The Buddhist Case Against Karma

Karma is a just world myth. Karma guarantees justice in every case. No one need do anything to achieve it. Justice just manifests without any need for intervention, let alone with the need to inflict suffering on anyone.

But of course no one believes in karma in this pure sense. Everyone backs themselves as "good" (fair, just, etc) and as an agent for good. We constantly intervene to address issues of fairness. And we feel fully justified in doing so.

In practice, belief in karma reflects the thought: "It's not fair and it ought to be!" Life is not fair. It never is. 

"The brightest ones of all, early in October fall..."

I do not believe in karma. I do not believe in guaranteed justice or deserved suffering. Rather, I believe that no one deserves to suffer, not even those who cause suffering; and that justice is manifest in how we treat each other or not at all.

This is the principle of ahiṃsa or "do no harm". 

Of course the implications of this are complex. But morality always is, if you take it seriously. And, of course, I am far from perfect. Still, this is what I believe and why I don't believe in karma.

The Lessons of History

On the one hand we have mercantilism, the 600 year old philosophy which says that to make people work hard you pay them as little as possible. Working hard being important because idle people have fun and rich people resent poor people having fun. This theory is resurgent right now as we see the share of profits going to labour (who do the actual value-adding) decreasing in favour of shareholders (who do nothing to add value, but risk their capital).

And on the other hand we have consumerism, which requires that everyone buy loads of shit things that they don't need. And this means that everyone needs excess income - i.e., income that is not required simply to survive.

When CEOs are paid 6 and 7 figure salaries plus bonuses every year (more than the average worker will earn in a lifetime) for extracting more work, from fewer workers, for less money, then consumerism is under serious threat.

People say that robots/AI will take all the jobs. But without consumers with excess income Capitalism is dead. So good luck with that.

So there is this worldwide war going on. Manufacturing is moved to the third-world because it achieves two things: goods are cheaper so that workers in the developed-world can be paid less; but also workers in the third-world now have excess income and become consumers themselves.

The trouble really starts when workers don't have excess income or live in poverty. Poverty is a huge problem in the UK right now - and we are the 5th richest country in the world. Mercantilists are happy because they still have third-world consumers and are making vast returns on their investment even while the UK economy stagnates.

However, unhappy citizens start to look for alternatives. Socialism worked OK for a while, but it lost out to a resurgent mercantilism. So now people are looking to the right for succour. Far-right (aka Fascist) political parties exist and are becoming increasingly popular across Europe. This is real. The French party Front Nationale are about as popular now as the National Socialist Workers Party were in 1933 - on the eve of taking power.

Many facile comparisons are made with Germany and that can blind us to the real comparison. In 1930s Germany, conditions imposed on them made German workers poor, or worse, unemployed. Hitler promised jobs for everyone and he delivered (by a massive build up of the military). He was genuinely popular, despite being obviously mostrous from the beginning. People were living insecure lives and they saw no end in sight with the status quo. They *voted* for Hitler, despite all the obvious reasons not to. Just as Americans *voted* for Trump.

My sense is that this is a crucial moment in history. The status quo is not going to shift without some major storm. And people want a change - they want secure employment, they want to be able to house and feed their families. While there is widespread poverty (i.e., the inability to do just this) we are in real and present danger. The flash point will be somewhere in Europe, I think. Probably somewhere unexpected.

And the lesson of history? Is that we never learn the lessons of history. If there is poverty, especially while the rich get richer, then there will be trouble. We've seen it all before, but our rich politicians are too busy looking after themselves and their class to do anything about it. Brexit is a step in the wrong direction, but people voted against the status quo, so here we go...

HMS Brexit: Ship of Fools

The non-binding Brexit referendum was won by a 1% margin. 15 million registered voters (ca 28%) didn't vote. So only a minority actually support it. The consensus is that there is no good way to achieve it. We are blundering on regardless with everyone hating the result.

One extreme faction want to crash out with no deal and rely on WTO rules. But that adds 10% to the cost of all our exports overnight. The USA is poised to trash the WTO. And we get a hard border in Ireland which is likely to restart the war there.

The middle ground Brexiteers want to stay in the customs union which means following all the rules but having no say what they are. Which the hardliners hate with all their hearts.

The opposition have backed Brexit for some reason. Now they have to rationalise a position they all hate, while finding indirect ways to oppose - they will vote against the deal and cause a no-deal crash out. The worst outcome for them.

People who wanted to remain point out that the leave campaign was based on lies and many leavers have changed them minds now. But no one is seriously talking about backtracking.

In the absence of any plan and in the face of considerable illwill from Europe over the divorce, the govt have thrashed out a deal that no one likes, which the cabinet and EU leaders are likely to vote down on both sides of the channel.

And if this happens, the PM will be replaced by a hardliner. The hardliners will win and everyone else will lose. And they will win because they are rich and have bet against the UK by investing their wealth elsewhere, mostly in Europe!

The democratic process has completely broken down at this point. The establishment far-right will have wrested control of the government away without any vote. And committed the nation to a course that the majority do not want. 

Welcome to the future.

Armistice Day.

The nascent German Empire and the Ottoman Empire were crushed by the British, (various) European, and Russian Empires with the pointless loss of millions of lives (mostly men). Germany, Britain, and Russia were all ruled by grandchildren of Queen Victoria (i.e., they were first cousins).

The generals on all sides were incompetent inbreds who saw working class men and "colonials" as canon fodder.

Chemical weapons were invented and deployed, causing mass casualties. Mechanised warfare also contributed to mass casualties. Even more men simply died of disease because of unsanitary conditions.

The French and British made a deal with the Arabs to remove the Ottomans and then welched on it, creating a lasting enmity and alienation between Europe and the Muslim world -- and also the conditions for ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

Americans got a taste for war on foreign soil and the vast wealth to be made from supporting it.

Russians decided they'd had enough of the Tsars and revolted, but ended up with Stalin, who was considerably worse.

Finally, harsh reparations were imposed that sowed the seeds for the rise of Fascism in Europe and WWII.

On the plus side, the horrendous, dehumanising, exploitative society that had grown out of the industrial revolution began to break down, which was a good thing. Not sure about the replacement, yet, though.

We will remember them 

(but probably not learn anything from the exercise)

Losing Track

Awareness seems to operate a kind of gestalt, but in addition to foreground and background, there is an underground. Bear with me. Think about meditating on the breath. You breathe away and pay attention to the sensations, maybe you count breaths, and then, suddenly, you find you are thinking about what to have for dinner and you don't remember when you changed tack.

"Not to worry," most meditation teachers will say, "just notice that you lost concentration and go back to the sensations of breathing. The important thing is to notice what is happening." This is good advice, if you are training your mind to concentrate. But consider this: what happened to breathing when you stopped paying attention to it? Your awareness of breathing disappeared and was replaced by dinner. It's not that you stopped breathing, right? Or you'd be dead. But you lost track of breathing. It faded into the underground.

In the Prajñāpāramitā you are seeking to leverage just this ability of the mind to lose track. Except you want to lose track of your self. For your sense of self to just disappear and leave you without a self. You do that by deliberately focussing on something else.

You start by losing track of the gross senses. Focussing allows you to push most things in your awareness into the background and underground. You lose track of the world outside, the room you are seated in, and so on. The initial goal is lose track of sense experience; for sense experience to move to the background and then fade into the underground. The world is there but it does not register because your attention is entirely elsewhere. When this happens it's difficult to orient yourself in space and time. Space feels infinite. There may be a sense of internal unification and it may be blissful This counts as a mystical experience in modern inventories of religious experiences. And it is a milestone in Buddhism, just not a very important one. It is relatively easy to lose track of sense experience.

Then you have to lose track of the remaining cognitive activity. This is more difficult and requires considerable persistence. When cognition itself fades into the underground, it becomes difficult to orient yourself to awareness. Without a sense of self, awareness is no longer self-referential, in any case. Without the usual cognitive activity your mind feels infinite, though you're not really aware of anything in particular. It is difficult to find words for awareness when sense experience and cognition are in the underground.

But you then have to lose track of losing track. At this point you are well and truly lost and cannot orient to any sense of self or world. You are nothing, nowhere, out of time. There's a kind of luminous awareness, but it doesn't have any features - like an infinite blue sky stretching off in all directions.

And beyond this is emptiness. No one is doing or thinking or feeling or experiencing anything anywhere within the sphere of emptiness. Nothing arises, nothing passes away. The experience of emptiness is not tainted with desire or aversion. There is no sense of it growing or shrinking or changing in any way. Emptiness just is. There is no one who experiences emptiness, because in emptiness it never occurs to anyone that they are experiencing anything. Indeed, if something did occur to someone, that would not be emptiness.

This kind of language will be familiar to anyone who has tried to read a Prajñāpāramitā text. Without the context it seems paradoxical, doesn't it? But notice how, when you lead into it and put it in context, that it flows more naturally. Words and concepts are stretched to the limit, but they are not broken. There may, in fact, be no words for being in that (non)experience, but it is not that we cannot understand it or talk about it in retrospect.

By the way, the dissolution of the sense of self can be terrifying. One should not treat it lightly or casually. It ought to be approached in a supportive and emotionally positive atmosphere and under the tutelage of someone who has experience of it. As Michel Foucault reminded us, the Delphic Oracle did not just say "Know thyself" it also said "Take care of thyself". (Technologies of the Self)

 

Invalid Generalisations

I recently read a philosopher arguing for there being two minds in the brain because, in some patients who have their corpus callosum severed (so called split-brain), to treat epilepsy, for example, there appears to be a division of will in which the left and right sides of the body are controlled separately. But this conclusion is aberrant thinking because severing the corpus callosum amounts to major brain damage. The results of major brain damage cannot be normalised and generalised.

It is not apparent that healthy brains experience this kind of duality. Most of the popular myths about the different roles of the different hemispheres of the brain turn out to be untrue. There may be some division of labour, the brain is nothing if not modular, but our minds are a result of the whole brain. The aberrations that occur with brain injury certainly give us insights into the architecture of the brain and then the contributions different areas make to our minds.

However, the routine over-simplification and essentialisation of observations means that most of what we read about the brain in popular media is wrong. It turns out that men are not "from Mars" and women are not "from Venus". Both sides of the brain have a limbic system, and many emotions are correlated with activity in the cerebellum, which is not divided. Blah blah.

People with agendas consume science news in a biased way. This is religious thinking: one comes to a conclusion then amasses evidence to support that conclusion, filtering out evidence that contradicts one's conclusion. Scientific thinking counters this in two ways. Firstly, it tries to make explicit what would constitute a refutation of a view, so that when a refutation comes along it is easily recognised. Secondly, it tries to weigh the evidence before coming to a conclusion, and then to keep looking at new evidence.

Mapping Legacy Epistemic Terms onto a Modern Ontology of Mind

This post started life as a comment on a blogpost on SelfAwarePatterns.

On the distinctions between thoughts, emotions, and feelings, I recall Cordelia Fine having an equation in one of her early popular books:

emotion = arousal + emotional thoughts

Trying to map archaic epistemic terms onto modern ontologies is difficult. Partly because we often don't acknowledge the different modes and levels we are working with.

Pre-modern India had no separate category for "emotion" or "feeling". Sanskrit has names for emotions and often several synonyms or fine distinctions in intensity, but emotions were lumped together with thoughts as "mental" (cetasika) whereas sensations were "physical" (kāyasika). So our European way of dividing up experience is not "natural".

So it just occurs to me that we could think more systematically about this.

The ontological distinctions are whether the stimulus comes from the peripheral nervous system or it originates in the central nervous system; and whether it is accompanied by physiological arousal or not (i.e., whether it also involves the autonomic nervous system).

This gives us

central - arousal
central + arousal
peripheral - arousal
peripheral + arousal

If you want to map the archaic Eurocentric epistemological terms onto this, then I suggest: thought, emotion, sensation, feeling. i.e.

central - arousal ≈ thought
central + arousal ≈ emotion
peripheral - arousal ≈ sensation
peripheral + arousal ≈ feeling

I haven't factored in the parasympathetic side of the autonomic system, i.e., ± relaxation. I suspect we don't see these as separate categories, but as positive experiences fitting into categories, i.e., peaceful thoughts, calm emotions, neutral sensations, contented feelings.

The next step would be an axis for anticipation/reward. But this would include anticipation of positive (↑) and anticipation of negative (↓), since these move us in different directions. Also, there are different reactions if the reward meets or confounds expectations.

The combination would give us a coarse-grained model that would allow us to map most of the archaic legacy epistemic terms onto a modern empirical ontology. So the new equation is:

experience ≈ central/peripheral ± arousal/relaxation ± anticipation/reward

So in this model, happiness, for example, is a centrally initiated experience, accompanied by physiological arousal, and the anticipation of a good outcome that has been rewarded with a good outcome. 

Pain, is peripherally initiated by pain nerves accompanied by physiological arousal and the anticipation of a bad outcome; but it may also become the object for centrally initiated experience accompanied by arousal. With slight pain or discomfort we may anticipate getting better and thus remain relatively calm about it. With intense pain we may anticipate death and this may spin off more centrally initiated experiences.

The idea that a physical experience can spin off many mental experiences is called prapañca in Buddhist Sanskrit. One of the supposed benefits of awakening is that uncontrolled prapañca stops. 

Momentary Madness

The doctrine of momentariness comes about as Buddhists tried to connect actions, especially the cetanā or intention behind actions, and their consequences, i.e., experiences (vedanā) and/or rebirth (punarbhava). It is a result, I argue, of constraints placed on Buddhists by the acceptance of impermanence (anitya) and dependent arising (pratītya-samutpāda).

Momentariness makes a certain kind of sense if you use meditative states as your model of mental activity. In highly concentrated states one can observe thoughts arising and passing away one at a time. They exist briefly and are replaced by another. Buddhists saw meditative mental states, cut off from sensory stimulation, as more real and this one-at-a-timeness became the norm when they thought about the workings of the mind. It was an unhelpful cul de sac philosophically, but they did not foresee this.

Things got even more tricky when budding philosophers in the Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika schools concluded that momentariness must also apply to real world phenomena and to macroscopic objects. The first concerted arguments for this conclusion did not occur until a little later in the early Yogācāra literature, but it was still the conclusion of many Buddhists in the classical period.

The trouble is that if a macroscopic object only exists momentarily, then it cannot move in space. The time it would take to get to an adjacent location is less that the time that the object exists. Therefore, movement is not possible. However, we do observe macroscopic objects moving around, so what is going on? Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika philosophers argued that the object must be disassembled into its constituent parts and re-assembled in another location. All too fast to see.

Cf. Rospatt, Alexander von. The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A Survey of the Origins and Early Phase of This Doctrine up to Vasubandhu. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995, p.67 n.144.

This is what a lot of Buddhist philosophy is like. Bound by axioms that are never questioned, Buddhists plough on regardless of the stupid things that come out. They often worked logically enough from their axioms. The trouble with deductive logic is that one either ends up repeating one's axiom as a conclusion or one falsifies the axiom. If we take the classic Aristotelian syllogism:

Axiom: all swans are white
Observation: Bruce is a swan
Deduction: Bruce is white, because all swans are white.  

Observation: Bruce is an Australian swan and he is black.
Deduction: the axiom "all swans are white" is false. 

But the axiom being false has to be a possible conclusion. Religieux often take the view that certain axioms are true and cannot be disproved. In this case deduction can only be deflected:

Axiom: all swans are white
Observation: Bruce is black
Deduction: Bruce is not a swan, because all swans are white.  

This enables us to satisfy logic and to preserve our axiom. By virtue of being black, we can conclude that, even though Bruce looks exactly like a swan, he is, in fact, not a swan, because we know with certainty that all swans are white. A black swan is a contradiction in terms. The contradictory observation itself is falsified. Those who believe the axiom feel no burden of proof here. They are not interested in what kind of bird Bruce is. They just know that he's not their kind of bird and he is therefore of little or no interest.

Having accepted the axioms, there is a logical, even rational, process of deduction. The problem is not in the process, but in the starting conditions. Most of the attempts at Buddhist philosophy that I have come across do not question axioms. One of the principle axioms is that Buddhist axioms are not to be questioned. So no one who studies Nāgārjuna's use of the tetralemma (not x, not not x, not neither and not both) ever questions Nāgārjuna's axioms.

For example, an unquestioned axiom is that dependent arising applies across the board to phenomena - mental and physical. The mental/physical dichotomy has long been axiomatic in Buddhism as well. In fact, as an epistemic distinction it holds up OK, since we do gain knowledge of the two domains in different ways. But, as an ontology, this duality doesn't hold up. No mind-body duality can explain the behaviour of the world with the degree of accuracy and precision that a monistic approach does.  What's more, mind-body duality leads to silly conclusions.

If we are going to truly make Buddhism fit for the modern world then we have to turn our attentions to the ideas that we are forced to accept as true and ask whether or not they are. Many of them are demonstrably false, and we need to come to terms with this.

Mysticism As Pure Subjectivity

I wrote this as part of my Heart Sutra history and commentary

There is a curious feature of mysticism. According to most understandings of the world, including that of early Buddhists, from the point of view of the individual the world has two poles: 1) the mind; and 2) the objects and processes that make up the world, including other subjects. In Western jargon, these are the subjective and objective poles of the world. Experience is what happens when the mind and objects (including other subjects perceived as objects) come into contact, via the senses. We may say that a subject swims through a world of objects and other subjects, like a fish in water.

Of course, in the bigger picture, mind is also a process within the world, but this is not how we experience it. This may sound like a tautology, but our sense of self is, in fact, a kind of experience in which we ourselves are the object of perception. We must also be careful not to reify the subject. The subject is a mind capable of representing sense data to itself as an experience. That mind is generated by a brain. The first person perspective is a quality of how the mind represents experience to itself and we know that it is not essential to experience, whereas a brain-generated mind is.

Typically, then, experience has this polarised quality. In meditation, we withdraw from sense experience and in the depths of it, we withdraw from experience entirely. The acme of mediation is to experience cessation. Not simply the suppression of thoughts, which results in alienation, but the cessation of experience – including, and especially, the sense of self. With the cessation of the experience of self, mystical experiences become available: for example, as one’s self falls away, one may identify with the whole world as self. This may be accompanied by a sense that space is infinite. This is simply the first of four spheres or rarefied experience called āyatanas. Beyond the āyatanas is the sphere of emptiness in which nothing arises or passes away. There is no experience per se, just awareness and being.

To achieve emptiness one withdraws attention from experience. In other words, one retreats from the objective pole of experience. Ideally, one completely withdraws any and all attention from objects of any kind. To my mind, this would be characterised as a purely subjective state – just the mind, ticking over but not doing anything. And many Buddhist narratives do talk about this state in terms of pure mind and so on. But it is far more common, in English to refer to such states in terms of reality, the nature of reality, or even the nature of ultimate reality. Suzuki and Conze, drawing on the rhetoric of Theosophy, referred to it as “the Absolute” or “the Transcendental”. Other commentators took the idea of an unconditioned dharma; i.e., the state of extinction of experience (nirvāṇa) and reified it into “the Unconditioned”.

In each case, the reified concept becomes an object to be apprehended. But the Prajñāpāramitā texts, speaking from the point of view of cessation attained by practising the yoga of non-apprehension (anupalambhayogena), argue against this way of thinking. Aṣṭasāhasrikā explicitly says that if you are still thinking in terms of “form is emptiness” (rūpam śūnyatā) then that is a thought being apprehended and it is not cessation, not Prajñāpāramitā. In the state of emptiness, there is no sense experience but also no cognitive experience. If one has visions, for example, then these are not emptiness, they are hallucinations being apprehended.

To repeat, mystical states are states of pure subjectivity with no objective component, but they are typically interpreted and presented as the opposite; i.e., states of pure objectivity with no subjective component. This contradiction leads to confusion, which is exploited by mystics as being productive. For most people, the confusion is the end of their religious career because it creates huge barriers to progress.

If we want people from outside religion to take mysticism seriously, we have to stop presenting it in terms that they know to be false. If we simply admit that a state of emptiness is purely subjective and tells us something about subjectivity, then we might find that scientists and philosophers start to take the experiences seriously.

In addition, we might free ourselves from the moronic influence of the so-called "philosophy" of Madhyamaka. When one cannot even adequately distinguish reality and experience, or subjectivity and objectivity, then one is never going to say anything sensible about either. And Nāgārjuna does not.

The Unknown

No one could have foreseen quantum mechanics. It came out of a funny little side project - trying to understand the photoelectric effect (roughly why some frequencies of light can make electricity flow in some materials). Newton had explained the wave-like nature of light. He did so just down the hill from where I currently live!

Einstein, who published four revolutionary papers in 1905, explained that the energy of the light came in packets or "quantum" (i.e., specific amounts). In surfer jargon, light waves always come in sets. And those sets can act as objects. This is what he got the Nobel Prize for.

Understanding that light worked like this led to a series of insights into the nature of the subatomic world that changed everything. Eventually, it resulted in electronics. And electronics has changed our world beyond recognition. Even in my lifetime! (e.g., the integrated circuit was invented after I was born)

In 1905, for a brief period, no one could claim to have a deeper understanding of reality than Einstein. And not even he could have predicted any of this.

When we think about the world a century from now, we have to pause. The likelihood is that something completely unforeseen is going to change things in ways we cannot imagine; that no one can imagine. We cannot factor this into our calculations. We cannot make allowance for it. We cannot even say from which direction or field it will come. It is completely unknown to us. No one knows or can know.

All we know is that throughout human history, and with increasing frequency, new ideas have emerged that have changed everything. Its not always technological. Think of the impact of fascism in the 1930s.

Everything happens for a reason

Or does it? Sean Carroll (physicist) discusses the question of why there is something rather than nothing and the kinds of answers that people have come up with. It turns out that thinking that "things always happen for a reason" (or not) is central of what makes any given answer satisfying or unsatisfying.

Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast. Episode 9: Solo — Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?

Carroll's take on "why?", "something", and "nothing" is very interesting.

The way I would put his argument about the first part is this. Arguably "reasons" are how humans account for their own behaviour and they don't apply outside this domain. In particular the universe simply evolves in patterned ways that don't correspond to the motivations of human beings. Motivation (reasons for acting) is a feature of sentience. We can sensibly ask a person why they did something and expect an answer. If we ask the planet why it orbits the sun, we can't expect an answer. We can say that it does, and how it does. But it doesn't do so for a reason.

As Dan sperber has said

"So reasoning on this view has argumentation aimed at persuasion as its main function. From the point of view of the communicator, it’s a way to convince people who would not accept what you say on trust. From the point of view of the audience, it’s a way to evaluate the arguments, the reasons that people give to you. Reasoning so understood is first and foremost a tool for communication."

So a question like "Why does the universe exist?" is making some unhelpful assumptions - it assumes the universe is an agent and existence is a choice that the universe made, and that by observing the universe we could infer its motivations. This is how we relate to people and their behaviour. But as a model for dealing with inanimate objects, this doesn't work.

Breathing in Pāli

I've been participating in a serious Pāli forum recently. I haven't read much Pāli for a few years so its nice to reconnect. The subject of how to translate the verbs assasati and passasati came up. And I did a quick bit of research and a write up which I reproduce here. If I get any useful comments I'll update this post accordingly.

assasati/passasati

Assasati is from Sanskrit ā + √śvas, where the verbal root śvas means "blow, breathe". In Pāli, the long ā has been irregularly shortened and śv regularly becomes ss. Similarly, passasati is from Skt. pra + √śvas. The initial pra is regularly simplified to pa.

Under assasati, the PTSD refers to ā (1.3). This entry notes the use of the pair of prefixes ā and pa

Contrast -- combns. with other pref. in a double cpd. of noun, adj. or verb (cp. above 2) in meaning of "up & down, in & out, to & fro"... ā + pa: assasati-passasati (where both terms are semantically alike; in exegesis however they have been differentiated in a way which looks like a distortion of the original meaning, viz. assasati is taken as "breathing out", passasati as "breathing in": see Vism 271)

What I take this to mean is that ā and pa, when used as a pair, mean "in" and "out", respectively. But the Pāli commentarial tradition read them the other way around.

However, PTSD confusingly gives "breath out" in its definition of assasati and assāsa.

This error and the correct reading are noted in Edgerton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary sv. āśvāsa-praśvāsa. By comparing various Sanskrit texts and their Tibetan translations, he makes it clear that assāsa (āśvāsa) means "in-breath" and passāsa (praśvāsa) means "out-breath".

And this makes sense in etymological terms also. If we look at the prefix pa (Skt pra), it can add several senses to a verb: onward, forward, forth, beginning. E.g., gacchati "go", pagacchati "go forth". It may also be used for emphasis. It would be quite unlikely to add this prefix to a word and have it mean "in-breath". Passasati must be something like "breathe-forth" or "exhaling".

By contrast, the prefix ā can have an indeterminate effect. But a lot of the time it adds a sense of "to, towards" or with directional verbs it reverses the direction. E.g., gacchati "go", āgacchati "come, return, arrive".

Thus, assasati "breathes in" and passasati "breathes out" are the expected readings. Although it's not so much "breathe in and out" as "the breath goes forth and returns". And this seems to be confirmed in later literature. The PTSD has been confused by the commentarial tradition. Which goes to show that the PTSD is a good dictionary but not perfect, and one should use judgement when consulting it.

One of the big problems that we have with translating is that some of our cognitive metaphors are different from ancient India. We think of breathing in, then breathing out. And we think that the breath is a movement of air caused by our physical movements. The air belongs outside of us and brings life-giving oxygen in.

What this analysis suggests is that in India they thought they breathed out, and then in. Breath goes forth and then returns. The breath belongs inside of us - like many ancient cultures, breath was life itself: words like spirit, anima, psyche, and soul all come from words meaning "breath or breathe". Possibly ātman does as well, though this is disputed.

The movement of our body and the sensations of breathing were caused by the wind element (vāyu) of which breathing was one obvious manifestation. There's not really a word for air as a separate stuff. Arguably, in ānāpāna-sati, you are not paying attention to air or body movements, you are paying attention to the sensations caused by vāyu circulating. Which is why you can become un-aware of gross physical sensations and still be focussed on vāyu. In this view, it is part of our being.

Pāli is a window into the past. But the past really is a different country.

My Heart Sutra Dilemma

In early medieval China, texts made up of quotes of other texts, in Chinese, were common - I call them "digest texts" based on the traditional Chinese term. Hundreds of them were in circulation (giving librarians a headache, but otherwise very popular).

The Heart Sutra is clearly one of these digest texts. And we know to within 16 years when it was made (645-661).

But I have now shown that the Sanskrit version of the Heart Sutra is a forgery. It was made and presented to make a Chinese digest text look like an authentic Indian Buddhist text, when it really wasn't.

It may be the only time such a caper was pulled off. Whoever did it was a clever and sneaky person (so I kind of admire them). But they were not very good at Sanskrit, so even with modern critical methods of restoring the "original", the basic text is full of mistakes.

This also more or less proves that the author or redactor was not the one who translated it into Sanskrit (unless they could not read their own writing).

But a lot of my work to date has been on how to fix the mistakes in the Sanskrit text. Modern mistakes are still obviously in need of correction, but what about the ancient mistakes?

Should I continue to restore a forgery? In particular, should I be bothering to show how they could have done a much better job of it? Or should I just call "bullshit" and leave it at that?

Not forgetting that millions of people around the world worship this text. So far, the millions seem quite unhappy about the effort to show that their worship is based on false pretenses. They are like, "Just piss off, we hate you". Making sure that all the evidence is presented seems like a good thing in the face of this attitude.

The so-called Hard Problem

Philosophers make a big deal of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. This is the problem of what it is like to be a conscious person from a point of view other than our own. We know our own minds, but we cannot know other minds.

But note that this is a problem of what can be known. In the jargon it is an epistemic problem. If we try to explain this in terms of what exists (or ontology) without reference to what can be known, then we usually say stupid things.

For example, David Chalmers, the young philosopher who in 1995 outlined the Hard Problem for the first time, in 1996 proposed a subtle form of mind-body dualism as a "solution". And since then has dabbled in all kinds of ontologies that don't solve the problem.

Consider that bees can see ultraviolet light and humans cannot. We will never know what it is like to see ultraviolet light. Even though we have cameras that sense ultraviolet light and feed it back to us a visible light. In the end our eyes only physically sense visible light and our brains are only equipped to process nerve impulses from our eyes.

So there is a Hard Problem here also. We simply lack the apparatus to ever know what it is like to see ultraviolet light. We will never know.

But the solution to this problem is not to propose that ultraviolet light is a different kind of stuff. We know that radiation comes in wavelengths from sub-millimetre to kilometers. Ultraviolet light is clearly part of a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation and differs only in wavelength.

We don't need to redesign the entire universe in order to account for not being able to see UV light. Our eyes are not sensitive to it. And that is the end of the story until someone engineers an eye that is responsive to those frequencies and a brain that can make sense of nerve impulses from such eyes.

Epistemology, what can be known, is always limited. In this sense it is a domain to be described rather than a problem to be solved. Some things will always be beyond our knowledge or understanding. There is the universe and then the observable universe: the former may be infinitely bigger than the latter, but we'll never know.

So the question is not how do we solve the Hard Problem. There are stupid questions and this is one of them. It is a stupid question because it elicits stupid answers, mainly in the realm of ontology.

A non-stupid question is, "What can we know about other minds?" Or better, "How do we know about other minds?" We know by observation and inference - the same way we know anything at all about the world beyond ourselves. And, very importantly, we compare notes. What we can know is the dispositions of others.

Of course the validity of inferred knowledge is always a bit doubtful. We often make mistakes due to cognitive biases and logical fallacies. But most of the time we get a pretty good understanding of other people - some of us better than others. And this is partly because we evolved in groups and we have the cognitive apparatus for sussing out the dispositions and relationships of our group. We know because we evolved to know, to some extent.

So the Hard Problem is just a specific case of the general rule that there are limits to what we can know. Don't panic.

Bullshit

I highly recommend Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit - Princeton University Press published it as a little book. It is a serious look at the prevalent phenomenon of bullshit and bullshitters, providing a working definition, and some commentary.

Bullshit can be distinguished from a lie, in terms of the different goals of the bullshitter and the liar: "Bullshit is rhetoric without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false; only whether or not their listener is persuaded."

The whole of the media, most advertising, all politicians, most business people, and many religious leaders are trying to persuade us of something without regard for the truth. Persuasion has become a industry all of its own: think tanks, lobbyists, public relations, spokespeople, community leaders, etc.

And this is why the issue of objective reality is important - it is both why I do philosophy and hate it at the same time. Without reality, truth is a mere convention. Without a clear notion that there is a true state of affairs, a way that things really are that is independent of our minds, then everything is bullshit and everyone a bullshitter.

Or worse, if truth becomes relative then all we have is individual truths. In this (Romantic) view, since there is no objective truth, one can only be true to one's self, to one's nature. Truth is replaced by sincerity. But, and this is important, sincerity in this scenario is someone trying to persuade you that they are a certain kind of person. In other words, sincerity is bullshit.

As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: "It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws."

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

- The last words from War & Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (Chapter 12)

This is great (though I probably still won't read the book). Compare my comments on the sunset illusion.

The Heart Sutra was not Historically seen as Authentic.

I was looking again at how Kazuaki Tanahashi presents the modern scholarship on the Heart Sutra and came across this quote:

"According to Fukui [Fumimasa], there has not been a single record or argument in Chinese history that suggests the Heart Sutra is an apocryphal text." (Tanahashi 2014: 77)

Fukui is responding to Jan Nattier's 1992 article which explains that the quoted section in the Heart Sutra (about half the text) is an extract from the Chinese Dajing translation produced by Kumārajīva et al (T223). He could not be more wrong. Here are the historical Chinese sources that contradict him.

1. Catalogue by Dàoān, 道安 in 374. Although this catalogue is itself lost, Sēngyòu reproduces much of it in his catalogue (T2145). Dàoān categorises the 摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪 (supposedly the Heart Sutra) as "unknown translator" and lists apart from authentic sutras.
2. 《出三藏記集》Chūsānzàng jìjí or Collection of Records about the Production of the Tripiṭaka (T2145), produced 515 CE by Sēngyòu (僧祐 445–518). Lists 摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪 as "unknown translator" and lists apart from authentic sutras.
3. 《大隋眾經目錄》 or Dà Suí Catalogue compiled in 594 by Fǎjīng also lists titles 《 摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪經》 and 《般若波羅蜜神呪經》 (T 55.123.b.22-3) under the heading of Mahāyāna texts "produced separately" (別生). As Tokuno notes, this category was invented by Fǎjīng to contain the digest sutras (抄經).
4. 《歷代三寳記》 Records of the Three Treasuries Throughout Successive Dynasties, compiled by Fèi Chángfáng (費長房 ) in 597 CE (T2034). Lists the 《般若波羅蜜神呪經》 with an annotation 或無經字 "perhaps not a sutra" (T 49.55.c.1).
5. 《內典文全集》 Complete collection of Buddhist scriptures (T2147) in 602 CE. Yàncóng was a skilled and systematic translator and an expert on Prajñāpāramitā. Yàncóng's catalogue again lists 《摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪經》 and 《般若波羅蜜神呪經》 (T 55.162.a.24-5) under the heading 大乘別生 or "Mahāyāna Produced Separately", i.e. digests of Mahāyāna sutras.
6. 般若波羅蜜多心經幽贊》 ( 2 卷)　Comprehensive Commentary on the Prañāpāramitā Heart Sutra 【唐 窺基撰】 [Tang Dynasty. Kuījī 窺基] T1710.  Refers to the Heart Sutra being produced separately (別出) by the sages, "rather than as preached by the Buddha" meaning he did not see it as an authentic sutra. 
7. 《般若波羅蜜多心經 贊》 ( 1 卷) Prañāpāramitā Heart Sutra Commentary.【唐 圓測撰】[Tang Dynasty. Woncheuk 圓測 (Pinyin: Yuáncè)] T1711.  "Since [this text] selects the essential outlines from all the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras, it has only the main chapter, without introduction and conclusion, just as the Kuan-yin ching (Avalokiteśvara-sūtra) is not composed of three sections.

If indeed the 神呪 (vidyā? dhāraṇī?) texts are the Heart Sutra, then all of the catalogues are united in not considering them authentic sutras. And once the category of "digest text" (抄經) is identified, the 神呪 are always categorised with other digests. However, given that the Heart Sutra cannot be earlier than 404 CE, i.e. the date of the Dajing translation it quotes from (T223), then the 神呪 texts, which have continuity going back to 374 CE, are plainly not the Heart Sutra. 

The first evidence of the Heart Sutra is the Fangshan stele dated 661 CE with a text very like the Xīnjīng (T251). The Damingzhoujing (T250) doesn't make an appearance until 730. It plainly post-dates Xīnjīng and was produced as part of the legitimising myth for Xīnjīng. The fact is that, as good as he was, Xuanzang was never a popular translator. He never had the impact that Kumārajīva et al did. So adding a text attributed to Kumārajīva was a way to raise the status of the text. 

However, we know from internal evidence that the Chinese text is not a translation from Sanskrit at all. It is a digest text based on the Dajing. Therefore it is wrong to say that Xuanzang translated it. What is more, Kuījī and Woncheuk both knew this in the 7th Century.

Of course someone translated it into Sanskrit, which can only have been aimed at deceiving us into believing that the Xīnjīng was a translation. Where the Xīnjīng might be seen as a pious attempt to find the essence of Prajñāpāramitā, the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya (i.e. the Sanskrit translation of the Xīnjīng) can only have been made to deceive us about the origins of the Xīnjīng. Which it did. Ironically, is a cheap forgery full of Chinese idioms and nasty unidiomatic Sanskrit phrases. Had anyone been paying attention for the last 1300 years this would have been completely obvious.

Fukui is now deceased. So he cannot go on fulminating, although Japanese and Japanophiles continue to cite his flawed works and those by other parochial Japanese scholar-priests who do not like to face the truth.

See also my essay The True History of the Heart Sutra. 

The Philosophy of the Heart Sutra

I'm thinking again about the "philosophy" of the Heart Sutra this morning. It seems to me that we can only stick to the middle way, the avoidance of the extremes of existence (attitā) and non-existence (n'atthitā) when we deal with the world of experience.

It is entirely straightforward to assert that when I do not pay attention to some aspect of my sensorium I do not experience it. When the neighbours' builder starts drilling a hole in a brick outside my window, the apprehension of that sound very often drives the words out of my head and I lose my train of thought. Unless I pay attention to it, I don't notice the chair that I'm sitting on. The experience of nonapprehension occurs every time we become distracted. Things pop into experience and out of it.

However, not experiencing something is not the same as its not existing. We must carefully distinguish between experience and reality. If I close my eyes, the world does not blink out of existence. I just did it, and I doubt any of you noticed anything different. When I close my eyes and electrical impulses along my optic nerve stop arriving in the visual centre of my brain, then I stop having a vivid visual experience, and it just limits to mostly dark, but with static from my brain.

And this doesn't tell me anything about the nature of reality. Of course, minds are part of reality and insight into the nature of experience is, ipso facto, insight into the nature of reality. But only in a very narrow sense.

The meditation practices that characterise the Heart Sutra are those where we deliberately withdraw attention from our sensorium. Done progressively, we can, with relative ease, reach a state with no sensory experience (except maybe some brain static).

And in that state of emptiness, there is no experience, or in Buddhist jargon terms, no form, no feeling, no recognition, no volution, and no dualistic cognition (śūnyatāyāṃ na rūpaṃ na vedanā na saṃjñā na saṃskārāḥ na vijñānam = 是故，空中無色，無受想行識).

It is emphatically not the case that the Heart Sutra is denying the existence of form. Instead it is pointing to difficulties of defining what an experience is, and especially what the absence of experience (emptiness) is like.

Of course, other approaches to practice involve focussing on objects (mindfulness of breathing) or the cultivation of qualities (such as the dhyāna factors) and these also work. And the Prajñāpāramitā tradition upheld such practices. However, they specialised in anupalambhayogena, the practice of non-apprehension, i.e., of withdrawing attention.

The Heart Sutra has been badly misunderstood, partly because Conze made a number of mistakes in his Sanskrit edition and because his English translations are nonsensical. Conze was influenced, as many others were, by D T Suzuki, who was as much a Theosophist as he was a Buddhist: hence his obsession with "The Absolute". Obscurities emerge also because, when the first Sanskrit translation from the original Chinese was made in the 7th Century, the translator misconstrued the text and made some mistakes (not counting horribly unidiomatic Sanskrit). And this Sanskrit abomination became the standard for interpreting the Chinese text. Also, the most prominent (and oldest surviving) Sanskrit manuscript is full of scribal errors and editorial corruptions which influenced ideas about Prajñāpāramitā in Japan, where it is kept. Finally, the Heart Sutra was decontextualised and lost the connection to the practical Prajñāpāramitā tradition and was interpreted instead first through the Yogācāra and later the Madhyamaka Schools of thought. This led to gross distortions of the message of the text away from being experience-centred towards metaphysical speculation.

None of this is helped by the most prominent recent translations from Sanskrit being made by people who do not read Sanskrit beyond looking up words in dictionaries. They do not notice Conze's simply grammatical errors. Despite meeting passages that literally do not make sense in Conze's edition, they shoehorn them into some kind of sense that is unrelated to the text.

No wonder the Heart Sutra seems mysterious! But, really, it isn't so mysterious. It extends a kind of experience that we all have. When our attention wanders, the thing we were focussed on disappears. Harnessing this by deliberately withdrawing attention leads to some profound states of mind.

• Withdraw attention from the sensorium and all spatial boundaries seem to fall away. 
• Withdraw attention from conscious mental activity and all mental boundaries seem to fall away. 
• Withdraw attention from self and all limits to compassion seem to fall away
• Withdraw attention from attending and everything seems to falls away. 
• Withdrawn from attending one dwells in emptiness (Pāli suññatā-vihāra). 

Emptiness is just over the horizon, not in some other universe. Emptiness as some kind of metaphysical absolute is meaningless and nonsensical. It appeals only to those who enjoy the sensation of being confused - just as a roller coasters and horror films appeal to some people for their intense sensations. A lot of people seem to want to revere something that they don't understand and which they consider incomprehensible. A garbled sacred text fits the bill.

My view is that we have to row back from metaphysical speculation when we formulate what we say to people about what we do. We pay attention to experience and we withdraw attention from experience. This leads to a healthier lifestyle, on one hand, and to genuine contentment unrelated to the experience of pleasure, on the other. It's not rocket science and its not mysticism either. It is deliberate and systematic exploration of the effects of paying attention and withdrawing attention.

Jordan Peterson

I'm quite prepared to ignore Jordan Peterson, his brand of politics (alt-right) has little to interest me (I'm a fan of Marx, so JP thinks of me as akin to a Nazi). And that would have been that, except that I gather that JP is popular in some quarters of the Triratna Buddhist Order. So I probably do need to keep him on my radar. Here are some good critiques of JP

• Ganz, John & Klein, Steven. A Serious Man. The Baffler. 7 Feb 2018
• Mishra, Pankaj. Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism. The New York Review of Books. 
• Robinson, Nathan J. The Intellectual We Deserve. Current Affairs. 14 Mar 2018
• William Davies. Short Cuts. London Review of Books. Vol. 40 No. 15 · 2 August 2018

Nationalism

Nationalism (and other forms of tribalism) are pretty much inevitably when ordinary people feel their livelihood is uncertain or threatened. Tolerance is a quality of secure & prosperous people.

The current rise of nationalism is IMHO a direct result of decreasing job security, worsening working conditions, disappearing pensions, failing public services, and falling wages across Europe and the USA.

Demonising nationalism won't help. What will help is job security, better working conditions, guaranteed pensions, robust public services, and wages that keep up with inflation.

This is not rocket science or ideology. It's a simple observation about what happens when people feel insecure and their livelihood is threatened. They tend to react badly and often violently when they can't feed their families.

Sure, they may scapegoat the wrong people, e.g. govts and the ruling classes are to blame, but immigrants might bear the brunt. But the idea that people are rational was always bullshit.

Don't be surprised when the masses get it wrong, after all they elected the people who took away their job security, etc. Don't be surprised when they act irrationally. They are scared and backed into a corner.

The rise of nationalism is the result of the capture of government by wealthy business people and the inequitable distribution of the profits of industry. This led to growing economic insecurity. And here we are.

You can't have a secure 1% at the expense of insecurity for the 99% and expect a stable and open society. You can only expect some crazy shit to start happening. And without fundamental reforms, it will only get worse.

I know some people are quick to point out that inequality is falling globally. True. Globalisation seeks to convert every human being into a consumer of useless products. Thus lifting the socio-economic status of the very poor is essential for the Globalisation project. But where everyone is already a consumer, it is important to weaken and divide them. Undermining their economic security does just this.

Also if someone earns a dollar a day, it's not that expensive to give them 2 dollars. If they earn the minimum wage in the UK, it is much more expensive to double their income. And the fact is that wages have been falling in the UK for 10 years.

Not All People-Centred Politics is Marxist.

I was looking at an article by a Anarchist this morning. Interesting guy. He reminded me that not everyone on the political left is a Marxist. Socialism predates Marxism, and Anarchists often see Marx as an authority figure to be rejected.

I think Marx's critique of British politics 150 years ago was prescient, but the idea that the British would achieve what the French did in their revolution has always been laughable. The British Class system kept everyone in their place.

Things have changed since the mid 19th Century, of course. Still, class is a major factor in British life. There is still deference to authority here in spades. And of course the Left are deeply divided as portrayed in Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Living in Britain has radicalised me to some extent. Most New Zealanders were socialists - we had a generous welfare state, my education and healthcare were paid for out of taxes. At least until the Neoliberal virus hit us in the mid-1980s. Growing up in NZ did not prepare me for the political right here.

The UK is largely run by people who inherited wealth and therefore power. Britain briefly went socialist post-war but it has lurched to the right since then and seems to be becoming increasingly right-wing. The welfare system has become punitive, university education is no longer free, local councils are going broke. The National Health Service is gradually being strangled by under-funding and is being outsourced to badly governed, unscrupulous private companies who are taking on massive debts in order to keep paying out dividends to shareholders. My local water company paid out more in dividends than it made profits in the last ten years.

And why? So the people who could afford to pay for services could pay less tax. Rich people don't mind paying a premium for personalised services at inflated prices. They do mind paying tax so that everyone benefits.

Another story today, in Forbes, points out that even if Brexit goes very badly, the leading proponents of it in government are so rich that they won't really be affected by it. But they also seem to be deeply deluded about the effects it will have.

It's not that the EU is perfect. The EU has major problems. But I think the key problem for Brexiteers is that Europe is republican and federal. Britain is monarchist and imperial and the ruling classes don't want to give up their power.

British politics is now highly slanted towards the desires of the rich. Our legal and tax frameworks cater for rich locals and rich foreigners as well. We're not even too bothered how they came by their money. No one is really interested in tax reform or tackling tax evasion. We have 10 times as many staff investigating benefit fraud than we do for tax evasion, and the value of tax evasion is 100 times greater. That's symbolic of the orientation of the nation.

As employment levels rise, but pay and conditions continue to be eroded, and workers get further into debt, the demand for goods and services is weak. Consumer spending fell in January. Richard Koo has described a situation in which businesses with debts no longer prioritised maximising profit but instead look to pay down debt. Similarly with indebted households. Eventually they realise that carrying debt is a drain on their resources and they tighten their belts in order to pay down debts.

The thing business people don't seem to understand is that if the workers get too small a slice of the profits of enterprise, they can't buy things. At present the lion's share of profit is going to shareholders and highly paid executives. These people don't pay taxes in the UK, they move their capital off-shore to tax havens, and they don't reinvest their money in the real economy to create jobs or raise wages. They are sitting on vast pots of uninvested cash. All the big tech companies have huge cash reserves for example.

This is not rocket science and it's not Marxism. Capitalism works best when workers are well paid and spend their money on goods and services. The accumulation of unused capital is anti-capitalist.

Brilliance on Twitter

People who moan about Twitter often say that it cannot convey complex information. This tweet by @biolojical shows how, with some imagination, one can convey complex ideas.


Mass in grams

10^33 . . . . 10^28 . 10^26 . . . . . . . . 10^17 . . 10^14 . . 10^11 . 10^9 10^8 10^7 10^6 10^5‍ 10^4 1000 100 10 1 0.1 0.01 0.001 . . . . . 10^-9human cell . . 10^-12bacterium . . 10^-15virus . . . . . . . 10^-23

NHS

Watching the NHS creak and groan under the weight of winter flu causes me to reflect on changes in the UK since WWII.

We started out with a basic generosity and altruism in which the government worked for the benefit of the people and made everyone better off. Building and funding the NHS was part of this. The economy boomed, there were jobs for everyone, and more or less everyone could afford to rent a house, if not buy one.

Since about 1970 we've gradually changed to a culture of selfishness and greed. And the government works for the benefit of large corporations. The value of people and work has declined precipitously, while rents have gone mental and hardly anyone can afford a house. And yet the 1% are doing better than ever.

Adults who saw WWII and perhaps WWI as well, were keen to make the world a better place in practical ways and to pay for it in taxes. But the children born afterwards, the so-called "baby-boomers" seem to have been spoiled by all this generosity. Ironically they *talked* about making the world a better place, but as a generation they prioritised and even festished self-interest (think Economic Theory and Ayn Rand). Witness the Beatles complaining about the tax rate (with John still in his trademark NHS spectacles).

Now we have low taxes and some people have more individual wealth but the health system is not able to cope. As a nation we are poorer and weaker than we have been for a very long while.

The worst thing is that our present prosperity is built on personal debt which has risen to about 100% of GDP and about 150% of household income. Debt mines our future prosperity. We have more now, but less in the future, because it costs money to borrow money.

Don't ask for a raise or we'll replace you with a robot that will work for free

In the news today is a story warning us not to implement a living wage because the pay rises will mean more jobs being lost to "automation".

The living wage being the minimum amount you need to actually live in the UK without government subsidies. Quite of a lot of people in full-time employment are still dependent on govt handouts to make ends meet.

Anyway, the gist of the story is:  Don't ask for a raise or we'll replace you with a robot that will work for free.

But the thing is that about 15 years ago New Labour opened the floodgates to migration from Europe flooding the UK with cheap labour from Eastern Europe. The results are that we are now leaving the European Union, we have the lowest economic growth of any country in the EU (on a par with Greece and worse than Italy!).

In other words its an empty threat that we know will backfire spectacularly.

Falling wages and rising personal debt has meant that there is a demand crunch - rising inflation is only making it worse. Unemployed people don't have much to spend and they tend to spend it on rent and food. Landlords and budget supermarkets do OK, but no one else who relies on the real economy does.

If you replace all the workers with robots who do not earn anything, but also do not *spend* anything, then the robots will make products that no one can afford and you go out of business. It's a race to the bottom. Meanwhile top CEOs are being paid 120 then average wage, to win this race to the bottom.

The only rational policy for a government is to aim at full employment, at rates of pay which provide for what everyone needs and a little more. If employers won't pay employees a living wage then the government has to legislate to make them. Yes, shareholders dividends might be a littler smaller, but fuck em, they're probably not even paying tax on their income.

The irony for those conservative business people who favour small government is that their refusal to offer a fair wage for a fair day's work is the biggest impediment to small government there is. Welfare would be minimal if there were jobs for all and fair pay and conditions. It is the greed and intransigence of business people that fuel the need for big government.