What's on topic here is down to JHB, of course.
It's been a lesson, having been in a cult, and another lesson again coming out and looking back. Part of me hoped I would see behind the veil, get the low-down on the real workings of things, but of course, behind the veil was another veil, this one labelled the Truth. Ah well, naive youth, innocent fools, but I was remembering, we weren't all so stupid. One premie I knew had a PhD in Maths, and was employed by the university researching the history and philosophy of science. I looked him up. He's now 90, and still researching, associated with Oxford university. There were quite a few really smart premies. Who for a while at least, believed a little fat kid missing from school might have the keys to enlightenment.
And speaking of intelligence, I was having a drink last week with a friend who is a brilliant engineer. He has dozens and dozens of patents and churns out amazing creations relentlessly. He told me that two years ago, he was a 'leftie' who woke up each morning and the top of his concerns was climate change. And now he thinks it's all exaggerated and just a scam to gather research money. We were sitting in a garden in one of the wettest parts of England, on dead grass on hard baked ground where it hasn't rained at all for months, and we were still hot at 10pm. And he's no longer a leftie, and thinks the only taxes raised should be spent on the police and the military. Nothing else. Oh, and the biggest threat to mankind now is communism.
I used to think proper grown ups ran the world. You've only got to look around at cathederals and bridges and planes, and see what scientists are pulling out of the hat, and what computers are capable of and recognise the incredible ingenuity of mankind, and it's surely not completely mad to imagine that people in charge of all this must be really smart. The aliens don't demand to be taken to visit an architect or an engineer. No, take me to your leader.
I look around and see people I know personally believing in mad things. Shouting at clouds some of them, literally. Somehow the logic and creativity we're capable of seems irrelevant when it comes to how we organise ourselves. It's just tribal, status driven. Beliefs are adopted as needed to fit into the right tribe. Not consciously. But we have a need to believe. We need a story of origins and destinations, we need to believe in some sort of progress, and I think that is failing.
I think the lessons learned from having been duped, having been so misguided, and then trying to sort it out must inform our outlooks.
Frankly, I have lost hope. I only hope I am wrong. I am planting trees, because however things turn out, it might not be a bad thing. That's the extent of it.
Once I was out to sea at night in a little dinghy with the wind blowing me away from a coast I couldn't even see. I rowed and rowed against the wind. My hands blistered and the blisters burst and bled, and I used my socks as gloves and carried on. I rowed all night and in the darkness, I couldn't even see if I was making any progress. But there was nothing to do but row as hard as I could against the wind. Of course, you know the ending. I made it. It was really hard to unclench my sticky stiffened hands from the oars once I was washed ashore by the surf. (That was the beginning of a very uncomfortable journey).
These days, I feel again like I am simply rowing and rowing, with no sign of progress and no destination in sight. But I'll keep rowing as long as I can, anyway. Just in case.
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