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Ghost Dog

(16,881 posts)
Sat Mar 9, 2019, 06:10 AM Mar 2019

Brexit and the First Rule of Streetfighting (Tom Peck in the Independent + 'Shantaram')

... Insanity is to think the vapour trails behind aeroplanes are spraying the human population with mind-controlling chemicals. To do the same thing over and over again and expect different results is not insane. It’s just crushingly stupid.

Still, here she was, again, warning Remainer MPs that if they didn’t vote for her deal they risked the consequences of a no-deal Brexit. Here she was again, in her next breath, warning Brexiteers if they didn’t vote for her deal they risked no Brexit at all. The only vaguely new note to add to this ongoing cacaphonic ballet was to tell the EU directly that they too faced difficult choices in the coming days. That if they didn’t give her what they didn’t vote for and don’t want, they too would be blamed for this crisis that is precisely zero per cent of their making.

When she first tried this gambit, months ago, I likened her to the heroin addict turned armed robber from the novel Shantaram. “The first rule of streetfighting,” he says, “is to always get madder than the other guy.” When three Indian prison guards are about to set on him, he warns them that, sure, they’ll win, “But one of you will lose an eye.” And then, for an added rhetorical flourish, he punches himself in the face.

The guards, certain of victory, nevertheless back down. But it’s not working for Theresa May. It’s been obvious for months that the hard Brexiteers, the Remainers and indeed everybody else will take the risk that it’s the other guy, not them, that will lose...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-brexit-grimsby-womens-day-reporter-a8814281.html


From 'Shantaram' (Khaderbhai Khan's philosophy):

... If the circumstances are right, bits of matter will always come together to make more complex arrangements. And this fact about the way that our universe works, this moving towards order, and towards combinations of these ordered things, has a name. In the western science it is called the tendency toward complexity, and it is the way the universe works... To continue this point, the universe, as we know it, and from everything that we can learn about it, has been getting always more complex since it began. It does this because that is its nature. The tendency toward complexity has carried the universe from almost perfect simplicity to the kind of complexity that we see around us, everywhere we look. The universe is always doing this. It is always moving from the simple to the complex... this universe that we know, began in almost absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex for about fifteen billion years. In another billion years it will be still more complex than it is now. In five billion, in ten billion— it is always getting more complex. It is moving toward …something... And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to, is what I choose to call God. If you don’t like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving toward it..

... Our planet may be smashed, it is true, and one day our beautiful sun will die. And we are, to the best of our knowledge, the most developed expression of the complexity in our bit of the universe. It would certainly be a major loss if we were to be annihilated. It would be a terrible waste of all that development. But the process would continue. We are, ourselves, expressions of that process. Our bodies are the children of all the suns and other stars that died, before us, making the atoms that we are made of. And if we were destroyed, by an asteroid, or by our own hand, well, somewhere else in the universe, our level of complexity, this level of complexity, with a consciousness capable of understanding the process, would be duplicated. I do not mean people exactly like us. I mean that thinking beings, that are as complex as we are, would develop, somewhere else in the universe. We would cease to exist, but the process would go on. Perhaps this is happening in millions of worlds, even as we speak. In fact, it is very likely that it is happening, all over the universe, because that is what the universe does...

... Anything that enhances, promotes, or accelerates this movement toward the Ultimate Complexity is good... Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents this movement toward the Ultimate Complexity is evil. The wonderful thing about this definition of good and evil is that it is both objective and universally acceptable... When we say that this definition of good and evil is objective, what we mean is that it is as objective as we can be at this time, and to the best of our knowledge about the universe. This definition is based on what we know about how the universe works. It is not based on the revealed wisdom of any one faith or political movement. It is common to the best principles of all of them, but it is based on what we know rather than what we believe. In that sense, it is objective. Of course, what we know about the universe, and our place in it, is constantly changing as we add more information and gain new insights. We are never perfectly objective about anything, that is true, but we can be less objective, or we can be more objective. And when we define good and evil on the basis of what we know— to the best of our knowledge at the present time— we are being as objective as possible within the imperfect limits of our understanding... When we say that this definition of good and evil is universally acceptable, what we mean is that any rational and reasonable person— any rational and reasonable Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or Christian or Jew or any atheist, for that matter— can accept that this is a reasonable definition of good and evil, because it is based on what we know about how the universe works...

... (W)e can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality... At the moment, most of our ways of defining the unit of morality are similar in their intentions, but they differ in their details. So the priests of one nation bless their soldiers as they march to war, and the imams of another country bless their soldiers as they march out to meet them. And everybody who is involved in the killing, says that he has God on his side. There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others... (W)hen we look for an objective way to measure good and evil, a way that all people can accept as reasonable, we can do no better than to study the way that the universe works, and its nature— the quality that defines the entire history of it — the fact that it is constantly moving towards greater complexity. We can do no better than to use the nature of the universe itself. And all the holy texts, from all the great religions, tell us to do this...

https://steemit.com/philosophy/@milinko/shantaram-theory-of-ultimate-complexity
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