Archive for the ‘A Theory Of Everybody’ Category
Dark Matter
There are five fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, gravity, magnetism and a human being’s conviction that the bad guy is never himself.
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
On Being Always Right
We have all heard it, but how often do we stop to think about it? Someone says, “I am never mistaken” or synonymous phrase. What could this mean? That the speaker has had his or her beliefs, calculations or conclusions independently audited for conformity to a real, external world, and has been awarded a grade […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
On The One Explanatory Model Of Our Time
“It always bugged me to be told that bullies were just jealous or insecure”, says a friend. “Even as a child I knew that was bullshit!” Her analysis was more that bullies thought they were superior and were thereby entitled to push the weaker around. My instincts ran in parallel, but I attempted to think […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
The Expatriate Excuse
There is a tremendous advantage of being a foreign resident that nobody ever cites: you can take absolutely any bad quality of human beings and attribute it to the host culture. So convenient is this that expatriates succeed in utterly forgetting what they witnessed in their own native land; everything negative is now treated as […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
The Democratisation Of Aristocracy
Never before in the course of human history, if I may wax a little Churchillian, have the bad habits and qualities of aristocracy reached so far down the social scale. The most obvious mode is, of course, fashion. Shopgirls are now as fashion-conscious as countesses of the ancien régime; one assumes that in the world […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
Why Maslow Was Wrong
If the Theory of Everything towards which the physicists are always striving means a unified and elegant account of all the forces constituting and acting upon matter, then any grand unified theory of man must provide a similarly elegant account of what drives human behaviour. The thing has been tried before, to less than universal […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, A Theory Of Everybody
The End Of The Road For Equality
The other day a BBC journalist was making or reporting a case for our concept of “equality” being a horrible muddle, confusing equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes. Well, duh, this used to be Political Ideas 101. Of course they are two different things! The right to compete on equal terms strictly implies the […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
Ho Anthropos Phusei Say-What? Zöon
Aristotle famously proclaimed that “Man is a political animal,” though “social animal” would be a better translation. It might be more accurate still to call him a blaming animal. After all, blaming is one of the things that we can do that no other creature can. Only in cartoons does the family cat claim that […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
Towards A Science Of Bad-Guy-ology
In my youth I remember a university tutor praising me for saying that Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative was nothing but a Teutonic pomposity for what we have always known as the Golden Rule. Forty years on, I now feel a sense of shame at this, somewhat ameliorated by a suspicion that I am not alone […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
Taking Up Space – The Real Basic Instinct
I vaguely remember Sartre writing that man’s most basic drive was “to fill holes – even the most obscene”. The rider has to be an insincerely contemptuous reference to sex, and don’t ask me what his Simone thought about this or about what woman’s basic drive might be. My takeaway is, however, that Sartre was […]
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, A Theory Of Everybody
