Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406 C.E.) –  was a North African polymath — an astronomer, economist, historian, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, hafiz, jurist, lawyer, mathematician, military strategist, nutritionist, philosopher, social scientist and statesman (!!!!!!!) —born in North Africa in present-day Tunisia. He retreated into the desert in 1375 and emerged four years later having written one of the most important ever studies of the workings of history.

This volume, commonly known as Muqaddimah or ‘Prolegomena’, became a masterpiece in literature on philosophy of history and sociology. The chief concern of this monumental work was to identify psychological, economic, environmental and social facts that contribute to the advancement of human civilization and the currents of history. In this context, he analysed the dynamics of group relationships and showed how group-feelings, al-’Asabiyya, give rise to the ascent of a new civilisation and political power and how, later on, its diffusion into a more general civilization invites the advent of a still new ‘Asabiyya in its pristine form. He identified an almost rhythmic repetition of rise and fall in human civilization, and analysed factors contributing to it.

Ibn Khaldun’s writings seem particularly relevant today after reading this:
Endgame

I’ve mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there’s a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today’s news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” – Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay.

Let’s hope (although I am not particularly hopeful in this case) that Climategate can help bring some integrity back to science and remove all political interference, and help to dissipate the now religious mania people feel towards Climate change. All it takes is to be at the top of a mountain or deep in a jungle to realise how inconsequential people are, and how the climate has been changing for eons (studying any data except the manipulated IPCC’s will do the same). You realise how any time this planet or the sun wants to do something, be it a new ice age, super volcano, hurricane, tsunami, solar flare, warm up, cool down, or an infinity of other possibilities, it will and there is not a dam thing anyone can do. Stop voting for delusional/lying politicians who tell you they can control everything on this planet, as well as the sun, moon and stars, and use this illusion (and madness in those who believe it) for political purposes.

We need someone who can tell it straight, (well, it would be a refreshing start!) and say that amongst many other things, yes we do need to reduce oil dependency, and yes pollution is bad and needs to be dealt with, and yes a shift to renewable energy would be a good idea, but sorry there are things we cant control.

This book is really superb. Taleb uses the Black Swan idea to explain the existence and occurrence of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations.  He writes about the impact of the highly improbable, which have a much greater impact on things than the probable (and usually misunderstood) and our tendency to simplify and therefore not see the whole picture.

Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as “black swans”—undirected and unpredicted,  although AFTER the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected.

Some nights it is so brilliant, I find myself reluctantly putting the book down as my eyelids droop and then not being able to sleep because it sets me off thinking for hours. Occasionally on other nights it gets a little boring and sends me to sleep pretty quickly which is not a bad thing either! Anyway, here are some of the standout sections so far. I really cant recommend it highly enough:

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Gross and outrageous under-reporting of jobless rates by the government.
Consumer Confidence? Ha!
President of hope huh? Nope. Obama to sign $680 billion 2010 budget for fighting wars. Not sure how he plans to pay for it with 12trillion debt already and 105 trillion in unfunded liabilities… Whatever right.. pffff.

photo from PJ

De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things is a first century BC epic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. It deals with the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The poem grandly proclaims the reality of our role in a universe which is ruled by chance, with no interference from gods. It is a statement of personal responsibility in a world in which everyone is driven by hungers and passions with which they were born and do not understand.

Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge’s approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is truthworthy? For no matter of dispute is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved, and so on ad infinitum – Sextus Empiricus.

He raised concerns which applied to all types of knowledge and advocates simply giving up belief: that is, suspending judgment about whether or not anything is knowable. Only by suspending judgment can we attain a state of peaceful enlightenment (Ataraxia).

Taraxia means something like mess. When you put an ‘a’ before a word in the Greek language it means ‘the opposite’ of what the original word means. Ataraxia signifies the balanced state of robust tranquility that derives from eschewing faith in an afterlife, not fearing the gods because they are distant and not concerned with us, avoiding politics and vexatious people, surrounding oneself with trustworthy and affectionate friends and, most importantly, being an affectionate, virtuous person, worthy of trust.

Enlightened individuals can escape periodically from their own hungers and passions and look down with compassion on poor humanity, including themselves, who are on average ignorant, unhappy, and yearning for something better than what they see around them. Personal responsibility then consists of speaking and living personal truth.

Skepticism goes back at least as far as Pyrrho of Elis. Pyrrho found peace by admitting to ignorance and seeming to abandon the criterion by which knowledge is gained. Pyrrho’s ignorance was not the ignorance of children or farm animals: it was a knowledgeable ignorance, arrived at through the application of logical reasoning and exposition of its inadequacy.

Induction also known as inductive reasoning or inductive logic is a type of reasoning which involves moving from a set of specific facts to a general conclusion. Inferring from observables. There are problems with this however.

Sextus Empiricus questioned how the truth of the Universals can be established by examining some of the particulars, since examining particulars is difficult as they are infinite in number.

I was curious how a few could look when represented visually such as linear, nonlinear series or nonlinear equations.

Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to use Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, his most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle Freud had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

Where once the political process was about engaging people’s rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. Curtis cites a Wall Street banker as saying “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

Maybe practice milpa agriculture with Mayans on the Guatemalan border, watching corn grow for three months. Fish in a lonely dugout, sun-up to sun-down, in the dying reefs of the Caribbean, with only a meal or two of fish as your reward. Do such things for a month or two.

First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don’t quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures our well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you and I are the unknowing captors.

In conclusion, I would point out that the high technological imprisonment of our consciousness has been fairly recent. There are still those among us who remember when it was not so entrapped. A few of us still know what it was like to experience non-manufactured realities — life outside our mass produced kitsch culture.

Each of us is but one strand in the vast organic web of flesh and blood chlorophyll. All things and all beings are inextricably connected at the most profound level. Any physicist will confirm this. We are bound by its every wave and particle, all of us — the lonely night clerk at Motel 6 and the leviathans of the deep, the sleeping grandmother in New Haven, Connecticut and the maimed Iraqi child in Kirkuk. It can be understood by anyone though, simply by owning one’s own consciousness. And in doing so we find that ownership and domination are both temporary and meaningless. And that the animating spirit of the earth is real and within us and claimable.

The purpose of life is to know this. Einstein glimpsed it. Lao-Tzu knew it. So did St. Francis. But you and I are not supposed to. It would shatter the revered, digitized, super-sized, utterly meaningless hologram. The one that mesmerizes us, and mediates our every experience, but isolates us from universal humanness and its coursing energies. Such as love. Or mercy. Compassion. Existential pain. Hunger. Or the unmitigated joy of simply being alive one finds in children everywhere, even among the poorest.

I honestly cant recommend this article enough.. Best thing I have read for ages.