My greatest passion in life is thinking and reasoning about stuff. I became firm in this pursuit a decade ago, when I decided to research a little bit about historical european philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Descarte. I didn't get very far in their works, but in the first chapters and prologues of important pieces of these folks' work a lot of important tenets of reasoning are laid out. And I decided it made sense to sit down and think everything through for myself.

Over the past several years I've had my eyes glued to the social politics in the Usa around me - during the Bush administration, and now during the Obama administration. I've made several forays in sharing my thoughts with others anonymously in various contexts on the internet. My conclusion has been that I really can't try to make a living as a writer. First of all, the numbers aren't there. The pool of literature out there which is available for readers is so large, that it's near impossible for one author to gather enough fans to support him in his work. Furthermore, publishers have the markets tuned in a way that benefits their own industry, and not the author's pocketbook.

But there was also something much more dark that made me see that there wasn't a place for my essays in the world I saw around me. And that is that there is a very pervasive campaign against innovative and progressive left-wing thinking in the States. And a person who proposes cultural changes can end up with his life being destroyed by those who wish to campaign against him.

And the prejudices against innovative thinkers run throughout the height and breadth in our society as well. I've been assistant director for a children's play this fall and winter, and I see the same social dynamic that I had to deal with as a boy growing up in the 1970s. I see that smart kids develop social impediments because their parents don't understand their nature, or their arc in life. And boys have it tougher, in this area.

Recently, I've been studying Australia through their mass media's internet audio and video streams... and I see a mirror image of the Usa. There, the left wingers have a monopoly on the mass media. It's fascinating that Rupert Murdoch is an Australian by birth - I can see how a frustrated, dejected right wing thinker would want to strike back at those who had ostracised him and his colleagues. I see the same tricks in the mass media of Australia, that are used in the mass media in the Usa. When there is dissent from right wing thinkers about something or other, the journalists will momentarily acknowledge that dissent... but then they'll go back to hammering in the left wing message. So, to see the mirror image of what happens in the Usa is very educational. As George Carlin mentioned one time "The table is tilted, the game is rigged' in the Usa. And the same is true in Australia.

Well, it's a fascinating journey I've been on in my relationship to writing. Years ago, I very eagerly taken to writing like a fish to water. It has been a way to learn about life.

I was inspired years ago reading a bit of the works from the old Westerm philosophers, such as Descarte, Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, and Henry David Thoreau. I really didn't get too far into their books. But still, it was an instrumental moment in my life - when I saw how these people reasoned, and decided to seek to follow in their footsteps. It made sense to me to think independently, using logic, putting together all the puzzles of the issues in our world.

I realised how people's perspectives about the world around them shape their attitudes and their courses of action. These conceptions are like the bed of a river, and the actions and attitudes roll downstream like the water.

A next stage, when I started having all of these insights about things, was when I thought it was very important to persuade others of what I had learned. A lot of what has been written on this weblog thus far falls under that category of prose.

However, just over the last few days, I've had a new realisation - that it isn't healthy to try to persuade people, per se. It's almost as if one is treating them like children. And I see that countries and cities where the journalists are doing the kind of journalism that I think is the most noble - such as Seattle, and New Zealand - seem to have people who fight emotional depression.

My conclusion has been that it's not a healthy situation for an editor of a newspaper to decide which slice of the events of the world she or he is going to tell the citizens of the city about that day. There shouldn't be that kind of filter. Instead, people should have a way of reaching out and finding the information about the world which interests them.

More of my thoughts about this can be read here.

So now, a series of conclusions are synthesising in my mind. The first idea is that writers and other creative people need to make their money from customers, rather than giving their work away for free, or relying on a third party to pay them - advertisers. I think that people would be willing to buy into a system where their dollars support these people's work, if it means that folks can choose what to read, and if it is a higher quality than the normal stuff you find out littering the web.

Writers tend to put their prose into a narrative which reflects their own views on the world (naturally!). And they would be inclined to believe that their words are merely a conversation held with everyone. But, in fact, that really isn't the case. Most people aren't interested in thinking or talking in the kind of way that a philosophical writer does, for instance. At most, that writer is having a conversation with his peers.

I think that this world would be a much healthier place if actual consumer markets decided whose writing was more desirable and whose was less. Also, it would lead to more respect for writer/thinkers - who are a class of people who have throughout much of history born the brunt of a lot of scorn. Independent thinkers are often viewed as "crazy" by mainstream society. Habits that writers develop when they are taking up the trade - such as using a self monologue in private, and talking with friends and neighbors about insights they have had without having a good communication technique down - can really lead to a lot of social stigma descending upon them. If these writers were able to make money with their prose even in those early years, I believe that stigma would be replaced quickly with respect from the public.

So... hmmm that's where my attitude towards writing has shifted to now.

Consequently, I think I'm going to try to open up a pay section of this website... where I will seek to put higher quality prose that probably targets other people's interests and tastes more specifically. Up until now, this blog has been a place to share a handful of my insights, and writing the posts has been mostly an excercise in personal musing about the issues.

Have writers forgotten that they are there to inspire, rather than to impose?

Over the last couple of days, I have been traveling by inter-city bus across the Usa. It's a trip I make often between a coastal city where I have relatives, and my home in a mountain state. I have been musing deeply about where I would want or not want to live in the next few years. I established that, in general, I prefer the plains and mountain communities over the large coastal usa cities. Then I had to examine exactly why I had that preference. It comes down to the quality of public discussion, and the amount of success people have in their own lives, because they are seeing the world around them rightly, and are acting in a way which meets the situation well. The allusion that came to mind was that people in the small towns of the plains states are like people living a natural life daily in the woods without a map - they have learned how to see situations around them, and assess them, and apply themselves to making their life work really smoothly in the midst of these situations. On the other hand, people in Seattle, are like folks with a map and a compass - whose conception of the terrain they live in is somewhat less organic. These people may get overconfident about exactly how the map tells them they can get from place to place. And they might end up having troubles because of this.

The map I'm talking about here, is that of the discourse and commentary on current events which comes out on the pages of newspapers and on the screens of television every day.

Listening to the conversations of plains people on the bus, I saw that they talk and think in simple terms; and according to my sensibilities, they are often in error about the things that writers discuss so earnestly in places like the west coast cities, Canada, and New Zealand. However, these plains people have practical wisdom about the situations they deal with in life, which I fear they might lose if they went to one of these other countries or cities, where journalists have this incessant narrative which is a filter through which they make us see the events of the world around us.

Taking another look at New Zealand journalism tonight, I realised that Kiwis journalists work to manage the message more than those in any other country I've studied. They want to impose their vision of how society should work on the other people around them. Even though for myself, I really enjoy kiwi journalism, I think this is quite arrogant of them to think that a human society can be molded from the top down through policies of micromanagement. And now when I look at New Zealanders in the background of news broadcasts, I see a browbeaten people, who feel that they have to knuckle under to this imposition which the thinkers and writers in their country make on them. I think that deep thinking writers should seek to facilitate people - to see the passions which others have, and try to harness them for the good of the overall society. They should nurture the visions and aspirations OF THE PEOPLE around them, instead of trying to impose their own visions unilaterally on a society.

And so I tend to like a society where people address life on its own terms, rather than buying into a narrative which writers try to sell to them. I see that people in plains towns seem to have more success in their personal lives than folks in cities like Seattle or Portland, because of this. For example, on the plains, people seem to happily adapt their lifestyle to whatever services different employers are seeking to purchase that year. On the other hand, in the west coast cities, writers lay certain very strong value judgements on the value of some types of jobs over others. Writers particularly are of a creative group of folks who feel personally maligned when they aren't able to utilise their skills, or develop their aptitudes - when they're stuck in the grind of a 40 hour a week job that doesn't give them these opportunities. What they forget is that they themselves are a minority of people in any society, and that most people honestly would enjoy the economic well being they experience by being adaptable, and working whatever job happens to be available that day.

Furthermore, the children I see in plains towns seem much much happier than children in the big city. In the big city, there are certain errors in judgement that the thinkers and writers of that city make in how they design the frame of reference for their articles, and quite frankly - one of those errors is the "stranger-danger" narrative. Kids who grow up learning to mistrust all their neighbors until each one proves herself or himself will not be kindhearted neighbors; and quite frankly, the dramatised way in which journalists tend to report things leaves parents with a very unrealistic view of what is and isn't a danger to their children. And children are the future of any community our country. Those children will be adults someday with the same attitudes and perspectives they learned from their early years.

In short, I think writers would do well to be a bit more humble. They should share their ideas eagerly. They should find a way to make money with their prose and by putting their ideas into motion. But they should not be so haughty as to try to dictate the course of the society around them. The people around them are those whose passions and visions and agendas will form the fabric of society. And that is as it should be.

I like the trend we see on the internet - where at link sharing sites such as reddit.com, and digg.com - people can gather information from a variety of sources. No editor controls what people read on a link sharing site. Instead, the passions of the internet community bring certain topics up in the queue. I believe that's a better way for people to get their news about the events happening in the world.

This poem was written by Denise Levertov, a very gifted poet. I remember reading through a book of her poems when I was in my first year of college. I think, however, that ideally this kind of poetry requires a person who has had enough life experience to be able to weigh the ideas which the poems allude to. This poem "Red Snow" is the last part of a three part story. I am sharing it here, because it seems to me that it's a very good metaphor for how intellectuals in countries like Canada and Britain vainly pursue the sport of persuasion, as the method by which they seek to effect change in their society.

Crippled with desire, he questioned it.
Evening upon the heights, juice of the pomegranate:
who could connect it with sunlight?

He took snow into his 
red from cold hands
It would not acknowledge the blood inside,
stayed white, melted only.

And all summer, beyond how many plunging valleys
                                    remote verdant lesser peaks,
still there were fields 
                        by day silver
                        hidden often in thunderheads,
but faithful before night, crimson.
He knew it was red snow

He grows tall, and sets out.
The story, inexorably, is of arrival long after, by dark.
Tells he stood waiting
                    bewildered
                       in stinging silver towards dawn
                    and looked over the abysses, back;

            the height of his home,snowy, red,
            taunted him. Fable snuffs out
                                                What did he do?

                        He grew old.
                    With bloodbright hands, he wrought 
                icy monuments.
            Beard and long hair flying he rode the whirlwind
keening the praises of red snow.

I've turned my attention to Britain, recently.

Today, I found this really interesting little video interview where a British intellectual by the name of George Monbiot grills a member of parliament - Hazel Blears.

I think this is a very profoundly obvious illustration of how english speaking intellectuals act in a misguided manner. The sport that we who have many words engage in, is persuasion. We are strong-willed folks, who have these visions for how to make the world a better place, and we go about trying to persuade others to see things as we do. I think that's our biggest wrongdoing. We ourselves, of course, are enthusiastic about our ideas, and are trying to accomplish something really great. But we're going about it the wrong way... and I wonder if the way Hazel Blears approaches her work and her life embodies the true Britain. Is Britain a hen-pecked nation?

I can see what Monbiot is trying to point out, in the interview - his idea is that this is a woman who doesn't deserve to be in office, because she doesn't have any kind of independent judgement about matters. But to my sensibilities, it seems that he's being a real asshole.

Something I've written about before, is that I have been working on a community theatre production recently - Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado" - and one thing I've seen is that our director has a very easy going, passive approach. His assistant director did most of the choreography. But it seems as if this passive approach really paid off. I don't think that directors who are domineering are effective. I've worked with a few of them. Because our director is passive, each member of the cast was given the freedom to develop their own character according to their own vision. And together we really produced an excellent show. We have extremely small audiences - mostly family and friends of the cast in a venue that sits hundreds. But people go out at the end of the night muttering about how professional a performance it was.

In the same manner - intellectuals in New Zealand also take a passive approach. There doesn't seem to be any persuasion at all in their public discourse - except when it comes to marketing goods and services through advertising. I was listening to a broadcast one day about a new form of military naval vessel which had been comissioned. And the interviewee started talking in light of her value judgements about the thing - she said they seem "snazzy" or something like that. But then she immediately realised that she had crossed an ethical line, and during the rest of the interview, she was very careful to be transparent and frank about the thing she was talking about.

Because of this ethic which journalists and intellectuals have in New Zealand - it appears to me that they, as a nation, come to more accurate conclusions by and large than the rest of english speaking world. And consequently, they are more progressive. They were the first nation to give women the right to vote, for example. They seem to stay somewhat ahead of the curve on these things.

And golly, reading some discussion boards where folks who are immigrating to New Zealand are talking about their move, and their new life - you see nothing but unapologetic enthusiasm.

Personally, in many ways, I really find a lot more food for thought in Canadian and British journalism. But I believe that we deep thinking folk might have a better niche in our societies if we keep our debate among ourselves - in internet forums, for instance. We should let journalism, on the other hand, be a thing which is transparent and frank - and does not seek to persuade or impose value judgements on the things it reports on.

It's not possible. ;-)

The bottom line is that the goal of a person like myself is to influence my society, and in order to have the most influence, the product has to be free. The only way a person can make money is with a good which is in scarce supply.

Furthermore, books are luxuries rather than necessities. And our Western society is a need based economy. People will always spend money liberally on what they need, and then become much more frugal when it comes to those things that they want.

This is the reason it's impossible to make a living as a writer, a photographer, an artist, a filmmaker, or a musician. Oh well.

I wrote a letter to the Obama transition committee about how we might change over to a luxury based economy - which I think would be much more fun. But it would require a very big rework of our economic systems.

It's interesting to watch how my writing style has developed on internet discussion boards over the past few years. I've developed a rhythm which helps me to attract other people to talk with, and allows me to have long in depth conversations with them.

The first thing, of course, that one has to recognize - is that different sites have different levels of foot traffic coming by. I love websites where you can have an in depth conversation over the course of a few hours of posting back and forth with people. At most discussion boards it takes weeks or even months to complete a single conversation. That's really unworkable, I think.

I'm thinking about starting a discussion board of my own. And I'm calling it a "mail and reader" - because it will no doubt be more like that - a place for intellectuals to exchange ideas back and forth, sporadically as if by mail; and of course other folks who walk by, can read the conversations. I'm still not sure I want to take the responsibilities of moderating a forum onto my shoulders. But I have yet to find an ideal place to chat with folks on the net. There's always a drawback that makes it hard. And I've been vigorously participating on web discussion boards for several years now. It'd be nice to have my own site, where I can set the parameters. Ideally, I think internet discussion boards ought to be moderated by the participants themselves - wikipedia style. But no one has created that kind of software yet. If no one else jumps on it over the next couple of years, I might have to create it myself.

The second thing that's important, is that it's good to challenge people. Challenge the mainstream opinion on an issue. Question the background behind someone's attitude, if you find it disagreeable. If you fish for responses in this way, you'll have more and faster paced conversations and you will have more opportunity to write. You'll get a lot more airtime for your opinions on a board, if you seek to correct diagreeable people. And it is a lot like the boat fishing which my family used to do on the lake on which our cabin was. We used to troll for fish. And one basically did nothing - sitting there for tens of minutes or even hours - waiting for a fish to take the bait on the line. You have to interject ideas into lots of different conversations, and then have a system (possibly with bookmarks) where you go through and check all your lines to see if you have a response anywhere. "Trolling" is a fascinating concept on the internet. Please don't giggle too much as you trip over eachother to comment, pointing out the similarities between my fishing allusion, and what folks on the internet decry as being odious.

There's something nice about anonymity on the internet, too. Since the dawn of literature, there have been certain topics which are taboo or controversial, which can be best discussed anonymously. These things can get people really riled up and upset. But, it's important for social progress that we talk about these issues completely and thoroughly, and allow others to put forth new models and outside-the-box appraisals about these things. Throughout even the past few hundred years of Western history there have been big public controversies over child labor, slavery, whether the earth was flat, the substances sold as food before the FDA was created (in the usa), homosexuality, communism, death. And in each of these cases, in order for the issue to be resolved, and healthy public policies to be put in place, you had to have free and open discussion about the topics. The internet has made this much easier recently, because of its tradition of anonymous public speech.

It's important to have a passion about the topic you're discussing. Although, when writing in a fit of passion, it is sometimes important to sit and look at what you're about to post, to see whether it needs to be rewritten so that it has the impact and the influence on the discussion that you intend it to have.

The most important thing I have found, is that one needs to have sincere caring about the other people in the discussion... and about the issue being discussed. If you are going to correct a troublemaker... you need to be working on behalf of her or his personal interests. And throughout the course of your conversation with that person, she needs to be able to see that (although many times she will not admit it).

The basic rhythm I've found in my in depth discussions is that deep conversations on the net is kind of like playing tennis (although in slow motion). You are sending the ball back and forth over the net. When the ball is in your court, you have the opportunity to reframe the discussion - to offer a different perspective on the issue (and optionally, you can also deconstruct your partner's motivations or try to discern the background which makes her or him write in that way). The person who can contextualize the issue the most thoroughly and most convincingly will win the debate.

"Trolling" is a fascinating concept on the internet. It's an odd amalgamation of many different concepts. The indignance people have when they call someone a troll - which means among other things "an odious person" - is, I think, mostly because of a defense mechanism people are experiencing on the internet. In the late 1990s... there came to be a serious problem on the internet of all kinds of untruisms being bandied about along with all kinds of insane types of blogging. Internet users have become very zealous about the judging the veracity of those things which they read. In this way an exposure to more information makes people better critical thinkers. This is why I am very glad of this information age, and the types of initiatives you see at wikipedia. People who have a centralized media - like north america had in the 1900s - become very sheeplike - "sheeple" is the cuss word that is bandied about on the internet these days. In other words, people tend to start adopting an ethic of reasoning according to consensus. Folks in the usa, for instance, look around and see whatever most people seem to believe, and adopt that worldview. (Yes, people are pretty dumb, here in the usa). And that is just not good for a society, overall. I think that such societies are putting themselves at risk for really big errors in judgement (such as electing president bush jr the 43rd for two terms). The internet therefore, is giving us a new generation of avid critical thinkers - folks who question everything, and who can find other people on the internet who also have seen these issues in a different light than their parents did.

But when you see folks yelling about "trolling" - there are other kinds of complex social dynamics wrapped up in that situation.

There are certain people who, in the late 1990s and in the first decade, were and are going about and making trouble and being rude on internet discussion forums and in blog comment threads. These people actively try to push people's buttons. They use heavy sarcasm in order to get a reaction from others. They can quickly destroy the health of a community which is based solely on words, if their antics aren't kept in check.

Also young budding intellectuals would sometimes tell others that they "troll" discussion forums. These people have very cool and outside-the-box ideas and models that they don't feel secure about yet. They just want to float these ideas and see if they can find others who might also have seen issues from this perspective. I think that these young men and women do a disservice to themselves when they describe themselves in this way. Their inductive reasoning is a valuable addition to a discussion, and does not cause problems at all. The only problem I've seen is when more mature adults want to harp on their spelling and grammar. One can see outbursts then, when the young woman or man can get very petulant because of personal insecurity. It's really ungracious for older adults to call youths' outside-the-box ideas "crazy." It's not a funny jest to poke fun at wordy young people in this way. The problem is, that it's like crushing a young flower under your foot. That person will invariably lose faith in all of her ideas, and go through a really dark time in her life. And then we as a society lose years and possibly decades of this person's service - time she would have otherwise used to benefit us.

Finally, the staid and prudish scientific community in the anglophone world has its hackles raised when too many people on the internet start questioning their research and collegiate ideas through inductive reasoning of their own. This is a serious front of contention on the internet in this first decade. There are a lot of holes in current scientific thought - where the practitioners have their nose so close into the research that they miss seeing the forest for the trees. And collegiate types are beginning to worry about their future careers, I believe, given that everybody can publish a blog page these days, and question anything which they'd like to.

This is a very fascinating short fiction film about a company who takes the creative juices from certain folks, and bottles them, and sells them to moneymaking enterprises.

It would have been a tremendous change for the world, when the written word first came on the scene back in ancient Persia, and to the west in Babylon. One effect that the written word would have created is that all of a sudden idea providers were separated from those who drew up and funded enterprises and benefitted from these things. Now I haven't studied the history of China... but certainly I can read of the history of the middle east, and later Rome, and later the usa. Each place where thinker/writers start working prolifically becomes a place that is a powerhouse of innovation, and a place where the standard of living goes up quite steeply. Interestingly enough, we also see that these nations become very militant... and the story of history is quite often a sad one. Why is it that we only hear stories about the wars that happened over the course of history? Because those are the things which mattered most to people of the day. The bible details the story of a people who were on the fringes of this whole season of innovation which was happening to the east in Persia. It doesn't sound like a happy time. Rome was also a bloody empire, and the usa is a bloody imperialist nation as well.

Now, the question is "What are the dynamics which are involved in these places which are such hotbeds of innovation, but also the source of so much misery and sorrow?" A couple centuries ago, many of us in the european nations and the european colonies decided to change our system of governance. We decided that the job of governing should be set up so that those who wish to rule must undergo an interview process... and be hired by the will of the citizenry. Since that time, our lot has improved quite a bit. Putting the power in the hands of the people to choose those who will have power over them made sense. Before that time, royal families would rule from generation to generation.

Now, as a thinker and a writer, I see another place where we could make some constructive change in our society. There's was a very fascinating short comedy film produced in Britain recently about how businesspeople milk the juices out of creative people, and capitalize on their ideas. I think that a lot of the reason that nations and empires like Rome and ancient Persia, and the usa tend to veer off track over time so garishly, is that those with the ideas are not given the opportunity to participate in the projects which their ideas inspire. If the person who has the idea writes about it... and then the idea gets put into action over here by someone else... that other group isn't going to know how to employ that idea wisely. And where they might get something puts together that works surprisingly well, even with the cluelessness of the founders - there will be still be nasty side effects to the project, or there will be slop in how the project has been undertaken that sullies what could otherwise be a much more noble endeavor.

Not only are projects done poorly - it is also the case that the person who comes up with the idea lives in poverty his whole life and usually dies in obscurity.

It's interesting however, that those people who do take their own ideas and produce inventions, oftentimes have a life with even more problems and hardship. Nikolas Tesla is a relatively recent example of this kind of person.

So how can we change this dynamic? This dawn of the age of the computer and the internet is an excellent opportunity, I think, to turn this dynamic around. I think that we should face the fact that making money from publishing books - compendiums of ideas - is not going to make any of us a decent living. It's as laughable as music composers who think that they can make a living by royalties from sheet music bought by choral directors... or playwrights who think that they can earn a living by collecting from impoverished community theatre groups These are not workable business models.

If we're witty enough to be able to start social and technological trends, by working hard to scatter the seeds of our ideas in the right places at the right time, we probably can figure out how to derive economic benefit from those ideas. The first step is to network with eachother. And the internet gives us the ability to find eachother, and befriend eachother... and even pool our skills. Think about setting out to build a house by yourself without tools. Here, you see you have to move a boulder... and there is simply no way to budge that thing. But with ten or twenty people, you probably can move that boulder out of the way. We thinkers have a penchant for solitude, and that is really holding us back, as well.