Philosophical Tangents: Culture Wars (Part One)

Power is Knowledge: Part II

This is a continuation of the series on the essence of knowledge (epistemology) and its relation to power.

II) The Mystique of Power

Power is knowledge, and power has its mystique. The powerful knows something you do not. We can take as an example the mystique of the bureaucrat. The less you know of them, the more powerful they are. The more arcane their character, the more pointless their rules and regulations; the more removed they are from any logical, rational, tangible reality, the better for them and the worse for you. Their counter-intuitive rules are capable of entrenching themselves into the world of things and beings, until jumping through their hoops becomes an accepted facet of existence. Just by their strength alone (the strength of the State) they can carve themselves into reality.

The know-it-all is the smaller cousin of the bureaucrat. They do not express things for any useful end. They like appearing intelligent as a means of controlling others. They are an expression of power as knowledge – their power does not come from knowing anything, but from the pretention that they have an infinite well of knowledge to draw upon. Such a character, desperate to impress, understands the mystique of power. They are deceitful, epistemological sorcerers, who can produce nothing of value, attain no results, speak not a single truth, and yet still maintain power over others.

The mystique of power is what maintains its position. This is why the powerful present themselves as inevitable, eternal, inheritors of some legitimate reign. Power maintains itself when the powerless have no hope. Power hates imagination, because imagination quickly realizes the mystique. The powerless do not only need to know injustice - knowledge is not power. The powerless need imagination, to lead them to hope, and then to wage war against power, until it is vanquished, and knowledge freed from its tyranny.

III) Knowledge is part of us

Knowledge is not something removed from the whole human being. To think of knowledge as some dis-embodied (distanced from the body), floating, transcendent well of information is to forget that we are biological beings. Knowledge is literally attached to the human being, and this means it is entangled with everything that makes us what we are. For instance, the beliefs of a religious fundamentalist cannot be removed from their personhood, nor separated from their emotions. The two are bound together. Far have they carried their erroneous beliefs with them, a companion through the shift of time; a warm body to hold in the cold, existential night.

Knowledge can also become attached, quite literally, to an authority. For instance, in the patriarchal family unit the father is power and it is this power that allows him to dictate what is and isn't true. He is an embodiment of power; it is conflated with him.

Much of our never-ending journey to enlightenment consists in shedding off false-beliefs, with an occasional shift in world view (or rebirth). But evil (untruth) is literally contained inside of us, and that is why it can never wholly be vanquished. Philosophy can only go so far in equipping us with shields against untruth, and no spiritual fire can wholly scorch away our epistemological sins.

Selim Talat

Liberalism: from Philosophy to Politics - By Martin Prior

Liberalism: from Philosophy to Politics

In researching this article I decided to look for liberal philosophers, and in Wikipedia some 80 are listed, but I have picked out some dozen to illustrate the development of ‘liberalism’ a word that first appeared in the 1810s.

Let us first look at the Chinese thinker Lao-Tze (6th century BC), founder of Taoist philosophy.  In general, he did not think people deserved or needed freedom: he thought it counter-productive to do otherwise.  Thus his economic views were not by implication laissez-faire, since his maxim ‘wei wu wei’, do without doing implied an objective.

Aristotle is noted for his work Hê politikê, in which happiness is his main objective.  He believed that oligarchy was a ‘good thing’ but too profit-motivated, and democracy was a ‘bad thing’, serving only the poor, and that meritocracy was the best thing only not feasible.  Therefore the best solution was a compromise, the ‘polity’ combining democracy and oligarchy.  Some economic points: (i) note the parallel between oligarchy and modern-day oligopoly, and (ii) Aristotle was a firm believer in private property, thinking it more effective than property-less examples among the ‘barbarians’.

Niccolò Machiavelli (Florence, 1469–1527), the ‘realist’ political philosopher, has been seen by later generations as a cold schemer, who worked in the environment of the many Italian states, principalities and republics, which latter he preferred, despite the name of his most famous work, Il Principe, The Prince.  In general, he argued that that liberty was a central good that government should protect.  In this he conflicted with those who believe freedom requires small government.

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Thomas Hobbes (England, 1588–1679) has been identified by Leo Strauss as the ‘father of liberalism’, but his principle theme was that government was motivated by ‘interest’, an important term which transcends politic and economic.  But he believed that only strong government could restrain unchecked interest.

Before turning to Locke, we should look at Baruch Spinoza (Netherlands, 1632–1677),  a Jew with complete commitment to determinism, for whom freedom could only be the freedom to say ‘yes’.  We must note this issue, since other philosophers discussed here have not notably addressed it.  

John Locke (England, 1632–1704) believed in “man’s” ‘natural rights’, which he considered to be life, liberty and ‘estate’ (property) as well as tolerance.  In economic terms , his theory or property was based on actions rather than inheritance.

John Locke died in 1704, some 70 years before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776).  But we must take Smith together with Anders Chydenius (Finland (then a part of the Swedish realm), 1729–1803) a Finnish priest representing the clergy in Sweden’s four-estate parliament, whose main output was in 1766, ten years earlier.  He advocated complete economic and individual freedom, which included workers’ rights of mobility, choosing their employer, freedom of speech and trade. And abolition of wage and price controls.  He helped draft Sweden’s 1766 Constitutional Law on the Freedom of Printing, which is the forerunner of many natons’ freedom of information laws.  Along with Adam Smith he had a concept similar to the ‘invisible hand’.

Adam Smith (Great Britain, 1723–1790) was indeed the founder of economic liberalism, though we see its seed with a number of thinkers before him.  His economic liberalism included the abolition of slavery, but he outlined the idea that finite resources will be put to ultimately their most efficient use if people were allowed to get on with it and act in their self-interest.  Smith does of course have his critics and disciples, notably Mrs Thatcher with her apparent tenet that greed is good.

We can take together Jeremy Bentham (United Kingdom, 1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (United Kingdom, 1806–1873).  Bentham is known as an early utilitarian, and his individual freedoms were far-ranging and well ahead of his time.  They included equality for women, abolition of slavery and separation of church and state.  His economic liberties included free prices, free trade and no restrictions on interest, and the end of colonialism.  But he was an interventionist regarding control of monopolies, pensions and health insurance.

Mills’ liberalism coincided with the shift from Whigs to Liberals round 1868, and most of the period of Gladstone’s first of four Liberal Governments.  He is said to be an early champion of the latter.  He believed in the pursuit of happiness as the ‘highest normative principle’ rather than a right.  In this regard he was a utilitarian and has been considered the founder of ‘Social Liberalism’: he accepted state intervention if there were sufficient utilitarian grounds.  We thus see a marriage of utilitarianism and a concept of social liberalism.

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1926) was born roughly at the start of Mills’ last 15 years.  He was influential to those in America who saw liberalism as seeking a rational basis for the economy above competition and seeking of monopoly power.  His central argument was that individuals required non-economic time to become educated individuals.

Veblan died in 1926, when Friedrich Hayek (Austria/United Kingdom/United States/Germany, 1899–1992) was starting to develop the philosophies of neo-liberalism, in which the market supplant any concept of social justice.  Neo-liberalism states that the states role is to ploice the free working of the market.  He did in fact predict the Greta Depression, but strongly opposed the views of John Maynard Keynes (Britain, 1883–1946).  Apparently the two became friends as air-raid wardens during WWII.  It was of course the conflicting views of Hayek and Keynes that revealed the conflict between economic and social liberalism.

I could say more about Milton Friedman (United States, 1912–2006, economist) and Noam Chomsky (United States, 1928– , linguist), but I shall conclude with the ideas of Isaiah Berlin (Latvia/United Kingdom, 1909–1997).  He is famous for distinguishing two concepts of liberty 'positive' and 'negative' liberty which he saw as mutually opposing concepts.  Positive liberty arouse through state power to ‘liberate’ humankind from its worst aspects and was in danger of sliding into totalitarianism.  On the other hand, negative liberty required that individuals were given maximal freedom from external constraints, as long as the like rights of others were not violated.

I stress this dichotomy because in my own arguments I have used a similar but different dichotomy: freedom from and freedom to.  Strangely freedom-to corresponds almost exactly to negative liberty, without the emphasis on the external.  To my mind this is the essence of Social Liberalism: the freedom to do as one wishes provided that other people’s like freedom is not violated.  To my mind this is part of single-person ethics if one wishes to consider ethics in axiomatic terms.  Freedom-from is generally emphasised by neo-liberals, for who freedom-to is less important.  Freedom-from is in fact in conflict with positive liberty.

If we take the step from philosophers, to my mind, the Whigs and Liberal successors differed from Conservatives in the way they managed imperialism.  Unlike Bentham they were in favour of colonialism.  But liberals knew when to advance and when to retreat.  But conservatives do not really know how to advance, but cling on to what they have  got, even when wisdom counsels retreat.  To my mind part of their motivation lies in the libs having a stronger capital base.

The European liberals are on the advance, mainly in partnership with the Christian Democrats, while British Tories are resisting retreat. So I believe are the Americans, with all their machinations in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere.

LibDems are a different animal altogether: they are civic liberals, ambiguous between the economic and the social. People usually talk of a dichotomy between economic and social liberalism, but much of what is called social liberalism is really civic.

I have finished by turning from philosophers to politicians. Many philosophers are also politicians. like Thomas Jefferson and the Finn Chydenius. Many too were close to politicians, like Machiavelli, Keynes and Friedmann.

In this paper, social liberalism is something that is rearing its head: John Stuart Mill and Chomsky are names which might be associated with social liberalism, but this requires a closer examination at some later stage.

Martin Prior

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 50 'Open Topic'

The latest philosophical fuss in education - By Patrick Ainley

The latest philosophical fuss in education

A big philosophical row is brewing in England’s primary schools about the knowledge (sophia – or is that wisdom?) that should be taught to 5-11 year-olds in the revised national curriculum.

The existing curriculum is accused by Conservative Education Minister, Michael Gove, of being too ‘skills’ based. The argument typically centres on history which is actually developed as a subject more at secondary school but relates to conservative cultural concerns. Traditionalists – like David Cameron with his plans to ‘celebrate’ the pointless slaughter of the first world war – feel history has become too ‘skills’-based. By that they don’t mean anything practical in the way of manual skills but that history and other teachers try to encourage pupils to think about cause and effect and why things happen. Instead of this generalized knowledge, the government wants pupils learning lists of kings and queens and the dates of imperial victories – bits of information pupils can learn by rote to recite in tests!

Gove justifies his prejudice in favour of this traditional type of schooling he enjoyed(!) by borrowing from a retired US professor, ED Hirsch. (That’s not Ed’ but his initials without punctuation, the sign of a true prawn – like AC Grayling, the former-London Uni philosopher who has set up his own traditionally academic private University). Hirsch claims that he tried to teach poor Black kids in community college about their history by informing them about the American Civil War. This basic factual information would, he argues, enable them to become knowledgeable about their own past and do as well as anybody else in – guess what? – more tests!

It’s not as if nobody had ever thought of or tried this before. In the 1960s French educational sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, advocated what he called ‘rational pedagogy’ – booster classes for working-class and minority ethnic university students to help them to catch up with upper and middle-class students who had acquired through the way they were brought up the ‘cultural capital’ recognized by higher education. In England at the same time, educationalist Basil Bernstein argued that traditionally academic ‘Education could not compensate for society’. The implication was – and Bourdieu came to accept this too – that the education system would have to change to be of any use to the majority of the population it failed.

Although there were some pioneering experiments – especially in the old polytechnics in the UK – so that many more people were encouraged by progressive primary and comprehensive schools to go on to further and higher education, education as a whole since the 1976 so-called ‘Great Debate on Education’ was narrowed to only what was useful in employment. It became training without jobs as employment collapsed and the traditional skills of apprenticeships were reduced to making students ‘competent’ in carrying out basic tasks for – once again – more tests! (Nowadays we have education without jobs and apprenticeships that

are often indistinguishable from workfare.)

Meanwhile, schools compete to cram their pupils for an academic National Curriculum. Gove confuses tests of memory under pressure – like University Challenge – with ‘intelligence’. He thinks this is inherited so that all the education system has to do is pick out the ‘bright’ Men of Gold, just like in Plato’s Republic, failing the dull Men of Silver and Bronze. So Gove thinks you don’t need to train and educate teachers, for instance, because – so long as you know your academic subject – either you can teach it or you can’t. Anyone can therefore teach in Gove’s ‘free schools’ as they can in the private schools that are the model for them.

In fact, regurgitating disconnected bits of information in traditional exams is the equivalent of training for the competence-based assessment that replaced the real skills formerly acquired on apprenticeships. (Even state school teachers are ‘trained’ like this nowadays and the government last week proposed ‘competence tests’ for NHS doctors.)

Knowledge has thus been degraded to information and skill to competence so that there is now a hopeless confusion of terms and nobody knows what they mean any longer. Clearly a job for philosophers to sort out! As we do so, we should remember that there is nothing wrong with training; it is basic to putting the components of competent performance together in the exercise of a skill but you have to go beyond training to have education. (You can train animals after all but you can’t educate them!) But training for the assessment of competence is what much of education is being reduced to.

Similarly, Hirsch’s idea of education is cramming bits of information unrelated by conceptual and generalizable knowledge. ‘Funny phonics’ even teaches reading like this – training primary children to ‘sound out’ letters in words that make no sense which predictably inhibits reading for meaning. Meaning and imagination come in at the level of knowledge which is inseparable from skill because there is no knowledge so cerebral it does not draw upon some practical skill (since the mind is not separate from the body) and you need skill to apply knowledge.

Training for unthinking performance and schooling in the rote learning of information restricts pupils / students to their place in the hierarchy of competing institutions for which largely written exams function as proxies for cultural capital. This is what reforming the national curriculum is all about. Philosophers must contribute to resisting it!

By Patrick Ainley 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 34

Art - By Harry Wareham

For more art by Harry Wareham please visit www.subpots.co.uk/

                                  Philosophical Tangents: Class War!

 

On the Claim of Not Being an ‘-ist’ of Any Sort - By Soo Tian Lee

On the Claim of Not Being an ‘-ist’ of Any Sort

A few weeks ago, I was engaged in a discussion with some friends on that wonderful debating chamber that is also known as Facebook. We were talking about educational reform in quite an animated fashion when suddenly one of the participants in this online conversation said something along the lines of: “I don’t believe in being an ‘-ist’ of any sort. My politics is beyond self-identifying as socialist, anarchist, monarchist, etc. Such identities are ideological and I’m not interested in them.”

Oh, the wonders of the age we live in where some claim to hew to a politics without tradition, a politics that does not come from anywhere other than one’s own head. “Ideological politics is so 20th century,” they say in a tone which is almost a sigh of boredom, accompanied by a flick of the wrist. With an ostensibly questioning look, they continue: “Weren’t all these firm political stances what led to the totalitarianism that plagued the earth during that age of extremes? It’s time to move past such things.”

Such a standpoint, which some have called ‘post-political’, may look deceptively reasonable, and even laudable. Two imposing pillars of horror in the last century, namely fascism (Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, etc.) and communism (particularly the Soviet and Maoist forms), were indeed founded on inflexible  political ideas. Is it not much better, then, to be somone does not feel the need to identify with a tradition of political thought but is able to mix and match the best bits of various political ideas to form a balanced, ‘holistic’ viewpoint?

My view on this is quite simple: to claim that one is not an ‘-ist’ (or an ‘-ian’, an ‘-ive’, or whatever suffix one uses) is to hide from oneself and (some) others the views that one really does hold. And the danger with this is that quite often, these views will just be rather mainstream and, quite possibly, rather centrist. In other words, the dominant strands of political thought that are the building blocks of one’s political viewpoint will be the ones that are widely accepted and transmitted through newspapers, popular film and music, random conversations on the bus, and so on. For example, I have never met a post-political person who did not think that capitalism is the least objectionable (if not the best) way to organise society. Neither have I met a post-political person who objected to society being organised according to hierarchical structures. In both these cases, there were political beliefs behind these opinions, namely supporting capitalism and believing in formalised leadership. But these political beliefs were hidden by claims which rejected ‘politics of the old sort’, claims which acted as a fig leaf that covered the nakedness of the post-political position.

I was searching for a literary depiction of the post-political standpoint when I remembered a few lines from a fairly old book, fairly well-positioned in the Western canon of literature. Towards the end of this book one finds these sentences apparently written from a divine being to a group that claims to worship him: “I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold. I wish that you were one or the other! But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!”

Some may object to what I have just said, saying, “Alright, alright! So my pick-and-choose, lucky-dip-ish way of doing politics may be a random jumble that results in a lukewarm concotion. But, to repeat myself, isn’t this far better than the dogmatism that characterised the last hundred or so years? At least I’m not killing anyone by being a moderate!”

Do moderate, mainstream, and/or centrist political views not result in any harm? A popular saying commonly (but probably wrongly) attributed to Edmund Burke states: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” To be post-political often results in sitting on the fence and saying that things are too complicated for one to act. In other situations, being post-political results in one rationalising the present state of things as being the best that things could be at this present moment, and that all that can be done is just to tweak things a little bit here and there to make the situation even better. But the fact is that we live in times where those who seem to be moderates are actually extremists for the status quo. Even as the wheels in the great machine continue to turn, the earth continues to suffer from environmental degradation, inequalities among people continue to widen, and old forms of oppression linger on while new forms arise.

What is required of us today is not a balancing act at the centre of politics or a complete exit from the field but rather a new form of principled politics that strives to avoid the consequences of the old extremism by paradoxically infusing one’s principles with a strong dose of humility. We don’t have it all worked out just yet, and may be wrong on a number of accounts, but the solution is not to avoid convictions but rather to embrace them in a way that combines passion with the openness to change one’s views if they are proven to be inaccurate or less helpful than one originally believed. Yes, one should say no to dogmatism, but no to content-free politics as well, as such politics are but a new form of dogmatism, an unavowed (or even disavowed) dogmatism.

Well, what can I say to end this piece? Simply this: soon after the social network debate that inspired this article fizzled out, I quit Facebook, and so can now probably be considered a non-Facebookist. But make no mistake: this too is being an ‘-ist’ -- that is, an ‘-ist’ of the old sort, a political ‘-ist’, a principled ‘-ist’.

by Soo Tian Lee

At its most fundamental level, what is power?

If we move outside of our human world, what occurs in the cosmos? An asteroid, hurtling through space toward another, collides with it. The body with the greater mass and greater speed will be damaged in the impact, but it will exert more of an 'influence' on the other body. The very large and dense bodies, the stars, hold the smaller bodies, planets and their moons, in their gravitational pull. Effectively, looking at the cosmos we can guess at a motive, but ultimately it looks like a whole lot of cause and effect. With the cosmos being inanimate and incapable of perception, we cannot say there are any power relations at all, but just an unfolding of various movements and collisions and such.

Now have I just wasted a hundred words or so of article space, or has this helped to put things into some kind of perspective? Are we any different from naturally occurring bodies, bashing into each other with no real discernible motive? I think so. Yet before we get onto humanity, lets bring it closer to home; the animal kingdom. Some people may turn to the wild world of animals as some kind of indicator of our own power-situation. There is a lot of killing and chasing and worry outside the walls of civilization. Predators use whatever means they have at their disposal (i.e. their bodies and hunting skills) to catch prey, so that they may devour that prey and sustain their own bodies at the slain creatures expense. The prey on the other hand is going to do everything it can to escape. If we may generalize, it is a constant battle for survival, where hunger is an ever-present threat.

So, power in relation to human beings; what is it!

Power in the human sphere is more complex than the clashing of forces, or the 'violent/benevolent' survival cycle of nature. There are two great categories of power we must take into consideration in regards to humanity. These are materials/technology and identity.

Firstly, how powerful a group of humans are depends on how materially rich they are. With a greater potential to move matter, to disrupt matter and to enrich matter, a group of humans can maintain itself to a better degree than another group of humans, and can use its material superiority to destroy any perceived threats to it. Yet perhaps more fundamental to this material power is the notion of identity; namely, group identity. Without the ability to cooperate with, or bully, fellow humans in the same group, power quite simply cannot reach the magnitude it now occupies; group identity is the only way societies can form and function on such a huge scale. The identity people gain from belonging to a group, be it a nation, or a culture, or a religion, or anything, is the means used to win that persons loyalty and ensure they will act according to how the ruler-ship decides. These groups are held together, above all else, by a common language. Language therefore, is the prerequisite to a developed identity, and thus to power.

  

The actual human body

Language and technology determines how we react to biology. For instance, woman's lot has for most of human history been decided for her, either by the raw facts of her being the reproducer of human kind, or male dominance reducing her role in society to that of a second-class citizen. It is only recently, with more (but by no means total) recognition of woman's potential, and the material means to ensure reproduction is not too much of a burden, that women can move toward liberation from patriarchal servitude and be allowed to flourish on the world stage as man's equal. Thus, we cannot attribute group-identity to biology alone, but must look at the whole situation to determine how much power a group-identity is capable of obtaining.

We are not, however, completely free from biology, nor are we completely removed from the bounds of nature. Our bodies for the most part of our time on earth were geared toward a life of scant survival. Now we live in an age of abundance, yet our bodies have not had time to catch up. We have an instinctual, infinite hunger for everything that ever has been or ever will be, and nothing can satiate us. This biological lust for everything lurks within us all.

The individual

Whether I like it or not, I belong to the group 'human'. We could dance around all day searching for a definition of the word, but generally speaking we can recognise a human being from a stone, a camel or a lamp-post (or a lamp-post shaped like a camel). In addition to human, I belong to the group male, olive-skinned, attractive/cute, English-speaking, 'P' political group, 'Q' religious group, 'R' economic class, belonging to 'X' family, and so forth. All of these factors play on my abilities to function in society. We could potentially view all human beings as individuals, with their own source of power and their own unique possibilities, but how often do we see a person and how often do we see the metaphorical masks they wear, or are forced upon them?

     
That is not to say that individual power does not play some role. There are always geniuses emerging who defy all of the rules. For the rest of us individuals, we do have personal power structures and we can be strong or weak, we can make good or bad decisions. Like all highly evolved mammals, we have a sense of self and we can reflect and decide on what to do. Yet ultimately our success or failure is not entirely in our own hands; our power to act is hampered or aided by our belonging to this group or that group. This means that the ultimate choices we can make as individuals to exert our power on the world, require us first to find a similar group and forge an identity within it: A thinking individual within a mutually friendly group.

    
Those of great individual strength wish to make everyone fight on their terms; 'I'm a powerful individual, why can't you be too?'. In reality, the power of the individual is propped up by a collective identity, whether they care to acknowledge it or not. Just as a fish does not see water, the privileged does not see his privilege; he cannot see that much of his power comes from outside of himself.

An opinionated answer

So, what is power in relation to humanity? Power is economic, social, sexual, physical, personal. Power is the ability to project ones interests out of the mind and onto the world, to make people and matter move. But it is not just an unfolding random force, nor a drive for pure survival, it is couched in our sentient ability to use language and build group identities and create machines of abundance and destruction. Our use of power depends on great projects; goals and dreams and plans and visions - everyone who uses power does so for an end they think is worthwhile. The infinite lust for power may be informed by our biological drives, but how we react to and deal with this biology is determined by us.

Looking at the world today, the ultimate form of power manifests itself in dominant forces getting other people outside of their immediate interest group to destroy themselves for the dominators benefit. Nowhere has this been more historically demonstrated than in woman, who for most of history has failed to recognise herself.  Sadly, we have not yet found a way to prevent this almost universally occurring form of self-destructive behaviour. We certainly won't find it through moralizing, or meekness: No individual, or group has ever surrendered its power willingly. It is only through fighting that power can be taken and shared amongst all power groups, such that they may shape the world around them into a mutually agreeable place.

Selim 'Selim' Talat

Wheel power - By Sean Ash

Wheel power

The Political Party and the Ferrari are clearly two different things, yet peculiarly both things appear to be indistinguishable. Where there is power, there is a Ferrari and where there is a Ferrari, there is power.

The phenomenal power of the Ferrari has alluring capabilities with its radiant red body and dazzling shine. It seizes the corner of every eye as it first presents itself, and does so much more immediately than any other car as we instantly become struck by such beauty. The Ferrari is unique and arguably no other car could stand out or make such an impression. It is this very pulling power; the attractiveness combined with our very own fantasy that conjures and conceptualises such machinery as being powerful, and we know this as we soon come to realise that we want this particular car like we want no other. Although we may fantasise over such grandeur, it is a useless thought to accommodate if such power cannot be grasped, as power without the hand is like a Ferrari without the driver; disadvantageous, inactive, inexpedient, sterile and unproductive. If such a thing were not to be made productive, it would mean living in a world far from reality with the possibility of being enslaved by the imagination.

The driver, that being the hand, detects such opportunity and strives to take hold of the wheel. He does so essentially in order to fulfil a sense of self-satisfaction and security of the reality. Secondly, he does so in order to present to the subordinate a higher mode of authority by presenting them with the paradigm of both hand and power as one. Finally, he must attempt to hold onto the wheel at all costs. For the driver to succeed, he must first undertake a degree to learn how to drive so that a license can be attained. He must be highly skilled and ready to manoeuvre against many things that could potentially cause great danger for the driver, the Ferrari and the pedestrian. The driver must be concerned with all things and protect all, as if the driver were to lose the fuel (pedestrian) or were to 'write off ' the Ferrari, then he would surely face losing power. He must also be fully aware at all times; ensuring that one's senses are clear, pragmatic and undiluted so that the slightest possibility of danger can be avoided. The driver would need to mirror (White paper), signal (Bill) and manoeuvre (Act); pressing down firmly on the clutch to then find the biting point (cuts). As circumstances have changed, he will need to either speed up or slow down and so the shifting of gears is imperative as also is of the option to reverse. He must know his car inside out, its potential limits and most importantly, how to cut corners. The driver rev's his engine to display just how powerful the Ferrari is and the pedestrian has heard nothing like it.

The pedestrian represents the oil (fuel) to power. Without the oil of the pedestrian, both car and driver are insufficient as if the Ferrari receives no fuel then both car and driver become inoperative. As not all pedestrians can achieve the driving seat of the Ferrari, it is the pedestrian that lives in a world far from reality and it is they who are enslaved by the imagination. They build among them fuelling stations (polling stations) where they supply the necessary fuel every time the Ferrari should pull in. They would then wash the car, polish its body work as someone who washed cars for a living would clean expensive cars while imagining himself owning such a thing one day (should one work hard enough). The pedestrian would then go out and speak to other pedestrians emphasising just how great the Ferrari is, as they would then continue to glorify the machine in an attempt to persuade others to join in on their worship.

They are the energy that presents power with the opportunity to be efficient and they are the cause for it to act or not to act. Never realising that their fuel has an unparalleled power of its own, the pedestrian struggles as they push the car along every time it breaks down. They make excuses for it every time a part of the Ferrari goes wrong; sometimes blaming each other for faults that are not of their own but of the driver who had lost control. The Ferrari starts to pick up scratches that are deep within the body work and impossible to remove. The upholstery starts to pick up stains, burns and holes are all that remains in the seats. The mileage has reached its limits and the engine needs rebuilding. The pedestrian fears losing any purpose it may have had and they cannot see an ounce of security for themselves without the Ferrari. They salvage what they can and leave this as an inheritance to their children. The driver will always feel that he is destined to drive the car but this does not always mean that the driver is what is best for the Ferrari, the pedestrians and the driver himself. Power should not be given to those that seek it, but instead those who can reject such power are the ones that should have power. As those who possess the ability to reject such power are the only ones that can truly take control of it.

By Sean Ash

Beyond the Gods - By Ellese Elliott

Beyond the Gods

Once upon a time, above the vast ocean waves and over the rainforest dew, beyond the heavenly planets and past the light of the moon, there was a magnificent kingdom which harboured amazing power: Pantheios; kingdom of the Gods.

The kingdom of Pantheios was populated with Gods galore. There was the God of the seas Hydrathon, the God of fire Pyroniter and the God of the stars and the sun Aurora, and so on and so on. Each God had its own particular niche, but all gods were indeed the creators of the Universe. Again and again, they recreated the grains of sand and the drops of rain. Triumphant! Powerful! Unbeatable!

However, there is more than just the Universe. Lots more! And despite the fact that the Gods could move the tallest mountains, part the deepest seas or spin the gigantic planets with merely the sleight of their hand they could not answer humanities most simplest question; "Why?" [Soft Break][Soft Break]Why am I here? Why am I am human and not a Lion? Why does the sun appear small and big at the same time? Why does Aristotle think I am beautiful and Plato not?  Why is love deemed good and hate bad? These questions could not be answered by merely pointing to some physical thing in the world. For every answer the Gods gave another question followed, and then another. It was hopeless. These were what the Gods called philosophical questions, questions that could not be answered with the eyes, if at all.

And so, it was often, that the Gods did not create again and again, the stars and the sun, the mountains and seas, but sat thinking, or arguing among each other about such questions of beauty, of morality or of life. And whilst they did, time worked against them. Holes appeared in the universe, planets decayed, and humans cried out as the natural order of things was thrown off balance as some of the Gods created and others stayed thinking.   

In what appeared to be the middle of no where, in utter darkness, one could see a slither of light, tall and narrow escape form a page of black. Disguised in the absence of things, a door led to where the gods meet.

  "Booom!"  the strip of light quivered. "A king is needed to rule over the people Demos!" Pyroniter  

  shouted, slamming his fist on the majestic table. 

  "But why Pyroniter, can the humans not rule themselves? Why do they need someone to tell   

   them what to do?" Demos reasonably argued.

   "Because you made the humans imperfect Demos! You are a fool!" 

    "Now now Pyroniter, if people are imperfect, then so is the king and what use is an imperfect  

    king? I am no fool Pyroniter, you are just short tempered."

   "Short tempered! Short tempered!? We have been here for over one thousand years you long  

   winded fool.  I've had enough of you Demos! I am going to ignite planet earth and watch it  

   burn!"

   "Don't be so rash Pyroniter. Even if the humans are gone the question still remains, forever 

    unless we answer it."

    "They will die soon anyway when the sun, the stars and the water are gone because I,  

    Hydrathon and Aurora stay here with you, and these problems you have created, these people.

    We have argued much, we have listened much and I am tired."

And then a quiet Hydrathon who had been listening for quite some time said this.

  "What if we put it to a vote?"

  "A vote Hydrathon whatever do you mean?" Aurora questioned.

  "It is quite simple Aurora. Either we think the humans need a king or we think the humans do not  

   need a king. If you think the humans need a king then wazzle your inhilomar  if you think the

   humans do not need a king then shnoogle your grokinfider."

  “But how do we decide who is right?" Demos asked.

   "Well Demos we are all Gods and so it  

   simply cannot be that two Gods are wrong and one is right. So whoever out of you, Pyroniter  

   and Aurora is the only one who thinks so then that God must be wrong."

And so they put it to the test and they took a vote. Pyroniter wazzled its inhilomar as did Aurora, but Demos shnoogled its grokinfider.

That's it then, but as Hydrathon was about to champion Aurora and Pyroniter as the winner   Mons God of the Mountains and Dimensio god of extension came.

  "Oh no not you Dimensio." Aurora whined.

One time Dimensio sat thinking about the problem of beauty and what it is for so long the whole Universe shrank into a tiny point and so he and Pyroniter had to make it pop out again in a huge explosion. There was a ringing all around for ages afterward.

And so the gods created the philosopher

By Ellese Elliott