No More Pencils

Define success. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Even if a person was a castaway, all alone on a desert island, he or she would still have in mind the approval of people back in the civilisation.

Imagine the castaway is fishing. He or she would measure success in terms of proficiency, skill, manual dexterity, as seen through the eyes of people back in civilisation.

If the castaway became really proficient at making a shelter, finding food and dealing with their desert island world, they would imagine the admiration of others. They would be proud of how much more ‘real’ they were than the others back in civilisation. Even disdain is by reference to other people.

There are those who devote themselves to the materials and to the task in hand. They are absorbed into the task, and the work is its own reward. 

How many are there like that? Not many.

The fact is that except for sociopaths, in our heads we all live in a community of other people.

And nearly all of us do everything by reference to other people.

So now, what is success?

Is it one where each person sees the others as a springboard to personal success?

Or is it one where each person does not care about whether the others are successful – except insofar as a lack of success of others endangers or helps their own chance of success?

Is it one where success means a common success?

A common success means each person feels that success is only success when everyone succeeds. It means each person feels responsible for everyone else.

Are we any good at feeling that kind of desire for communal wellbeing?

Why should we be when the arc of human development over the past centuries has been for all of us to search for and find our individual voice. We may be polite, accommodating, civil, or pushy and grasping – with all shades in between – but in truth we are all making our individual way forward.

Tell me, how is it working out?

And now that we (or at least Google and Facebook) have access to big data, we learn that our precious individuality is in large part a mirage. We are predictable. Predictable and we give off signals all the time.

We leave such a trail of data points that we have become exposed for the predictable creatures we are.

So where is our individuality that we guard so preciously?

In truth we are tied to avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. Follow our trails over the years, and you will know us.

So, my idea of my success – is my idea of success even mine?

How far did I choose my pleasures? Keeping up with the Joneses stretches a lot further than the neighbour’s new car.

Suppose a person comes to realise that everything they do is built around an image of success they didn’t themselves create.

Or suppose a person comes to realise they are in a race defined by success and rejection where they themselves are the only person they care about.

Suppose a person comes to feel they want everyone to succeed and not for them to succeed at everyone else’s expense.

Perhaps the first conscious step that person can take is to put themselves among the kind of people they aspire to be like. Then maybe they can be clear enough in the head to define success.

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I wrote this piece on May 2nd, on Typeshare. That was a copy of the article I published on 22 January 2023 on Bear Blog. Is there a yet older version that I wrote?

An article of 27 May 2011 in Der Spiegel describes the German occupation of Poland in WWII. Hans Frank had the task of clearing eight million Jews and Poles out of part of Poland. His job was to make room for ethnic Germans. These ethnic Germans were imported from around the Baltic and from Volhynia and Galicia in western Ukraine.

The article recites that in 1940, Frank told a reporter for the Völkische Beobachter newspaper the following:

“In Prague, for example, large red posters were hung up announcing that seven Czechs had been executed that day.” That had made him think: “If I had to hang up a poster every time we shot seven Poles, we’d have to cut down all the Polish forests, and we still wouldn’t be able to produce enough paper for all the posters I’d need.”

It’s quite a boast. More to the point, who back in Germany at that time knew of Frank’s boast?

The Völkische Beobachter was the paper and party organ of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party). It had a circulaton of over 120,000 in 1931. By 1941 its circulation was over one million, and by 1944 it was one million seven hundred thousand. Its last edition appeared in April 1945.

So when Frank made his boast, it was quoted in the newspaper of the Nazi Party with a circulation of almost one million.

In 1940, the population of Germany was almost seventy million. It was greater if we include the countries and territories Germany annexed, but let stick with Germany itself.

Three and a half million Germans were in the armed forces. So that means the newspaper circulated to one in sixty six of the population in Germany. And it was a spectacular quote.

So it seems reasonable to say that it was commonly known in Germany that the Governor-General of Poland was executing Poles in their thousands, and proud to boast about it.

We often hear a complaint that newspapers are forgetting their role of delivering the facts and instead are intent on forming public opinion. They are accused of relaying only what fits the newspaper’s own ideology or direction or interest.

So, the argument runs, a newspaper should separate fact from opinion and give out the facts and then be explicit where it wants to give an opinion. This raises the question of whether it should give an opinion at all, to which the answer would be – and why not? After all those who run the newspaper are people as well and they have opinions.

The flaw in the argument of all of this is that there are no such things as facts. Of course there are facts but when newspapers report facts those facts are filtered through the collection of attitudes, desires, beliefs etc. that form and inform the minds of the people who work in and run the newspaper.

And therefore nobody on the newspaper can actually see the facts.

It takes huge insight to be able to see the facts. The context, the understanding of man, the history of mankind – a man must know all of these clearly because he can state the facts. More than that, it takes huge insight to be able to draw back and not go along some well-trodden road originally walked by one of the greater or smaller thinkers. To do that would be to simply regurgitate and parrot an opinion that is not the journalist’s own, rather than simply looking, seeing, and analysing.

It is basic. We do not have consensus on the nature of reality. Where is the consensus between the religious and the secular? Where is the consensus between those who hold that life is predictable and those who think that outside of a small field of predictability there is an ocean of chance? Faced with this we can say that people do not all occupy the same interior universe. What chance then their agreement on facts?

So we task newspapers with an impossible job. And this is not to say that a newspaper should simply decide wholesale that it’s going to ignore a pursuit of fact and just tailor everything and everything in its message to the opinion that wants to put over in order to sway public opinion. That is a complete abandonment of its task. But recognising that it is not possible for a person to see the facts without them being slanted by their own opinion is to ignore reality.