Twitteretter

In Twitteretter 340 I split humanity into those who ensure they are happy doing what they have to do, and those who spend their time wishing they could do something else. The same applies to self image. You are a certain way, combination of your genetics, upbringing and habits. You can choose to be happy, or unhappy, with it, be it physique or intellect. It is, again, a simple matter of personal choice. And don’t get me wrong, however happy you manage to be with what you are currently like, this is no reason not to make improvements. It is critical to understand that your being is not a destination, but a journey. Whether you depart from Happy or Unhappy Port, your life will be most productive, and you will be happiest at the end of it, if you sail in a general improvement direction, towards the land of Your Ideal and, when arriving, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde when writing about Utopia, setting off again, to the land of Your Next Ideal. Progress is the realisation of Utopias’ (or ideals...

I’m giving away my age, at least with some of these dichotomies, but I’m interested in what these choices say about me. I am, or have been, at least, I confess, more on the first camp than the second. In these historical duels, I tended to align with the group representing hard work, dedication and determination over talent and panache . Only lately, as I mature, I’ve understood that the apparent ease in the performance of the second group is of course the result of work as hard as that of the former, and my preferences have in some cases changed, in others, disappeared altogether, making both equal in my estimation. Top performance, however effortless it looks, is always the result of excruciatingly meticulous preparation. But, if you are interviewing and looking for those who believe hard work to be the key to their and your business’ success, the choices in the title may hold the key to finding them and separating them from those who think talent may just come to them, without effor...

What is fear of failure? That feeling preventing you from doing, or even worse, fully committing to, things you may succeed at. Let’s be clear. You are going to fail. A lot. Unless you do nothing. Failure is the way that you learn to succeed, success being a building built by piling not bricks, but failures on top of each other. The more you fail, the closer to success you get. Many, however, worried they may fail, don’t try, giving up the chance to succeed. Winston Churchill, a pretty successful person by all accounts, told us: ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts’. You will succeed when you throw yourself fully into everything you do, accepting success and failure as possible outcomes, enjoying the former and learning from the latter, to turn it into success. You will be set free, able to realise your full potential only when, as Kipling’s fantastic ‘If’ poem teaches us, you treat success and failure, those two impostors, just the sam...

Sometimes I think I am too impatient for the future to arrive. I wish things went faster. I want to jump to the point when my business projects arrive at that ever elusive success destination. Or to my next holiday. Or to the end of a cold, grey winter, to the weekend or, nowadays, after a year of coronavirus pandemic, to vaccination, a pint in a pub or a meal out with friends. This, I think, is natural, a trait probably shared by all humans. We set our mind on a destination, both distant and uncertain and, since we don’t like waiting, and we hate uncertainty, we immediately wish we were already there, preferring the certainty of success to the toil of its pursuit. Alas, the future does not work that way, and it cares little   for our wishes. It arrives, precisely and reliably, one minute, one hour or one day at a time, whatever your chosen unit may be. Once you understand this you realise you better enjoy the process, make the most of it, as it will be what most of your time is sp...

This is a fundamental choice that probably divides humanity into 2 distinct groups. On the red corner (no political connotations to the colour, just playing with a boxing ring analogy) are those that wish they could do only what they like. A lot of their time is spent regretting having to do things they don’t want to do and feeling generally unhappy and frustrated by the opportunity cost of those activities. On the blue corner, those who like whatever they have to do. Since they have to do it anyway, they make the most of it, enjoy it, and avoid all the frustration and regret. This different attitude tends to also make them more successful at whatever they are doing and, by succeeding, frees them up to do more of what they like to do more. Like Neo, in The Matrix, you can choose your pill, or corner in this case. The path to the blue corner is easy, it starts by liking whatever you are doing right now, and, since you are now reading or watching Twitteretter, subscribing and sharing Len...

The title is one of my favourite quotes, which I have tried to live my life by. It is from ‘The Miser’, a great Moliere classic, incisive and thought provoking, as all his work. The meaning is clear. What one promises does not matter, only what one delivers does. What got me thinking about this, specifically, was the Chancellor’s announcement of a 1% pay rise for NHS workers. I remembered the famous, or I think we now can really start calling it infamous, Brexit bus. An extra 350 million per day for the NHS. The pay rise equates to 450 million per year. Then I realised, maybe we misunderstood and Boris Johnson and Co never meant pounds, but rather, pence. But even then, this week’s pay rise would only be a third of that downgraded promise. The trouble is that politics and government are based on a promise to delivery premise, on the citizenship voting on the basis of promises and, those benefiting from that vote, delivering on such promises. Something in this cycle seems a tad broken L...

When it comes to living life, one of the choices to be made is whether to just live it, day to day, slowly advancing towards death without a narrative, or whether to search for meaning, to try to make your life count for something, to make a difference (whatever you may find your meaning in). Searching for meaning may make life more fulfilling, at least when you find it. The searchers like to think so. But, also, searching makes life undoubtedly harder. It is not enough to just live, the searchers demand more, expect more from their existence. As a consequence, what would for others be a perfectly fine day, for the searcher is a day wasted, if it does not contribute to the existential narrative. The temptation of nihilism is always there, the void, its tempting mindless rest, which the searcher, at times of exhaustion, envies of others. But, alas, once you choose meaning, giving into the void would be admitting defeat, calling it quits, which the searcher, invariably, refuses to do Len...

I was having a conversation about xenophobia and antiimmigration sentiment yesterday. My interlocutor was passionately stating that he cared about his people much more than about others, and that he objected to others, as he called them, taking benefits, rights or anything else from his people. For him, his people were his co-nationals. I got to thinking that, in this, he is probably no different to anyone else. For some, their people are their family, whose interest is above anyone else’s, regardless of justice or fairness. For others, their people are their tribe, nationality or race. For some of us, our people are all humans (I would in principle not exclude other sentient extra-terrestrial beings if we were to make contact with them at some point). So, in a way, we are all equally tribal, but different attitudes to issues such as immigration depend on how we define our tribe, and who we see as The Other, as opposed to We or Us (rather than the epistemological Hegel/Husserl concept)...

This week saw the annual prize giving of a literary competition in memoriam of my late father, a subversive essay tournament for those in college age. It is easy to underestimate the importance of such an event in today’s World, in which we surround young people with domestication tools, sapping their nonconformity with a myriad of time killing, distracting assaults through their mobile devices. Our market-based society encourages young people, unwittingly but unapologetically, to observe instead of act, to passively like instead of uncompromisingly protest. In this context, subversive essay seems more important than ever. Gone are the days when being young was synonym of being, indeed, subversive, when conformity to society’s norms came only with the experience, or defeat, of age. I confess I had not paid enough attention to the importance of this initiative but, if we can get our young to write subversive essay, and applaud them for it, we still have a chance to build a better World...

When you start the journey of life your pockets are full of a currency, time, which you can trade for anything else. As you skip along the life Monopoly board, your time reserves slowly deplete, as you trade them for experience, activities, relationships, knowledge and even wealth. The analogy is not perfect. When you spend time, you cannot earn more, at least not yet, even though as a species we are working in that direction, or trade back, buying time with for example experience. You cannot accumulate it, or unequally redistribute it, taking it from others. At the end of the journey, your pockets are full of the things you traded for, and empty of time. When you think about it this way, time is a unique asset, it cannot be grown, only spent. It is its absolute limitation, its inflexible scarcity, that make it the most valuable thing we have. From this perspective, it is bemusing to watch many waste it with a profligacy they would never show with that much more flexible asset, money...

Normality is slowly restored in the US political system, after the incumbent president’s failed attempt to overthrow the election. The mainstream body political breathes a sigh of relief and declares that institutions held surprisingly well and the effort got nowhere. Alas, this may be complacent. The orchestrated attack on truth, fact and reality will have long lasting consequences and could be, if not remediated, a stepping stone, increasing the chances of success of the next attempt. On thinking about this, it is worth quoting, one more time, Hannah Arendt: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for who the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist’. Through this prism, today’s outcome is not a victory, but rather a precarious truce, an adjournment, calling for vigilance and action, not celebration...

We live in dangerous times, at least in a precarious equilibrium. It is easy to dismiss warnings about current terminal threats to democracy and the nihilist autocratic attack on the institutions of many countries as exaggerated and over dramatic. To those who may be flippantly of this opinion, I recommend reading Hannah Arendt, witness to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. When you read her naked analysis of the totalitarian takeover, you are shocked by how relevant it is to current times. Practically any Arendt quote you choose can be applied, unedited, to today’s politics. This is a warning. Even though very few of us were alive in the 30s, we don’t need reminding of how they ended and how close to an existential cliff edge our species was. The aftermath of a great recession and fast geopolitical change conflated, as they do today, with overconfidence by the media and our institutions to allow a monster to rise which took all the will of humanity, and many lives, to defeat...

A couple of days ago I wrote about how appeasers, in this case Republican congressmen and Senators in the US, expect a different outcome from the same behaviour, borrowing a quote from Winston Churchill. Observant readers may have noticed that the initial statement was a reference to another quote, this one from an, in my opinion, even much greater mind, Albert Einstein, who is credited with saying: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result’. Einstein was referring to the scientific method but, in fact, his quote is at the crossroads between science, philosophy and even self-help (not that he would understand the latter term). This in fact is a common human trait that manifests itself everywhere. Many wish for different outcomes, different results, but few have the will, the desire to change behaviours to bring them about. Honesty with oneself is the first and most important step in that hard road, wishful thinking its worst fo...

On reading some of my Twitteretters, some friends have described me as an idealist. This, by the way, was not meant negatively, and I did not take it that way. I do in fact take it as a compliment. You see, there is a connotation in many people’s thinking that idealism is not realistic, that wishing for an ideal society (in the context of this specific discussion, idealism can of course be deployed in many other areas) is nice but ultimately futile for unfeasible. This is a line peddled by those with less lofty aims. If idealism can be discarded as well intentioned but useless, it is acceptable to not be an idealist, and be instead individualistic, egotistic or just realistic, someone who likes and wants to maintain the status quo. The thing is, the only condition needed for idealism to become eminently achievable would be for the great majority to believe. If we did, we would achieve whichever Utopia we choose to seek. You may say I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one. Join us Len...

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu were household names not that long ago. Today, few know the names, never mind their doctrines. At a time when selfish kings and ruthless oligarchies ruled, the abovementioned opened our eyes to the basic concepts that brought about the Enlightment period and, with it, democracy. Separation of powers, the right to vote and, above all, the social contract, Rousseau’s idea that the power of a state and its leaders exists only in as much as it is willingly granted by its citizens, in the expectation that it will be wielded in the interest of all those granting it. Alas, this does no longer, in many cases, hold true. Many of today’s regimes have grabbed power and no longer receive it from citizens (Putin or Xi, for example). In other societies, governments represent some, but not all (Brexit Britain, Trump’s USA, Torra’s Catalonia). The social contract that legitimated our democratic systems survives no longer, relinquished in febrile populism...

I’ve already introduced JJ Rousseau and his The Social Contract in previous Twitteretters. He is not only a very renowned philosopher, but quite possibly the most influential political author of our history. His work set the basis for the advent of modern democracy, providing the ideological backbone to the constitutional assemblies of the French Revolution and, nearly at the same time the other side of the Atlantic, to the American Revolution and its development of a sophisticated parliamentarian republic. However, and unlikely as it seems, Rousseau was hugely influential also by writing what is credited by many as the first romantic novel, La nouvelle Heloise, opening the floodgates of a genre that has produced incalculable pages and book sales of a volume unthinkable for philosophy works. Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Rousseau both gave us the tools to challenge our social and political environment, to possibly improve it, and to evade it, reducing the urgency to do so...

The 1930s Vienna School, including its best known member, Karl Popper, concerned itself with the concept of objective truth (he also has very interesting thoughts on tolerance, as relevant today as they were in the 30s, which I will post on separately). Popper comes to mind because of the strategic attack on objective truth orchestrated by many modern governments (UK and US amongst others, such as Russia, China or Brazil, less surprising and disappointing). The strategy is based on continuous repetition of ideas and opinions, which are equated to fact, and on the simultaneous systematic devaluation of actual facts by alternative pseudofacts which are invented to counterweigh them and, when disproven with great effort, replaced immediately by a new alternative. The objective is the exhaustion of the critical mind through volume of statements to disprove, so that objective truth, reachable only by rational elimination of all alternatives, remains elusive to all but most committed critics...