Who watches the Wedgeman?

The title of this post is taken from Don DeLillo's 'White Noise' and kinda sums up my worldview at the moment. It seems that what I think is pretty much irrelevant to most of my problems and the people around me. I hate myself, other people still seem to like me. I think I'm desperately unattractive and dress incredibly badly, other people seem to think the opposite. I think I am fundamentally a good person, other people disagree. I think that the world is a black and white place filled with choices that are either right or wrong, other people tell me it's grey and that right and wrong are all relative.

Heinrich's right. What good is my truth? My truth means nothing. 

No 'did it hurt?' quips, if you please. This one seems to be: 1) enormously long because it is 2) in two parts and is both 3) Philosophical and 4) Political. Enjoy or ignore, it's mostly written for me to come back to in a few years and laugh at my naivety anyway. :)

I have (fairly arbitrarily) decided that there are essentially two types of people: happy people and sad people. One is not inherently better or worse than the other, they're just different. For the longest time, I'd thought that it was better to be sad than happy because then you weren't deluding yourself about the nature of the world (I am, as you'll know if you've ever met me or paid any attention to this blog, a sad person). A while back, I changed my mind and decided that it was a lot more fun to be a happy person. Even more recently (within the last couple of years) I decided that actually, I'd been wrong all along and that there weren't happy or sad people, there were just people and that everyone was happy or sad at different times.

Obviously I'm not saying that sad people are never happy nor that happy people are never sad. I've never thought this. It's silly, even for when we're making enormously broad assumptions about people. Right now, I'm not sure if it's better to be sad or happy. I'm not sure it's possible to change being a sad person into being a happy person or the other way around.  So anyway, ask yourself: are you a happy person or a sad person? (Be warned, I think there are a lot more sad people in the world than happy ones and if you're reading this, it's fairly likely that you're a sad person).

What else have I been up to? Oh, I had a nifty discussion with my brother earlier about what level of freedom people should have? I've discovered that I'm stupidly liberal and that he's slightly less liberal but still really liberal. Essentially, we discussed how far the state should get involved with the decisions of the people in it. I proposed free will as the core of my argument; if people want to send their children to work instead of school, they should have the choice to do so. They should be made very aware that doing this is a stupid thing and that an education will be the only way for them to make any money. People could also have homeopathic treatments (at their own expense) if they want instead of NHS care, they should just be made aware that they will probably die. This may keep the stupid people from living too long and improve society generally.

There would likely still be crime (the choice there is made by the criminals; if they stay within the laws, life is nifty, if they break them, it's really, really unpleasant). As for the crime of inciting racial/religious/etc. hatred, then that would disappear; I've always thought that if you feel strongly enough about something (no matter how stupid it is) then you should be allowed to tell others about it. It's more important to me that they can say these things and then have the people listening make their own choices afterwards.

If you're the head of an enormous megaconglomerate, the only thing stopping you from keeping all your workers' wages at 25p a year is the fact that they can work elsewhere and you'll have no workers. If all the enormous megaconglomerates work together to try and fix wages, then you have an issue. Nobody can live on that much money; they can't afford to go to other countries and so they would start to die. Once enough of them had died, the chairmen of the megaconglomerates would probably learn their lesson and work things out properly. Yes, this is all a fairly sinister way to look at things and one that didn't sit too well with my brother who thinks that every human being has a degree of social responsibility.

We should pay tax to help people who aren't as fortunate as us (being, as we are, very, very middle class) and try to be generally nice. The issue I have with these things is that these decisions are of benefit to the people as a whole, but not to certain individuals (i.e. the very rich). He thinks that this is ok because they're rich and can easily afford to lose some of their money to help starving kids (very true). I just take issue with the line drawing that has to go on. At what point do you decide to say 'hang on, the government has no right to decide e.g. what colour a person should have their house'?  I also take issue with the fact that a small number of people are deciding what will happen for the masses. (A large number can't decide because it becomes extremely impractical to have a referendum every few days for important issues). I don't think it's possible to have all of the people being happy without all this free will stuff.

Anyway. Now you all know that I seem to want everyone that isn't me to die (feel free to misquote me in the future if/when I become famous and things/you get bored) and that I'm apparently some sort of evil Jew-killing fascist. Possibly. This entry is approaching 1000 words, which is just as well because I was worrying that I wasn't able to actually write properly for lengths of time anymore. This bodes well for an idea which some of you may be aware of. Keep an eye on this blog for future entries with info about my theories on the nature of heroism. It should, if nothing else, be an entertaining ride.

Is there such a thing as an objective reality? Well, I don't know. I do know that I (and everyone else I've ever met, for that matter) view(s) the world subjectively. But if most of us view the same thing in the same way (e.g. 3000 people look at a spade and see a spade and one person looks at a spade and sees a geranium) then surely it must be that in an objective reality (if such a thing exists). Now, what if 20 people look at one thing and say it's x and 20 people look at it and say it's y. Well, then, I guess you ask more people. But what if no matter how many people you ask, you always get an exactly 50/50 split? Which answer should it be in an objective reality? And if all we ever experience is a subjective reality, how do we know that an objective reality exists?

I guess this is why I prefer the idea of a consensus reality. If more people believe something is x than y, it's x. If it's the other way around, it's y. I can appreciate that this does mean that if enough people believe in God, then He must exist and the same is true of the moon landings being faked and everything else. I guess there's problems to both viewpoints, really. 

Maybe it's possible that the consensus reality is also the objective reality. But then we have the flaws in both systems. Hmm, maybe someone (likely Sean cause he likes these philosophical posts) will make an insightful comment that I can edit this to include. 

"Who are you?", "What do you want?", "While you are here, do you have anything worth living for?"

In some ways, these are questions that changed my life. In other, rather more literal ways, I appreciated hearing them on Babylon 5 and then forgot about them. I was introduced to three rather different questions yesterday by Mel Kohlke, my English tutor when I helped out guiding new people around for the Open Day. My group was hastily taken around the university and grounds. We got as far as Sketty Lane (to see the sports centre thing), Singleton Park, The Pub on the Pond and nearly as far as the beach. She said there were three things all undergraduates needed to ask: how will I be taught? How much choice will I have about what I learn? And what can I do in my free time? She then went on to say how wonderful Swansea was for these things. Remarkably enough, she wasn't just selling the university to these people (though there was an element of that), she was actually telling the truth. I have had lots of choices and things; I do love the environment (part of the reason for taking the potential people as far from campus itself as I did).

While we're on the subject of 'things that changed my life, but didn't really, but I still thought they were cool', I decided to re-read Neil Gaiman's 'Dream Country' (a collection of short stories from the Sandman series) and was blown away again by how very, very good he is. The story of Calliope and how Ric Madoc is eventually driven to madness by all of the ideas he has (and they aren't just throwaway things, there are genuine novel concepts in therre - "A man discovers a library card to the Library of Alexandria" being a personal favourite) thrilled and moved me again. And the tragic tale of the death of Element Girl (a truly second-string character in the vein of a female version of Metamorpho), struggling to maintain a normal identity. Death was characterised perfectly, as she always is, and everything about Gaiman's writing screams 'brilliance'. It's come to the point where I'm beginning to doubt if I prefer Gaiman to Moore. Perhaps when I re-read Watchmen (as I tend to do on a fairly regular basis) my mind will change again.

Looking at my life from a different point of view, things seem all exciting and stuff as I approach yet another party (I didn't get proper sleep for 56 hours after the last one due to... stupidity and sleep deprivation mainly) as well as the now-staple Red Dwarf Night and a brand new evening of roleplaying on Tuesdays next week. Hurrah. I can't help but feel there's a Kosh-like figure looking over me somewhere and thinking (as he always does) "The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." We are all the pebbles in the avalanche that is human existence, and it is always too late for us.