Who watches the Wedgeman?

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.