It is conceivable that democracy is only nominally about the majority rule but is essentially a moral test: those who are willing to impose their preferences on others by the arbitrary standard of being in the majority are implicitly denying that preferences can be objectively right or wrong in their own right, thus negating the rationality of their choices and the authority of their own preferences. It then follows that this collective self-negation has representative priority over the negated preferences. If this is right then the abusive, humiliating, deceitful and exploitative governments are not a failure of democracy but express its proper function, provided it is applied only to those who vote.

A minority can never defend itself against the will of the majority by means of representative democracy, but by declaring itself as not represented and rejecting the premise of representation, it invalidates democracy, and thus becomes powerful as a disrupter of the premise of democratic authority.

Democracy could work only in a tightly knit, highly interactive group of peers who agree on principles, which could include at most one hundred individuals. On the national scale it is a bad joke, an aberration.

We transcend democracy once we realise that Power (the “brick wall at the back of the theatre” F. Zappa) is the primary reality. All we have to do then is deal with reality: the brick wall at the back of the theatre. This is transcendent of all the illusions: freedom, democracy, equality under law… all just part of the show. Once you think about it, it is not that bad; dealing with the actual Power is not as difficult as overcoming the illusion of freedom, and this interaction is subject to rules we can grasp; seemingly absurd things start to make sense.

Consider ‘a tree’ that you perceive as real. What you see, smell and touch is precisely what you think you experience: it matches exactly the concept of a tree that you have, and that is how you identify ‘a tree’ as the object of your experience. The only means of revision of the conception of what you experienced is additional experience, subject to systemic consistency of all experience, including the testimony and the conceptual criteria of identification maintained by others. Your initial ‘experience’ is therefore inherently unreal, subject to being systemically validated by others. You never experience ‘reality’ but only the temporal continuity of your conceptual world-model and then infer whether it was ‘real’ on the basis of cohesion with the world-models of others.

You need the input of others to deduce what is real, and therefore there is nothing real ‘in itself’. The real consists in the conceptual integrity of the meaning held in common.

I can accomodate the distinction between ‘no-thing’ and ‘not zero’. When I say ‘nothing’, as in ‘no thing’, I mean no object-identity that could be consistently posited at the empirical level, but there has to be some meta-level (above empirical) essence that animates the whole system. At the meta-level we find the laws of sense, and of course the self-evident, immanent sense of ‘I am’, which is reflexive consciousness as far as we can reduce it. Consciousness is not a thing (not an object) but also not zero, it has meaning, a structure, which is above the world and also permeates the world, like Logos: the metaphysical framework in which all empirical content becomes possible. In a sense, only Logos is real, absolutely, whereas the empirical is not strictly real, but only a system of quasi-linguistic, infinitely contingent relations that depend on the real to signify anything at all.

The immanence of ‘I am’ is conditional on the meaning content of identity and on external relations, which are governed by sense. There is no ‘I am’ without ‘sense’. Moreover, the laws of sense dictate (necessitate) that ‘I am’ is essentially a multiplicity, each ‘I’ sustained by reflexive relations with other ‘I’s’, and dis-integrates otherwise. For these reasons I take ‘I am’ and the laws of sense as belonging on the same level, both being part of the same immanence.

An argument wins if it is consistent with the structure of being, irrespective of whether it persuades anyone else. A winning argument enlightens us to choose the right actions to reliably serve our ultimate interest. Everything else leads either to failure or to self-destruction. It is in everyone’s interest to be persuaded by the winning argument… or else suffering and self-nihilation is bound to follow.
Those who destroy themselves or sabotage their own ultimate interest need not be persuaded that their reasoning is wrong; their wrongness is corrected by failure and nihilation.

Based on the dominant narrative, I suspect that the collapse of the real estate bubble will be triggered by a sudden glut of high-rise apartments hitting the market all at once. Who lives in those appartments: foreign students, a convenient scapegoat that can then be recycled to argue how essential mass immigration is to the ‘economy’.

Empirical ‘Science’ is a misnomer; it does not have the capacity to generate knowledge. Science is focussed on the conceptual integration of theory and phenomena, and thus can be more precisely characterised as cognitive technology. It does not discover any pre-existing meaning of reality but augments reality to fit the theory. Some scientific theories can be persuasively integrated with phenomenology, but no scientific theory is perfectly consistent or ‘true’, because ‘reality’ is neither conceptually definitive nor complete.

Doubt is uncertainty where uncertainty is due.

It is not the case that Science gives us Evidence. Even just to accept what is reported as ‘evidence’ is already an act of faith. We may nevertheless be rationally justified is considering the possibility that ‘it could be evidence’, and then evaluate what this hypothesis would entail.

Knowing the truth does not imply being truthful.

Technical/Scientific knowledge is not a sufficient condition of social value, because in the hands of morally imperfect beings it can be used against the interests of others. Technical knowledge becomes a critical liability when it is in the possession of the ruling power, which is normally the case.

An expert in science is an expert in formalised abstraction, not in reality. For example, expertise in statistics is limited to statistical models, but statistical models and what they mean by ‘data’ are not the objective reality. The link between model and reality does not follow from the model but only from reality, which is thus inherently unverifiable by means of models. Scientific claims about objective reality are therefore only acts of faith, always beyond scientific expertise, always misleading, as there are no ‘experts in reality’. Science can be rational only when it generates systematic propositions, not in the pursuit of pre-existing ‘objective reality’ (which would entail contradiction) but of narrative consistency of ‘the world as we know it’, integrating our sense of naive phenomenology and conscious agency with the formality of meaning. This kind of science is impossible for specialists, since specialisation precludes systemic integration and sound systemic judgement.

Telling a lie implies a voluntary decision to convey information and the belief that the information being conveyed is false. Consequently, someone who is coerced to reveal information does not lie even if they believe that the information is false, because coercion precludes the voluntary decision to convey information.

The appeal to expertise is misleading: having a great deal of specialised knowledge does not imply being truthful about it, therefore it does not follow that reliance on experts makes one less likely to be misled.

If over the last two years the roles of Israel and Palestine were reversed, then the situation would, without hesitation, be characterised as the Holocaust, and so it must be called the Holocaust irrespective of roles. Currently, the state of Israel is committing the Holocaust.

Being untruthful is practically indistingushable from being illogical, because lies cannot be consistently integrated with the broader system of meaning.

Public experts and officials are concerned that people are being mislead by misinformation. They argue that the best way to avoid being mislead is to trust the experts and follow the official advise, but this is misleading. The only strategy to prevent being mislead is not to trust anyone, expert or not expert, official or not official. This glaring omission suggests that public experts and officials are only concerned about their limited capacity to mislead people: they want monopoly on deception.

Corruption is the default state of human systems. This was the central insight of W.R. Bion: every organisation, institution, fraternity, tribe or nation is inherently corrupt, instinctively corrupt, and it takes extraordinary and traumatic effort to conquer this corruption. Moreover, the effort required cannot be institutionalised, can only work face to face, without leadership, and is therefore limited to small task-oriented groups. The condition that triggers the required effort can perhaps be characterised as DESPAIR.