My reader might not be surprised to find that I spend a lot of time watching stuff online (I will return to this later on), when I am free and not doing tasks like lesson and materials prepping on a Monday (or other weekday) morning, much of which is of a masculine nature - at the moment, for example, on a Sunday night, I am listening to a recent live stream from Undead Chronic, but I listen remarkably often to Redonkulas, Taylor the Fiend, Raging Golden Eagle, Razörfist, Better Bachelor, and of course, Turd Flinging Monkey, and a whole load of others I could mention, including (via an Android app) ‘The Art of Manliness’.

Here in South Korea, where I have been living (accidentally, but that is a story for another time) for literally twenty years, a lot of the apartments I have had have not been blessed with TVs. When I first arrived here, there was always a TV but the basic subscription (which is, believe it or not, paid for in your monthly electricity bill) was rather dull, there was no TV guide that I could find and to be blunt, my level of Korean has never been good enough for any deep comprehension of whatever they were on about, so we could say that there was little motivation to even watch. This situation started to change in 2004 when I finally got back online (I built a new PC and paid for - yes, paid for! - a copy of XP Home) with the fastest cable connection available at the time. I admit that a lot of what I was downloading thereafter was actually TV shows, but they were good, with a lot of them concerned with the more paranoid kinds of topics. The only disadvantage I have found with this is that I keep returning to the same ones all the time (George Carlin, anyone?)

However, beyond the simple question of boring televisual fodder, wider life these days seems to be little more than a string of distractions. Log in to your favourite social media site (especially FB) and you will probably be confronted by one or more "inspirational quotes" that some depressed soul has posted in the hope of asserting that he or she is not actually in the mental state that they are in; pretending that they are in a better mental state than their readers, it would seem. Personally, I always find these things an utter drag; I wouldn't mind so much, but all too often these days, said quotes appear to originate from someone whom I have never heard of, and the result is, I assure you, not inspiration. Instead, it feels more like patronisation: words which often seem to have little relevance to me or my situation, really no better than the kind of patronising drivel you receive from the talking heads on the TV, and deserving, I think, a similar level of regards.

It is a common saying that words are cheap, and there is much truth in this; one gives more respect to those who lead by example, as those who give regard to mere words and sayings are often not what we might call "men of action". They think that it is enough to demonstrate their sympathies in words, and not to have to graduate to the level of physical actions, such that this has become a disease within our society, which is often referred to as "virtue signalling". When they do, in fact, commit themselves to action, it is nowadays frequently of the violent and destructive type, and the observer may well ask: "Where is the inspiration in this?"

As I say, I do not find these so-called inspirational quotes to be very "inspiring". If a person can be said to have any reasonable "philosophy of life", and if they have taken Socrates' advice and take opportunities to avoid an “unexamined life”, they have probably realised that any other person whose ideas are worth considering cannot be reduced easily to any reasonable conceptual kernel: since they also took the time to consider their lives and experiences, the thoughts that they have to communicate are not, and cannot be, of a straightforward and simple nature. Worse, perhaps, because society contains so many people who literally want to be able to pass their lives with a minimum of responsibility and fuss, they want also to be able to offload their own responsibility onto others; hence, the promulgation of another person's sayings or ideas constitutes an attempt to avoid responsibility for the errors and disasters of their own lives, and the decisions that they made which did not work out. This has now reached the highest levels of political life, and too many of our elected representatives habitually dissemble publicly and try to shift responsibility and blame onto others. It is hard, therefore, to have any confidence in either them or any institution to which they may belong.

To put this idea into some kind of perspective, there is a brief passage in one of the books sent to me by my sister, “Philosophy Made Simple” [1] in which one of the authors gives an example from his own experience:

Recently one of the authors of this book began his lectures in a course entitled ‘Introduction to Philosophy’. He tried to give the class some idea of what sort of material they would be considering throughout the course by raising the question that Plato had asked over twenty-three hundred years ago: ‘What is justice?’ To suggest what this question might mean, he raised related problems, among them: ‘How do we distinguish just acts from unjust ones?’ ‘How do we tell what we ought to do, or what is right?’ ‘Is justice based only on legal conventions, or are there other, more basic standards?’ After the lecture, a student remarked to the professor that many questions had now been asked and he wondered if the answers would be forthcoming in the near future. The teacher told him that they would consider some _possible_ answers in the course, but he could not guarantee that they would be the _right_ answers. The student answered, ‘That’s all right, so long as we get answers - just so that we don’t have to think.’

This illustrates the root of another common problem in modern Western political life - the mentality which willingly follows an authority figure rather than actively considering an issue for themselves, a group of people who engage in automatic, tribal responses, and essentially vote as an unthinking block. Again, I will return to this later.

At this moment, as I sit here typing this on my current tablet, I have, as mentioned above, been living and working in South Korea, in a variety of teaching jobs and locations, for almost twenty years, and as you might imagine, I have seen a lot of changes. The greatest surprise is that, although I have had a few hairy situations (especially with regard to imminent visa expiries, I kid you not), I have been able to remain mainly in work and to pay off my remaining debts not once, but twice; I am now a five-year cancer survivor and, perhaps partly as a result of the COVID situation, am now on medications for elevated blood pressure. Yet I am now in my sixtieth year and still working, having just re-signed (much against my better judgement) with my current employer for another possible year. Incredibly, fully ten percent of this life has been spent working with the military, in one form or another, in both the UK and South Korea, something that I never expected, not least because I my attempt to sign up with the RAF was originally rejected back when I was nineteen.

In the UK, as I have mentioned elsewhere, it proved very difficult to find a suitable job after school: I failed my A-levels and therefore spent some three years thereafter bumming around my home town with no clue what I wanted to do; my parents - now both gone - were simple working class folk and had no real suggestions as to what I could do about my situation. It was only when I went to my old doctor for a repeat prescription that the penny seems to have dropped... he seemed surprised to see me.

"What happened to you?" he asked: "I thought you were going to university!"

"Ah, I failed my A-levels," I said.

"Well," he replied, "don't you think you ought to un-fail them?"

I didn't realise at the time, but this would prove to be a fateful decision and later, looking back on it, the understanding started to come to me that I could change my circumstances by making a choice; I would also come to understand, even later, that a lot of people struggle doing this. As the kind of choices that life throws at you are frequently dilemmas rather than between good and bad options (i.e., are more likely to be between bad and worse), and also because people with little strength of character tend to follow the line of least resistance, they are all too often stymied when confronted with serious decisions with serious consequences. Unfortunately, these people form the majority in human society, and the slow process of enfranchisement, by which people with little education or property have progressively been able to vote themselves entitlements to more of the national wealth, has resulted in the situation in which we now find ourselves. For the truth is that so many people in modern society have become dependent upon benefits and handouts from governments, who, themselves afraid of losing power in a ridiculous electoral system, pander to these parasitic dependents, that we are locked in a death spiral. So many nominal adults, who need some kind of parent-substitute to care for them and tell them what to do, and who also think that said parent-substitute should finance their ridiculous lives, are destroying Western society.

The type of "inspiration" sought by these people is not, therefore, one which fosters real independence. Their "heroes" will tend to be those whose utterances justify their idiotic existences, meaning, of course, left-wing and possibly even revolutionary, despite the fact that the usual results are huge amounts of death and destruction. In fact, this has been true since at least the time of Napoleon. They respond en masse both to statements from their chosen authority and to criticisms directed at them as a tribe: they defend “our man” or “our woman” vociferously, but not deeply or logically; intellectually they present as rather shallow. What they want is justification, not inspiration.

Also, at this particular time in my life (and I realise that this may upset a lot of people), I do not exclude practitioners of religions from this category. My reason is that they have basically the same issues. The adoption of a particular godhead for guidance is no different from the acceptance of any other arbitrary tribal authority. People who belong to such a community will behave in a way that allows other members to identify them as fellows (i.e., virtue signalling), and because the wider community will take care of them, they focus on conformity, and in this way, avoid as much as possible the need for personal responsibility and the making of difficult decisions.

Notice, of course, that our argument here is not with the godhead; the problem is the weakness of the acolytes and the pandering and connivance of religious leaders. We might additionally point out that although religious leaders are not usually elected (except, perhaps, by their peers), their authority is accepted by those who subscribe to membership of the group. The parallels are all exact.

The essence of a self-directed life is the acceptance of responsibility for one's own decisions and actions, and therefore, also, for oneself. This position necessarily precludes the authority of another individual over oneself, if one is to exist as a sovereign and independent being. As we are all destined to arrive at the same final fate, one would think that people would be motivated to make the most of their lives before the advent of the inevitable, but instead there is much weakness of mind, deliberate misdirection and profiteering, which appears to be tolerated for the aforementioned tribal reasons. The tribalists, however, are still dependent upon a parental figure and are ill-disposed towards personal responsibility and accountability.

To live an independent life is surely to avoid these things; however, society is being run by narcissists and grifters, the examples of whose lives provide a poor guide to the majority of people. This means that leadership by example is very important, and rather than providing anonymous "inspirational" quotes, we should point people towards good examples from other people's lives. When confronted with tough choices, fortitude is required, so who presents a great example of that? Give me your thoughts below.

I myself realised, just this week, that I had been slowly reconnecting with some great exemplars, whose writings had been unavailable to me since I left the UK, as they had mouldered away in my parents' house in the interim, because (during that time) no decision was ever made over whether to send them to me. During the last few years, however, changes in circumstances forced an arrangement by which, at my personal expense, my sister and her husband sent my remaining library out to me, one or two boxes at a time. I have been disheartened to discover that in that time, some wonderful (and very expensive) books, which I prized greatly, had vanished, and as some of them are now out of print, they will probably never be replaced; and the thought occurred to me that my father, in particular, had never placed great value upon knowledge. Despite all of this, I have been overjoyed to be reunited with my collection of Michael Moorcock novels, and this week I hit one of Harry Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" [4] books.

Books about art, science and philosophy, including Paul Feyerabend, Friedrich Nietzsche, and from among them, this week, my copy of John Seymour's "Self-Sufficiency" [2], a seminal and opinionated work from a Man Who Knew (purchased when "The Good Life" was a regular evening fixture on BBC1). There was also my copy of Patrick Moore's "New Guide to the Planets" [3], which I have been finding impossible to put down. Alas, most of those whose books I am rediscovering have since passed away; but their words live on. I mourn the passing of the Prince of Darkness...

None of these gentlemen had a completely easy life; Patrick Moore was fortunate enough to be the presenter of the BBC's long-running astronomy show, "The Sky at Night", and let me assure you, he is greatly missed. Michael Moorcock's career, though now well-established, certainly had its ups and downs, especially during the 1960s; at one point, he owed some three thousand pounds (a very serious amount of money in those days) due to his publishing commitments; he would face more misfortune much later, when an operation (in Texas, I believe, the result of a bad decision by a senior nurse) led to restricted blood flow in his feet, and the eventual (surgical, elective) loss of his toes. John Seymour had a disagreement with his colleagues which led him, in his old age, to part company with them and try to set himself up with a new farm, but he passed away in 2004.

I suppose that humanity is basically divided into two types: those who succeed (or at least, those who persist peacefully) through their own decisions and endeavour, and those who essentially experience some measure of success through the efforts of others, and who are simply well-positioned at particular moments. The latter type could probably be characterised as our typical political type, the former perhaps as a dedicated country man. The political type is the one usually given to narcissistic dissembling and opportunistic point scoring, and also (probably) trying desperately to redirect blame when there is an inevitable crash. It would be difficult to describe the personality of the former because he is the type who dislikes crowds and their idiotic behaviour; he prefers his own company.

Traditionally, the latter might be referred to as "sinisters", and the former as "dexters", and personally, I think I am one of the "dexters ". Our problem, socially, is that most of society is composed of "sinisters ", either the narcissistic leader mentality or the dependent followers. It has amused me, over the last few years, that dexters in social media have often described themselves as "proud autists " (or similar), which leads us to an interesting alternative terminology: for "sinisters ", read "narcissists" (with group orientation) and for "dexters", read "autists " (with solitary orientation). Many might disagree with this, but there is a huge narcissist presence both in the media and in more general social life these days, which therefore represents a huge international expression of personal insecurity and incapability. It also places people on a "spectrum" of autism-narcissism, which seems to me to explain a lot about human history.

The paradox of the narcissistic personality is that they are often incapable of doing things for themselves: we should, perhaps, not be surprised at their habit of attracting attention to themselves, and using various emotive means to get others to undertake tasks for them; in situations where they have to act independently, they are therefore disadvantaged. Add to this a tendency to make irrational or illogical decisions, and the periodic collapse of society is not surprising. Also, since they tend to attract other less capable (but similarly dependent) people, they tend to acquire a following who look up to them as authority figures despite their obvious faults, and who are then able to support them until the inevitable happens. This "authority" provides the motivation that fearful, dependent people otherwise lack.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, of course, is a quite different personality. I suspect that this person differs greatly in terms of schema formation and the integration of new knowledge acquired through practical experience, is highly focused and can ignore distractions in order to complete a given task. Another difference may be that they are better at making decisions based upon their combination of existing knowledge and predictive ability, which allows them to plan well for whatever comes after. This may also mean that they experience lower levels of stress and are basically much more self-sufficient individuals. I doubt, however, that they are literally "autistic"; they are simply better able to concentrate and to integrate new experience and knowledge with old. The narcissist is necessarily autocratic (and therefore dependent upon the skills and strength of others), whereas the autist is necessarily autonomous.

Another way of looking at the difference between these two personalities is that the narcissistic type generally has little to offer wider society beyond a few stereotypical opinions based upon their desire to live an easy life; one of their abiding characteristics is to constantly seek out new problems with which to distract and manipulate the wider population, whereas the autist type tends to be able to offer solutions. This is, of course, poison to the narcissistic type, and a direct threat to their influence and power. It is, however, exactly the situation we have in so many of our social institutions right now  - including education.

All of this suggests that, if some major catastrophe should take place in the future, there will be a huge toll taken among the dependent members of society. They are already at a logistical disadvantage simply by virtue of living in crowded cities, where they produce no food and only consume. Likewise, they are heavily dependent upon electricity-based, computerised technologies, which includes, of course, the very media which indoctrinate and control them. They are also (in most places) disarmed, although this does not mean that they will not be a threat to those around them. This situation, I would suggest, results from living an unexamined life - a routine which they always seem to think will continue indefinitely, until misfortune strikes in the form of (for example) loss of a job. However, if the situation arises that electrical power is permanently cut off, an awful lot of people will suddenly discover exactly how dependent they really are.

These days, when I am free, I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I research a lot of things because we have moved into an age where old certainties are disappearing. Whereas, in an earlier generation, a person of a particular age would by now be anticipating retirement, I have to think about what I can do to support myself in old age, given that I am not living in my homeland (and had a very sketchy work record there). I am also paying attention to historical exemplars, meaning (in this case) people who were autonomous and had ideas. One personality who stands out is, of course, Socrates. It was at his trial that he asserted that "an unexamined life is not worth living", and we only have to look at the state of Western society today to see what happens when people do not reflect upon their lives. Too many people these days seem to have little to offer, period, never mind to society. The greatest disservice perpetrated by state education systems has always been, I suggest, the lack of Socratic reflection. The other greatest disservice that the state in every country has perpetrated upon its people has been forcing them away from the land and into the cities, where they can be more easily controlled, as it is no longer easy for them to feed themselves as they used to.

A possible example of where (or in which circumstances) reflection would be important would be when it becomes apparent that some kind of career shift or change is necessary. An important consideration would be, of course, the sum of your experience and training, and the skills that you can call upon if a sudden shift is forced upon you. There is also the question of whether new skills can (or should) be acquired, and maybe even things that you can do without any actual additional training, possibly because they are enabled by your existing skill sets. Being unable to do this, which was certainly true for me when I was younger, is a serious disadvantage; nowadays I may have the opposite problem - experience of things like analytical chemistry, teaching English as a foreign language, different operating systems and all kinds of software, actually make it hard to figure out what to do next. I have been busy today with one possibility and I have other bits of experience which may feed into it, but it is all up in the air right now. My point, however, is that it is necessary to reflect in order to plan the future. Reading John Seymour also makes clear how important it is to be able to link knowledge and skills together.

I have mentioned a number of gentlemen to whose ideas I have been fortunate to have been exposed. I would like, in the future, to expand on some of them, but right now, to finish, I remember an article I wrote in similar vein about ten years ago, which was never made public. The central idea was a recollection of Isaac Newton who, in early correspondence with Robert Hooke, famously stated that: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This is the Western tradition: everything we have was built upon the intellect of the past, with the result that we always have a great corpus of information upon which to build anew. Like the gods of old, the West dies when the corpus dies. Your choice, Western man.

References:

[1] Popkin, R. H. and Stroll, A. (1990): Philosophy Made Simple. Heinemann Professional Publishing, Oxford, UK (Second Edition). ISBN-10: 0-434-98608-9; ISBN-13: 9-780434-986088.

[2] Seymour, John and Sally (1973): Self-Sufficiency. Faber and Faber, London. ISBN-10: 0-571-10635-8.

[3] Moore, Patrick [Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore CBE HonFRS FRAS ] (1993): Patrick Moore’s New Guide to the Planets. Sidgwick and Jackson, England. ISBN-10:0-283-06145-6; ISBN-13: 9-780283-061455.

[4] Harrison, Harry (1978): The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You”. Sphere Books Limits, London, UK. ISBN-10: 0-7221-0578-9; ISBN-13: 9-780722-105788.