The Pope escapes arrest in the UK

I wrote about this matter in November 2009 (see: Child Sex Abuse Scandal Rocks Ireland) but some will be wondering what this is about. Prof Richard Dawkins had made calls for The Pope to be arrested and charged with ‘crimes against humanity’ in April 2010 (Times 2010-04-11). However, as the months rolled on the eminent Geoffrey Robertson QC was reported to concede that the Pope would not be arrested in the upcoming UK visit. Arrested for what? Under The Rome Statute individuals can be charged with ‘crimes against humanity’ (in specific circumstances if they are one of the State Parties.)

Huge protests are expected here in the UK. Geoffrey Robertson QC is one of five select jurists in the UN’s internal justice system responsible for holding UN officials accountable for corruption and mismanagement (C-FAM 2010-04-08). Robertson is an Oxford Rhodes Scholar. He is no fool!

In his book published last Friday - The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse – Robertson QC is reported to refer to the Vatican as a “rogue State”. The Captain has purchased this book and will be studying it intensely. “Mr Robertson has laid out a powerful and cogently explained case in which he urges the international community to press the Catholic Church into abandoning canon law, the ancient set of ecclesiastical rules that also define disciplinary provisions for offences ranging from sex crimes to ordaining women” says The Age – 2010-09-08.

The Guardian 2010-09-11 reports that under Canon Law, “…"penalties" for raping children include such draconian measures as warnings, rebukes, extra prayers, counselling and a few months on retreat. It is even possible to interpret canon law as claiming that a valid defence for paedophile offences is paedophilia. Since child abusers are supposedly incapable of controlling their sexual urges, this can be used in their defence.” Just read that again – so, a defence to GBH or robbery could be the fact that the perpetrator is afflicted by criminality!!!

All this is the spatter from The Murphy Report 2004 (in Ireland) on Child Sex Abuse (CSA) spanning some 60 years. Hundreds of Catholic Priests were to be implicated (Interfaith 2009-05-19). In 2003 the Irish Government offered compensation to victims of the sex-abuse to the sum of £725 Million, based on a lower estimate of 10,000 victims! However, if all 150,000 suspected victims were to successfully claim, the sum could rise to £10.8 Billion (Telegraph 2009-05-20).

The Papal visit is expected to cost at least cool £12 Million – but that cost may go up depending on the scale of any unrest. The Pope is to honour and beatify the Victorian churchman and writer Cardinal John Henry Newman – making him a saint. A congregation of some 70,000 is expected at a park close to Birmingham. (FT 2010-09-10).

The Financial Times 2010-09-10 states that the Pope is likely to meet with protests when he visits the UK on 16th September 2010. They say that he “…stands naked before the blast of secular charges that now assails him with mounting force… has used both his quasi-divine authority and the Vatican’s statehood to push his church into more active hostility towards homosexuality, and above all homosexual marriage and adoption by homosexual couples; abortion, under any circumstances whatsoever; in vitro fertilisation; divorce; condoms, even where these are shown to reduce Aids; the ordination of women and the marriage of priests.”

The Examiner 2010-04-10 has been more scathing: “There is no doubt the behavior of the Pope has been criminal. Indeed most of the Catholic hierarchy participated on some level in the cover-up of the sexual abuse of children. For decades they denied, obfuscated, and covered-up the sexual abuse of countless children throughout the world.”

Dawkins’ welcome to the Pope was “Mr Ratzinger, as head of the world’s second most evil religion you are not welcome. True, your church recently “pardoned” Galileo (four centuries late), and eventually revoked its historic anti-Semitism. But the equally long-established misogyny remains. On almost all issues concerned with sex, contraception, population and reproduction your stance is illiberal, inhumane and immoral, and your propaganda claim that condoms don’t protect against AIDS is scientifically inaccurate and murderously cynical. In criminally shielding child-raping priests from justice you have placed the welfare of your church ahead of your victims. Go home to your tinpot Mussolini-concocted principality, and don’t come back.” See Dawkins – Audience with the Pope. 

More sex abuse

It gets worse. An inquiry in Belgium heard 475 complaints of sex-abuse committed in the 1950s through to the late 1980s by Catholic clergy. “Because all sex is banned to priests, abuse of minors is lumped in with – and is apparently seen as less serious than – “living in concubinage”. The stress on salvation means that “punishment” is a matter of prayers, fasting, a retreat or community service: typically, offending priests are moved to other parishes – but rarely to posts where contact with children is unlikely. The result, very often, is more molesting.” (FT 2010-09-10).

The Vatican was allegedly angered when the Belgium police raided and broke up a meeting of Catholic bishops engaged in discussing paedophile priests. (BBC News 2010-06-28).

History

“The first child sex scandal in the Catholic church took place in AD153, long before there was a "gay culture" or Jewish journalists for bishops to blame it on. By the 1960s, the problem had become so dire that a cleric responsible for the care of "erring" priests wrote to the Vatican suggesting that it acquire a Caribbean island to put them on. (The Guardian 2010-09-11)

The Pope has been tangled up in legal proceedings about sex-abuse in the USA before. But the US authorities have always found a way to bail him out on technicalities. Robertson and others will have been sharpening their axes from all that. (This is a good read: Fox News 2005-05-09).

…. to be continued (This is a long one and the story does not just stop there. I will need to update this page so stay tuned).

What is real stubbornness?

I guess some will immediately start asking why I am so interested in that. I’m thinking that I often meet people who refuse to move, change their mindsets, or take appropriate action when circumstances or evidence would expectedly dictate ‘change’.

There are reasons why people don’t change or move. These can be numerous e.g. fear of change, fear of the unexpected, difficulty in changing habits, effect of tradition or culture, inability to see benefits of change, inflexible attitudes, forgetfulness.

But I’m not talking about that kind of stuff so much. I’m talking ‘real stubbornness’. That is something I’ve been observing over the last 3 years. I’ve come to some ideas about what real-stubbornness is:

1. Foremost, it is a sense of pride in being all things that constitute being stubborn. People who are real-stubborn never try to hide the fact. They joke about it, laugh and boast about it. They boast that they are boasting about their stubbornness.
2. There are no inhibitory factors related to fear, anxiety, culture, tradition, failure of memory, cognition or habit.
3. Logic, reason, evidence, adverse personal life consequences, adverse consequences for others – nothing moves them in attitude or in action.
4. Even pain or repeated severe pain does not cause them to shift in mind or body.
5. Promise or realistic prospect of the utmost pleasure or wealth does not motivate them to move.
6. Even their awareness of others who are equally stubborn does not bring insight or change. They simply malign others who are ‘real-stubborn’ as if the condition couldn’t possibly affect them.
7. The few who gain partial insight refuse to change. Instead they wear the badge of being ‘real-stubborn’ with some sense of achievement.

I’ve come to a sad and possibly misanthropic conclusion that the condition is not as uncommon as we might think. My personal observation is that it is quite common.

Trying to help these people is like wasting your time and effort to say the least. Do I feel sorry for them? Like no!! They deserve all that life gives to them. They enjoy spinning top in mud flood! As they say on a Rock close to your heart - ‘Eeef dee cyap fit, wear it!’ [which upon code-switching becomes ‘If the cap fits wear it’].

A reflective time… tiny chemicals

I’ve been quite busy since September 2009, with new work and new experiences. There have been so many experiences to blog about but not in this space. I therefore spent much more time blogging at Jumbie’s Watch, My proper English on this blog has me rather restrained, which is no bad thing. At Jumbie I tend to free my thoughts in a different way. This blog is therefore more reflective, more measured – in a strange sort of way.

I’ve recently been looking back at 2009 and looking forward into 2010. My mind is flooded. So much has happened and the future brings so much to me. I wish I could conquer the need for sleep. It has been a very challenging year – two ‘assignments’ took me a lot away from home. Nov 2008 – early April 2009, I was travelling up and down the country with work. I discovered Cornwall and the Cornish way of life. It’s a beautiful part of the world. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In December 2008 some idiot crashed into the side of my car. That led to headaches that went on into the first part of 2009, and it was only resolved about a month ago. The crash brought me closer to valuing life. It happened so fast. Luckily I was not injured physically; just shaken a bit psychologically.

I was delighted to be back at home in April 2009. [I’m afraid to use the word ‘home’ lest some idiots assume that I mean some godforsaken Rock in the sun.] Time to think, write, do other kinds of work. Time.. time.. an amazing thing.. how it flows. How I flow through time. And I’ve been thinking about when I cease to flow in time. As one gets older these kinds of thoughts come to mind. It’s difficult to avoid when you see more and more people around you who you knew suffering illnesses or dying. You are confronted by the mortality that limits your own existence. It presses upon the mind to achieve and to be free!

Then from Sept to Nov 2009 I was also also into a 9 to 5 situation again – among workers – nation-builders; whatever you call um. It’s a sad situation generally ‘at work’. People there do what they do. They somehow or the other became caught on a treadmill, acquired possessions and status and then fight hard to remain on the treadmill. Their collective reality is that they’d be much more contented doing what they want to do – but they never admit it openly, or they hypnotise themselves into believing that they ‘lurve the job’. Many of them don’t think they’re sad – but I know they are.

And I look out at the world. I discover the complexity of the ‘worlds’ we create. I like studying law for example, but there is a time when its complexity becomes painful. Painful as I read past a few words separated by commas, then a few more words, then more commas. Then new paragraphs and sub-paragraphs leading me down into a tangle of Boolean operators – all this designed to limit something in certain circumstances. And I wonder what are all these limits? Why must they exist? And the answer is pretty simple: limited resources endangered by human greed, selfishness and solipsistic attitudes.

Yet among English politicians we saw greed and human callousness protected by a system of rules that allowed MPs to claim from sexy DVDs to moat cleaning.

The wars in Afghanistan continued. More crap came out about atrocities committed in the wars by British and American forces.

Diego Garcia remained off the radar, while Guantanamo Bay took the spotlight. Can you hear a silent scream?

I spent most of my time in the last 6 months, thinking about a land where I grew up for the first 30 years. Well ‘grew up’ physically, I mean. The reality is that I grew mentally twice what I did in 20 years of life in England, compared to the 30 in that place. Yeah.. ‘that place’. That’s a place I am deeply ashamed to be associated with. Why? Because I think if people know I’m from ‘there’ they would secretly be thinking “..he must be like them.. but he’s putting on a good act.” Well the reality is that people are like that.. I am like that. When I meet somebody from ‘that place’, I naturally have a presumption that their attitudes and thinking processes are likely to be ‘like them’. Come on – let’s not kid around.. people to get judged by their ‘cultures’. So when I meet people from ‘there’ I’m naturally sensitised to thought patterns, values and quirks that are part of that culture.

The other night (27/12/2009) we had some ‘visitors’ over for dinner. An interesting discussion happened. I became quite animated. They were shocked by my hopelessness for a people that live in the Nation of Trinidad & Tobago (i.e. that place).  At Jumbie’s Watch I frequently refer to ‘that place’ as Donkey Rock. The visitors some of Trinidadian origins - lived in some degree of hope for that Nation. I held much less hope. They hooked into how much I read the online newspapers about that place – and suggested that I do that because I have a slight hope that things there will become better. Well slight, like very slight, and approaching zero rapidly – I would admit to. But that is not the reason I read those newspapers. I said so – that my reading those newspapers were simply and truly about my fascination with the human capacity for stupidity. The reality is that I am not at all interested in returning to that Nation. I think that people who are separated from their homelands - especially where life in those homelands has deteriorated seriously - often long for the opportunity to return. In opposition to such longing is the reality of what life might be like in those homelands at the present time. In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, the extreme rise in violent crime presents a serious and difficult to ignore risk. The trajectory of the rise of those risks, over the last 10 years - with little indication that law enforcement agencies have been effective - suggests that there is unlikely to be rapid change in the trajectory in the foreseeable future. It is therefore baseless wishful thinking to say that there is hope of improvement. But life is a strange game – if you make your case to powerfully you risk being marginalised, labelled, seen as different.. not one of the herd.

So always there are these games I have to play – for example: I ought to say that there is very slight hope, when in reality I truly believe there is no hope. That is only to appear not ‘absolutist’. Funny thing though, few people hold any absolutist views about the chances of recovery from end stage dementia or any other terminal illness. But hey – when in comes to a country – a Nation – you can’t appear to be devoid of hope for recovery. Why? Because  we all ought to be all soooh patriotic to our respective Nations. And to say that you have lost hope in your Nation, means you’re and ungrateful unpatriotic bastard, or somik. No one really cares to say that a Nation is convulsing to death.. and there’s nothing you can do to save it. So – many times I hear people re-affirming their faith in an ability in human beings to change. Like oh puhleese – don’t I know that they can change? But I’m not talking about small groups of people. I’m talking very large groups. Well ‘that nation’ had 50 years to change and mature.. and what do we see today? Gross immaturity and myopia – and it’s getting worsening.

2010 brings more of the same. The number of the year changes – obviously – but people in their numbers hardly ever change. And if they do change it is because they have been subject to some extreme force that causes major discomfort or major emotional enlightenment.

Some may think that I’m unhappy from reading the above snapshot. I was never one for happiness OR  unhappiness. My modus operandi does not depend on happiness OR unhappiness – I’ll do what I do regardless. My adopted philosophy is built on eudaimonia – difficult for most people to grasp – simply because most people are driven by states of pleasure or pain attached to states of happiness or unhappiness. In contrast I’ll take the seemingly difficult and tough road if it brings me contentment and greater benefits for others.

I harden my outlook on the future of that Nation. I also harden my perceptions of human nature. I feel we are a dying species and we’re bent on self-destruction. Have a Prozac or two, or more – I face reality cold as it is. Those who cannot face reality – well, they can play with their happiness chemicals whilst the universe and its forces continue to orchestrate their mere purpose; to increase entropy. The universe is happy..and they are happy on their tiny chemicals.

Who is Captain Walker?

This is no ‘reveal’. I’m going to explain why the screen name ‘Captain Walker’. The ‘avatar’ or screen icon in my profile and comments, gives something away – its a small photo of Mel Gibson from a scene in Mad Max – Beyond Thunderdome.

Well my nickname used to be ‘Mad Max’ back in Uni many years ago. Why? You must wonder. It was recognised and said by one of my esteemed tutors, that I marched to the beat of a different drum (and still do). Others picked up on his comments. At first I was a bit embarrassed but soon I was to learn it was my nature, and I should go with it. I go my own way.

Mel Gibson played the role of Mad Max in Mad Max – Beyond Thunderdome. The scene is set in the aftermath of nuclear war on earth. Law and order had broken down and Bartertown was about the worst place to find yourself, situated near a desert. Well into the film, Max finds himself exiled from Bartertown among some children (some are teenagers), living in and around an oasis. They are the survivors of a plane crash, which was meant to bring them escape from a city that was to be bombed and the nuclear winter that was to follow. Captain Walker was at the helm. Walker apparently took some of the adults surviving the crash with him to find help. He promised to return. Max bears some resemblance to the Captain Walker in their legend.

They take Mad Max to be Captain Walker and in the end of the scene above, one says, “We is ready now..take us home”.

‘Walker’ then has a very hard time explaining to them the reality of their situation. He struggles to cope with their misguided expectations. He cannot deliver that which is based on a distorted myth which became a ‘faith’. At one point in the film he resorts to using force, but that does not bring them to reality.

I feel like ‘Walker’ sometimes. No – I ain’t no hero – and I ain’t here to save any bunch of people. But the feeling that many are living a false existence gets to me. In the film, the children’s Walker – by their expectations – is meant to take them ‘home’. But though Max knows who he is – he is still another identity to the children which he cannot escape – and he as ‘Captain Walker’ is unable to help them in their quest for the promised land.

Possible ‘links’:

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome	Caribbean situation
Nuclear holocaust	Slave trade
Oasis and/or Bartertown	Monkey/Donkey Region
Survivors in the Oasis	Survivors of slave trade
Captain Walker	Me

Well yes surely nobody dong on dee rock looking to me to take dem home. I know dat fuh sure. My ID is not just about events on the Rock. It’s about other areas of work and life – the Rock just happens to be a small part of the whole thing.

Paying to be 'me' – affording our discomforts

It has been rather interesting thinking about this. What is it to be 'me'? How do I pay for that?

What I mean is that each one of us (extrapolating from myself) has a fairly good idea about our likes and dislikes. So we gravitate to certain things, and we avoid certain other things. We like certain things and activities, and we detest other ‘things’ and ‘activities’. The stuff we like to do, we do them quickly, we prioritise so that they are taken care off with greater efficiency. The things we do not like we avoid, and leave to one side as much as possible.

However, the way we make our life’s preferences carry certain costs. Those costs may be tangible in terms of material things e.g. money, or the things money can buy - or intangible in terms of what cannot be quantified e.g. stress, disappointment, loss of opportunity.

For example, someone may dislike intensely the stress of moving home. So, either consciously or unconsciously that dislike is factored into decisions about a new job offer. Because ‘stress’ is the thing to be protected from - the dread of adjusting to a new town, influences decisions - the person might say “Well for £10,000/yr more, it doesn’t make a big difference to me.”

Perhaps a more down-to-earth example is dieting – which is difficult for many. It is easier not to diet. “What’s a few pounds or kilogramme more..you only live once” – some say.

Which of us truly wouldn’t want an extra million (in any of the big 5 currencies)? People in general crave for money – that’s the truth. Few admit it. But strangely there is an amazing contradiction i.e. those who need money the most,  do not work the hardest or the smartest in order to achieve greater financial security.

What, for example, is the cost of disorganisation? Everybody needs to be more organised. Yet we have people who live in utter chaos and mis-prioritisation. They convince themselves that the chaos surrounding them is organised, and they know where everything is. Not true! I’m not talking about the average disorganisation, I’m talking serious disorganisation.

Or take examinations. An important examination (or similar decisive event) is approaching, but the priority becomes larking around with friends.

Which of us have never been in any of those kinds of situations? Few.  So my observation is that many of us make choices and decisions that do not match a hierarchy of priorities in our lives. This costs us in tangible and non-tangible ways – yet we are content to pay. So basically we afford our discomforts!

Confused and primitive to the core.

I was motivated to write this having reflected on my interactions with the human species recently.

They pride themselves as being several notches above other animals. They have built very large and complicated structures. Their intelligence has allowed them the privilege of creating weapons that could destroy the whole planet they live on. They have sent men to the moon and spacecraft to very distant worlds. They control large amounts of energy. They can produce lots of food. They can fight off very serious illnesses.

Yet they are ruled largely by emotions and primitive instincts that lurk deep in the substrata of all that intelligence. Ruled? Sure. When they do something that happens to be in conflict with their intellectual prowess, what do they do? They tend to become emotionally upset. That may or may not show itself. But whichever way, it frequently takes hold of their cognitive processes and steers them in a pathway aimed at defending the ‘integrity’ of the emotional being living deep inside. The endpoint of that is that they then feel justified in their actions both at cognitive and emotional levels.

The cognitive aspect is seen in the processes related to rationalisation. The emotional aspect of justification is observed by a sense of satisfaction – a feel good factor. Therein lies the seeds of what is commonly referred to as evil. The conscious mind can be directed by this unconscious stratum, to rationally seek vengeance in its various forms. The latter provides the emotional justification. But extending that further they can easily arrive at terrorism.

The emotional being gets in the way of progress and can produce chaos:

1. It slows down two way communication pathways destined for the cognitive being.
2. Communicators have to exert greater energy not to upset each other in order to maintain a clear conduit of communication – seen so often in political, legal, crime, and business negotiations.
3. Envy is part of the emotional being. It drives people to madness.
4. Avarice – drives individuals to exploit others.

The cognitive being is capable of great feats of logic and understanding, too many to mention here. If only  this being could be unshackled.

I feel sad for me and this human race. We are so slow and so primitive. So intelligent and so stupid. I feel powerless. I wish I did not feel.

Looking away

Recently I was on the way into a supermarket. Nothing special about that you might think. But as I was about to enter I spotted a former work colleague – one of my own batch of professionals, who I trained with. I hadn’t seen her for about a year.

It was a Sunday – about 14:00. This colleague walked past me, about 5 feet to my right. Her gaze was focussed at some point in the distance. So at first I thought she did not see me. As you normally do – I look in her direction. And all this is happening in microseconds - I’m thinking she will catch some bloke (me) looking her way and look my way, and I’ll say ‘Hi good to see you again’.

But no – she keeps the gaze straight ahead. “Hmmm…” and you might be thinking, “Nothing strange about that. It happens all the time people don’t see each other because they are so busy and wrapped up in their own thoughts.” Well as I’m writing this I’m seeing her passing by in my minds eye. I could replay that video clip a thousand times. And when I do, I see her eyes focussed in the distance and not moving from left to right even in the slightest. Its a look straight ahead.

I have no reliable way of verifying what is in anybody’s consciousness. So I cannot know with absolute certainty what she was looking at and why she did not see me looking straight over to her in passing. But what did that gaze in the distance mean? It clicked – and here it is. I’ve done similar. When I’ve seen some person I do not want to take notice of, I’ve deliberately looked in the distance – just like that. And when did that I would not have been focussing on anything in particular. I’d just look ahead just to avoid eye contact.

So, here was I on the ‘receiving end’ I now think. I could never know what was in the mind of the other, but the closest approximation, is to look at myself first i.e. when I did that sort of thing – and make some kind of extrapolation.

Now some might be thinking that that was the only such incident. No – it wasn’t. The same happened about a year ago. A male professional colleague who knew that I thought he was a plonker passed within 3 feet of me. I always look plonkers in the eye, because I have nothing to fear. So I looked over to him. Guess what. It was that same kind of robotic gaze – at some amazingly interesting ‘non-object’.

What I realised is that when you wilfully avoid the gaze of another person you really do not focus on something of interest. You simply look ahead, like a robot. If you’re truly distracted by something interesting in the distance and miss sight of a familiar face, then your eye movements would not be blank and straight ahead. You’d be looking at the ‘thing’ that has grasped attention but also vary your gaze to surrounding objects. I’ve also checked that I can pick up very easily if someone within a cone of 5 feet from my eyes looks at me.

Well – in the case of the plonker avoiding my gaze, that’s understandable. But when it’s someone who has nothing I know of ‘with me’ – it now puts me to wonder again about human nature.

Identifying with the patzer

The dictionary will tell you that ‘patzer’ means ‘amateur chess player’. However in this piece of reflection, I’ll extend it to mean all idiots and the not so intelligent - outside of the game of chess.

I’ve been observing a phenomenon, where in general, the amateur finds some degree of camaraderie with a group of people. That situation will normally arise where the expert bludgeons the apparent idiot with facts and evidence, to the point where the patzer will need to cower.

What would then happen is that others will ignore the expert and enquire of the patzer if s/he is okay, support her and get her back on her feet. She’ll be treated as a victim, instead of as a felon deserving of punishment.

Why I know about this? I’m used to suffering idiots with their own idiotic logic. It’s simple really. The technique is to use the evidence of what they say to put in opposition two things that cannot co-exist. So you can’t move left and right, forward and backward at the same time – one has to prevail. What would then happen is that the patzer will realise that left nor right are options. Cornered – now waiting to be bludgeoned. Now the patzer sees zugswang in sight, cannot move – a thing cannot be the one and it’s opposite at the same time. That is the simplest form of logic in most situations.

And that is when rescue tends to come. Instead of the crowd descending on the idiot and finishing her off – what to they do? They provide comfort and support. And that is the world I see. But in an futuristic world – my fantasy world - such beings with such logic would be eliminated. I yearn for another time, another space.

The definitive idiot’s guide to causing yourself stress and failure.

Yes after years of careful research into the human condition I've now come up with the 'Definitive Idiot's Guide' to causing yourself stress!

Well, they say every little helps. I've been motivated to write this because I see so many people trying so hard to cause themselves stress, that I decided I needed to provide a practical guide.

The way I see it, if you're gonna do it do it; do it well - and have a reference manual as well.

1. Waste your time. I mean seek out ways to convince yourself that you're working productively - but in reality spread out the work so that it consumes any time available. Don't just confine this to work. Apply it in every aspect of your life.
2. Never plan anything. Just go with the flow. Do it - whatever - any old time. Unleash your creativity on life!
3. Watch loads of TV and listen to the radio all the time.
4. Drink yourself drunk on a Sunday night, so you're properly hung over on a Monday morning.
5. Believe that God or some other mystical being will guide you to the promised land.
6. Reject any helpful suggestion to improve your life or performance. After all everybody is against you.
7. Be stubborn – not just average ‘stubborn’ – I mean reject anything that causes you any discomfort.
8. Hang out with idiots – I mean seek them out and gain support from them.
9. Blame everybody else for your life’s problems:
   1. you’re overweight – it’s your parents’ genes that caused it.
   2. you don’t have enough money – well you don’t spend anything really, and you earn too much money – so ‘what the heck’s the matter with the world?’ you must ask yourself.
10. Forget what happened yesterday or months ago. What do you care? All that matters is tomorrow.

Well it’s a work in progress – and there is no deadline. So this idiot’s guide has to live up to it’s principles. I’ll finish it any old time. How’s that?

Perceptions of perceptions.

Like huh? Well, one can never be 100% sure what others think of you (i.e. me). People basically don’t tell (by words) all of what they think – for umpteen reasons.

So I’ve been asking myself what do others really think of me. I cannot be 100% correct either because I can never truly know what is in the mind of the other. Which then leads to another question, why should it matter what others think of me.

How does one come to know what the other thinks? It’s easy enough if they say something. But because they won’t actually say what’s on their minds I’m left to make inferences based on conduct and non-verbals.

Perhaps I should deal with that question first. I imagine the following reasons are relevant:

1. We live in a very complex social world. It is extremely difficult to swim alone against the ‘tide’. We are by nature animals that live in herds and isolation from the herd means less survival advantage. Isolation can come not simply by physical distance from the herd. Psychological distance matters very much more than physical distance. What others think of you is a marker of psychological proximity or distance.
2. Psychological proximity – how truly close others are to you – provides a sense of readiness to offer support.
3. That readiness of support from others brings a sense of security – largely against all life’s unpredictables and threats.

I’ve avoided reasons that have to do with any form of narcissism; reducing the ‘what others think of me’ to how it might affect ‘me’ in most basic of ways.

Non-verbals

Actions and non-verbals speak louder than words. Really – the research proves it. In fact communication experts have known it for years that 70% or so of meaning is transmitted by non-verbal means (body language) as it is commonly called. As the years roll by experience has thought me that my assessment of non-verbals has grown more accurate. How do I know? I’ve reflected carefully on voice patterns, breathing patterns whilst people speak, eye contact, body movements etc.

I also work amongst people who are aware of non-verbals and who may even try to mask what they ‘give away’ – so in a sense I’ve been ‘trained’ to look under the ‘psychological armour’ of those who have a better chance of concealing their innermost thoughts and feelings.

Knowing

I pay a high degree of attention to detail. My perspective of people in general is that they don’t like paying too much attention to detail. In some circles I hang, people who pay attention to detail are simply labelled as ‘obsessive’ – even though extreme attention to detail is required! In that attention to detail, inconsistencies between what is said, how it is said, and other corroborative details, often leads to a picture that I’m not getting the full picture – or the truth. In one other circle of work my skill in detecting those inconsistencies are used to full potential and I am valued.

Disrobed

Ever had a dream that you went to work naked? It is a very common dream. For those who have had such a dream, recall how awkward it felt. Conversing with me is like being naked psychologically. I will pick up more than you care to allow others to see – and the worse part is that I won’t let on that I’ve seen something of you that you cared to conceal.

For those who do not know of my professional status, they are happily ignorant. It’s like standing next to a guy and you didn’t actually know he had on ‘X-ray specs’ and was actually seeing under your clothes. But what when you discover that he does have on X-ray specs? Ooooh..that’s uncomfortable. And interestingly people in general believe that their minds cannot be read. Well that’s true in the literal sense of those words, however, peoples values, motives, perceptions, honesty/dishonesty, economy with the truth etc can be read. It happens every day – read what’s in the political news some time. Well - I'm cool with close 'others' knowing that I'm delusional and that I have no special powers to see 'under their clothes' - the better the 'view' for me!

Summary

So in essence to be near to someone who has on X-ray specs 24/7 is not easy. Everyday life from my perception depends heavily (too) on people not being as honest as they make out.

We don’t expect others to ask questions about each inconsistency or flaw in the logical sequence of our thoughts. But to be next to someone who might spot such flaws is to be ‘naked’ – even if they say nothing of the ‘nakedness’ they see.

But I’m sure my perception of inconsistency and lack of logical sequence is communicated to the other by non-verbal means, that I may not be aware of. The other will not relish that. Trust me, few like or can endure staying for prolonged periods under and X-ray machine or a microscope. 

The price of proximity to reality is probably isolation. However, I have no regrets. I value the former far more, than the camaraderie that comes from association with fools.