with a chemical fertilizer factory can probably achieve the same devastation...

The Darth Vader face of America also has its analogues on every continent. The especially horrible aspect of the American Darth Vader though is that it forces its way into the lives of all the Earth's other peoples, squawking with electronic self-righteousness that it is the harbinger of freedom...

...yes, there are men and women who have obtained their jobs unfairly. They are legion, and the burden of their incompetence has sunk countless companies and economies. Yet amongst their number are individuals of great ability, who lacking beauty, mediocrity or some other qualification of 'meritorious selection' by average fools, would never have had the chance to exercise their gifts without the unfair intervention of some wiser sponsor..

Are you a fake? This was the engaging header on an e-mail which recently arrived in my mailbox. Well, I admit to a fake tooth, but I think the rest of me is as real as real can be. Truth to tell, the odds are good that the world in general doesn't give a damn if I'm plastic, ivory or Martian rock. Still, the writer had in mind a qualification...

We watched as he carefully unwrapped his little bundle from a scarlet kerchief, and spread it out on the dirt floor before our altar. It was given with a good heart, we could see. But we sighed. That sigh of a god who is sick to death of gifts of chicken feathers, and milk, and honey. Should we tell him? Damn it all man, we want GOLD ......

The Third World is a state of mind. It is not a geographical place. It is not the plumbing in a man's house. The geographical place may be a stage for Third World living, and the plumbing may be a symptom of Third World limits.

The "Third World" itself though, if the metaphor is to be predictive at all, is a collection of designs for living -- that is, cultures -- which dominate the thinking of particular, critical masses of people.....

...the US is waging war on a certain category of terrorists, notably those posing a threat to current American interests. That is a credible and normal objective for a nation state. Further, the United States has also declared that it will ignore the sovereign rights and interests of all other states and peoples in pursuing such terrorists. This is neither wise nor defensible...

Scholarship is that process of becoming familiar with, ordering, and acknowledging the thinking of earlier workers in a particular line of inquiry. It can easily become a lifetime task. The process is obviously valuable. Subduing the arrogance of an ignorant mind (especially one's own) is very healthy. Scholarship not only helps to avoid past mistakes and save the waste of "reinventing the wheel", but can also be a stimulus for new and more sophisticated ideas about a topic.

However, the largest body of scholarship always remains inert, not only failing to stimulate new ideas, but actually forming a bulwark against the intrusion of fresh thinking...

Gender differences are the great distractor, source of misery, spice and occasional joy, but to make the most of more important human things, not shared by dogs, cats and goldfish, you have to settle for some kind of working compromise on gender relationships. One of the nice things I've found about being fifty-six is that it is at last occasionally possible to talk to a woman without both sides secretly (or not so secretly) sizing up the sexual equation...

At this moment I looked around the carriage, and a chill went through my body. Of all those passengers, not a single one showed the slightest signal that one of their number had collapsed, and might be in mortal danger. The bodies remained lax, the eyes unfocussed, the woman on the floor invisible to their attention. It was surreal.

My disbelief gave way to outrage, and throwing decorum to the winds, in a loud voice I demanded in English, "SOMEBODY CALL A DOCTOR". Nobody looked at me, but an uneasy twitch rippled through the crowd...

We kidded ourselves for a while that Star Wars had gone away. We pretended that flower power was winning. But in our heart of hearts, in our 3 a.m. nightmares, we knew that no toy of destruction, once conceived of, has ever been left to rest....

...Far more important to a wretched bug like me, is what the other silly critters of my species actually DO with their lives and TO mine. If they suspect there are gremlins at the bottom of the garden, then they'll act on that belief and affect my welfare. We have to live with the stubborn illusions and simple hopes of common people. Many a merry philosopher, realizing this, has set up shop as a fortune teller or guru to make a tidy income from their wishful thinking...

Rapid global social change, the transmigration of millions of people within and across national boundaries, and the internationalization of employment have all made the preservation of social harmony both more important and more difficult. The traditional dependence upon formulaic politeness persists, but the swift punishment which might have followed violations of form in traditional societies is no longer sensible. In a dynamic and ever changing world, we wish each other well, but pause after each handshake to see if the other fellow is holding an olive branch or a gun behind his back....

The personal legacy of this Vietnam consciousness raising in young adulthood was a lifelong skepticism about power and the would-be powerful. But there were other spin-offs too. One was the assumption that the causes adopted by the educated youth of the age, that is, the students, would always be in the vanguard of enlightenment. That is certainly how students would prefer to see themselves.

Alas, accumulated experience and a wider reading of history, has made me increasingly skeptical of the proposition that students are typically in the vanguard of anything but their own fashion statements. Sometimes they are on the side of the angels, but just as often they are dupes...

... a typical naive set of assumptions about "group oriented" cultures it that the participants within them are basically altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing and sociable. A society of such individuals should exhibit the very best of human civilization working in equitable, democratic communities. By contrast, those from individualistic cultures should be cold, grasping, selfish, egotistical and almost incapable of the cooperation demanded by a civil society. Indeed, a society of individualists, by this stereotype would be a dog eat dog affair, dedicated to conflict, riven with disloyalty and betrayal, forever failing to build a stable and humanistic community.

Now let´s take a plane trip and look at the real world. Better, like me, let´s work for a while in a fair sampling of both supposed archetypes of culture. What do we find? We find that the real social content behind those supposedly individualistic and group-oriented labels is drastically at variance with the stereotypes...

Ah, now this business of Rule by Virtue. Virtue's Reward is indeed an ancient and potent principle. Machiavelli and Confucius would both approve. The problem confronting all ambitious men and women on grasping power is how to discourage upcoming competitors. Ruthless opportunism which has been so successful for the winner must be discounted somehow. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown, and never more so than in a community without rules. The Chinese crown nowadays is definitely made of thorns..

Sometimes whole populations enter a downward spiral of lethargy, neglect and failure, so that by the minimal criteria of maintaining a mere animal population they begin to fall by the wayside. Grasshoppers and, say, fungal viruses, seem to have no such problem. What do humans need that grasshoppers don't in order to remain energetic, goal directed and productive? ...

Well how about your own pain? Could you do without it? You will fight to the death to keep your comfort zone, yet the edge of pain defines and heightens your sense of the real. Without it you would live in cotton-wool land, the mere shadow of a living creature. And here is one of the great paradoxes of life. We crave, as it were, the knowledge of pain, but shrink from its sensation. At the point of pain our courage fails us, we flee, or paralysed by fear, we surrender all autonomy and submit in misery to the conqueror....

The most successful democracies seem to be those in which the office of president and/or prime minister carry strictly limited authority. These are not jobs for Great Men, but for corporate managers who can make reasonable decisions in an orderly manner, cheer the team along a bit, and keep an eye on the main game...

Out in the backblocks of unreconstructed macho males and pumpkin scone women they never had a problem. They played the eternal seasons of struts and giggles, infatuated romance, white weddings, bawling babies, economic drudgery, drink and abuse, spreading waistlines, kitchen divorce and dad's shed up the backyard. Was it so different, after all, from some middle-eastern religious proscription on the genders?

Late, too late to play the game again, we realized our mistake. Regretted that nature had been politically incorrect and unfair in the apportionment of talent...

Enter the teacher. A teacher's role is to induce new knowledge into the knowledge systems of other beings. A desperate task, universally unwelcome to the owners of those working systems, no matter that they willfully put themselves in harms way by enrolling for a "course" in this or that. Until the moment of having to learn new knowledge, it doesn't occur to them that a threat to old knowledge is being posed. They bite, swallow a mouthful of the new stuff, and gag. It's foreign matter...

The state as an instrument of power will always be hostile in its purpose and ultimately corrupt in its methods. The nation-state, so conceived, has serious limitations. The state as an instrument of service has always had trouble maintaining the integrity of its service because its agents have always succumbed to the methods of power...

The acid bath of fear will quickly reduce our average man to average savagery, whatever the price of his suit. It follows that every situation, organization or government which subsists by some degree of fear will harbour captive agents to spread its terror...

The common experience of every adult is that the stated principles in a culture frequently fail to match the outcomes that they claim to promote, and indeed often seem to generate results that either contradict or block the realization of their intent. Why?...

The conclusion which I am drawn to then, is that, as with most natural phenomena, the tendencies to "goodness" and "badness" follow a normal distribution curve in the population. I sense that beneficence is favoured in the largest number of individuals (maybe an outgrowth of the need to nurture), but only favoured weakly. That is, most people are easily lead astray either by misinformation, or by temptations of money, status, sex, ambition etc. However, their attachment to "evil" is likely to be as weak as their attachment to "good"...

So how does a writer differ from the language makers all around him, the cacophony of chatterers? By writing a symphony. The disproportions of our conversation are artless, for where there are patterns they are unconscious, and where there is significance, it is selfish. The writer is able to create patterns of disproportion which create newly defined significance. He marshals the trivia of random occurrence into an enterprise with purpose and direction, just as a musician marshals noise into music...

The truth is that when cultural paradigms start to fall apart, a few heroic souls will hold out against the tide, but most will bend. If we want virtue, then there must be incentives to virtue. It must be made advantageous and easy for your average timid soul to act professionally, honestly and humanely in his daily life...

With telesales there is a large component of luck. That is, in any bunch of telephone numbers there are X number of sales waiting to happen, and if you do something wrong they won't happen. I doubt very much if I ever persuade anyone who wasn't inclined to buy in the first place. The X number of available sales varies quite considerably, and unpredictably, from shift to shift...

Nobody argues that walking is bad for your legs, or looking bad for your eyes. More locally, procreation is Nature's basic use for all living things. The general pattern is, the organism breeds and then dies. Sexual organs which remain unused, or rarely used, may well send the biological signal that the organism as a whole has completed it's natural cycle. Wouldn't it be ironic if one quick wank a day fooled Nature into constant renewal, a perpetual lease in lieu of immortality. Maybe those gents as rich as Croesus had a point, but were let down by their wily concubines...

...nowadays I pay the rent (barely) by working as an evening telesalesperson, flogging a pen set at an outrageous price and fraudulently in the name of a charity (which actually receives 6%). This is the world of the salesman, where truth is contracted to the immediate goal of securing a sale. I hear from the booths all around me the insouciant lies of a sales contest. They are earnest, genuine, and wholly promiscuous. Once won, the customer like a fallen woman, loses all respect...

...Is the sales team so different from TAFE managements in so-called educational institutions? I think not. I have seen and heard them lying shamelessly about "competency", and "quality", and nonexistent specialist staff skills in order to secure contracts and tenders. "Yep, we can do that. ISO9000 certified". They don't see themselves as lying at the time. The presentations are also earnest, genuine and wholly promiscuous. Once the tender is won they lose all serious interest in meeting educational commitments...

The two paths to a quiet life are to say nothing to anybody about anything, or to say everything that comes into your head. The second way is easily the most effective. Sooner or later the absolutely discrete person will be blackmailed or persecuted for something they didn't say. However, the purveyor of utter candour is regarded with mute horror by all dignified persons, and given a wide berth. Thus, like much else on this website, the Aphorisms have done a great deal to guarantee Thor perfect social obscurity.

This assembly of comments and speculations was mostly written in 1997. Of course, a few things have changed inside my head since then, but the basic tenor remains the same.

God is to human language as the zero is to mathematics. Thus god in an infinitude of isolation is without substance or value, but makes the most useful of all digits when dreams are multiplied by words. There is no doubt about the power of the god digit in any discourse amongst humans, and we cannot discount it there, for human actions follow where thought leads. Yet when our voices cease, my bet (another empty value to be sure) is that all kingdoms of heaven and hell will come to a zero sum game.

   2. Social Innovation
       (and resistance to...)
            [ the odd idea to kick around ]