A short piece on the portability of principles, instinct and having enough certainty to become your own ‘authority’.
Has being ‘unvaccinated’ (i.e. normal until five minutes ago), damaged my career or made my life more difficult? Should I have kept my mouth shut? Was I just being a desperately paranoid weirdo?
I don’t think so. I’ve made the leap to self-employment and company owner in recent months, partly as a result of my unwillingness to be bullied or to hide my thoughts and feelings. My certainty in the absence of evidence was shocking and foolish to many people in my life, who otherwise consider my judgement quite stable. Not as a reasonable decision, honestly arrived at through relative risk assessment and sober judgement. More as a selfish act of indulging the ego, denial and recklessness.
I’ve been working out of Montrose recently, on a wind farm service boat. This has given me an opportunity to spend some gloriously sunshine-filled days in the beautiful Angus and Aberdeenshire countryside. I’ve even had the pleasure of visiting an old college friend. Someone I haven’t seen in years. Since before our country decided to aim at being fully communist.
We shared our stories of the last few years, sitting on the lawn outside the (literal) palace that he lives in. The suffering of loved ones. Death and mental illness caused or worsened by pandemic restrictions. The ones who died at the bureaucratic hands of ‘our NHS’. Those who pulled through.
I told him ‘I didn’t bother with the vaccine’, because ‘I’ve had covid, twice, and I had my T cells and antibodies confirmed, so I don’t need it and my doctor agrees’. That’s how I explain it to normies. I made the decision to avoid the jab long before I had covid, but the timeline never comes up in conversation. I just tell it that way, to keep it in bullet-proof simple terms.
My friend is surprised, but there is no conflict. Good people may not make the same decisions as us, but they don’t stop loving their friends over what their medical choices or politics are. That’s why it’s important to own it, and not to hide our decisions. Like when my Jewish father in law tips generously, conscious that stereotypes of tightness are not restricted to us Scots.
My friend says, ‘‘I’m going to take my fourth one soon. They say the fourth booster is the one now. You know, maybe it’s all just for profit. But they say the fourth is THE one, you know? Four IS THE MAGIC NUMBER, and that will do’.
I don’t have to say anything. We look at each other. The absurdity naked. The decisions have already been made.
It made me realise that you don’t have to say anything, to persuade people. Your life is an argument. Your actions embody the principles that you have chosen to live by.
A principle is a distillation of patterns recognised, logic applied and ideas abstracted. It is whisky, not beer. A principle is a portable, life-saving device. The subconscious sees it, even if the mind can’t immediately articulate it. Actions speak louder than words. The wages of sin is death.
Many of the seemingly trite sayings that qualify as received wisdom ring true to me now with such vitality and truth, that it is astonishing to me. When a tired old saying, demonstrates itself to you to be true in day to day life, as well as in the grand political issues or business-ethical dilemmas of the day, it can be profound to re-examine such basics as:
- Actions speak louder than words
- Two wrongs don’t make a right
- If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything
- Etc.
All of these little nuggets of wisdom are so profound. They allow us to know the correct way to act, even in the total absence of anything that would sate the modern cravings for ‘data’, ‘peer-reviewed’, ‘fact-checked’, ‘government-approved’, ‘facts’. ‘Certainty’ can be dispelled effortlessly, out of hand, by the cynic. Yet, somehow we can act in the unknown chaos of life, and come out on top, with the amazingly portable and efficient wisdom contained in principles.
Principles are so abundant, and cheap to acquire, that they are easy to disregard. However, the ability to deeply understand them, so thoroughly that their application is an unconscious reflex, is a rare and valuable commodity. Although, achieving that level of principled instinct is really worth aspiring to.
Here is a powerful one: Consensus does not equal truth.
The only downside of the love of wisdom is always being on the wrong side of the mob. And subject to the social punishment of being correct in contradiction to the mob. For example, in thinking support for ‘Ukraine’ might have gone too far:
The implications for wading through the soup of the day are myriad. Contrary opinions on Ukraine, Russia, the UN, the WHO, national debts/deficits, monetary inflation and general state-worship come easily. Life decisions like who to trust, where to work and what moral compromises should be made to earn a living might take a bit more thought.
In the mundane day to day routine at sea, there are times I really hate being a Merchant Navy Officer. You can become a prisoner of routine. A slave to the job. A wretched soul, absent from the little beautiful details of life as a father and husband that are the greatest joy of life. All for the grubby little pursuit of money – at a level of compensation that is never quite enough to get ahead.
Why bother?
Well. Is it too grand a word to say I do it for honour? Or conscience?
Bill Gates once hired an entire cruise ship that I worked on, so that he could have a private cruise experience with Tom Hanks, and their respective partners. I wasn’t on board at the time, but the stories of the sheer wealth and indulgence of that one-week private charter remained on board that ship for many years. The cheap seats were about $10k a week on that ship, so you can imagine what it might have cost to charter the entire ship and nearly 800 crew for yourself.
I remember a time when I might have been impressed by Mr Gates and his wealth. Or the wealth of many of the Russian Oligarchs I would see floating around in the Caribbean. But not anymore.
After reading a dozen or so libertarian-leaning books on free-market economics (deprogramming after an eco-science degree), I began to see the hidden hand of coercion all around me. The maritime industry, much like the energy industry, is essentially cartels all the way down.
So what, I hear you ask?
Well, now I’m a captain.
I’m not the captain of an oligarch’s superyacht or a 6-star cruise liner, but I am a Merchant Navy sea captain. I’m on my third command now, so it actually feels real now. As my imposter syndrome fades away, I can reflect on the fact that while Bill Gates may have enough money to charter every ship in the harbour, he is not a captain.
The point is, I didn’t inherit my license. I didn’t win it as a prize. Nobody handed it to me, and even if I could obtain a fake or expedited credential, King Neptune would expose any fraudulent shortcomings in my skill level in a heartbeat.
You can be as rich as you like, but you’ll get nowhere without the experience of a real navigator. And there are no shortcuts to that experience.
I could say I was a qualified captain for years if I wanted. In truth, until I had actually served as one, it wouldn’t matter. Actions speak louder than words. Authenticity cannot be faked. And when Bill Gates is buying up farmland before an artificially-induced food shortage, we can infer some unpleasant motivations, because actions speak louder than words.
I might be deluding myself, but I do think that I have learned over the years that to live with integrity, one must reflect on the basic assumptions of life, over and again. I think I have been right on many things, entirely through instinct.
Like learning anything practical, I have come to believe that the way our society functions is entirely contrary to the natural order. My experience in learning to drive ships and lead people has confirmed this.
The only way to learn is first to do the thing. Then, later, understand the thing.
The ‘see one, do one, teach one’ theory of learning has been much evangelised elsewhere and needs no further confirmation from me. It is correct. But I think knowing that our society actually legally requires employers and educators to do the opposite to this, is rather revelatory. If Jordan Peterson’s maxim of ‘observe the effect of the actions, and infer the motivation’ holds true, I believe understanding this inversion might be the key to unravelling much unnecessary state intervention in our lives.
The very concept that education must come before you perform a work activity (e.g. the 6 months of college that are required before you even set foot on a ship), is wrong. I accidentally bypassed this rule by joining the Royal Navy Reserve at University and learning by doing for 4 years. All of the best boat handlers I know started this way, or as boy-fishermen, or in the military/auxiliaries where practical training comes before academics. Most of the people in maritime who started with the academics first have no appetite for the actual job. After 10 years, 90% move ashore, quit or retrain, taking all of their experience with them. A terrible waste, and an even worse investment strategy for the employers and governments who fund their intensive training.
The inference I make from that, is they need to intervene before you actually learn how to do the job so that you believe that the ‘authorities’ actually add something by giving you a credential. In reality, all this credentialling does in my industry is make it far harder to find competence, by front-loading the experience of potential employees with expensive (and questionable) training, creating an artificial shortage of labour. This also encourages employers to tolerate poor performance much longer than they would if there were a free market for seafarers’ labour.
Cartels, all the way down.
When you understand that our brains think symbolically because actions speak louder than words, then the world becomes a much darker place.
You begin to question why, for instance, my 7-year-old daughter is being asked to spend time at school drawing up ‘posters’, to discourage people from using plastic bags and straws to ‘save the planet’, or ‘turtles’, or whatever the flavour of the months is? Pointing out the stupidity of such (already illegal) activities is pointless.
- McDonald’s gives you a paper straw that doesn’t work, even though the cup and the lid are plastic anyway and both are destined for the same bin!
- The turtle’s in the Pacific garbage patch won’t be affected by a plastic straw in a McDonald’s garbage can in Arbroath.
- The pacific ocean ‘garbage’ is more than 68% polypropylene ropes, which were legally cast off by Chinese fishing boats, who are actually causing real environmental damage by scouring the seabed of every living organism on a daily basis, with complete state-backed approval, and the protection of the communist UN ‘tragedy of the commons’ enshrined in international law that is UNCLOS.
Nope. Irrelevant platitudes such as ‘every little bit helps’, come reflexively.
Portable principles like ‘actions speak louder than words’ help us understand what is really going on:
- They want soggy cardboard straws in your mouth (or even better – sucking your warm milkshake through a blue surgical mask as well), precisely so that you know that your techno-enviro-bureaucrat authoritarian betters can ruin your day, without your consent, and you will go along with it. They didn’t make a mistake and do something pointless at great expense. The point is the exercise of power.
- The point of the poster in West Lothian primary schools is not to change the behaviour of people who read the poster. It is to teach children from a young age that their time should not be spent playing, bonding, reading, applying logic, learning maths, or actually solving problems. They are being taught through trained action that their time is best spent on this earth, creating nagging propaganda under the direction of a state-licensed ‘educator’.
- The purpose of every fear campaign, whether it be catastrophic climate change propaganda, ‘novel’ disease outbreaks, arguably avoidable wars, etc, is revealed in the universal response to every problem. No matter how unique or nuanced, only one solution is ever proposed: more power to the un-elected internationalists, and less to sovereign individuals or governments. In short, communism by international treaty.
The scientific method is very clear. As soon as a single piece of evidence contradicts your theory, the entire theory is in question. Observed reality does not lie. Only our story about why things are happening and how to react to them is what falls short of the truth.
Acting on principle, ethics and an instinctive conscience, I have:
- Worked in the energy industry with a clear conscience
- Avoided serving in the military, while our politicians have betrayed the public
- Abstained from islamophobia and antisemitism despite much propaganda
- Resisted pressure to conform to unnecessary covid hysteria
- Maintained an ability to make a living, and raise a family. This is despite gargantuan doses of cultural nihilism, national-socialism and relativism while living in Scotland, the UK and USA.
Someone actually told me I was doing a terrible thing last year, when my wife and I brought our youngest daughter into the world, during the winter of 20/21 lockdown. ‘What an awful time to bring a life into the world’ I was told by a poor, nihilistic, normie.
Our youngest daughter is the light of the world, and the happiest toddler I’ve ever seen. I’m so glad we didn’t listen to anyone like that when making our decisions.
Being right when others are wrong requires you to trust your own senses, and then trust your own ability to withstand the consequences of either making a mistake or enduring the judgement of everyone else who believes you are making a mistake.
When we got Delta, and my wife thought she was going to die for two days, she was clearly judging my argument against experimental vaccines rather harshly. But now, as people have been morally defeated, and we are T-Cell confirmed immune, with little consequence, she has thanked me for convincing her not to rush and take medical risks for the sake of social pressures. Our friends who quit the NHS over booster-induced illness (much worse than our covid symptoms) reinforced this decision soon after.
Learning to drive boats in a commercial setting was great training for being a father, and a citizen, in this regard.
I have learned that judgement is a muscle that must be exercised. So is courage. And conscience. Fortunately, plenty of people have come before us, so we do not need to learn every lesson on our own. We can and must become the authority in our own lives. We can steer our own ships.
And that doesn’t go away, just because Bill Gates is better at regulatory capture than the rest of us.