03 October 2008
"Researchers have laid bare the behaviour of Australian bosses, revealing how everything from the pink shirt under their power suit to the size of their leather-backed chair and their choice of jargon-heavy management speak mimic the strutting and chest puffing seen among our animal ancestors.
They say bosses don't spend as much time reading or working at their computer alone as employees think they do, and instead pass the vast majority of the day in meetings where they stamp their authority with the biggest chair, a louder voice and frequent interruptions to conversation.
"What we found was universal animalistic displays of power, masculinity, sexuality and authority that seem to be hard-wired in," Prof Braithwaite said."
::View Article::
Despite our every-day intuitions, we're not all that much different from Apes. Our brains have been built upon and expanded at each stage of our evolution from ultra-simple single cell organisms to the relatively complex organisms we are now, and a large amount of our mental activity occurs in the more 'primitive' and archaic regions of the brain that we possessed when we were still swinging from trees, or earlier.
It varies according to individual genes and upbringing (we're not all equal in this regard), but our thoughts and actions are often characterised by purely subjective ego-centric emotional reactions and symbolic gestures of status rather than rational and objective reflection: i.e. the placing of our individual selves in the context of a greater whole such as our society or our natural environment.
This probably explains most of question time in parliament, and also why the results of democracy are sometimes quite painful to contemplate.
12 September 2008
Times are changing. We're moving towards a 'progressive' Liberal national culture which is doing away with consensus and common standards, allowing for different view points and modes of life to be realised, all under the same roof. You have the right to be who you want to be, and society will not promote a certain set of values, Right? Take this publication from the 1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings in Sydney:
"A new possibility is emerging in Australia. This is the possibility of a paradoxical new universal in which negotiating differences becomes the national essence. Nation in the sense of jealously-guarded boundaries and internal homogeneity no longer exists in a meaningful or at all productive way. Instead, the new nation must be founded upon a postnationalist sense of common purpose. The national ethos must be based on the creative and productive virtues of internal diversity and an outward-looking internationalism."
::View article::
So, the 'new' national culture, or common good, in Australia is to revolve around difference? The bonds that link us are supposed to differentiate us? This sounds absurd, really.
What can it mean? Surely a group of people must have some common values to ensure at least a basic level of social harmony and order?
"This is the new basis for cohesive sociality, a new civility in which differences are used as a productive resource and in which differences are celebrated. It is the basis for the postnationalist sense of common purpose that is now essential to a peaceful and productive global order."
::View article::
But of course. All of this Liberal talk about the promotion of "internal diversity" is simply a smokescreen for the promotion of an unspoken "global order"' based purely around economic growth.
See, when a wide mix of traditional cultures, values, and standards that used to exist with more autonomy are thrown into the giant melting pot of a centralised and Pluralistic political state under the guise of "diversity" and "difference", all get levelled down to the lowest common denominator of materialism. This is because the common element held between most unique value systems is materialism, in that most unique cultural and value systems naturally recognize the need to achieve a certain level of material sustenance before their particular higher desires or ideals can be addressed.
There is nothing wrong with a certain amount of cultural materialism, obviously. The problem arises, however, when there are no values commonly held between a people to regulate materialism and subordinate it to higher collective and holistic interests.
Materialism should be a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and this is where Liberalism and Pluralism conveniently come in: they remove the 'political correctness' of any sort of positive, spoken, social consensus that pure economics and material growth might answer to, leaving society to be directed by the special interests of the economy and associated slogans like 'individual consumer choice'.
29 August 2008
While attempting to watch some of the athletics in the Olympics games a couple of weeks ago in amongst the swarm of advertisements and crassly sentimental pre-packaged drivel, I groaned as yet another Quantas add geared up. A large chorus of beaming children carefully selected from a large variety of ethnicities piped up for the 8th time to insist that 'we are one but we are many', that 'we are Australian'.
What exactly could they mean by this I wondered as I began looking for the remote control that had vanished down the side of the couch. I guess they meant to impart the sentiment that while the collection of people living on the landmass that is Australia are characterised by a diverse range of, not just places of origin, but also religions, secular values, and other ideologies, they, we, all share a special bond, or a 'common good' that binds us together as one. Sounds nice doesn't it?
But is this in effect saying we can all have nothing in common and by doing so, have something in common? Now I was becoming confused!
Australia is diverse. With our current annual net-immigration intake of just below 200,000 we're going through another major 'diversifying' stage in our history. Apparently, we are not all going to agree on an 'extensive' ethical project, or on any significant set of values by which we should live our lives, without experiencing inter-ideological conflict: so we agree to disagree, and make values a strictly private, rather than a joint, shared or social matter.
We are under absolutely no obligation to society beyond obeying some very basic laws and we are free to pursue our purely personal self interests and our person comfort. No social consensus, or 'common good', required: just do what you will. This is knows as Liberal Pluralism. Its basic justification is that it delivers freedom and choice: freedom from the ideological impositions of others and choice to choose one's own conception of 'the good life'.
But hang on. This is starting to sound too good to be true. For starters don't we need some sort of 'common good', some sort of social consensus or set of standards, and some personal
obligation towards a set of goals, in order for there to exist, in the very first place, a society which enables the existence of 'free' individuals who are capable of thinking and forming particular conceptions of 'the good life' in a Liberal manner? Bear with me here. I'm thinking of such things which actually set the stage for a Liberal society.
No one can deliberate over, pursue, rationally debate, or change their conception of what makes up the good life if institutions like the family, schools & universities, religions, philosophical societies, politics are not upheld through social virtue, i.e., obligation. If homes are broken because parents become too self-interested to commit, if schools are havens of undiscipline and universities simply degree factories rather than places of wide deliberation, if politics is restricted by 'politically correct' dialogue and ministers pursue simply their own career advancement rather than the greater good, then 'Liberal' freedom is logically impossible.
Crime, obtuseness, a focus on industry instead of creativity in learning, and corrupt leadership are not conducive to the type of society in which people objectively deliberate over what values they will follow and accept others who hold different ones to their own.
This leads us to the conclusion that even a pluralistic 'liberal' mass and diverse society, like modern Australia, cannot do away with obligation or consensus. Such a society requires some
illiberal manifestations in order to realise the freedom, choice and diversity it purports to exist for. This leads us to a further and more interesting question.
Why, in all our diversity, do we all feel as though we have to associate under one mass society, which by its very nature (namely the co-existence of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and ideologies) calls for a lowest common denominator compromise between all the competing conceptions of the good life? Why do we feel we have to live in a mass society which subsumes all the different conceptions of the good life relative to the different backgrounds, ethnicities, and ideologies into one big melting pot?
This simply leaves us with less social harmony and consensus that might otherwise exist if we lived in smaller, more localised social or political entities where we actually agreed upon values, customs, and laws. Now, less social harmony leads to many 'illiberal' things such as more of governments impeding on our lives to (1) prop up communities who's constituents do not work together and to (2) clean up after minor or major conflicts. It also leads to more alienation, depression and anxiety among a group of atomised and unconnected individuals who enjoy no more meaningful social interactions than those that surround the buying and selling of products, and who derive no sense of meaning from their employment, day in-day out, in a society they don't have any attachment to.
Unfortunately we innately view more homogenous and localised (organic) societies with suspicion. Why? Well, largely because of the very fact that they naturally revolve around a higher level of consensus between their members. Thus they involve the individual being subjected to the goals and standards of the community to larger degree than in a mass plural society.
It is this sort of fear of being judged that will result in us as 'Australian's' partaking in a life increasingly characterised by a lowest common denominator mass culture that citizens care nothing about and derive no meaning from, and in which government will be increasingly sticking its nose to make up for the absence of non-abstract, grass roots human consensus.
26 April 2008
An active form of Nihilism is basically a worldview recognizing that value judgments like 'good' and 'bad' are simply relative or subjective. Exclaiming that something is 'good' or 'bad' can never reflect anything other than, basically, your fears and desires let alone any inherently 'good' or 'bad' nature of the thing as it is in itself separate from your perception of it.
Knowing then that value judgments or morals stem from the fears and desires of human beings rather than from objective truth, the nihilist can re-assess what he or she has been encouraged to perceive as morally 'good' or 'bad' by a society possessing a fundamentally materialistic agenda and which today values tangible things like money, size and quantity more than intangible things like happiness, usefulness and quality - and notions like 'equality' and 'consumerism' more than common sense.
Now, because Nihilism brings all of our values/morals/ethics down from the clouds and reduces them to what they are, i.e. mere human preferences, a mental attitude like Nihilism might initially seem repressive because fatalistic, in that it wrenches people of whatever 'higher' meaning drives them in life, resulting in a stale state of affairs in which people are left with no beliefs, or no internal motivating forces, beyond their desires, and no interest beyond the 'grubby' and overly self-centered urge to satisfy these desires.
However this does not have to be the case. A strong set of values are essential for any ascending civilization, and they will differ depending on the nature and constituents of the civilization. Active Nihilism acknowledges the importance of values but simply bears in mind that all ideals/values/morals are nothing but the product of human desire rather than God or absolute truth. We human beings are the creators of 'good' and 'evil' and thus Nihilism is invaluable as a mental attitude enabling one to 'clear their lenses' so to speak so that one can judge whether a certain conception of what is 'good' or 'bad/evil', or in other words a certain set of morals, is corrupt or alternatively whether it is noble and sustainable. Its about leaving emotions aside for that moment and assessing the pure structural consequences of our morals and associated shared beliefs: Forgetting questions of 'right' or 'wrong', one can look at what we are doing by valuing something as being good or bad and what consequences this will have.
A nihilist can look past the claptrap and differentiate between those human values which twist reality and depict it through candy-coated happy glasses from those human preferences which do not mock reality. Its about perceiving the intangible structure of society that will keep it ticking along well behind the flux of purely self-serving moralising, the materialism, the house & share prices, and the egos.
By David
19 April 2008
"A civilization which moves massively in any direction without conscious self-control is in disordered flight as if pursued by enemy hordes" - John Ralston Saul: Voltaire's Bastards.
As Australian society rushes in leaps and bounds to rationalise all aspects of life into a standardised, efficient and production-line type of affair be it buildings, public spaces, music, politics, public debate, education and other essential services, it appears at the same time to possess the slightly related belief that scientific advancement is unquestionably good or that such advancement, by itself and devoid of what it achieves, reflects genuine social progress absolutely.
The scientific revolution which caught on around 500 hundred years ago in response to holistic minded folk wanting to find out about the true the nature of our world as opposed to the religious interpretation of it has unintentionally left us with the obsessive belief that "invention and change are virtues". Thus we feel it more necessary to flee, for the sake of it, into the in fact uncertain and untested future to solve many of our social problems as opposed to simply looking to the knowable and already-tested past.
We live by the near unspoken understanding that the dynamic and many-faced nature of a society is to be guided to a large degree by various scientists, or people who are rational experts in only one narrow field. At the same time we have grown be very suspicious of the notion of the civic-minded person of broad culture and understanding, who links everything together in the social context, and also of the 'conservative' person - where ever they rear their heads, as both these sorts are perceived as aiming to usher us onto the 'regressive' path back into the 'dark' past.
Indeed we seem hasty to jump onto the bandwagon of any new scientific and technological development: be it in the field of genetics, agriculture, machinery/computing, pharmaceuticals, socializing, and even boredom alleviation/entertainment, often simply because the development has recently arisen. But do we examine closely enough both the known and, more insidiously, the as yet unknown negative consequences to human dignity, health, social awareness, and imagination that stem from such scientific developments?
What I feel we fail to acknowledge, yet again as society, is that like the mental tool of pure human rationality, science and technology are merely means, or tools, to achieve ends. Only a confused society would mistake them for ends in themselves.
By David
22 March 2008
The ancient and enduring needs of food, shelter and safety have more or less been satisfied in developed countries during modern times with the gradual development of capitalist systems and technology. The main problem with this situation is that many of the emotional needs required by humans have been ignored by this process. The community spirit has also virtually disappeared and secondly many peoples social abilities have gone with it, leaving a vacuous human shell that is unable to properly interact with other humans.
In the developed world people are enjoying a prosperity that is unprecedented in history, technology and mass production have enabled us to produce goods and services with an efficiency that allows us to have anything we want whether it be for shelter, travel, entertainment, gadgets, all sorts of food and disco bars. With all this prosperity there has been a significant change in the value system of many people with an emphasis on what they can consume, not what they can contribute to others and their society. This has had a detrimental impact on community life.
The planning of our cities around economic objectives has created a suburban culture that also encourages consumerism and not much else. The normal interactions based around community life are few and people are isolated in their homes or work places not engaging with those around them outside a consumer context. There are many examples throughout our cities of these socially dysfunctional buildings, the fast food joint with a drive through, the soulless office buildings built with cold stark materials and shopping centres full of bright light and franchised retail stores full of disinterested teenage staff. Furthermore our suburban homes and apartments are now designed to withdraw from the outside world and not integrate with the wider community. These McMansion type homes are centred around television, computers and other gadgetry to entertain the individual and allow him to disengage with those around him including other family members within that home.
People in past traditional societies got most of their fulfilment from spending time with family, friends and acquaintances. It was normal for people of different ages and backgrounds to be communicating and sharing experiences with one another, often these were lifelong interactions. Examples would of been a grandparent taking care of his grandchildren, a housewife talking to the local butcher and a teenager working as an apprentice learning from a middle aged tradesman. Thus in general people were better socialized and not just limited to interactions within their own age group. As we progress in to the 21st century we can see the younger generations are becoming less and less socialised. Examples of what I see in today's youth are indicative of the inability of many young people to interact with other people in a normal way especially with those outside of their own generation. These examples are constant listening to Ipod music, frequent mobile phone chatter and text messaging, rudeness and disrespect to others and in general lack of etiquette. Of course there are many exceptions to this rule and there are many older people with less than desirable behaviour. My objective is not to assign blame to these youth but to analyse the environment that is causing the breakdown in healthy social behaviour.
The solution to our social problems will be very difficult to achieve as consumerism is integrated into our psyche and it is hard for many people to think outside of this reality. Small steps that we can take individually and in small groups are to limit the amount of time we watch television, surf the net and play video games. We can also limit the amount of time that we do nonessential shopping and when we do to go, to visit local shops not oversized shopping malls. What people should be focussing on is spending time with friends/family/neighbours as well as getting involved in community activities such as school fetes, sporting events and other common interest groups. This may not seem very cool to many young people but neither is being obese, social inept and sitting in front of the computer/TV for hours on end.
On a political level we can also change how are cities are designed by promoting local communities and smaller housing and shops that are less about status and economic efficiency and more in line with being part of the neighbourhood. We can also change our school system to teach cultural and moral values as well as academic subjects. I believe achieving these objectives is not impossible it is just a matter of discussing these issues with other mature and intelligent people and then taking action to move forward. This is one of the goals of the Australian Nihilists and we encourage people who may already be thinking about these issues to come along to our meetings, organise their own if in different regions, write articles or just even sign up and participate on our forum.
By Nicaea
15 March 2008
The West champions human reason. Words like logic, rationality, structure, and efficiency are used by leaders of Western culture with an almost divine air about them. Those who are taught, in our many mechanistic schools of business, management, and government, to be 'logical', 'rational', and 'efficient' are the modern elites. Why is this so? What is the historical root of this now unspoken celebration of reason and its component concepts?
It can be traced back to Europe's Age of Reason, or
Age of Enlightenment, as it is variously referred to. During this time, people like Voltaire, Rousseau, Newton, Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith and many more used their own faculties for perceiving structure, for perceiving causes and their effects, and also the universal laws of logic, (in other words their faculties of reason) to explain the workings of the world in a way that reflected truth rather than in the ways in which the then established monoliths of church and absolute monarchy explained the world - for the church and monarchy would inevitably include in their explanations of reality the necessity of the servitude of the people through the use of concepts such as 'original sin' or original and chaotic 'states of nature' among men that can only be managed by a king with the absolute power to ensure we don't continue squabbling but get on with things.
Men, primarily, but also women of the enlightenment aimed to use their powers of reason to construct views of the world which did not falsely elevate one section of society, like kings or members of the clergy, to un-proportionally high positions of power over all other sections of society. They thought that an entire collective based on reason would as a result produce a society based on virtue, or the widespread practice of social goodness. We still think this today. Rationality = virtue, automatically and necessarily so, in the minds of most Westerners. However, while rationality can be used to come to an understanding of 'virtue' in the sense of acting in a extra-individual and holistic culture, it can also be used, as indeed it tends to be nowadays, for other - more self-serving - purposes.
For reason is simply the ability to perceive and manipulate structure, and nothing else. The laws of physics and logic, for example, are the products of reason - and these laws reveal the workings, or structure, of reality. The men and women of the enlightenment used reason to perceive the structure of their society - or more specifically what was being done to it and its people by un-proportionally despotic rulers and institutions - and to identify and overturn the so-called 'facts' that these rulers and institutions advanced to give credibility to their entire positions of power. It was simply lucky, an accident no less, that many of the people of the enlightenment used the human tools of reason and rationality for holistic purposes - i.e. to battle against a false, because increasingly self-serving, regime of power that was stemming from church and monarchy in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds.
Unfortunately for us, this concurrence of reason and virtue, or power to manipulate structure, and virtue, is not taking place in the public sphere nowadays. Our modern elites, the managerial or governmental technocrats with knowledge only of systems and structure and the most effective way of manipulating structure (efficiency), are not instilled with the virtue that must act hand-in-hand with this rationality to produce an admirable society. By modern elites we mean politicians, bureaucrats, managers, economists and other social 'scientists'.
For example, politicians are taught the most effective ways to steer interviews in their direction and to avoid answering certain questions, they are proficient at coming up with statistics, graphs and flowcharts to suit any and every need, and the electoral system has been made more efficient over the years while the involvement the average 'citizen' has in his or her public affairs as dropped dramatically. Social 'scientists' such as economists employ impenetrably rational vocabularies which are so abstract that they cannot be understood by someone without years of training in the specific jargon - and thus an average intelligent person, while not possessing the specific jargon but possibly a sound and intelligent reasoning capacity coupled with some common sense - has to spend so much time wading through abstract concepts to work out that the concepts have been rationalised so much and abstracted from reality so much that they miss the particulars of reality and lead those in the discipline around in wide circles for years on end, often back to the same starting point, while the original problems such concepts were supposed to address go largely un-changed in bare and un-abstracted reality. All the while the rational elites pat themselves on the back.
As our society has become more rational it has also become increasingly fractured into smaller and smaller and increasingly insulated professional groups. This can and has had at least two consequences. Firstly, those in each professional group hide behind their walls of specialisation and expertise, making their recommendations and decrees, without actually doing much good for the society they purport to serve. Many such people scorn a general and broad education as 'unemployable' to keep this culture going. Secondly, but also because of the first consequence, while the rise in professionalism has paralleled the rise of individualism in the modern epoch the result has been, ironically to the dismay of individuals, less autonomy and self-determination. Abstract and 'efficient' answers to real world issues taught by proponents of the same systems of thought dominate the globe and are in the process of standardising it beyond belief.
In summary: the basic point of this article is to highlight the simple, but often unobserved fact, that reason does not necessarily equal virtue, or goodness. We must encourage the cultivation and use of reason/rationality in schools and universities while also encouraging the cultivation and real-world-use of non abstracted thinking (common sense) and, most importantly, holistic values.
By David
21 February 2008
Parenting is an extremely important aspect of any society and the lives of future generations rely on effective parenting, unfortunately in a world of extreme liberalism parents have abandoned the traditional roles and value systems needed to raise healthy and functional children. In Western countries children are overindulged and allowed to have free reign which have consequences in our wider society and also for the individuals in their own lives. The concept of discipline and boundaries are seen as outdated and negative, and unnecessary in a child's upbringing. This situation must be reversed and values have to be reintroduced into parenting that include discipline, character-building and instilling appreciation for things in children.
Discipline and teaching children to understand that there are consequences for bad behaviour is another area that parents ignore. Parents are now afraid to say no to a child for fear of being unpopular and thus the child does not understand the concept of not getting what they want even when their behaviour in getting what they want is unacceptable. There are countless examples of children behaving badly we all know them, the boy that hits its mother because she won't give him his toy, the little girl that runs amok in the shops and won't sit still, and the parent that sits on the sideline unable to take control of the little terror that is only four years old. I often ask who's in charge here? Parents are so stupid that they even take this a step further by protecting there precious little darling from being disciplined even at school. An example is where a student gets in trouble for cheating yet the parent will stupidly intervene and say their child is innocent and accuse the teacher of actually picking on their child. Thus children now have the mentality of "I'll do what I want!!" regardless of how this will affect others and themselves. Parents need to actually intervene when the child is behaving badly and inflict some form of punishment. Children need to understand that there are consequences for bad behaviour.
Parents overprotect their children and do not allow them to experience hardship and do everything for them. Parents should make children do tasks that include everyday chores like keeping their rooms clean and helping out in the kitchen and garden. Parents should also encourage kids to get out into the local environment and explore their surroundings, instead parents are comfortable with children staying inside and being passively entertained, thus remaining safe from outside dangers. Parents need to realise the value of character building for their children and that hardships should be part of their life experience. Providing this in today's modern western society is difficult because everything is so safe and comfortable. However, any sort of scout group, brownie group, summer camps, cadetships or boot camp should definitely be something to be considered as something they should participate in whether they like it or not. In past times children of aristocratic families who had the means and free time to immediately satisfy every desire and who were thus in danger of becoming slothful and ignorant about hardship and childishly self centred a la your Hiltons were variously sent to strict boarding schools, military camps, or were at least educated and tested in the ways of character, knowledge and combat by private tutors.
Today parents focus on the feelings and desires of their offspring and overindulge on their every whim. Children are given the latest toys and gadgets including TV's, DVD players and computers. Parents think that by providing the material things that their children desire, they will be content and feel loved, while this is true to an extent they also need to be taught the value of working for things and not to expect everything to be given to them. Parents need to use a reward system based on good behaviour and hard work. An example would be to set tasks and reward children for achieving these tasks while not rewarding laziness, whether this is inside or outside the home.
The task of bringing children into this world and raising them is a significant one and it is important to recognise its profound social consequences. Parents need to establish a value system based on reward and punishment and ignore liberal notions of freedom and wellbeing for children regardless of their behaviour. Parents need to be bound by a set of roles, duties and responsibilities to guide the next generation in life and into adulthood.
By Nicaea
14 February 2008
The saying goes that Universities have become little more than degree factories. The focus certainly isn't on education. Like in the greater society, quality is tolerated if it's more profitable than the alternatives, but it rarely is. While there is a lot to be disappointed about, there are also great possibilities in these institutions.
For the uninitiated, here are some realisations to look forward to: Having a PhD doesn't entail any impressive qualities. Some of the intellectuals you encounter will seem borderline retarded. Some will not speak English. Some will be shining examples of where affirmative action gets us. Meanwhile, now you can listen to their tedious lectures on an ipod (progression). Mostly, you'll just endure a horde of dull liberals. Hence, if you plan to approach your work as a nihilist, dirty truths and all, then be prepared for some difficulties. If you are looking for the elite, prepare to look hard. They are there, but they are few.
Most students don't care. They are there to pass their units, please their family, and eventually get a higher paying job than they otherwise would have. The ideas mean nothing. They are quite capable of giving a presentation on the horrors of consumerism only to go shopping after class. While the majority fall into this category, some do not. So there is room to be effective and have some fun. Here are some suggestions:
- Universities have student newspapers. Write for them. You could have a series of opinion pieces throughout the year, or you could review quality albums or books. While many will detest your nihilist outlook (pseudonyms are helpful), others may be in tune with what you're saying, so include a contact email with your writing.
- Join some clubs/societies and get involved. Universities can seem like
lonely places but chances are that there'll be something appealing, whether this is a cultural, academic, political or spiritual. Better yet:
- Start a club/society. If there is something that interests you, such as metal or philosophy, and is not represented, go ahead. This is a great way of meeting like-minded people, whether the club becomes official or not.
- Host a radio show. Disrupt the stream of pop-rock; play some quality music. Take the opportunity to advertise worthwhile things on campus, such as the soon to be/new club.
- Posterise the place. People do read posters and fliers, particularly if they're eye-catching. While publicising the new club and your radio show, chuck up some aunus/anus/corrupt fliers, again with your contact email. This, coupled with your writing, and who knows, a nihilist society could be an addition to the campus.
- Work well, not constantly. Remember: procrastination is like masturbation - great at the time, but in the end you're just fucking yourself. When you sit down to study, study. You will feel much better if you have time for exercise, hobbies and socialising rather than constant school and work. Get into good habits quickly, and you'll become addicted to the peace of mind that comes with them.
- Evaluate. Let the faculty know when you come across a great teacher or subject, and let them know when you're disappointed. This could make a difference come time for promotions, renewal of contracts and reconsideration of units. (Do this at the end of semesters to avoid vengeful marks). Also be sure to send links to the appropriate sites to the bright academics.
- You will be too busy during semester to follow every appealing thing that arises. It happens to all of us: the busiest time of year and fascinating distractions abound while one becomes channel to a stream of creativity and ideas demanding execution. Write the gist of each disruption down. Come the break you’ll have a nice list to keep you busy, whether busy crossing things off or busy avoiding the whole thing.
Although there is a lot to fault in our
modern Universities, there is much promise. While the student voice is largely self-righteous and idiotic, you are in a position to make the alternatives heard. Combine the advice in this article and you will be on your way to changing the culture of your campus.
By Hut
03 February 2008
A concrete forest, towering pillars of iron and steel in constant motion all working towards the ultimate goal of production. A wasteland where no life occurs but for occasional blades of grass or a tiny creature scurrying across the blackened dirt, and even these are lucky to escape certain death from toxic gases and chemicals polluting the landscape. This is the modern industrial landscape, supposedly the ultimate triumph of man over nature, where all human instincts are put aside for the common goal of mass production.
Being a rather strange child, I gazed on this grim sight with awe and reverence, to me it spoke of power, the ability of man to dominate and control, to bring the natural ecology to its knees for his own ends. All this appealed to me, I desired that power for myself, I wanted to see more of the natural landscape destroyed simply for the sake of complete and utter domination, the impulse to destroy came first. This may seem inhuman to some, but it was little more than typical teenage rebellion. The industrial landscape was aesthetically ugly and had an ominous atmosphere, matching my contrarian ideology, which aimed to violate what I perceived as 'acceptable' standards.
This is also the same reason I was drawn to heavy metal music, in which my taste became increasingly more extreme as I searched for the music that would truly tear down all that was considered 'acceptable' by the modern mentality. Eventually this led me to the
Dark Legions Archive, where I began to realise that 'extreme' underground metal was more than simply an anti-society movement, it had another, higher purpose. It didn't only want to destroy, it wanted to create something better. This caused me to rethink my infatuation with the industrial landscape which dominated large parts of my home city. I looked instead to nature, and began to realise that its beauty was infinitely more inspiring, that its harsh extremity was truly opposed to moralistic modernity, while the industrial landscape was simply a manifestation of the ugly truth about humanity; it was dominated by greed and an uncontrollable impulse to manipulate the landscape in a pathetic attempt to satisfy an insatiable hunger. It wasn't a symbol of man's power, but his abdication, his loss of self-discipline, and his ultimate failure.
At this point I became disillusioned with the idea of industrialisation and rejected the landscape as a pointless act of destruction. However, shortly after I started listening to death metal more than the romantic Norwegian black metal bands; I watched Edward Burtynsky's manufactured landscapes. He managed to capture, in an entirely objective fashion, the ugliest and most horrifying images of the industrial landscape around the world. Much like death metal, it forced the perceiver to face a reality they would rather ignore. Most modern people don't want to accept the price that the planet and certain people pay for their comfort, yet both of these art forms presented it in such a way that it became undeniable. I learned to view the industrial landscape in this way, as a symbol of the ugly nature of humanity, and a motivator to work against the modern mentality.
Now as I sit in the Adelaide hills and reflect on my home, looking past the bland and sheltered suburbs to the miles of factories and asphalt, I feel a similar awe at its sheer terror, but now it is accompanied by melancholy, and at times even a creeping dread that may be invoked by the greatest death metal bands. Looking beyond this, beyond the human incursion, I gaze out to the ocean, it seems to stretch on forever, dwarfing the insignificant human settlement, I realise that humanity may have passed the point of no return, but all those who do not accept its current path find hope here, in the endless wonder of the universe beyond ourselves.
By Moses
07 January 2008
I am able to sympathise with the radical atheist position. At first I was attracted to it primarily because I perceived it as sharing my view of religion as pure stupidity and denial of death. For an intelligent person it is easy to form this view especially in western countries where religion has become a way of conveniently ignoring reality, replacing it with a simplistic, moral, black and white world where following some basic rules assures immortality and eternal happiness. Radical atheists see this part of religion, but unfortunately overlook the more complex and beautiful aspects.
When I first began to realise that A.N.U.S. was not as anti-religious as I had originally thought I was not angry, but rather curious. I knew that these were people with knowledge that quite probably went beyond my own, leading me to believe that if they were not radical atheists, then they probably knew something about religion that I did not. Soon after this I read the Bhagavad-Gita, an important Hindu scripture, and was able to see that the ideas communicated were very similar to the philosophy of A.N.U.S. It promoted a transcendental worldview where the individual overcame their ego in favour of finding their place within a cosmic order. This gave them purpose and hope where before had been meaninglessness. With this in mind I noticed that other religious scriptures seemed to contain similar ideas, although they were more obscured in some than others.
At first the individual was isolated within themselves; their lives only had subjective meaning, revolving mostly around their ego and emotions. When they began to understand their relative insignificance they had an inner crisis. Eventually they realised that the only way to overcome this existential void was to align themselves with an order that was higher than their own existence. By doing this they took part in the eternal and transcendent cosmic cycle, contributing to the rhythm of nature and satisfying their existential need by breaking down the boundary between the individual and transcendent reality. In this way they became immortal because they were no longer just an individual, but part of something which could not be effected by physical events.
The physical application of this transcendent ideal is culture. Through culture each individual is given a place that reflects their character. This opposes the modern doctrine of individualism which teaches that inequality is immoral and that each individual should strive only to satisfy their most basic physical desires. Confining each individual to a life of meaningless consumerism and impersonal, boring work not only fails to satisfy the individual existentially, it creates an unstable society that can be destroyed by even the slightest of challenges, because it has no binding element allowing it to act with unity in a time of crisis. Religion allows for a society to partake in transcendence and in doing so unifies it culturally. Modern Christianity seeks only to push the individual further in to the world of subjective self; this is utterly contrary to the original purpose of religion.
This new found meaning in religion did not blind me to the fact that many modern manifestations of Christianity are a sham; but I realised that the problem lay not in the religion itself, but in the fact that it had become subject to the will of the crowd. Much like modern politics, modern religion caters for the lowest common denominator and nothing else. That is why the modern brands of Christianity preached are often so simplistic and also self-orientated, because the people who now define it only want what is easy and pleasing at the time.
The radical atheist movement, led by those such as Richard Dawkins, is yet another modern movement that becomes obsessed with a problem that in itself is not huge, and loses its holistic focus. Much like the neo-Nazis with their fear of non-whites, and Christians with their fear of death, the radical atheists are essentially a negative movement which only tries to eliminate a problem, without offering a genuine solution. These negative movements are doomed to failure because they create an entire ideology out of one aspect of reality, and in doing so lose focus on everything else.
The solution is to perceive the cause of these problems and more importantly, how the process that brings them about can be replaced by a more natural one. Only a positive, holistic view that unites all aspects of society, including religion can stem the tide of modern decadence, or rampant and accelerating individualism. Rather than destroy religion we should concentrate on restoring its inner meaning, that of transcendence; individuals aligning themselves with a higher order of things.
By Moses
01 November 2007
"By pursuing his own interests he frequently promotes that of a society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it" - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1766.
The above quote from the father of modern liberal economics, Adam Smith, basically states that free economic markets, driven fundamentally by the self-orientated preferences of market participants, most efficiently allocate resources for the greater good of society when market participants are in fact not aiming to better anyone but themselves. For 'free' economic markets are virtual arenas in which buyers and sellers interact and in which the price for goods sold on that particular occasion is set and the amount of goods sold on that particular occasion is determined. As such, markets are the meeting places of parties that carry with them their own self interests and nothing more: buyers and sellers who demand the goods and who produce/supply the goods, respectively.
A basic principle in economics is that the total net benefits are attained for all market participants (all buyers and all sellers in the market of a certain good), and apparently also the whole of society too (echoed by Smith's quote), when the number of items buyers are willing to purchase of each good (demand) is equal to the number of items suppliers/producers are willing to sell of each good (supply). Add to this the tendency for free markets to reach this 'equilibrium' position naturally, and you get the conclusion that free markets naturally allocate resources for the good of the whole - in spite of the original partisan and selfish intentions of market participants. But do they really do this? First we need to examine how markets naturally reach this point of 'equilibrium' (where quantity demanded equals quantity supplied, or, Q*) before we can assess the claim that this equilibrium, and thus free markets, driven by nothing more than selfishness, ensure the best total outcome for society as a whole.
The downward sloping demand curve in a common economic model like the one below reflects the willingness of people to purchase more of a good at a lower price, and the upward sloping supply curve reflects the tendency of suppliers/producers to supply more of a good if the price they will get for it is higher.
Imagine if the price for a common good like paper, in the market occupied by both producers of paper (pulp mills etc) and buyers of paper (retail stores etc), were different from the equilibrium price P*. With a market price of less than P*, (i.e. lower on the vertical axis than P*), the quantity demanded at that price would exceed the quantity supplied at that price, resulting immediately in unsatisfied demand. This unsatisfied demand would naturally create upward pressure on prices, providing suppliers with an incentive to supply more to the market, until the excess demand was met - back at the equilibrium price.
Now, in any market the amount of a good on offer from suppliers or producers, as well as depending on the demand for those goods, ALSO depends on the costs of producing and supplying the good, including costs associated with labour, materials and other expenses. The more it costs to produce and supply a certain amount of a good, the higher the price the supplier will charge (and this will be reflected in an economic model by a new supply curve which will in turn reflect a lower equilibrium quantity ultimately agreed upon by buyers and sellers). However, the only supply side costs currently factored in to economic considerations are the PRIVATE costs born by the individual producer. If the WIDER social costs of producing and supplying goods, like for instance paper, were factored in to an economic model, as opposed to the aforementioned labour and material costs born merely by the individual producers, then the equilibrium market position, i.e. the quantity which buyers and sellers unintentionally 'agree' upon and thus the quantity produced which most benefits society, would be much different.
Say we factor into the supply concerns regarding the production of paper the ADDITIONAL costs - not simply to the producer but to the environment, to all of us (including the producer), from deforestation - we immediate get a new supply line for our economic models which indicates that a lower quantity of paper than before must be produced to attain market equilibrium and thus to maximise the total benefits to society from hosting a market for paper. A lower equilibrium quantity will be indicated when environmental costs are considered because the increased price the producer will charge - when it recognises that as a part of society it bares additional, in the form of, environmental costs - will cause demand to drop off somewhat, until a new and lower equilibrium quantity is reached.
Ultimately, it seems that the social costs of producing and selling goods that are environmentally, morally, or otherwise harmful to society in the long run are not as tangible as the private and producer-specific costs of labour and materials, thus they are ignored by our highly materialistic society. Like many of human kind's inventions and discoveries, the conceptual systems of economic can either be used appropriately and realistically as a feedback mechanism, or it can be used parasitically. Liberal economic systems, in which we as Australians conduct our affairs with nothing in mind but our own selfish interests, must be accepted as un-sustainable. Economics can only be truly informative if economists, buyers and sellers are truly realistic about the wider implications of their own interests and if they factor these implications into their decision making. But it is difficult to picture market participants freely representing the wider and extra-individual costs of their activities into their decision making. In that case, and for economics to be of any use in efficiently allocating resources, they must be made to.
By David
30 October 2007
Throughout civilised history in Indo-European cultures a small number of intellectual elites established centres of learning and universities to encourage critical thinking and discover the reality of our world. What has happened in modern society is that everyone has wanted to elevate themselves to the level of intellectual elites and many people now are being educated in schools and universities without the noble ideals to drive them. Written below are my own personal observations from when I participated in university.
When I first went to university I got excited, not just because there were girls as I came from a boy's school, I also got excited because I believed I would learn something new and be more challenged than at high school. What I discovered however was that it was no different to high school, in fact the only difference was that the university students were from privileged backgrounds. As I became friends with some of the students, I realized even though they were nice people, their only objective for being there was to improve their status in life. They wanted to do the appropriate course, get as high grades as possible so they could then get into some graduate program at some corporation. They had no real yearning for knowledge and intellectual endeavor. They just saw it as a means to an end.
Because of the liberal notions of equality for all, including education at university level, the system is becoming corrupt. University is now a farce and a waste of resources because ultimately people people that attend don't care for anything but themselves and their standing in life and what they can get out of anything. What I'd normally hear before exam time was people rote learning stuff for the exam and only for that reason. This led me to believe that very few people think at all. Thinking is an uncommon activity and one that is only exerted in a process that is designed to manipulate other people and the system. Thinking beyond this is seen as unnecessary to many people and to do so would even provoke ridicule as they believe that the inquisitive person would be wasting unnecessary thinking time that could be used for further manipulation of people around them.
Plagiarism is also rife at undergraduate levels and even at Master's level. This plagiarism is a symptom of the underlying dysfunction of the status objectives of the students. What is the point of the process of education when students cheat if it isn't for status? It's even gotten to the extent where there are signs in exam toilets warning students not to use mobile phones for cheating purposes. It is obviously an all pervasive problem with the university system. The fact that it happens at all should ring alarm bells for our society. Should not these students who pursue university studies have a genuine interest in what they are learning?
Another problem I found with our university system was the large number of international students that pay for their university education. Normally I would find the ideal of international students studying in Australia an appealing one as they can learn about our culture and Australian students can learn more about international cultures. However the universities that encourage them to come to Australia don't really care about educating the international students. In fact a large portion don't even meet the minimum requirement for basic English comprehension! This also meant that there was very little interaction between the international students and the Australian students because of the language barrier. They were just a product of extreme capitalism and globalisation which produces very little for society in Australia and in their home countries except for how to create more sterile environments that efficiently produce goods and services with built in obsolescence.
I believe that education needs to be restructured to two levels. At one level there should be a learning system that is based on critical thinking and a yearning for learning for students that genuinely want to think and advance their knowledge and this should be for two reasons. The first reason is to advance ourselves culturally and improve society and the environment. The second reason is to produce goods and services in an efficient way but to do so that fits in with the first reason, to improve society and the environment. On the second level education should be based on technical and general skills for the average person. The technical skills should be based on a trade, clerical work, sales and even general practice medicine. The general skills should be based on skills needed for everyday life and can include cooking, driving, budgeting and even manners. Only a minority of the population would fit into the first category as very few people have a genuine interest in thinking and learning. Most people belong in the second category and there is actually nothing wrong with this fact as not everyone is the same. Intellectuals in society should claim control of universities and have real power to determine who should be educated as it is completely unrealistic to expect every person to become an academic as it only results in the corruption of our university system.
By Nicaea Delyan
06 October 2007
Australian society is run primarily in the interests of the economy. Now, corresponding to any period in which a certain social orientation reigns we may discover certain regimes of truth, or particular ideologies, which reinforce the social orientation.
Those in power must universalise their worldview so that the particular social orientation persist: a more enduring and thus 'successful' worldview will convince individuals in a society that they act in their own interests when in fact they are really just means to an end beyond themselves.
So, what does the social orientation entail and why? Well when we compare these modern times with the stock of literary, architectural and other historical indicators of past European ages, we may see that the current 'politically correct' worldview which pervades much of the globe (and not just Australia) is relatively individualistic, 'humanistic', and materialistic in nature.
Its aims are effectively to engineer and reinforce a society which, as if it were a shopping centre, possesses the minimum of entry standards and excludes no one because its aims go no 'higher' than economic ends which are benefited most by ensuring that the largest possible quantity of individuals are both buying and selling now and into the immediate future.
Along these lines the apparent equality between all homo-sapiens is parroted and the 'universal rights of man' are constantly evoked as if they were something that actually existed somewhere in the universe to be discovered as fact.
A safe, comfortable and rather mundane 'consumer' existence is celebrated so that we pander to nearly all of our desires which, only fittingly, can be satisfied by products. It's also vital that we don't forget to belt up and subsequently die on the way to work or to the shops, decreasing the economic biomass of the nation and Gross Domestic Product with it.
The endless invasion of marketing in our lives reinforces the narrow-minded view that buying a particular brand or type of car, for instance, over another makes one somehow different and special. Indeed, it is a pity that the genuine inequality between human beings is trivialised in marketing slogans like "Everyone's journey's different: that's why we've designed different models for different people" and is realised only as far as the shallow plane of choice between products. (Openly display difference in some sort of significant ideological way, for example by questioning democracy, consumer society and 'equality between humans', and then see how long it takes before you are avoided; quite hypocritical in a society that in theory preaches that all people are equal).
We must face reality: We live in a society which, like all of them before ours, possesses an agenda. Capitalism, populism, humanism (equality) are not 'disinterested' ideologies. Further, many of us as citizens have internalised these ideologies, meaning enough of us constantly reinforce them in our own thoughts and actions and keep the status quo going. But is there a problem with all this?
Well look at the aforementioned emphasis we place on equality. Julius Evola suggests in his book 'Men Among the Ruins' that the aspects under which human beings are all equal represent the 'minus' or the lowest aspects of humanity rather than the 'plus' or most interesting aspects. He asserts that to give primacy to the lower aspects of humanity is like regarding the bronze in many statues as the prime feature of the statue rather than regarding each as the expression of a distinct idea to which the bronze merely supplies the mundane working matter.
It would seem that only a community which aims exclusively to maximise the value of goods and services supplied and demanded by engineering a bumper crop of human consumers would regard the mere fact of belonging to the biological species 'homo-sapiens' as a fitting standard to evaluate its individuals against. I might be wrong but I suspect that a chimp could be taught to work in many of the jobs homo-sapiens are currently happy with and to engage in the purchasing of products.
But perhaps this hints at the truth; that the powers that be (exploiting the stock of values we currently hold) posses a vested interest in the slow but sure levelling down of the human being from the
lofty heights it has proven it can reach - right back down to the level of working and consuming apes.
By David.
06 October 2007
When one sweeps their mind clean of many of the concepts that have been instilled in one's pattern of thought over the years by a globalized society possessing a set of fundamental assumptions, taking great care to address, to the greatest degree humanly possible, the bare facts of experience in their raw essence, it becomes startling to observe the degree to which the idea of Democracy is worshipped today.
It is asserted as though it is some sort of universal moral/political law, naturally existing as such, and so it is very rarely itself dissected and justified. "But that is anti-democratic", or the like, can be heard prematurely killing numerous debates. 'Real' universal happenings, such as the laws identified by physics, are those forces embedded in nature which just are, and which cannot themselves be questioned. The force of gravity and the force which binds atoms together, known as the 'strong force', for instance, are all universal happenings, meaning they apply, for all practical purposes, anywhere and everywhere and cannot be questioned. They are by their nature necessary and immutable.
However, there are no equivalents in the realms of morality or politics - because all such notions are completely subjective and man made. No universal moral or political laws 'exist', and therefore no theories in those realms should be taken for granted. Today, one is usually dismissed immediately for questioning the suitability of democracy. I think this is wrong. Democracy is taken as a given, when in fact it has no objective basis what so ever. Furthermore, its subjective basis seems, to this writer, to be misguided.
Democratic theory has been parroted in the -modern- western world since the Enlightenment period. That period of European thought was all about discovering the universal traits that exist in the universe (in the human being, the physical universe etc). The thing identified as existing, universally, in all people, was their faculty of reason. The concept of 'reason' is a slippery one, but it has something to do with grasping effects and their causes, or alternatively, grasping the laws of logic which are apparently infallible throughout the Universe.
People were encouraged to break from the traditional sources of authority such as the church and monarchy, and to work reality out for themselves. Apparently the *potential* ability of all people to grasp effects and their causes vindicated the notion that they should lead society themselves, all of them, 'equally'. No one person's vote would be worth more than another's.
This might sound nice at first, but it ignores two points. Firstly, the fact that one person is often more developed in their faculties than another, and secondly that many people do not care about the dynamic and holistic issues that they find themselves voting for or against once every four years. So what? Well this results in nothing less than one intelligent and well researched vote being cancelled out and ruled obsolete by one ignorant vote.
Alarm bells should be raised considering that our popular current affairs shows on television are clogged with light weight segments like 'the worst neighbors in the country', while our most popular newspapers often struggle to raise themselves above the depth level of a tabloid magazine.
Moreover, in our modern time of highly specialized labor can we really expect that all people have the time and breadth needed to devote themselves to political and social issues?
In contrast to Ancient Athens, the era and place that originally spawned state democracy, the average voter in our modern democracy is engaged with some form of narrowly specialized job all day and this era of paid employment is typically preceded by time spent in narrow fields of education in preparation for our narrow fields of employment.
Consider the citizen, male as he was, in Ancient Greece who spent much less time at work for himself and whose education was not nearly as specific and individualistic as in modern times. It was concerned, not with entry into some specific field of employment, but with developing the whole (man) in all his virtue.
This reflects the preoccupation held by Ancient Greeks with life beyond the individual. For the Greek citizen "was essentially social...Religion, art, games, and discussion of things - all these were needs of life that could be fully satisfied only through the polis (city-state)...Moreover, he wanted to play his own part in running the affairs of his community"1.
I do not think it is a coincidence that a political theory like democracy sprang up in Ancient Greece. As well as experiencing a culture that revolved around civic pride, the voters were exclusively the men of the polis: many of them kept slaves and their wives managed all the domestic affairs, leaving each of them with time and energy to devote themselves to the society.
The reality of modern life is much different to the utopian idea that everyone is equal in their reasoning abilities. Similarly, the reality of
our culture is at logger heads with the democratic premise that all modern 'citizens' care about the realm of life beyond entertainment and the individual.
Besides the further fact that not all people are equal in their abilities but that paradoxically all votes are considered equal, democracy is slightly absurd because there exist no cultural obligations related to logic/argument, politics, and society.
By David.
1 Kitto, H.D.F. (1951) 'The Greeks', Penguin Books, Middlesex, pp. 141
06 October 2007
Australians love an underdog. We often get behind the disadvantaged or 'battling' party in sporting matches, in conflicts, and in any situation where some number of people potentially come out 'on top' of another. Often, however, this psychology goes so far that we display the type of behaviour that is commonly labelled 'tall poppy syndrome' in that we tear down the 'best' among us in the various pursuits that together comprise the activities of our society and our communities, be they economic, sporting, artistic, intellectual, and so on.
Accordingly, a person cannot be held up as an ideal in Australian society for long before he or she is attacked and scorned, often in quite a primitive and vicious manner, by various people and/or interest groups. So what could possibly be the cause of this? Two hypotheses suggest themselves to my mind: our convict past on the one hand and our multiculturalism and pluralism on the other.
To the first: A large part of our outlook as a people was forged at a time when Australian society was sharply divided between ruler and ruled, master and slave, corrector and convict. From 1790 to 1820 the nation was first and foremost a British penal colony, and a modern and materially developed nation was so quickly built simply because the then leaders of the separate colonies possessed the luxury of a totally subject labouring force, i.e. the convicts, who could be mobilised and set to work at once where ever some infrastructure building needed to be done, largely for pastoral, agricultural, and settling purposes.
Many convicts were subsequently 'placed' in the employment of freemen, many of whom came to Australia basically as businessmen to benefit from the economic opportunities presented by a rapidly developing Western capitalist nation with a large and cheap labour force. The convict workers were given very few, 'rights', if any, and punishment for abandoning one's assigned duties, be they in the service of the particular colony on the one hand or a freeman on the other, was swift.
It would not be a huge leap of faith to assume that a subjugated collection of British outcasts shipped to a harsh and inhospitable new land and made to work under the hot Australian sun would have harboured a very vivid resentment and jealousy towards those 'on top' considering the comparative luxury in which the British officers and subsequent free settlers surrounded themselves with.
The second hypothesis behind our Tall Poppy Syndrome is another but more recent aspect of our collective outlook: the political philosophy of pluralism and an associated social philosophy, multiculturalism. Pluralism in a multicultural setting is basically an idea that encourages the coexistence of different interests, lifestyles and ideals within a single geographical and political entity, many of which naturally would have existed with more autonomy in less globalised times.
Considering the inherent lack of consensus in matters of ideals that this Pluralism promotes by its very definition it should surprise us little that Australian cultural possesses no meaningful shared definition, on the whole, of what constitutes success or failure, resulting in the state of affairs in which anyone held up as an elite or as encompassing the ideal is quickly torn down from their pedestal.
But of course Australian society does possess some kind of unconscious common ideological orientation, despite the fact that this is not to an extent that we can publicly glorify those who encompass it. Due to the disparity of values that is effectually promoted in our society by pluralism and multiculturalism we simply lack any consensus of what constitutes success beyond that element of success which is common to all the interests, lifestyles and ideals that bubble away around us: materialism.
The aspect of the 'good life', or that which constitutes success, and is common to all the competing sets of values has naturally taken the form merely of material success. For everyone, no matter their culture, beliefs or ideals, needs to achieve a certain level of material sustenance before they can then fulfil their higher desires or ideals. Such a point of commonality held amongst people possessing different value systems can thus be referred to as the 'lowest common denominator'.
Thus, while we scrap with each other to tear down the different individuals who are held up as the ideal Australian from time to time, be they a particular sportsman/woman, intellectual, artist, public figure, or worker etc, it comes as no surprise that all the while behind the scenes the one type of person who is increasingly being emulated by the average joe is the purely material man or woman: the person who has the big car, the big TV, the McMansion and accordingly the big ego, put up like a wall around him or herself to block out anything which goes beyond the lowest common denominator concern for status through goods and money.
By David
06 October 2007
My well meaning parents had the desire to educate me at a private girl's school. They were influenced by modern values which dictate that women should be educated and have the same opportunities as men. Their intentions were genuine and I am grateful for the many useful academic skills I acquired. However, the private girl's school was influenced by feminist agendas. It left me misguided and in a career that was not suitable to me and my abilities that were more in line with my natural feminine instincts.
The purpose of the feminist agenda was for women to gain equality with men in the workplace. We were constantly reminded that in many professional careers the number of women was significantly less than men. Statistics about men in high status careers were quoted often. Our school believed that through education we would become independent. We would achieve our full potential academically and professionally instead of 'being chained to the kitchen sink'.
Influenced by the propaganda, I pursued the academic path with a view for a career that was male orientated. I dutifully went to University and enrolled in an appropriate degree. What I didn't realize at the naive age of seventeen, however, was that I had no natural interest in these courses. I eventually came to realize that I had been misguided by feminist agendas which were based on statistics. What I have become passionate about are feminine pursuits which are neither academic nor professional.
That is why this organisation appeals to me, it looks beyond the propaganda that modern society feeds you and sees the world in a real form. The real form of it is that we look at the reality of the way males and females adapt to the world. And that reality is that men and women are different and this is a scientific fact not a feminist fallacy. Sexual selection has created differences between the sexes. This has meant that the needs and abilities of women are often different from those of men.
It is not my objective to explain these differences, my aim is to state that people of both sexes should aim to pursue what they know will ultimately fulfil them, within practical limitations. It should not be set by feminist agendas which are not based in reality. For example if a woman chooses to be a stay at home mother and invest in her family then she should not be made to feel guilty about it, if a woman wants to be a dressmaker or beautician she should be able to pursue that without feeling that she is less important. And if a woman wants to be highly educated professional then so be it, but it should not be forced upon her by propaganda.
In conclusion the way we look at the roles of men and women needs to be carefully examined. We shouldn't construct empty moral rules based in delusion and statistical adjustments as the consequences are that many women become misguided and unfulfilled in their everyday roles and that our society looses an invaluable part of itself to the relentless modern march of social standardisation.
By Nicaea Delyan
hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.