Today's ramble

I used to be baffled by why people read the Gutterpress or how people could think that a person could be born evil, why did people follow Hitler, how does a person believe that everything was created by an omnipotent guy in 6 days or that one race is biologically more moral than another....etc ad nauseam.


I guess the answer was made more clear to me when reading a recently Richard Littlejohn column. Before you say it, I know! I grumble about the reactionary gutterpress and yet seem to spend half my time reading it. In it, Mr Littlejohn writes that John Prescott, who recently has confessed to be suffering from bulimia, is lying because.......well......he's fat.


Well yes, that..if you think about it makes sense......except it's bulimia NOT anorexia you fucking oaf. Two completely different forms of nervous eating diseases, then main difference being bulimics (because of the bingeing nature of the disease) often gain weight. It's like saying someone who tells you they have had surgery to remove skin cancer is lying about it because they haven't lost their hair from chemotherapy. It takes 2 minutes to find out that bulimics gain weight. Fortunately, I don't have any close family or friends who have suffered from an eating disorder (to my knowledge) but even I knew that bulimia is not anorexia. So why does this kind of thing get published....and uncritically read by millions.


It's because it's simple. People like simple. Life's fucking complicated at the best of times. Even the simplest of our actions require hundreds of tiny judgements; what we buy, what train we get into work, where we sit, what we look at. In all this noise it's so comfortable to simplify, simplify, simplify - So bulimia becomes "eating disorder" and "eating disorder" means anorexia.


Keeping a handle of what's going on at any point in time is like trying to keep hold of a child's turd in a swimming pool, it's slips and slides everywhere and even if you do manage to get a hold of the thing, you'll probably just end up with shit on your hands....so what the point, just ignore it like everyone else.


That's why we simplify, like when a blogger repeated use a metaphors to explain something. We digitalised things, put them in clear black and white categories, on or off....in the deafening white noise of the tiny judgements that make our decisions. But things are not digital, they are analogue, beyond true categorisation.


That's why people believe that god created the earth and life, because the alternative is can't be explained in less than 20 seconds. That's why people used to believe that the earth was flat, that people of a different race were a lower species, that homosexuality was the work of the devil, climate change was a myth....etc ad nauseam.

But without this way of simplifying we couldn't function. We'd be fucked, unable to make a single simple decision, constantly re-waying the consequences in a constantly shifting reality. We'd just be stood there, like a crashed computer. (This happens when I try to decide which DVD out of the hundreds to watch...I'll stand there for half an hour just reading the names. Unable to make a decision).

So we need it, and it's nice but the real judgement we all need to make is how much to use it. For a final metaphor - Simplicity is like a nice warm bath......except if you're not careful....it's a bath that will eventually be full of child's turds.....

.....and Richard Littlejohn.