tijaco

a view of the world

There’s something to momentum. You can build momentum in so many different directions, and yet its results seem to dominate our lives somehow. I guess momentum means that we are no longer conscious of our actions. These actions are transferred from slow thinking to fast thinking, from conscious decision to habits. Once we lose consciousness of what it is, it can morph without our knowing, or affect other things in our lives without our making the conscious connection.

I am being vague in my phrasing and content, but this is another nascent idea that I am developing.

At some point in time, we are in a state. In this state, at this instantaneous point in time, our brain is wired in a particular way. Our pathways are defined, some more strongly than others, and those defined and undefined pathways are what makes us who we are. They are what has given us our habits, our feelings, our thoughts. But not many of us are thinking about this fact. Not many take the step of being conscious of our consciousness.

What is the value in being conscious of our consciousness? Is it a good thing to be more self-aware in that way? Defining ‘good’ has always been a problem. And if we define the word, there is always going to be conditions. It always depends on how we use this consciousness of consciousness. It always goes deeper than our definitions of what is ‘good’. Why do we each have our definition of ‘good’? Where do these definitions come from?

Having conversations with a theologian challenges this question. There is often the debate of where an atheist finds his sense of good and bad without gaining it from God. My standard answer has been that we all experience suffering, and from that suffering we understand ‘bad’. Conversely, we understand pleasure, in both the short and long term – from this, we can understand ‘good’.

A more evolutionary answer would be that we understand what is ‘good’ in how we evolved. It has always been useful in prolonging the human race to understand when we, and those in our community, are suffering. If we suffer too much, in a physical sense, we will die. If we just let ourselves and our communities suffer, the human race would likely cease to exist. Or, more likely, those with these empathetic and suffering-reducing tendencies will prosper, leaving those less empathetic to die out and fail to pass on their genetics.

I have gone down a path and found myself far away from consciousness. But there does seem to be a path back.

Consciousness itself lends itself to empathy. It is difficult to be empathetic without being conscious. There are certainly examples of empathy which are automatic and aren’t thought about a great deal. But even those examples are likely a result of having built a habit, or at least a value system, which stemmed from conscious thought.

My point is that consciousness is evolutionarily positive. Empathy is a big part of the reason for this. If we can empathise with people and understand when they are suffering, we can work to reduce that suffering. On a mass scale, this has clearly worked well for us as a species.

But it doesn’t stop with empathy. Consciousness is important for many different things. I guess you could trace consciousness back to the cognitive revolution at which point our past stopped being purely biological and started being history. We were no longer apes with a very limited consciousness but rather humans with vast expanses of awareness.

There is a strong argument that, in the decades to come, a revolution will take place that is equivalent to that of the cognitive revolution. What our lives would be like on the other side of this revolution would be inconceivable. Trying to understand it now, even if we knew what it looked like, would be like trying to explain agriculture to a monkey. They simply won’t understand. This is what I find so engaging about the subject of technology.

But for now, we have this relationship with technology that is sickening. Instead of making us more conscious, in many ways it is making us less conscious. We are now cyborgs, with the world’s information at our fingertips, ready to be consumed and utilised in as diverse a way as our imaginations can muster. And yet the vast majority are trapped in a cycle of scrolling and wasted time.

This content has served a purpose of dividing us into groups and making us so well-defined as thinkers that we no longer think. Instead, our groups think for us. Nuance is destroyed. Critical thinking a thing of the past. Technological tribalism rears its ugly head. The internet has offered us the easiest way to remove ourselves from this tribal trap, and yet the ‘powers that be’ seem to have used it to trap us even further.

But we are still conscious. There is still room for critical thought. There is still time to save ourselves. There is still time for nuance. There are plenty of people who see through the bullshit. Our conscious minds are adept at such skills. So many have become disenfranchised with politics and the media. So many want something of substance, something better than what they have now.

This doesn’t seem to be something which is articulated well. It is something which is very difficult to communicate. But unless we try, we fail and get slightly better each time, there is no way of stopping the tribalism that has seen the end of empires through the millennia.

Now that we are a global society with the capability for ending civilisation, the extension of this environment wouldn’t simply be a setback of decades or even centuries. It would be the end. That would be ultimate evolutionary fail. Some see it as inevitable, asking the question of why we haven’t encountered any similar life if life could move past this point. It’s a good question, and only time will tell.

There are some people in this world that I come across when I am researching some or other topic and I just think: how do you sleep at night, knowing what you have done? I don’t think these things about criminals; they tend to have environmental reasons for their crimes. I think about this in terms of lobbyists. In particular, lobbyists for the aged care sector.

Victoria has been going through a second wave of coronavirus recently, and it seems to be affecting aged care homes in particular. With some hints from some press conferences and tweets that the aged care sector was notorious, I decided to look into it. Some of the characters I found have spent large portions of their careers lobbying the government to loosen regulations on private aged care providers. Some of spent years arguing in courts that their facility shouldn’t have to abide by something as simple as providing air-conditioning to their residents.

This isn’t an exciting type of evil. It is the most mundane, most impersonalised, most insidious type of evil. These lobbyists have likely never been in one of these struggling aged care homes. They likely have little to no contact with the nurses that have to carry out their new “flexible work” policies by being called in to work at hours’ notice and having no choice but to accept if they want to pay their bills.

When we think of the evillest people in society, it is easy to imagine that they are shadowy figures plotting in dark rooms. In reality, they are completely out in the open. They walk the city streets. They have conversations whose consequences no one can fathom. They have meetings filled with buzzwords and jargon to make them feel better about the reality of their work. They front up to the media whose questions were staged, and they rattle off their public relations spiels.

Perhaps it is not these people who are truly evil but the system in which they operate. But this robs them of their agency and their consciousness to make a decision.

The actions of these people share parallels with the propaganda model under which they thrive. The media in the West has a façade of balance, and many see journalists, perhaps decreasingly these days, as arbiters of truth. In places like China or Russia, however, the propaganda is far more overt. The news in China reflects the CCP’s party line and everyone knows it. Out in the open, it is far more honest, far more noble.

These lobbyists are murderers and torturers. Much like calling Western media propaganda, it feels a little extreme at first. But removing the layers and reasoning down to its core, this is exactly what they respectively are. The murderers that we see locked up in our prisons are far more blatant, open and noble, at least with themselves, about what they have done. Much like Western media, the lobbyists’ more indirect actions cloud the motives of their actions and can use the excuse of simply “being part of the machine”. This doesn’t stop the fact that they are the cause of the suffering.

When researching these people, it seems as if they are proud of what they are doing. I came across one particular lobbyist whose career read like an alternator between government and business lobbyists. It is difficult to understand how someone could write out their career history like that and think “I am doing a good thing”. They must justify it somehow. Perhaps sleeping on a bed of money gleaned from the suffering elderly is worth it.

Moving on to a slightly lighter tone, I wanted to discuss a bit more the idea of China. I noted how blatant their media is. But it isn’t just blatant. It is evidence-based, reason-based. If their media is all bullshit propaganda just like ours, then props to them because they have convinced me far more than Western media. I would posture that this is more a symptom of who is on the right side of the argument than whose propaganda is more effective, but the difference is stark.

In the Western media, the depiction of China is ridiculously one-sided. There is never even the opportunity to see the Chinese perspective. In the English-speaking Chinese media, of the moderate amount I have consumed, both sides of the argument are offered a place. There is the opportunity for the West to make their logical case. But they fail on each and every occasion. It seems that the Chinese media can afford to have the Western perspective on a panel because they trust that they are correct. Western media doesn’t have the same self-confidence.

A similar concept has come to light in the rise of social media and podcasts. Podcasts have offered an alternative to the quick sound-bite version of the mainstream media. As a consequence, people have flooded these podcast forums. It seems that Western audiences aren’t too stupid to consume any more than soundbites, but instead that they were just never offered any more than that. This has bizarrely manifested itself in a comedian, TV host and MMA commentator offering some of the more enlightening content of our generation.

That isn’t a symptom of a healthy society. A healthy society would have provided similar and more professional content to its consumers at the beginnings of the technologies that allowed it. We’ve had radio and television for decades, and yet only now we are realising that if content creation was made accessible, we could actually educate our population?

Apparently, there used to be intellectual debates on television before it was corporatized. Now, those intellectual debates have seemed to have a comeback with the internet. So long as the content creation remains accessible, we might have a chance to do what we should have done with the other technologies. Now that our society is addicted to far more short-term content, perhaps we will need to keep waiting.

When I was on my walk today, I started thinking about how we attribute meaning to things. It seems like humans are meaning seeking creatures, and that we are always trying to attach some meaning to the inanest statistics. This is probably an evolutionary trait because the cases in which we accurately attribute meaning likely outweigh the cases in which we inaccurately do so. Trying to articulate what I mean here is difficult, and this idea is certainly nascent in my mind, but I’ll give it a go.

There seem to be certain situations in this world which are effectively win-win-win and others which have some pay-off and some compromise that we need to make. I thought of this when I was walking along wearing a facemask, and watching people running and not wearing a facemask. I am not passing judgement on those people or even on the government decision, but it got me thinking about different situations and the trade-offs of some compared with others.

Wearing a facemask while you are running would be far more annoying than wearing a facemask while walking. In saying that, when you are running, there is far more chance of a virus to spread because you are moving faster and excreting more bodily fluid. So, as the transmit-ability (if that was a word) increases, the inconvenience also increases. It would be far better if as transmit-ability increased, the inconvenience decreased (or convenience increased). That would be a kind of win-win situation. And that kind of situation is what I see in the case of renewable energy.

With current technology, renewable energy really is a win-win-win. First, it is now far cheaper to build renewable energy than to even continue with fossil fuel generation. Next, it is now far more reliable now that battery technology has improved. Third, it is better for the environment. And finally, renewable energy creates far more jobs than does fossil fuel generation, at least in the short-term. These jobs are also far cleaner and safer. There really isn’t a loss in building renewable energy generation, that is unless you are an executive at a fossil fuel company. But even then, there is still time to invest in the right way and save your dying energy company. Without going too deep into the weeds here, this is an example of a win-win-win situation.

But renewable energy wasn’t always like this. Even a decade ago, the cost of solar energy was greater than that of fossil fuel generation. This creates a situation much like the facemasks – an increase of risk of impending disaster came with an increase in convenience. Now that the technology has improved, we are in a win-win situation. But that technology improvement didn’t occur because entrepreneurs and scientists were morally minded. For much of the improvements, it was simply a sight of long-term economics rather than short-term. They just wanted to make more money.

Now, to get back to the idea of meaning. I am often questioning “why” certain things are the way that they are, even on a sort of cosmic level. Is there some philosophical reason why just at the right time when we have the ability to save the Earth from impending doom that renewable energy finally reaches its win-win-win stage? Could we not have lived in some alternate reality in which there was no way to gather energy from renewable sources. In that situation, would we all not be doomed? Why is that there always seems to be some solution that isn’t all that inconvenient?

The problem of nuclear energy and weapons offers another example of win-win-win in terms of proliferation. Nuclear energy is one of the most expensive and dangerous ways of creating energy in the long-term, and nuclear weapons only make us more and more unsafe and unstable. Therefore, nuclear proliferation seems to be a win-win-win for everyone involved.

This is why I am disposed to attach meaning to the world. These are two of the biggest problems of our era, and yet they both have incredibly simple, win-win solutions. It seems incredibly lucky, convenient or of some greater creation. This is as close as I get to believing in God.

I might be repeating myself once again here, but to reiterate what I mean in terms of the pandemic. All of the actions to mitigate a pandemic and reduce its effects are incredibly inconvenient; reducing human contact, wearing face coverings, washing your hands. Is it just pure dumb luck that this pandemic is not as great a threat to our lives as climate change or nuclear war? While we might not take the simple solutions on those issues, we cannot deny that those simple solutions are there. But with a pandemic, that is not so.

Or is it that I, as a human, am attaching meaning too liberally? Perhaps I would see it differently if the pandemic was an existential threat to the human race. Perhaps then I wouldn’t see the measures as inconveniences and would only see the positives in the arresting of the disease. Or perhaps if the pandemic were more deadly, a win-win solution would be found more quickly. But these alternatives just aren’t logical enough for me.

The only ‘out’ I can find to this conversation without admitting that this is all too convenient and that there must be some God, is that not everything means something. It is just pure luck and circumstance, cause and effect patterns that led us to where we are today. It will be pure luck and cause and effect patterns that lead us to where we are going. All that we have is our consciousness to make an impact on the probability of a better future, however we define that “better” future.

And so, it comes back to this Buddhist idea that the only thing that really matters is the present. That our concept of the past is a product of our ego narrating our memories, and the future the product of our ego projecting from those memories. All that we can do is be present and change what little that we can change in order to shape the world however we please.

I often start things that aren’t very long lasting, especially when it comes to creating content like blogs and videos. But here I am again, trying to start a new routine. This time, I am going to attempt to write a blog post every day. I am currently trying to build a website, and that website will take the domain tijaco.blog. This blog, as you know from reading it, will be posted on my write.as page. In future, I might buy a domain for this one, but for now it will just be left as is.

In these blogs, all I am going to do is sit and write for a whole hour each day. This will be basically unedited and more like a stream of conscious or rant than a real piece. My real, polished pieces will appear on my website tijaco.blog and once I get back on social media, they will be shared more regularly. That’s the plan at least.

That’s something I wanted to talk about today. On Saturday night, as I have done a few times before, I blocked myself from all social media sites for an entire week. I am using a program called SelfControl that doesn’t let me access whichever sites I give it permission to block. In this round, I have blocked Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. These are my main culprits for distraction and while some of them, especially YouTube, offer a lot of good, there are ways I have found to access YouTube videos which doesn’t get me embroiled in a long rabbit hole of rubbish content consumption. This alternative is to illegally download the YouTube videos I want to watch, which is an annoying process, before discarding them when I have finished watching them. This has worked especially well today as I have been researching the Xinjiang region of China and although I have found a new YouTube channel I enjoy, I haven’t been sucked into a spiral of consuming their content for hours on end. Instead, I have watched three longer videos that gave me the information I needed and moved on to the next thing.

That brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about here: Xinjiang and China in general. I always knew that it was absurdly difficult to research China as an anglophile and gain a balanced perspective. Oftentimes I resort to reading the obvious propaganda reports from Western media and trying to garner some sense of truth between the bullshit. I was doing just that today, reading a report by a man named Adrian Zenz whose credentials read like a CIA checklist. After reading about half of this utterly confusing report, I found him complaining about an organisation called the Global Times, denigrating it as the mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Upon reading that, I became interested. After a look at the reports from the Global Times, I couldn’t believe that I had never stumbled upon this before.

Zenz is not wrong in noting its affiliation with the CCP – it is essentially the English version of the People’s Daily, the CCP newspaper – but this is exactly what I have been looking for. After all, despite the “diversity” of media in Australia, all of the perspectives are aligned with Australia’s (business) interests. All I have been looking for is a publication that provides the Chinese perspective. After reading some of their articles, I have found that they are far more objective in their reporting than any newspaper I’ve seen in the West. There is a level of analysis and evidence that just is not present in Australia outside of the independent, investigative space. This is a publication I will be using in the future. Of course, as with any publication, you must note the biases.

After having explored some of the pieces from the Global Times, in particular those connected to Australia and the United States, I found one which referred to a TV channel called China Global Television Network (CGTN). Again, this network is subject to the CCP, but as noted above, all of the mainstream media outlets in the West are connected to their respective governments through the propaganda model – this is simply more overt. Once again, watching some of the videos from CGTN, I found the analysis to be far better, far more evidence-based, than that of the Western media. After watching a documentary on terrorism in Xinjiang, I saw the Chinese perspective on the situation. Unlike all of the analysis I have heard from Western media, the Chinese perspective was incredibly reasonable. With my previous research on terrorism in Xinjiang, I know that the documentary-maker could have been far more scathing of the United States flaring of terrorism in the Middle East, but instead it focused on what China is doing to solve the problem. I then watched an analysis show called The Heat in which several intellectuals conversed on the topic of Xinjiang and the treatment of the Uyghurs in the region. Rather than platitudes and emotional claims, they explained how the CCP sees the situation, how they are solving the problem and exposing the inconsistencies and lack of evidence in the claims by the United States.

In exploring who is on the right and wrong side of this debate, I want to make sure I am not siding too quickly with China. I tend to assume that the United States is in the wrong based on previous patterns throughout history, especially since WW2. But in this situation, if there is a better case to be made on the American side, I am failing to see who is making it. There doesn’t seem to be any concrete evidence that there is a lot of wrongdoing on the side of China. There are images that are flashed on Western TV screens of prison camps and forced labour, but this isn’t concrete proof of wrongdoing – the United States in particular has the biggest prison population on Earth which is overwhelmingly black. We don’t see China flashing images of African American prisoners around the world. They know better than to meddle with the internal affairs of other countries, and their media makes that crystal clear.

So, this is the story of two outlets that I have discovered today that will offer me a more balanced view of the world in combination, or even in the absence of, Western media. My journey to find the truth takes another step.

Recently, I have been researching China’s history, particularly since the Communist revolution. I have also been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s books and how he sees the shared fictions that bind our societies together. Here are some notes on nationalism from those two perspectives and how it can, much like a tool, be used various ways.

First, it makes sense to define nationalism. As with many words, its meaning gets faded and subverted the more it gets used. I am defining nationalism as simply the sense of national identity. In particular when writing on China, nationalism appears on both sides of the Communist revolution, both in the so-called Nationalist side and the so-called Communist side, perhaps even more so on the Communist side. In the West, nationalism especially since WW2 has been shaded with a sense of evil, mostly due to the nationalism shown by Hitler’s Germany. In reality though, nationalism has many different forms.

The best way of conceptualising these forms was mentioned in Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” as a spectrum which denotes how “nationalistic” or how much value is given to the nation state. For some forms of nationalism, there is simply a sense of patriotism and a feeling that we should do what is best for our own country. The point at which this nationalism gets dangerous is where the country itself is seen as especially superior to others. Taken to an extreme, we have the example of American exceptionalism and a thinking that the US can do no wrong on the world stage. Taken to a more directly evil extreme, we have the example of Nazi Germany believing themselves to be the superior nation state.

But there is a powerful force in nationalism if used and controlled in the right way. For example, if there were a nationalism based on mateship, the values of the country would be friendly to its neighbours rather than imperial. This is the nationalism that I believe Australia could benefit from. Instead, we seem to take most of our values from the United States, with our complacency and stagnation imported rather than home-grown. This is a separate idea that I may come back to, but first a note on another type of nationalism that has proven to turn a society from poverty to relative riches.

China had suffered a century of devastation, known in China as the century of humiliation. This started with the opium wars of the 1840s and 1850s and effectively ended with the Communist revolution of 1949. China now had a new, visionary leader in Mao Zedong after a comprehensive and unexpected victory over the US-supported nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. This conflict resulted in Chiang Kai-shek and his party, Kuomintang, fleeing to Taiwan. This resulted in decades of martial law and brutal suppression of the Taiwanese population in a period known as the White Terror.

Mao, for all his infamy in the West, is still a revered figure in China today. I would argue that there is good reason for this. Mao brought a nationalism and vision to China that was much needed. This man had a different way of doing things, and while his policies ended in disaster, the coalescing of the nation was a huge feat and paved the way for the more competent policies of his successors to transform China into the superpower it is becoming today.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, took this national identity and utilised it along with far more competent policies. The special economic zones were some of the most visionary policies ever implemented and transformed Shenzhen from a tiny fishing village to a technology hub rivalling its neighbour Hong Kong. Opening up China to the Western world was another visionary move in this period, although it came with its drawbacks. The population revolted and was met with government force in Tiananmen Square. While we can argue whether such governmental force on its citizens is moral, there is also the point to be made that it was required to focus the vision of the nation.

This is a vision that took almost a billion people from poverty and has turned an agricultural society into a competing global superpower. This kind of growth has never been seen before. This improvement was not matched in the West, even given our well-advanced starting position. I am not arguing that Western countries should adopt China’s model, but simply that we learn from it.

My takeaway from China’s rise from a century of humiliation to a global superpower is, among many other things, that nationalism can be an incredibly effective strategy of mobilising your people. This shared vision of a Chinese dream aligned the goals of the citizens of the nation and with the right guidance has transformed their country. Could Australia take some lessons from this?

My thinking on Australian nationalism is that we barely have any at all. Instead, we see ourselves as a 51st state of America. We import everything from our taste in Netflix shows to global movements of race relations, whether they are relevant here or not. We have the opportunity for visionary leaders given the relative strength of our unions and the Labor Party that has been established as a result. Leaders like Kevin Rudd and all the way back to Gough Whitlam have had visions for an Australia bigger and better than itself. Instead of sticking with these leaders, they are routinely dismissed by our friends across the Pacific. It seems that the only thing we haven’t imported from America is a sense of sovereignty.

What could Australia do to establish a sense of healthy nationalism? There are plenty of ideas. For a spark point, especially with the coming decline of the American empire, we could use a republic referendum to start a conversation about sovereignty in a new era. I am not one for symbolism for symbolism’s sake, but this is for a specific purpose. With emotions raised and conversations started, we could have a democratic debate about our country’s sovereignty and how we envision ourselves in the future.

In terms of policy, a sense of nationalism could be created around the transforming of Australia into a renewable energy superpower a la Ross Garnaut. The Australian value of mateship could be taken to both domestic and global stages, healing indigenous relations within our borders and helping our South-East Asian and Pacific neighbours to develop their own economies. There are plenty of ways to take nationalism, and yet very few points in history in which change can be fostered. I believe that one of these moments will occur in the decade to come.

This piece will essentially be a book review, except that rather than repeating a synopsis or rating its merits, I will be reporting what value I took out of these two books. At the time of writing, I have just recently read Sapiens for the second time and I am almost finished Homo Deus for the second time. I am reading these books again because I just recently bought Yuval Noah Harari’s third book ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ and wanted a refresher on his previous work after having read it about a year ago.

One item of great value that I took from Sapiens was the timeline of history that he outlined.

First, we were effectively animals subject to biology. The cognitive revolution brought with it the ability for humans to communicate fictions to each other. This was the beginning of history, as opposed to simple biology.

Next, we were hunter gatherers who tended to have diverse animist beliefs in which all plants and animals seemed to have equal value to us. We saw ourselves as part of the environment rather than dominant over it. On some level, at this time we were far healthier. Our diets were as good as at any time in history and exploring the plains of whatever territory we inhabited meant we got plenty of exercise. We were, in effect, free. Then came the domestication.

The agricultural revolution is described in Sapiens in a really poignant way. Rather than humans domesticating animals and crops, the animals and crops domesticated humans. Now, rather than exploring the plains for exercise and eating a diverse diet, we were doing back-breaking work for exercise and eating an increasingly concentrated diet. The agricultural life wasn’t adopted because it was healthier and caused less suffering, but rather for purely evolutionary reasons. Agricultural societies provided the conditions for far more children than did hunter-gatherer societies, albeit less healthy children. And this was one part of the puzzle that I had never really thought about: evolution doesn’t care about the human condition, it only cares about the numbers.

With the agricultural revolution came a shift in thinking. Rather than seeing the world as one in which humans are part of the environment, we were now dominant over the plants and animals. We now focused on ourselves and on our futures. These beliefs also had to be strong and widely believed. Only a shared fiction amongst the whole community can be effective – this requires true belief. In modern times, we have plenty of these fictions; money, human rights, rule of law, etc. But the agricultural revolution was the start of these shared fictions which Harari calls “intersubjectivity”.

This then leads to the unification of humankind and the scientific revolution. Nowadays, we have built new religions around the human experience. We have political religions around ways of structuring society and these religions tend to relegate the lives of animals to an even lower form. We are now far more focused on the human condition, and this brings us to Homo Deus, where the term ‘humanism’ is explored.

Now, we are focused on humans more than anything else. In politics, we are told to vote for who we think is right rather than having God choose our ruler. In the market economy, we are told to buy what we want according to our own feelings. In art, we are told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder rather than in the eye of some ethereal force. If enough humans believe something to be art, it is considered art. There is something ideally democratic about this idea, but I do feel that we have a lot of work to making sure this humanism is not subverted into propaganda for the few.

Harari separates humanism into three categories; liberal, socialist and evolutionary. Liberal humanism is one which is focused on the individual and whatever the individual wants, most characterised by capitalism. Socialist humanism is one in which all of society should be considered and in which the party is in control, characterised by socialism or communism. Evolutionary humanism is the harshest of them all, spousing that whoever is stronger will win out, characterised by Nazism but also by some futuristic types.

I do have a problem with this characterisation, but it is not in the types themselves. They seem accurate for the kinds of philosophies that the vast majority of people believe in the present day. I just believe there to be an alternative in which the positive components of all three can be represented. Rather than separating them out and being given the option to choose one, I would argue that you could take the democratic aspects of liberalism, the long-term vision aspects of socialism and a side of evolutionary humanism that deals with the inevitability of human progress over the next century. But that might be a topic for a different video.

The final section of Homo Deus, which I have read before but have not yet finished this time around, is about the next step. Throughout history, we have gone through animistic religions, more tolerant polytheistic religions, less tolerant monotheistic religions and now humanism. What’s next, Harari argues, is the belief based on the concession that we humans do not have much free will, if any at all. The extension of this is that data essentially becomes the new religion. I remember this fascinating me on first reading, so I am keen to get into again.

These are the biggest takeaways I took from reading those two books. There are plenty of things I haven’t mentioned here, including some chapters on writing and money and how they have revolutionised the way that we interact with the world, and also a lot of incredible points about the animals and their place in this theatre. I shall report back once I have finished the third book in the effective Yuval Noah Harari trilogy.

why it is an economically absurd concept

Over the last few weeks, I have been researching the idea of Australia going through a gas-fired recovery. That is to say that the Liberal government wants to facilitate even more gas-fired projects in order to stimulate the economy and create jobs to recover from the economic downturn caused by COVID-19. There is a lot wrong with this idea and, by the end of this video, I hope you too will understand just how stupid it is.

First, a note on the economy itself. The Liberals are doing their best at the moment to make it seem like the economic downturn is due solely to the coronavirus and the fact that we had to shutdown the economy. This is incorrect, but it is certainly in the government’s self-interest to have people think this. If people were to look at the graphs and see the economic health of our country before the outbreak, they would see a different picture.

One of the best journalists who sheds light on this subject is Alan Austin. He is a contributor to both Independent Australia and Michael West Media, and he has been outlining just how poorly the Coalition has been managing the economy ever since they got into office.

Now that I've noted just how poorly the Liberals have managed the economy to this point, the following stupidity might come as slightly less of a surprise. In the wake of COVID-19, Scott Morrison created the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC) and appointed them to the mission of “mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 on jobs and businesses and to facilitate the fastest possible recovery of lives and livelihoods”. Those are the words of Nev Power, head of the NCCC – we will get to his other credentials soon.

The NCCC, like most ideas of Scott Morrison, is a complete farce. And it didn’t take long for the cracks to appear. An early leaked report from the NCCC called for the Australian government to spend big on gas projects. Anyone who looked into who was involved in the commission shouldn’t have been surprised.

As outlined by Fossil Fuel Watch and reported in Michael West Media, there are plenty of fossil fuel interests embedded in the NCCC.

The head of the NCCC, Neville Power, is a former CEO of Fortescue Metals and deputy chair of Strike Energy. What does Strike Energy specialise in? Oil and gas exploration. He also holds a handy $1.6m in shares in Strike, a solid incentive on its own. He has also advocated for a gas pipeline aimed at expanding onshore gas in Western Australia. The chairman is only the start of a familiar pattern.

Special advisor to the commission Andrew Liveris is a big advocate for the expansion of the gas industry in Australia. His directorship at oil and gas giant Saudi Aramco might have something to do with that. Also being the Deputy Chairman at chemicals and engineering company Worley Parsons along with $50k in shares at the company might go further in explaining his love for fossil fuels.

Another commissioner at the NCCC is Catherine Tanna, managing director of one of the biggest polluters in the country, Energy Australia. We are starting to see a pattern here. She is also a board member at the Business Council of Australia (BCA), one of the biggest and baddest lobbying groups in the country. They have been identified, along with the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) as one of the biggest opponents to climate action. Nice one, Catherine.

We will end with James Fazzino, who is a member of the Manufacturing Working Group within the NCCC. He is described as a gas industry “kingmaker” and the man “who underpinned the development of south-east Queensland’s gas industry”. This is an industry, as we will shortly see, that is on the brink. Fazzino represents one of the most blatant conflicts of interest here. He is a director at APA Group, which is in the business of gas infrastructure. It will build a pipeline connecting the controversial Narrabri gas project to a separate pipeline connecting it to Sydney. That project is currently under review by the NSW government.

All of this points to a ‘gas-fired recovery’. Energy Minister Angus Taylor has talked about this prospect openly, and I will try my best to explain why this is a terrible idea on several fronts.

First, we can address the economics of gas and the fact that the whole fossil fuel industry is on the brink of collapse, only being held up by government subsidies. Gas in particular has been in trouble for the past 10 years. With more mild winters occurring around the world due to a warming climate, the need for gas to heat homes is declining. The gas companies around the world have not responded to this decline in demand, and instead have increased supply. This has resulted in an oversupply of gas in the market, and they are actually running out of space to store the excess gas. If this threshold is hit, the price of gas will go negative.

'The situation was best summed up in this clip from a recent IEEFA podcast. <podcast bit>

The International Energy Agency’s recent gas report has projected that demand will be further affected by COVID-19, and they are projecting a 4% drop in consumption in 2020. This is coming from an organisation known to underestimate the risks of fossil fuels because they tend to be affected by the garbage coming from the industry lobbyists. But the data is clear – the gas industry is collapsing globally.

With such low prices for gas globally, there is no chance of Australia being pulled out of a recession by exporting gas. There is almost no chance that a new gas project will make any money at all, let alone pulling a country out of the biggest recession since the 1930s. And all this was evident before the COVID-19 pandemic which has only worsened the situation. It’s clear that exporting gas isn’t going to drag us out of any recession. The next argument to attack is that of products which require cheap gas to produce. If we have a bunch of gas being produced in Australia, why not use that gas, make some stuff and then sell it on to the rest of the world? Could that bring us out of a recession?

To explore this, we have to focus on the Australian domestic gas industry. It is a complete mess, especially on the East coast. How a gas industry usually works is that the corporations take the gas and export most of it. But for the country where the gas is being produced, there are certain rules that the government can put in place where the gas company has to reserve a certain amount to give to the domestic market at a reasonable price. Without this policy, the gas companies can do what they want and the country itself, even though it is abundant with gas, pays whatever price the gas companies want them to pay. This is what is happening on the East coast of Australia. In Western Australia, the gas companies have to reserve 15% of their production to provide to Western Australian consumers at a reasonable price. In the East Coast, even though we have one of the biggest gas export markets, we still pay far too much for our gas because there are essentially cartels running the industry.

If a gas-fired recovery were to be feasible in Australia, you would need a low domestic gas price so that you could use that gas to create ammonia-based products or to create petrochemicals. You would also want high global prices for those products so that you can bring money into the Australian economy (God knows the cash would go to corporations’ coffers anyway). In reality, it is inversed. We have high domestic prices because of the gas cartels on the East coast, and the prices for ammonia-based products and petrochemicals are extremely low and falling even further. The logic of a gas-fired recovery in Australia is completely ridiculous.

Notice that until now, I haven’t once noted the environmental impact of the gas industry. Nor have I mentioned the health effects that are associated with gas production. I have focused purely on the economic case for a gas-fired recovery. And based on pure economics, it is a ridiculous prospect.

The environmental side of the gas industry is full of deceit and propaganda. The industry likes to promote themselves as far less polluting than coal and as a good path towards the decarbonisation of our economy. Firstly, coal is not a very high bar. Second, they’re probably wrong about that anyway. The amount of fugitive emissions that are produced in gas production often makes it just as bad, and oftentimes worse than coal.

See, when coal is dug up from the ground, unless you’re digging up a 40,000 year old cultural site, there’s not much that can go wrong environmentally speaking. When you burn the coal that you have dug up, then the emissions get produced. But gas drilling is different. In the process of gas drilling, a lot of emissions are produced at that point, before the gas is even being processed and used. This is what is called fugitive emissions, and because of the growth of the gas industry in Australia in the last decades, it has accounted for the majority of our increase in emissions through that time.

With all of these emissions being produced, and no money being made by the companies, it is baffling how the industry is remaining afloat. Tom Sanzillo best explained this on the IEEFA podcast I referenced earlier: <podcast bit> An already dying industry whose death is only being accelerated by current conditions is not going to bring us any kind of economic recovery.

To create economic growth, requires some transfer of wealth to the people who are going to spend it. Simply lining the coffers of huge gas companies is not going to stimulate the economy. This transfer of wealth can come through providing jobs at the companies themselves, or it can come through taxing the gas companies and using those funds to create jobs in more jobs-intensive industries. Neither of these avenues are open with the gas industry or with the current government, and that is precisely why a gas-fired recovery is so incredibly stupid.

more thinly veiled propaganda

There are some politicians in Australia saying that we should ban TikTok. Here is my take on this topic, and why it is even being discussed in the first place.

This is the next in a long line of attacks, both thinly veiled and explicit, on China in recent months. As the empire of the United States begins its descent into abject failure, they are not going down without a fight. Their quasi-colonies from the UK to India and Australia are taking their rhetoric to new heights. The suggestions of a ban on TikTok in Australia is as about as predictable as it is infeasible.

But why does the United States hate China so much? As much as anything, old empires don’t enjoy new powers taking their place. As an apparently independent country, Australia shouldn’t be taking sides. Unfortunately, it is inevitable that we will. The alternative is a coup and change of leadership, which has occurred at least twice in our history. Our media machine sets up this deep propaganda, with not one mainstream media outlet in the country making the case that we should even take a balanced approach on China. In order to find that perspective, we are required to either listen to the independent experts on the topic or find niche independent blogs. This lacking diversity of opinion will see us fall with the sinking ship.

TikTok serves as a good example for just how lopsided this perspective is. It, along with seemingly every other technology company, has had its share of data sharing scandals. Google exposed user data and didn’t tell anyone because they thought it might damage their reputation. Facebook and Twitter were both embroiled in the well-known Cambridge Analytica scandal in which data was harvested for political advertising. Did we ever think about banning Google, Facebook (including Instagram) or Twitter? Of course not. So, what has TikTok done that is so egregious as to face potential bans in Australia?

Australian politicians are arguing that TikTok is being “used and abused” by the Chinese government. Any evidence for this activity whatsoever? None. TikTok’s data is stored in Singapore and the United States and is not subject to Chinese law. It is true that it’s difficult to track data and we cannot say for sure that the data is not being sent back to China. But if so, why do we care? And if we were to be consistent in this line of argument, we would require all tech companies with Australian data to have that data stored in Australia.

This counts out Google, whose data centres are spread across the world. No more Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, whose data centres are spread across the United States. Again, if we reject the artificial narrative that the United States is somehow morally superior to China, we can see these attacks for what they are: a complete farce.

The United States’ treasured first amendment on freedom of speech is one of the cornerstones of their nation, but there are loopholes. These social media companies flirt with the line around freedom of speech regularly. As is a familiar pattern, first they censor what are widely seen as extreme opinions. Alex Jones being wiped from social media is the first shot. Now, we are seeing more and more reasonable commentators being censored. The algorithms on platforms like YouTube have been found to favour establishment media companies, which is another move towards censorship. They will inch closer and closer, taking more and more power, until such a time when they have the discourse of the community under a tight leash, just as they do in the TV and radio landscape.

But do we regulate these social media companies to assure the semblance freedom of speech is maintained? Do we threaten them with bans in whole countries because of their data scandals and censorship? Of course not. There are big changes that need to occur to maintain open discourse throughout all of media, not just online. These big changes will surely be the subject of future pieces. For now, I note these problems to illustrate that our attention is being concentrated on TikTok for far less evidence of wrongdoing than we have for US social media companies.

The final point on the issue of TikTok being banned in Australia is that of its infeasibility. As reported in the Conversation, the government would first need to request its removal from the Google Play and Apple App Store. If this was to occur, there would be a problem with the likely millions that already have the app installed on their phone, and the potential for new users to simply use a foreign country’s app store. The next (and more draconian) step is to block access to TikTok’s servers, which could still be circumvented with a VPN if people really wanted to use it.

Finally, given TikTok has already been around for a while, it has likely almost reached saturation in Australia. This means that anyone who was ever going to download it has likely already downloaded it and is using it regularly. If Australians’ data was going to be sent to the propaganda minister of the Chinese Communist Party and used to propagandise us into joining their evil cult to dominate the world, it would be too late to stop it.

Luckily for the United States, our population is already hypnotised by their own spell. The propaganda machine has worked with remarkable effectiveness. Should they wage war on a rising China, many Australians would be already be ripe for the fight.

some musings on the pair

Having gone down a rabbit hole of researching psychedelics, I have found myself trying to formulate a coherent theory of how the mind works. Here are my musings so far.

First, a disclaimer. On writing this piece, I have never consumed psychedelics before. After having looked into it, I now have plans to do so. But I did want to write this piece before I engaged in a psychedelic experience – a naïve perspective is valuable.

Psychedelics, in the research I have done of them, seem to put the mind in a state of plasticity. This simply means that our minds have more ability to change. On a side note, ‘the ability to change’ is Einstein’s measure of intelligence – it seems that we’re on a good path, then.

This state of plasticity, or the ability to change, seems to be a similar state to that of children. In a child’s brain, there seems to be certain structures in place without the content filled in. As they haven’t gathered the experiences and built up models of the world themselves, their mind is like that of a colouring book. The outlines are there, but the colour is not yet filled in. Psychedelics, as I’ve heard from both experts who study it and from people* who’ve experienced it, seem to return the mind to the state of a child. This sense of wonder with the world returns temporarily.

So, why do we have this ‘ability to change’ under psychedelics? How is it that we return to this childlike state where we feel as though the world is novel and wonderous?

There is one analogy that I’ve heard is one of a ski mountain. I first heard it on a Tim Ferriss podcast with Michael Pollan, but it comes from researcher Robin Carhart-Harris and is well reported in Vox here:

The best metaphor I’ve heard to describe what psychedelics does to the human mind comes from Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelic researcher at Imperial College in London. He said we should think of the mind as a ski slope. Every ski slope develops grooves as more and more people make their way down the hill. As those grooves deepen over time, it becomes harder to ski around them.

Like a ski slope, Carhart-Harris argues, our minds develop patterns as we navigate the world. These patterns harden as you get older. After a while, you stop realizing how conditioned you’ve become — you’re just responding to stimuli in predictable ways. Eventually, your brain becomes what Michael Pollan has aptly called an “uncertainty-reducing machine,” obsessed with securing the ego and locked in uncontrollable loops that reinforce self-destructive habits.

That is one powerful way to think about how psychedelics take us back to the time before our ways were so set. And as I was learning about this, a few other books and models sprung to mind.

First is that of James Clear and his book Atomic Habits. I haven’t yet read this book, but I’ve been told of its general message several times. The idea is that our lives are dictated by these smallest known (atomic) parts of our behaviour (habits). This can be extended to talk about larger aspects of our lives. Our physical health is a product of our exercise and dietary habits, while the tidiness of our houses over time is a product of our cleaning habits. This is consistent with this ski mountain analogy in that these habits are difficult to change. We often get caught in those ski slopes, in those habits, and it takes a lot of discipline to shift them to something more constructive.

Another relates to mental health and comes from the book Lost Connections and to a lesser extent Chasing the Scream, which are both written by the same author Johann Hari. The general outlook from Hari is that humans want to bond with things and make connections. If we are not making connections with constructive things like healthy relationships with our family, friends, community and work, we will suffer. These connections can be replaced with drugs which is more deeply covered in Chasing the Scream, or they can be replaced with a feeling of anxiety and/or depression.

There is much talked about in treating anxiety and depression with psychedelics, and the thinking around the relationship between the two provides a good basis for understanding why it can work. Depression and anxiety are less understood than is commonly thought. As happens quite often, categories and labels need to be created for illnesses in order to communicate between medical professions, the patients and the wider public. This goes to a deeper point about language as symbolism which I won’t explore here. The point is that depression and anxiety aren’t necessarily very different from each other. One way which researchers have more accurately differentiated them is that depression is a regret or intense focus on the past, while anxiety is a regret or intense focus on the future.

The way I am formulating it, psychedelics’ function in the treatment of this mental illness is twofold.

One part of it is that it can provide a path for the user to see the world as being important only in the present. This is very much a Buddhist way of looking at things, and it is known that a highly experienced meditator in the process of meditation shares the reaction in the brain with that of someone experiencing a psychedelic trip. The part of the brain that is quieted in these two experiences is called the ‘Default Mode Network’ (DMN). This is seen as the capital city of the brain and while it is quieted, different parts of the brain that wouldn’t otherwise communicate are allowed to do so. The way I see it, this DMN is essentially the recording of the past and hence our conception of the future. In that way, it is the essence of our ego or our ‘self’. Temporarily quieting this part of the brain allows us to see a different way, perhaps bypassing the years of meditation that might otherwise be our only path to reaching this state of presence.

The second part is more connected to Johann Hari’s concept of depression being a lack of connection. If we are to provide the user with a fresh coat of snow upon which to create new habits, this also provides the opportunity to build better connections more easily. Of course, if the use of psychedelics is then combined with the building of still bad habits and negative connections, there will be no change. But if the psychedelic is used in a constructive way, it can provide an opportunity to build a completely different life to that which preceded the trip.

The ski mountain analogy, the concept of plasticity and the quietening of the DRM are really all different ways to explain the same idea. This goes to the suggestibility of people when taking psychedelics, and this is also the core of the risks associated with the drugs. Physically, in the case of psilocybin, there is no known lethal dose. The risks only come from the potential of a bad trip and from the stupid things that people might do while tripping. These risks can be mitigated very easily if done in the right way.

So, what have I come away with after researching psychedelics and how the mind works when we are taking them?

Children’s brains have not yet formed the long-term defined pathways that adults have. Therefore, they haven’t yet absorbed many of the imagined stories that adults have. They don’t have the same pathways so clearly defined in their minds. They are wholly in the moment because with no real past to consider, there is no real future to be projected. They have no choice but to be present. Meditation allows a long-term path for adults to maintain this presence. Psychedelics, when consumed correctly, can offer a shortcut to a path of maintaining this presence. That is, without giving up the control that the child never had.

Regardless, this area is one which is fascinating to me and I am certainly going to continue to research it.

better times are coming, but who will benefit?

Australia is going to have another boom. That much is fairly obvious and predictable. Having read the work of Ross Garnaut and having paid close attention to the machinations of the energy sector, this much becomes clear quite quickly. Last time, the boom was in our mining sector. This time, the boom will be in renewable energy and the industry that will be built around it. Whether or not this could, should or will happen is not the subject of this piece. Neither is the focus whether it will happen before the effects of climate change make the Earth wholly inhabitable. Instead, this piece is based on its inevitability over the next decades and whether we will learn from the mistakes of our first boom.

The mining boom, by all independent accounts, was wasted by the Australian government. There were skyrocketing revenues coming from the mining sector, and Australia had the chance to tax those revenues at a reasonable rate and do wonders with the taxes*. Instead, the Howard government chose to let the big, multinational businesses do their thing and not worry about taxing them too much. Even still, the revenues coming to the government from the increased revenues of the mining sector were substantial. With these taxes, rather than implementing programs which were good for the working class, Howard decided to reduce taxes on households. The effect was that people had more money in their pockets, which was nice. But they then spent this extra money on housing, causing house prices to rise.

This response to the mining boom was contrasted with Labor’s response when they finally got in office in 2007. Kevin Rudd came to office with a plan to tax the mining sector properly, and he paid for his Prime Ministership with it. Rudd’s plan was to set the rate at 40%, and this prompted a $22 million advertising campaign against him from the Minerals Council, not to mention the constant abuse from the Murdoch media. Along with some opportunism and power politics, he was eventually removed from office and Gillard’s replacement plan of a 30% tax on only a portion of the industry was significantly weaker. Regardless, the tax was scrapped soon after Abbott gained office in 2013 and we’ve not heard a whisper of a tax from the two Prime Ministers since then. What would Labor have done with these taxes? Perhaps fund the NBN, the NDIS, Close the Gap reforms, properly funded the CSIRO, improve our education so it’s a bit better than 39th out of 41 countries.

But Labor’s plans to tax the minerals sector properly is only one step in countries benefiting from their own resources. Norway’s method was to create a sovereign wealth fund. Back in the 1970s, Norway realised that they were at the beginning of an oil boom. For this reason, along with the fact that oil prices are known to be unstable, they established this fund in 1990. After 30 years, the fund is now worth over a trillion US dollars. The Norwegian government is allowed to take 3% of the value of the fund to spend each year if it needs to do so, which now equates to $US30 billion. In saying that, the first time they withdrew any money from the fund was in 2016 in reaction to a declining oil price and was used for public spending.

So, what can we learn from our own past mistakes and the different paths that other countries have taken? We have a golden opportunity with renewable energy to facilitate a new boom in Australia. In fact, it is likely going to occur anyway, regardless of whether the government takes any decisive action. Renewable energy provides an opportunity for, as Friendlyjordies puts it, “the first power grid in human history to be built without government subsidies”. The private sector knows this, as do forward-thinking Liberal MPs. NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean is on board with turning Australia into a renewable energy superpower. As is Labor MP Josh Burns. And it’s for this reason that distinguishing between the two major parties in this country is more important than ever.

As is evidenced by Prime Ministers going back to Whitlam and likely even earlier, the difference between Labor and Liberal is stark. The Liberals, as they have done before, will waste the boom and allow the profits to be sent offshore, into the Cayman Island accounts of the richest. Labor, as evidenced most recently by Rudd, will put their political careers on the line for the good of the nation.