The voyage of the Leif Erickson and the Garuda.

I would like to contact the people we had an extraordinary adventure with, in India around 1979.

A group of us built two boats in North Goa, the Leif Erickson, and the Garuda, and sailed them south. The boatbuilding took four months, so we set off rather late in the season. Both boats were about 30 feet long and based on the hulks of old rotten dugout riverboats that we bought. We added freeboard planking, outriggers, rudders, masts and sails, and rowing benches and oars that we constructed ourselves having replaced the rotten parts of the hulls with local wood and caulked them with local materials that the native fishermen showed us how to make. Each boat also towed a small dugout canoe for shore visits.

Both boats set off southwards down the coast hoping to round the cape to Sri-Lanka, but we had set off rather late in the season for favourable weather. Nevertheless, we had a couple of good weeks sailing, occasionally pulling into incredibly remote fishing villages for water and supplies, to the astonishment of the inhabitants. The ocean seemed idyllic, we saw turtles and flying fish and swam in the phosphorescence at night, but then disasters struck:

The Garuda hit a rocky offshore island partway down the coast, the crew survived but the boat did not. The Leif Erikson continued and then ran into a typhoon in the night somewhere off the Malabar coast. After a titanic struggle against the typhoon the Leif Erickson limped into Cochin harbour with most of its rigging wrecked. An hilarious scene ensued when a motor launch from the Cochin Yachting Club came to inspect our craft, having heard that ‘a British yacht had arrived’. ‘That’s us’, we said. They took one disbelieving look at the bedraggled hippies in their ramshackle vessel and made a swift exit.  We swapped the remains of the boat for a few crates of beer. After a few days, the group dispersed on their travels and we have not seen them since.

About 20 people became involved in various part of the boatbuilding and sailing, we would like to contact any of them with a view to exchanging memories and photos and maybe writing a book about it all.

They say that everyone on the planet lies no more than seven links of acquaintance away from anyone else, so if you know any of these people please send them this article, or if not please forward it to someone who you think might know of them.

Herewith a list of those names we can remember: -

Leif Erickson Crew.

Pete Carroll, Christine Hutchinson, Simon Dunsford (British), Lars Jorgenson, fisherman, (Danish), Alfonso Lerna, racing driver, Alvaro Dominguez, chess master, (Spanish), Satayabodhi (Dutch guy, sannyasin name) Tony D’Souza (Anglo-Indian)

Garuda Crew.

‘Herr Robert’ as we called him, (German) he had worked on cruise liners, and a German couple. ‘Saco’ (Indonesian) and a skilled Chef. Ralph (Australian)

It would be great to hear from any of you 40 years on.

Regards, Pete and Chris Carroll, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.   

I do not usually do verbal interviews online, I prefer the more leisurely medium of email interview as it gives more time to think, nevertheless I did become persuaded to do this one: -

https://thothermes.com/episodes/season-5-episode-4-the-birth-of-chaos-peter-j-carroll/

You can tell that I would have preferred more time as I keep saying, Well…. Erm….

Meanwhile a team of mathematicians and physicists crawl all over the Hypersphere Cosmology chapter of the Occultaris, eventually to appear in book form.

Eight years have elapsed since my last book. Correspondents and publishers have started to ask if I have anything else in the pipeline. I most certainly do, although I wonder if the world can or will entertain its exceptionally challenging hypotheses. Herewith the provisional introduction and contents.

The Occultaris. Magic and Natural Philosophy.

By Stokastikos, Peter J Carroll.

Ch1. (Intro) Natural Philosophy, and the Occluded Universe.

Natural Philosophy used to mean the investigation of the natural universe and all its secrets by any means possible. It used to include anything natural that we could observe from mechanical, celestial, biological, medical, to even apparently ‘occult’ phenomena.

The great quest of Natural Philosophy lasted from classical antiquity until modern times and its remit included the study of all things, although it tended to avoid the pitfalls of applying reason to Theology and Religious ideas.

Then beginning in the early modern period, Natural Science began to assert itself and ended up by just calling itself Science from the latter part of the 19^th century onwards.

What distinguishes Science from Natural Philosophy?

 “All Science is either Physics or Stamp Collecting.” -  Ernest Rutherford.

With this bold statement one of history’s greatest scientists asserted that the scientific understanding of anything depends on developing an explanatory mechanism that we can do some maths and measurement with, and check against experiment or observation.

Chairs of Natural Philosophy still exist at some venerable old universities and today Physics Professors usually occupy them.

Despite doing a great deal of Natural Philosophy, including speculative metaphysics and alchemy on the side, Isaac Newton managed to put optics, and terrestrial and celestial mechanics into the fold of (Natural) Science and then much else followed and The Enlightenment blossomed. Eventually even the study of living organisms grew from the mere phenomenology of Natural History into the Science of Biology with the discoveries of Evolution, Biochemistry, and Genetics.

These developments tended to leave Natural Philosophy with all the phenomena, ideas, and questions that we could not develop mechanistic explanations or descriptive mathematics for, often because we could not concisely define or measure them. Thus metaphysics, consciousness, teleology, essentialism, and subjective experiences tended to remain there largely ignored or dismissed by Science.

Enlightenment thinkers dismissed Alchemy and Astrology, probably quite rightly, as proto sciences that did not work. Religious ideas and practices became viewed as having social and psychological functions only, with nothing useful to tell about the Natural Universe on the basis that nothing Supernatural exists. Anything that really exists falls into the category of Natural, no matter how astonishing or hidden, or improbable it may seem.   

Magical ideas proved particularly resistant to mathematical quantification and description by testable mechanisms. Magic thus tended to become regarded as an Unnatural Philosophy concerned with phenomena that do not exist because we cannot readily measure them or easily perform repeatable experiments on them.

However, the far reaches of Physics in the Cosmological and Quantum domains do not yet conform to Rutherford’s ideals. Both fields remain at the stamp collecting phase, we have collected masses of observations, but we have no convincing and testable theories of mechanism, we just have a series of conflicting and often mutually contradictory ad hoc explanatory schemes. Cosmologists present extreme speculations as established facts. As Landau quipped “Cosmologists are often in error but seldom in doubt.”

 Quantum physicists argue constantly about the nature of the underlying reality or whether an underlying reality even exists or even has a nature that we can perceive.

Magic suffers from its own problems; in antiquity, magical theorists tended to borrow heavily from Religious ideas for a metaphysic and a vocabulary to describe their ideas and practices. Today, analogies to science often become employed. As Ramsey Dukes observes; Pseudoscience has become the language of choice for modern magical thinking. ‘Quantum’ has replaced ‘Astral’ in the magical lexicon. Yet that does not seem entirely inappropriate because as the great quantum physicist Richard Feynman asserted, “Nobody understands quantum physics” either.

This book aims to advance the cause of Natural Philosophy, the great quest to understand the secrets of the Natural Universe, by combining insights from the Unnatural Philosophy of Magic with insights from the increasingly Unnatural Philosophies of Cosmological and Quantum Physics.

In the cause of rendering all three of these disciplines less Unnatural and more consistent with each other, this book will advance many radical proposals and unusual hypotheses with supporting evidence, mathematics, and some proposals for experiments and observations.

Two magical experiments performed within the last thirty years gave very strange results and initiated the lines of enquiry that led to this book. Over the course of a career one becomes accustomed to Enchantments (making things happen by magic) going awry, sometimes solid objects in the vicinity shatter spontaneously, or teleport unbidden, sometimes unwanted metrological or seismic events have occurred, but these two experiments relate to Divination (finding information by magic).

In one of the two experiments a group of about forty magicians gathered in an Austrian castle and after a week of varied rituals and preparations set out to scry the Big-Bang event in a coordinated mass dreaming experiment. At the time, the so called Big-Bang had very much captured the popular imagination and become the officially sanctioned scientific answer. Many paperback books and documentaries had appeared on the subject and some of the Chaos Magic practitioners present had even gone so far as to identify Chaos Magic as ‘Big-Bang mysticism’. Despite expectations, all those who reported a result reported that the universe of 13 odd billion years ago looked much as it does now on the large scale. This provoked a quarter century quest to understand why almost all Cosmologists thought otherwise and whether they might have misinterpreted their observations, and whether a better interpretation exists.

Magicians have always made maps of the cosmos to guide them in their endeavours. For a long while they remained content with the solar system of the sun and most of its surrounding planets, and kabalistic schemes which derive from or relate to that, with maybe a nod to the surrounding celestial sphere. The magician Giordano Bruno went to the stake in 1600AD partly for asserting that other stars had planets orbiting them and that those planets carried other life forms.

In the other experiment conducted in the West of England, a group attempted to scry the results of horse races using a modified Ganzfeld procedure. Experimenters would first set up an array of unusual or surprising objects unknown to the test subjects. These objects would all bear numbers that corresponded to the race numbers of horses due to participate in a specific race in the near future. The test subjects would then enter a sensory deprived Ganzfeld state with opalescent lenses placed over their eyes and soft light shone into them, and with white noise played into their ears by headphones. Test subjects strove to achieve a vision of whatever object an experimenter would dramatically present to them after the race, the object chosen would correspond to the winning horse. The test subjects had no clues about what such objects might consist of or what races they related to.

Fortunately, we wasted no money on betting because it rapidly became apparent that test subjects frequently achieved false positives. They managed to scry unknown objects in the array, but these often did not correspond to the winning horses.

These results raised profound issues of indeterminacy, psychism, and the nature of time which led to several decades of research into the properties of the quanta which supposedly underlie the whole of natural reality.

Magicians have always made maps or models of how natural reality works. Early ideas about the Platonic essences of things and elemental classifications of phenomena as relating to earth, air, fire, and water gave way to models based on the rays and emanations and the luminiferous aether of pre relativistic physics.

If we have almost got to the underlying fundamentals of Nature with our investigations of the quantum realm, then perhaps we can attempt the final leap which will necessarily include accounting for magical phenomena in rigorous rather than pseudo-scientific terms.

The final leap almost certainly implies that we abandon two long held popular ‘privative’ concepts. A privative concept means an idea defined by the absence of something. Thus ‘Death’ does not consist of anything except the absence of life (except perhaps in Discworld). We commonly regard ‘Space’ as merely the absence of anything between separated objects, and ‘Time’ as merely the intervals between events.

When Newton proposed the concept of gravity, the idea of action at a distance without physical contact remained problematical to many including Newton himself. The later addition of the idea of a ‘gravitational field’ merely buried the problem until Einstein realised that what we call gravity means curved spacetime. As Wheeler later neatly summarised it, “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.”

In Einstein’s General and Special Relativity, space and time do not exist separately but always in the combined form of Spacetime. Moreover, spacetime has a definite geometry, structure, and properties, it can become stretched or compressed or curved or stressed by the presence of mass and energy. These principles underlie both the conventional Big Bang Cosmology and its alternative - the Hypersphere Cosmology that chapter 2 will explain.

In some approaches to quantum fundamentals, the mass and energy of the quanta themselves consist of geometric distortions in the fabric of spacetime. Chapter 4 will explore the idea that the existence and all the properties and behaviours of fundamental particles may arise from the geometry of spacetime if it has just two more natural dimensions than commonly realised.

Magical theories also require some sort of a medium for effects which extend across space and time. Traditional ideas about ‘spiritual forces’ or astral planes or ethers have never proved particularly useful or satisfactory and the more modern idea of ‘magical energy’ implies little more than some substance that sometimes does what someone wants it to.

This book will attempt to show that a (curved) six-dimensional spacetime could account for the structure and behaviour of the entire macrocosmic universe, the existence and properties of all fundamental particles of the microcosm and their quantum behaviours of superposition,  entanglement, and apparent indeterminacy, in addition to accounting for the probabilistic nature of enchantment and divination in magic.

Our most astute futurologist provokes us with the thought that the quest of Natural Philosophy may lead us to dark places: -

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

The Call of Cthulhu --- H.P. Lovecraft - 1927

Yet only a Promethean response to the Indifferentism and Hostility of the Cosmos towards our randomly evolved species seems to offer it any long-term chance of survival. To this end we must attempt to correlate the contents of our minds and voyage far.

Ch2. (Physics) The Macrocosm, Hypersphere Cosmology.

Ch3. (Magic) The Occult Universe.

Ch4. (Physics) The Microcosm, Hypersphere Mechanics, Reversible and Transverse Time.

Ch5. (Magic) Practical Metaphysics.

Ch6. (Psychology) The Anthrocosm.

Ch7. (Magic) The Human Condition.

Ch8. (Outro) A Life.

And now for something completely different - Circe’s Children.

It all began with seed provided by the Greek wizard Xarisal. After seven years slow growth in the chilly British climate, Circe, the largest of the three Mandrakes (Mandragora Autumnalis) at Chateaux Chaos, has produced a mandrake apple, a seed pod. I shall offer some of her children for adoption at the next Druidical Eisteddfod with a view to their widespread reintroduction to Southwest England and Wales over the next century.

Lastly, another addition to the lockdown sci-fi creations, a major upgrade to the Frontier Space War game system with multiplayer and solitaire options and multiple backstory possibilities including neo-modern political and culture war, Alien encounter, and a Dune-style neo-feudal conflict. See below in the games section.

What has gone wrong with Britain?

I only vaguely remember the Hong Kong Flu during my teens in 1968-70. It killed more people than Covid has so far. Some services and facilities became temporarily disrupted but societies carried on without much fuss or lockdowns. The virus still exists but humanity has fairly good herd immunity to it now.

This current Pandemic has brought many issues into focus, in part because the now omnipresent media has had so little political or celebrity or sports news to report on.

However, we look at most of these issues the wrong way around.

We do not have a housing shortage. We have a population glut.

We have deliberately engineered this by allowing a net immigration of 300,000 per annum. This suits property owners fine; their properties inflate in value and this effectively acts as a massive tax on the young. Property has become a much more lucrative investment than industry.

Normally a ‘price improvement’ means something has got cheaper. When you hear that ‘property prices have improved’ that means, bizarrely, that they have got worse, i.e. more expensive.

Continual immigration suits the capital owning classes fine, it depresses wage costs, it provides a short-term fix and profit. Continual immigration also suits the lefty liberal faction as well, as it provides a ready source of votes, and issues they can exploit.

Now an entire younger generation faces chronic employment insecurity and accommodation insecurity issues. And what do we fob them off with? The nonsenses of identity politics and faux individualism via consumerism and social media. No wonder we also have a mental health pandemic.

We should supposedly feel grateful for all the care workers, nurses, and doctors we have imported from abroad. Surely, we should feel ashamed that we have deprived poorer countries of these people by importing cheap labour and skilled people more cheaply trained abroad, rather than properly funding such work and training here.

The UK has become absurdly overcrowded, the cities become increasingly nasty and unpleasant places to live, the countryside shrinks, and the physical and psychological environments become degraded. Nobody hitch-hikes or lets their kids outside unescorted, and nobody leaves their doors unlocked anymore.

The current course will not prove sustainable. Economy staff from abroad will increasingly demand parity, and the ecology of these isles will collapse further through sheer overcrowding. I have not seen a Puffin south of Hadrian’s Wall or Anglesey in a long while.

Vast amounts of UK capital now get invested abroad in the sweatshops of the developing world. We should force its reinvestment here to redress the chronically low productivity.

The majority of UK wealth has become either invested in property or offshore. Some might call this a Developed Economy, it looks more like a Decadent Economy.

The Decadence of the UK economy reaches a pinnacle in the financial centre of the City of London. Here the difference between assets and liabilities has become wilfully obscured, and most of the world’s serious proceeds from crime and corruption come here for discreet laundering.

Eventually the real bills will come in for all this. Decadence leads to decay and collapse.

The pandemic has revealed the weakness of UK manufacturing and our dependency on cheap imported labour.

Instead of outsourcing clothing manufacture to third world sweatshops we should develop high tech computer driven looms and garment assembly devices. Instead of exploiting imported field workers in appalling working conditions we should develop artificially intelligent harvesting machines and upgrade people’s pay and skills to use them.

Instead of short-term fixes and quick profits at any eventual cost we should apply our considerable brains to creating an ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable future for this country, and that means selectively De-Globalising it.

Anyway, enough rant for now. Herewith the last in the current series of lockdown beach-detritus creations; Ship eating Space Slugs (originally created to clear space debris from planetary systems, they devoured their creator species and now infect the whole galaxy). Here a Lithonian ship approaches a swarm of them, hoping its warp-lance will prove effective as a giant bug swat and flip them into hyperspace. I make this stuff to amuse my grandchildren obviously……….

Some further speculations on particle and quantum physics and 3-dimensional time: -

1) Imagine that time may have the same threefold dimensionality as space and that the ‘doubly unobservable*’ orthogonal time dimensions have a spatial signature.

(* We cannot even observe so called ordinary time, we merely infer its existence from memory, records, and expectations, we can perhaps infer the existence of orthogonal components to time from quantum superposition and probability in general.)

2) Imagine that the quanta of spacetime can rotate as spinors with various planes about various axes. Let us denote the spatial dimensions as x, y, x, and the temporal dimensions as a, b, c. As the universe has no preferential directions, only relative directions, then we can denote spatial spinor rotation as xy(z) and temporal spinor rotation as ab(c), where the first two letter denote the spinor plane and the bracketed letter denotes the axis.

3) If xy(z) corresponds to the ordinary chiral spin of fundamental fermions then ab(c) probably corresponds to the strong nuclear charge that some particles carry, and which can manifest in 3 ‘colours’ ab(c), ac(b), or cb(a) or their ‘anticolours’ if they spin in the opposite direction. Fundamental fermions can only carry one unit of ordinary spin and optionally one unit of nuclear charge and these undergo spatial and temporal inversion respectively because of their axes.

4) xy(a), xy(b) and xy(c) may represent electromagnetic charge. The fractional electromagnetic charges of quarks suggest that they may possess only one or two of such spins, whilst independent particles such as protons and electrons must carry all three. The spatial dimensions of x and y both lie orthogonal to all the temporal dimensions of a, b, and c. Electromagnetic charge undergoes temporal but not spatial inversion, the spatial orthogonality of the electric and magnetic vectors arising from an electromagnetic charge also seems to fit this model.

5)  ab(x), ab(y) and ab(z) may represent particle generation which seems to add only mass. If so, then particle generation undergoes spatial reversal, so either neutrinos act as Marjorama fermions and become anti-neutrinos on spatial inversion, or particles and anti-particles can have generation of either sign. Like ordinary spatial spin, generation spin does not seem perfectly conserved and can presumably interconvert with orbital angular momentum.

6) The waves of twist and anti-twist sent out from the spinor rotations of spacetime quanta may cause the spacetime curvatures of mass and electromagnetism and the very short range strong nuclear force. 

The Plague Lockdown continues with slight relaxations. In the absence of human disturbance in this remote hideaway on the ocean shore, abstract thinking proceeds apace, so much so that the next oat cuisine innovation and beach detritus creation remain incomplete.

Alternative Physics

The ‘Crisis in Cosmology’ rumbles on with no resolution in sight between the model which measures the supposed expansion rate of the universe from supernovae luminosity and the model which measures it from anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Jim Peebles, one of the main architects of the Lambda-CDM Big-Bang Cosmology has gone on record to say that he still considers it mostly correct, although incomplete, despite its limitations.

Those limitations do look serious. Peebles himself comments on the resemblance of the dark matter and dark energy hypotheses to the discredited Ptolemaic Epicycles idea.

Some people begin to wonder if the entire theoretical edifice may have structural faults. Yet few seem prepared to question what has become, since the 1930s, the fundamental assumption of cosmology – The Expansion Hypothesis. Ditch that by explaining cosmological redshift by another mechanism, and suddenly everything becomes clear and phlogiston free: -

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology

Whilst awaiting confirmation or falsification of that, (343K reads and counting), speculation upon the nature of the quanta continues.

If ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting’ (Rutherford) then The Standard Model of Particle Physics largely remains at the stamp collecting level without a coherent theory. It consists of little more than a big catalogue of ad hoc assumptions and particle types defined by a large number of parameters about whose origin we have no clues and with which we cannot calculate much, particularly about the insides of nucleons. The default Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics strongly implies that either the underlying reality lies forever beyond our understanding and/or that no underlying reality really exists at all.

Surely, we can do better than that.

A few hours tinkering with a bathrobe belt anchored at each end into heavy books on a glass table confirms the possibility of rotating a point in three dimensional space through 720⁰ to return it to its original orientation without tearing the belt or leaving a twist in it. You really need to do this ‘hands-on’ to appreciate the contra-intuitive strangeness of rotations of space itself. A continually rotating point in space would send out twists followed by un-twists in all directions in space.

This form of rotation known as SO(3) forms the basis of Milo Wolff’s ideas about The Wave Structure of the Electron   

http://mwolff.tripod.com/point.html

Here what we call a ‘particle’ appears as the point where an incoming ‘spherical wave’ rotates by SO(3) and then becomes an outgoing spherical wave. In this model we can consider a particle as a rotating point which creates the appearance of waves in the field of space, alternatively we can consider waves as disturbances in the field of space which come together to create the appearance of particles.

The outgoing wave appears as a time reversed form of the incoming wave.

The outgoing and incoming waves would together constitute a spherical Standing Wave in spacetime with the ‘particle’ at its centre and its ‘field(s)’ surrounding it.   

Such time reversal, the idea that phenomena can go both ways in time forms a crucial component of the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226312851_Transactional_Interpretation_of_Quantum_Mechanics

Such Temporal Symmetry readily explains the strange quantum phenomenon of Entanglement in which two particles once in contact can still show apparently instantaneously correlated behaviour when separated to arbitrarily large distances. In TIQM, waves pass backward in time from the particles to the point when they separated and correlate their behaviour.

In Quantum Superposition a particle can appear to occupy two (or more) mutually incompatible states at the same time, or rather it can appear to behave ‘as if’ it must have occupied incompatible states immediately before interacting and exhibiting behaviour because it doesn’t do both behaviours, just one of them chosen randomly.

A combination of Entanglement and Superposition leads to the popular idea that a particle can ‘be’ in two places at once.

Superposition implies that a particle can exist in two (or more) states at the same place, so what separates those states?

The idea of Imaginary Time may supply a possible answer. If time has the same three dimensionality as space then plainly we can only easily observe a single dimension of it, well we cannot really even observe that, we merely infer it because of the apparently linear sequences of events, we don’t usually see something do two separate things at once.

The two ‘other’ unobserved dimensions of time would constitute a plane of Pseudo-Space somehow at right angles to observed time (and space).

If spacetime does have three dimensions of time, then the waves associated with particles could also travel through imaginary time if the pseudo-space of imaginary time can undergo a similar rotation to ordinary space. The Transactional Interpretation could then model Superposition as an Entanglement across the pseudo-space of Imaginary Time.    

Moreover, a mixed rotation in a plane of one spatial dimension and one pseudo spatial dimension might explain electromagnetic charges and fields, whilst rotations purely in the plane of pseudo-space might model nuclear charge and its extremely short range spatial field effect.

Rotations in occluded dimensions in general might explain the apparently probabilistic behaviour of reality and the manifestation of the whole suite of fundamental particles.

The study of Natural Philosophy seeks to explore the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. A century or two ago Natural Philosophy split in two and Science and Magic went separate ways. A fuller understanding of the universe will need to include both. The ‘occluded’ or hidden dimensions of time symmetry and the pseudo-spaces of imaginary time may provide the bridge which joins them back together.

It may take a while to explore and explicate this mathematically.

Magic

Ian Read who ran several Runic courses on Arcanorium College has asked me to ask around to see if anyone has saved them, as he no longer has copies himself. If you do have copies please get in touch with me. Pete.

The Epoch Owners Club has started to attract participants http://epochownersclub.freeforums.net/

Politics

Some Chaoist Political Thinking for the silly season.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!

How sweet that French revolutionary slogan sounds - yet it all ended in slaughter, dictatorship, and war. Fraternity rarely extends far without Patriotism.

Liberty and Equality contradict each other. If people have liberty they will compete as individuals and groups, and Equality will decline. Most developed economies have some redistributive mechanisms that take some power from the winners and distribute it to the losers to stabilise the system, but inequalities will always develop in any culture that permits Aspiration.

Equality of Outcome comes at the price of complete loss of Liberty.

Equality of Opportunity leads to the dominance of Meritocracy.

Thus, any mixture of Liberty and Equality will lead to some Social Friction.

Liberty and Multiculturalism do not sit comfortably together either. Left to their own devices within a society, subcultures will tend to self-segregate to preserve their own culture and to favour their own people. Most developed economies have some mechanisms to prevent subcultures becoming too insular or too dominant over others.

Multiculturalism implies restrictions upon Liberty, freedom of speech, and choice.

Acculturation, and the halfway house of Integration also imply some limitations to Liberty.

Multiculturalism and Acculturation create a great deal of Friction when a society attempts to promote both at the same time; when for example, it encourages the retention of a religion whilst discouraging all the social practices and attitudes that go with it.

Thus, cultures which import or contain other cultures can expect some Social Friction in addition to the Social Friction arising from the Liberty-Equality dichotomy.

Advocates of Equality will often attempt to conflate the two, and to brand culturalism as racism. The Champagne Socialists and the tiresome ‘Woke’ of the loony left specialise in this. Both the extreme left and the extreme right have a vested interest in worsening race relations.

Low Social Friction leads to dull and less creative societies. Moderate Social Friction leads to Creative Chaos in a society, and so does a lot of it, but that also brings a great deal of destructive Entropy as well.

Wealth acts rather like heat in thermodynamics, it only does useful work when unevenly distributed. If you force its even distribution, then you need other mechanisms to get things done. Naked force provides the mechanism of choice in all communist societies.

Asking how much inequality you want in a society seems oddly akin to asking how much crime you want in a society. The kneejerk answer of ‘none’ always implies a personal commitment to obeying all laws at all times, no matter how wrong or situation inappropriate they may seem.

The optimum level of Social Friction and Creative Chaos seems to arise when 1% of the population owns no more than 10% of the wealth, and no subculture or minority accounts for more than 1% of the population. Beyond these levels expect plenty of Entropy as well. There must come a point beyond which little will remain to unite us in diversity.

The current UK policy of trying to maintain economic growth despite low productivity by importing from other cultures cheap labour and skilled people more cheaply educated abroad does not seem indefinitely sustainable or cost effective. Neither did the British Empire, and for exactly the same reason - Entropy build-up.

A few of my favourite political notions: -

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

― George Orwell, 1984.      (i.e. Retroactive Enchantment by censorship.)

“As a rough rule of thumb; everyone before 1800 was a bastard in today’s terms”

– An eminent historian of my acquaintance.

(If humans still exist in 200 years’ time, they will probably say the same about us for wrecking the planet.)

The ideal political system consists of a mixture of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy.

(The Classical Greeks worked that out long ago)

Absolute Monarchy leads to Despotism.

Absolute Aristocracy leads to Oligarchy.

Absolute Democracy leads to Mob Rule.

The unelected judiciary and the unelected civil service now provide more effective checks and balances to absolute mob-rule democracy than does the aristocracy and the monarchy in the UK.

The EU failed badly here. All the power in the EU lies with its civil service which became a gigantic faceless bureaucratic Synarchist Oligarchy that completely controls mere figurehead leaders and a puppet parliament.

All schemes for Utopia seem to end in Dystopia

The best political systems seem those in which nobody wins, and the Social Friction remains at a sufficiently high level to maintain Creative Chaos but does not become so high that a lot of Entropy occurs.

We have not had a significant body count from internal politics in Britain since the seventeenth century civil war. In that period, we lurched from absolute monarchy to ‘parliamentary’ autocracy and eventually back to a peculiar messy compromise of constitutional monarchy, influential aristocracy, and gradually increasing democracy. Arguably the resulting system maintained its extraordinary dynamism for three centuries partly by externalising its excess friction in colonial and imperial activities.