Power

"Information isn't power, power is power" - Sersi Lannister. 

(I must have started writing this before the final seasons of this aired as it seems wildly uncool in my reviewing of it!)

The concept of power fascinates me. It is ethereal, we intuitively know it when we see it but we struggle to accurately describe it. We seem to have left the analysis and study of power relatively well alone, the definitions remain imprecise and I put this down to a lack of need based on our ability to spot it when it is relevant as well as it being a purely contextual thing. There is hard and soft power but again, this is a contextual description of the interaction of states and governing bodies. You could certainly use hard and soft power to describe a situation between individuals, it might be less appropriate but generally you would be understood. Hard and soft power are still vague descriptions of power that require us to use our innate understanding of it to be able to appreciate what is going on. In physics power may be applied in many contexts however the building blocks that contribute to the power are the same, time and energy. I want to probe into the nature of social power to see if there are any building blocks so to speak. I want to reduce power down to its base components to see if that yields new insight or better understanding.

If I had to define power in a human context I would say it is the ability to impact the outcome of events to align with your desires. The more things you make happen that you wanted to make happen the more power you have. We can apply this to some very mundane situations. I want to drive to the shops because it is quicker and easier than other methods and I can do so because I have a car. My car gives me power. You could argue it was the money that bought the car which was the source of my power. What about when my car is at the garage? I still paid the money for it but I don't have access to the power it usually affords me. In my mind I am of diminished power when my car is at the garage.

Really I want to just teleport to the shops and back or imagine what I want and have it appear in front of me much like the people in Star Trek. These I cannot do and not because my transporter deck and replicator are at the garage or that I lack the funds to buy such things. I cannot do it because it isn't presently possible to do either of those fun fiction things regardless of the funds at your disposal. Money gives a lot of power but it is capped. With these simple pair of thought experiments we see that money cannot be a building block for power. A better analogy might be that of energy and electricity representing power and money respectively. Many of the things we use energy to power in our day to day lives runs on electricity. We convert other sources of energy into electricity so that it is easy to divide, distribute and transfer it. We use money rather than barter because it is a more efficient mechanism to distribute goods and services. Without this social agreement to respect the exchange value of money it would afford you no power at all in much the same way that a battery will afford you no energy without an appliance to use it in.

Although money is not a building block of power it is certainly a carrier of power, again going back to my analogy, much like electricity is a carrier of energy. This means that the things which generate you money within society are themselves some of the building blocks of power. Money is quite a good place to probe as it crosses all the various scales of power within society. Money is the same whether you are talking about nations, religions, large multinational companies, groups of activists, small local businesses, families or groups of friends. The quantities will differ but that is all. The higher up you go on the scale the more relevant money is, nations and businesses must consider it at all times but for fortunate families and groups of friends it should be almost irrelevant when considering the power dynamics at play.

The many possible scales at which power may be considered makes it further complicated. The power struggle between two individuals will be able to take on a variety of forms given the situation. Compare a mugging to a choosing of which particular pub to go to that evening. Both will be resolved in part based upon the power of the individuals in question but the methods and forms of power will be radically different. These one on one interactions are again wildly different from those between nations. Not only do you have the power interactions between entities at the same level but you have all the possible interactions between levels. Individuals against companies, nations against religions, families against nations. Finally, to make it all near impossible we have the reality of it all being one interlocking web of power interactions. All entities at all levels in relation to all others in an ongoing struggle to retain and gain power. A very similar mechanism to those at play in capitalism and evolution but general and universal. 

Maths is very easy when you have two things affecting each other. We can very accurately and simply describe the most basic atom with one proton and one electron interacting with each other. As soon as we try and throw more particles into the mix the maths becomes very hard and knowing what is likely to happen is much harder to predict. Even if we were able to map out the exact components of power we would not be able to use it predictively. The reasons are two fold, as with the three or more particle atoms, it is chaotic. Power also relies on using it, you can have loads of power and make bad choices and come out the worse for it. It is much like economics, you have to assume people do things in their own best interest which will work a lot of the time but not exclusively. As much of a science we might want to make of it the outcomes of power rely on human choice and so it can never be exact. The tides of power can be fickle like our stock markets and they can also be unpredictable and chaotic like our weather patterns. When talking about the expected results of a power dynamic they should be discussed in terms of probabilities and ranges at best.

We need to look at knowledge and information before moving on. Both are relevant to power and both are related to facts. I define information as time dependent facts such as Mr Bond is in Paris or the exchange rate is 0.71 £ on the $. These things are facts at the time but offer no assurance of remaining that way. Knowledge is immutable, it is facts that are not (or we generally believe to be at least) time dependent. The circumference of a circle is found by multiplying pi by its diameter or that aspirin is toxic to cats would count as knowledge rather than information. Both can be equally empowering but do nothing at all alone. You have to use to information or knowledge you have in order to gain power. The main distinction between the two is that you must use information before it expires which at least is a help in showing you how to use it! You also have to have either knowledge/information that your competition has not got or is unable to make use of.

Commonly it is stated that knowledge and information are power, this may hold more truth to it than any claims about money being power but it still isn't the whole story. A better way to look at them would be as a power multiplier. You have to already have some power in more tangible forms so that you can use your information and knowledge to increase that previous power. I play a lot of games, much of the ideas of power can be equated to games. Information is a great resource in games, it lets you make better plays but there are two common problems with it. Firstly, if you don't have sufficient other resources that the game revolves around then you can't do anything with that information. Alone it is useless. The second problem with information is the skill level, in a new game that I don't yet play well gaining information is of little value because I am clueless how to implement it even if I have the other resources to do so. The games I am best at are the ones in which I can best use information to gain advantage.

In game terms my power would roughly equate to my in game resources multiplied by my skill at the game and some number representing my level of information in the game. As such, with no skill or information my power is just my resources. A gain in information and no skill and my power is still my resources, I need to gain both skill and information together before I am able to increase my power level beyond that of just my resources with information and knowledge.

This leads to another property like information or knowledge that is ethereal yet relevant to power and that is intellect, skill, guile, willpower, confidence, or whatever you want to call it/them. It is another power modifier that can increase your power level but only does so if you have real sources of power to begin with. Essentially it a way to fudge the numbers so as to reflect the nature of human choice in power. All it is really saying is that if you want something more or are clever about how you obtain it you have better odds of getting it than the indifferent or thoughtless.

I have lumped these things in together because they feel mathematically similar to this problem. In practice willpower is often at odds with intelligence. You are confident in a situation which gives you power but your confidence comes from a lack of understanding the situation at hand properly, for example. This is not to say they are always at odds, you can be both stupid and pessimistic or smart and confident, although in the latter case less commonly in the face of poor odds of success! For a more comprehensive outline of power we should separate out willpower and intellect. Far more so than the separation of information and knowledge. This gives us three things of our own character that do not directly provide power but all of which scale with power. Those roughly being grouped into information, intellect, and willpower.

So knowing lots of things, being confident, and being smart will make you more powerful provided you have some tangible power. This is where we look back to money to show us what tangible power might be. In the board game analogy we are looking for the resources, the things you use to do the things with! I have found four broad groups which seem to contain all these resources. I have called these work, influence, might and material. Typically they are tangible and external unlike the three modifiers but they do not seem to fall within any strict parameters to help with definitions. Changing the scale of which we look at the power dynamic has a huge impact on the "resources" used to enact the desired changes.

While almost all decisions will be formed from some basis of knowledge, intellect and willpower not all actions require all of the four groups of tangible power. Some are entirely left out and others are pretty negligible when compared to others in other situations. This is where the context comes into play so heavily. 

Material power is the easiest to understand and relates most directly to the board game comparison. How long you can carry on driving without needing to stop to fill up is a power afforded to you by how much you have left in the tank. How much food you can prepare for dinner is contingent on your access to ingredients. How much of a sandbag wall you can build in a flood situation will at some point be capped by the quantity of sand. This is all again very context dependent. When events are time critical it may not be about how much sand you own but how much you have available at the location that will be useful within the time frame. For the less time critical elements you will find economics simply taking over. Money is a nice simple way to represent the acquisition of the required materials and their transportation to the place they are needed.

Work is the next easiest to grasp. It is simply the ability to do the thing. You have the ingredients for dinner, the knowledge of how to make it, the will power and intellect to do so but you still have to put in the work and actually make dinner. You cannot just will it into being sadly. You can pay others to make your dinner for you. That is an alternative but it still requires work and you still need to obtain that work in some way. Conventionally we use money to obtain work from chefs in restaurants! We also use money to buy machines that increase our own capacity to achieve work. Historically there was a lot of work obtained via duress. These days it is mostly mechanical work, hired work, or good old fashioned doing it yourself. Usually some combination of these things. The improvement to our tools has been one of the most significant factors in the increase of power our species has enjoyed. It has been continuous improvement to our pool of knowledge however that has facilitated our improving tools. 

Next up is might. This is typically the relevant power when the rule of law is not being followed. This ranges from the mugging in the street to the wars between nations. Often the motivations are to increase ones economic position but not always. Greater might can be obtained with an investment of work or the procurement of tools. Money can play a role in the lead up to a conflict but for any given conflict at any given moment finance is not relevant, it is just about who wins in a fight. This is why you tend to find people unafraid of a scrap having more clout in social dynamics. It is a big part of international diplomacy too. Countries dump vast swathes of their GDP into their military so that at any given moment they are looking reasonable when the question of who wins in a fight comes up. If they don't do this and just sit on the money and don't invest it into "might" then when the question comes up it is too late. It is a form of power society mitigates greatly and this is a good thing. The power of might usually results in destruction or people winding up forced into bad situations. In many ways society is simply a power allocation and distribution system. 

Lastly we have influence which is the most ethereal of the types of power. Usually it is bought with the other kinds of power. You have influence because you have might or the ability to control lots of resources and work.  Alternatively clever use of information can obtain influence. Simple charisma can do it too. Influence is at a bit of a peak presently with the internet being such a game changer. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and YouTube have vast amounts of power although it is broadly in the spheres of information and influence. Celebrities have more power than ever before due to platforms like Twitter and their considerable influence over fans. Not only is the concept of influence tricky because it is intangible and often linked to other forms of power but also because it delves deeply into the realms of psychology, which itself it not a solved science! In this context I describe influence as the power by which one entity can entice action from others without any promise, exchange, or coercion. One entity simply wants something done and others follow, be that for love, or respect, or some other motivation. At the individual end of the spectrum this is commonly seen in people copying or following attractive or successful people. You could argue that this was a bit like an exchange but the attractive/successful people don't have to give any thing away. It is like potential energy that can be used to power things without being consumed in the process. 

In the larger scale pictures we call influence soft power. It is a funny one because it seems at once both a result of others interpretations of your other actual powers in a given context and a quality unto itself. Influence is a bias for others in your favour and it is obtained by being liked or admired or by being in an enviable position. This makes it more complicated than the others. If we were trying to map all this power out as if it were physics then the core three physical sources of power, might, work, and material, would be the base units. The modifiers such as information are more like the unitless values in equations that just change the scaling of the values with units. Influence however is a derivative power made up from a potential combination of all three of the other base units and then seemingly modified by it's own unique unitless value that we can consider to be charisma, charm, likeability, respectability, desire to emulate etc. That can then be further modified with the other conventional modifiers like information. 

So there we have it, the seven factors that contribute to human power. Four direct sources of power and three factors that help you scale up those four direct sources of power.  Of the direct sources of power there are three physical ones in material, might, and work and then the more elusive, or even resultant, force of influence. Those four are then affected by the context of the situation rendering them anywhere from the only consideration to irrelevant, and then modified as per the relevant information, willpower, and skill. It feels as if it is too hard to measure many of these factors in general and even if you could, each situation where a power dynamic comes into play is sufficiently contextually unique that each would need a model constructing for it. For now it seems as if our own intuition in regards power is far better than maths, science, computer modelling, and all that new age jazz! A rare novelty. I am not really sure of the benefits of having mapped out this concept which most of us seem to intuit naturally. I mostly did it as an exploratory exercise for myself. There is no real huge insight here, I am just getting my thoughts ordered. My hope is that it will help  me understand and evaluate events in the world more accurately, easily and quickly. I find it fascinating how it overlaps so directly into strategy games all the way to man made systems like capitalism and also natural forces like evolution. Power and logic seem somehow linked, both directly, but also in that they seem to underpin everything else while having this hard to pin down and define quality to them. 

Cultural Conquest

I write this essay in the wake of the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. I have some mixed opinions about the situation most of which are irrelevant as I am not privy to all the pertinent information. I cannot as yet say if it was a good call from anyone's perspective strategically or even morally. I have always believed that war should be targetted at those giving the orders. It puts the incentives in the right place and would presumably tend towards a reduction in casualties and waste, and most relevantly the choice to go to war in the first place. That is a general case belief that goes on the assumption that the hypothetical war was inevitable, ideally from the perspective of the just against some objective evil. If there is an alternative way to avoid a war that doesn't involve killing people there is a good chance it is a better line of action. I certainly cannot speak to any of this in the current case of Iran and if conflict was either inevitable or justified.

I am left in this odd limbo of knowing a bit about the specific context enough to have my ideologies confused and conflicted but not enough to work it through and come to any real conclusion. I find the provocations unsettling. Major assassinations are a great way to escalate things towards a war. Indeed if the sides were at all evenly matched this would be taken as a direct declaration of war. I find the subsequent threats by the United States about Iranian cultural sites should they retaliate to be abhorrent. That is not an attack on anything bar humanity itself and does everything to suggest that such actions are not taken by the side of the just. Targetting those at the top of military operations might be the optimal way to fight wars, destroying cultural sites is the certainly not.

Mostly what this recent event has made me realize is quite what a backwards idea conflict between nations and escalating it really is. It is actively counterproductive and incredibly short term. It smacks of much that is done wrong by capitalism and democracy in their haste and hedonism. This is most so the case for the United States who are in a fantastic position economically and culturally. Leading the world in both aspects means they do a better job of conquering allies than they do enemies. It is in their interests to have a world full of economically developed and stable allies. Such places trade with them, they use their products and make them richer and more powerful.

I would argue that the modern human in a western democracy has far far more in common with any other such person from any other such nation than they do with their grandparents and older generations. Indeed I would say that the western democratic nations 100 or so years ago have more in common with places like Iran now. We have changed and we have moved away from historic cultural elements. Not entirely and not evenly at all, I am talking on the large scale and in trends and averages. Democracy, capitalism, and especially the United States have become incredibly good at making things people want. From food, to gadgets to entertainment, giving people what they want is what the States is absolutely the best at. These commodities have shaped us and made those with access to them more homogeneous. The internet has sped this process up too. 

There are certainly subtle differences from place to place but broad strokes we humans like and dislike much the same stuff the world over. The more we mingle, trade, share and do anything at all with each other the more alike we become. It is not so much a case of American or British or where ever, it is a case of modernizing. We are leaving behind some older values and ideas. We should reasonably expect the people of the world to become more like one another as they mix and consume the same sorts of thing.

With this in mind it would make far more sense to remove trade sanctions with Iran. It would make even better sense to provide free wifi to the people. Free Netflix and BBC iplayer access. Low cost iphones. Get McDonalds and Starbucks out there. Much as I doubt it has a direct effect on the government it should have a more pronounced effect on the people which slowly indirectly affect the government in turn. People being much the same the world over are likely to embrace these things given the historic precedent set.

It is somewhat of a cultural conquest but it is a lot less arrogant than it sounds when you consider how quickly we have made the transition away from such things ourselves. It is not our culture we are attempting to replace theirs with in this cultural conquest. It is instead a new modern culture that is evolving. It is more like sharing than overwriting. The United States simply has a small head start.

Saudi Arabia is an example of a country where American influence is having a significant impact despite the different forms of government and ideological differences, mainly in the influence of religion on the governance.

This concept of cultural conquest also explains a lot about the tight controls on things like the internet places like Russia and China are attempting or enacting. I used to think it was an attempt to quell internal dissidents which seemed futile and ill conceived. As a means to prevent a cultural assimilation it makes rather more sense. Certain modern western values are not entirely compatible with how a number of governments like to act!

Now, I am not suggesting that a world full of consumerism and hedonism are a good thing. The idea of everywhere just being little America is pretty horrendous but it is vastly better than war or the persecutions of people by their own governments. A world full of Starbucks and McDonalds doesn't sound like the healthiest, physically or morally, but it sounds a lot more stable and peaceful than the one we have. It is at least a good way towards the global cooperation that is likely needed for humanity to take the next big steps in progressing the species.   

Certainly there would be plenty of kick back from governments on letting in external retail and media brands. You could encourage the companies in question negotiate with the foreign governments themselves. All the domestic governments need really do is offer subsidies and remove impediments for successful entries into the foreign markets and let natural forces do the rest. The BBC being what it is should just be free to anyone who wants it and who's government allows it. It should be better funded and more autonomous too but that is another matter! The US should be trying to get McDonalds and Starbucks into every nation, with appropriate twists to accommodate the culture at hand, be that certain kinds of meat off the menu or what ever. 

It just seems like such an all round win. No one wants to bomb retail outlets from their own companies. Why invest in missile defence systems that add little utility when you can just as effectively protect yourself with the companies of hostile nations. It works in all directions, would be aggressors gain compliance and alignment, and a bigger customer base. The potential targets gain a valuable defensive asset which in turn provides utility and employment to people. In even more simple terms it is applying resources in working together rather than working apart. 

In practice there are likely many reasons this is not common policy. For one it is only just becoming apparent how our use of companies and media align cultures. It is a slow process that operates over generations and as such is a little too slow to be an individuals goal or plan. Us humans like to see the fruits of our labours and so long term projects are less commonly found in societies, even less so in the policies of democratic governments with short term limits. I have witnessed the UK and the US becoming more alike over a couple of decades, accelerated with the advent of the internet, but they were closer than most to begin with. They are also still plenty different despite years of closer relations and exchange. There is every chance that such things would be a significantly slower process in more different cultures with a greater degree of rejection or required tweaking of products needed. Even so, we are not looking to make culture homogenous. That would be ghastly. Especially if it were a superficial consumerist US one! I am all about the freedom but I would like to see it used more nobly and productively. Ultimately I just think it is a good rule of thumb that countries should do their best to encourage homegrown industries to expand beyond their borders. We have a lot of protectionist subsidies and these would be far more productively used to incentivize global expansion rather than protect against international competition. 

The more ways we can interconnect and the quicker we can do so the better. We will be better positioned to tackle the problems of our age which are very much species wide issues not national ones as they have historically been. We need global responses to pandemics and to climate change. Anything that can help us see ourselves in the same boat as each other will really help us navigate that boat in the right direction. Things are clearly already going in that global community direction but there is a long long way to go and we can do more to help it along the way, or indeed in many cases stop resisting the change. 

The Failings of Modern Western Systems

 

Capitalism and democracy have brought us a very long way and been instrumental in rapid advances in technology and human rights and thus quality of life for many generations. They have brought us so far and yet I intent to argue that they are no longer fit for purpose. Society has outgrown and outpaced what they can do for us and we need better solutions for bigger problems now faced by people and humanity as a whole. 

Conceptually I am still big advocates of both capitalism and democracy and would seek to include strong components of both in any utopian design exercise. They are just not the be all and end all that society seems to treat them as being. We are blinkered by their historic success. We try and spread democracy like we did with religion in the middle ages as if it were doing people a huge favour, saving them from eternal damnation etc. That we presume our form of government so successful and fit for purpose is a little frightening. Capitalism and democracy are held in such esteem that making a case against them feels like it would be viewed in an almost treasonous light. 

What is needed is something more appropriate to handle a world were technological progress is extreme, a world where we are sufficient in numbers and power to affect the whole planet, and one where we are increasingly connected through trade, communication and the actions of others. These three significant factors  (our nominal power, rate of power gain, and interconnectedness) are the things that are putting strain on democracy and capitalism and exposing the weaknesses. As systems they demonstrably have flaws but there were no better alternatives and the flaws were minor in relation to the perks afforded. The perks of these systems are certainly still bigger overall from where I am sat but the flaws seem to be increasing in issue at an alarming rate. 

The only flaws in capitalism are that wealth has an aggregating tendency and that there is not direct alignment of the interests of people and that of profit. Luckily these are both easy fixes. We have taxes which are the perfect tool for wealth redistribution to counteract the aggregating properties of wealth. These taxes work double as they are also incentives to mitigate negative externalities from the pursuit of profit such as air pollution or unhealthy consumables. Sensible taxes on undesirable actions prevent a lot of them and can fund remedies for the remainder. Taxes can be directly applied in sustainable and fair means with the end of promoting the best advantage for society and should be the responsibility of the government to enact. A discussion about where society should be headed and what is the "best" are certainly important details to be clear on so that a suitable job can be done of things. Rather too big of a topic to branch into here though. 

The problems with democracy are more numerous and harder to fix. From them stems the lack of appropriate fixes to the ills of capitalism. If we were to simplify modern society and try and represent it as a board game then government are effectively the designers who right the rules. The aim of the game is ultimately up to the individual however capitalist society very much has money as the points system it uses to determine the winner. It is pretty obvious that a game is rigged when the writer of the rules is playing the game as well and changing the rules as the game is in progress! Big game producing companies don't let their employees enter into competitive events for this reason rather obviously but society lets it's leaders be very involved in the wealth game. This is a source of bias at best and corruption at worst and needs addressing much more than it already is if we want a government that is doing a proper job. 

The next issue with democracy is that it is very short term. Parties and individuals do things that get them re-elected rather than what is in the ultimate good of people and society. Mostly these things are aligned but not always. A lot of good things take a long time to take affect and thus confer little advantage to those in power at the time. Equally there are some bad things with long lasting negative effects that give short terms boosts that are all too common in democracies. The solutions to this issue have the effect of making it look less and less like democracy. They involve things like removing term limits and having the only options to remove people from positions of power as firings, resignations, or the old classic of death. You can also do it with fixing single terms with no re-election potential but then you also somewhat need to do away with party affiliation which seems like it might be a tricky extraction.

The final issue of democracy is the scope. You absolutely don't want just one governing body in charge of everything globally even if this would solve a lot of issues. It is for much the same reason you don't want monopolies operating in the economy. They stop working optimally and can stifle emerging competition that might force them back into serving people rather than themselves, or at least just being inefficient and stagnant. This means you want to have numerous governing bodies as we do in the modern world. This however concedes a lot of power, away from people and towards wealth. Governments have to bid for the wealth of the powerful, both companies and individuals, with favourable tax rates and business laws. Essentially this undermines the power we would like our governments to have and lets it reside more in companies than people, more in the few than the many. A large global wealth gap means wealth can exploit poorer nations, often in ways that ultimately come back to affect everyone, again such as polluting industrial practices. 

These three failings of democracy ensure that the flaws of capitalism are not properly tended to which in turn has the effect of making people subservient to profit. Modern society is a support network for companies more than it is for people. In a world with an ever shrinking need for workers this is a fairly scary prospect. There is a lot of anti establishment propaganda that suggests there are cabals of the wealthy sinisterly plotting against us. In practice it is just mis-built systems, the improper alignment of rules and the systems by which we write those rules that naturally makes it look that way. There is no big conspiracy, it can just appear like it from some angles because people are acting in accordance with the incentives. They are not in cahoots, they are just playing the same game. The system has always been imperfect but there is no impetus to change anything so long as things are improving, which they generally have been. There is especially no motive to change when there are no obvious alternatives that are better, nor when things are as good as they can be for those with the power to make real change. The issue is that there is little discussion about these problems. No real end game for people or nations in mind. Humanity is just sort of bumbling along fixated in the now which has historically been fine, if a little slow and meandering. Now it is more of a problem. Now our actions have significant impacts on the future not just socially or economically but on the whole planet. 

There are arguably some current social factors hastening the issues with democracy. These are far from self evident and more speculation on my part than anything else. We have information overload making things more about frequency and volume than they are about accuracy. You could also say that social media has promoted a purer kind of democracy where our political leaders are more representative of us as an averaged whole than they are the best of us, as you would want at the helm. There also seems to be an element of increasing political identity and tribalism. As religion declines in most democracies it feels as if politics is taking it's place in many ways. It is quite dangerous when ones identity is so heavily tied to anything ideological like that as it makes any attempts at compromise like personal attacks. None of these things really help democracy function. Ultimately you just want a really well educated society with a really boring governing body at the helm making informed, impartial choices to benefit the people and not those making the choices. 

Education is huge for a democracy to function well but it is also one of those really slow effects that doesn't do all that much to help those in power at the time. It seems as if we could really do with improving the utility of our education for modern life, certainly the education I was given aged 10-18 involved learning a lot of fairly useless stuff in time that could have been spent better preparing me for adult life and being a benefit to society. This is rather a topic for a different essay but it is an important point to note. Any nation touting for democracy should be supporting that argument with a top tier and up to date education program. Why do we have teenagers learning about Shakespeare, oxbow lakes and trigonometry? These are fairly niche specialized things that only those with interest should be learning. There are plenty more worldly useful topics we could use that time for that would help people in the real adult world that schools barely touch on such as mental health, political systems, efficient actions, critical thinking etc. Good education should be interesting and beneficial. Useful education needs to be at least one of those two things and yet there is time being wasted on teaching things that to many people are neither. 

Back to the main topic, this essay is just asking the question, what should an ideal form of government look like? We are assuming we can apply the simple fixes to capitalism if we can solve the governance problem so we only need to worry about that. It should have elements that ensure long term thinking is used. These come from removing biases from those making the choices. No need to worry about retention of power either so as to as tackle the potential issues with bias and short termism. Discretionary life appointments or fixed duration single terms are the obvious ways to do this (as I am talking about things like running the NHS, the chief of police etc rather than pure politicians we are largely already doing this). No financial gains to be made from choices made is the other big one. This mostly just means people in government shouldn't sit on company boards, have other jobs, have significant investments in any areas, and likely applied to immediate family too. This all gets rather sticky rather quickly. You cannot eliminate nepotism and so putting too much effort into doing so is foolish. Means by which you can help tone down nepotism without adverse costs seem good but not something to get overly hung up on.

I used to think implementing some kind of large jury style parliament backed up by a well run civil service and a referendum style democratic vote of approval system on new legislature was the way to improve things. A kind of purer democracy which took politicians and parties out of the mix. There are certainly some benefits to this idea but sadly I think it is likely more flawed than existing democracies. Experiences of the fall out of referendum politics and how they are quite divisive in society has made me wary of them. More than that it is the total lack of suitability of people to make informed choices. Politicians struggle and mostly seem to fail so what hope do less qualified people have? The world is incredibly complicated. To make good choices you need to be so well informed generally and be an experienced expert in the field relevant to the issues at hand. You then really want a bunch of people exactly like this to debate and discuss the issue and pool their opinions, all without personal bias on the subject. A consensus agreed by such a group has a reasonable chance of making good choices but only if it is an isolated matter, in reality nothing is isolated so you need to bring in more groups of experts to expand the discussion, make sure some fix isn't causing a bigger issue elsewhere. This is not what the public nor the government is, although at least the latter get to listen to such debates before they ignore the advice. What people want is absolutely one of the most important things to take into account when trying to run a country however handing over the reigns of power to the people is less than likely to result in that. We need a system that involves the people and removes bias, but it needs to also involve the best means to make optimal choices. We are probably out of luck even with Plato's philosopher kings as there is just too much to know and understand. They would mostly just have to be masters of delegation these days! 

I used to think that the wisdom of the crowd theory was enough justification for democracy to be the best solution. In practice it clearly can't be. In a guess the weight of a cow at the fair event your data would be meaningless if you had to submit your answer in an entirely unknown unit of weight. Wisdom of the crowd only works if people are informed and aware of the parameters. We know what a kilo is and can see the cow and can have a rough stab at how those things relate! That is far too simplistic of a comparison for it to apply to democracy. Rather than the average cancelling out noise as it should when people are making informed judgements you just get chaos as you do with the unknown unit of weight measure. For democracy to function in accordance with wisdom of the crowd you need very specific questions with expositions on expected outcomes for each possible vote. That or some other clever means of involving the people and giving them voice and power but not in a way that lets them steer you into a ditch or just running round in circles. Voting on preferred experts as executives is a good way to do this but it becomes more of a popularity contest than a proficiency one and moves you in the direction of party politics. 

What I now see as the best direction to go in as far as governance goes is a little bit more dissolved and certainly not at all mapped out. I think you ideally want to take certain elements as globally as possible while making other aspects small scale. Ripping the responsibility of governments in twain and sending them in opposite directions. Local councils would gain more power as would NGO style bodies. If you could have more and more nations on the one hand joining up to trade pacts, freedom of movement pacts, standards pacts, etc, and on the other hand dissolving power internally towards local governments it would allow for a transition towards a sensibly run world. Ultimately if we can create a kind of tax body which is independent of nations and governments then there is no place for companies to hide and exploit people. They cannot play regions off against each other and so profit can start to serve people again. This would need to be an opt in system which feels like it would then need to come with some significant incentives. 

To have any sort of system where you have independent bodies responsible for important areas of society you are going to need a checks and balances system with means of oversight. There needs to be a power cycle from people to local government to global bodies to courts and regulators. There would also seem the need for a funded news, facts, and information service that was a lot like that arm of the BBC. Much like education, you can't hope to usefully involve the people if they are not informed. With misinformation so rife there needs to be a reliable means of finding out facts. We have seed libraries, places where weights and measures and kept. It seems like we need one of these for truth. Sounds like a scary prospect trying to get a publicly funded truth department. Very dystopian in feel if not intent. It too would of course need to be overseen with checks and balances. 

We are doing most things correctly or nearly so. We have systems already like those that seem most suitable. The changes required are much more like bug fixes and updates than they are akin to revolution. While we are seemingly on track to eventually get there in terms of a utopian society that really does serve the people it is neither assured nor getting there fast enough for the problems at hand. We need global action as soon as possible as far as the environment goes. This could help kickstart a powerful NGO with a means to collate funds and redistribute them as a means to tackle climate change that could then morph into one capable of managing a (partial) global tax and wealth redistribution system. It wouldn't need to be the only system of taxation by any means, it would just need global reach. Local governments would likely still source most funding from their jurisdiction. Much as this is a bit tangential a route from where we are to where we want to be is essential. You can make plenty of utopian systems to rule over society but without a means to get there they are either outright failing or at best causing severe disruption, setbacks and tumult. Or we could just let it go to ruin and rebuild with the benefit of hindsight and the convenience of significantly reduced numbers to rebuild for... That would be an easier thing to do but it is going to be an unpleasant journey to the starting point. Really the task is simply to smooth out and coordinate power while reducing conflict. These are all quite tricky as people never wish to relinquish power and people naturally have tribal biases. This is a fight not just against systems of power but also human nature embedded within our ambivalent selfish genes. When put in those terms it does feel as if we have done pretty well to come as far as we have. 

The Case of Shamima Begum

I am no legal expert and cannot comment on any aspect of the case of Shamima Begum on that front. What I can do is comment from a moral perspective, or that of what it says about the state of our society. Shamima is not easy to like and I cannot say that I do. I have only seen a few clips of her being interviewed but she comes across poorly, as I am sure would most teenage girls, especially ones in her position. The thought of an interview of a teenage me being how I was judged is a pretty chilling prospect. Shamima has also made some very poor life choices. Being dislikeable and having allied herself with public enemy number one she has made herself quite easy to villainize. That being said, our governments attempts to wash their hands of her is utterly disgraceful and wrong on multiple levels. I don't think she should be given a free pass, I don't know the specifics of her actions, and thus a fitting punishment if required, but I do know she deserves a fair trail and that is our responsibility. She is our mess and if you make a mess you clear it up, that is pretty basic stuff. 

Now, lets us consider that she was 15, a minor, when she left the UK. We failed to protect a minor being groomed by a terrorist organization. We failed to stop them stealing our children and putting them to use in their quite awful cause. Then we had the gall to blame her and make her the bad guy. We are trying to punish a child victim as an adult perpetrator. We are doing so despite that not being how the law works by not letting her have her trail or become repatriated. We have failed this girl every step of the way and neither admitting this failing nor trying to make amends. We are likely going to continue to fail her simply in an attempt to avoid having to admit that we ever did in the first place.

While this is bad on a personal level for her and her family it is more concerning on a societal level. Imagine her name was Emily Watts and she was pretty, eloquent, and white. Would she have her citizenship revoked? Much as those responsible for this debacle would argue that they would but you know they wouldn't have. This hypothetical Emily could have dual nationality with somewhere else like Australia or Canada or other "people like us" countries and that wouldn't change things either. Sure, we would try Emily when we brought her back and she would do some jail time if deemed that she had acted criminally but we would never discard her. What we are essentially promoting here as a nation is a pretty clear racial bias where by people who look like like Shamima are not regarded as British regardless of the fact that she is 100% British. She has never visited Bangladesh. She speaks with a London accent. I don't care what you look like or what your name is, your accent betrays "where you are from". Shamima is a Londoner. All you do by trying to claim she isn't somehow is to disenfranchise all those British people who also look like her and reinforce an "us and them" bias in white British people who are predisposed to such things. 

Revoking Shamima's citizenship is a huge betrayal of individual justice while also being a massive betrayal of the British people as a whole, particularly those that have dark skin. It is a terrible example to set and really diminishes our ability as a nation to try and take the high moral ground. Not that anyone which much of an interest in history would be fooled into thinking we had that in the first place... What I find most distasteful about this whole thing is that there is relatively little in the way of outrage. This is the kind of thing that has long term implications and fall out. It is like when you drop bombs with too much disregard for civilians and then wonder why a generation later there are loads of easily radicalised young adults. These choices are imposing a rift on society that is of no merit and to no ones advantage. Rifts that can last for generations. The public seem like they either don't care all that much or actively support this choice and this re-enforces this rift. Obviously ours, and most other governments do loads of shady and immoral stuff, plenty of which results in loss or life or other injustices. What stands out about this act is that it is a very symbolic one with little in the way of benefits. It looks like a political stunt. Like, selling arms to even shadier nations is bad but you have to pay the bills somehow. You can see why arm deals happen and appreciate there are some perks involved. This case however has nothing but drawbacks and would be so easy to just not do. I guess at least it does showcase that governments act a lot more like they have your interests at heart than the reality. Even the favoured people are still third in line behind self interest and those with power and money. 

Human Subservience to Emergence

Humans like to think of ourselves as the dominant species on the planet. While this is broadly true it is rather missing the point as species are not the only players in the game. If we actually look at where all the power and wealth is located we start to see a different picture forming. By far and away it is companies and governments which have the wealth and power. They are the entities which dictate how our lives are lived and the direction we are heading in as a species. This is not obvious at all however if you take the view that both companies and governments are controlled by people. It may focus the lens as to where power resides within humanity but it does at least keep it in house. If you start to consider companies and governments as emergent properties of society then you can take the view that humanity has already become a subservient species. A scary irony for all those who fear robotics and artificial intelligence will enslave us - it has already happened with with far simpler creations.

How is it then you ask that a company or a government acts independently from humanity despite being controlled by people? This is a bit of a semantics fudge as clearly neither are independent of the other. What I mean is to do with who's interests are being served by the actions of companies and governments and by those of people. It should be the case that companies and governments serve people and improve their lives however it increasingly seems to be the case that these institutions take more than they give and are primarily self serving.

This emergent property of seemingly inanimate institutions working in their own interests is the result of a few things coming together. Firstly it is to do with success in business or on politics as having little or nothing to do with the overall net good they afford to humanity. Obviously they need to bring some good to some people else they would cease to be viable but they only need to bring that good to some people. Just so long as some people, the "right" people, are better off it doesn't really matter who is worse off. Governments mostly only need to care about their citizens and only if they are liable to revolt or have the capacity to vote. Businesses only care about people with money and only in places in which they operate. Essentially business is just playing one game which is about market share and profitability and governments are playing a different game of simply trying to retain power. These are both linked to serving people in that gaining market share and profitability are generally the result of providing a desirable service or product better than anyone else in the world of business. Retaining power as an elected government requires that they too do enough for the people they govern to seem like the best option.

Ideally these institutions would exclusively work to serve humanity and make things better but there is no mechanism to power such wishful thinking. Competition between companies and political parties is needed to keep them streamlined and functional but it leads to their primary objectives only having partial links to the purpose they are intended for. This is essentially the inverse problem of communism. That ideology set out to make serving people the primary objective and failed because it had no impetus to make it work. Either you wind up with self serving capitalist institutions or stagnating incompetent communist ones. Capitalism and democracy clearly won the first debate in terms of economic and technological progress which in turn seems to afford be best quality of life and freedoms for individuals but there is more at stake. In round two we now have planetary issues like climate change to which capitalist and democratic countries are seemingly quite poorly equipped to handle. We also have serious social issues brought about by huge wealth gaps within societies and this is just scratching the surface as to the failings of the democratic capitalist systems. We in the west seem to think round one was all there was to it and that capitalism as it stands is the optimal or only options, neither of which are true. Pure communist setups do not do well and are clearly not a solution but it is increasingly apparent capitalism and democracy are also failing us on so many fronts.

The next important factor in the emergent properties of companies and businesses is that the individuals helping to run these institutions are well aware of these rules of the game and that people are self interested. People have ambitions, they have bills to be paid and all that sort of thing. When you work for a company or for a political party your actions are broadly going to be those that are most inline with the objectives of your employer. Lots of individuals, most of which will have decent morality and low levels of power come together to operate under one umbrella that collectively has vastly more power and easily facilitates the degradation of a moral code. Trying to do the right thing for humanity, be that sustainable practices, appropriate treatment of employees, people in other countries, people not buying your goods or voting for you, and all that sort of thing will often not be the best thing for your institution. Either you exploit some people somewhere and benefit from that or you don't do that and some other less scrupulous entity does so instead and puts your institution out of action or at least reduces the power it wields. So often the situation is either do the wrong thing to remain in a position to be able to do the right thing. This obviously just means whoever is on top should be doing the "wrong" things when it is in their best interests.

People have always been self interested and throughout history have exploited each other for their personal gain. This aspect of humanity has helped to mask the fact that we have now outsourced a lot of this exploitation to companies and governments. I don't know if that is good because it is inevitable and at least this way we bear less of the burden for our poor actions or bad because it is obviously bad! Sadly the former is only a relative good if it is inevitable and has no superior alternative which certainly isn't impossible.

In theory we only need to solve the issue as it stands for governments as if they were established in a way that they did act purely in the best interests of humanity they would legislate such that companies do so as well. The issue with that is that we would need somewhat of a consensus on the matter from governments around the world. If only a few governments are forcing companies to be socially and environmentally responsible then those that are able will simply base themselves elsewhere. Governments have to compete with each other for the affections of companies. The can do this in positive ways like providing good infrastructure, stable and safe social climates, well educated work forces and so forth but these are costly and slow. They can do so in more neutral ways with tax incentives and relief. Or they can turn a blind eye to dubious practices ranging from exploitative pay and working conditions to lack of regulation on waste and so forth. All these dubious things reduce company overheads and thus increase profitability which is a win for them. The government gets increased cash flow, tax revenue and employment opportunities which is a win for them too. It is the people who lose out both in and out of the hypothetical country in question. Those in the country may suffer low life expectancy and poverty due to low safety, polluted environment and low wages. Those outside lose employment opportunities and ultimately have to share the same planet we are collectively spoiling even if it is further from the source so to speak. If we do manage to find a solution to governments operating as they do, and sadly necessarily must, we need to do find away to implement it globally which just seems like wishful thinking.

The only real thing I can see towards making progress in the right direction is a reduction in nationalist ideals. Most countries try and generate national pride and very understandably. It is hard to ask people to go to war for you and pay taxes and things when people have no love for their country. It is shunned as unpatriotic in most places, even bordering on treasonous to not support ones own country blindly and in all ways. We chose which club football team we support and sure, a lot of the time it is the one most local to us, but not always. We do not tend to chose what country we support, it is chosen for us. It isn't even really a question that we could support other nations even in something as simple as a sports event, posing it as such sounds odd. There is nothing wrong with having pride in ones own country either. We are bound to like the things we grew up with, the traditions that we are used to. We will always identify more closely to those that have shared experiences which fall a lot in line with culture. There is however a big difference between a country and a government. A country is so much more, it is primarily the people but it is also the traditions, the laws, the history, the geography and so on. The government is just the institution presently steering the ship. At school we are taught about the great things our country does but very rarely the bad things. We are also given the impression that disloyalty to a government is the same thing as disloyalty to the nation. This is the kind of thing that should change. The world is made small by technology and we are much more like one big nation in so many ways. The problem is the rivalries between countries leads to huge waste, inefficiency and opportunities for companies and governments to make things worse for everyone not better. We need to start thinking of how to make things better for everyone and not just our customers or countrymen. And by all means, put more effort into those close to you, be it family, the local community, or the nation, just make sure it doesn't come at the expense of anyone else.

I don't really see a way to avoid companies and governments having differing agendas from individuals. There needs to be a driving force for them to work and that is all there is to it fundamentally. Nor do I really see a way in which those people working in those institutions will be able to get away with putting the greater good over that of the institution when that is an option. All is not without hope however as I can certainly see a world where public pressure and well thought out laws and social systems mitigate or minimize any adverse side effects from these differing agendas. Essentially I think we can get to a place where the option to not act in the greater good is less an less viable for the institutions. Public pressure is certainly the starting point. In terms of climate change we could leave it upto economics to solve it but that will be too late for those without sway in the markets. This includes most poor people as well as many non-people things. Luckily public opinion is changing and it is driving change in practices and legislation. That is why I think a step away from nationalism would play a big part in getting public opinion focused on goals that are for the overall net good. This is not really a solution to the problem, more just a way of moving in a potentially more positive direction. The emergent properties of companies and governments controlling things are not even really the problem, it is how we let them do so. We want them doing the job they do, we want them steering the ship, we just want them doing it on our behalf rather than theirs. You could even look at it in a completely different light, that humans are so impressive that we have come together to create entities even greater than ourselves. Life an emergent property of chemistry, evolution an emergent property of life, consciousness an emergent property of evolution, society an emergent property of consciousness, and now companies and governments an emergent property of society. Where next? Are we just a step in the progress towards something greater in the crazy world of emergent properties or have we just let our tools get a little out of control?

Humanity's Worst Invention

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday. It occurred to me that hate was a somewhat unique attribute to humans. Significant parts of the emotional pallet are palpable in intelligent mammals but hatred and anger do not feature in the same way in the non-humans as they do with the humans. It is hard enough explaining ones own emotions so trying to explain how a dog or cat feels differently will not be a seamless process!

The widest gap between humans and other mammals is of course languange. This allows us to create a much more real mental construct for past and future. Most mammals have a "two dimensional" emotional pallet where all the shades are rooted in the present. Humans manage to have warped their emotions over a three dimensional canvass where by things can be past, present or future. While you may get nervous dogs as much as you do nervous people you will not find a dog worrying in the absence of a thing to worry about. A dog will learn not to walk in front of a car as a result of its memory from previously getting run over and loosing a leg. It will not however spend its days regretting getting run over in the first place or indeed worrying about the next car that is going to hit it. Dogs are aware of past and present, cause and effect but they do not house their emotions. Emotions relating to experiences with cars are almost entirely confined to situations containing cars in this example. The dog does not carry those things with it in quite the same way people are inclined too.

Fight or flight is a practical survival mechanism when faced with danger. The issue is that past and future dangers still elicit bastardizations of fight or flight emotions in humans. You can't run from something that has happened, nor can you fight it. All their is to do is accept it and learn from it but that is not often how humans behave as a result of past fight or flight moments. I think that it is the structuring of time aspects within our emotional range that has resulted in hate and anger being such significant emotions in the human range.

Anger and hate are not practical or useful emotions. They are a damaging side product of an emotional construct that hasn't caught up with our intellectual capacities (or indeed our modern way of life). I have always felt like emotions where a blend of things, like mixing paint. You have your general positive paints and your negative ones. Then you have your personal paints that relate to feelings about yourself and ones that relate outwards to things, other people and so forth. Mix a positive paint with another persons paint and you have affection, mix the positive paint with your own and you have pride. There is another set of shades/tints or whatever you want to consider them as in your own analogous understanding of things. That is more the context of the thing or being. Each different mix results in a new colour of emotion. While humans many have the broadest range of possible emotional colours they can mix it seems as if many of them are redundant or even counterproductive. Their are shades and gaps on our large three dimensional canvass that have no productive value but none the less need filling in.

The purpose of emotions from an evolutionary perspective is simply a way of quickly aiding an animal in decision making. For simple creatures with simple lives it is a pretty good system. It allows creatures with fairly little understanding of their environment or the mechanisms by which things work to function very effectively within those systems. Humans have broken out of this blissful bubble of ignorance enjoyed by the rest of the living world. We shouldn't need emotion to guide us in our day to day as we understand how things function. We can plan, organize and arrange things. We can consider potential different outcomes and prevent bad ones occurring. While all this extra knowledge of our environment is fantastic for technology and science it poses problems for our poor sensibilities!

When we come across something we dislike in the world we generate the fight or flight emotional paint mixer. When that thing is far away in time or space there is no action to be taken. You are left with this nasty shade of hate that directs you to act but has no proper outlet. As such it lingers, like a heavy metal trapped in the body. There are lots of people out there who are building up unhealthy levels of hate for which there is no proper outlet or useful way to enact.

If you mistreat and beat a dog it will dislike you. Depending on the dog in question it will either cower in fear when it thinks it sees you or it will try and attack you. What the dog will not do is brood on that fear and grow it out of proportion. It will not machinate in the absence of your presence ways to hurt you back or eradicate your potential threat. Revenge is entirely a human trait. It is something we like to think of as an outlet for our buildup of hate. Animals don't do revenge because it is a completely stupid endeavor. It is a risk and a waste of time and resources. If animals bothered with revenge they would not fare so well in the big game of evolution!

I think there is this misconception that evolution is perfect and that emotions are a pure and righteous natural response to things. People don't perceive hate and anger as pernicious problems as they imagine we have them for a good reason. I propose the reason we have such things is the evolutionary equivalent of growing pains. When your bones grow too fast for your tendons and they hurt! Our intelligence has outpaced our emotions and as a species we are hurting. Anger and hate are the toxic appendix we could really do with finding a good way to remove. By all means, dislike something. Have preferences and opinions. Just don't let those things turn into anger and hate. Fantastic advice in theory but all too akin to me suggesting you simply stop some other natural bodily function like digestion.

Normally I like to propose solutions when I highlight problems. I am not exactly sure what a sensible solution is for this one. Evolution won't now fix it for us so we can't just wait and hope it will solve itself. I am not sure that a medical, genetic or technological solution is a good idea either. It sounds like it would touch on some serious moral issues and would likely have some scary unpredicted side effects at least in the development stage. Probably the best route to easing the tensions caused by hate and anger in society is cultural change. If people are made more aware of the issue and if the viewpoint shifted from emotions all being pure and natural then it would certainly be a big step in the right direction.

Evolutionary Selective Breeding

I have a theory regarding evolution. It makes some sense logically but as ever I only have anecdotal evidence and have no plan to obtain any scientific evidence on the matter. My first premise is that members within a species, or a not insignificant proportion of those members, have a predisposition to being attracted to similar features to those they have themselves. While I have seen this plenty enough with people it was actually the occurrence of it in dogs that was the real tip off. Cultural effects could very easily be the driving force in humans pairing off but that seems like it would be a much weaker force in dogs. When out and about with a pack of assorted dogs and we come across another dog it is always those closest in breeds to it that get most excited. The Labradors want to get frisky with the other Labs, the Terriers prefer the Terriers and so on and so forth. It is clearly just a trend as well, it is like a filter that applies to a more abstract notion of attractiveness. There are lots of big handsome dogs that all the bitches have the eye for regardless of their breed. The overall attractiveness of a dog is modified by the closeness in breed to the bitch evaluating him. A medium looking Lab looks better to another Lab on average than it does to a Schnauzer. They say there is no accounting for taste however I propose that there is some accounting for taste, certainly statistically when it comes to what we find attractive.

They say opposites attract, that is also true to a degree but I don't think it is the predominant factor. For one, differences stand out more than similarities in a pair. Couples are more alike than they are different although the areas in which they are different typically are very polar. These polar attributes in human couples are more to do with character and skills than they are with looks but there are some trends there too. Now, this is all conjecture but it would make good evolutionary sense in the way that good science involves controls. If you are predisposed to traits that are either similar or opposite in regards finding a mate and producing offspring then that will have the best and quickest results overall for your species. You still get good genetic variation by encouraging both opposite and like attributes however you focus your results so to speak. A bad trait will become more localized and have more chance of failing to reproduce in further generations, it will be removed from the gene pool more rapidly. Equally a good trait will be adopted more rapidly. If you purely mix genetic material at random evolution will be slow. If you are able to focus on a mix of more of the same genetic material with fewer yet more extreme differences then your species will evolve quicker and more suitably. It is like selective breeding but done with sensible logic and maths as nature loves to do rather than by design as we humans understand and practice it.

That is basically it, a theory on how we select mates based on how it would best advance the evolution of a species on the whole. I assume this occurs quite a long way down the tree of life among species that reproduce sexually. So this is good for evolution in the wilds of nature but what does it mean for humans?

The spread of human traits should be increasing and it seems like it is. Humans are the second (first? pretty sure dogs is first) most diverse species on the planet. With dogs it is down to the selective breeding we have imposed on them. With humans it is for a different reason. Our technology and society is the main thing aiding us in our capacity to survive. Being short or tall, fat or thin, stupid or smart, now has very little baring on your ability to reproduce compared to really any point in our history, it being increasingly important the further you go back in time. Most health issues now affect people later in life. Without nature ruthlessly plucking off any imperfect design humanity has become incredibly diverse. Technology has given the design space of humans a lot of wiggle room. Our predisposition towards mates with some significant number of similar physical attributes combined with this large wiggle room has lead to a very diverse species in what seems like a pretty short space of time on the evolutionary time scale. There are both pros and cons to an increasingly diverse population and discussion of that seems like like it would be best left for another time.

Philosopher Kings

I consider Plato's Republic to be a cornerstone of right wing thought. Despite considering myself a lefty I have never disagreed with his assertion that the Philosopher King is the optimal form of rule when you have it. I also entirely agree with him that it is not sustainable nor is it something you can aim for, it is just luck when you get one and that luck will assuredly run out. This is why I have always favoured democracy, a less optimal but more consistent and entirely sustainable method of governance.

To this end I have always been an advocated of John Stuart Mill's approach towards liberty and society. For democracy to work you need to trust in the good judgement of people. John Stuart Mill is a man who advocates liberty and education as a means towards ensuring people can make good judgement.  I had chosen to believe him as his ideas fit with mine regarding a social view and therefore a way of maximising the effectiveness of democracy.

What I have recently realized is that there is every chance that John Stuart Mill was just a Philosopher King himself, it was he who made his people great and not so much the environments he created. It is impossible to say which is which or even really separate those two things however it does serve as an ominous reminder that my political beliefs are potentially misguided.

If Plato is right and the only way to have the people of John Stuart Mill is by having an actual John Stuart Mill in the first place then right wing politics are probably more on the money than the left in a theoretical sense. This is sad, it means society works best when people are told what to do, when they are given less choice and less freedom when it comes to running things.

I have always been a strong supporter of referendum votes. Single issues are much clearer and purer than voting for people or parties and their complete set of opinions and stances on all matters. Recent events with the British EU referendum vote has completely shaken this view I once held. I felt entirely unqualified to hold an opinion on the matter and would much rather an executive had been in charge of the outcome.

Further to this I found the single issue to be incredibly divisive. The country seems incredibly split with far too much vitriol held for the other side. Given that I had no factual basis to cast my vote upon I used social premises to guide me. The status quo was fine as far as I could and voting to leave a union is never going to have the effect of increasing your foreign relations. As such I was part of the remain camp. I am not angry to have lost, I am sad about it but far from devastated. This is the only public comment I have made on the matter thus far.

Change and upheaval can be very good things for society, leaving the EU might have been the right thing to do in lots of ways. I didn't know before and I still don't now. We are where we are and so all there is to do is make the best of things going forward. Getting angry at those who got us here will only make things worse.

The significant aspect to me of all these recent events is how it has shaken up my belief system and not at all the potential economic ramifications. A little like losing ones faith. I thought I knew where I stood politically and now I have far less idea. I was a left wing democrat, now I am just confused. It is perhaps back to the drawing board for a Utopian form of governance. Referendums seem fair but is fairness worth all the conflict that comes with it?

The issue might not be with referendums and democracy as such and could be to do with the present difficulty in establishing truths and facts within current society. There is so much information, so many voices and such short attention spans that truth is often just the group shouting the loudest. I have a lot of rethinking to do and society has a lot of rebuilding to do but none of that has to be a bad thing. Questioning things, especially those you thought you knew, is a healthy way to go about things.

For now the main thing I can take from this is that I am far more likely to cast my votes towards potential Philosopher Kings and far less towards political ideals. I can also fairly comfortably state that none of the prospective replacements for David Cameron we have give even the slightest wiff of the complete Plato package. Can we just have a referendum to put David Attenborough or perhaps Steven Fry in charge for a bit?

Google Truth

There is no such thing is bad publicity is far too simple a statement to be accurate. There are reasonable sentiments behind it that apply in certain situations at least. It may well be good for promoting a circus act but BP and Volkswagen I am sure feel differently about negative press. I want to look at how the internet is affecting information, perception and publicity. Broadly my conclusions are that, although it is still far from a unanimous fact, bad publicity is seeming to have some more notable positive effects in certain areas. I also am beginning to wonder about the notion of truth and how that seems to be changing.

The internet is fantastic, it is the mos significant human advance since the printing press and is still in its infancy. It is an exciting time to be alive.While there is still much more positive change to come as a result of the internet there are issues with any new technology. We take a while to adapt, to learn what is acceptable and what is not. We need to adjust as a species and work out new etiquette surrounding our new technological capabilities.

I am reluctant to bring my tastes and opinions into evidence but I have no other recourse to explain myself on these observations. Without wishing to name and shame I will simply say that a larger number of the top artists, performers and "celebrities" of the day seem to be quite unpleasant people than in previous decades. Extreme to the point of being interesting but not at all good examples of people. There seems this morbid interest in what horrific thing some of these people will do next and so they generate quite a lot of extra media interest. I am shocked to find such people with some of the highest followings on Twitter and other such social media outlets. Dim as my view is of humanity I can still only conclude that at least half of the followers of such characters are simply doing it for the same reasons one cannot avoid looking at a road accident as they pass by.

We measured things like popularity on sales prior to the internet. For record companies I am sure this is still the driving force behind most of their choices however the rest of us seem to now measure popularity based on internet traffic. The more internet traffic you get the more you are being advertised for free and the more you have data to support your popularity. It is one of those works both ways thing. You can be good and so people will hear about you or you can have people just hear about you and assume you are good. Either way you will end up with some sales. Twenty years ago there was a lot more success based on merit and far less based on appearances and character.

Put another way, you might hate a lot of the music being produced at present. You might hate the people doing it and watch their moves so as to relish in their falls, If this describes you then you are part of the reason these characters exist. We now have two types of celebrities, those we love for who they are and what they do and that are examples of how to be a good person. Then we have the anti celebrities which serve as a reminder of how not to be and what the troubles are with society.

There is a new currency in town, we used to have just money and votes and between those two things most political power was found. Now we also have hits, little votes we make all the time telling the web what we want to see and do.

This concept of the political power of internet hits leads to the concept I call Google Truth. It doesn't really have anything much to do with Google but I couldn't find a better word to summarise the mechanism at work and so I stuck with it. The way Google Translate works was explained to me as something that looks at as many copies of the same text in the two languages in question as possible and simply takes the most common translation as the right one. It was a breakthrough in automatic translation software and was only possible with vast amounts of data. I am sure search engines work similarly and use records of other peoples searches and most common hits to provide results for new searches.

Twenty years ago if I wanted to know something I would look in a text book or an encyclopedia. Now I ask Google, often it points me towards Wikipedia. Although it took a lot longer to find information before the internet I only needed to find it once. Now I find I am much more wary of the information I get. I will find several sources and compare them or I will go to places I can place in a known context of trust. When I know a little about a subject I am looking at I am a lot more aware of who I can ask, which sites are reliable and so forth. Finding out that kind of information is easy and feels reliable. When I am treading new waters am have no idea where to look or who has credible opinions and knowledge I am clueless and find the internet far less helpful. Yes, there is lots and lots of information but without context or sufficient other relevant information I find it to be less use than before in a lot of ways.

There are areas in which the internet seems to be a shouting contest rather than a vast encyclopedia. If  you are looking for information supporting anti-vaccination it is out there regardless of the truth of what a terrible idea it is to not get vaccinated. The more anti-vax content there is on the internet and the more people looking at it the more it will increase its online credibility all regardless of the facts.

The internet feels like it has the capacity to spread misinformation. It can reinforce your biases and opinions with no need of evidence to support doing so. This is the basis for the concept of Google Truth, it says that the position with the most hits is the truth and that is not necessarily the actual truth. It is good in that it forces me to analyse the information I find rather than accepting it as fact as I did last century.

Leaders have been creating false truths to propagate in society for centuries, this is nothing new. The change is that the mechanisms driving the internet mean that it is a naturally evolving thing rather than a specific planned thing. You don't need money or votes to affect the truth now, we all just slightly affect the various truths found online in our day to day browsing. Some naturally evolving things are good, the economy, evolution! My hope is that the actual truth has a survival advantage over a false Google Truth as it were in an evolutionary analogy. As such over time the truth will out as they say. Given the similarities with evolving systems it implies that there are environmental niches where false Google Truths will flourish. While we can assume the truth will out it will be a slow undulating process.

If misinformation online is a problem going forwards then perhaps there will become some accrediting body that certifies sites for accuracy. Like the BRC or ISO9001 so that consumers of the sites information could revert to those encyclopedia years and assume some accuracy of fact in what they are reading. Not mandatory but sufficiently recognized that the majority of sites became accredited.

If we learn to think about what we read then Google Truth's will not be a problem. If we just accept what we read then we will have lots the blind leading the blind. A couple of decades is not nearly long enough to assess the outcome of the internet at all, especially given the many variable associated with something in its infancy. It does seem like cultural progress is speeding up which again implies good sense is winning out over false Google Truths. It also seems like there is a lot more noise coming from sections of society with quite shocking and antiquated views. Broadly I think this is an indication of the potency of the internet in being able to magnify everything opinion and information based and not an indication that antiquated views are on the increase as a result of Google Truths.

Am I left or right wing?

When I was younger I thought I was left wing. Certain appealing morals seemed embedded within left wing ideals. Due to my limited perspective of one I am afraid of bias and so have spent much time since coming to understand the right wing ideals to be able to better see past the bias. It is said that those who are not left wing when young lack heart and those who are not right wing when old lack brains. While too cut and dry to be accurate I can appreciate the sentiment behind the saying. Over the last hundred years or so right wing politics has done better on average for society than the left, excluding a rough patch in the late 30's and early 40's which is not something I care to try and compute the total effect of. This is another broad claim that could be discussed at length and that I have no intention of explaining or justifying. It is simply an opinion I have found that I now have. It is not so much the right that trumps the left, more that it is cohesive with capitalism and thus more naturally successful. Capitalism is the thing that has most driven improvement in society over the period in question and it has best done so under the bareback riding right than the reins clasping left. This is an economic, infrastructural and technological measure of improvement rather than a moral or happiness one. I would argue that left wing governments in democratic capitalist states do a better job of increasing the morality and content of society but this is even more subjective and harder to demonstrate than an economic difference and again, I have no intention of doing so.

The more I look at right wing policies and my theoretical ideas of how to run a perfect society the more I find that I am not left wing but right wing. Most of my methods of utopian governance would be derived from right wing economic principles. They have an air of left wing about them because I have overlaid the highly practical workings of capitalism with my moral code so that they are less open to abuse. It is always powered by capitalism but tempered by some notions of equality. The free right wing capitalism is alike to a train engine while left wing ideals are just the tracks that keep it going in the direction you want it to safely and smoothly. All the magic happens in the train, the tracks are just a dull, static necessity.

When I probe this idea even further I find that left and right distinctions lose much of their meaning. You want both, but you want them for different reasons and acting in different ways. Treating them like they are the two sides of the same thing, both fighting for the controls, simply feels inefficient. The difference between the political left and right, certainly in the democratic capitalist west, feels really rather minor in the grand scheme of things. In terms of political alliance I have typically favoured those I find morally most acceptable however the older I get the more I find I am drawn to those who seem like they would be most capable of running things.

Much much more relevant to me than a right or left wing slant on your ideas on how to run things is the idea of efficiency. Certainly there are two clear ways to divide up the pie, equally, a slice each, or not equally. The only half sensible non-equal method is upon some measure of merit and there we have the two main ideas of modern governance - communism and capitalist meritocracy. It seems pretty much over for communism and even slices of pie and the debate is all about how big the big slices should be, how small the small ones can be and who should get which slices. The main focus should not be so much on slice sizes and distribution but on making more pie. Simply put, if we make enough pie then everyone can have as much as they want! Humanity is quite a long way off the technological levels that would make Ian M Banks Culture utopia of infinite pie a possibility but we can certainly make a lot more pie than we presently do. Every wasted resource and unnecessary job done ultimately means less pie. A lot of things we commonly do or that capitalism encourages are not the most efficient way to do things, usually just the most rapid. A lot of the choices we make as people and the conflicts we have lead to a lot of inefficient things being done. Making more pie and being more efficient should be the centre issue for any political party, for any company and for that matter each and every one of us. In answer to the original question, I am right wing mechanically, left wing morally and above all I am into the idea of the efficient production and consumption of pie!

My Autism

I have autism and I am uncomfortable talking about it but it is for all the reasons you might not expect. A part of my reticence to divulge that I am autistic is because the term is very broad in meaning and not well understood biologically or socially. When I tell someone I am autistic they do not know what that means about me nor do they know what response I expect of them in return for my revelation.

The other part of my discomfort with the subject is that I feel like a fraud. While cultural perception is changing the view is still largely that autism is a disability. This is not an unfair view to have as for many that is exactly what autism is, however there are the lucky few to whom autism is a gift. I count myself among the lucky ones and feel as if I am being disrespectful to those who struggle with autism when I say that I have it also. It is confusing for others as well when they see people requiring life long care due to autism and then are confronted with someone like me using the same descriptive term to describe themselves and so I don't often bother.

Better terminology would be a great help in this matter. I have tried using phrases like “a little bit autistic”, “high functioning autistic”, or “on the spectrum” to better describe my condition but these feel just as ambiguous as well as attention seeking and pompous, and so I gave up trying. Mostly now my friends and family will break the news to any new person on my behalf which saves me the awkwardness. Usually however they are doing so in an attempt to calm down some social faux pas I have made! “Oh, don't mind Nick, he isn't being an arsehole, he is actually autistic.” Once you know me a little bit it is much easier to put the term “autistic” in an appropriate context and not have it either be meaningless or misleading as it is when you have no knowledge of my character.

I only discovered I had autism in my early twenties (about ten years ago) and have not since bothered to get diagnosed, both of which facts exacerbate my feelings of being a fraudulent autistic person. A diagnosis is only needed if you wish to get care, indeed the fact that I don't need any care means I wouldn't get a clinical diagnosis. This is all well and good, I don't need care and so not being able to get a diagnosis so as to obtain care implies that the system is working as intended. The problem is that while I don't require any care I do require understanding. By having the system not really recognize those who don't need any care they perpetuate the social perception that autism is exclusively a disability.

As the general aim seems to be getting autistic people out of care and into society it seems a little odd that most of the studies into autism overlook those who have managed to avoid needing care themselves. I have been very lucky in a number of ways, all of which have greatly helped me to get along in society. I can easily imagine that by changing the conditions of my life very little and nothing about my autism at all that I could have wound up being a far greater burden on society. I hope that by writing my experiences of growing up with autism and finding my place in the world I might help those without autism to understand it a little better and those with autism to perhaps find some idea as to how they might cope better.

I am overly confident, indeed arrogant in many ways. So much so that a teacher told my parents this at a parents evening when I was about eight. They didn't like her or care very much but did relay the message to me none the less. I was oblivious to my arrogance or its affect on others at that time. I really benefit from being told things, they are not obvious to me. I knew that arrogance was not socially acceptable but couldn't make the link to my behaviour. Once pointed out that I was arrogant I could observe that trend in myself and rein it in. I am no less arrogant now that I was then but I have learned how to filter it out or counter it with humility in the few things I don't still think I am amazing at. This is typically how I have learned to fit in with others, by someone eventually disliking me enough to honestly point out my flaws so that I can realise them and address them.

I spoke of filtering things out, this is something I think neuro-typical people do automatically. My filter is manually operated and requires a lot of effort to work, not to mention a lot of mental engineering over the years to craft it. I find that now meeting new people or formal social affairs very draining as those are the occasions I am operating my filter at full. When I am relaxed around people I know and am comfortable with my filter is off and I speak my mind. I am very good with animals and attribute a large part of that to having the default state of no mental filter. I find both animals and people trust me readily and again I attribute this to being able to operate while fully expressing what is one the inside.

The day that I learned I was arrogant was the day that I started to build my filter. I was only really aware I had been doing this when I learned that I was autistic and therefore probably not alike to other people in how I saw the world. I figured everyone consciously had to work at not saying something offensive or inappropriate. It is like having to check down a list of things in your memory every time you use a new word or phrase in a situation. I am fully aware that I can come across as very stupid if I am caught off guard by a question or comment. If I have no past experience of how to respond to something that I can draw from, or even if I'm not very mentally astute due to something like just having woken up and thus am unable to recall those experiences I have had that would help then I can flounder for words and appear to shut down.

My filter is greatly refined compared to how it was by the time I discovered I had autism. My better understanding of myself has aided me in being able to compensate and improve my filter however it is the help of others, mainly my partner, in informing me of the way they perceive things and me that has helped. Essentially the most helpful thing in my being able to get along in society was having someone by my side to tell me not only when I am being an arsehole, but also why and their “normal” perspective on my actions.

Socially I am still rather clumsy and the further you go back in time the worse I get at an increasing pace. Oddly my arrogance to the rescue again as it provided an unusual defence mechanism for my poor social skills. I was quite able to loudly take control of a social situation and become the centre of attention. This is a trait I very much acquired from my mother. The trick is that by controlling the whole situation you never have to interact with anyone. If you are disrupting the whole class by putting on a clown show or playing up you become an actor or entertainer to be watched. It gives the appearance of interaction but is devoid of any complex things that I didn't understand or required too much effort to master. As soon as dealing with other people become too much I was off doing something unorthodox or radical taking the attention away from me and onto my actions. I fall back into this habit quite readily when drunk but otherwise tend to take a more recluse approach to not having enough energy to deal with a social situation these days.

At school I was not popular, the unusual things I did, coupled with repugnant arrogance, awkward social skills and an alarming tendency to speak my mind even when I thought little of things all contributing to my popularity. To say I was bullied would be misleading, being fairly big and growing up in a fairly nice area meant there was basically nothing physical that came my way I can recall. There was plenty of verbal abuse and exclusion however this was something most kids get at some stage and something I thought I largely brought on myself, even at the time. I gave as good as I got and the difference was I sincerely believed what I was saying which tended to give it more weight. I vividly recall getting some grief from my peers and the teacher for replying to one of the less intelligent people who was calling me a boffin that I would rather that than be thick like him. I was surprised at the condemning response of everyone else, I thought I had replied in kind and was being as fair as one can be in an insult slinging contest. It was experiences like this where people actually informed me of when my actions are unacceptable that gave me a reference frame or check-list of how to go about acting in future.

The abuse I got made me fairly thick skinned but it rarely bothered me that much. The other kids didn't like me very much but then I didn't like them very much so that all felt good and reasonable. I have always been perfectly happy entertaining myself and in my own company with just my thoughts. I didn't really form any proper friendships until I was about 13 or 14 with anyone my own age. There were a few older kids who I found fascinating that I hung around with but at school in my own year I didn't have friends as I would define it. I found I naturally ended up with whoever the next least desirable person in the room was and sort of out of expectation I would find myself doing things one does at school with them. These relationships were volatile, there was little understanding between us and I am sure I was very mean to many of those people I spent time with in my earlier school years. I think I attracted other outcast types at school because I seemed to revel in the abuse, if I was with someone else then I would be getting the abuse and who ever I was with was getting respite. Another fantastic irony that my greatly dislikeable nature made me attractive to certain kinds of people. Even when I started to get what were more ordinary friendships I still got loads of abuse from other kids. I likely brought it on myself more as I felt more secure in having real friends. What I didn't realize so clearly was that people didn't always see things like me, I assumed my friends felt like me and I was generally surprised to find them unimpressed with me giving abuse to people they were friendly with. This mostly caused problems in group situations, which I still struggle with to this day. One on one I can interact fairly well with people but in a group, particularly one with unfamiliar people I am inexperienced and prone to doing awkward things.

As well as older children I found I got on well with girls when I was younger and had more kindly relationships with them. Girls mature faster and although I was very immature I was drawn to the mature. I also think that girls are less mean to boys than boys are to boys which meant that there was less often abuse to start escalating and reciprocating. I attribute a large part of being able to form friendships with my peers to having shared interests. Before I had any real interests of my own I was only drawn to people who I found interesting and this was typically the different, the mature and the experienced. It was not until I had my own interests in things that I had any common ground to interact with people and it was not until I was old enough to be afforded enough independence that I could really acquire my own interests.

Interests are hugely important to me even now as a mechanism to interact with people. I can talk to complete strangers about some topics indefinitely however I struggle with small talk and basic interactions with people I know well. I am a massive gamer, I always have been and probably always will be. Games have rules and are highly specific. I can easily describe, discuss, analogize, break down and explain things like games. This gives me a firm bedrock by which to interact with people who share an interest in one of these kinds of thing. Science is another example of an interest I have that I have little difficulty using as a tool for discourse.

My first proper equal friend was also a gamer and a scientist. I learned from him that your interests converge on a focus when you have someone to share and expand on them with. Broadly we both just liked games but because we were friends and played them together we wound up liking and playing a lot of the same games. This further helps interaction as you will be more likely to share more interests with more other people via this sharing and focusing process. Also as you age more and learn more about the world while gaining ever more independence you gain access to greater pools of people who share your more obscure interests.

The main game in my life has been the trading card game Magic the Gathering, or as large portions of my peers would call it “Tragic, the Saddening”, some jokingly, others more seriously. It was one of my older friends that first showed it to me and at first it was just a game much like any other. Unlike the others however I discovered a somewhat small and underground community of players. Basically none of my school peers played Magic and so I had these two separate worlds. Of these worlds the Magic one had some strong appeals and I would periodically plunge myself into it when the other was not so pleasing.

The Magic community is more like a weird family unit than a group of peers. It has a range of ages and people look out for each other and support each other. The local games shop people will all lend each other cards and organize a car pool to go to tournaments. The older people will look out for the younger ones, the experienced players will mentor the newer ones. It is not all happy families but it is far more noticeably a community than anything school or working life ever offered. The main thing about the Magic community is that they all speak Magic and are interested in Magic. This meant I could go to a huge social even full of loads of strangers yet have no anxiety about the required social interactions. I could go to new places and meet new people with guaranteed common interests and I could do so relaxed and as myself. I did not have to act up or become the centre of attention to avoid interaction. I did not need to go over in my head every possible iteration of events that could transpire over the day non-stop beforehand because I knew I would be able to wing it so to speak. Because of the older maturer elements of the community I would frequently be told how to act better rather than simply being ostracised by the group. It so many ways Magic has helped me find my feet in the world. I still tend to relate real life situations to potential in game Magic situations simply because I understand things so much more clearly in those pure logic terms.

Gradually through a process of trial and error as well as seriously taking on board any genuine criticisms of my person from others combined with a diversifying range of types of social interaction I became a more socially acceptable person. By about sixteen I was starting to get a little interest from the ladies and by about eighteen I had managed to stop rubbing people up the wrong way as a matter of course should we not have much in common. I was fairly reasonable in one on one situations from quite young but had been so bad in groups that I was politically very toxic to be attracted to or be friends with. I often felt let down or betrayed by people I liked when they wouldn't back me up in my disputes with others. This was my fault for failing to realize my own confidence in conflict and comfort in being disliked by others was a not something many people shared. I am not sure if it is a result of receiving much hatred and abuse over the years or part of the autism that has made me not care what people think of me if I don't like or respect them. If I actively dislike someone it seems logical to me that their dislike of you is a complement of sorts.

So at eighteen off I went to university because that is what all the people my age that I knew were doing. Armed with my new ability to not offend and given a clean sheet in regards what people thought about me after having gone to school with me for the past twelve years I was fairly adept at making new friends. What I soon discovered was that most of these friends were just so because of civility and circumstance. All we had in common was age and location and for a short while this is enough. I had fun, I learned about people and things and places and I made and lost a lot of friends. None of them were painful or sudden loses but gradual drifting out of each others lives. Shared interests are important in a friendship as they offer activities to pass the time together after all that is to be said at that time has been said. Shared interests are not enough alone, they allow you to be with someone for long periods of time but they don't (presumably obviously to most of you) necessarily make for good friends.

What I found more and more as I lost friends that those that I was keeping were those who shared more that just interests with. They shared the same sorts of values and perspectives as I did and they were those who I would call genuine or true to themselves. I spoke of filters and how I manufactured one to keep all the offensive thoughts from getting out. This may make it seem like I am not a very genuine person however I would contest that this is about as far from the truth as possible. I am very much the same on the outside as on the inside regardless of the level at which my filter is operating. While I filter many things out I am manufacturing nothing new, all of what comes through the filter is real pure unadulterated me. When I am at formal situations and my filter is working at full capacity it is not that I am not myself, I am just an overly restricted and confined me that I do not much enjoy being. I am less able to express myself while the filter is at full.

All people have filters that they use in varying degrees however some people have masks as well. A mask is like a filter except that it also manufactures output that is not true to what the conscious feels. These masks are used for a wide range of things from coping with and or hiding from insecurity to being more effective in certain job roles. Not all masks are bad however none of what I would call my good friends ever wear one when they are with me. I struggle enough with working out what people think, want and feel when they are being honest to me. When people are disguising these things by use of personality masks then I really struggle to know how to interact. I can now recognize many kinds of mask people wear and the reasons they are doing so and although that helps me understand their motives it does not help me interact with them in a way I can generate any affection with.

Although I have been able to curtail many of the annoying things I might say through experience I have been less able to do the same for all of my actions. I am hypersensitive to things, it seems like a ludicrous thing to say because I have absolutely no idea how anyone else feels about their sensory inputs. I am exactly as sensitive to things as the only experience I have of how sensitive one can be towards things! Tapping, dripping, poking, flashing, beeping, ticking, loud, bright all have strong negative connotations for me. It is not uncommon to find that I have buried a ticking clock in a huge pile of clothes to muffle it. I usually wear a hood up while I am out and about and mostly it is to shut out much of the light, noise and visual spread so that I have less to process. Simply going a place I have not been to before I a draining experience as I am hoovering up all these new senses and committing them to memory.

Although they seem like quite different kinds of filter I lack not only the one to stop things coming out of me but also the one to stop things coming in to me. I have an eidetic memory which is sort of like what most people think a photographic memory is. My brain doesn't seem to bother filtering out the irrelevant data from the senses and just saves it all to hard disk. I can fairly vividly picture in my mind, much like a film reel, any place or event I have been to. I can draw reasonably accurate floor plans of buildings I have been in (each room). I cannot glance at a page in a book and then read that page in my head with my eyes closed. What I can do is return to a place in a book for some quote or detail with great ease just based on the shape of the words on the page. I can picture exactly in my mind where the thing I read is located and find it again.

There are some perks to this kind of sensory set up as well as some drawbacks. I don't get lost but wind chimes make me want to do bad things! I am used to living as me and so both perks and drawbacks are just normal to me. The important thing to do is find suitable ways to exploit the perks and to circumvent the drawbacks. Again, finding out I was autistic made me realise that there were some more fundamental differences in my perception of things which allowed me to better use and/or compensate for them. Had I been diagnosed earlier then perhaps I would have been able to start adapting sooner. Perhaps I would not have been mature or self aware enough to use that information wisely any earlier than I got it.

The biggest drawback to taking on all this information is that you fell like you are an old computer with too many programs running. You can freeze up every now and again, you can become intolerably slow at certain tasks. I feel like I am a vast database with huge hard disk storage capacity but only accessible via a cruddy slow old processor. It is very nice to have a great memory, it makes learning all the more rewarding but it is also tedious becoming tired just visiting some place new or being rendered incompetent by something as simple as a beep. Again, I am used to these things and so the thing I struggle most with is explaining this about me to others. It even sounds ridiculous to me when I give the reasons I do or don't want to do something.

I often wonder if my not knowing I was autistic all throughout my childhood and education was actually a great aid in my coping with it. Obviously I do not suffer the more prohibitive aspects of autism strongly which is the main factor in my being able to get along in society autonomously. If I had not been measuring myself against normal people while growing up then I might not have bothered learning many of the interactive tricks that I did. I might have just used my condition as an excuse to act differently and be a more difficult person as a result. I think the exclusion based on being labelled as autistic would have been worse to endure in my school years than simply that of being disliked as an equal. I am sure people would have been nicer to me but it would have been less of a useful training ground for later life. Having both the period of not knowing I was autistic and the period where I now do in my life have had strongly positive effects on my character but it is not the sort of thing you can plan to do. It was a lucky and happy coincidence that it occurred as it did for me and that both experiences have helped me rather than hinder as they easily could.

While I coped fine with school I was almost certainly a hindrance on everyone else, teachers and pupils alike. Several of my teachers went on extended leave due to breakdowns. There is certainly the argument that it would have likely been better for everyone else at school had I been diagnosed younger even if it might then not have been so helpful for me. Sadly this is all far too full of ifs and maybes to be of any real insight or use. Likely the best thing to have done in a utilitarian sense was have some social service autism expert spend a little time with my teachers and myself informing us and preparing us. The problem with that is each case of autism seems to be entirely interwoven with the character of the person, their circumstances and the extent to which they are along the spectrum. As such, the said expert would have to know me at the time to some extent to be able to help anyone out at all.

Even with my greatly increased self understanding it was entering the working world that I found the hardest. Getting autistic people into work so that they can be productive and autonomous members of society is the main objectives of support given to autistic people. It is hard to describe why I have struggled in several lines of work concisely or in an on point way. Typically I do things very well or very badly, very fast or very slow, I don't do middle ground much. I find it hard to do things not my way and I find it even harder to explain why I want to do things my way. I found I was winding up employers much like I wound up teachers despite my slightly increased maturity. Any job I had that did not engage the brain I would find so boring that I would become miserable. Most jobs that did engage the brain required a complete package of skills of which I was missing a chunk. I have done a variety of rather different things and have settled into one of only a handful of things that I could see myself being happy doing. I have been a shelf stacker at a supermarket, a professional card player, a production manager (I am a truly terrible manager and suspect that would be a strong trend among autistic people), a lab worker and now I am a very content dog walker.

There are a lot of things I could do very well in a lot of different avenues of employment. The thing is that in most of those roles I would usually be required to perform tasks I would be shocking at, basic things like not appearing to be a moron on the telephone. In order to utilize my potential in any given industry I would need a great deal of extra support from the employer. I don't know if that would be an economically sound investment in my skills but I should like to think so! There are certainly an increasing number of employers specifically seeking autistic employees so as to take advantage of their unique perspectives and creative problem solving. Socially speaking again I would suggest that the best return on investment would be to encourage employers to take on that extra cost and work with autistic people directly. Certain industries are much more suited to autistic peoples talents such as architecture, computer programming or scientific research. Any social worker helping out during childhood with education and teachers should go on to help out with careers advisor meetings, job applications and interviews in more extreme cases.

While I think we could do specific things like my afore mentioned vague social policies to help society get the most from its autistic people, and they to get the most out of life, I think the most generally helpful thing is information and understanding. It is my close friends understanding my quirks that allows them not to hate me. It was the lack of understanding of employers that made many of my previous jobs so all round unrewarding and it is my own understanding of my differences that has helped me to find a way of living that works for me. I hope this whistle stop tour of the autistic attractions of my life has helped spread some understanding on the subject.