Automatic Living, Otherness and Death by Gantt charts

There are only two ways a professional can kill themselves: one is with whisky and the other is with Gantt charts. If a life of automatic living doesn’t particularly appeal, you can take a lesson by ignoring a writer you’ve probably never read. Ignoring Aristotle might just be the best thing you ever do.

In contrast to Aristotle I don’t think we need unity to tell a meaningful story. In contrast my prescription would be the 3 ‘Others’ – the otherness of place, the otherness of action, and the otherness of people.

Every journey begins with a place. For all my movements, and the eternal missing of that smoke-filled hive I used to call home I’ve learned one thing – I need to take more holidays. I’m down in Brighton right now and for the first time in years I’ve been somewhere I don’t know, on my own. For the first time in years I haven’t spoken to another person in several days. Sometimes taking a holiday from other people is the healthiest thing you can do. Blaise Pascal put it best when he said “All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” Pascal knew speaking to oneself self is the first sign of sanity.

We make a very weird habit of associating consistency with integrity. The Gantt charts mentality puts us into a psychological prison – we normalise and repeat what we do and who we are - and become slaves of routine. Art as a reflection of otherness is useless to a Gantt mindset. Freedom of action and a discovery of the unknown can only be achieved with an otherness of action.

Finally there is the otherness of people. After twelve years of debate I can testify that my only enemies are people who agree with me.

My first ever Dolansphere post spawned from a disagreement with someone called Ian. Ian is homosexual, is exploited with zero hour contracts to the benefit of heartless capitalists and consistently votes Conservative. Ian is misguided, arrogant and will verbally bitch-slap me every damn chance he gets.

I wouldn’t have him any other way for two reasons: He reminds that otherness gives me a sense of who I am. In knowing who Ian is, he reminds me of whom and what I am not. Ian also reminds me (perhaps too much) that I am not always right about everything. If I could make one recommendation: having a shouty, self-important man convinced you are wrong about everything in your life will definitely make you wiser.

Much of the emphasis on being functional in todays society is based around adopting and strictly adhering to the most demanding routines. The Business “Go get-em” manuals may proclaim “Consistency is king” but personal development requires attention and involvement in a diverse world. Without a commitment to an otherness of place, action and people the only option is death. Death by Gantt charts.

Handing in my Passport to Marlboro Country

In the post-election come-down a crashing normality began to resume in my everyday life. Without endless stress, unworkable hours and the constant need to do something the days began to seem emptier, the weeks longer. I’ve not even been back a month yet it already feels like years. As is the form with such moments, I began to look over past work. I quickly realised there were very visible patterns emerging. An inability to sit still, an obsession for work and so, so many references to smoking.

It became obvious I had been choreographing much of my life around my addictions.

Nicotine is such a curious choice in the world meat market of amphetamines, barbiturates and opiates. Given our culture has never been more anaesthetized on the currency of factory grade dopamine and serotonin, it would seem to most people an unadventurous choice. Seem by some as poor return on investment or by the more cynical as just a habit of the undeserving poor. 

On all of these accusations I would take issue. As a long term user I would contend Nicotine is an extremely clever drug. It calms the nerves when you are under stress, wakes you up when you are tired, and helps you relax when you’re tightly wound up. It’s great with food, drink and alcohol and all other forms of biological satiation. Marlboro country is the perfect vacation whatever the weather.

I’ve never understood why I started smoking. Maybe it’s a desire not to be like my teetotal father whose life, as you expect of a farm-boy of Irish catholic descent, is hardly one of spirited intellectualism. Maybe it’s a need to be more like my mother who by my age was married, divorced and flirting with a London metropolitan Buddhism. She was quickly co-opted into a meditate-there, smoke-this, get-the-Ashram lifestyle. She, of course, promptly found herself living in a temple in India. In case you were wondering - the marriage didn’t work out.

Whilst making a mental list of what, who and when to assign blame I had a more troubling thought. If these biological drivers which seem to encompass many of my compulsive needs and behaviors were melted away would there be much of me left? Isn’t that exactly what a hopeless addict would say? Of one thing I am sure – addiction will cut my life short. I am at peace with that.

Three Weeks have passed since I had written the previous two statements. No. I am not at peace with that at all. As I now write  this I am six days over my smoking addiction. Besides the aforementioned troubling me for sometime after I saw it written front of me, I woke up in my London Townhouse after a late night conversations over Johnny Walker and feeling shit. But not the kind of hangover shit I am far too accustomed. It was the kind of toxicity that makes it hard to get out of bed and face the world. Its when you begin realise your health is not an infinite resource. It was the kind of morning where you realise you may not be dying but you are definitely killing yourself. 

There’s a lot they don’t tell you about giving up smoking. I decided to read up on the road ahead. These sources concentrate on the good and great of ‘kicking the habit’. I can see the therapeutic websites have s poor understanding of their  target audience. I didn’t want the positive pep-talk - I wanted to know what Lovecraftian horrors lay beyond. As soon as I read ‘the worst of it will be over in two days’ I knew it was time to put on a crash helmet and pack my anti-depressants. So began the 48 hour jog across no mans land.

Among the side affects they don’t tell you about are – your veins will start hurting (this is apparently normal, as your blood pressure lowers suddenly) that your piss will smell like an ashtray, you will have night sweats and the accompanying night terrors (something to do with nicotine receptors dying in the brain) and before the increase of appetite you will feel so sick you won’t eat for 24 hours. This of course is on top of the ‘normal’ anger/depression emotions, the inability to concentrate and the tragically trudging country miles in order to find a shop that doesn’t have cigarettes behind the counter.

So addiction or at least the person willing to die to satisfy an addiction has been purged from my soul for now. The dance with addiction is anything but over – I sit here drinking some of the finest coffee money can buy, fresh from another evening chat with Johnny. But I do feel a little cleaner, a little happier and little bit more in charge of my own destiny. 

Addictions can still be good friends. They convinced me they are worth dying for. As with anything that good you’d be mad not try it. Make sure you give up some along the way. Because saying fuck you to Marlboro Country feels pretty good too.

Because I'd rather be ashes than dust. On work, elections and the power of values

The pleasures and sorrows of work have taken me on some notable adventures in the past year. I’ve schmoozed at Westminster receptions, dined with MPs and taken pictures as rioters took it upon themselves to destroy the streets of Tottenham. If anything typifies the existence of a political intern it’s faux glamour – worrying, on a fairly regular basis, if you have enough money on your card to get the bus home as you desperately try to get a room full of millionaires to remember your name.

Interning is now behind me and the self-imposed poverty that overshadowed that chapter of my life is now fading. The glitz is also fast disappearing – as I write this I am in an office at 10.30pm for the fifth time this week, I stink of cigarettes and the smell of takeaway hangs thickly in the air. I sit in silence with my fellow party apparatchiks - two glassy eyed men, tired, unwashed and kept half insane by the constant humming of the machines day in, day out.

Work, for now, consumes everything - and I’ve never been happier.

Selling one’s values to a largely disinterested electorate is both draining and disheartening. A personal intellectual commitment to a world view is met by a loud, discontented almost donkey-like sigh. They squawk “They’re all the same!” from a seat of moral authority exclusively reserved for those without the belief or desire to change anything. This unfortunately is an accusation almost entirely vindicated as all three main parties try sticking their variety of coloured flags in the Holyland of British Politics – the centre ground.

This wall of inactivity and disinterest is perhaps the biggest hurdle for everyone on the campaign trail. When apathy is king the creeping viziers behind the throne have to put in 100 hour weeks to cajole even the most miniscule percentage of people to remember that we have elected representatives worth voting for.

As the reality of 16 hour days set in and spouses get ignored, friends get forgotten and the outside world becomes a misty half remembered before-time, the human cost quickly becomes apparent. People cope with this isolation in a variety of ways. Me and another immediately went for the easy option - anxiety and depression. Some went with flat-out anger. Others simply regressed into various levels of delusion and paranoia.

An ironic bi-product of Parliamentary democracy seems to be the time when people are least connected with the world around them is during an election.

Elections are a deeply emotional business and even an emotarded android from the overly repressed Anglesphere isn’t immune to its effects. Certainty of winning and losing flipped so rapidly in the last days I failed to remember where we even were on this issue by polling day. The mood in the committee room changed almost by the hour. It was like being stuck at a party in the Hotel California where everybody suffers from severe bi-polar manic behaviors.

The power of values brings a special kind of unity to those under its spell. I have no doubt that despite the collective madness elections imposes on its victims I have made some friends that will last me for years to come. The bond that is formed when people come together to inflict imposed collective misery upon themselves for an objective greater than themselves is a far less common experience than you might think.

This is when the values you hold become something you can take pride in – because you worked hard to make them a reality.

I’ve been asked to draft a report on what I learned in Portsmouth. My unofficial take on this is as such -

In an age defined by its political apathy burning the candle at both ends becomes an election neccessity. Luckily for me, I'd rather be ashes than dust.

The tutti-frutti loins of Skeletor. On rhetoric, language and the digital landscape

Many, many moons ago when I first decided to take up the virtual pen I decided to blog about my first love - language. Linguistics is and will always be interesting because it is an extension of our identity. All emotions have a tone, every region a lilt, every single syllable indicates education, background, temperament and age. Being shot in the face with that much information just transports me to nerd heaven. The argument that followed was if language is going to be part of your identity you might as well have fun with it - break rules, be inappropriate and talk incongruously about the tutti-frutti loins of Skeletor. Convention is for conservatives and the aged. My frutti-loins are for everyone else. My initial endeavor didn't cover one aspect of the language landscape - we are changing the way we communicate. Since leaving London I have migrated onto Skype as much as possible simply because I find Facebook chat such an abysmal way to relate to other human beings. It's not so much conversation as it is reducing the rich tapestry of my soul to binary code then asking a data analyst to explain it using pie-charts. Telling jokes on messenger feels like self harming at the farmers market for the amount it amuses people. I am now fairly certain Facebook chat has lost me friends. As far as social media goes, that's pretty fucked up. If you are going to commit violent linguaphilia you should probably learn from the best: I personally recommend Cicero. The Roman PR maestro had 3 elements for a good speech: logos, pathos and ethos. Logos (logic) is the basic need for language to make sense. This is important but most communication isn't just about transferring information. We need to give information meaning, depth and personality. If language is part of a person then personality is an essential part of language. This includes all their gripes, needs, emotions and wobbly bits. Strip out the personality in language and we're just left with dead symbols - this invokes the vacant eyed take-me-on-a-cyanide-binge conversations that are getting fast becoming the norm on this text-based, no-frills, Tesco-value online conversation culture. That's where the rhetoric of ethos (character) and pathos (emotion) come in. When we talk to people, in the usual oral tradition, we express ourselves (our ethos) and try to make people laugh or empathise with us (our pathos). It's so natural it's only ever noticeable by its absence. Those conversations we loathe with THAT weird guy probably just lack ethos and pathos. If it feels like you’re talking to a walking excel spreadsheet he's probably just a pathophobe. He may also be a Quantum Leap fan. Or find Katie Melua moving. Maybe all three. Humans tend to do well at loving other humans. Similarly language must have human characteristics for us to love. Language needs humanity as much as humanity needs language. Without it we become as sterile as the black mirrors we type on. As social learning is little more than visual theft therefore the habits of the cybernetic age are beginning to dilute our pleasure of language. Whether it be t3xting, 3/\/\/-\1l or ROFL @ FB convo's - in the cybernetic landscape convenience is king. I may be a language libertarian but my frutti-loins still have standards. It’s just a little hard to see the logos sometimes. I’ve come a long way in three years but the message remains the same - value the pleasure and beauty of language. With one added sci-fi proviso: Don’t let the machines take your humanity.

On deprivation, natural law and the full-time forgotten of Occupy LSX

So after a terrible night's sleep that probably comes naturally from spending 8 hours in sub-zero windchill conditions I've discovered that cigerettes, tea and friendship doesn't cure mild hypothermia. Biblical prose relates a stark truth of modern life “The poor will always be with us” as child poverty rises, real incomes shrink and unemployment hits unprecedented highs such sentiments have never been truer. Today's autumn budget policy bombardment was a skilfully executed media exercise to hide the central plank of the news today- The situation going to get worse, much worse.

Yesterday I was having one of my off days emotionally, as anyone knows who has filled in a job applications ad verbatim a hundred times, it teaches you that insincerity is bad for the soul. I noticed Occupy LSX had a lecture on moral determinism and therein a vaccine for my soul sickness. The lecture itself was pretty flawed, but if there's one thing that typifies Occupy it's variation. Ages, motivations, backgrounds, blue collar, white collar and no collar are all here. So, in such disorder I did what came naturally. I socialised.

A chronic smoker and an avid chess player I made friends more easily than most, with the general plan to find people who have, since day one, have lived there. The media elusive "full-timers" of occupy. So began three friendships- The thief, the addict and the veteran. Divided in age and circumstance but united by the ugliest of human experiences - deprivation. All their stories of largely self-inflicted misery certainly won't light up the sympathy circuits of everyone but they were all, in a very Christian tradition, penitent figures.

They didn't blame corporations, or the government for where they were but accepted their personal part in the destiny they've realised. Why then, I asked them, did they decide to come to the camp in the first place? The answer was uniform and so blindingly obvious. They had no where else to go.

These individuals make a up significant majority of occupy's “full-timers”. They have no life to leave and compared to their usual grind of hostels, squats and streets occupy is a paradise for them.

So we played chess, drank tea, had dinner, went to lectures, watched movies and even read together. Then my eyes almost rattled out of my skull in disbelief. I was actually having fun. The paradise wasn't relative, it was real.

My interest in politics is guided by the simplest of principals- to reduce the physical and emotional deprivations that characterise human misery. At Occupy LSX the hungry get fed, the cold get clothed, the ignorant get access to education. Everyone gets a place to stay if they need it and most of all they get an accepting community to be part of. The great deprivations that were an everyday reality for the occupy full-timers have, at least for a time, been alleviated.

The sniping of the lack of aims, focus and strategy for the movement are insignificant criticisms when you realise at the heart of what they do is feed, clothe and educate the homeless. There are of course the political posers, the career campaigners and the various hangers-on civil disobedience tends to attract to its fold. They aren't the real beneficiaries of occupy. The full-timers are.

The people of occupy are dug in deeply already. Their microcosm of society is one few among them would like to relinquish. This means the crack down next year likely to be before the Olympics, will be swift, ruthless and brutal.

The reality of this means the full-timers who made their home here will go back to their squats, shelters and streets and resume their lives of criminality, addiction and loneliness. Among them will be people who steal food to eat, wear clothes until they fall off and whose destitution will become absolute.

The feeding of misery is contrary to the natural law of humanity. This will be an inevitable consequence of the eviction at St Pauls. I cannot support it.

To those who occupy and feed, clothe and shelter London's full-time forgotten will continue to have my support, respect and empathy. To those who denigrate the movement for political reasons I say this- suffering is bigger than left and right. Occupiers are, at this very moment, trying to address that.

Political consensus is cheap and humanity is golden - Try above all else to value its contributors.

Suffering a poverty of means, morality, and aspiration. A manifesto for a divided Britain

Following the worst nights of civil disorder seen in my lifetime I expected some big questions to be asked during the recall of Parliament. Something is clearly beyond damaged in our national psyche when chaos descends, not because of any one cause or factor, but the simple collective realisation that you can get away with it. Destroying your community for personal gain has, and always will be, morally bankrupt. Big questions on the state of the means, morality and aspiration and the lack thereof in Britain's young working class I thought would be the central theme of the debate in Parliament on Thursday.

Unfortunately what I heard was almost the complete denial of any problem. They were labelled 'opportunistic' 'Greedy' and 'mindless'. This sort of language is simply used to vindicate the political classes of any responsibility. These individuals may have been all of the above but these are learned behaviours from a society that successive governments have helped to create. It's time they owned up and it's time they took real and lasting action on social stagnation.

We live in a divided Britain. While I think we do a good job in providing great access to the means of social mobility, we keep the classes so vehemently separate it's no wonder they begin to demonise each other. I have always believed that it's a working class pragmatism and humility mixed with an upper class education, motivation and ambition that produces the kind of people that change our world. Yet we're all so scared of each other this paradigm is almost impossible to achieve in our society.

I say this needs to end now.

So in the spirit of blue-sky thinking that such endemic social problems demand, here are some of the ideas the government needs to issue to end the plague of seperateness, the denial of access to centres of excellence and the realisation our ideas of a punitive justice system does not recognise the value, and indeed the need for, the inclusion of the community it affects.

Private Schools: Centres for the rich and famous to keep their children away from the working classes. They provide a wonderful service to the tax payer by having parents who essentially 'pay twice' for their childrens education. They also enjoy tax-free status due to the special value they give to the community. I say they keep this- but only if each and every school that claims charitable status accepts 20% of their students to those with entitlement to free schools meals at no cost. Schools either become businesses and contribute in tax to the education of others, or become charities that make a difference and cease to exist in the current state where they do neither.

Bring back EMA but reform it: No free money for kids but give them everything they need to have a meaningful college experience. Free School meals, Free travel to college and book vouchers to cover the cost of any materials they need for their courses. Those who can pay do, those who can't get support they need. It means not a tax payer cent is ever spent on cigarettes, but college no longer becomes a financial burden on those who cannot afford it. Education should be for the capable- not the rich or the financially needy and policy should finally reflect this.

Restorative justice: One of the most depressing things to emerge post riot is the first e-petition to make it to the 100,000 mark was to revoke the benefits of the rioters. I won't go into the legal nightmare of a mum being made homeless because her thirteen year old son bricked a Dixons but what I will say is that our justice system needs to A) involve the community it affects and B) Rehabilitate those who believe their community is so worthless that it is worthy of destruction. You destroy a shop? You help rebuild it. You steal its stock? You help make it profitable again. You threaten them with violence? You become an assistant to a police officer and help prevent violence in the future. Justice has to be more than punitive- it has to show how everyone benefits from a society of tolerance, freedom and order. It also needs to show how people working together create a meaningful direction for the whole of the community. Inevitably people outside of this are the very people who turn on it in times of crisis.

National Citizen scheme: National service lite essentially. Potentially a great scheme for social mixing but A) it's only 6 weeks long and B) it's not compulsory. Many peoples first 'defining experience' is that of being away from home. Combine that with something that educates someone in the value of community service, gives them skills they can use, and bonds them with people of all backgrounds you create a platform that unifies people and gives all classes a degree of common experience. This would be at least be a nine month scheme that ends the endemic social separateness that affects people of all classes.

Role Models: Unfortunately there is no one policy that can fix this. We need a greater celebration among the wider world of those figureheads that foster peace, tolerance, innovation and imagination. I went through history class without ever being taught about Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela or Mother Theresa. People like Richard Branson, Alan Sugar or Mark Zuckerberg never have their story told about how their one idea changed the world in business studies. Education should be about helping people to have a degree of self-actualisation that helps them realise that success doesn't come from an accident of birth but an understanding that as long as you're passionate about something you can lead by example and become the kind of person people talk about for decades.

This is not about wealth. It is about values, it is about creativity and a non-linear view of what success is. Part of the problem is too many people view wealth as a statement of success- People need to view social value in new and more complex ways and providing more role models in our education system is a great way to encourage people to think differently on the idea of what 'success' is.

You may argue that these ideas won't work, you may even argue that these ideas are crazy. You may believe that there is more that we the people, and the government can do. If so 'share' this article and contribute to the debate- Because the silence of our politicians is nothing short of jarring.

Why you must kill critics, attempt to fail and paint the world.

If there’s one thing that confuses me it’s how standardised the world has become. If this blog has any personal value it’s myself trying vainly to produce something that makes me distinctive. Graduates have to produce a thesis- a piece of work that is entirely theirs. It’s a right of passage, you’ve gone from being a consumer to producer. It’s seems like an apt finishing note that education has changed how you approach learning.

How we learn is probably the most important facet of being human. Learning made us the most powerful species on the planet because we do it best. Bizarrely in a world of increasing non-linearity how we learn has remained remarkably uniform. Sure we have the internet now, libraries are everywhere but everyone will read books, do exams and pass or fail.

Learning for me comes in two forms- understanding and experiencing. Universities do well on the understanding ‘didactic’ style learning but really fail on the experiential side, which really undermines the idea of being ‘learned’. Instructional or observational learning is only part of the story and for this humanities tend to have the greatest missed opportunities in experiential learning. John Dewey an American philospher and education reformer suggested the uniformity in education weeded out the originality and the individual nature of intellectual development it was suppose to create.

“Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. "

Say for instance, you observe a relationship between two people through a one-way looking glass. You might understand how a relationship operates; you may even begin to work out behaviours that foster good or bad relationships. You will never understand the emotional value of pursuing that relationship precisely because it’s not something you learn as an observer it’s something you feel as a participant. Experiencing is a fascinating aspect of knowledge because it is teaching you the unteachable, it filters through a personal and unique biological and psychological system to create an indefinable essence of knowing not just how but why, when and if through the prism of individual expectation and involvement.

This car crash realisation happened to me just over a year ago. I had just started work in a laboratory on my graduate thesis. I had known what science had involved before then but one thing that had never occurred to me is how lonely that job makes you. I had lots friends, a girlfriend, an active hobby in debating but from 9-5 I was occupying an otherwise empty space. Maths, measuring and materials became my only friends for the majority of my time. The sterility of my environment had become a metaphor for my working life.

By the end of the three months I had nearly lost my mind. I had every expectation of what science would involve but not how it would affect me.

Now I realise that science is not one of the careers that hardly markets itself for the socially marvellous, but one thing I learned is that I’m not mentally wired for a job that requires a lot of isolation. This was a psychological filibuster that effectively ended my career in science before it even begun. The kick in the teeth was that it took my entire university career before I could experience this.

Now I look at my CV and see that my degree takes up less space than my address and that alone suggests to me that education in this country isn’t working. Most of the people who talk of the formative experiences of education simply don’t talk about essays, tutorials or deadlines. They talk about time they wrote for the newspaper, went travelling with the debater or ran for student president. They were experiences that I created, chose and most importantly participated in.

It's easy to sideline experential learning when the environment becomes all about grades. Those who decide to do little but study at university probably degrade their employability and intellectual development for two core reasons- they become risk averse and lack initiative. Risk adverse behaviour is exactly what you would expect in an environment where you are forced into an observational role in education. The observer is set apart from those that create knowledge.

I've known many English literature graduates during my student travels all of which that can recite some of the most beautiful poetry I have ever known. Few, if in fact any, have even attempted to write poetry of their own. Whilst continually forced to be an observer and asked to critique the work of others over time it pushes them further and further away from participating in the very work they are celebrating. A builder can only be called a builder if he builds things. The first attempt might be somewhat crude but at least he can call himself a builder. At university everybody becomes what any builder hates. They become critics.

Being in an environment full of critics can kill the artist within many people. This is because critics, especially inexperienced ones, will almost always judge their peers (or in many cases their competition) very harshly. The first mistake the inexperienced critic makes is judging people by impossibly high standards, the second is attempting to make themselves feel good about doing so. The third mistake is assuming that people want to here about their tastes rather than their opinions. The final and most maddening of all is oft-committed crime of attempting to prove how knowledgeable they are instead of helping the reader or the artist appreciate or develop the piece. Thus we must kill the critic without trial. Creative genocide is the ugliest crime of them all.

Luckily for the critic there is a cure for this sickness- attempting to fail. The experience of attempting to produce any work of merit weather it be a poem, a book or an article teaches us something that didactic learning never could- that originality is hard, motivation is inconsistent and that writing about yourself makes you vulnerable and scared. Most critics never come from this point of view precisely because they are armchair generals in this regard. Viewing the tactical moves without the human reality of the experiences involved, and therefore ill-informed to make judgements on that which they do not know.

It seems that, at least formally, we are only taught one type of learning our entire lives. I think experiential learning needs to become a bigger facet of all our lives, precisely because requires us to be participant in what we love observing and that transition teaches us things we could never otherwise know about our discipline and our very personal relationship with it.

I say get out of the armchair and head for the front line and start experiencing what you learn, appreciate and love. Don’t be educated to be a critic, be educated about yourself. Maybe then you’ll paint the world. Maybe then I won’t kill you.

Getting lost in the violence

I recently read an interesting article written by a friend of mine titled 'Don't ignore the violence it's all we have left' supporting the recent protests against austerity cuts. It argued that the violence that ensued shouldn't be written off as the actions of a few renegade students trying to grab the headlines, but as a group willing to resort to violence to stand up against perceived injustices.

While much of the debate around the fairness of the fees increase or the recent finance settlement for local government is a road well travelled in the media, I think a simpler question could be asked- Should political activism include violence?

There is a part of me that thinks violence should be a tool we can use to defend that which we value, although at the time I felt it wasn't doing a very good job of defending anything. Defacing the cenotaph maybe a great way to get on the front of the Daily Mail but it's hardly a way to endear the electorate to your cause- even if that cause involved protecting the Care-Bears from Mumm-ra's Doomsday cannon.

I think understanding what constitutes an effective symbolic gesture is something the left lacks, and if they are to succeed they must understand that media attention and media sympathy exist in very different ballparks. I think if everyone in receipt of the EMA spent one pound and sent a letter to the treasury saying “How much does your independence cost?” I think the 2 million letters arriving at the treasury would hardly slide past the 24 hour media. It would show a unified voice of protest without tainting it with violence.

Along with making effective symbolic gestures, it also pays to realise what your political objectives are. They are not destroying Conservative HQ and not burning effigies of Nick Clegg, It's to get the current government out and make Labour look like a reasonable alternative.

Shooting the government down now is incredibly easy- Osbornomics is a widely perceived economic gamble, which is ironic because reckless fiscal gambling contributed to the mess we're in. Not to mention the axing of the arts council and regional development funds which actually raised government revenue not depleted it. Doesn't being a good Conservative involve knowing what to Conserve?

The list could go on- Cameron's aides involved in illegal journalism, Lord Young saying 'we've never had it so good' Grayling's defence of homophobic motel owners (rewarded with a ministerial post no less). When Brown made similar mistakes the media barked on for months over lost gold reserves, bottling elections and 'that bigoted woman'.

The fact remains if you want the current government out you don't shotgun the libdems, you target the Cons and the amount of ammunition they've provided over the last nine months far outweighs that of Clegg's reneged pledge. It's also worth spelling out that many of the Lib-dem seats that will be lost at the next election will probably move into conservative hands.

This lack of vision in hijacking the media against Liberals only undermines the lefts political agenda, and yet they blithely go along with it. Understanding that activism involves picking effective political targets and not making crass ideological statements is another lesson that needs to be learned by Britain's austerity left.

Finally the political statement made by flying the red flags, placards with Iron Fists and attacking the royal family suggests the modern-day left idolises the revolution embodied by political violence. This can only bring associations of the current and past regimes of Communism, which I think uncontroversially can be called the 20th century's biggest failed social experiment. Millions left to rot in Gulags, Freedoms trampled worldwide, Continents enslaved whilst protecting an immovable oligarchy of complete moral bankruptcy is hardly a historical legacy worth holding onto.

Remove your association with Communism immediately- it's unnecessary, extreme, immature and associates your movement with one of the darkest chapters in modern political history. The good news is that Social Democracy is a far nobler ideology encompassing a respect for individuals, a faith in democracy and defined role for the government dictated by and for the people.

Idealising the roots from which a movement came might sound nice but ask your media team if it's good idea to associate your product with Communism and I think they'll politely ask you to check into the local re-education centre.

The lessons for the left must firstly be violence grabs headlines but not sympathy, violence only creates fear and disaffection with those who don't understand your message. Effective symbolic messages require thoughtfulness and media accessibility -do something different- don't just resort to violence and do something they don't expect, remember Gandhi brought down a government by not fighting back.

Secondly the Conservatives record in government has involved the usual fuck-ups and reversal of positions of any parliament and concentrating fire on the Lib-Dems will help you lose the next election not win it. If you want to attack the Cons now is the time to do it- Cameron’s lost a powerful media ally and his spin team is currently without leadership. Give him all the mercy they Gave Brown- None.

Lastly remember kids, put the Lenin T-shirts and motorcycle diaries aside- Communism isn't cool.

Lets stop asking questions and start telling stories.

One reason I think I'll remember this Christmas for a long time, is that this year I learnt that everyone has a story to tell. In a room of people aged between 20-78 I simply asked someone tell me a story, and people were falling over themselves to tell me their story. Polish, Jewish, Irish, English gathered to tell me tales across four continents. My world became bigger and better with every one.

Perhaps one of my biggest post-graduation problems is escaping mundanity. Life is just so full of bus rides, tube journeys, queueing and stock-question, stock-answer scenarios. Lots of sterile conversation, lack of eye contact and faux sincerity. Can be quite maddening when you notice it everywhere.

My lack of updates has been in part to my new job, I too have aspired to the dizzying height of unpaid desk drone complete with personalised email version 2.0. Unfortunately the most terrible and repetitive conversation many of you will have post-graduation is 'What do you do?' I seem to remember when social status came from a delicate distillation of guesswork of intellectual capacity, relative confidence and interests. Personally I'd prefer 'Shaughan, just tell me a story'

It almost feels like people can't even be bothered any more, I expect the American approach to be next- 'Sorry buster, too busy to ascertain your relative personal wealth could you just write down your numerical value on a piece of paper please?' . Perhaps the deeper tragedy is when they find my actual market net worth currently resides at £0 PA. The come hither eyes rarely work after that bombshell.

It was nice to see Christine recently, we both banned the topic of 'career development' an as such talked about the correct use of punctuation. I hadn't laughed about grammar in a long time, and to many of you probably sounds like the conversational version of hell, but for me the hyphens of hope spelled an end to mundane, samey conversation I'd gotten used to. It was different, unique and a conversation I'd probably never have with someone else.

It held value because it was both personal and rare, a celebration of our nerdy interest in language and formed a connection between us in a marvellously comic framework. It struck me at that moment she is very good at telling stories. Has anyone ever told you story about a hyphen that made you laugh? All about how you tell it. Told you she was good.

This experience reminded me of the value of telling stories, since then I've been a small mission of mine to start telling a few stock tales. It's a pleasant reminder for me that life isn't always mundane. Sit me down and ask me and I can recall the time I was almost killed by the Bulgarian Mafia, my interesting experience at my first and last Students Association dinner and the time I accidentally looted a listed building. Those are just the ones that made it's past Dolansphere's PR team.

The best part is these are self-contained little epics is that each one contains elements of comedy, tragedy and the overcoming of the absurd and extraordinary. I've found them great with connecting with people, because it ends our association to the familiar. Because it presents something about us both funny and vulnerable. Gives an insight into often bizarre events that have shaped me.

Now being a 21st century male a sizable amount of my life is to do about escapism. Books, Movies, TV, Radio, the internet, Video games and alcohol keep me suitably removed from the world around me for most of my spare time. Probably because these media are all very good at telling stories, maybe we feel we don't have to any more.

In an age overloaded with information we need to hang onto that which is personal, and our stories are little pieces of our identity. If we forget them we forget part of ourselves.

Lets stop asking questions and start telling stories. Maybe then we'll get some meaningful answers.

On closure, moral dilemmas and breaking my design.

I once wrote in this blog that 'self reflection needn't be the bastard child of tragedy' and I hope over the last year I've given you some indication that reflection on morbidity is often a barrier to a life worth living. However if you'll let me indulge in a little artistic hypocrisy for one blog post I hope that I can explore my most recent experiences with you in some depth.

If there's one thing I despise it's lazy storytelling. There has to be part of the writer that dies when they finish a new Hollywood script in which the ending where every plot thread is resolved and every moral crisis the protagonists faces is dealt with. Life doesn't happen that way, there is never one complete resolution to everything.

A great example of this is Virginia Woolfe's Mrs Clarissa Dalloway of which much of the book is spent reflecting on the big choices she made in her life as she prepares for an evening party. As she is reminded of all the choices she never made in marriage and sexuality and she is driven mad by the life that never was. Clarissa begins to admire the courage of an acquaintance Sepitmus who is a shell shocked war Veteran who commits suicide to escape forced incarceration at mental hospital. Clarissa as begins to sympathise with Septimus she fields herself question after question on the choices she never made. Eventually she's reasons that her personal captivity, as a Victorian housewife, is much like the one Septimus killed himself to avoid. She herself considers suicide but partly through a mixture of cowardice and self deception decides to return to her party. Nothing is resolved, because most of life never is. It's what makes the narrative real for me.

The best stories never seek closure because it's not a part of life we ever learn from. Experiences of importance should remain with us forever however they make us feel. Years later they can create distinct emotional responses in ourselves. If closure were to numb the recollection of our most intense moments it would be poisonous to who we are.

The story of our lives won't be remembered in the regular day to day lives, but in the terrible moral dilemmas we make. We can't take them back, we can't even rationalise them because sometime there are no right answers. There are permanent decisions we make in our lives that make us ache. The real tragedy is these experience erode in poignancy over time .

The reason these stories resonate with me is because my brother died at the age of 18 and I was last member of my family to ever see him alive. I knew something was wrong, on reflection I probably knew he was leaving. I never tried to stop him, I made pleasant conversation. I went to school on time. I didn't want to be late. Even as a small, stupid child afterwards I felt heaped with that responsibility I never wanted. I could have understood him better. I could have asked him to stay. Things could have been different.

For years I wanted closure, I wanted some epiphany to happen that meant either I didn't have to take responsibility or that I wouldn't care any more. It never came, but as I grew older, met others and read more, I understood that there is a part of life would always have some unresolved finality to it. How we feel about a person remains remarkably constant. A terribly human trait is that it is often easy to get attached but so very hard to let go.

Our personal war of instinct vs reason is one where we see past our present needs in order to see the benefits of a future concept. As we've evolved as creatures of immediacy, I suspect that's why we're emotionally punished for being creatures of the long term. I think it is this facet of human nature that predisposes us towards wanting closure. Sometimes you have to wonder why we've evolved to be creature with such a questionable emotional memory. I think the simple answer is that it's just easier that way.

Science produces some pretty depressing data on this- There are some studies that suggest the amygdala, a hemisphere in the brain that stores emotional memory, is gradually suppressed over time, long before degradation. Evolutionists have postulated it's pre-programmed restriction on our ability to recall strong emotions to prevent constant, vivid emotional recollection. It seems nature has decided that total recall of our entire emotional history is more than we can take.

When we are asked to take the long view of relationships, I hate the idea that feelings or the emotional impact of our experiences somehow ebbs away over time. It seems impossible to hold onto the concept of a coherent self, if what was important to us seems to decline over time. Not through any realisation, or change in outlook, just a result of the inability to recall accurately the emotions involved.

I think one of the best virtues of human evolution is that part of the process involves breaking the previous design. Because we even have memories suggests there are advantages of going beyond being creatures of the now, even if we still have a huge evolutionary hangover involving the immediate demands of instincts or the suppression of long term memory. I think as our consciousness evolves this bizarre need for closure will eventually fade away. We will continue to 'break the design' all over again.

As we all struggle to come to terms with closure, I'd like to suggest that maybe closure isn't healthy or necessary to move on with our lives. It's simply a biological and psychological mechanism to make our lives easier. I think if are to take the time to explore ourselves, breaking this behaviour is part of that process.

This denial of self and the forgetful nature of emotional experience doesn't require closure, it requires an acceptance of what I value. Maybe experience is a dish served raw. I hope I never forget that.

Getting high on isolation. On self, society and solitude.

As I suspected three months in and the smell of the dole queue is starting to get to me. Sure I've worked temp and I've been to three interviews now (I was recently told nine is allegedly the magic number) and some days I just get tired. Tired of making phone calls and tired of attempting to sell myself to people I've never met, for jobs I don't fully understand. The terrible thing about the modern age is the level of insincerity required to get through each working day.

But I am still enjoying myself regardless, moving back to London is definitely a positive step, something about the pace of this place is good for a young person and the monuments around every corner are a nice reminder that anything is still possible.

I've noticed since returning to London that time alone, peace and solitude are more precious probably because they are more finite resources here in the capital. I've noticed several times that cancelling because you want time alone people always assume the worst. I must be depressed or exhausted or I must have some deep emotional trouble. It seems in the war of People Vs NonPeople if you reside in the NonPeople camp you must be fit for the asylum.

Weirdly these are often the times I'm happiest. Most of classical psychology would string me up as a fully fledged crazee. It is widely believed that man is a social being, that interpersonal relationships are the main, if not only source of human happiness. When did we become so afraid of being alone?

As habit dictates I investigated such behaviours and unsurprisingly much of it condemned this choice, until I stumbled across a paper published in 1958 entitled 'The capacity to be alone' by Donald Winnicot who seemed to argue there are healthy aspects to solitude.

“It is probably true to say that in psycho-analytical literature more has been written on the fear or the wish to be alone than on the ability to be alone... Its seems to me that a discussion on the positive aspects of the capacity to be alone is long overdue.”

It seems to me that Solitude is important for at least two reasons. Firstly time alone allows us to develop as individuals, personally. Much of my reading has declared that other persons are dangerous to individualism, and developing false personalities on the basis of reacting, and being subject to, constant external stimuli is probably societies most commonly accepted form of insanity.

Secondly it allows to us to imagine. Remember when we did that all the time? It's funny that something deemed essential for the healthy development of our children is something adults either hardly do, or at least never talk about. Creative spark doesn't come from concentrating so hard something appears, it comes from having the time and the peace to imagine the form of things we wish to create.

For this laptop to exist someone had to imagine it. Reality is simply the affirmation of collective imagination married with physical possibility. I think we need to give ourselves more time to be alone, to imagine and to know ourselves.

Solitude is perhaps the only access we have with individualism, certainly many case studies have revealed that group mentality allows our social image or 'ego' to override the conscious choices the self or 'Id' may have made. Bruno Buttlehiem made this observation with Israeli teenagers forced to conform to a set of group values. Immediately even outside the value remit, as social conscious grows, the individual (and therefore the artist) diminishes.

I think this struggle with our social-ego produces bigger damage than we realise. At the group level it begin to threaten our own needs and desires. Beyond that I am unsure how anyone shares themselves with somebody else when we don't give ourselves enough time to develop a solid sense of self. Being defined, even partially by someone else is a fallacy. We can't be someone we are not.

Post-modernists may try to view us as social constructions, but when we are alone we have to be the ones to make the decisions for ourselves of what we think about, what we dream about and what we decide to care about. It's the only time we become pro-active people rather than simply reactive individuals.

I'm well aware isolation is not always a healthy drug. Certainly excessive use can result in nihilism, the inability to form any relationships or just fear of other people. I think solitude need to be approached in much the same way our relationship with alcohol is. It must be used occasionally and with mild dosage to enhance experience and not deny it.

I suspect this might be harder than it sounds as we seem to have become great 'information addicts'. It is hard for people to not be doing something sometimes anything to avoid doing nothing. I would appreciate a more constructive approach to down time. One that reminds us exploration of self is valuable commodity in a time where, much of who we are is defined by what other people expect.

Anyway in an act of sheer hypocrisy, I've been feeling myself getting a little lonely of late. So I think struggling against a blank screen maybe off the menu for a few a days. Such is the form I would like to end on a quote-

"Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind"

Without imagination reality becomes static, without individualism society becomes sterile and without solitude and a sense of self none of these things are possible.

Tragedy and why we need it and the moral problems with new liberalism

Two Months in we are beginning to see the first flashlights of the coalitions agenda, it seems we are seeing the scaling back of the Public Sector and a bigger emphasis on us participating in our politics. Weather it be becoming part of the 'Big society' or forming a 'free school' or simply participating in http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/ in suggesting how the government may legislate better in the future. Certainly the angle is to increase social welfare by having the government do less and people do more to shape social welfare in way that they choose.

The angle is to create a more liberal ideal. That seems a natural shift from the Blairite years of nouveaux socialism.

Social engineering on government scale has largely been unsuccessful, particularly in the UK. It is worth noting that even in the boom years, the introduction of the minimum wage and increased access to working tax credits had only one outcome- the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. New Labour was a momentous failure. Increases in social services was funded by debt and was unsustainable, bureaucracies found themselves paid more with less to do and by the end they were approving projects with no fiscal backing to make the incoming government look bad when they cancelled them. By the end it degenerated into school yard politics. You spend too much. You don't spend enough. We've all heard it.

One thing I will gift New Labour with is idealism and a sense of moral purpose (illegal wars aside). As badly managed as it was they made a genuine attempt at making things better. Now I think the new government can't even be bothered incorporating a morality into itself at all. The moral basis for their social policy seems to be an emphasis on Liberalism and the freedom to choose. Liberalism sounded sexy to me at first- the losers lose, the winners win, free markets creating capital unhindered and a world where expression and opportunity are truly free. Hayek believes that these principals to be inseparable-

“Neither good intentions nor efficiency of organization can preserve decency in a system in which personal freedom and individual responsibility are destroyed.”

Unfortunately Hayek didn't graduate into recession caused by high rolling Gamblers. Free trade certainly pissed on my freedom. Individual responsibility meant 6 figure severance packages. Post-recession this emphasis on freedom worries me. It seems a failure of governance caused the recession, so our new masters in No 10 are suggesting now they do even less?

The reality is that power without money always results in optimistic low-cost social agendas. I'm worried that our new found freedoms will result in a new scapegoat for the government- us. Political development throughout the 20th century was a consensus throughout Europe that governments do more, this newfound assumption they now do less seems like a step back, not a step forward.

Getting back to creating a Liberal meritocracy may sound wonderful, but all liberalisers will admit that it is naturally- self serving system. Adam Smith used this as the basis suggesting the selfish ideals will drive will drive all markets including the moral market.

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain."

Capitalism may work financially but I don't think it's a moral driver for how we live. It would assume that my interest in the social wellbeing of other is guided by selfish gain rather than that of empathy garnered from being a long sufferer of that terrible illness of being human. One of the problems in investigating economic theory is that those who publish tend to be the winners. Winners tend to be big on knowledge but small on empathy. Perhaps one of the most ironic tragedies of political philosophy is that it's written by people who often don't experience failure at all.

A society that begins and ends solely with self interest manifests itself in many terrible forms, it exploits, is ruled by cronyism and manifested in the very worst parts of the world where day-to-day government play no part in the lives of its citizens. An over managed government ensure social projects become toxic high tax, unsustainable failures.

The terrible thing about living in Britain is that under a two party system, the talk of a progressive politics is exactly that. The reality is we're back into a political swing towards Conservative austerity after years of wasteful socialist largesse. Identical as every political swing since 1945.

I hope one thing we take away from the Blair-Brown era are the moral sentiments that not all people who fail deserve it. Not all people who succeed deserve it either. The Moral bankruptcy of New Liberalism is the assumption that tragic figures could never exist in a Liberal utopia. It forgets even if systems are perfect humans are not.

It seems strange to me that tragedy being the most popular expression of art doesn't find itself into politics more. I accept that politicians or leaders of any kind should lead by by example, but this distorted image that politicians have to perfect all the time means the false picture we get is going to lack the genuine human facets- inconsistencey, the struggle of making hard decisions and the drama that we create when we ask people to put their reputations on the line to justify themselves. David Laws was such a tragic figure caught out not because wanted to make money (he had no need for it) but the fact he wanted to protect his private life from public scrutiny. Yet once smeared he was axed immediately. Politics demands perfection. This idea that politics has to have perfect people undermines it's capacity to accept that talented people sometimes fail.

People who never push themselves hard enough or are just too scared to make decisions they might be wrong on don't belong in politics. Dostoevsky was very aware that human capacity to allow others to redeem themselves is the part of the human condition that forges the strongest individuals and that harmony on the basis of mutual perfection can never be real-

“Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it.”

I think he's suggesting a love of humanity comes from an understanding that as moral agents we fail all the time, that some wisdom that can only comes from failure.

As we embrace New liberalism I would be careful of this idea that the less the government does the more culpable we are for our own fate. It can get horribly judgemental, in Victorian England someone of lower class would be called an “unfortunate” nowadays under in our more liberal society they would be called a “loser” Just because we've found ourselves in our more meritocratic society lets not forget the message of 3,000 years of tragedy- The pure meritocracy can never exist and on that basis many of those who fail deserve moral understanding.

We would do well to remember our fate is never ours alone, morality needs to compensate for both the randomness and the consistencies of the human condition. That in itself is an impossible task but never underestimate the value of investigating the impossible.

It's why philosophy matters.

Why I’m choosing choice, fear and the future.

As I sign off on the paperwork that will later become my under graduate degree, I had a terrible realisation- nothing is certain anymore. For 24 long years I always had the notion of what I wanted to achieve, school, college bum around for year, uni and then get a job. I had thought naturally I would float into a science role until I realised the rather mechanical Germans I had worked with in the lab seemed to relish the chores of early morning maths slightly more than was natural. Then came the alarming realisation that's not what I wanted to be.

I sit here in my rather grubby t-shirt with the rather empty declaration “we’re free” but science teaches us there are in fact measurable boundaries to the universe, that deterministic laws of motion that dictate everything I am capable of. Science’s brilliance lays in it’s ability to deconstruct problems analyse them and push forward the most accurate theory on the data provided. The discipline is extracted from mathematical proofing simply substitute the numbers for real world measurable equivalents and you have the essence of how science approaches problems.

So soon I will have my certification that tells the world that I am technically proficient in this discipline. Dragging the world’s understanding of the unknown into certainty once seemed a great way to contribute to this world, yet now on cusp of being licensed to do so it begins to seem so empty. Some people take a different approach; Richard Feynman a physicist on the Manhattan project and one of the great quantum thinkers seemed to embrace a search for uncertainty in science:

“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”

True enough words; dogmatism of any kind always makes me suspicious and the many times science has proved itself wrong does a good job of eliminating arrogance in this field. Still I feel this is a slightly confusing message for a physicist for even in the seemingly random quantum dimension there exists certain albeit chaotic probabilistic frameworks. Thinking back to my Christmas time search for crucible moments I’ve since come to two conclusions:

1) Crucible moments don’t exist and that small and gradual change over time simply affects our character to the point we decide (consciously or unconsciously) to redefine ourselves.

Or crucible moments DO exist and:

2) Crucible moments are often misrepresented. They are not over coming great adversity or completing some arduous task but simply a change in attitude, perspective and ambition when faced with complete uncertainty.

The amount of uncertainty in my life to date has practically been nil, and at any time I can remember when the future was uncertain the only thing I can remember about that time was complete anxiety then relief once certainty took hold again. I suspect that has something to do with how society is designed since getting the degree seems to be what life was about since I was about 15 and any uncertainty was greeted with the fear that life wouldn’t be as I wanted it to be. Now I’ve scrambled to the to top all I have is uncertainty but with it comes free to choose who I want to be, what I want to do and what the focus will be for the next stage of my life. No assignments, no deadlines, no 9 o’clock start or 11 am meetings all I have now is choice. It seems uncertainty brings us a wonderfully unexpected gift- the choice to choose.

My life to date hasn’t exactly been bad to despite the lack of choice within it, I suspect in six months and several thousand dole financed cigarettes later I’ll be writing, that maybe, just maybe uncertainty is over-rated. Potentially a life without direction is no more defining than stand in the queue for the post office- I just don’t know now. I can’t get away from thinking I will be taking some important decisions in the next year. What they will be of how they will affect me is all part of the uncertainty.

I don’t think science (or even Feynman) has done me much good teaching me to cope with uncertainty but university has equipped me with some education and initiative and I suspect these are the core skills for making the most of uncertainty. Uri Meller PhD, writes in his sociological thesis “Coping with uncertainty” that the only way we move forward is to accept uncertainty is our greatest opportunity for change.

“The ability to accept uncertainty and tolerate ambiguity might become an essential aspect of a personality that has to deal with an unpredictable environment. Accepting uncertainty includes the ability to be in confusion and to accept that confusion as a necessary element in the process of interacting with a nonlinear world, a world suffused with ambiguity.”

He makes some interesting points on the inconsistent nature of personalities but I guess I like him because he writes likes a scientist, although I’m not sold that we need necessarily to be confused in uncertainty. My thoughts are to get the most from a time of uncertainty we need not to be confused but lucid to recognise the opportunities it presents.

The answer I will hazard in this six month overdue assignment on my initial question "What is a crucible moment?" is this- If we choose choice in our lives then we choose uncertainty. The only time we amalgamate everything we are is not what we do when asked to do something, but who we choose to be when we can do anything.

I’m gaining some sympathy for the post modernists now; certainly my search for certainty in science hasn’t even yielded a desire for certainty at all. I’m sure I’ll grow out of this soon enough, like the enthusiastic anarchist that realises that a career, a family and a home actually gives you tangible benefits often lacking in idealism.

Despite that I think I need a written record of the time that uncertainty never scared me for the first time, a precious moment in which almost I’m probably enjoying more freedom than I have done in years in who, where and what I want to be. I suppose I better start acting like this time matters.
As I take my first teetering steps into the uncertain job seekers funded future, Voltaire offers these comforting words:

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

So given a world where certainty is absurd anything is possible. So to those graduating enjoy. You’ve never been freer.

Politics is broken and you know it

It must be an election year. The amount of political smear I need to rub off my TV every morning is getting worse, the usual parade of fraud, gay-bashing and death taxes has already entered the increasingly comical world political discourse. Only this morning I saw internet chatter of people legitimately talking about whether a B&B owner should be allowed to exclude gays. Fuck. Is this what political discourse is these days?

I’ve debated long enough to know when something is and isn’t a debate. If this had been a white supremacist excluding a black man, or a Muslim refusing to serve a woman because she is not wearing a Burka or a Mormon refusing anyone who didn’t believe that there were city states in North America 50 years after Christ’s death, there would be no debate here. We would say “Wow your ignorance is so staggeringly bad it’s a real sad state of affairs that we need to make laws for people like you.” We would move on. Discussion over.

But Grayling is a senior conservative. It’s a recession. People are quite anti-government. The usual questions were asked. By all means let the politicians score points against each other but don’t give them credit for it. Don’t let them make morons of us all.

I despise big state politics. Big states waste money, big states are lumbering and inflexible in the fast paced world of Global economics, big states always limit freedoms, big states are bureaucratic and inefficient, big states are impenetrable when people need them, big states control and manipulate information. Big states deprive people of money, freedom and any political empowerment whatsoever.

Do we live in a ‘big state?’

Those little sparks of electricity rushing through your brain just now is questioning and appreciating the political landscape of Britain. Maybe when we starting talking about what politicians think instead of the stupid things they do maybe the media would take us seriously for a change.

Leave the pathetic attempts at character assassination to the pages of heat magazine.

I want politics please.

Searching for the Crucible

Sifting through job applications today I was eating literally giga-bytes of corperate mantra, my eyes quickly becoming soiled with a thousand pages of motivational Amercanisms, catchy slogans and bastard philosophy skillfully adapted for the free market. Then one item caught my eye, A career path little with was elegantly described as filled with 'Crucible moments' where an individual is remade in the paradigm image of Accenture, Pzier, SBR or whatever company it was. I found this idea quite attractive, had I undergone crucible moments? Certainly I may only be 24, but I've hardly wasted my time here and yet my head was empty- I could never pin down my 'defining moments'

So I naturally did what many of us do when we are lost for answers- I googled it. Unfortunately unless I want to work in Emergic Ecosystems, or buy the book for guaranteed career success and I still was at a loss. So plan B was hatched, a nice long walk alone trips to potential crucibles, perhaps jarring some joy or selling some sorrow but no doubt stirring activity from the graveyard of memory. Remembering my young self was particularly strange, it's weird one can be so curious and yet make little, if any, decisions for myself, in an inexplicable ball of energy with no focus but so much enthusiasm for relative mundanity.

Nietzche sprang to mind as he sometimes does

“I have done that," says my memory. "I cannot have done that" -- says my pride, and remains adamant. At last -- memory yields.

I was unsure weather to be jealous of the young me, happiness was easy for him, albeit empty by my current standards. Perhaps the hallmark of maturity is when we make happiness harder for ourselves.

Then I laughed that person is me or was me, I got really perplexed at how one could be envious of oneself, but decided to leave that behind and get to the task at hand. I could see no crucible in this empty, icy playground but I had this vision of the person I used to be, I had not ceased to exist, but now had chosen to exist differently. That must have a path, one of choice, development, success and regret. I had some idea of what a crucible might look like but still had fill it, and yet I could not.

I remembered that my dad had made me sing the songs he would buy for me to bolster the confidence that is deficient in probably every 8 year-old overweight ginger boy. That stirred mixed emotions firstly came from a very unique form of private shame followed by a realisation that maybe that was a 'crucible moment' One thing that struck me is that if it was, why was it so hard to remember? Why are such crucial developmental breakthroughs so elusive to us?

I figured once again we were still the same society that thinks self analysis is only for the sick, philosophy for the unemployed and mental crucibles something only discussed in IBM's motivational workshops. Maybe it's because we're in a habit of normalising everything we do, which makes life easier to deal with, but comes at the cost of self awareness. I settled on something Carl Jung danced with but never explicitly said- perspectives of importance are relatively transient things- There are linchpins, family, friends and the other usuals but by in large what was important to me to 2 years ago isn't important to me any more and if I go back more than five years I see such a foreign set of needs and desires that I almost think my memory-ego is a different person entirely.

“All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insolvable... they can never be solved, but only outgrown. This 'outgrowth' proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the person's horizon, and through this broadening of his or her outlook the unsolvable problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge.”

I like this Jung quote, at first it seemed depressing, forcing us to the doom of failing to 'solve' life's problems. Growth and development are matters of perspective and probably misguided allocations at best. The empowerment to create a world in which problems are perspectives and not physical obstructions is a intriguing if a little optimistic concept. I would be daring enough to say it does have some practical application, certainly I would say one of the the biggest problems of our age is unrealised potential, just another self-problem built on perspective.

I think memory can play horrible tricks on us, joy, I would say is perhaps the worst way to learn anything, in attempting to piece together my crucible I could not think of one experience wrought through happiness I had really learnt from, apart from, that it made me happy. Happiness never changes anything, in fact it's truly abhorrent trait is that it encourages us all to stay the same. Maybe man's true cross to bear is that development can only come from misery, pain and regret, expediency of the mind to end such anguish is remarkable and the fruits of such are lifelong. Persistence of memory makes me hate regret, such a terrible trick of the mind to label the crucible that forged me with such an illogical emotional impunity.

All to often we know those defeated by their past, defined beyond all doubt as worthless and incapable by the ghost of their memory-egos. It's seem a weird fact that people can become ruled by someone they used to be, but is likely a sign of a weakness and a failure to grow beyond our problems. More than anything these individuals have stopped valuing their problems, become dependant on their memory-ego as a ruler and refused to be a dynamic actor in their own lives. I think much of this modern depression is based on just that, not our eroded relationships with others but a damaged relationship with our past selves.

So I kept walking, I went to my old school, a park I used to play in, a place I used to eat. Many of past my selves appeared, I was envious of some, pitiful of others and one even suggested he knew I would come visit him. I asked them all what they had thought was important and the responses were mixed and still my crucibles were still vague. Largely they were happy with my present self, they were happy I still viewed them as important, they were my not my judges and spite my seemingly unending ability to recall regret, I had not regretted meeting them again.

I took to walking home having had tea with the past, my mind naturally wandered the future and a small glimpse of my future-ego appeared, I couldn't see him clearly yet but it didn't trouble me, I'd been vexing a lot about future recently but after the brief chat with the past I had realised I was developing in such a way that I was unlikely to be to be miserable. Though I had wondered about my sanity these days, long walks alone, talking to ghosts and being left to write the obituary of my two day old memory-ego gave me some cause for concern. Luckily Christmas won't give me much time to dwell on the sensibilities of such behaviours. Modern life is so full of distractions.

I hope you will make time for your memory-egos this Christmas but do so in the right capacity, not in the denial or worship of past selves, but a good friendship you can share a bottle of wine with over the festive season. I find my memory a treacherous thing often making me forget the wisdom of the past by focussing on present concerns, and treat them as a gateway to that oft forgotten knowledge.

My search for crucible moments was largely a fruitless one, but I found once again diving into my myself quickly became it's own reward. I worried less about the future and had made peace with my past. Anyway I'm being shouted at to get off the laptop, Christmas not being a season for the philosopher but will end with this festive message from Seneca

“That which is hard to bear is sweet to remember”

It's hard not to think of Christ's passion, isn't it? I hope you make time to remember some regret, search for your crucibles and have port with the past, I can assure you it's more christmassy than it sounds.

Merry Christmas everyone.

The power of discourse and the language of intent

You might say this work was pioneered by a little social experiment I decided to run recently- Those of you who know me well will know that I almost never watch TV. For about the last 5 years I find it nearly impossible to sit still long enough to digest a TV programme. Recently I'd decided to revoke that policy for about 3 hours a week, by watching for one hour every other day, a news channel from a different country. It was a silly little exercise to gain a little cultural insight into other countries needs, concerns and lifestyles.

Almost immediately I began to realise linguistic disparities- at first I thought this unimportant- nothing more than a different cultural take on language, but I began to see more on this, even though what they were describing was almost always the same, I began to realise how they were saying it was making me feel a different way. It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, it felt like 'unbiased' news was still projecting an agenda onto me, but I couldn't put my finger on how- how could the same facts make me feel different things despite being presented in an objective manner?

Then I had bizarre moment, a collection of news stories in Afghanistan broke at the same time across three news channels CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera.

The first story 'Terrorists plot Afghanistan election chaos'
Second story 'Insurgents threaten to disrupt elections'
Third story 'Neo-conservative Afghan rebels seek to end elections'

Now I'm no idiot, I'm aware that much of the media carries with inherently loaded language within it- but I would ask you this when have you heard Taliban fighters described as 'neo-conservative Afghan rebels?' This bothered me so much, because this in itself seemed the most objective 'label' for those Afghans involved in the conflict, essentially those who do not embrace democracy and support the opium dealers in Afghanistan.

Certainly a long way from bringing 'terror' these people just want to feed there families. When did the 'terrorists' (I E bringers of Terror) become guerilla fighters in other lands? It seems we've branded our enemies a people with no other objective than terror. Not only is this provably false, it over simplifies conflicts, and it shifts the justification away from us. We are the invaders, but they are the bringers of Terror?

I began to feel strange like I had been lied to, but the weird thing is I hadn't been lied too... Yet I felt deceived in meaning. So once again I took to the world of philosophy to find answers and found a political fellow by the name Michel Foucault, and politely informed me that I can be given an answer correctly in factual context but deceived in the emotional response of that factuality. The striking thing is he then said this is the basis for all authoritative discourse. Weirdly he had been talking about the soviet union, and yet I felt based on my silly little social experiment designed to give me insight into cultural values, it had all become relevant again.

Then I began the horrendous path of a crazed linguist, I began to question not only language, but the nature of the discourse that language had created. It seemed that discourse, across medias, that was always geared in one direction, How long will the recession last? It seems we missed out on a public discourse on how we might choose to end the recession, were bailouts the only option? Where did we borrow from? How much should we have borrowed? I don't know because nobody discussed these issues publicly. Our foreign affairs seems to be 'what will we do next?' not a 'Should we do anything next?' I find this subtle manipulative language style so dis-empowering. It seems with a little linguistic finesse it breeds with it a public consent can be wrought through a series of very tight avenues of extremely loaded questioning.

Orwell whom I mentioned before in a similiar capacity, I feel needs a greater mention here- his essay 'Politics and the English language' is a fascinating look at how phraseology can so subtly underpin an ideology without even openly advocating it.

“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

I felt the words 'Regime change' 'Global security' ringing so hard in my ears it was deafening. Where had war gone?

Do I think the media is controlled by networks seeking to advocate some neo-conservative agenda? No, of course I do not- but I do feel that language in the media is beginning to become not only less objective but less empathetic too. If language can corrupt thought, I would ask you to consider to what the objectives of the undemocratic (non-democratic anyone?) Illegitimate (by whose standards?) terrorists (Weren't the Taliban a theocratic governance?) might be. It seems that language may have ganged up on these fellows but would ask you not to join this club of language bullies. Nobody likes a bully...

Don't be satisfied with reassigning adjectives, but I hope you continue to de-construct language but use that skill to re-shape a discourse. It's is the nature of egotism to deceive, it grants a power we all crave- I would ask you to identify and isolate the language of intent to that end, so that we no longer become slaves to the words of others but only the discourse that we make for ourselves.

That is the very definition of a liberal media- but you probably didn't know that...

I would begin to ask yourself why that is the case...

Remembering the victims of peace

The Afghan war is one which produces many mixed feelings in people; the recent surge of deaths in Helmand province has cast doubts on the likelihood of success in Afghanistan. Amid claims of election fraud, security issues and the Obama administrations policy of scaling back troop deployments, the future looks pretty grim for Afghans.

I think we need to be reminded why we deploy troops to foreign shores – many individuals seem to think that fighting for democracy abroad is some sort of Western cultural imperialism. I think that it’s highly racist to simply assume that democracy and the freedoms it brings are simply the desires of solely Western nations. People cannot seem to understand that we live a morally complex world where good things can come from bad actions. Most people would probably accept that vast majority of injustices occurring on a mass scale are a result of totalitarian regimes worldwide and yet an increasingly vocal minority are speaking out against taking action.

So the argument progresses – what’s so special about Afghanistan? The primary reason has to be heroin, which is at the heart of this conflict. Afghanistan produces 87% of the worlds heroin at a tremendous social cost to the West, but at an even bigger social cost to Afghans. In some regions where heroin is used as currency, addiction rates have sky-rocketed destroying families, creating health problems and ending lives. The problems don't just end there; this massively profitable business generates billions directly funding crime syndicates and international terror networks. Heroin’s addictive quality is often used to ensure loyalty to heroin growers. Whereas the Western aid agencies may come with food and blankets, Taliban fighters know at least they can get their next fix by staying loyal to their grower. Addiction creates a massive barrier for Western forces in getting Afghans to accept change, but it’s only part of the problem.

Most Afghans don’t fight for addiction, some misguided notion of the Jihad, and certainly not to maintain sovereignty. The majority of Afghans simply fight to put food in their bellies and money in their pockets. When coalition forces went in and simply steamrolled any poppy growers (largely ignored by the poorly developed Taliban state) they essentially created a new problem – they made many Afghans unemployed and at the same time angered a very rich and powerful section of Afghanistan. This gave birth to what is called the “5 dollar Talib”. An unemployed tender of a heroin field is given 5 dollars and AK 47 with three magazines. His job is to tend to the heroin field and to fight anyone who comes near it. Considering Heroin is Afghanistan’s single biggest industry this has now armed a significant portion of the population. Terror cells had already been operating in Afghanistan for over a decade so arming the population was fast and easy. If you want to understand the significance of this into the ongoing conflict I would invite you to look at Helmand – responsible for 80% of the Afghanistan’s heroin growth and the bloodiest region for British and coalition forces.

Thankfully, this is now being acknowledged as part of the problem. Organisations like USAID are funding farming programmes in which poppy growers are subsidised to grow other crops such as maize with the subsidy used to “top up” profits in order to make it as profitable as growing poppies. In a recent discussion I had with a sergeant who served two tours in Afghanistan, he said where these programmes had been a success Taliban insurgency is virtually zero. Furthermore public health and social cohesion was improved due to greater access to food supplies and reduction in addiction rates. In a recent interview General McCrystal has now accepted that 95% of Taliban fighters fall into the “5 dollar Talib” category and has shifted the objectives from targeting insurgency to appeasing the local populations, showing them there are viable alternatives to promoting heroin growth. I think a solid understanding of why Afghans fight is the key to breaking this conflict and making it winnable.

Pulling out now would be our biggest mistake. Elections will require security to run smoothly and a government will be required to maintain the state apparatus to keep any sort of peace in the future. Certainly collapsing into a power vacuum will create an even worse environment than the current conflict in the inevitable power struggle that will follow. In the meantime, the Middle East would be showered in heroin and Afghanistan would become another failed state and a hotbed for terrorism that would certainly affect countries like India and Pakistan for generations to come.

Pacifists irritate me because they suggest that nothing is worth fighting for. I'm not a champion of warfare but I see Afghanistan as an opportunity to foster positive change on a domestic level for Afghans, and an international level for ourselves and Afghanistan's neighbours. If you think there is currently no social cost in inaction for us, I'd like you to use this Remembrance Day not only to remember our servicemen, but to remind you why they fight.

I would invite you to remember the 336 deaths in 2008 resulting from heroin abuse in Scotland alone – more than the 208 British servicemen killed in 8 years in Afghanistan- and just a tiny fraction of the deaths that can be attributed to Afghan heroin worldwide.

Lastly I’d like you to remember my brother, Jai Dolan, who tragically died in December 1997 as a result of heroin abuse. I hope that in remembering him we can remind ourselves that success in Afghanistan can prevent senseless deaths like his.

We declare war when the price of peace has become too high, and would ask you not only to remember the servicemen who die in the tragedy that is war, but ask you to reflect on the often unspoken victims of peace that these men fight for.