50 Fun Facts About Me

As I’ve turned 50 this week, I thought it might be both fun and factual to share 50 Fun Facts About Me, to mark the occasion. 

1)     I like lists. 

2)     I sometimes go over the number allocated on lists. 

3)     I was born on July 27th, 1976, as an only child to two wonderful parents. Although I’ve averaged around 20 stone as a 6ft 7 weightlifter for most of my adult life, when the midwife gave my wee bottom its first slap I weighed just a mere 7 pounds. 

4)     I’m hugely blessed to be married to my wife Zosia – a beautiful, smart, witty, caring beloved, who doesn’t mind that she married intellectually upward but domestically downward. 😅

5)     Remarkably, my mother became a Christian at the age of 79. She’s a wonderful lady – so kind, generous and loving – and we have a great relationship. My father was a lovely man too, but he’s no longer with us. He sadly passed away in April 2023, and is greatly missed. 

6)     I have absurdly low levels of anxiety and incredibly positive mental well-being, and remarkably balanced reactions. I don’t know how this came about, but I am very thankful for it. 

7)     There have been about half a dozen key ‘fork in the road’ moments in my life that have gone on to radically shape more than I could have imagined at the time. The most profound and exhilarating of which was becoming a Christian 25 years ago. 

8)     Each year my weight-training extremes involve heavy lifting outdoors in freezing cold January/February, and heavy lifting in the garage in unbelievably hot July/August. The benefits to the mind as well as the body are inestimably positive. I also cycle about 45 miles per week, which reaps multiple benefits in body and mind. 

9)     You can find my online work in many places: on Substack, on my Philosophical Muser blog, on my YouTube channel, on Network Norfolk, on The Adam Smith Institute blog, and several other places with a quick Google search. In the writing sphere, I always enjoy hearing from old friends and new. 

10)   The top four cheese-related snacks I enjoy making for guests at chez Knight are: 

I)                Fry halloumi in a pan with sweet peppers and mushrooms, beat eggs, milk and butter in a jug, then pour egg mix on the pan to make a halloumi omelette. 

II)              Ciabatta bread covered in Port Salut, dripped with olive oil, toasted in the oven and served with crisps and red grapes. 

III)             Fried halloumi, beetroot slices, sweet peppers and fried mushrooms in a baguette, lightly toasted in the oven. 

IV)            Roule with garlic herbs spread on McVitie’s digestive biscuits. 

Do come round and try them! 

11)   You can find lists of my favourite books, music, movies and TV shows in the Entertainment tab on my Philosophical Muser sidebar. 

12)   My favourite alcoholic drinks are Jack Daniel’s and coke with ice, Gallo red wine, sweet sherry, port, and Kronenbourg lager – and I love how each drink comes into its own depending on the context and environment. 

13)   My favourite foods are Greek, Indian, English, Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Thai, Turkish, and Spanish. Basically, pretty much all food. 

14)   One of my biggest regrets is not learning to play the piano and guitar at a young age. I know it’s technically not too late, but my late‑stage human‑capital accumulation curve makes me feel like I’ve probably missed the boat. 

15)   My Big 5 Personality Profile is approximately: 

Openness – 85^th percentile
Conscientiousness – 70^th percentile
Extraversion – 80^th percentile
Agreeableness – 65^th percentile
Neuroticism - 30^th percentile 

16)   I can be hard to pin down, because I don’t fit into easy categories. I am an extrovert who loves socialising, but I’m very content in my own company; I carry high levels of optimism and hope about humanity in general, but I’m generally pessimistic about humanity at an individual level; I value the private life, but I express like an open book; I am highly analytical yet emotionally highly sensitive, especially to other people’s pain and discomfort. 

17)   I am very bad at all outdoor sports that are played on a field or pitch. 

18)   About 20 years ago, long before social media and AI, I participated in a Turing test experiment to see whether participants could distinguish between a human from a machine.  I caught out the bot decisively by tricking it with a syllogism in which I hid a semantic shift in the common word ‘nothing’, along the lines of: 

Nothing is greater than the universe
An apple is better than nothing
Therefore, an apple is greater than the universe

Things have moved on a bit since those days. 

19)   I find it difficult to physically cry, even though I’m emotionally sensitive. 

20)   I once embarrassed myself in a supermarket asking a female member of staff by the fruit and veg section if they had any ‘free range’ bananas. After an awkward mutual pause, I realised I meant to say ‘fairtrade’ bananas, and we both laughed. 

21)   Politically, I don’t support any party. I’d characterise myself as economically right wing, socially left wing, anti-authoritarian, pro-liberty, human‑centred, reflective, and non‑aligned – which doesn’t bode well for any particular tribal affiliation. 

22)   For years, my most read Philosophical Muser blog post was The Economics of an 'All You Can Eat' Buffet. That stayed top of the pops for over 10 years, but has recently been overtaken by the following: 

1} The Political Compass Test Isn't Very Good, Is It? 

2} The Disturbing Cult Of Greta Thunberg: Questions She Can't Answer (And No One Else Will) 

3} On Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, Supply & Demand, Feminism & A Quote To Die For!! 

These posts are not, in my view, anywhere near my top 250 in terms of quality, but I assume their popularity comes from the fact that the subjects contained have been widely Googled.   

23)   My favourite UK places outside of my home city Norwich are London, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath and the Lake District. 

24)   My favourite holiday destinations outside the UK I’ve visited so far are (in no particular order) Barcelona, Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Sicily, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Athens, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, Porto, Dublin, Paphos, and Letchworth State Park in upstate New York (The Grand Canyon of the East). 

25)   I strike a fairly rare balance in harmonising a keen interest in both things and people. Some people are much more interested in things (mathematics, physical systems, objective properties, mechanical topics, etc) more than people, whereas some are really interested in people and inter-personal connections and less about things. I am passionate about both, and I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember, which feels like a blessing for which I’m very grateful. 

26)   My favourite poet is William Blake. 

27)   I try not to let scammers get away without telling them how loved they are by God, and that He wants so much better for them than the life they’re currently choosing. 

28)   I’ve never had or needed any fillings from the dentist, and I got to 49 without ever going into hospital as a patient – until I broke my wrist this year. 

29)   I’ve been quite prolific creatively over the years; I’ve written 11 books, have 5 or 6 more that are nearly finished, and I’ve published around 1500 articles in various places online. 

30)   I enjoy making videos for my YouTube channel, where I’ve even had a few famous people on as guests. 

31)   One of my main ambitions is that the material in numbers 29 and 30 above will bear more fruit in years to come. 

32)   I’d like to be famous, though not for the usual trappings of fame - least of all the erosion of privacy. What I mean is that I’d like to be famous by virtue of writing best-selling books or becoming a global influencer, yet still live a largely sequestered, private life. 

33)   I love dogs; and I believe that the way we’ve domesticated dogs and made them part of the family is one of the most wonderful things we’ve ever done. I’ve had two dogs in the past, and we hope to get another next year and call him Wodehouse (after P.G. Wodehouse, whom we both love), which I know the dog in question will appreciate, especially if it’s a male one. 

34)   I’m a mentor (in the sense that I’ve had formal mentees), and I might be quite interested in pursuing mentoring or coaching as a vocation at some point. 

35)   I lean toward Essentialism - choosing what truly matters and letting go of what doesn’t. If it isn’t a clear Yes, it’s a No, because life already gives us more than enough genuine Yeses to fill our time. 

36)   If I had to choose favourite animal, it would be a tiger. 

37)   Things I don’t really care for that many people do seem to, in no particular order: Star Wars, Harry Potter, the celebrity culture, champagne, Ernest Hemingway novels, punk music, rap and hip-hop, firework displays, awards ceremonies. 

38)   I’m a blue belt in Taekwondo, but I got that in my early teens, so I’d probably need to rely on other strengths to fight off five muggers. 

39)   The place in the world I’d most like to visit one day is Jerusalem. 

40)   I run a monthly non-fiction Christian writers’ group on Zoom. 

41)   I love going on walks in nature with special people. And contra C.S. Lewis on this, I believe that walking and talking in nature are two of life’s most exquisite pleasures when combined. 

42)   One of my primary goals is to live a life of kindness, because I believe that the closest thing to a superpower humans have is the ability to show kindness. Of course, kindness doesn’t always present itself as gentle warmth, especially when the kindest thing we can do in a situation is speak uncomfortable truths. But in terms of how we treat others, the attempts we can offer to help make their lives better, and the work we do to help create a more loving society, kindness is one of the most precious qualities we can strive for. 

43)   At home, all our rooms are named after great writers. In our house, you’ll often hear sentences like “Let’s relax in Milton tonight”; or “I’ve put some gifts for the family on the bed in Dickens”; or “Could you get the hoover out of Blake and give Dostoevsky and Austen the once over?” 

44)   One of the most surprising blessings I’ve learned about my writing scraps that I couldn’t assign to one of the books is that it’s usually fairly easy to develop the passages into the autobiography I’m writing. In fact, I hadn’t planned an autobiography until I’d had more experiences and successes to capture, but transforming these scraps has revealed that the story was already quietly forming itself long before I realised I was ready to tell it. And I guess that’s a good illustration for life in general too - it becomes more of a profound story the more we pay close attention to it. 

45)   As soon as I wake up, I down a pint of water. Then, unless we have company, I have my usual breakfast ritual: a raw egg mixed with milk, protein powder and chia seeds, followed by a banana and a yoghurt with flaxseed. Then I’m all set to seize the day. 

46)   I’m a huge fan of the freestyle approach – whether that’s talks, video-making, discussion panels – I really value not planning or preparing much in advance, and the adventure of going with the flow. Don’t get me wrong, for some things there is a necessity to prepare well. But I vibrate more to spontaneity – there’s something wonderfully alive and liberating about the art of what might happen when we create content. 

47)   Advice I’d give my teenage self is: Don't be so hard on people who you think are wrong! Be kind and gentle when you are trying to explain to them how foolish they are being! 

48)   The way I’ve tried to live in my relationship with God, and the values I espouse, I honestly believe that every year of my life has been better than the previous. Of course, there have been years and seasons that have had more difficult challenges than others, in a non‑linear fashion – but the growth, maturity, enhanced life experience and increased wisdom during every passing year has meant that each new chapter has deepened my sense of gratitude, sharpened my understanding of what truly matters, and expanded my capacity to live well, love well, and walk faithfully with God. 

49)   I believe that everything happens for a reason in the grand cosmic narrative, and our mistakes are a key part of that. Case in point: this entry was going to be the following: quite often, when I get approached by scammers, I embark in conversation with them to try to help them transform their lives for the better. Then, I noticed I’d already put that in number 27, but I decided to leave this one in anyway, because somewhere in the vastly complex social butterfly effect, errors can be artistically meaningful at a deeper level – and somewhere down the line I’ve altered the fabric of social reality by its inclusion. 

50)   I’m not naturally very good at DIY, but I enjoy trying, and I can distil a pleasing satisfaction when completing a project. Especially if it aligns with William Morris’s wisdom about having nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. 

51)   I think if you asked my wife what my biggest fault is, she’d say that my head often seems to be in so many conceptual places at once that I might not notice when it’s time for her to empty the bins.    

52)    On reflection, I think my proudest life achievement thus far isn’t anything creative; it’s how I supported my dad and mum for several unbearably tough years through his decline with dementia, and gave him the send off he deserved at his funeral. Because I believe that the very best things we do in life are those gentle, steadfast acts of selfless love that shape who we become – usually done quietly and faithfully, not spectacularly.   

Thanks for indulging me on my big birthday! 😍

The Art of the Political Con

 

The sad thing about watching contemporary politics is that it is full of so many con artists in front of a willing public who falls for what’s on sale hook, line and sinker. But con artistry is not all equal, and here I’ll explain the distinctions I observe. First, let me establish a long-standing truth in psychology about the typical con artist: a good con artist doesn’t pressure you into doing something; they compel you to be a willing agent in your own downfall. But this is predicated on their success in knowing the true picture and veiling it from their subject(s).

Now, socio-politics is full of all kinds of con artist - differing widely in age, character, belief and presentation. But unlike the classic psychological description of the con artist I outlined, these are of a different breed. They qualify by successfully getting large swathes of the public to fall for their con, hook, line and sinker – examples of which are Jeremy Corbyn, Greta Thunberg, Owen Jones, Sadiq Khan, Nicola Sturgeon, Dianne Abbott, Ed Miliband, Ash Sakar, Paul Mason, Zack Polanski, to name but a few. But their distinction is that their con is not based on knowing the true picture and veiling it from their subjects (although there is, of course, a lot of concealing going on) – it is a kind of con of incompetence, where most of what they believe is so absurdly incorrect or miscalculated, yet tribalistically persuasive enough to compel people to be a willing agents in their own downfall.

You may be on the left reading this, thinking “Hang on, what about those on the right - the likes of Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, et al – playing a similar game?” Something different is going on there – it’s equally to do with psychological leverage, but it operates on almost the opposite mechanism. Because if you’re paying attention, the left tends to obtain its cognitive leverage by creating illusions, and the populist right by breaking illusions (see my blog on Hyperbolstering). They prick the balloon of the left’s illusions, and that’s why the vitriol coming from the left is more like the hate and rage that comes from being found out and exposed, alongside the inner malice many of them feel towards people who are more successful than them or have more status. The left deceives by pretending to be more competent than they are; the right attempts to expose what the establishment wants to remain concealed.

That’s also why the left’s cognitive leverage will always rest on a suite of well‑documented cognitive mechanisms that operate beneath the surface of rational enquiry. And as highly prominent figures like Greta Thunberg, Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski are showing – you can be an utter simpleton and still cast in your net the willing acolytes of identity‑protective cognition, because the tendency for people to defend beliefs that signal loyalty to their tribe, and provide emotional reassurance and moral self-congratulation, even when those beliefs are demonstrably false, miscalculated or self‑defeating, is as old as the hills.

And for those like me who’ve always been interested in human behaviour, you might also see that the most striking feature of this phenomenon is that many of these political influencers are not deliberate manipulators in the classic sense. They are not con artists who know the truth and hide it; they are participants in the very illusions they propagate.

Most con artists manipulate by knowing they are above the manipulation. Yet most political con artistry is of a more peculiar dynamic: manipulation while not knowing they are part of the manipulation.

Prediction: Burnham Will Be The Worst Prime Minister We've Ever Had

Oh dear. As much as I disliked Keir Starmer’s Labour - and I reeeaaally did dislike them - from what I’ve heard from Burnham’s Labour Party so far, I predict things will be even worse under Burnham. In fact, I’m going to make a bolder prediction: by the time of the next General Election, there is going to be widespread consensus from the right, centre and left (well, as much as there ever can be) that Burnham’s term in office has been the worst this country has ever seen.

Starting with today’s cavalcade of economic illiteracy, that most bus fares in England will be capped at £2 from the start of next year, and the clearly economically sub-literate new Chancellor John Healey’s claim that this policy will cause "no burden to British taxpayers". I’m not writing this post because I think this £2 price ceiling is going to be one of the worst things about the Burnham premiership – I’m writing it mainly for illustrative purposes to show that, in Burnham, we have a leader who has never shown even a passing intention to appear like he knows what he’s doing on anything to do with the politics and economics of our country – and that this one policy is illustrative of what a disaster his whole reign will be.

Ok, let’s be candid on this particular showboating policy: a £2 fare cap is not clever, not helpful, and certainly not free. This is not even complex – it’s GCSE-level economics: price fixes always have to be paid for by someone. So, who really pays? Well, contra Healey, if a bus journey costs, say, £3.50 to provide, and the government forces operators to charge £2, the remaining £1.50 doesn’t vanish into the ether. The Treasury must reimburse operators for the shortfall. That’s going to cost hundreds of millions in ongoing subsidy. That is a burden on taxpayers, no matter how many times Healey insists otherwise. Moreover, if there is any underfunding of the scheme, councils will be forced to top up subsidies or cut other services. A national fare cap simply shifts the pressure downward.

Also, bus operators ultimately pay too, and they might even cut services in doing so. If subsidies don’t fully cover the gap, operators absorb losses. And when operators absorb losses, they respond in the only way they can: by cutting routes or reducing frequency, and maybe even shedding staff. If subsidies don’t keep pace with rising costs, operators will be forced to cut routes and staff – it’s basic arithmetic.

A sensible politician would never force a business to sell below cost. It distorts prices and hides true costs. Artificially cheap prices encourage overuse and discourage efficiency. Furthermore, an economy in which operators become reliant on government reimbursement rather than private revenue makes everything less secure, not more.

Policies like this badly misallocate resources too. A universal fare cap subsidises everyone - including people who can easily afford full fares, and penalises the many who never use buses but are already taxed to the hilt.

No, this is everything we can come to expect from a Burnham government – it’s a political slogan; a bribe; a faux-compassionate headline‑grabber, not a serious policy or strategy. Expect Burnham’s government to be a shambles – and we can revisit this prediction in a few years’ time.

Hume's Greatest Contribution To Philosophy

 

Let’s begin with a statement that is both provocative and unsettling: we never truly predict anything entirely new. By ‘entirely new,’ I mean empirical facts that cannot be anticipated through extension or rearrangement of prior experiential patterns. This might sound counterintuitive - after all, science seems full of predictions. Sure, but as we’ll see, from a broadly Humean perspective, what we call predictions are better understood as extrapolations from prior experience. They are reasoned extensions of patterns we have already observed.

Our knowledge of the world is deeply grounded in experience, in that sensory perception, emotional learning, and many of our expectations about how the world behaves arise from accumulated interactions with reality - whether first-hand or socially transmitted. On this view, reasoning alone is insufficient to generate entirely new facts without experiential content to work upon.

David Hume - probably the most influential empiricist philosopher (and definitely the best empiricist writer) - argued that much of what we know about the world derives from experience, and that our impressions of reality are shaped within the limitations of human perception. Without experiential input, our capacity to form expectations about the world would be drastically constrained. (Hume himself distinguished between “relations of ideas,” such as mathematics and logic, and “matters of fact,” which concern the empirical world - and it is primarily the latter that concern us here.)

To illustrate this, imagine a philosophical thought experiment: a child - let’s call him Henry - is born and raised in conditions of complete sensory deprivation. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Henry survives physically but receives no sensory data at all. Philosophers have long used similar abstractions to probe the origins of knowledge. In such an extreme scenario, Henry would likely lack language, learned concepts, and expectations about how objects behave. His mental life, at least with respect to empirical knowledge, would be profoundly impoverished.

Of course, modern philosophy and science have strongly indicated that Hume over-stated his assertion – we now know that the human mind possesses innate structures that organise experience, and that infants are not entirely blank slates. Still, Hume’s insight remains one of the great contributions to philosophy.

You still might feel like objecting: but James, don’t we predict new things all the time? In fields like evolutionary biology or physics, scientists often forecast outcomes not yet observed. Even everyday expectations - like “the sun will rise tomorrow” - feel like predictions. But there’s an important distinction to draw here. From a Humean perspective, many such predictions are rearrangements or extensions of existing knowledge rather than anticipations of conceptually independent novelty. What we call “new” often remains anchored in prior patterns and expectations.

Hume also famously argued that while we observe regularities in nature - patterns that lead us to expect one event to follow another - we never directly perceive a necessary connection binding cause and effect. Building on Hume’s insight, in my books I tend to use a working distinction (not a standard Humean term) between “causality,” meaning observed regular patterns, and “causation,” meaning the deeper necessity we often assume but cannot directly observe. Causality, in this sense, is empirical: it arises from repeated observation. Causation, by contrast, represents the unseen necessity we project onto those patterns. We cannot reason our way to that necessity independently of experience.

For example, we expect that if an apple detaches from a tree it will fall to the ground, or that banging your head on a doorframe will hurt. These expectations are grounded in repeated observation and in learned regularities. However, even these expectations are shaped by the models we construct from experience. Classical physics describes gravity one way; quantum theories offer deeper and sometimes counterintuitive accounts. Without the empirical investigation that revealed the quantum world, its laws would have remained inaccessible to us. Our theoretical understanding grows through experience-informed inquiry rather than purely armchair reasoning.

I wrote a neat illustration in one of my books to convey this. Suppose that as of midnight tonight, a fundamental regularity of nature changes: electricity no longer produces a magnetic field. When you wake up, nothing initially seems different - until your radio falls silent, your doorbell fails, and coils of wire refuse to generate magnetism despite functioning batteries. At first you suspect a mechanical fault. Only after repeated failures across society would you infer that a deeper regularity has shifted. The point is not that such a change is scientifically likely, but that without prior experiential clues, we would struggle to anticipate radically unfamiliar behaviour. Our expectations are tethered to what we have already learned.

Even some of the most celebrated scientific “predictions” can be understood, from a Humean angle, as extensions of existing conceptual frameworks. Neptune’s discovery followed unexplained perturbations in Uranus’s orbit; Dirac’s equations mathematically implied antimatter; Maxwell’s equations pointed toward radio waves. Many philosophers of science would still call these genuine predictions - and rightly so within scientific practice. Yet they were not conjured from conceptual nothingness; they emerged from rearranging established ideas within existing theoretical structures. Theory guided discovery, but it did so on the basis of prior empirical and conceptual foundations.

Let us return to Henry. Suppose at age 18 he is suddenly granted the full range of senses. In front of him are two billiard balls, and an experimenter rolls one toward the other. Hume used a similar image to illustrate his point: without prior experience, Henry would have no basis for expecting what happens when ball 1 strikes ball 2. Will ball 2 move? Shatter? Remain still? Only after repeated observations would he begin to associate events and form expectations about physical interactions. What seems obvious to us - that the second ball will roll - is obvious largely because we have learned the regularities of physical reality through experience.

Don’t get me wrong, we mustn’t over-egg Hume here. Hume’s enduring challenge is not to gainsay reasoning’s utility – it is to frame our understanding of empirical reality as inseparable from experiential learning. Of course, Kant developed this by arguing that the mind contributes structuring categories, and modern Bayesian epistemology in some ways extends Humean ideas, somewhat like how Riemannian geometry extends classical Euclidean models. Yet the central problem of how we justify our expectations about the future when they depend so heavily on past experience remains one of Hume’s most enduring philosophical legacies.

Fantasy Redistribution

Every few days recently, young people who get most of their political theories from Instagram show off their arithmetic by announcing that if Elon Musk “gave away his trillion dollars,” every American would get $2,800 and live happily ever after, presumably in a utopia powered by free Teslas and renewable energy.

But, alas, this misunderstands both the arithmetic and the economics, but mainly the economics. Firstly, Elon Musk does not have a trillion dollars stuffed under his mattress. If he did, the mattress would be visible from space. His wealth consists almost entirely of ownership of productive assets: shares in companies, intellectual property, physical capital, and claims on future profits, and other things you cannot eat, wear, or use to pay for your New Statesman subscription. Redistributing Musk’s wealth does not mean redistributing his personal consumption. It means redistributing ownership of productive assets, which doesn’t magically create new goods.

Redistribution can change who benefits from future production, sure – but it cannot increase the total amount of goods and services available; it merely reallocates purchasing power and ownership. Selling existing assets and distributing the proceeds is a transfer, not an expansion of the money supply. In simple terms, it simply changes who owns the stuff that makes future stuff.

The upshot is, serious debates about wealth demand more than viral arithmetic; they require at least a passing acquaintance with how an economy actually works.

All this feeds into the more serious claim that if we just confiscate the wealth of millionaires and redistribute, we’ll help alleviate world poverty. The reality is, an economy is constrained not by how cleverly we shuffle ownership claims, but by how much real output it can actually produce. You can redistribute wealth, and you may have good reasons to do so, but no transfer of shares or bank balances can radically lift people out of poverty in the long run if farms aren’t growing food or factories aren’t making goods. Redistribution can change who gets the returns from production, but it cannot substitute for production itself. A society that cannot generate enough to meet its needs will not cure hunger by rearranging balance sheets, however dramatically.

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Uneven Intuition

 

Suppose an atheist hears two scenarios:

Scenario 1: A man comes to believe Jesus is Lord by seeing a miraculous healing in church

Scenario 2: A man comes to believe Jesus is Lord by a direct, personal impartation from the Holy Spirit.

Both of those scenarios are, in fact, common in the world – but if an atheist were to reject them both as unsatisfying, he’d probably be more unsatisfied at the second than the first.  Yet this is hard to justify, because Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 differ in how the belief is acquired, not in the epistemic status of the belief itself.  That is, given the truth of Christianity and how God does His fundamental imparting of revelation (1 Corinthians 12:3), then unbeknown to him, the atheist’s greater discomfort with Scenario 2 is driven by accidental or psychological features, not by a genuine epistemic asymmetry.

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Images Of God

 

"Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”
Thomas Merton

Alongside that is Calvinist pastor and psychoanalyst Oscar Pfister’s observation:

“Tell me what you find in your Bible, and I will tell you what sort of person you are.”

While I don't think those observations are literally true every step of the way, they contain a lot of truth. Often we ask what God is like, but we shouldn’t neglect to ask what we are like when we look at Him. Is our conception of God sometimes less the God who is, and more the God we think we need, or the God we want Him to be? We must allow God to shape our image of Him, and be careful that it’s not our wishful image of Him shaping us.

Just a few thoughts for us all to be mindful of.

Most Schools & Universities Are Now Indoctrination Camps For Impressionable Young Minds That Deserve Better

Depressingly, according to Rob Henderson, the number of incoming college students who describe their political beliefs as “far left” has tripled since the early 1980s, and doubled since 2013. Alas, it's all a very deliberate ploy from the state, of course.

Think of it this way. Arguments frequently erupt about whether 16 year olds should be allowed to vote. Most left-leaning people habitually say yes, most others say no. The majority of young people vote for left wing parties, so the bias of the two contrasting positions is obvious. Left-leaning politicians want young people to have the vote so they can secure more votes.

I once explained why women tend to be more left wing, but alas, the reason I think young people also tend to be more left wing is much more disturbing and disheartening. The cynical answer, which I also think is the truest, is twofold: it's that young people have fewer responsibilities and not much capital, so they don't feel many of the costs of left wing policies (although even that impression is less true than young people think). And it's also the case that very young people are ripe for indoctrination, and the education system plays on this (as anyone who has been to a protest rally would have witnessed).

I believe it is very much the fault of the schools and universities at a proximal level, but it's also more distally a product of the establishment that has a significant deleterious effect on young people's education. I think whenever you observe significant shifts in the zeitgeist, whereby something is very noticeable (which in itself is unusual, as things usually manifest in a creeping fashion), you have to look for a top down influence, because bottom up influences don't usually show up on the radar this way (occasionally they do, but not often).

The surge in young voters in the past few years is symptomatic of a mass indoctrination program by the left, to take their thoughts captive when they're young, and keep them for as long as possible until they (or at least some of them) grow up and learn how to think more proficiently. Didn't you find it strange that the parties who support votes for children are Labour, Liberal Democrats, Green Party, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru? It's all very deliberate, you know.

That's why the left wants to lower the voting age to 16, to catch even more pliable young minds and enmesh them in their net. This is because for the past couple of decades (at least) the establishment is potentially vulnerable to opposing ideas and movements that occur in a more globalised nexus of interconnectedness. That is, influential ideas, in favour of the establishment and against it, are going to manifest with an exponential curve, not a linear one. Consequently, the establishment has driven its agenda to start on schoolchildren when they are young, and mould them in the establishment fashion through the rest of their education, and later in university too.

And because the state operates in loco parentis, it tends to become coterminous with actual parental influence/family too - so the child has even greater difficulty escaping the often subtle, sometimes explicit manipulations. There are many elements to the agenda - a lot of it is a Stockholm syndrome-type conditioning to make the impressionable young things believe they should love the authorities and delegate personal freedoms to their leading players. Then there are veiled threats bound up in identity politics, and group identification, and a whole host of other things that are complex and probably require a whole book of thoughts for me to jot down.

The upshot is, the top down cause is a systematic drive by the establishment to manipulate the young into exactly the kind of pliable, conformist citizens the establishment wants them to be. And that is the principal reason why left wing politicians are always championing the lowering of the voting age to 16, and why the number of young people who describe their political beliefs as “far left” is increasing to the levels it has been.  

See The Individual By Seeing The Group

 

You can tell a lot about the credibility of many views in public discourse by analysing the groups of people who subscribe to them. You can't always tell everything - and obviously you should also draw from further analysis of the propositions - but a good subsidiary way to consider which group is right is to consider the type of people in each group, and work outwards from there. You also get indication, as I've stated before, of what else they are predicted to believe, and then you can start to join the dots and understand that the structure and bad logic of one belief is connected to structure and bad logic of another, and so forth.

Let's take the example of a matter I raised recently in this Blog post, and expand on the psychology even further:

Opinion A: Israel is committing genocide in the Middle East.

Opinion B: Israel is not committing genocide in the Middle East.

Swathes of people are firmly convinced of Opinion A, and swathes of people, myself included, are firmly convinced of Opinion B. Those who hold Opinion A are unlikely to be convinced otherwise, and ditto those who hold Opinion B.

So how do we tackle such a subject, when it causes so much irreconcilable division, so much animosity (even between people with whom we otherwise get on well and like), and evokes so many painful emotions, given the near-inevitable continued bifurcation between Opinion A and B folk?

Even if you knew nothing about the particular propositions at hand, you can get some idea of the likely credibility of the claims by observing the individuals at the group level. I will give you my impression of both groups, from my experience of hearing comprehensively from both sides, and from knowing quite a few people, including extended family, who are based in the Middle East, and have openly shared their perspective. While there are always exceptions, the individuals in Group B (Israel is not committing genocide in the Middle East) tend to be much more balanced, objective and thoughtful in their analysis, while allowing for fair criticism of Israel's handling of some situations. They are also a much broader and more diverse group of people, whose views on other matters would be much harder to predict.

The upshot is, when I look at individual beliefs people have, I try to discern the character and tendencies of the groups behind particular opinions, because it offers a subtle but powerful lens through which to evaluate the driving forces behind those beliefs. Obviously, careful examination of evidence and argument should always take primacy, but knowing the patterns in individuals’ broader beliefs can illuminate potential biases, inconsistencies, and blind spots, and confer high degrees of predictability on what else they are likely to believe.

One final point regarding the claim that Israel is committing genocide: Israel possesses overwhelming military superiority and, if its objective were simply the physical destruction of the Palestinian people, it has the capability to inflict vastly greater casualties than it has. That alone should at least give reasonable observers pause before assuming genocidal intent.