14. Why Grasshoppers Don’t Have A Problem

Posted on January 29, 2001 by thormay

If you think of the human men­tal sys­tem in terms com­pa­ra­ble to the oper­at­ing sys­tem of a com­puter, then there is a curi­ous incom­plete­ness about it. Of course the house­keep­ing func­tions, the bits that tell your body to breath and your heart to pump are under excel­lent auto­nomic con­trol. Just as well too. If my breath­ing stopped as often as I for­get to take the ket­tle off the stove, there’d be real trou­ble…

But if any­thing marks us out in the ani­mal king­dom, it is the drive to pur­sue agen­das that wildly exceed look­ing for the next morsel to eat, or screw­ing the hand­somest male or female that scent can find. That is, it is the drive of some of us to do other things is out of pro­por­tion to imme­di­ate sur­vival needs. Con­tinue read­ing →

Posted in competence, culture, management, merit, motivation, proportion, truth | Leave a comment

11. The Conundrum of Men and Women: Innovators & Imitators

Posted on May 14, 2000 by thormay

[related sto­ries: Gen­der Puz­zle / The Inside Track on Hap­pi­ness / Foun­tain of Youth / Let­ter to an Imag­i­nary Lady .. ]

Yin and yang, the war­rior and nur­turer, hard and soft, strong and weak, men and women. How hard we tried to per­suade our­selves that they were one. Repulsed by the pet­ri­fied shells of old cul­tures with their stereo­types and rigid role mod­els, we declared our­selves free. Earnestly we searched for the per­fect part­ner of equal qual­i­ties. Searched so long in vain.

Out in the back­blocks of unre­con­structed macho males and pump­kin scone women they never had a prob­lem. They played the eter­nal sea­sons of struts and gig­gles, infat­u­ated romance, white wed­dings, bawl­ing babies, eco­nomic drudgery, drink and abuse, spread­ing waist­li­nes, kitchen divorce and dad’s shed up the back­yard. Was it so dif­fer­ent, after all, from some mid­dle-east­ern reli­gious pro­scrip­tion on the gen­ders? Con­tinue read­ing →

Posted in competence, gender, innovation | Leave a comment

10. Teaching as a Subversive Activity

Posted on April 22, 2000 by thormay

We all dwell in an unsta­ble buzz of mol­e­cules. Some of these atomic tides have become sta­ble enough for a while, and recur­sive enough in their rela­tion­ships, to some­how gen­er­ate that sense of “I”, the iden­tity which allows us to view other assem­blies as enti­ties of greater or lesser rel­e­vance to the preser­va­tion of “I”.

We clas­sify these other enti­ties, and their rela­tion­ship with self, on a scale from solids to pho­tons, and from embed­ded con­vic­tion to diaphanous hope. At some hard to pin down, but robust perime­ter of cer­tainty, we declare all within to be our sys­tem of knowl­edge and being. Within all ele­ments must har­mo­nize, or at least develop pro­tec­tive shells of mutual igno­rance, like pearls cohab­it­ing blindly within our liv­ing oys­ter. And hav­ing set­tled upon this sys­tem of knowl­edge, for bet­ter or for worse, we become immensely pro­tec­tive of it. It is, after all, US, and all which threat­ens it threat­ens US. Con­tinue read­ing →

Posted in Research & Study, teaching, truth | Leave a comment

5. The Art of Disproportion

Posted on December 19, 1998 by thormay

Every writer cre­ates a pat­tern from dis­pro­por­tions. The pro­por­tion­ate is that checker­board of nights and days within which our lives are gov­erned, the rou­tine of sleep, how you part your hair, when you check for your mail, the trips to the shop that you make when bread or veg­eta­bles run out, the peo­ple you encoun­ter at the bus stop, what you say to the lady you see on Thurs­days. Words, though, in their nature are dis­pro­por­tion­ate against the pro­por­tion of expe­ri­ence. This note itself is a car­i­ca­ture.

So how does a writer dif­fer from the lan­guage mak­ers all around him, the cacoph­ony of chat­ter­ers? By writ­ing a sym­phony. The dis­pro­por­tions of our con­ver­sa­tion are art­less, for where there are pat­terns they are uncon­scious, and where there is sig­nif­i­cance, it is self­ish. The writer is able to cre­ate pat­terns from dis­pro­por­tion which cre­ate newly defined sig­nif­i­cance, a fresh real­ity. He mar­shals the trivia of ran­dom occur­rence into an enter­prise with pur­pose and direc­tion, just as a musi­cian mar­shals noise into music.

Posted in poetry, proportion, truth, writing | Leave a comment

5. The Art of Disproportion

Posted on December 19, 1998 by thormay

Every writer cre­ates a pat­tern of dis­pro­por­tions. The pro­por­tion­ate is that checker­board of nights and days within which our lives are gov­erned, the rou­tine of sleep, how you part your hair, when you check for your mail, the trips to the shop that you make when bread or veg­eta­bles run out, the peo­ple you encoun­ter at the bus stop, what you say to the lady you see on Thurs­days. Words, though, in their nature are dis­pro­por­tion­ate against the pro­por­tion of expe­ri­ence. This note itself is a car­i­ca­ture.

So how does a writer dif­fer from the lan­guage mak­ers all around him, the cacoph­ony of chat­ter­ers? By writ­ing a sym­phony. The dis­pro­por­tions of our con­ver­sa­tion are art­less, for where there are pat­terns they are uncon­scious, and where there is sig­nif­i­cance, it is self­ish. The writer is able to cre­ate pat­terns of dis­pro­por­tion which cre­ate newly defined sig­nif­i­cance. He mar­shals the trivia of ran­dom occur­rence into an enter­prise with pur­pose and direc­tion, just as a musi­cian mar­shals noise into music.

Posted in art, culture, innovation | Leave a comment

#2–1998 EDINN : Re-spinning Intellectuals into the Social Order

Posted on November 29, 1998 by thormay

1. What is an intel­lec­tual any­way?

Intel­lec­tu­als as a sub-species rate some­what lower than gar­den spi­ders in the pub­lic esti­ma­tion (they are not use­ful, they can sting if you pick them up, and they are eco­nom­i­cally val­ue­less). Maybe it is nec­es­sary to sort this con­fu­sion out before we go on to find­ing them a place in the social fab­ric.

The com­mon atti­tude was neatly encap­su­lated in a piece Paul John­son wrote for the Wall Street Jour­nal in 1987 (reprinted on 24th May 1987 in The Aus­tralian). This claimed to put intel­lec­tu­als in their place. “Most intel­lec­tu­als”, wrote Mr. John­son, ” pro­fess to love human­ity and to be work­ing for its improve­ment and hap­pi­ness, … but it is the idea of human­ity that they love, rather than the actual indi­vid­u­als which com­pose it. The con­se­quences can be less than thought­ful.” It seemed to me that Mr. John­son was being less than thought­ful, or rather mak­ing  quid out of a prej­u­dice uni­ver­sally exploited by pop­ulist politi­cians for mil­len­nia. I wrote a short riposte to the news­pa­per: Con­tinue read­ing →

Posted in culture, innovation, intellectuals | Leave a comment

1. Finding Truth: The Human Mind as an Error-Checking Mechanism

Posted on April 12, 1998 by thormay

“On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s sud­den­ness resists, win so.”
[John Donne, 1572–1631]

[ Pro­logue: In 1998 in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia, I had become a polit­i­cal casu­alty in the work­place of a new State government’s “reform drive”. Only time could restore bal­ance there. It wasn’t worth trench war­fare. So I decided to head off for the dark side of the moon, oth­er­wise known as China. In a three month inter­reg­num arrang­ing visas etc., in order to pay the rent I plunged into the world of tele­sales for a few hours each after­noon. Talk about a moral edu­ca­tion… Any­way, this very short piece reflects the real­i­ties of that time. Par­don the icon­o­clasm, but come to think of it, what has changed?]

It is time some­body invented the elec­tron the­ory of truth. Per­haps it could go some­thing like this. Human minds come with a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent valences, although no one has yet devised a peri­odic table of their range. The sim­plest fel­low, like a hydro­gen atom with its sin­gle shell elec­tron, holds that one truth stands for all worldly and other-worldly expe­ri­ences. More com­plex souls have a vary­ing num­ber of truth (elec­tron) shells, and although their con­scious­ness may habit­u­ally dwell at a fairly inti­mate level, say the behav­iour of a spouse, with suf­fi­cient heat and agi­ta­tion, their atten­tion (hence their judge­ment) may jump to an outer shell of national affairs, or to the dizzy dis­tance of humankind. A few rel­a­tively eccen­tric human types may scarcely ever access their inner shells of inti­macy with the laser light of mind. Con­tinue read­ing →

Posted in evidence, merit, truth | Tagged | Leave a comment