Rights AND Responsibilities not OR Responsibilities

Looking back at a discussion from 4 years ago, here are my current thoughts on Jordan Peterson’s view of how we speak to young people about rights and responsibilities, with thanks to Giles Davis and Michael Snow for their contributions to the original discussion which are incorporated here.

This is my understanding of Peterson’s view:

‘Young people are being fooled about ‘Rights’.

‘It’s better for young people to focus on their responsibilities rather than their rights. Rights, though important, are inherently selfish; they are about me. Responsibilities are selfless; what I must do for others or wider society.

Young people have been cared for all their lives thus far. As adults they need to give back to the world. But it’s not merely an issue of obligation. All people, including youngsters, need meaning in their lives. Meaning is to be found in responsibility, what can I give, not rights, what do I get.

People find meaning in the responsibilities within their careers, their family, their friends, charitable work they do for others, the education they pursue and the voluntary obligations they undertake within society.

It’s not the rights that are granted to you so that you can be awarded your rewards and privileges that will make your time-limited life on Earth worthwhile. It is instead the sacrifices you make to the highest good that you can conceptualize and strive to attain. The responsibility you take for yourself and within society.

Beware the pedlars of more and more ‘rights’. They wish to turn you into someone who is simultaneously privileged and victimized.
Whining; narcissistic; noisy; demanding; chronically resentful and unhappy; distracted from seeing the bigger picture; everything in dualistic conflict.
Importantly, always looking to authority to give you something; to make your life better; infantilising you.

Instead, take on responsibility; shoulder them willingly; make yourself useful to others; stop telling others how evil they are and how righteous you are; find the heaviest burden you can bear and bear it stoically, forthrightly, admirably and without complaint.

___________________________________________________ 

To me it's about balance, as with most things. It's good that young people are aware of their rights (i.e. not to be abused), but they also need to be aware of their responsibilities. One without the other potentially leads to problems. Both/And not Either/Or. Yin & Yang must be in balance.

But we aren't very good at getting balance on social change in the UK. We see something that we think needs changing and instead of aiming for balance, so often the pendulum moves to the opposite extreme, which is just as bad, (an extreme), from the situation before change was initiated.

It's because activists & campaigners are very good at calling for and making the case for change at a political/societal level but don't think through to the end game.
Zealots seldom do.
In a sense, they get caught up in the frenzy of war but don't have a clear idea what the peace should look like or how to bring it about in a fair way
They seem happy with the victor simply becoming a tyrant, since they assume they will win. It’s the mindset of Hitler and Stalin and Mao etc.
They also give no thought to the unintended consequences of their campaigns on wider society.
Total victory is the only goal; the aftermath will have to take care of itself.

But as I’ve said above, under the ideas of non-dual philosophy, one needs to get away from the idea of EITHER/OR rights and responsibilities, and look at BOTH/AND.
It's the right of every human being to find out who and what they really are. And more, it’s their responsibility to find that out.
To discover. Dis - cover.
In other words to pull back the veil; to come out of what one is not, to comprehend really and truly what one is.

That is the real right AND the real responsibility of each and every one of us.

Memory: are we letting the past dicate our present?

You know how decades later, we remember really clearly things from our childhood, teenage and early adult years? 

For example, I know I remember poetry and music learnt in those years, yet music I learnt new in the last 15 years, I have to almost re-learn from scratch when coming back to it only a year or two later.

My point is that the experiences in our formative years really imprint themselves on the areas of our brain that deal with memory (hippocampus; neo-cortex; amygdala).

This can be a good thing. 
As well as factual information retrieval, having clear memories of your distant past to memorialise relatives long dead or friends long lost touch with is useful psychologically. Memories to cherish. 

But it can also be a bad thing, depending on the subject and how it affects you now.

The evolutionary purpose of memory is NOT so we can remember the past in the sense of an historical record or a memorial or nostalgia. 
It's so we don't repeat stupid mistakes and negative behaviours, and so that we DO repeat behaviours that were positive and worked for us.

That’s why societal (not just individual) memory, is so important. 
Chaos ensues when we ignore or tear-up the lessons learned from the past with hubris (foolishness), as opposed to changing carefully and at a pace that that doesn’t cause chaos (wisdom).

When it comes to our socio-political views, we can find ourselves thinking and therefore speaking about them in a way that may have been true (as least as we thought) then, but isn’t true, or at least has changed significantly, now.

Views set in stone on important matters before our brains have finished developing (around 23 for most), and before we have had wide experience of society, will often not be nuanced in the way wisdom would require.

I was fortunate as a teenager in that, being a good singer and good all-round sportsman, I was asked to join clubs & societies outside of school, where I mixed socially with adults of all ages, classes and political persuasions.

However immature I’m sure I seemed to some, I benefitted and matured much faster for these experiences, than if the first time I had meaningful interaction with adults outside of my family and education, had been when I started my first job. 

Is the lack of these wider adult social interactions, replaced by online peer-group interactions, the source of much teenage and student angst for example?

Whatever, it's so important not to get sucked into having a closed-minded view, based on something we read, or heard, or were told, or experienced, often decades ago. 

Open-mindedness and a willingness to cast-off past views where appropriate, is difficult, but also liberating for you and even for others.

Difficult because it requires you to genuinely, in good faith, re-visit your long-held opinions and admit the need to change, which can be painful. Pride and embarrassment can be hard negotiators.

Liberating because, just the willingness and ability to try, makes you a better person, and who doesn’t like that feeling? 

But also because in changing your mind, shifting your position, even if only on some issues, and only partially, you are acknowledging the fact that society and individuals change, and that you are willing and able to adapt. 

We’ve all had some sort of epiphany in life; where we have a sudden light-bulb moment of realisation about something we thought we knew then realised we were wrong, or a problem we couldn’t fathom and now we get it. 
Even when the subject is trivial, it’s a wonderful feeling isn’t it?

Liberating also for others because, along with this more open, honest, free way of thinking, will come a change in your character; often materialising in a happier more energised manifestation of your humanity.
It may even nudge others to make some changes in themselves.

Now, it won’t cause joy or liberation to closed-minded people who feel comfortable (I would say trapped) in that mode of being, and comfortable with how you were before; your towing of the same line as them; your mutual bolstering of each other’s self-righteous, tribal, closed-minded egos.

But by being open-minded; genuinely exploring other views and possibilities; not seeing changing your mind as threatening who you are; seeing well-considered change as right, not embarrassing; seeing the past as something to learn from, both the good and the bad, but NOT something that should control your behaviours and views many years later, you become free; seeing things more clearly. 

A good practice for this is to steel-man a viewpoint you disagree with. To think as though you're going to debate in favour of a view you disagree with. 
Done with integrity, this shows you that other viewpoints are often neither stupid nor evil; even if you still, on balance, disagree.

So, as well as using our memory for memorial; nostalgia; error minimisation; and necessary information retrieval, let’s use it to reassess our values; our purpose; and how we interact in society. 

Importantly, such change doesn’t have to be seismic.
Drastic change often throws the baby out with the bath water.

I recall a situation, 20 years or so ago, when a couple married for 15 years and with early teenage kids split-up because the woman had had a cancer scare, and the reappraisal of her life changed her so dramatically, that, among other things, she ended the marriage. Her husband’s comment was that she became a totally different person. While this may have been right for her, there is certainly no need for that degree of change in order for the advantages of an open non-agenda-driven reassessment of your views & attitudes to show themselves.

For example, it can simply come in changing what you choose to do with your leisure time; how you express yourself; how you interact with others; being clear as to what is truly important; whether to change your job or work-life balance.

With open-minded calm reappraisal, putting defensive pride in your previous views to one side, you often gain insights such that new ideas, understanding, meaning and purpose outside of your usual routine, starts to emerge.

Positive purpose, not the purpose of the insular, the tribal, the ideologue; the activist zealot, which is ‘my way or else’. 

Rather, the purpose of the wonder-explorer, the wise traveller; the seeker of wisdom.

So let’s use our memory for the obvious things, yes, but not let it control who we are now; for with a questing and open mind, who knows who and what we could become?

Message to the rationalist atheist: It's NOT science or spirituality - it's BOTH

I disagree with you, the rationalist atheist, only about one material thing and one consequence of that.
The key material issue is that I think the universe was brought into being by some creating source, whereas you think it just happened coincidentally, out of literally nothing, without a creating source. [The more recent idea that the universe has 'always' been there is just a cop-out, an attempt not to have to explain how it came about].

To many religious or spiritual people, your view on this is just as irrational as you claim theirs to be. How can 'something' come from 'nothing' in anything other than agenda-driven hypothesising?

After the creator issue, you and I agree on everything that science can explain. That you don't seem to accept that there is anything science can't or at least won't in the future be able to explain is, I assume, our only other disagreement.

A view that science will eventually explain literally everything about the human condition, including consciousness and how it is derived, let alone the existence or not of a creating source, sounds like faith to me; that thing you disparage in the religious.

I'm not attracted by semantic arguments about supposed difference between the words faith and belief. The Christian creed starts CREDO, I believe, not I have FAITH.

The two words are often used interchangeably; indeed I do so.

Where you use the word 'belief', to simply mean what you think you know at the moment, I would use 'understanding'. i.e. 'my current understanding is X, but I'm happy to change that with suitable evidence'.

I am in agreement with that, but as a 'creator source' of the universe is impossible to either prove or disprove in your rational scientific terms (not finding something doesn't mean it's not there; not knowing something doesn't mean it's not there to be known), arguing about the existence or otherwise of this is pointless, since we simply think about it in totally different ways, and that won't be reconciled by science, because to me, science is just one way of interpreting the universe, the Earth and Humanity, whereas for you, it seems it's the only way.

Both/And not Either/Or would make the world a much more contented place. 

Hence my recommendation of Michael J Snow’s book, Mindful Philosophy. The closed-minded will struggle with it, of course; the open-minded should find much that is helpful to their well-being.

Science needs to be rescued from the political ideologues

Until yesterday (historically), it was accepted in science that there is no such thing as unquestionable consensus.
Indeed, that the concept of consensus or ‘settled science’ is lazy; unimaginative; restrictive; dangerous.
Any agreement was, at best, what we think we know at the moment.
But that it was unquestionable, either scientifically or morally, would not have been a mainstream view; indeed would have been vehemently resisted by the majority.
We mustn't stifle learning by restricting inquiry, was the majority view.
Judgments about the efficacy and/or desirability of ideas must come after they have been investigated, not before.

Unquestionable scientific consensus equals complacency & laziness at best; and, as anyone who's been awake in recent years has realised, serious error and tyranny at worst.

Consider all the knowledge and discoveries that wouldn’t exist if, for example, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, let alone engineers and medical scientists, had just shrugged their shoulders and gone along with the prevailing mainstream view of their time.
Forget life-saving blood transfusions, pass me the biggest leech you can find and cross your fingers.

Science, in its pure and proper sense, is about constant questioning, hypothesising and testing to form theories that appear to work, but that are still subject to further questioning, hypothesising, testing etc.
And this has worked well because, until recently, science wasn’t conducted based on the pre-formed answers required by those funding the research, or the personal political agendas of the scientists or those on the Boards of the companies they work for.

Politicised science should be anathema, not only to scientists but to the rest of us who depend so much upon what science does for us.

But if the blatant politicisation we see of subjects in the Arts, Humanities and soft-sciences (sociology; psychology) is allowed to bleed into the hard sciences, the errors and indeed deliberate misusing of science will increase, bringing misery to the majority of humanity before very long.

Thoughts on the Church of England

Recently, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and wealthy former oil company executive who, compared to most in this country, let alone globally, lives the life of luxury, announced that the Church of England would be giving £100 million away to assuage the guilt that HE has decided it has, for its part in the slave trade.

I saw the article about it on Twitter and I made a reply which has, if not gone viral, certainly had an awful lot of views, an awful lot of likes, and an awful lot of retweets. I don't claim any great insight; I think it's a statement of the obvious. I said:

“what would Christ have done with all that money? Answer? He wouldn't have had it as it would have been given away to the poor as it came in. Think of all those in need of money now, and Welby’s concerned about slavery that WE, the British, pro-actively ended over 200 years ago? Justin Welby, as he repeatedly shows, is a political animal not a spiritual one”

My point then is, what on earth is the Church of England doing having £100 million spare to just give away on the whim of a politicised & therefore unworthy Archbishop?

I know they have old church buildings to maintain and the salaries of their (ever reducing number of) clergy to pay, but that has presumably been taken into account before this announcement, and anyway, having that much spare cash is utterly obscene and utterly out of keeping with the example given by Christ, that any Christian Church of any denomination should amass these kinds of sums of money.

The Church of England has now been ‘modernising’ for 60 years. And of course, when they use the word ‘modernising’, what they really mean is changing to fit in with the transient fads of a secular and increasingly atheistic society.

And what has this constant pandering to the secular atheists achieved in that time?

·        a 90% reduction in regular attendees;

·        An average age of regular attendee of over 60;

·        A reduction in available clergy of 25% (many parishes rely on retired clergy & reduced services);  and

·        Less than 50% putting “Christian” on the most recent 10 yearly national census for the first time

Now I thought it was common knowledge, because it's common sense, that doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results is a sign, if not of madness, then certainly of foolishness. But apparently not in the Church of England.

Now the one thing I would not accuse the leadership of the Church of England of being is unintelligent. However as Dr John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto has pointed out, it is perfectly possible to be very intelligent and also very foolish, and there is no contradiction in that whatsoever. Knowledge and wisdom are not synonymous.

For the last several decades there has been a group think among the leadership, - and of course via training, now among many of its clergy, - that you can describe as ‘secular’ in the broadest sense of that term.
More specifically a politicisation of the Church of England. And very specifically the following of certain politically left-wing secular, materialist & often atheistic societal fads & tropes.

It used to be said of the Church of England that it was the Tory party at prayer. This has not been the case now for many decades. It is now very much the Liberal Democrat party at prayer. Well educated, wealthy, middle class, out of touch with the masses, and pandering to every secular woke fad that comes along.
I’m afraid that, while the liturgy still uses ridiculously archaic terminology like, I don’t know, God, Jesus Christ, Holy Trinity, and recites the Lord’s prayer and Apostles creed (words suitably altered of course), it has become a mere veneer, trying to hide the Church of England’s blatant secularisation & politicisation encapsulated by, as I said in my opening remarks, the wealthy former corporate executive who lives the life of a king, certainly in comparison to Christ and his disciples, let alone 90% of the global population, Justin Welby.

Back in the late 1960s & early 1970s when the move was made away from the 1662 Prayer Book language of thees and thous, it was said that the old language is why attendance was falling. This turned out to be untrue and I suspect those advocating for it suspected as much and were operating politically. Politics rather than spirituality is behind most major change in ALL Christian denominations.

I highly recommend Andrew Doyle's new book ‘the new Puritans’, because the Church of England has now turned into a far-left puritanical cult.
What's the difference between a cult and a religious denomination? At the basic level, numbers! And when you look at the number of people within the population who attend church even once a month, let alone more, the numbers are fast dwindling to those of a historically relevant yes, but currently irrelevant, cult.

To borrow from people in the political sphere when they can no longer be a member of or vote for the party they have voted for all their lives, ‘I haven't left the Church of England; the Church of England has gradually left me.’

While starting from a lower base in terms of numbers in the UK, it is hardly surprising that the Roman Catholics and eastern Orthodox Church are not haemorrhaging adherents to anything like the extent of the Church of England or indeed, other secularising Protestant denominations.
What we are learning is that without maintaining the transcendent mysticism of God, the ethereal nature of Language and traditional doctrines, - secular atheism and politicisation wins out remarkably quickly. Indeed, the modern C of E has encouraged it.
Programatic secularism is the term that the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, used to describe this deliberate programme of gradual steps toward moving the church into the secular and away from its traditional spiritual doctrines.

So, the time has come for the Church of England to be disestablished, because the number of adherents and therefore its spiritual usefulness to Society, no longer warrants it.

Our new king, Charles the third, said recently that the Church of England has a special role in the life of our nation. All this comment goes to show is how out of touch he is with the reality. He is 75 after all. He’s living in the past. It used to have a special role but outside all the ceremonial function at coronation's, royal weddings and in his private chapels, which of course is all King Charles ever sees, it no longer does, as the latest national census clearly shows.
That being the Head of the Church of England is one of the props to the institution of the monarchy itself, is not a good enough reason to continue pretending that it is either relevant, or, required to have special status. It should be disestablished and made to stand, or I sadly suspect, fall, on its own two feet. I don’t like saying that, but we need to be honest about it.

The sad thing is that many ordinary members of the Church of England, those who attend regularly and give their time, resources and efforts to support their local church, are not like the hypocritical politically motivated leadership at all. They are being led by donkeys, hypocrites and charlatans who care more about political ideology, patting themselves on the back for how kind & caring they are in secular terms, than the poor.
Don’t tell me that the Church of England has got £100 million to give away for assumed guilt about something we abolished well over 200 years ago, and in the same breath tell me they care about the poor in their own society.
It is an arrogant elitist institution, or at least is being led by arrogant elitists, and that must stop.

The traditions, liturgy, doctrines and practice of the Church of England have gradually been watered down, secularised, over the last few decades. Why?
Supposedly to make the church more accessible – but accessible to whom?
To stay ‘relevant’. But relevant to whom?
As all the data demonstrates, to those who neither believe nor care.
In attempting to pander to secularists, political ideologues & full-on anti-theists, all the church has done is reduced the number of its formerly constant adherents.

And now, the C of E is setting-up a commission looking into whether or not God is gender neutral and perhaps we should stop saying ‘Our Father’.
So they will, presumably, be altering the Holy Bible itself, altering the words spoken by Christ himself when he spoke of ‘my Father’.

The Church of England just becomes more secular & more politicised, and shrinks ever toward a cult that cannot abide, let alone proclaim, its own God-given ethereal & metaphysical traditions in anything other than post-modern atheist materialist terms, which dooms it to reducing into oblivion at worst, cult-status at best – and that’s not much of an ‘best’ is it?

Thinking out loud on why the existence of a Creator is just as likely as not

 An attitude which you often hear is: ‘The only way to know, or experience, or believe in a Creator, would be through the human construct of material scientific evidence. We have no such evidence and so can conclude that no Creator exists.’

Now, while this is understandable on a basic level, I suspect that this is human-centric, hubristic, single perspectival thinking, which is almost the definition of foolishness, in cognitive science terms.

So here are my thoughts & conjectures.

My eyes can only capture a limited spectrum of light. My ears can only hear on a limited spectrum. The human brain is limited to the concepts and modes of thought that it is capable of reaching.

Think of an ant colony in the desert. It has neither seen a human nor can conceive of a being so long lived and so much more intelligent. We are beyond their comprehension. Yet we exist.

The universe is so vast, it is inconceivable to me that we are the only sentient beings capable of self-awareness, and high-thought functioning.

A Creator may be to us what we are to the ant colony. A Creator maybe in a space or have an existence our brains simply cannot comprehend. Other sentient creatures in the universe may have evolved further than us and may have a closer more direct knowledge of, and link with, the Creator.
We only have human language & human symbols to explain our understanding of what the Creator is to us, but they are not likely to be accurate representations. Maybe if we evolve to a higher level of understanding and consciousness, we will become more directly aware of the Creator and see the Creator more clearly.

Maybe, as our life span is to a mayfly, so our concept of time is but the blink of an eye to the Creator.
Maybe the Creator is one of a species of beings beyond our understanding.

But I think it's narrow minded hubris to look at this in a purely human-centric materialist way and say, like doubting Thomas, ‘unless I can touch it or feel it or see it or measure it, it doesn't exist. In fact it CAN’T exist.’

It's much simpler to think that way of course. Simple perhaps to the point of naivety and intellectual laziness. But in a universe this large and this unlikely, that way of thinking is probably human-centric hubris.

When those who don’t believe in a Creator/God say, ‘I’ve never seen a miracle’ OR ‘a good Creator would stop anything bad happening to anyone’, they are being superficial & simplistic.
Firstly, some people both throughout history & now, claim that miracles HAVE happened to them. Dismissing them as delusional or charlatans is an ideological not open-minded position. Miracles can take many forms.
Why is that so hard to accept?
And why should each individual not be able to decide for themselves whether or not an experience they’ve had is a miracle?
Why do the materialist atheists get to decide?

In terms of a Creator intervening to stop bad things happening, there are times when we interfere with lesser cognitive creature & times when we don’t.
So, we intervene in the lives of animals, we intervene in the lives of insects, birds etc but at other times, when we could intervene, we don't.
Does that ‘sometimes we do intervene, sometimes we don’t’ behaviour mean we're de facto evil beings? Does that mean we've ceased to exist?

People try and say that you either believe in evolution and rational scientific materialism (the doubting Thomas principle explained above) OR you believe in a Creator. But I don’t see that these things are in conflict unless you have a very narrow way of looking at the world and the universe.

Why is it so unbelievable that the Creator put the evolutionary process in place?
Remember, to the Creator, our experience of time may not be theirs. We think the Earth & Universe are incredibly old but it may be a matter of minutes to the Creator.

Why could it not be that the Creator is pleased that we are finding out how his creation works? Maybe even wants us to?
Maybe this is a journey of discovery that leads us to see the Creator clearly.

Science does NOT clash with the existence of a Creator unless we arrogantly & hubristically assume that we are the highest form of BEING, of knowledge & consciousness, and also that what we know now about the laws of physics for example, is as much as we can ever know; people 1000, 2000, 3000 years ago thought the same.
And why could it not be that there is another dimension where the laws of physics & time are wholly different?

Then there are those who claim we don’t have freewill. That the universe is simply the equivalent of a highly sophisticated pre-programmed computer game.
But a hypothesis like that, which serves no practical purpose, indeed is counter-productive, is what my father called ‘trying too hard to show how clever you are’.
We certainly behave, and MUST behave, as if we have free-will, so I see no practical benefit in claiming we haven’t.

BUT there is a downside to a Creator giving his creations freewill of course, which brings us back to the, ‘a good Creator wouldn’t let bad things happen’ trope.
The downside of freewill is that we will make mistakes, do bad things from time to time. However, these are hugely outweighed in number by the good things we do.
There are far more pleasant, nice, fair, honest, kind transactions between people every day across the world than bad or nasty or UNkind ones.
However, because the good outweighs the bad, because friendliness, kindness etc is the norm, we tend to ignore it; familiarity breeds contempt; we take it for granted to the point of forgetting about it.
The commonplace ‘good’ is ignored and the rarer ‘bad’ emphasised. Just look at the news every day.

And there is the possibility that for this world and our lives to be ‘real’, (i.e. meaningful), there has to be a genuine danger of failure and suffering. Further, to achieve ‘true reality’ that failure and suffering has to be actual, not merely pretend or threatened.
The spoilt brat has never known suffering and is the poorer, less societally useful person for it.

So, in summary, when we look at the vastness of our universe, it seems to me that a Creator, & one who intervenes sometimes & not others, is perfectly possible, even likely. We just can’t properly comprehend them, as the ant doesn’t comprehend us. And we are likely missing the point when we complain that the Creator doesn’t behave how we would want them to behave if they were human – they are NOT - any more than we are an ant.

All of my ramblings here are off the top of my head conjectures, of course, but then again, so are the theories of what sparked the creation of the universe, and what was there before.

It’s conjecture that there IS no more than our universe, and that there IS no more to the existence of the universe than the laws of physics as we know them.

But of course, we won’t truly know any of this until we die – what an adventure!

Foolishness and Wisdom – Theory & a contemporary example

 A chance remark about J K Rowling being involved in some controversy got me talking with someone recently and they admitted that they knew nothing about the subject, which was trans-gender rights. We didn’t talk long but I said that I would go away and write something which I hope would explain how I have come to my view.

When I started, I soon realised that I needed to use some of the philosophical and psychological learnings I’ve made over the last few years of study.
So here is my first attempt to look at the situation in that way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U2caURO-d4

Above is a link to a talk by cognitive scientist, Dr John Vervaeke. If you don’t want to watch it all, watch from 26 mins 30 secs in for a few minutes but here’s a quote.

“Knowledge deals with ignorance. Wisdom deals with foolishness. Knowledge & wisdom are NOT the same thing. You can be very intelligent and very foolish; and there is no contradiction there at all”.

To be wise, you have to be able to take multiple perspectives of the thing you are considering and find, where possible, a meeting point. This takes a real desire because taking multiple perspectives requires serious effort and can also require you to take seriously & find value in viewpoints you don’t like or share.
Single perspective closed-minded tribalism is SO much easier. BUT without making that effort to look at the problem from multiple perspectives, you can’t see the bias within the single perspective that you’ve inhabited, often unthinkingly, or perhaps I should say, unchallenged, for years.

It’s the old saying, ‘you can’t see the wood for the trees’.
You can find yourself expending all your efforts merely to rationalise in knee-jerk reactive fashion, why what you already believe is right, & any alternative view wrong.
Never stepping back outside the trees to see the wider landscape, the wider perspective, and genuinely questioning in good faith whether this long-held single perspectival belief is in reality the best one.

As Plato pointed out, we are finite beings. We are not gods. We are bound to circumstances and fate in powerful ways. And if we forget that, we fall into hubris. Hubris (arrogance) prevents us opening our hearts & minds to seek truth.

So, onto the specific subject I was asked to explain my thoughts on, the trans-rights issue.

In the same way that falling feels like flying until you pull the chord on the parachute and it doesn’t open, so policies that massively change the accepted societal norms, like the SNP have just passed into law, allowing people of one biological sex to identify as, and then be treated in every way as if they really are the opposite biological sex, can feel like a positive change until the reality of what it actually means in practice hits home.
For example, biological and often physically unaltered men in female sports, bathrooms, prisons etc will not end well for far too many biological women.
And rest assured, it will be the vulnerable, and particularly women, and specifically those from the lower socio-economic groups who don’t have the resources to avoid the problems, who will lose out most.
I suggest that what we see in a governmental policy like this is a single-perspective ideology filled with god-like hubris. Foolishness.

While I shouldn’t have to state this, I will, in the hope (probably vain) of preventing the more hysterical feedback.
I’m with J K Rowling on this issue, whose view can be summarised as: dress how you like and identify how you like but DO NOT tell other people that they must pretend biology isn’t real, and that you are reducing or removing their rights in order to make yourself feel better.

Now, lest people again jump to the wrong conclusion about my views, wisdom is certainly not refusing change.
Obviously. How could it be?
Rather, it’s being able to look at an issue from many perspectives and tell which societal changes will be overall positive to society, and which will be overall negative, WITHOUT having to risk conducting the experiment in real life to find out.
Some experiments are simply too dangerous if they go wrong (see Communism & Fascism but also the Wuhan gain of function lab leak for a contemporary practical example).

We are too ready, I believe, to let people off with foolishness if it doesn’t directly affect us;
We are too ready to let people off with foolishness just to be non-judgemental; because being non-judgemental is supposedly ‘nice’ and being judgemental ‘nasty’.

But it’s not that simple.

Like all catchy soundbites, it’s yes, BUT…… 

Speak to a rape victim or the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver, or the parent of a child being bullied at school, for example.
Don’t judge? Don’t speak out? Keep silent?
Some things MUST be judged, otherwise we have slavery, chaos, and anarchy.

What are we saying when we say, ‘oh, we mustn’t judge other people’? We all make judgements about others every day.
The fact we only think it doesn’t mean we didn’t make the judgement.
Do we think accidental foolish actions or the foolish actions of the well-meaning, are somehow OK?
So it’s the intention that matters most, not the results of the action?
This feels right on a superficial level but is surely nonsense if you think more deeply.
Indeed, such an attitude is itself another somewhat self-indulgent foolishness.

The outcome of an action HAS to be the crux of the matter, because some actions (some foolishnesses) have adverse consequences on others which didn’t need to happen.
Some actions then lack wisdom, and wisdom should be at the heart of all we do as much as possible.

In complex societies like ours, there are questions for which there is – NO - perfect - answer. And believing that every problem for every group or individual can always be solved is another foolishness.

And when it comes down to it, the total acceptance of the trans-activist agenda by the Scottish government is, I believe, a case in point.
Sometimes, the best we can do will still leave a minority feeling unhappy; pretending otherwise, which beliefs and policies like this do, is more foolishness.

Wishful thinking is not wise.

Trying to make one very small group happy by giving them rights the basis for which are NOT borne out by accepted & proven scientific knowledge? Really?
Trying to make one very small group happy by giving them rights that require you to remove the rights of others? Really?

Boy, you’ve got to tread very carefully doing that.

And the SNP with their Green party coalition partners have rammed this through with foolish speed.
It is single-perspective ideology and great hubris writ large.
It’s foolishness.

J S Mill spoke of the tyranny of the majority and certainly, that can lead to bad results. But even worse is a tyranny of a minority.
At least the majority getting their own way has some natural logic to it.

But we are currently living through a tyranny of the minority, and not of the minorities you may immediately think of, but of the elite at the top of society around the world who feel themselves untouchable in any meaningful way.
The trans-gender activist agenda couldn’t possibly gain the traction it has without the support of many powerful & influential people.
What you or I think of it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if the elite, the powerful, the influential in society, didn’t want it.

They are imposing/allowing/facilitating, society altering policies of which the trans-agenda is only one (others are, mass immigration, gender theory, critical race theory, intersectional theory, covid alarmism, climate alarmism and the like) all hiding behind a claim of safety/of kindness/of tolerance/of inclusivity.
And it’s irrelevant how many of these specific issues you agree or disagree with, because the gaining of your agreement is totally irrelevant to those pushing them forward.
Their purpose in turning society upside down is the belief that THEY, the elite class, the good guys as they see themselves, will still be in charge after it all goes to hell in a hand cart, and their position in society will be not only unaffected, but strengthened.
Strengthened by diminishing, if not removing, democracy.
Leaving the wealthy, the influential, the well-positioned a free unconstrained run.
Removing the ability of the majority opinion to change or even influence policy; that’s what these elites are after.
They are acting from a single perspective and with god-like hubris.
It's foolishness.

So, my working hypothesis, which seems to fit what is actually happening, (irrespective of the official narrative), is that they are trying to bring about a global technocratic dictatorship of the elite class, by destabilising the societal norms of the liberal democracies, in terms of social behaviour, energy availability, food availability, travel availability, and finance availability. 
It’s these things that the individuals within a democracy rely on to understand and function independently of the apparatus of the State.
Perhaps I should just say that when I keep saying ‘THEY’, or the 'elite', ‘they’ can be symbolised & embodied by the WEF, which is basically a club of the most wealthy & influential people; the self-styled elite of global society.

They are using a host of seemingly unconnected ‘foolishnesses’, to get us all distracted and arguing, in the hope that we won’t realise that there is a much larger creeping authoritarian agenda.
We can’t see the wood for all the trees they have us frightened of and bickering about – and I’ve already given examples of these distracting ‘trees’ (exaggerated alarmism over climate & covid, wars, energy shortages, cost of living problems, mass immigration, gender theory, critical race theory etc).
The constant use of fear and division is destabilising society in order to distract us from noticing the over-arching purpose.

Which is what?

Well, in my hypothesis, it looks remarkably like Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’.
That was written in the early 1930s, so of course the details will be different, but the basis of it seems to be coming to pass, certainly at the high or meta-level.
The population is forced into groups (intersectionality). Groups of greater or lesser importance, from which it is next to impossible to escape, and the only people with any real autonomy, and who get to decide everything, are those in the top elite group.
The WEF members & their wannabe acolytes.
The rules don’t apply to them, rather, they decide the rules that they apply to everyone else.
We saw this in practical terms when so many people in positions of power & influence were caught ignoring the Covid rules – rules THEY had put in place or supported.
And in a wider context, almost daily, we see stories of those with money or influence getting away with behaviour an ordinary person would not. Of mega-wealthy unelected people & corporations buying undue influence over governments and administration of States.

I am concerned that the WEF ‘group think’, is that representative democracy hasn’t produced the ‘right’ results (Brexit/Trump); it’s had its chance and failed; and so must be done away with.

It can’t be said openly for obvious reasons, so it is being done by stealth.

It’s a REgression to the time before the franchise was made universal to all adults, when the elites decided everything and the rest had to simply accept it and know their place.
That this is in fact a regression back to the historical norm, elites being in charge and the plebs doing as they’re told, doesn’t make it right or good; and it certainly isn’t progress, quite the reverse.
The enslavement of humans by other humans has always been the global historical norm, but few would argue this means we should return to it.
And yet, fundamentally, this is what’s happening with our democracy via the rapid overturning of key societal norms.

If something is foolish, it shouldn’t be happening.
It is not in any way wise to look the other way just because the issue isn’t currently affecting us, or it’s too much effort to fight it, or we want to tell ourselves what kind tolerant people we are, or the people doing it convince us they truly believe in it, or they bribe us in some way, or they distract us by manufacturing lots of ‘trees’ to get us lost among.

Foolishness, whether accidental or well-meaning or knowingly dangerous, is still foolishness, and must be identified, called-out and resisted.

Now, this must NOT be done with hate in our hearts - but it must be done.

That’s wisdom - but it also takes courage - because those creating all the distracting foolishnesses - are both very determined - and very powerful.
They’re playing for high stakes, (the effective rule of the world) and they propagandise, and bend, break, or simply make new rules, as they deem necessary to win.

Thanks for readinging. By for now.