Infamy!

They’ve all got it in for me! The late, great Kenneth Williams’ most remembered line popped to mind when I began to type this wee blog. This weekend it was my birthday. I am a few – very few – years away from qualifying for my meagre state pension and life has been, shall we say ‘variable’. I’ve had a few laughs, I’ve loved and lost, I’ve made and spent a bit of money, but the one thing I have learned is that nobody – nobody – knows the future.

Not even Elon Musk who is, I fear, going to be responsible for a lot of people losing their shirts as they follow his wild lead. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, the next day, the next year; yet everybody thinks they know what happened before, or what is happening now. But do they?? This past year has given far too many people, ill-equipped to exercise such analysis, far too much time to do just that. And while it is only human to imagine the universe is out to get you, it really isn’t.

So how did I spend my birthday weekend? Eight hours of it, thereabouts, was given over to watching the whole of the new Adam Curtis documentary “Can’t get you out of my head – an emotional history of the modern world”. Having followed a link in a tweet I sat there, spellbound for the entire day. I couldn’t look away. My mood went from “Oh, my god, just another nutjob” to “Wow, I never realised that!” I found myself swaying in the breeze, my stomach lurching as I thought I’d fallen for propaganda then feeling relief that I had been right all along.

And it made me realise something; actually, it made me solidify theses I have had all along, as the best confirmation bias always does. There are conspiracies, of course there are, but conspiracy theories are invariably the result of incomplete facts, inadequate comprehension and, most of all, prejudice. And by prejudice I mean, literally, pre-judging the outcome. Thus, if you believe there is a new world order which wants to shut down economies, almost nothing will persuade you otherwise, especially arguments to persuade you otherwise.

I think I can guess where the documentary maker stands on Brexit, Trump, politics in general, but I wouldn’t bet my wad on it. The series skilfully mixes cold, hard fact, with some difficult to stomach truths and shows how little it can take to spread a rumour of foul deeds and secret plots. Eventually though, if you are honest and pay attention you come out of it realising that you were right all long.

Or that I was, and it’s all of you lot who are wrong. Or maybe that’s is how Curtis wants you to think… or not? I don’t, however, believe his intent was to change minds but rather to get you to open them a little wider. An unfeasibly large butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon rain forest and three weeks later floods drive people out of their homes in Somerset. Coincidence? What do you think?  

Humanomics

While politicians imagine they are playing chess and planning many moves ahead, only to be thwarted in turns by equally clever players doing likewise the rest of us get on with life as it is usually lived. We react serially and occasionally in parallel with events as they arrive at our door. Problems, hardships, opportunities, threats... win or lose, we meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. Here at ground zero, planet reality, we know that life ain’t fair and not everything goes always to plan. Chess it is not; chaos, more like.

The Domino Theory, the Butterfly Effect, the Law of Unintended Consequences. If Newton were today formulating his laws in relation to human interaction he might observe that every action has an unequal and not entirely proportionate, not necessarily opposite reaction. Press this button and what happens? Nothing to see here, but a butterfly in the Amazon has just been squashed by a falling tree... that nobody heard. The tumbling dice of everyday life on earth knows no easy solutions except the aggregated effects of the millions of one-to-one interactions that make up real human economics... ‘humanomics’.

When you analyse all those possibilities though, it turns out there aren’t a gazillion different responses to stimuli but in fact just a few: fear, revulsion, love, curiosity and some in-between shades we give clever names to but which are just shadows of the eat/fight/fuck programming of our primitive brains. Tip the first domino and watch them all fall in a horrible, slow-motion inevitability, one after the other. Cause and effect, time after time. Instead of planning theoretical chess moves those oh-so-important leaders might want to stand and observe how the chips actually fall.

A million people are in motion. Like water they flow where you let them. If you open your borders wide it should come as no surprise that they flood in. If you suddenly slammed the door shut, Mrs Merkel, did you think the flow would be turned off like a tap? Put a rock in the stream and the bifurcated migrant-Mississippi will find other routes; if the gaps through which those torrents flow are too narrow the pressure will build and down will come somebody else’s flood defences. Hungary, Croatia, Serbia... one after one they falter and tumble.

All very pretty till it flaps its wings

Was this the best that the EU could come up with? Over the forty-odd years we’ve been paying in (and increasingly so in the last decade) the EU has shown itself incapable of dealing with even the simplest attempts at harmonisation. Imagining it can exist as a central planning regime after the Soviet model, a bunch of detached, unelected, comfortably made men and women make their unhinged decisions, imagining the stupid humans beneath them will quietly acquiesce. But although true academic chaos theory involves quantum mechanics, predicting that if you push people they will push back is hardly rocket science.