“…as everyone knows, if the first butterfly you see is yellow the summer will be a happy one. If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer. Black and brown butterflies should never be talked about – they are much too sad.”
Tove Jansson, ‘Finn Family Moomintroll’.
It is the same every year, as soon as the sun warms the earth for the first time, I start looking for butterflies and even after all this time, I am hoping the first is golden. I don’t know why that passage left such an impression on me as a child, but no spring has passed without me thinking about it.
I have never been able to find out whether Tove Jansson based her premise on imagination or on local folklore. It doesn’t really matter. Whether it is truth, myth or fantasy, I choose to believe it. And, if…
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Could any creature
more perfectly delineate
the strange
ludicrous
joy
of existence?
*
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This series of posts have been about the manipulation of democracy, on both sides of the Atlantic, by a new generation of internet-based personal data collection tools. These tools feed on the information we – wittingly or unwittingly – provide to social media applications like Facebook and Google. We have seen how a small number of our opinions, expressed on such social media, may provide a comprehensive inference of our voting intentions, laying us vulnerable to instantly presented information – or disinformation, in the case of the past twelve months.
Equipped with products like NationBuilder, a team of people carrying out political canvassing on the doorstep will already know what your voting intentions are likely to be. Their message to you may appear to be a traditional reinforcement of a party political manifesto, but it could equally be an entirely fictitious reference to a script that has been created by organisations who use that tool to cast doubt in your mind. The tool isn’t doing this, but it is enabling those who build the message – sometimes hundreds of thousands of different messages – to falsify or subtly bend the truth, as in my experience, related in Part One of these posts.
There is no law against lying to the public, as long as you do it under the cover of a political process. That is the sad conclusion drawn by experts across the world, following the turbulent events of 2016. The UK has data protection laws, as, increasingly, has the EU. But neither country applies the law to the truth of what is given out as fact in elections. In the US, there is no single public data protection statute, though different states have their own, many of which conflict with each other. (source)
We need to consider the trade we make when we use social media. We do not pay for the use of a very sophisticated suite of applications, at least not up-front. Instead, we give the platform providers the right to use our data. Few of us ever read the small print. I understand that trade-off with advertising, having been in the software business for many years. I’m perfectly happy for Facebook or Google to show me images of what they think I might want to buy. Sometimes, I do click on them to buy something, so, it works, and allows the social media platform to make its money – but not as much money as they can make in an election year…
More sophisticated use is frequently made of our data if we respond to one of the ‘you won’t believe what this resulted in…’ type of sensationalised banner, in similar style to a tabloid newspaper. You may then be led, unknowingly, to, ‘install’ a product such as NationBuilder, which will live alongside your social media tool, collecting your political data. If you haven’t checked, click on your settings and see whether this is hitching a ride on your life… Remember, these system run on the internet, so they don’t need to download to your computer, just run alongside what you already have in some distant server farm. Again, there is nothing illegal about such software, but the use to which that data is put – the motives of the end user who wishes to engineer public opinion in a targeted sector of the population – is increasingly seen as immoral and hostile to an open and truthful political process.
The fault here does not lie with the technology. The IT business has been offering ‘data-mining’ for a generation. What is new is the willingness to shift the process of opinion-farming into dubious practice that should lie outside the law, but doesn’t.
I have watched a fascinating process for many years as new ‘elites’ are generated in society. During the 1970s and for a period of thirty years, it was IT, itself, that attracted a generation of bright minds. The latest was the growth of the power of international banking, mirroring that of the internet. In each case, a small group at the top of the pile viewed themselves as above the law. In each case, new laws were required to protect the public – the ‘little people’ to quote a popular phrase among the ultra-rich investment banking community.
It may be too late… The ability to understand the complexity of modern commercial, political and governmental processes, all of which rely on embedded computing and the internet, may be beyond all but the few. Most of these few will have been seduced by the lucrative returns they can make in commerce. I am a proponent of business, having run my own company for two decades. I consider business to have been the engine of social progress – but only as it long as it serves the common good.
What we lack are laws and funding that extend the rule of law into all such dubious aspects of society, so that electoral manipulation is as much subject to scrutiny as banking… though the latter has yet to mature, as well.
There are many voices raised in support of this. The latest is the founder of the internet, himself – Tim Berners Lee. In a recent article in the Guardian newspaper, he makes many of the points raised in this series of three posts, but with much more authority than I can. His comments on governmental mass surveillance make sober reading as well, especially in a week that has seen the Wikileaks revelations about ‘smart’ domestic devices being able to listen into our home comforts… Anyone remember the chapter in George Orwell’s 1984 where the speaker on the wall tells Winston and his love that they’d better get dressed?
Why aren’t we chilled at all this? Have we become numb to it all? Is the fear of terrorism really enough justification to change all our lives in ways that may never be reversible? Is it simply ‘bread and circuses’ – keeping the masses happy with sport and shopping while those running our lives do the ‘hard stuff’? Or, have we simply become soft? In a period of relative prosperity have we forgotten the need to struggle for the truth? History, for those few who still study it, paints a vivid portrait of what happens, next…
Philosophically, we should question those who seek to control for a living, in all its forms. Life thrives on freedom, but freedom needs laws to control its excesses. Never before have we so needed the spirit and letter of the law to be strengthened to protect human rights. Never before have we so needed that new generation of lawyers to come forward with a will to protect society and its values beyond their personal pocket.
When you see newspaper headlines accusing the country’s most senior judges of being ‘the enemy of the people’ then it’s time to worry most of all… The Law may be occasionally pompous, but it’s the best friend we’ve got.
Original content©Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
Other parts of this series:
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Beyond the boats of reason beached
We walked – the lady, the dog and I
And darker day came after darker night
As air of truth died on the breeze
And chaos of nightmare dawned.
⦿
Beyond the boats of reason beached
We walked – the lady, the dog and I
And breathing stopped because
We were not breathing
And chaos of fear dawned
⦿
Beyond the boats of reason beached
We walked – the lady, the dog and I
And darkness pressed upon our skin
But only pressed, not cut
And chaos of reality dawned
⦿
Beyond the boats of reason beached
We walked – the lady, the dog and I
And the tide had turned and waited at our backs
But waited in a darkness, pregnant
for the power of reality dawned
⦿
Among the boats of reason beached
We returned – the lady, the dog, the tide and I
The way was that which shone from our own skin
Which filled the empty darkness
And the shroud of chaos fell
from a reality finally unafraid
⦿
©Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
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Alethea is also a Companion of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness
Truth
open the room of my mind
search for me
within faded
doubt
listen to words
sing
My birth
There was once a girl named
Alethea
her heart sparked with truth
My mother always told me she found my name, Alethea, in a book. In my child-mind I created a tome perfumed with age, adding gilded pages over the years. Sometimes I imagined stories, filled with strong and beautiful goddesses, and smiled with the thought that I was held inside.
“It’s Greek,” my mother told me, “for truth.”
When I opened the book inside the room of my mind, I watched the pages unfold like the wings of a butterfly, and waited for a girl named for truth to manifest into form.
I never doubted the existence of this book, until one winter afternoon when I was thirty-six. That day, alone in my New Hampshire home, I cupped a phone…
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We can speak of mysticism, of magic, of meditation, of psychodynamics and many other labels, but all these refer to the attempt by the human consciousness to become aware of a deeper level of existence than our normal day-world.
In dreams, we experience another ‘world’ but it is often confusing and seldom follows the laws of cause and effect with which we try to control what happens to us in our day-world.
A more accurate word to describe this quest is that we seek to enter the world of metaphysics. Meta, in this sense, implies a greater or underlying understanding. Physics speaks for itself, but only since the age of ‘rational science’ has it excluded the aspect of consciousness. Meta-physics, then, is the search for laws that involve the whole human in a deeper understanding of action, reaction and possible reconciliation.
Today, more than ever before, these concepts and experiences are important. We live in an age where the citizens of some of the most developed nations on earth are polarised against each other, not by physical harm being done – in the sense that a tribal feud would bring – but by an antithesis of idea…
Person ‘A’ sees that what is happening is against the very core values of their being, and turns the collective clock back for the county, in terms of its part in the world. Person ‘B’ see that ‘A’ is soft, susceptible to external persuasion and that things can be only be solved by self-based firm action and unity of purpose – and if there are casualties, well, they had it coming. Both sets of people are sincere in their beliefs. There are no laws of physics to describe such divergence of heated opinion; they are a complex mixture of logic, emotion, culture, and the invocation of ancient survival traits in the lower parts of our brain-stems.
Physics speaks of action and reaction. These have psychological equivalents as well, but the same laws are not followed. My beliefs may change tomorrow, but the angle at which a ray of light will be refracted through the same piece of glass will not.
Is there a science of how and why things happen? At a physical level the answer is a definite yes. Considered from the perspective of the whole of Life on Earth, the answer is not so simple. Metaphysics begins with a set of core principles – technically an ‘ontology’ or study of Being. Being is what is. Its attributes are to be rather than to do. If you believe in a human soul, an inner, deeper part of our being, then that soul may be said to live in world of Being, though we may pass the whole of our life without knowing of its presence.
Being does not need reason – it knows itself to be the child of a perfect universe.
Being underpins Doing. Doing is the unwinding of potential to do. Intelligence ‘aims’ that potential where it knows the most good can be done. In physics the ‘most good’ is the desired result – the football in the back of the opposition net, for example. In metaphysics, the idea of doing cannot be separated from the experience of moral good – as seen at the highest level of that person’s consciousness. Psychology sees ‘good’ in a similar way to physics, in that it is a relative quality. In metaphysics, good is a real thing and pervades the universe, waiting for its children of consciousness to wake up to its guiding presence.
We need not speak of God, here. But we can if we wish. We must, though, speak of Life. The Good is that which serves all Life as equitably as the distribution of potential for action will allow, looking after the developing consciousness as much as the physical vehicle which houses it.
The inner core of many of the mystical or magical traditions is the idea of polarity. Something is polarised when it exhibits an extreme of a certain quality. The ‘poles’ of such qualities might be easy to understand, like life and death or black and white, or hot and cold, or wet and dry. Many of these qualities are relative to the observer, in other words relative to the way we are affected by them. We are reactive to such things – they originate elsewhere and with a greater cause.
The word ‘spiritual’ simply means something that affects all the levels of our Being. The idea of spiritual polarity begins with the Will, or, in physics, the set of laws, that comes into existence at the birth of the ‘world’. We can define the ‘world’ as we wish. It can refer to the arising of life on Earth or to the Big Bang of the whole universe, depending how far back in time we wish to go. Time is, of course, not what it was. Einstein re-wrote the laws of classical physics with his proven theories of space-time within relativity.
The laws of consciousness describe increasing levels of awareness – from the simplest single-celled organisms, whose main property is to continue to exist as something separate, to the complexity of the human being, with the history of its entire evolution written in the increasingly sophisticated levels of its nervous system and brain. The story of Life on Earth is written along the human spine…
When Life is examined in this way, we begin to see the evolving climb of consciousness; and the importance of the polarities which drove its evolution. Something with increasingly powerful ‘eyes’ is being produced in the biosphere of the Earth. That original ‘Will’ of the universe, as seen on this planet, has resulted in the consciousness of mankind.
In the next post, we will ‘Look back along the telescope’ at the core polarities of how things happen, relating these principles to what is revealed in the depths of the human consciousness.
©️Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
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Fascism arises as a result of certain conditions. These are not limited by being ‘a long time ago’. Suggest this to anyone happy with the current political environment of Britain and the USA and they will look at you as though you are an academic who is out of touch with both popular opinion, and the ‘revolution’ of the underdog that has created the new order.
Fascism can and needs to be simply defined so that our children and grandchildren, who are not close enough to the societal memories of the second world war, can be equipped to spot its festering signature.
Fascism begins with populism. We are reminded by a usually charismatic would be leader that the system is corrupt and that we – our undervalued group in society – are being deprived of our rights by an alien minority. There has to be a minority that can bear the brunt of our group’s revenge.
Fascism believes that things can be black and white; and that any wisdom to the contrary is part of the mind-fog generated by the intellectual experts who have created the ethos of the governing elite – who themselves are, of course, corrupt, liberal or not.
Once elected, fascism uses its initial popularity to shut down or obfuscate the mechanisms of opposition using one or more forms of brutality. Increasingly, this brutality is of the mind. As long as it can continue repeating its ‘you’ve been robbed’ message, it knows it will get enough time to silence the truth. Truth and facts are always the first target of this form of mental derangement made politics.
Appearing to strengthen the society in which it grows, such twisting of the real begins to weaken the country it infests, leaving it vulnerable to international forces who are less concerned with violence of the mind and more free to use outright military force. Defending the country from real war is anything but simplistic.
Mussolini, the leader of Italy during the second world war, was a classic fascist. He rose to prominence and control of Italy using all the above techniques. His thugs silenced opposition. He was a charismatic man with an intense appetite for both food and sex, and is reported to have ‘needed’ several women a day. Recognising that, by itself, Italy could not be strong enough, militarily, he sided with Nazi Germany, which eventually ate him.
At the end of the war, he fled and was arrested, in Sicily, when a mob presented him, freshly beaten up, to a mid-ranking British officer who was part of the Allies’ liberation force and had wandered into a town square. That man, ironically enough, was Alan Whicker, who went on to become an internationally-respected television journalist, gaining his own notoriety by interviewing several of the world’s most powerful dictators – at a time when to do so would normally have result in your death.
In the first post in this series, I described how a Facebook page was used as a mechanism to present me with a deliberately misleading advert that was targeted at a certain group of voters, just prior to the UK’s Referendum in June 2016. Further research and the publishing by several UK newspapers of the larger process of which my incident was a tiny part showed that there had actually been hundreds of different ‘messages’ used by the campaign, which was a key part of Leave.eu’s successful strategy to take Britain out of the EU, backed by the right wing of the Conservative Party and the extreme right UKIP. Each of those – millions of adverts – had been targeted specifically at people ‘tagged’ as potentially swing voters – the target group where the power lies in any democratic election.
The identification of this group, including (incorrectly) me, was derived by a highly sophisticated system of data analytics created by a UK company, Cambridge Analytica (CA), in which American hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer now has a major interest. During the recent US elections, Mercer and his data-mining technology switched from Ted Cruz’s campaign to back Donald Trump’s when the former began to falter. They were said to have a significant effect on the election’s result.
There is nothing illegal about data mining, nor, currently are there limitations on the use of such data during elections, though that is now being challenged. Wikipedia’s entry on the US arm of Cambridge Analytica includes its referenced competence in military disinformation campaigns, social branding and voter targeting.
Again, there is nothing illegal about these operations, but they don’t work in isolation.
To carry out such penetrative campaigns you need to have data to feed the data-mining algorithms. Recent developments, seemingly originating in work carried out at Cambridge University, revolved around how to infer character and voting intentions from social media data and are summed up in Wikipedia’s entry on this topic, which states that Cambridge Analytica is using psychological data derived from millions of Facebook entries. Elsewhere, the same source says that research at Cambridge has shown to how easy it is to infer voting intentions from a relatively small number of posts.
The history of these events, and the technology behind them are summarised by the Guardian in this article.
Those are our Facebook posts, shared with our friends. Are our simple communications being used, without our permission, for such data mining? It make take governmental intervention to uncover the scale of this, but, thankfully, this is now being initiated, at least in the UK.
We may also need some geniuses on the side of the people, as well.
This is technology that is changing how we are governed and what agenda is used to appeal to the ‘underdogs’ in a society, sweeping aside shared values that have maintained peace and relative harmony since we emerged from the smouldering ruins of the major wars of the last century.
Prompted by reports of this in the Guardian, (one of the newspapers banned from the recent White House briefing, along with the BBC, CNN and several US Newspapers) there is now an official investigation by the UK’s privacy watchdog. But it has come too late to alter the populist course on which we now seem to be set.
Facebook has recently said it will review the use of such data and that it is opposed to political manipulation using its information as a basis. But, be careful next time you’re tempted to respond to ‘What kind of archangel are you?’ on your favourite social media… you never know who has paid to gather that data and is processing it to find out much more about you than you thought you were revealing…
Next week, in the final part of this series, I will step back and examine the underlying forces, political and psychological, that have caught us, unprepared, for the use of this data on a massive scale.
Continued in Part Three
Original content©Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
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“ … the standard translation of one of the chief scriptures of China refers to the venerable Lao Tse as “the Old Boy”. This sounds comical to European ears, yet it is not so far removed from the words of another Scripture which has been fortunate enough to receive translation at the hands of those who reverenced it; “Except ye become as a little child.” I am not a sinologue, but I incline to the opinion that the translation “Eternal Child” would have been equally accurate and in better taste.” Dion Fortune
Dion Fortune’s comment in The Mystical Qabalah struck me when I first read it, more decades ago than I care to remember. Nothing unusual there, as what I learned from her teachings over the ensuing years has shaped and informed my thoughts and personal journey since my grandfather gave me that book when I was fifteen. I still…
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