Unmaking Sense

Episode 12.77: Turning-points; pivotal moments; ladders we throw away; boats we burn: how we outgrow the world that made us who we are.

Most people reach a turning point in their lives when they turn against everything that has made them what they are. That can be family; it can be tribe; it can be society. It can be nation. It can even be world or species. But change and turn we do. The most balanced and mature of us turn benevolently to suggest that what has made us who we are needs now itself to be changed and to do better. We find ourselves having climbed into a tree using a ladder only to realise that we need the ladder no longer and can throw it away. We burn our boats.  We can no longer go back to what we were because we are determined to become a better version of what we are. 

Episode 12.76: Hierarchy, leadership, influence and simplification.

Four pillars of mayhem all grounded in the wrong ways we make sense of the world.

Episode 12.75: Are limited kinds of anarchism feasible?

In a week when angry mobs have attacked hotels shops and other facilities in many of England’s towns and cities we should be cautious about advocating anarchism, but as I have said 1000 times, anarchism is not the same thing as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing angry mob. Properly understood it means a refusal to acquiesce in the necessity of absolute hierarchy and leadership, and is as such an means of liberation, not enslavement.

Episode 12.74: Why pure anarchism fails

A society based upon pure anarchism in the proper sense of “without hierarchies or leaders” cannot ultimately survive the challenge of the risk-taking opportunistic angry mob or imperialistic army against which it must protect itself if it is to survive.

Episode 12.73: On What Matters

We consider the question ‘What Matters?’ in a world where we reject absolute answers., and why the answer is definitely not “Nothing, because anything goes”.

Episode 12.72: The liberation that flows from an absence of absolutes and the requirements that would arise from them.

Freeing ourselves from arbitrary absolutes that serve the vested interests of élites allows us to take charge of our lives and make more of them. Freedom from enables freedom for.

Episode 12.71 The Olympics: how pointless they are and what that teaches us.

The Ikympics celebrate people who are very good at doing things that don’t need doing. But that tells us something about everything we do, which can also on some scale or other be adjudged equally pointless.

Episode 12.70: Could the questions and answers we ponder reflect social values more than we think?

Which questions do we ask and how do we decide which answers to accept? Just as we cannot have a private language, so we need social help to decide what matters. But society may approve solutions and answers that are not accessible, and not want us to try alternatives. So we continue to do things we don’t want to do to earn money to support lifestyles that are not fulfilling. Over and over again.

Episode 12.69: Boredom and entertainment.

Sometimes what appear to be blissful states if peace can seem tedious. We imagine, for example, that we would like to live forever, be immortal, but would we? How would we spend all that time? Some things need to be ended, especially when they are not and never could be finished, like a painting or a book. We like solving small problems because we have no means of solving big ones.6

Episode 12.68: Not all describable things are possible.

It sounds obvious that not all the things we can describe and talk about are possible, but often in life we beat ourselves up for failing to achieve things of just that kind. We imagine that if we had done something differently, things might have been otherwise; but if the hypothetical solution is not achievable, even though it is describable, this is folly.