CAPITALISE EVERYTHING

Daaaamn right!....

So what I am attempting is to bring forward the observation that in our society there is this intense push to privatise and 'transactionalise' everything. I think I have blogged previously (my existential crisis...one of many, but of the few that actually pass my rational barrier, and make it out to the bloggosphere. Oh, well, 'sharing is caring') about my concern.

However, this particular subject is beginning to crop up everywhere on my radar: NHS privatisation, outsourcing of jails (what the....?), education (old news I admit) etc. And finally, I recently read this on a twitter post, which I paraphrase: should teachers begin to see their students as consumers of their service?

Now, I am a capitalist, I am not blind to the fact that human nature necessitates a personal profit driven motive to progress (i.e. higher levels of hygiene, if we need a basic measure for progress, as an off hand example). However, there are certain things which should never be subject to a transaction. For example, the communist mindset is ideal for a happy, cohesive, functional family. It's normal for the family mantra to be: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". I am glad mum and dad never expected us to earn our way, and pay rent while my sis and I were freely pooping in our nappies. The communist slogan is frankly a beautiful sentiment, and works well within a family setting (and why we may all hate/love to bits our families) but it just doesn't scale - as a couple of social experiments have demonstrated. AND...by this same token, just because capitalism works so well on a large societal/civilisation scale, does not mean that capitalism scales down. It must be admitted, acknowledged and respected that certain services are the product of the generosity of human nature (which capitalism by definition does not consider, but this doesn't mean this generosity of spirit is non existent).

Admittedly, this generosity I speak of is easier to imagine in the case of a teacher/student relationship, and not so much between a criminal and his/her jail warden, but what I am trying to say is that there are certain 'services' of a society which should remain run by the state. Yes, I agree that state run services suffer from gross inefficiencies, these should be addressed, but with a surgeon's scalpel, not a butcher's cleaver. 

The outcome of these trends of gross capitalisation, is that when student's are asked why they did not fill out an assessment/survey form for a class at the end of a semester reply that it is not in their interest to contribute to the betterment of the class, as in a few years time, it is possible that new graduates from the same, but now 'better' class will be their competition in the market place. (True story. Courtesy of a friend.) This deserves a capitalisation of WTF larger than I can get in this font. This thought process is so poignantly a product of capitalism, it will serve these students well on the stock exchange. But to live a life of such emotional miserly is to never live - to redefine the human condition. <- Yeah, yeah... I am being sentimental, but then I'm not an emotional capitalist.

Symptoms of a sickness

*cough* *cough*.....*sneeze* and *wheeze* ..... I guess I have had a fair run of about a year not being sick...and now it's time...

I've also been recently noticing a trend in society which seems to indicate to me, something of a sickness in our society....(Ah...today is a hard day to write in a focussed way, and I just noticed that what I'm about to do is offer criticism of a system within which I live, and offer no solution...)
Okay, back to it - specifically, (and this may be a naive observation to most) is that societal laws aside from preventing/punishing its members for doing harm to each other, also remarkably prevent us from being decent to each other. An example of this, when a person has been wrongly dismissed at a company, and even prosecuted based on false grounds, does not (cannot) receive an apology from their company once this person's name has been cleared. To apologise, is to admit wrongdoing - and consequently (most importantly), to become 'liable'. The word 'sorry' is now a legal liability! Wow.

So, okay, I admit, this isn't insightful, but my small observation here is that,
although laws are reactive to societal behaviour and evolution, they also shape/confine us in the short term. Is it possible, that children will no longer be taught to 'say sorry' when you've done something wrong? ... because well frankly your parents are gonna now sue my parents?

I can imagine that in my example above, there was/is a discord between what they felt was right, and what they were legally advised to do, within the person who wrongfully dismissed the given person. The fact that this feeling exists is encouraging, but they fact that it remains a feeling is not so much. I wonder how long this feeling will linger?...

(PS. [Legal disclaimer...hehehehe....] The example I used wasn't something that happened to me, or that I actually made up from scratch, it came to my attention attending a recent even on the Leveson enquiry - which is another fascinating subject, full of 'symptoms of sickness'.... :))

"Good wine" and subjectivity

My laptop battery is solidly dead, and I am too lazy to get the charger (but not too lazy to type with my index finger), hence this is the first post from my phone...

Anyway, I was at a wine tasting today... (very nice perks of the job). We were provided with a selection of wines and asked to rate them on various criteria: flavour, acidity, alcohol, 'balance' (?) etc. It was a lot of fun, the highlight of my evening included meeting a forensic anthropologist (I now think I know how to sex a skull!). A comment made by one of the members of our group struck me, specifically, the comment was on the nature of subjective element of the scoring. Now subjectivity I think to most people implies an element of indetermination, arising from the belief in a 'right' answer and expressing a certain element of skepticism that the current experiment is capable of exposing the truth.

This statement got me thinking... (I personally have always been and remain convinced that if I think a certain glass of wine tastes crap/good then it is, I have no time for the 'quality', price, year etc... of the wine)... of my new thesis that we are all in a very frightening and vulnerable way very similar to each other. You and I share the same pains, the same anxiety, our mutual silence is what prevent us from realising this. I thought of my first experiences lecturing, the first time you present a set of material, your stomach is in a knot, your voice shakes , you think what will they ask me? These amazing brilliant students? ... (if you prepare well, they ask you questions you can answer) and and...most surprisingly the subsequent time you give the lecture, the very SAME questions are asked! I was astounded the first time, but I wonder what this says about subjectivity? Does it exist?

These people that put this wine tasting event on, and had us fill in a survey, they knew this, that on average we are all the same, and they just wanted to calibrate to our similarity...

Hmmm... I don't yet have an answer, but I think I need to think more, what does it mean - subjectivity?!

And before I loose myself to the ecstacy of music, I express my last naive subjective thought that my friend's ragou was very nice :)

Guilty until proven Innocent

Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.
(that's me trying to appear clever :))

...now, without trying to appear overly dramatic, this is the treatment I received when I went to have my driver's license renewed recently. I'll divulge a little into the specifics of this story, and then relate it to the subject of this post.

So. Boring details aside, I needed to obtain a Sydney State license having a Tasmanian State license. Now from my conversation with the person working for the roads authority, I came to understand that she could not issue the licence to me then, because, they did not have proof that I had not lost my Tasmanian license due to negligence etc. Consequently, they would have to send off a fax to Tasmania to receive details of my driving record, and I would have to come back later. Damn it. I had my passport with me, and asked if it would help matters if I could prove to her that I was not in the Australia for the period in question, and consequently could not have committed any driving offence. (...well, at least that they would know of, as I was driving overseas...)

Anyway, point is, they did get a fax from Tassie 'clearing my name', I did come back later, and she did issue me a NSW license... but, after a little reflection, I realised that I was treated as someone who had committed an offence. And proof was required to state otherwise. Not the other way around.

Innocent, until proven guilty: A concept that we are (in the Western world) brought up with, and consider our fundamental right.

However, while this idea may be played out in courts, or at least portrayed as such, on an everyday level we are facing the complete opposite treatment. In interactions with government agencies (particularly!) we are frequently asked to present papers, documents (signed by JPs, lawyers and others...) that provide 'proof' of our intention, condition, statements. I'm not blind to the fact that this method of approach has grown out of necessity, as there are people that lie, steal and cheat, however, I like to also think that these are not actions of the majority. And yet, we, the majority pay for it, with our time, energy, and resources.

Is it correct to observe that the fundamental fibres/protocol for officially interacting with each other, and various agencies, are actually based on the very opposite premise? Namely, that you are guilty, until proven innocent?

The Appearance of Value

Do you know where one of the most annoying places to get a paper cut is? on the tip of your right index finger....ow...no typing right, no writing....bah....

Petty complaints aside, I have a bigger issue to tackle, and this is the idea that I crave my coffee in the morning. I will often get it from the coffee shop downstairs, where it will cost me about £1.30, although I have perfectly good coffee (which at this moment is actually a small fib, this unfortunate purchase has all the appearances of good coffee and none of the taste, but that's a side issue) in my office, which will cost me all of £0.30 or less to make (factoring in its cost, and milk and sugar, and my hourly wage ;)).
Yet, I get distinct pleasure from coffee served to me and have an irrational conviction that it is somehow better than what I could make. It is my little indulgence for getting up in the morning :)

With the plethora of coffee shops around my work, I understand that to attract more customers they need to 'differentiate' themselves from the rest. How? I can guess, by cooler music in their cafe, or fancy spoons, or red cardboard cups instead of gray ones, etc etc. How provide their customers with a 'feeling' that they are special without forking out the extra money for fancy coffee, or organic sugar, or whatever...

Successful marketing plays on this, i.e. selling hot air, 'a feeling at no cost, and all profit'. This is where the 'cost benefit' occurs - in the time lag between the actual/legal meaning of a word, and customer perception, or the 'street' meaning. For example, when you/I think organic, we think cows on green pastures, eating buttercups bathed in sunshine. It means 'good', 'warm', 'grassy', 'wholesome', that is it's street value. Yet, legally, to be allowed to stick an organic label a product, means obviously something different. Something like, the fertiliser which the food was grown with had to be 50% sourced from renewable sources (erm...let's not go to define renewable), for example. This is its 'real' meaning.

This disparity between meanings is where a lot of profit is to be made, and it's legal. Which is kind of crazy when you think about it. I would definitely not maintain a close friendship with a person, to whom I said: Please do not tell this to anyone....blah blah.
I later found out that they told everyone, and when I confront them they retort that they kept their word, they did not tell 'anyone'. Admittedly, this is a clumsy example, but I hope it carries the point. The people we value most are those who understand us most, not weirdos that don't 'get' our meaning.
Hmmm... this actually reminds me of a book about jokes that Freud wrote (yes! would you believe! and which I have read, that is also not a joke). In this book, Freud explores the mechanics of the most basic turns of phrase that make us laugh etc, and one of the most common is the brief misunderstanding of a word in a given context.
So I guess, I understand why this approach is so common in many branches of our society, not just between friends over a coffee.... ooohhhhh .... yes, coffee... in a brown coffee cup for £1.30 :D....special.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Hahaha....I never noticed before - but there's a 'transliterate' button in blogger now, very interesting.....

"I have just been to" <--> "И хаве юст бен to" ....хехехе....

Anyway, indeed, I have just been to the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I remember seeing his painting "Musicians in the Orchestra" which for an instant made me think I was looking through a window at real people. It is a beautiful exhibition, and makes you realise that not that long ago, we had no idea what people looked like in motion - the way our muscles flexed, or the lines our knees/arms/thighs traced as we walked or swam. Amazing to think that this knowledge was absent from the collective consciousness! (...made me consider how trivial my research is in the larger scheme of things... in a decade or so, everything that I have done will be worthless, not to say it's not important, but that it will be assimilated into public knowledge, and hence become unnoticeable, because it will become obvious.)

I left with one distinct impression though...as though the exhibition, it's arrangement... had an idea to express: the idea of our (i.e. humanities) visual maturity. What I mean by this is, as you begin your walk through the exhibition, you see the first early paintings/sketches by Degas of dancers/people. And you realise how awkward and sometimes out of proportion the limbs are, and how sometimes the faces, heads, necks of his subjects are almost brutal in their coarseness. The plaques in the exhibit make mention of the fact that at this time, people in motion were rarely drawn because it was so difficult to hold a pose, and sometimes ropes or other props would be used to fix a dancer's figure in a certain position.

Then, as you walk on, you get introduced into the idea of photography, the efforts to capture motion. And Degas' paintings improve - the dancers now posses a delicacy, fragility and grace that was absent in his early drawings. Now, I do not want to say that Degas drew these later paintings from photographs, but that rather, the existence of photographs, and his exposure to them, allowed him to fix in his memory (for longer than was otherwise possible) the still figure of a dancer 'in motion'. Consequently, when drawing from memory, he was able to recall this image with greater accuracy than he was previously able to do.

Now, is it possible, that before photographs to compare to, people seeing Degas' first paintings of dancers in motion, really considered that this is what they looked like? Not having the capacity to 'feel' that the proportions where wrong, because they of course had even less exposure to dancers than Degas? (i.e. this sense of proportion, and motion, had not entered the collective consciousness?)

Could this in any way be justifiably related by analogy to the infantile early (early! i.e. BC) paintings? or those of small children? Photography/movies has allowed the specific fluidity of human form to enter our minds. Before this, we looked upon these forms, and in our 'minds eye' saw the stick figures of our early childhood?

Relational Relativity

I've had an interesting week, a spending a few more evenings in the pub than usual, meant that I spent a few more hours than usual harping on about my philosophical ideas (I apologise to my companions!). It occurrs to me, that 'the world is bad', 'life is unfair', etc etc. Yet, 'we are not bad', 'we are fair' etc etc., 'we' just 'do' bad things occasionally (as I expanded upon in one of my previous posts). So we live in a world that we say is all these negative things, and in which we try our dared hardest to be all the positive things, and occasionally find ourselves doing some negative things. And yet, we are the world - as Sartre said - "hell is other people".
Anyway, this is a nonsensical post.