Numbers are now mostly used to mislead. They form a veil across our reality. They obscure the translation of what we perceive directly into organised thought and cogent argument.

Paolo Freire famously said that for slum children in Brazil, words had to mean what the children wanted them to mean before they could have socially accepted meanings. So oppressed and dispossessed were these abandoned children that even simple language mainly expressed their alienation.

I think that numbers are now the domain of hedgies and populist politicians, of petty bureaucrats and oligarchs, of the educational system and the health system. We cannot use them for our own purposes to mean things that we want them to mean.

I used to weigh myself on the bathroom scales most mornings. Then I became aware that my weight on my scales simply delivered me against my will to the narratives of public health that I do not believe in. So, I simply stopped. I don’t need that largely subliminal stress.

We have written here before about how to get valid information about the world out of the cacophony. Then I looked at my laptop recently and thought how much I disliked the physical device and what it brought me. I turned off Twitter and restrict myself to email and the Met Office. I don’t need it.

My friend and colleague John Smith had a heart attack. He was persuaded to go to hospital and his reaction was “those doctors owned my pain” — via various numerical scales, I am sure.

In Alan Garner’s newly published anthology, Powsels and Thrums, there is a story which uses irrational numbers to convey the essence of first love. A genius author can still reclaim numbers to his own meanings.

Numbers in organisations

Numbers are over-used in organisations, of course. To the extent that if you provide your manager with numbers that measure something, your manager will probably use them to make management decisions, whether that makes sense or not.

This makes available a managing upward technique that can be used positively or destructively. My colleague Patrick Hoverstadt changed the senior management of a large organisation by getting their direct reports to provide a set of numbers showing what the senior managers needed to manage.

There is a PhD formal study of a work system where two tasks need to be performed in a balanced way. One of these tasks is cheap and easy to measure, the other more difficult. The study shows that the measurement imbalance always leads to task imbalance and therefore to arbitrarily large inefficiency. Better no numbers than these numbers, and I take this to be the normal case.

The numbers produced to measure work conceal narratives about what the work is. I once worked on a big software project and the project management numbers said six days to completion. An external review said at least eighteen months to completion and, in the gap between the two narratives, delivery became impossible and heads rolled.

Scale

Most innovation projects are asked to demonstrate that the results can be scaled up. To do so simply guarantees failure at any and all scales. This is an easy demonstration that numbers are the problem. This issue is tackled at length in Seeing like a State by James Scott. A local system can be trained to work better: but better for whom, and why should the training work in a different situation? What are the “side” effects and externalisations? The person asking for scaling up is making massive and unwarranted assumptions that are concealed by “improvement” numbers.

In Clean Business Cuisine my colleague Michael Mainelli takes a lighthearted look at the same issue. (Michael is Mayor of the City of London this year.) His advice, if I remember it right, is to “get a big picture grip on the details” and then to “get a detailed grip on the big picture”. The meaning of numbers is the meaning they acquire by what we make of context and how we interpret the detail. No more and no less.

Focal practice

Albert Borgmann uses the concept of focal practice to describe the veil of numbers. His key example to describe what a focal practice is and does is the open fire to warm a house. It is a focal practice because it draws a number of activities together. People sit round a fire, and it creates a social space that people really value and enjoy. There is a set of interlocking tasks around cutting and drying wood that are necessary to keep the fire going.

A central heating system also heats a house but without becoming a focal practice: it is there to avoid the work and the human contact. The central heating system is governed by numbers: its heat output and the temperature the thermostat is set to. The message of these numbers is that the house is warm enough if the numerical goals are achieved. The message of the focal practice is that what matters is elsewhere.

I knew an architect who explained to me why you can’t open the windows on a tower block office. Everyone wants to be able to sit by an open window at times and architects know this, but the contract for the building will stipulate the room temperature must remain stable between fairly tight limits. If you open windows, the temperature is no longer stable and so the numbers dominate the lives of people who work there.

I installed here a new central heating controller that complies with recent regulations. You are likely to have a similar one. I can set three time periods during a day, and I can set all the days separately. Do I feel more control? Absolutely not. In winter if it is cold I light the woodburning stove earlier in the day. I write while watching some big oak logs from a fallen tree here flame with endless variety.

Raw goats milk

The regulatory authorities here and in the US will tell you that there a risks drinking raw milk compared to pasteurised milk. They are not wrong and can give you numbers. In my first aside, whereas cows have to be regularly tested, when I enquired from the vets what the incidence of TB in milking goats was, they told me there is no testing and no data.

I have never heard a story of someone who had to stop drinking raw goats milk because it was making them ill. And on the other side there are lots and lots of people who ascribe their health to lifelong consumption. Of course, the risk data from the authorities does not take into account the health status of the people who report problems. The point of lifelong consumption starting young is that the bacteria in the milk will develop the immune system that ensures that consumption is safe, is beneficial. The risk numbers point to danger, when they can be considered to point to robust safety.

The way to underpin this strategy of controlled exposure to risks that lead to health is to consider the goats. In a low stress environment with grass, browse and good food, goats will maintain their own health. And the nanny goats will maintain the health of their offspring via the milk they produce for them. Sharing the milk with the kids is a powerful safety mechanism for human infants.

Many people have what I call a chemistry set worldview. They want to enumerate the components of a food for instance and say categorically that it is OK or not OK. I call it chemistry set because it denies that living systems are at work. These people want a definitive set of numbers. Life turns most things into more life irrespective of the numbers. This is precisely why the numbers are a veil and are misleading because only in special circumstances do they lead to the risk they purport to describe.

Marks and scores

Edwards Deming famously refused to grade his students. He regarded the practice of marking work and giving grades as destructive of the educational aims. Grades are a good example of where we have swallowed the narrative of tracking progress and valuing “results”.

There is a question of accuracy or validity of course. I had a privileged education that gave me 1-to-1 tutorials to discuss my essays. On one occasion a tutor marked an essay as essentially an exam fail. During the discussion he understood what I was saying and said the essay was a 1st — in an exam you don’t get that chance.

Then there is a question of overall standard and bunching. I once marked 250 student essays and they were pretty poor answers, not really distinguishable. I sorted them roughly into four piles which I called 35, 45, 55 and 65. Only because the university required marks. One student had found some very relevant text on the net but hadn’t been clear that he was quoting. When I asked the student to correct his omission, I was in trouble with the administration for only giving one student a second chance.

Deming is very clear that the numbers are in the way of the education. Students try to get a score rather than master the subject, and these are very different things. At worst they try to parrot their teachers rather than think. Interestingly from my children’s experience, the International Baccalaureate version of Critical Thinking was the worst from this perspective.

The number or grade of a score seems to cut through a lot of uncertainty and contingency, but of course it cannot do that. So, what seems solid is actually ephemeral and the more you know about the context the flakier it is.

Facts

Numbers often masquerade as facts and facts often shore up their credibility with numbers. Neither bear much scrutiny. We are right back to numbers having to mean what you want them to mean before they can be used to convey meaning in social settings.

The root of the issue is that all facts, all occurrences, have multiple simultaneous contexts. For instance, a number on a bank account. The high street banks have a duty to prevent money laundering. I knew a Somali gentleman who had lent £5000 to a friend. When the money was returned his bank account was frozen and the bank would not tell him why. Probably the salient fact is his Somali nationality and the bank account entry has almost nothing to do with how event unfolded.

A colleague of mine, as part of his psychotherapy training, did the following exercise. He went to a hospital waiting room and for 15 minutes made notes on what happened in that time. He had to scrupulously avoid all inference and interpretation and stick to what actually occurred. I have done a version of this exercise in child observation. It is surprisingly tricky. Just think for a moment about numbers in this context and the meanings they are likely to convey. I think they push towards the observer’s prejudices and away from the lived experience of the people in that setting.

Or go to the other extreme and a hard engineering setting. When a railway coach goes along a stretch of actual railway, it must not catch on objects to each side of the track. Imagine for instance a coach pulling alongside a platform which curves along the length of the station. You would imagine, I would imagine, that the parameters to be met could be described in a set of engineering numbers so that coach designers could be confident about their product. I am assured that this is not the case and that railway lines have idiosyncratic differences.

Reader beware

The underlying question is why did the writer or speaker use those numbers in the way that they did? That can be a rewarding question in unravelling intent and meaning. Facts, well maybe not.

The veil of numbers was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bio-mimicry is our guide. If we think we can do a thing better than nature does it, we will find to our cost that we are mistaken. If we have an admiration for machines and management by command, we will fail to understand our failures. If we think solutions must scale, we will put forward solutions that perform poorly.

These things are systems issues. Any natural system is built out of other natural systems that it treats as both independent and intelligent. To a considerable depth and with mind-boggling complexity. Our instinct is still to simplify so that we can understand — and then to work with the simplification not the reality.

There is no alignment of purpose in these systems, just a beautiful architecture where the life of a subsystem becomes exactly what the supersystem needs. The biocides: fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, anti-bacterials, pesticides, etc., cannot possibly have a role in this beauty because they cannot respect the life of subsystems.

The natural world does not produce also-rans, it produces shining examples, pinnacles of health and beauty. In our weird world of shifting baselines, we come to accept mediocre health as a norm, so-so performance as what you can expect. We are not surprised or concerned by stunted plants and sick animals.

One reason for this weird perception is simply propaganda. We have been sold that we need health supplements and great shampoo. We have been convinced that animals need veterinary support. And that plants need help coping with infestations of various sorts. We have been sold solutions in search of a problem.

Another reason is some sort of impostor syndrome. An effortlessly intelligent child is not celebrated as they put the need for education in the shade. The person who is never ill is not an example to be held up. Glowing vegetables must have been expensive to produce. We really don’t like the notion of successful avoidance of intervention.

Terrain theory

If a natural system, such as a person or a meadow, is not thriving, is not a pinnacle of health, then we can engage two entirely opposite types of theory. Our cultural instinct is to go with the notion that something is spoiling the Garden of Eden. In previous blogs we have called this sin thinking. Something invaded, attacked. Someone did it wrong. We need to root out (interesting language) what is spoiling things.

Terrain theory says that if the terrain, the foundations, are adequate, a living system will thrive. It thrives because that is what it does. If the system does not have adequate foundations, that generally means something is missing. If I am overweight or moody, I am probably missing some micronutrients or a warm social context. Too much sugar and carbohydrate may be true and may not be the root of the issue.

Not many people are able to sit with the theory options. Is someone else wrecking my life or do I need to be sensitive to what I lack? Given how ubiquitous psychological projection is, looking for someone to blame may destroy our hope of understanding.

So completely have we indulged in interventions that treat only markers and symptoms that there is every chance that a terrain lack is caused by interventions that were mistaken in their goals and their mechanisms. Most diseases now have an iatrogenic aspect.

Corporate degeneracy and disease

It is a commonplace now that corporate bodies are psychopathic. Aseem Malhotra uses the language very pointedly and very publicly on a big stage. From where I sit it feels as though corporates compete to be big and bad and to control the public narrative. They feel they will be outmanoeuvred by corporates even more badly behaved if they do not sell everyone down the river.

Governments and regulatory agencies have been captured and subverted sufficiently that there is no risk from trashing people and the environment. Big pharma can and will make you ill to enhance their profits. Israel will make you complicit in a horrific genocide, against your will and that of Israelis themselves. The CIA will generate new wars. The mechanisms that were put in place to control the worst excesses simply do not work. Grenfell.

The best things in life are free

Corporates and their government imitators will only do things for profit. To make a profit you have to sell stuff that people can be persuaded to want. Over-simplification and over-intervention are baked in to the system. All the wisdom about working with what is there in its uniqueness is crowded out, except in systems that do not pursue the commercial imperative.

I have rehearsed in these blogs how to take official health advice and do the polar opposite. The sane applies to much government policy and for the same reasons. Doing the opposite is mostly cheap or free. The bleating about people not being able to afford to eat properly only betrays the policy nakedness. Of course bio-mimicry will be essentially free: no natural system becomes sub-optimal because things can’t be afforded.

Sunshine

We are bathed in the light of the sun. Study of agriculture reveals that the fundamental of its economics is how much of the available sunlight can be captured by plants and used to feed the soil. This is the ultimate free lunch and the gift that keeps on giving. The better fed the soil biome is, the more fertile the ground and the more nutritious the crops.

Interventions give short term economic benefit of course or they could not be sold, but we can tell if they are a scam by how they affect the fundamental rates of sunlight capture. One of the permaculture principles is to have many (seven) layers of vegetation each capturing the light filtering through the higher levels. Not just wheat in a field and certainly not bare soil between crops. Capture the available light and everything else will fall into place.

Sunshine on our skin is supposed to be harmful. There is a whole industry of actually harmful sunscreens to protect us. Our first thought should always be to understand how the natural world allows us to thrive, supports our thriving.

If we thought like this we would be suspicious of the idea that the sun is cooking the planet. Maybe pay attention to how we have trashed the cooling systems of the planet so that it can no longer thrive. The planet too has a terrain theory and needs a dense cover of plants in order to cool itself. Desertification is the sign and we don’t look deep enough at how it happens and how it can recover. We want to intervene with geo-engineering.

Giants

There were giants of men. There were Aborigines a hundred years ago standing two metres tall, muscled warriors. The were giant chieftains in Kazakhstan. Everywhere where people still lived close to the land. We have forgotten that we are pale shadows of what we could be. We forget because we do not want to know of our fall. And we forget what we need to know about who we are when we allow our terrain to work with us.

The bio-mimetic thought is: what in this thriving shows us what is missing in the stunted people around us. Missing in their terrain and the interactions it supports. Bell hooks says very few people heal themselves alone.

Time and cycles

After five years on our Welsh smallholding, I am still constantly surprised and challenged by how different things are: day to day; month to month; year to year. This year for example the trees have grown three times as much as previous years. You think you have learnt something and it turns out you need to learn the next thing.

Biodiversity and complexity are there because the ecosystem needs to be stable within this flux. A variation that the ecosystem responded to last year may be responded to differently this year because parameters have changed. Rainfall, temperature, wind, sunshine hours, patterns of changes.

The human social idea seems to be to stabilise the parameters. We build houses with heat and light to even out the seasons. We try to compensate for geographical separation with transport systems. We have legal systems that aim at stabilising social structures. But why?

Not so long ago, human organisation moved with the seasons. Sometimes large and organised social forms, sometimes small bands foraging on the land. The advantage of flexible and dynamic social structures on different scales is that people have practical experience of many different possibilities. This is much closer to an ecosystem model: many ways of achieving stability, many notions of what stability is required. Use the pattern that fits the needs of the moment. Rely on the subsystems that work in that pattern. Don’t nail anything down.

Positivity

I hate the very whiff of positive thinking. The very notion of paying attention to what is “good” in a situation makes me nauseous. It has come to mean turning a blind eye to evil and endemic corruption, to daylight robbery and systematic repression. Institutions of all kinds are rife with faux enthusiasm and toadying.

I had a colleague who became aware of his boss’s corruption in a contract. He lined up another job to go to and then called his boss out. That whole question of having many alternative routes and many social forms with which to work draws the sting of the coercive structures that are built around us.

The question becomes positive about what? Without being either solipsistic or group-minded what is the route to everyone thriving? Not some ideal solution but something that allows people to do more of what they need to do, what makes them grow. With this angle we see that people want to fix and define goals and means primarily to allow them to control others, not because the goals are important.

On the fields of our smallholding this is biodiversity, of the soil, the plants, the insects, the animals. Biodiversity can expand very fast when terrain questions are addressed. So new actors come on the scene with new roles and relationships and the whole works better than before. My role is primarily to let it happen and then to recognise and celebrate it. And it has no limits.

Choice

Because I am primarily a steward, not a consumer, I don’t make a lot of choices. Nor do I believe that the choices I do make are particularly significant. A lot of what I do is choreographed by the animals and birds I look after. A fox takes a chicken (some of them like to roost in the trees at night) and I have to think about egg production. The pigs are off their food for a week and I wonder if I need to change something.

We are sold the notion that affluent people can buy what they need. But actually raw (goat’s) milk, really free range eggs, meat from animals that have not been treated with wormers and vaccines, is not easily available at any price. This is the drift of this blog that the bar for what you are allowed to want gets lower and lower. Corporate forces take the available quality labels (“organic”) and find ways to subvert them.

Only in fact by raising some pigs and some chickens can you really understand what they can look like and taste like. Or by integrating into a community that does these things in a way that can be understood, seen through. The choices that are supposed to be the reward for earning money are actually being taken away from us, like Brexit promising freedom. Our freedom disappears when we are sold narratives that we do not know how to debunk.

Ecosystems are not subject to narratives, except that peoples’ misconceptions about how they work result in degradation. We must find the spirit of Goethe the naturalist to observe otherwise. Biomimicry is not going to work if we do not see what is going on.

Nature’s way was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1984 George Orwell said the ultimate aim of the Party is that you don’t believe your own eyes and ears. When this occurs, and it does all the time, we don’t tell ourselves that we no longer believe our own eyes. It is more like addiction: where is the person who can and will describe their own addiction? We always give ourselves a cover story. I remember a report from the spate of train bombings in Spain that a US student had witnessed a bombing from a safe distance and immediately went onto Google to find out what was happening.1

Addiction is the appropriate label. We are addicted to the foods we are sold, and we are addicted to the information we are sold. We are sold on what is thrust at us. We have a cover story about consumer choice and it is a lie that we tell ourselves. That is what addicts do. How many people can research and come to the obvious conclusion that all breakfast cereals are harmful to health? How many people can actually maintain critical thinking in the face of the mandated narratives?

There is coercion behind the addiction. How many people became addicted to cigarettes without being manipulated and pushed by a corporate initiative? How many people will tell you they don’t have time for a breakfast other than cereal, toast, or a croissant? Why does the report of their own eyes and history not count as evidence?

Critical thinking

Since Milgram, the estimates of how many people are capable of critical think remain stable at about 20%.2 We follow the dictates of power and authority. We do what the teacher says, we do what the doctor says, we do what the policeman says. Not many people challenge the doctor, and not many doctors make space for a challenging conversation. Not many doctors challenge their peers and the institutions they work in.

Many educational institutions claim to encourage critical thinking. When I was teaching in a university setting (Business for IT) I found it next to impossible to even get the idea of critical thinking on the students’ agenda. The notion of how critical thinking about the syllabus being studied might be an advantage personally is a big leap. I myself was floored during a viva for my degree by the question from the external examiner “what was wrong with the course?”.

David Graeber used to say that his job as an academic was to unpick the conformity engineered by the students’ previous education. During my college interview for a place, the rather august and fierce fellow interviewing me (a former All Black I believe), was bent on discovering my relationship with my academic father. Had I read any of his books? No. I think I may well have become more conformist after that.

The granddaughter of a colleague of mine was subjected to an interminable series of interviews to become a fast track civil servant. Faced with a panel of previous fast trackers she asked what big programmes they had cut their teeth on and then commented that if she had been on those programmes she would not want it known! That was the clincher.

Other thinkers

We can of course read the critical thinking of others. By its nature such reading will take us for a while outside the official narrative. We can’t borrow it of course, and it can be addictive in convincing us of our own critical powers.

If we are consistent in what we bring to our thinking — always positive, always kind, giving the benefit of the doubt — we are likely to be exploited and radically undermined.3 The competition for control of the narrative and incentives people are given to establish that control mean that there are real reasons to fear being seen as a critical thinker. The boot will be put in. In the extreme this is Navalny and now his widow.

It is not conspiracy to believe that powerful institutions and people want us the believe their lies and not to believe narratives that expose their hidden motives. The very notion of facts becomes contested and people in public life state barefaced lies repeatedly and even when corrected. People who care about truth say how worn down and exhausted they become just by paying attention to the barrage.

Even the motives that we might resist can be twisted and dark. It seems that the UK government is following a scorched earth policy of making it impossible for the government that replaces them to succeed. And I saw a prediction today that the US election this year would not happen, being overtaken by planned chaos.

The alternatives

If the Party in 1984 want us not to believe our eyes and ears, they will succeed in that just by grinding us down. Kafka’s contribution to this understanding is to rehearse the random illogicality of bureaucratic action, that doesn’t allow a logical response. When David Graeber was drummed out of the US, there were attempts to destabilise his mind by breaking into his flat and subtly moving things. There are also mafia thugs ready to threaten dissidents with common or garden personal violence. What remains is an attitude that I associate with religious persecution, where the truth of what I believe becomes ever more inescapable in the face of attempts to crush it.

What was contentious and unclear is clarified by repression. If governments and pharma companies will not acknowledge vaccine injuries, the injuries take on a greater significance. Why hide them? What are the options then? To join the consensus denial or to inquire further into evidence not destroyed by the people demanding consensus.

Donella Meadows

Donella Meadows proposed a hierarchy of places to intervene in a system. The top two for our purposes here are the goals of a system and ultimately the mindset within which a system runs. The usual frame for this “places to intervene” is a system in need to reform and some smart people working out how to enact the reform.

If we are thinking about our perception being obliterated by the Party, we have to understand that the places to intervene have already been used against us. We have to understand how the system has been manipulated to blind us to what is happening, to the evidence of our eyes and ears.

To do that we have to understand the actual goals of the system, in the sense of POSIWID. What is the consistent outcome of the system doing what it does, irrespective of what it is intended or “supposed” to do? That such an investigation is often branded as conspiracy theory only confirms its importance. For instance, if competition between firms results in prices going up, don’t believe that competition keeps prices down.

And having understood the goals of a system independently of the accompanying propaganda, then you need to see what the mindset is, and indeed how that mindset must change is the system is to be different. There are plenty of systems where governance acts to protect the interests of the people working in the system. We don’t hear much of them because he Party mindset is that such systems are “socialist” and therefore flawed and oppressive.

An example now 100 years old and still fresh as a daisy is the big car manufacturing companies in the US buying up public transport systems to close them down. They knew that people “really” wanted to own a car rather than use a tram. The goal was to make sure people needed a car and the mindset was that transport and the opportunity for conspicuous consumption should be at the aspirational heart of society.

It is never a question about whether public or private transport is “better”. That is just a smokescreen and a distraction. It is never about whether the risks of vaccinating or not vaccinating are greater: that debate can go on for ever and be manipulated for ever.

Pandemic?

We need to give these notions a serious road test. Always bear in mind this is not about true or false propositions, it is about being able to critically examine what “the Party” is saying. So, was there a pandemic and did the actions the pandemic narrative was used to justify make any sense?4

There was a “casedemic”. The number of cases identified by PCR testing swelled and caused enough fear for people to do things they otherwise would not have done. The PCR test according to its late inventor and world expert over many years cannot be used outside a laboratory setting and certainly not for public health. So, the signal in the testing was not a real or reliable signal.

The way the statistics were recorded with a gap between test and outcome data is guaranteed to give a casedemic without there being any underlying signal. The reporting of cases was done in such a way as to inflate fear of the pandemic.

The fear engendered was used to drive a vaccination programme. That programme made some companies and individuals extremely rich. The claims made about the vaccination programme by people prominent in public life and top politicians were never true: the ability of the programme to slow the spread of the pandemic was never even tested experimentally. The claims of efficacy were watered down and then largely abandoned.

There are widespread harms from the vaccine. On the medical side there was never any informed consent: what patients got turned out to be simple propaganda about safety and efficacy. But people who refused the vaccination (a very basic human right) were excluded from venues, activities and even their employment. The massive anxiety generated in people who were at very little risk, relatively and absolutely, needs a massive and humble apology.

Elites were largely exempted from being vaccinated, with that fact being concealed and camouflaged.

And the virus itself cannot be produced for inspection to validate the programme. What we are given is a computer artefact of what are claimed to be fragments of the virus. The actual activity of the virus: of infection and transmission is surmise.

The abrogation of human rights of many kinds is not remotely justified by what is actually known of the pandemic. Fatality rates are much less than 1%. Even the use of nasal swabbing should never occur in a medical setting. All the rules were thrown out in favour of draconian actions, but the underlying rationale was weak to non-existent.

This is precisely the scenario we are interested in. A mass hysteria around a narrative that achieves something for “the Party”. Critical thinking is dismissed as conspiracy theory even before it is articulated. A real and present danger, one that can be used to destroy you, us, anyone.

The longer view

George Orwell was writing about and for his own times. 1984 came and went. We treat his words as if they are still a prediction rather than something which is and was with us all along. Our blindness to this effect of mind control on our own selves is wilful blindness, something we secretly embrace. As ever we see others as subject to mind control more readily than we see ourselves.

The notion of integrity that this throws up runs against the drift to plagiarism and AI in general. Our eyes and ears and our ability to articulate what is real for us can be lost casually in a welter of seeming sophistication. How many people do we know who firmly speak their own truth, based on their own observations? We don’t even mourn that lack.

The violence is subtle. We may not even notice the loss of our own autonomy and authority. But the loss of self and agency as it develops is as deeply damaging and violent as anything we can imagine. A holocaust of what actually matters to ourselves and to the world.

Finally, we need to point out that the embodied “Party” are the shallowest, stupidest, most sociopathic people in our ambit.

1 One of my friends tells the story of a bullet-ridden car coming to a halt opposite his flat in Battersea, the remnant of a running gun battle which appeared in the press only as a ‘minor incident under investigation’ without any detail, despite one of his neighbours being a reporter/photographer directly on the scene.

2 Stanley Milgram of Yale who, in a series of experiments that probably wouldn’t get approved today, led ordinary people to behave in, um, shocking ways.

3 In game theory, any consistent posture can be exploited by an opponent. Think of poker, in which playing faithfully to the actual strength of one’s hand is a losing strategy.

4 You may have strong feelings and opinions about this topic, which is the point. If so, kindly treat it as a thought experiment and keep reading!

Do you believe your own senses? was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Inner defences

Many moons ago I wrote a paper with Richard Veryard for the Microsoft Architecture journal. It was about IT security and it argued that the usual architecture, modelled on a fortified castle with strong boundaries was ineffective and inappropriate. Thankfully, infosec practices now agree, but the pattern of thought continues to dominate, there and in many fields.

After thousands of years, we still have Trojan horses. We still have enemies within the gates. Humans have always lived in caves for security, but Odysseus was able to outwit Cyclops. I want to argue here that the topology we have for security and defence is more theatre than practical, a wall that appeals to MAGA lowlifes but not to citizens. On the face of it among all the lies, the wall protecting Israel was vulnerable to some hang gliders and a rusty bulldozer.

For an IT example, old by now, let’s take a major European bank who wanted to know that their global network was secure. It transpired fairly quickly that they were not willing to limit the ability of their star traders to load 3rd party software on their workstations. So, of course, they could not tell whether packets on the network were legitimate.

Let’s go back to the castle and its wall. The architecture is like two armies facing up to each other for a pitched battle. The wall declares what has to be breached for defences to fail. That is not how wars are fought and it is not how security breaches happen. Almost always there is an interpenetration of inside and outside, a mixing, a confusion of topology.

A colleague worked with a school exam board. Every year they had to employ thousands of teachers to mark papers, and every year tabloid journalists would take a job undercover and expose scandals. The company running the board did not accept that the teachers they had on temporary contracts were inside the company: security could not happen.

Physiology

Gregory Bateson had an important contribution about the boundaries of our bodies. As I recall he used the example of a lumberjack and his axe: where is the sensory boundary of the lumberjack at work? Today I have an incredibly skilled digger operator unearthing the drains from my house: there is no boundary between man and machine.

Rupert Sheldrake has an example of an almost blind teenager who could see through his mother’s eyes. The optician knew he couldn’t see what he reported through the boy’s own eyes and could not complete tests when his mother stepped out of the room. This gives us an entry into the necessarily social aspects of security.

The boundary of our bodies is not our skin. The skin can be a useful barrier membrane like a castle wall, but the immune system based in our nasal passages is infinitely more complex and more important. Our various microbiomes in our gut, on our skin, in our mouths, etc. do not respect any obvious physical boundaries to our bodies. An infant and a carer synchronise their heartbeats through the heart’s magnetic field.

A forest is highly interconnected both in communication and nutrition. Trees feed each other. Mother trees will sacrifice themselves for their progeny. Vast fungal bodies extend for miles, connecting trees and plants.

Germ theory

Germ theory is so ubiquitous that we forget it is just a theory and a metaphor. When we realise that it is a way to blame external agents for our illness, and that Big Pharma knows how to exploit that to steal our money we may want to give it a second look. It even sounds simplistic: avoid the germs and you won’t get ill. Zap the germs and you will get better.

Animals and humans who are metabolically healthy and live in an environment that supports that health mostly don’t get ill. People who farm regeneratively don’t spend money on vets. We all know people whose sheer vitality precludes illness. Where did the germs go? The alternative theory, terrain theory, says that the internal conditions of the body are the biggest determinant of health.

If an external agent is causing our illness, we look to external support in overcoming it. If instead, we think that feeling below par is a signal to take care of ourselves and our internal environment or terrain, then we will correct our course. There is vast resistance to the notion that we are not taking care of ourselves in an environment that has become stacked with factors that undermine our long term health. I worked with Noel Cobb, who when he had a mild heart attack searched his soul for how he was hardening his heart.

The people who demanded Covid lockdowns committed this mistake. They thought that keeping children from their peers, old people from their families would keep them safe.

Architecture

There is no core to a person or an organisation or a city that can be walled off to keep it safe. To think so is to commit an architectural error that precludes security. Instead, there is a living process that needs to be connected and vibrant.

The health and security of a living things depends on the health and security of all its connections. In an ecosystem there is massive redundancy to these connections and the routes by which they may be maintained. The biomimicry lesson is that life builds life, that in a healthy system everything ends up guaranteeing everything else. There is security because it is continuously generated even before it is defined or understood.

A wall is a single point of failure, like the weakest link of a chain. You don’t make a system more reliable by making the parts more reliable: you have to make the interaction of the parts more reliable and that often means building redundancy. Almost everyone makes the same architectural mistake: it is deeply buried in our culture. Our common sense is mistaken.

When we are drawn to an architecture of exclusion and suspicion, we should ask ourselves why. If we are not happy with the way the existing security gets generated then we will need to play our part more fully. There is no security for us at the expense of others.

Schooling

There are some foundational errors in what we consider schooling to be. I will not use the word education for something that is not a leading out but a walling in. It is errors deeply buried in our childhood that betray us into thinking we can be a castle or an island. We are persuaded at school not to see things jointly.

Very few schools, even the best, are able to celebrate when a pupil gets beyond conventional wisdom. Perhaps fewer still are able to support a pupil who will not comply with things that they see as wrong. Very few institutions can properly support whistle-blowers, even if intellectually they think they should.

School architecture becomes more prison-like, and the ethos of keeping pupils in and intruders out seeps into the school culture. But a school that cannot support its staff and pupils to be what they can be can never be secure. It cuts itself off from the only real source of security: the intelligence and vigilance of its people.

One of the principles of the original Emilia Romagna schools was that one day a week the school was held in the town square. Think about that as an architecture of embeddedness versus an architecture of privacy and exclusion. Pedagogues observing and facilitating the learning of pupils on behalf of parents, not the state. If we teach children albeit subliminally that they are only safe in prison, we get the worst possible outcomes.

ID

We are edging round the question of what it is that we are trying to make or keep secure. Can a person be secure? Or a company? Or a town? The other side of the notion that we can have a wall as a boundary to keep the dangerous outside out is the notion that what is inside is in some sense fixed and stable. Managers love the idea that people are resources that they can count and marshal. The notion that what people can do depends on what they are allowed to do and how they are allowed to change and grow, is often anathema.

The price of a poor notion of security is often a degradation of what it is that is being secured. Like an animal in a zoo not being the animal that people have come to see. Or the classic colonial belief that subjugated people are stupid and lazy. There is a campaign in the US called Let Grow to champion the need for children to have independence. Imagine the magnitude of the thinking mistake that makes parents over-protective.

Schemes that use a fixed ID in order to develop a security system are counter-productive before they even start. The formal ID and the abstract notion of security become a cover under which all sorts of malfeasance can and will take place. What we need to protect is what we want to become not past achievements. A living identity that can never be quite captured is not at all the same thing as something that remains bureaucratically constant.

Subterfuge

The very best security attacks are those where the target is and remains unaware of what is happening. I once worked with a commercial director of a large corporate. At an away-day event I saw him go into a phone booth and come out doubled up with laughter. His cryptic comment: “I took him for quarter of a million and he thinks he owes me a favour”.

We know that many classical IT security products have backdoors and trapdoors often at the behest of so-called national security services. At one level security measures are being put in place and at another the potential for global attacks that are hard to even detect are introduced. Something has been outsourced that is then impossible to manage. Lines of responsibility are blurred at the same time.

Indeed, I became aware first-hand that sometimes security measure and security personnel (I am thinking of a Security Director for a global company) are there as window dressing only and are in trouble if they try and do their job.

When I first started work, my job involved using dynamite as a signal source. The dynamite arrived in unmarked trucks and was stored in nondescript steel bunkers on farm tracks. And all during the time of the Irish troubles. We did have a moment’s doubt when one of our casual labourers turned out to be from Northern Ireland with a criminal record.

The issue of what, after the event, has been secured and what has been exposed to subversion is worthy of deep consideration.

Immune systems

The most sophisticated security system we know of is our immune system. It can detect potential threats by the billion and is constantly training itself to cope with new situations. It is not universal; it works best on the situations it grew up in — it is brilliant in its own context.

One of the many problems with the Covid-19 so-called vaccines is that they trained immune systems for a very specific threat at the expense of the generalised function of routine defence. In military strategy pulling defences out of shape so they are not ready for what turns out to be the main attack has always been practiced.

What we can recognise here is that if the immune system or similar defence mechanism does its routine job really well, we no longer recognise that we are under attack in all those ways. If we do not know what the system is doing for us and still less how it performs its miracles, we are unlikely to recognise when we might compromise its functioning. One of the reported harms of the Covid-19 vaccines is that cancers that were managed or dormant become active again.

This is also a generalisable lesson about security: if we cannot fully specify either what is being secured or what it is being secured from, then a broad spectrum learning from experience is the best we can do.

Am I secure? was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Henri Bortoft tells us not to seek to understand the milk via the cheese. But the cheese can take us on a most edifying journey. The ability of a raw milk cheese to mature itself is a wonder.

I milk two goats each morning and that is more than enough milk for us. So, we have a problem that goes way back into human prehistory: how to turn excess milk into a more long-lasting food. And like many things in ancient culture, the solutions are not just useful and practical but things of subtlety and joy.

If you go to standard advice about making cheese you get to pasteurise the milk and then add freeze-dried culture. That works and produces palatable cheese of various types. But it takes you toward the cheese we get commercially, cheese that does not improve with age and which goes mouldy given half a chance. The bacteria and fungi that are needed to mature the cheese were killed in the pasteurisation.1

It is so counter-intuitive and counter-cultural to keep milk and then curds at room temperature while they develop! We spend our kitchen life avoiding doing that, despite our millennia of cultural history without refrigeration. My guide in my explorations is David Asher in The Art of Natural Cheesemaking.

I also make kefir every day and so I know this is a stable process. Drink the kefir, add new milk to the “grains”, and hey presto a new batch the next day. Kefir is a broad spectrum culture, and Asher says it has all the bugs that are needed for a cheese to start its journey, according to the conditions it finds.

The cheese process also has its continuity, so some slops from a batch of cheese are added to the subsequent batch. The grand raw milk cheeses, the Parmesans if you like, do just that to keep a developing and distinctive character. That puts them alongside the sourdough starter and the beer yeast stocks. If a process depends on microbial action, then the microbes need to be propagated. Stable microbial processes are indeed a wonder.

Raw milk

Clearly the milk inside the goats’ udders does not go off. If you stop milking each day the milk production stops quite quickly: “drying off”. But from day to day, just as in humans, the milk is deemed fresh and wholesome. Normally we refrigerate our milk more or less straight away and it keeps for a week at least.

We know from making cheese at room temperature that the microbes in the milk form a stable ecosystem that does not allow sudden growth of any particular microbe. That seems to make evolutionary sense, but why are the microbes there in the first place? One answer is that there are microbes everywhere and that nature abhors a vacuum. You get sudden souring of pasteurised milk because the balancing and stable ecosystem is not present.

But there are deeper answers. The goats themselves live in a microbial world and depend on microbes for their very nutrition: ruminants feed from the bugs that digest the forage that the goats eat. They need the microbes even more obviously than we do, and they need an immune system that acts against harmful bugs the way we do, too. Apparently, substances from the saliva of goat kids feeding from their mothers can enter the mother and she can produce a response in her milk to help the kids fight an infection.2

This stable and responsive microbial world is also necessarily local. There are generalities across all goats and indeed across all ruminants, but the particulars are specific and local. French farmhouse goat cheeses (“crottins”) are recognisably the same and recognisably different. Different over geography and different over time. The curation of the cheese process is both a guiding hand and a response to differences.

I am not making any extravagant claims to the emerging qualities of my cheese. But some cheeses made in a similar way reach gastronomic heights. The tastes and textures flow from the microbes in the milk. There is a confluence here of human social history and community, of animal behaviour and interaction with shepherds, and of the benign microbial cultures that live in and support that world.

Technologies

The farming world is a bit entranced by technology. There has to be a machine to do it quicker, an agrichemical to solve a problem, a way to squeeze more out of less. We have avoided most of this just by being a smallholding of limited scale. Milking two goats is easier to do by hand. Keeping the nettles and thistles down is easier to do with a scythe.

The cheese story is heir to this tradition: practical peasant low-tech hands-on work. Labour intensive if it needs to be. Involved, observational, continuous, embedded. If I lose my sourdough starter I can grow another one but it will never be the same. If I go on holiday someone has to look after the kefir.

Albert Borgmann is the philosopher who looks at what we lose when things become more convenient. His paradigmatic case is the move from an open fire as heating to central heating. He calls such things focal practices, because they are the foci for many diverse things that happen around them. There is a whole raft of human culture embedded in sitting round a fire that is lost when we can flick a switch, no matter how we try to hang on to it.

I want to know the raft of practical things that go along with letting our foundational microbiota do their magical work for us. I want to know how the processes take shape when we are really just curating. I cannot let convenience technologies like freeze-dried culture interrupt what is trying to be.

There is discovery at the social and personal scale and there is discovery at the metabolic scale. Mental processes are well entwined with the microbiome of the gut and any time we adjust our metabolic milieu to be closer to how we evolved we can expect to think and behave differently. That is as subtle as it is interesting because of the question of how we can be conscious of such changes.

Roasted meat

We have had a family project called Wild Routes. It involves camping and doing things in a modestly off-grid sort of way. One of the most striking activities is to do a pit roast. Dig a hole, light a fire in it, when everything is hot put a large lump of meat in the hole and cover it up with soil. Several hours later the meat is meltingly tender.

Again this in a bit counter-cultural. We don’t like soil/dirt near our meat and we like to be able to time and control the temperature of the cooking. That is how we believe we get the “perfect” roast meat. We have usually done a couple of the largest lamb shoulder we can find, sandwiched with great branches of herbs and wrapped in foil.3

The practice in our culture that still comes close is I suppose the hog roast. There is all sorts of expensive technology around a hog roast but it still involves cooking a pig for a long time.

It was a bigger project than I imagined but we built an outside wood-fired oven. Such a beast you stoke a fire in its belly until the whole structure reaches 450C. It will then cool if allowed to do so gently over at least 24hrs. The available control is to cook when the oven reaches about the right temperature and to close the oven door which cuts off oxygen to the remaining fuel and gives a moister, smokier heat.

I have eaten a lot of meat in my life, but cooking that much closer to our evolutionary roots was and is a revelation. Put another way the accidents on my learning journey have been stunning. An overnight smoked whole brisket a bit too cool. A whole chuck that was crisp on the outside and falling apart inside. And a pork shoulder that, even though I insist every week that we want the fattest meat, the butcher was embarrassed about: the tenderest crackling I have ever tasted in years of trying.

The other day I gave our weaner pigs a branch of green acorns which they attacked with joy and gusto. They have definitely never seen an acorn before but they knew acorns were pig heaven. I am speculating that we can access our instinct for meat the way we have never known it. For cooking far messier and smellier than you could do in modern house. For cultural roots we have nearly lost.

Who we are

The modern consumer word would have us believe that everything is a choice. We can choose friends and associates, we can choose the values we believe in, we can choose what to eat and what to wear. Who we are becomes a construct. The serial personae of David Bowie, a true magician of this.4

This is important to corporate entities who can then manipulate us. The cultural roots and the focal practices that centre us in our proper social evolution are anathema to marketing. I have a friend, a keen horsewoman, who will write a brief list and go the supermarket, coming away with only what was on the list.

The raw milk cheese and the wood-fired meat roast are capable of helping us find out who we are when we have become lost in the entirely self-referential world of marketing and selling. When the identities thrust upon us have confused and betrayed us. The labyrinth is radically undermined by a sense of who we are together. Some opposite of identity politics, a solidarity with our microbial bodies and their environmental needs.

I used to run a risk management consultancy company. It was sophisticated and intelligent in its way. Through it, I came to understand that getting companies to understand the big risks they faced and the getting them to see how to address them ended up in bad faith. We could only really help with risks that people lost sleep over, and selling people loss of sleep is not a great business model.

This is in microcosm the failure of our education system and our culture. We mistake who we are under the weight of pressure to be someone different. And we don’t know how to regain our footing. Education as we know it is about externals and never about refusing to comply. Many of education’s “successful” graduates are psychopathic in their disregard for what matters to them and to their social milieu.

What we need to know, to understand properly, in the set of focal practices that will support us in being who we are and who we need to become. The focal practice that kept me sane was always wilderness, a fascinating practice where any intervention detracts from the wildness of the wilderness itself. It is the ultimate unpackageable, unmarketable, polar opposite of everything corporate entities stand for. And, yes, there are many “products” that only prove that the focal practice disappears when we try to grasp it.

Conservation grazing

Just as the conditions the cheese matures under need curating to allow the cheese to achieve its potential, our damaged and depleted landscapes cannot be simply rewilded, if that means letting go. We can curate the process of the landscape achieving its potential with animals and plants that belong there in a diverse and balanced system. Highland cows, browsing goats, wild boar, beaver, together with keystone predators like eagles and wildcats can be midwives.

There must be, but I cannot yet imagine, social conservation grazers that will check the rank growth of psychopaths and sociopaths that ruins our society. Something that was always there in more balanced and nuanced societies to keep the weeds in check and allow many more people to find out who they are and who they can be.

1 I once read that, to an American, if a cheese in the fridge changes, then something is wrong, whereas to a Frenchman, if a cheese in the fridge fails to change, then something is wrong. You can guess on which side of that I find myself!

2 This reminds me of the response that certain plants have to being overgrazed; they become bitter and less palatable the more they are nibbled at and restore their native sweetness when growth resumes.

3 The braver among you will source a shoulder of mutton!

4 “The minute you know you’re on safe ground, you’re DEAD.” — David Bowie

The cheese of life was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Suppose I have reason not to trust doctors, and general practitioners (GPs) in particular. Not a particular doctor, though that will always be true, but where GPs are coming from, what they have been taught, the tools they use and the data they rely on.

They are often engaging, even charismatic, people who seem interested in me and my health: but only from a particular angle. You can get at this issue very quickly by examining informed consent. The things doctors promote to their patients are many times with hindsight not a great idea and patients are almost always not in a position to take a good decision about their own health. Indeed, it would be odd for any professional to give their clients the information to be able to challenge their advice.

You can get a different take on the same issue by looking at the patients who want to be given some pills to make them better. There is a huge increase in prescriptions of pills for mental health issues: depression, sleeping problems, anxiety. There is no sign that this prescription in effective over time and lots of evidence that people are addicted and damaged: doctors seem to say that they will prescribe a very small dose, so that’s OK then. The things that might help patients who say they just want a pill are dietary and exercise programmes that doctors are much less good at selling. We trust GPs with poisons but not with our lives and the way we live them.

The contexts for this situation are not helpful. Pharmaceutical companies are rich and powerful and control the media tightly, so there is little useful information available from everyday public sources. Medical education is extremely conservative and slow to change — it is also corrupt. And the majority of the population in the UK is now metabolically unhealthy, so the experience of doctors is overwhelmingly of patients whose metabolism does not work properly.

Just to explore this last. There is a high level of concern about the link between salt intake and hypertension, and there is indeed a link in the data. However, people who do not have raised insulin levels can process salt without problems and excrete any excess. Indeed, more salt is necessary once metabolic problems have been sorted. The slogan is “don’t blame the salt for what the sugar does” and indeed you can easily reduce hypertension by going keto.

Destroying the hinterland

All civilisations to date have collapsed when their hinterland can no longer support their population, usually through destruction of the soil. We are a million miles from learning this lesson. Both literally as we turn the agricultural land of the world into deserts, and metaphorically by ignoring the destruction of other things we depend on like social infrastructure and trust.

Yes, I am saying that doctors have come from being a factor in the effective management of illness and disease to being a factor in the destruction of general public health. They don’t quite recognise yet that they are actively destroying patient trust in them and their system. They know but don’t know that health research in the UK is thoroughly Stalinist. They know but don’t know that they are being bribed to push medicines that don’t work.

This is not a benign effect in the margins. If, as is far too common recently, you have a major trauma in your life and you turn to your doctor for support, perhaps in managing to sleep, you will probably be treated as having a mental health condition. Make no mistake: they’ll say your inability to deal with life-threatening trauma is your fault! Take these pills that may result in brain damage and addiction. Let us complete the ruin of your life.

Doctors are not responsible for the collapse of our civilisation, but they are a good example of the destruction of the hinterland without which the civilisation cannot exist. As we speak if you are damaged by a Covid vaccine there is no support available, and many people and institutions will not believe your story. The mainstream media will refuse to cover your story even when handed full verified documentation on a plate. Collapse is in front of our eyes, and we don’t see it, just as previous civilisations refused to see their own future.

Customer care

Obviously the tobacco industry did and still does kill millions of its customers. There is no other way to put it. And it seems the food industry learned its business methods from tobacco: get your customers addicted. Since those addictions are harmful to health — no accident — the food industry kills more of its customers than any other industry. What proportion of the population hold out against breakfast cereals?

We can talk about the alcohol industry; we can talk about gambling. Other people can and do fight those battles, sometimes with some limited success. But the point we are after here is still the destruction of the hinterland: we can see industries literally destroy their customer base and we can see how there is no other business model out there.

There is no governance in these industries that says: hang on we can’t keep doing this indefinitely. And there is no governance that says why does such a pattern exist across industries and still less what can we do about protecting our future.

During the financial crash of 2008, banks kept trading frantically in worthless paper until the crash actually happened. They were ripping people off, but it was party time. The crash resulted in the biggest ever transfer of wealth from black Americans to whites. The focus was on the survival of a rapacious banking system, not on protecting the hinterland.

The oil industry is the prime case. By their own reckoning they are destroying the liveability of planet earth, and despite bold statements their mission keeps reverting to what they know best. We are addicted to cars and to industry that needs cheap energy. We even take gross risks with our national security to feed our addiction.

The hinterland focuses the issue. If we kill our addicted customers, who cares so long as there are enough customers with nowhere else to go? Remember McKinsey advised the Sacklers about how to get more customers addicted to opioids. The climate case is the extreme of hinterland arguments: when the very planet becomes the hinterland it is obvious to everyone who looks that ecocide, genocide are the only outcomes. The fact that people argue about when we might die proves the case.

Tipping points

If the hinterland was steadily degrading so that the policy choices were obvious, at least we would have our eyes open. But these things swing suddenly around tipping points. Ecological collapse happens quite suddenly when it comes. Climate is tied to ocean circulation which seems to be switching. People make wildly ill-informed decisions under stress, perhaps especially politicians do. And it will always be the case that disastrous options are dressed up as salvation, maybe genuinely believed in. Eat vegetables for instance.

Looked at through the other end of the telescope, we do not heed the gradual changes that are perfectly measurable and communicable. We find narratives to comfort ourselves that we do not need to change just yet. That is the behaviour that guarantees tipping points over which we no longer have any control.

If ocean circulation switches to another pattern, there is nothing in the science that says we can get it to switch back to patterns that work for us. Almost nothing of this nature is reversible. Neither can we test policy “options” to see if they “work”. Everything takes us to a new place, and the new hinterland will probably not supply the services we need. We may not like where evolution takes us.

Hinterland

No-one thinks the hinterland matters. Almost by definition it is the part of supporting services that is not thought to be important. Of course, there are many, many ways that life can become unsupportable, and hinterland can be shorthand for the ones we neither know nor care about. If you look at how narrow political agendas have become you can see how corresponding wide and important the hinterland becomes.

This is not a matter of information and reporting. The recent case of lightweight concrete in schools and hospitals (and …) was properly investigated in a timely manner, proper proposals were submitted to take care of the issues, the problems which would be faced by the sheer scale were enumerated: but schools and hospitals were placed, maybe briefly, in the hinterland of things not to worry about until they became someone else’s problem.

The hinterland is a densely interconnected system in the way that a political programme cannot be. All the unexpected interdependencies and gotchas are lying there like landmines and booby-traps. These things have their origins in all the ways we don’t follow through our decisions. Lightweight concrete has a design life of thirty years so … Borrowed time is why things can build to crises and perfect storms.

The governance of hinterland relationships

If the hinterland is, almost by definition, all the things that a civilisation chooses not to pay attention to, what is to be done when the capacity of the hinterland comes into doubt? Who knows when stresses and strains and small failures add up to an existential threat? Well of course the hinterland itself and its denizens know. And those denizens will never be asked in the current scheme of things, which is why civilisations collapse.

If I lose trust in GPs, then nothing will change until the roots of that lack of trust are addressed, until someone can speak to me about the reasons why I do not, cannot, trust my GP. It is not a question of who is right, it is a question of institution and hinterland. The pressures from big pharma and big food are such that this is not a matter of a fireside chat over a pint. The pressures on the system, clearly seen in the furore and fuss around vaccination, become existential for the institution: how could they not, eventually?

The data that GPs use, the evidence if you like, is systematically invalidated by a failure to understand metabolic health, and of course metabolism is necessarily the root of all biology. The so-called crises of obesity, of heart disease, of diabetes, of mental health, of all chronic disease in our population are symptoms of mistaken notions of metabolism. As David Bohm knew so well, a single failure in a system of thought can invalidate the whole edifice. There is nothing that I can say to my GP to bridge this gap.

So, when the ability of the hinterland to support and service a civilisation is crumbling, what is to be done, what are the governance moves and structures? Bridges need to be built. There must be a recognition that from the perspective of a civilisation or an institution there are some risks and wrinkles but from the perspective of the hinterland full scale collapse is in view. And to build a bridge means accepting vulnerability. An institution must understand that its view of itself will get swept away. Of course, people want to circle the wagons.

Exemplars

When South Africa moved away from apartheid, there were elements and stories of bridge building between a repressive government and the bulk of the population that the country consisted of. There was much talk of democracy and its principles, but the nub was some crunchy negotiation about sharing power so that the hinterland could recover somewhat.

In a similar way the GOP in the US has to come to grips with its hinterland, in a way that allows the hinterland to have a voice and to understand the hinterland’s part in taking the country to a better place. The alternative is a disintegration and collapse that we may yet see.

We need to see very clearly that there are no unilateral solutions to the collapse of a hinterland: only proper governance can help.

When the hinterland bites back was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When US scientists were challenged by the then president to study and report on climate change, they chose to study carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. They chose to study carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because they could model it — not because it was the most important thing about climate change to study. This type of failure is endemic in the power/science nexus: providing a plausible narrative is always more important than solving the problem.

The foremost alternative to studying the mechanisms that warm the planet is to study the mechanisms that cool the planet. The chief among these is the water cycle. Are we damaging the ways in which the planet has always cooled itself? Too fiendishly complex to model back in the day but holding the key to practical ways to modify climate change. Perhaps the key to why it still doesn’t suit political people to pay attention to cooling is that it is local and can only be local.

When another US president had a heart attack, powerful white men in the US had hysteria about their grip on power. Public health scientists were challenged to come up with a public health answer to a problem that didn’t really exist. What they came up with as a narrative was about saturated fats clogging peoples’ arteries. The science was poor to vanishingly non-existent and the effect of the narrative has been to make public health infinitely worse. Sins of omission and sins of commission: sugar was the culprit that went off scot-free and saturated fats turn out to be foundational to health.

When my brother studied agriculture at university nearly fifty years ago, he was taught that tilling damaged soil structure. Since then, we have had fifty years of soil structure destruction by heavier and heavier machinery and more and more potent agrichemicals. Soil now requires escalating amounts of fertiliser to grow crops: so much that it may not be possible to dial back without serious food shortages and so much that water pollution is endemic. This is a story that took hold of farmers imaginations in the teeth of all the good science.

How these three epochal and epic mistakes interact in the present challenges is the subject of this blog.

The water cycle

In a rainforest it rains. Yes, really. We sort of assume because we have the wrong narrative that the rainforest is there because it rains, but it is largely the other way round. Walter Jehne started a rainforest on semi-arid land outside Canberra and without adding water it maintains itself as a rainforest. And when you clear a patch of rainforest in the Amazon, it quickly becomes desert.

Between the cooling effect of evaporating and transpiring water at ground level and the heat loss effect of water vapour condensing high in the atmosphere and the effect of clouds reflecting the sun’s radiation, considerable cooling occurs locally. Local temperature under tree cover is typically six degrees below that on open ground.

These are the mechanisms that big science chose not to study. Now no-one says that land use plans reflect a further reduction in the cooling effect of the water cycle, even in places like California where this is crucial.

The mantra of people who work practically with these effects is that we should keep (rain)water on the land as long as possible. Streams should be slow and winding and full of ponds — bring back the beaver! The soil should be a capacious sponge capable of storing vast volumes of water. Trees should bring up deep water and produce recycling via rainfall. There should be zero surface runoff: all rain should soak in. There should be no bare soil to lose water from.

There is also a water quality argument, that streams that do eventually flow from a water-catchment area should be clean and free from excessive nutrients. The prevalence of agricultural chemical fertilisers such as nitrogen as river pollution proves that the water cycle is not working as it should.

Human nutrition, beyond propaganda and fairly tales

It is not so easy to escape human evolution. Why would we want to escape our origins? You tell me but there isn’t a field of endeavour which does not have strands of human exceptionalism, does not hold out the possibility that we are NOT part of a beautifully complex set of living interconnections.

The simplest, cleanest starting point is this: what did we evolve eating? By sheer mass of numbers, the answer has to be ruminants. Deer and antelope, sheep and goats, cattle and bison. These animals provide everything you need to be healthy because we evolved eating them. They graze a wide range of plants and trees and provide us with a single point of balanced nutrition.

We can ask the question the other way round. What is the single complete food that we can eat without any deficiencies? What is the single food that will correct the major macronutrient and micronutrient deficiencies we see in modern populations? Ruminants. Why is this not understood in the halls of dieticians and nutritionists? Well, that is a long and political story in which Seventh Day Adventists feature more prominently that scientists.

As an aside, there are other valid foods in other climes. An American nutritionist who went to dwell with Inuit for a year and live on seal meat and blubber (no vegetables at all) was told by his colleagues he would die. He thrived: a stunning disconnect.

What is the fashionable/propaganda target for telling people what not to eat? Red meat: ruminants. This cannot be an accident, that the very food that can remove our dependency on supplement and pharmaceuticals is demonised.

Soil restoration

Soil has been damaged, eroded, throttled, starved almost to the point of killing it. In most places round the world, perhaps especially in places like Australia and New Zealand where rapid colonisation led to farming practices totally unsuited to the land. So how do you start reversing some of that damage?

Soil is an incredibly complex ecosystem, and it rests on fungi and bacteria and other micro-organisms that can mine the bedrock for minerals to support life. This is what a soil is and how it evolved. There are critical micronutrients that need to be present, and I believe present in the right sequence, to allow the ecosystem to build itself. I think the first in the sequence is Boron.

Here is how we handle this in upland Wales. We have a home-made mineral lick for the sheep that is largely seaweed. The sheep know to consume small quantities of mineral lick, thus acquiring micronutrients for their own health. Their excrement which they deposit at the tops of slopes thus contains necessary micronutrients in an organic matrix, ready to be used by soil micro-organisms.

If we don’t treat our sheep for intestinal worms, then the excrement is dealt with in short order (three days) by dung beetles which bury it deep in the soil. The burial is important to get the minerals where they are needed and to interrupt the lifecycle of the intestinal worms.

The various soil micro-organisms, but especially the fungi, create soil structure and pore space in the soil. As ever, life creates the conditions for life to flourish. The pore spaces contain air and water and the organisms supply minerals and water to plant roots in exchange for sugars which are their food. There is a ridiculously simple and cheap experiment where you can kick-start soil life and greatly increase soil fertility by watering with a very, very dilute sugar solution.

Ruminants are thus the answer to soil restoration, to the extent that I don’t know another anything like as effective. And note this is evolutionarily specific. The guru of all things dung beetle, Sally Ann Spence, was trying to bring back a species of dung beetle from possible extinction, used a local traditional breed of sheep on their traditional pastures to do so, successfully.

If we do not prevent the processes involved, ruminants will restore and build soil, the way they always have. Eight feet of amazingly fertile soil on the Great Prairies are largely the result of the huge herds of buffalo that roamed there. Yes, the farts and burps that are credited with destroying our planet come from the only engine that can save us.

Soil and cooling

Good control of the water cycle implies soil development and vice versa. There are cases where wildfires bypassed particular properties because the soil held enough moisture and was cool enough. Ruminants tend to like shade and the mixture of trees and pasture seems to work as a pattern in many ways.

Remember, the whole ecosystem needs the right amount of water and the plants that ruminants browse create particles to nucleate rainfall, as well as transpiring water into the air. The windbreak action of trees and hedges is important in keeping water cycle functions local.

Obviously building roads and car parks destroys those localities’ ability to cool themselves and we have all experienced their heat. Ploughing a field and/or leaving it bare gives a measurable loss in cooling too. It is just not what we model and not what campaigners fight for.

Ruminants

Ruminants are herd or flock animals. They really do pine away without their friends. They bunch together for protection from predators, and this makes the predators important in maintaining this behaviour. A typical farmer thinks he is better off without wolves, bears, and mountain lions, but this is just wrong. The ecosystem function of ruminants depends on them being a herd on the move.

Given a chance, ruminants will browse grass and herbs, bushes and leaves, tree bark and even thistles. They eat a wide spectrum of plants to gain minerals from different plant sources. Some plants have deeper roots to bring up water and minerals, some grow at different seasons to provide continuity. Traditionally, a goatherd will take his charges on a circuit to visit different ecosystems to increase diversity.

Part of the demonisation is that for instance cows use too much water. Again, this is the opposite of the science which is that managed herds of cows will keep more water on the land, and that water will be cleaner.

Since ruminants are going to increase soil fertility, the number that can be supported on a given area of land will be greater if they are managed to allow their ecosystem role. But these is a limit when density becomes too high due to disease processes taking hold. In the wild, predators and diseases limit population.

Land use planning

I can’t see how land use can be planned without understanding the central role of ruminants. They are indispensable to soil fertility, to human nutrition and to cooling the planet. There is no nutritious food without healthy soil. It is not too challenging to work the number of ruminants we need to bring the agricultural land we have into condition. And the amount of prime food that operation implies can be set against the nutritional deficiencies of the population.

As an example of where things go, there is a huge imbalance between animal agriculture in the west of the UK and arable farming in the east, losing the benefits of both.

There is much worthy work going on to try and reform the food chain and to understand what incentives will allow farming to deliver what the population want and need. But this work does not understand that our place in the ecosystem is a given, not a choice. We cannot modify who we are in the biochemical and evolutionary scheme of things. First regain a foothold on soil health and human health and then see what is possible. Don’t allow more flaky science and political turpitude to take us down a road which is failing faster than we can even recognise.

Since I wrote this, I notice a new book on a closely allied theme: why the industrial route to food cannot ever work. Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Chris Smaje.

A tale of flunked science and the pre-eminent importance of ruminants was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was once staying in a friend’s house in France, on holiday. My carefully chosen reading was World Turned Inside Out by Tom Cheetham. Also staying at the house were a married couple, both senior schoolteachers. They wanted to know what the book was about, and were unimpressed, verging on scathing, when I couldn’t tell them. In their world something that could not be articulated was not worth spending time on. The book is about Islamic Mysticism and the magnum opus by Henri Corbin Alone with the Alone. From my perspective the very inexpressibility of thought patterns and practices in quotidien English was the point.

We could equally talk about the work and writings of Temple Grandin, a severely autistic woman in the US who has had a dramatic effect on how animals are handled. People are bemused and impressed by insights and results from a pattern of thinking that is inaccessible to most. Or we could speak of Greta Thunberg who even as an autistic child could take on the sleazy power players of our world and own them.

I have long remarked in myself a difference in thinking when my body is in ketosis. Apparently our brains go into ketosis after six or eight hours of not eating: for most people, every night. The expression “sleep on it” may point to a solving of problems in a different thinking mode. People also report a more spiritual thinking style when in a deep fast.

The ancient world had a practice called incubation. To heal a city an envoy would bring back a law from the spirit world. Incubation consisted of a fast of several days in a dark cave with a guide to navigate the spirit world. I love the image of getting as far from normal and conventional thinking as possible.

A feature here is to avoid what is expected by others. Which does absolutely not mean that this is individual and heroic. Thinking shared among minds, developed jointly, is uniquely powerful. I am not a crossword person, but I used to sit beside my elderly mother to do The Times jumbo crossword, and just by my sitting there she could do clues which otherwise defeated her.

As the level and sophistication of narrative control in our society becomes ever greater, our need to make sense independently of the commentariat becomes daily greater. It doesn’t matter what the content is, we need fresh air.

Bateson and Laing

Gregory Bateson spent several years developing a systematic family therapy, looking to analyse conversations in dysfunctional families to see where the dysfunction was located. In such family systems there is generally a person who is perceived to be the problem: they are not! And from that insight it is generally concluded that it is always the mother: it is not. Actually analysing the patterns of communication is intractable if it is done rigorously.

We see here, neatly wrapped, that in a family we may be wrapped in a system of communication that does not allow the structural situation we are in to be understood. We cannot assume that the self-assessments of people’s family situations can withstand sympathetic evaluation against other accounts. Some of the roots of diverse thinking surely lie in these compelling but irreconcilable accounts.

R.D. Laing1 has the same pattern but looking at people diagnosed with severe mental illness. His question is always whether madness lies in these individuals or in their enclosing society. He was able to show that in alternative residential social settings the symptoms exhibited by the “mental illness” were strongly modified and ameliorated. We cannot assume that extreme and vexing symptoms belong to the person showing them.2

Getting away from function

There is a long history of people wanting to assign characteristics and functions to areas of the brain — from phrenology on. And we need to be aware of the strong current of eugenics right through the last century and into this one: inferior people with inferior brains. I liked a recent tweet saying how odd it is that intelligent people think that they know more and can make better decisions when the first thing intelligence shows us is that we don’t know.

We can move from the dysfunction all about us to the notion of dysregulation. There is a clear and measurable distinction between brains that are regulated as designed and which are working in a coherent pattern, and brains that are more chaotic in their active connections and can be said to be dysregulated. We don’t have to talk about content or function to understand dissociated patterns of thinking, that may produce unwanted or distressing symptoms. This is not a value judgment: it is a description of a state which may also be self-reported.

In a recent talk by Lilianne Mujica Parodi she shows how the speed and effectiveness of messages between different brain regions is affected by whether the cells are fuelled by ketones (fast) or glucose (slow). We can glimpse that how our thinking feels may indeed reflect how the internal regulation is working. Without any loss of individuality or diversity, with no sense of normative thinking I am able to think my thoughts or our thoughts more or less clearly.

So, the quality and clarity of our mental processes is very much an aspect of our metabolic health. That should not be controversial or a surprise, but we all tend to gaslight people for their perceived divergence from our norms. It would be wonderful to be able to value people for the clarity of their different responses to the world around us. The tendency of people in power to define difference from their views as problematic, criminal, and ill is itself so sick.

Meeting our cultures

If a colleague of mine with ADHD has trouble getting to meetings on time, whose problem is that? Does it show that she can’t meet expectations of punctuality and is thus deficient or defective? Or does it show that our notions of meeting are so inflexible that they risk excluding some people they really need to include? When you think what a colossal waste of time most meetings are, it is far from obvious how to go about answering such questions. If we can only run corporate life by the clock, who would know what we lose?3

Rebecca Solnit in her wonderful Field Guide to Getting Lost talks about ways of losing ourselves physically and literally. On a field trip to the far north of Norway I was walking in wilderness using a map made by the USAF in WW2. I came across a whole deep valley and chain of lakes missing from the map! Navigating the terrain with no guide from map or person was indeed liberating, even formative. We need to drop our props. The world says we stay safe by knowing where we are: but do we really know where our maps lead?

John Raven’s research in many countries round the world found the parents of schoolchildren all had as their top priority that the next generation should think better than their own. And there are precisely no education systems with this as a goal.

Our dominant culture wants to compare individuals’ ability to think. This person is better than that person at maths. This person is more creative than that one. First let us say that Gregory Bateson as an anthropologist said there is no way we can use our own categories, such as economy and culture, to describe newly contacted tribes. (Spoiler: no-one listened.) Then let’s say that some unlikely candidates have turned out to be maths geniuses or revolutionary artists. If I want to say that Alice is better than Brian in some way that says lots about me and very little about them. And although there is sometime a nod in the direction of collective wisdom, it is always secondary.

In The Dawn of Everything Graeber and Wengrow have essentially an endless list of our prejudices about the past and the evidence that those prejudices are ill-founded. The nature of our mistakes are summed up in the term “primitive”. We don’t allow the notion that other cultures were more sophisticated than ours in many, many ways. I think there are modern studies showing how nationality is a key determinant in whether researchers can get their papers published in the best journals.

Compelling insights

There is a disgustingly non-PC joke about an Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman going to the guillotine. For the Englishman the guillotine fails and he is freed. The Scotsman, too. The the Irishman says “wait, I think I can see what the problem is”. Sometimes we have insights that are never going to work in our interests but are still compelling. If we celebrate diversity of thinking this is going to happen much more often.

I recall a story about a transatlantic flight in an aircraft with a jet engine in the tail. A shard from the engine severed all the controls to the aircraft tail. The aircraft was stable but no-one knew how to land it. There was time available to get ideas from the best pilots and their simulators around the world, but in the denouement the pilot discovered for himself how to crash land without killing everyone. In a polycrisis world, who knows what we are relying on people to be able to do.

What allows compelling insights to come to fruition? How can your unique style of creative tension and my irreverence towards official narratives come to something together? My sense is that there is a gentleness and fierceness of spirit, an uncompromising but loving patience that we might see in Wendell Berry for instance that is its own truth. The truths that we need must be lived. It cannot be about what other people should do.

Angels and archangels

At the age of four, in the nursery nativity, I intoned “Don’t be afraid Mary, you are going to have a baby”, apparently gruff even then. Mary’s defining quality in being able to hear Gabriel was complete humility. We wouldn’t be able to see an angel if we met one because their intelligence transcends ours. I would link this to the practice of incubation described above.

It is vexing to try and find language for a humble openness to what we do not and cannot know. The opening vignette above describes how people close themselves to anything that can upturn their understanding of the world. My own struggles here on a Welsh hill smallholding are to understand what abundance is possible when I circumvent shoddy agricultural practices. Just as we all struggle to find the health that is possible for us when we avoid damaging myths and downright lies about food and pharmaceutical products.

The angels of course know what is possible for us, and how full or wonders that can be. And the higher angels know how society can be healed too. We have failed to learn from societies that have done it better. We have told ourselves that sickness and disability accompany ageing. We have despoiled the natural world in the name of profit (!) and cheap food. And we cannot find the humility to hear the angels and what they might want to say.

Gentle people are asking what labels do. If you have a label of ADHD or PTSD or major depression, does that help me to hear you and you to make your points and contributions? We have normalised oppression and violence: sensibilities towards that need to be heard. Equally we need to hear of joy and find it for ourselves. The drab and the uniform drag us down. The quirky, the unconventional and the downright weird may yet save us. After all, it’s the ‘unreasonable’ person who changes the world.4

1 Fun facts: The house in east London that Gandhi stayed in in 1931 late housed Laing’s experimental setup. One of Laing’s great achievements was to die while playing tennis in the south of France: what a way to go for a rebel.

2 The ORSC Systemic Coaching people talk about ‘voices of the system’ and how when a perceived-as-problematic member of a group is got rid of, another member of the group will often start voicing the same concerns, though perhaps more skillfully.

3 It’d be remiss not to mention James Scott’s notion of legibility, a kind of running by the clock that loses a great deal.

4 Shaw, of course. “The reasonable man (sic) adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Authentic listening to real individuals was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most economic arguments are simply excuses for doing something inexcusable. They attempt to erect some necessity to justify damage and pain. I want to start from literal ground roots to establish a different agricultural economics that does not trash the planet. Needless to say, this is an urgent project.

The soil, our remaining debilitated soil, is the cooling system for the planet. We worry incessantly about overheating and we ignore the cooling system. The cooling system involves plants growing in the soil and photosynthesising. This process captures carbon that otherwise remains in the atmosphere. It drives a local water cycle that has a direct cooling effect on the atmosphere. And it has a dramatic effect on where and how much rain falls locally.

The rate of photosynthesis is not a given for a particular plant cover. It is depressed on soils with depleted and chelated trace mineral profiles. It is affected by the water cycle. And it is directly driven by the diversity of soil life. It is damaged by most agrichemicals — whether fertilisers, biocides, or veterinary medicines. The photosynthesis that happens can feed the life of a healthy soil and fix carbon in soil, growing its fertility. The photosynthesis from a given area of land is not replaceable: that land area either captures sunlight there and cools the atmosphere, or it fails to do so.

Successful local plant growth depends on recycling the plant material through the soil. Over the majority of the earth’s agricultural land this depends on ruminants digesting the otherwise resistant cellulose material of the grasses. This is the context for people who believe that humans should eat less meat.

Foundations

I want to use two principles that are not normally advanced in economic reasoning at all. Albert Borgmann talks of focal practices for human activity, and how technology, while increasing convenience, detracts from practices that make us human. And Marshall McLuhan wants us to understand that every extension of human capability is also an amputation.

Maybe we should rehearse the two paradigmatic examples. For Borgmann, humans sit round fires to keep warm (I sit in front of a woodburner now) and in the process all sorts of social benefits accrue, whereas a central heating system is so much more controllable but has no focus. For McLuhan, the telephone system allows us to talk to many more people and at arbitrary distances, but something is lost in the quality of the conversation that ensues.

We will also take it as a given that economic “reasons” for agricultural choices move costs from direct costs to exported costs that are paid by others and by the environment generally. Sometimes these exported costs are understood, even if hazily, and sometimes people are completely blind to them. People do not usually see a farmer ploughing a field and think of the damage caused to the planet. People may see and regret soil erosion from fields, but few think about the degradation that must have preceded it.

Biodiversity

One focal practice we might concern ourselves with is herding. Typically in a mountainous area, a goatherd will take his flock of goats on a circuit each day. In different places the goats will browse different plants and trees. The choices made of what to eat lie in some intersection of goat appetites and goatherd selection of route. Both the goats and the goatherd necessarily come to understand what is good.

If a farmer reseeds a field with Italian ryegrass, even neglecting the ploughing and spraying that precedes this, they produce a monoculture. There may be a good yield of fodder in terms of tonnage per acre, but there is no diversity and therefore no choice. Both upstream and downstream parts of the web suffer. There is no diversity of roots to help feed a diverse soil biome, and there is no ability of the goats to select food that will maintain their health.

If we lose the focal practice of herding, we will lose our understanding of the significance of dietary choices. For our livestock and ourselves. Our livestock can browse a wide range of plants that have roots into different soil biomes. In doing so they can correct local deficiencies and toxicities and improve our own health. How many people still know this in any practical sense? This is an exported cost that results from losing our ability to learn about micronutrients and nutrient density and health. It may not be recoverable.

If we lose the focal practice of herding we will also lose the sense of what happens to the soil in the landscape as a result of browsing. The diversity of plants supported in a landscape that is browsed and grazed is much greater than in less managed landscapes. We will only notice this by herding and paying attention. We are talking about styles of sylvopasture: trees for shade and to help bring up water from depth and a rich sward of diverse grasses and forbes that fix a high proportion of the sunlight into soil carbon. Soil carbon is held in the biological structures that support pore space and sponge-like water-holding properties of the soil. A soil that holds large reservoirs of water is resistant to the ravages of fire.

The cost of losing the ability to manage the soil in a landscape is potentially infinite. We can lose the soil catastrophically in extreme weather events. We can lose trees and infrastructure to fires. Soil life can be extinguished in droughts. Some people know how to bring back semi-arid regions to productive life by the careful management of intense grazing, mimicking perhaps the vast herds of bison, but most people have lost the focal practice and even the possibility of knowing.

Agricultural revolutions

In Seeing Like a State, James Scott shows very precisely how the notion of making Royal forests more productive leads to their rapid demise. The history of colonial agriculture is a history of just such a false economics. Some regions in Australia we destroyed by colonial agriculture in less than fifteen years, never to recover. The amazing deep soils of the American prairies will be gone in a hundred years from when they were first ploughed. The various revolutions up to the more or less current green revolution are all flawed by the worship of a painfully limited notion of productivity.

As a point of comparison, the best soils in the world are in strips alongside some of the great rivers of the Amazon. They were formed in ways we don’t really understand by people now eradicated from the region. They are a hundred times more productive than our agricultural soils.

Agricultural revolutions are precisely McLuhan’s extensions and so we need to ask about the amputations. What is in common to agricultural “improvements” of all kinds is mechanisation: narrow productivity goes up as labour usage goes down. This happens at a farm level, a community level, and a national level. If you like, the need for seasonal migrant labour to pick fruit is a cameo of this.

Agricultural revolutions also tend towards monocultures for related reasons. Think of the formations of combine harvesters moving across the prairies: they are now largely computer controlled and there is no human presence. The farmers may well live in Florida.

Real productivity relies of complex patterns of interwoven plants and complementary ruminant grazing. The productivity of a given patch of land can be raised even eightfold by a closely managed rotation of diverse animals, birds, and plants. This is labour intensive. (Tell me about it here in Wales!) But this is the amputation: you cannot raise the real productivity without sympathetic and intelligent labour which you have just shed comprehensively. Amputation indeed.

In true colonial fashion, we seem uninterested in how to get agriculture to flourish. How it can produce more, better food. How it can start to restore climate and environment. How it can provide seriously rewarding employment in beautiful places. How it can be at the forefront a finding a way.

Supermarkets

Supermarkets sell us nasty food and pay the producers prices that keep them stuck with bad practices. The majority of food in the UK is sold in supermarkets and the majority of the population suffers from metabolic syndrome: there can be little doubt that supermarket food and especially ultraprocessed food undermines the nation’s health.

Supermarkets are a classic McLuhan: they offer a huge extension of nominal choice and reach in retail food, and in doing so they cut us off altogether from any connections to what we eat. They are full of kitsch references to a farming that doesn’t exist because they make sure it cannot exist. The last thing a supermarket major wants is to deal with the unexpected twists and turns of real food production.

We can see how thoroughly consumers are isolated from their food in the extremist reactions of animal rights activists and radical vegans. The abuses these people complain about are real and are an embedded feature of food supply chains, but the answer is to regain our place in the food ecosystem, not to pretend that we don’t need to eat meat. The very mismatch of complaint and proposal speak to a rupture of any sense of what food is. Arguably there would be no vegetarians without supermarkets and their extensions: the amputations are inescapable.

There are (at least) two levels of disconnect with food. Firstly, there is the community embedded sense of how food is produced and what patterns of consumption make sense at a community level: killing a pig and sharing amongst a village would be a good example. We can respect the animal and make sure nothing is wasted. Secondly there is the sense in our taste and smell of what we need to eat and what is good for us. These senses have been comprehensively and deliberately subverted by food science. We can regain a sense of how good food tastes when we are part of what needs to be.

Even though we here buy meat from a local butcher who prides himself in buying locally, our own meat is noticeably better. Welfare standards, even the happiness of the animals, is part of that, and the absence of stress when the animals are killed is supposed to be important too. We don’t use modern breeds of poultry designed to produce heavy birds in the minimum time. I haven’t got to the bottom of these effects but it is clear that my sense of what is good, tasty, healthy food, from animals that work in our agri-ecology, can establish a renewed sense of connection.

Economics

The history of economics in agriculture is clear: it has consistently led us down the path to ecological damage and destruction. Be very clear: the rate of application of fertilisers to agricultural land to produce the same yield of crop goes up year on year. Even without price hikes in fertilisers, this is simply unsustainable in economic terms even before we consider externalised costs: soil destruction, river pollution, food quality degradation, ill health in plants and animals. We absolutely know that the economic arguments are in bad faith, including all those depended on for government policy.

The real economics is of course more complicated. Doing things that boost local fertility and biodiversity accrues benefits on a wide range of impacts which are never evaluated together. Everyone’s values and targets are narrower than the effects that need to be studied. For instance, the rate of photosynthesis achieved locally is fundamental and fairly easy to measure but is never considered in policy choices. We could consider this economic evaluation the repatriation of all the costs that were casually externalised to justify bad practice.

There are supply chain systems that deliberately connect consumers with their food and its human producers. There are restaurants that encourage you to physically choose the fresh food that will be cooked for you. The real economics, as distinct from now discredited economic excuses, lies in the education implicit in reconnection.

Borgmann says that in doing this work we will become more human.

Reasons and excuses in planet-wrecking was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has become a commonplace that we cannot have a working political process until people are able to say that Brexit was a stupid idea that has been shown to fail the UK catastrophically. The biggest factor in the necessary political debate needs to discussed, explicitly and openly. People do not have to agree of course, but the evidence needs to be on the table. The point is that it is not just Brexit and our relationship with the EU that cannot be discussed: the political process itself becomes impotent. I find this effect fascinating, and I wonder who is using the effect deliberately. 1

This is not the only sphere of debate where the impossibility of discussing what is really happening leads to an Alice in Wonderland debate that can lead nowhere good, and which for many people may be poisonous. In many discussions there is an elephant in the room that people ignore. The effect we are discussing here is where everyone knows that unless the elephant is discussed, all debate will generate nonsense. The effects of such taboos on speaking about what matters most generate some extreme social dysfunction. People whose self-image is tethered to being effective are going to exhibit weird and destructive behaviour.

Elites around the world are testing just how much they can get away with that is outside the rules, the constitutions, their mandates. And there is very little pushback. People challenging elite behaviour are held to account even when their behaviour is perfectly legal. Elites themselves believe they are increasingly immune from even scrutiny, let alone sanction.2

When Greta Thunberg says that it is self-evident that political leaders are not doing nearly enough to limit climate change, she is using our argument here in reverse. The evident fact that the political process is impotent can be used to argue that there is something that cannot be discussed that needs to be part of the debate. And that until it is, nothing will change. Perhaps growth itself must be questioned, for example.

Abortion was introduced into US politics almost accidentally as a way of capturing the votes of a certain demographic, a certain mindset of voters. Like Pandora’s box the issue got out of control to the extent that it now makes much necessary politics unavailable, inaccessible. Something about the nature of abortion as an issue, and even more so abortion arguments as they are deployed, makes politics impotent. It makes no difference at all to point out to “pro-life” voters how much death their views lead to.

Mediation

In the infamous school shooting at Uvalde, the police locked themselves away rather than face the shooter to rescue the children. Parents were understandably livid. In the recent midterm elections, 70% of residents of the county voted Republican, guaranteeing no change of policy. How can this happen? What would make a difference to people voting against the interests of their own children, against the lives of their own children?

There are examples, and have in the recent past been famous examples, of brave individuals mediating between factions which seem irreconcilable. People who can say to a dictator or a warlord: you need to see this differently. YOU need to see this differently. There are other perspectives that will allow you to meet your purposes better.

I am suggesting here that for the Brexit elephant or for the Ukraine destruction, it may be necessary for totally unacceptable things to be said in private but in an uncompromising way. There are things that need to be said, clearly and succinctly said. When the emperor has no clothes it should not be up to an innocent child to say what everybody knows. One of the obvious problems is that a politically secure emperor surrounded by sycophants has no way of hearing these messages.

We are talking about narratives that keep people conflicted and acting against their own interests without them being able to see that the narratives are the problem. The secret services, certainly in the US, are open about working intimately with social media companies to maintain these narrative frameworks. That used to be mainly about the US empire and colonialism and now it seems mainly about keeping an imploding GOP in business.

If you are a corrupt politician, you have to be able to buy votes somehow. The political power that flows from those votes is used to pay back the corrupt favours and bribes that were given to buy the votes. If the needs the corrupt politician services imply a narrative, that narrative must be maintained so that voters think the politician’s policies make sense. The whole edifice of legitimate and authoritative government can then reinforce the corruption.

But this process of corruption and its narrative support is precisely what leads to the creation of terrible and mad mistakes that cannot be dealt with by the political process. The entrenchment of perspective in the narrative is what makes alternative perspectives impossible. Brexit is only undiscussible and irreversible if you have tied your populist corruption to the notion that it was a political choice made by the British people. It was made undiscussable by buttressing it in totally illegitimate ways such as limiting its discussion on the BBC.

Dogma

A characteristic of people central to these non-debates, these debates that avoid reality, is that they are dogmatic. They hold views that they take to be be absolutely true in all circumstances.3 Abortion is wrong even in the case of a child raped by her father. Cutting taxes generates economic growth. Gun ownership is the root of freedom.

Of course, people who are dogmatic to this extent cannot debate the circumstances where their beliefs may not hold. And social media and rags like the Daily Mail are there to provide an echo chamber for dogma and make sure people feel supported in never having to think again. These are the people of course whose votes can be bought by corrupt politicians: they will do as they are told so long as a project is wrapped up the in the dogma they believe.

Dogma and racism are close allies. I remember a district council where the councillors would vote against any facilities for Travellers on their patch, even though the law requires them to make arrangements. Even after they had been on education course to help them understand their legal duties.

The exclusion in principle of evidence that might contradict a dogma and allow development of thought and understanding is the whole point of holding a dogmatic point of view. The denial of other points of view and the validity of people who might hold them has generated the nonsense about being cancelled, being woke: some things cannot be questioned, and that is where we started out. Good questions must be avoided at all cost and the cost of avoiding them can become infinite.

Trust

When I know someone well and find that they hold things to be true that I think are false, I can feel, literally and physically, the trust that it takes to work towards a meeting of minds. I have to trust such a person to be able to ask about their own assumptions and prejudices if I am to explore my own. I think this is not understood. People want to focus on winning an argument, as though the logic of the interaction is superior to the beliefs of the heart. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: Pascal.

Who would expose themselves to sociopathic bullies by talking about what really matters to them? Well, people who feel they have little more to lose, so great is the harm being done. The Greta Thunbergs. The Just Stop Oil activists. Or in previous generations, the Suffragettes.

This is not trust in institution and procedure, in due process. It is the opposite, it is trusting in the humanity of someone you disagree with on something of huge importance.

Truth will out

These huge undiscussables prevent people from thinking and prevent social political processes from working, but there is another side to this. Dirty and inconvenient truths will surface and be seen, widely seen. Truths about things that cannot be spoken of! Truths that cannot find expression in oceans of relativism and whataboutism, will become apparent.

It feels to me that there is a disconnect between the explicitness of language and description and the implicitness of knowing when something, even an un-named something is true. The dynamics are opposite. The undiscussables have a huge impact and a huge sanction attached to them. You will certainly suffer if you challenge them. But this effect is leaky and over time becomes less effective. There comes a time when the existence of the sanctions and taboos comes to lend credence to the very things it tries to suppress and invalidate. Trump is an asset until he is a liability with very little time in between those understandings.

With issues like climate change there is something more like a war of attrition. The massive, truly enormous, funding of climate denial propaganda means that the truth-will-out dynamics need to happen again and again for different audiences in different places and times. The truth is more like a background given that will be argued against with pseudo research again and again while there is money to be made for oil companies.

On the big issues there are armies of people who have identified with something that is not true, and there is probably an undiscussable to disguise that fact. The dire history of imperialism and colonialism. The way agriculture destroys civilisations. Entrenched child abuse. The sheer wickedness of corporate greed. Food addictions. The words denied, denial, denialism get used until they are worn out describing people who will not look at what they are seeing. The impact is to fragment any possible social cohesion around an issue: the very cohesion that is necessary to get action moving when vested interests dig in their heels.

Staying sane

Kafka’s wonderful novels describe the impact of madness in the environment on his protagonists. R. D. Laing starts with observed and diagnosed madness and shows how it belongs in the environment. This is not a struggle between goodies and baddies, it is an epic journey to make sense of things that are designed not to make sense, to see through the smokescreens and the decoys and the misinformation.

We now have enough national governments around the world refusing to promote Covid vaccinations, for certain groups at least, that the governments who want universal mandates can have their motivations questioned. But for a while the heroic questioners of this set of received truths were vilified and ostracised, lost their jobs and their reputations. These things will not be reinstated when their work is vindicated. We work in a world that can and does sacrifice those with the integrity it needs most.

The genie that was loosed was allowing money to buy power. Graeber and Wengrow are clear about societies that recognised this danger and got their political arrangements right. Whether we can ever get the genie back into the bottle has to be moot. Arguably the present arrangements deliver a society that almost everyone finds oppressive and unrewarding.4 Allowing money to buy power was once a political choice and a very stupid one indeed. We don’t see ourselves as monumentally stupid but the evidence is there.

All these arguments get focussed by the feeling that we don’t have many political lives left. Mass migration triggered by climate change and war raises challenges we have never met before. The renewed sense of the chance of a nuclear exchange, and the infantile provocations that might lead there. The extreme sociopathic decision making of giant corporations wrecking political initiatives that might heal. And ecosystem collapse that we don’t even try to understand, the loss of vital diversity on a daily basis.

Politically there is little difference between stupidity and the inability to organise to implement sensible policies. Lets call it the Brexit stultification effect.

1 possibly related is this David Allen Green blog post: “[Three bills,] when taken together, telling us all we need to know about Brexit: that the exit was rushed and botched, that the exit has provided no practical benefits, and that that the exit will never be enough for many of those who supported it.”

https://davidallengreen.com/2022/12/how-three-bills-now-before-parliament-tells-us-the-story-of-brexit/

2 consider the recent and ongoing case of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the subsequent halving of Tesla’s share price. How often had he made rash and impactful pronouncements on that very platform, now finding himself in possession of what seems to be more of a distraction than a business opportunity. Alongside other more business-like distractions such as SpaceX and its seeming lock on the future of satellite communications.

3 In Will McWhinney’s Paths of Change, dogma and absolute truth exist only in the worldview of a Unitary reality

4 r/aboringdystopia

The Brexit stultification effect was originally published in GentlySerious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.