Charlie Munger has two great quotes that I’ve been mulling over for several weeks:
‘It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy’.
And
‘What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at’.
So, are we living in a world driven by humourless desire?
Perhaps on Wall Street that is more true. My father-in-law retired early from his Wall Street career saying that ‘I got one thing all those guys will never have – ENOUGH’.
But everything has a contrast. Attendant to Envy is Disgust. A far more dangerous element of humanity, in my opinion, because of its apparently pragmatic self-justification.
How harmful can envy really be? If I want to buy a nice new television because my friend just upgraded to a 55-inch 4K QLED screen, does it really harm anyone if I put in a couple of days overtime to pay for one? Or if we stretch ourselves to finance a new car, with improved safety features, and 7 seats so we can accommodate the kids and the in-laws when they visit? Or if I covet some nice cast iron pans, so that I don’t risk ingesting chunks of Teflon, and end up buying new baking trays every five minutes because the supermarket ones deform and scratch so easily? Who is harmed by these modest desires?
[A side note. We currently have no television in our living room because the 1-year-old accidentally launched the remote control at it and cracked the screen. We’re playing music instead, while I insist that the insurance company offer the correct replacement. Turns out, my son’s dance moves are far more entertaining than an endless loop of Netflix nursery rhymes, Halloween magpies or Ryan’s World on YouTube].
Asceticism may have a place if it is voluntarily self-imposed. The Puritans and the Communists had that Spartan goal in common. But I do not believe it to be a virtue in itself. Evolutionary scientists say that ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ was a necessary adaptation to near-extinction events in human history, like the ice age. Indeed, symbolic communication, ritual and language are purported to be the very mechanisms which delivered Homo Sapiens, alone, through the mass extinctions. Something worth thinking about, as we come through the most symbolic time of year.
If your neighbour in the next valley over has a few more surviving children than you or has just erected a nice patio and conservatory at the end of his cave, he might just know something you don’t know. And you’d better study and copy him, quick, fast and in a hurry, if you want to survive the next winter as well as he does. Envy is a survival mechanism. An important one.
The trouble comes when you think you know it all already, and you decide you’re just going to go over and take his valley and his children and his cave and shank him to death. Much of the human history of envy is bloody and brutal. Only when ‘raiding gives way to trading’ can envy become a positive driver of human interactions.
Envy drives emulation and competition when channelled correctly. But if you lack the ethic of competition, or the imagination to compete voluntarily, then envy turns sour.
Understanding human nature and going with it, instead of fighting against it, is what it takes to escape feudalism and enjoy market capitalism.
Envy combined with hopelessness or resentment breeds disgust. Disgust is a powerful force and one that is often weaponised. It is something we need to really pay attention to in our current moment, in ourselves and others.
I was reminded yesterday of how disgust was used to turn our society against itself, as governments divided their citizenry into the categories of ‘vaccinated’ and ‘unvaccinated’.
The fact that these terms were used in this way, without specific reference to which vaccine or disease was being referred to, illustrates the implication. These words were used to mean ‘Clean’ or ‘Unclean’. ‘Safe’ or ‘Dangerous’. ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’.
One of my cousins who is undergoing chemotherapy for some quite serious cancer has refused visits from anyone who is not ‘boosted’ with a recent Covid-19 jab.
The fact that someone who is at death’s door with cancer and chemo would refuse the help of her own ‘already triple jabbed but ‘unboosted’’ parents, at Christmas, shows you how viscerally real this idea of contaminated people still is to some. Even to the detriment of her son and husband caring for her.
I feel so sorry for her, on so many levels. Personally, I can hardly fathom it. Judging by the completely empty vaccination centre at our local shopping mall, I’m not alone. I’ve had multiple conversations with people who now regret taking the clot shots, and will never have another booster, or possibly any other vaccine ever again.
Broadly speaking, people are either disgusted with the abuse of power, the lies and manipulation that has taken place, or they are disgusted by the refuseniks like me who wouldn’t ‘follow the rules’ for the ‘greater good’.
There are degrees of disgust, for sure. But it is the human capacity to treat other human beings as bacteria, to be wiped off the face of the earth with bureaucracy, bleach or bullets, that has led to many of the genocides of the recent past.
Why else would ISIS or Al Qaeda thugs, busy fighting the US Air Force, take time out of their day to snap the crosses in Christian churches and graveyards, and genocide the Aramaic speaking indigenous Christians of Iraq? How did Hitler convince burly 200 lb soldiers that pregnant Jewish women were an immediate existential threat to them and society, that needed to be shot? What was the language of the instigators of the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi?
‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ alludes to an intuitive equation that hygiene is virtuous. But when hygiene and morality are invoked by politicians, NGOs, or corporate entities, we should instantly be aware of a manipulation.
When rhetoric blames broad concepts like ‘hate, ‘populism,’ or ‘intolerance’ for all that ails our modern society, be on your guard. This imprecise, nonspecific language is a tool for confusion and manipulation.
This week, Tony Blair’s pro-globalism Institute for Global Change released poll data. It showed that European attitudes toward mass immigration of refugees have reached a new low, with Germany, in particular, reaching its limit. As Scotland enshrines transgender ideology in law, and Kurdish ethnic riots raged across Paris this Christmas, and Wahabi extremists online called celebrating Christmas ‘worse than murder’, it’s probably time for some serious contemplation about the various powder kegs we’re sitting on.
As usual, we’re not the first people to face the destruction of our nation. Luckily, past generations have lived through such cycles many times before. Part of the cautionary tale and its solution is spelled out for us in the mystical symbolism of the Nativity.
As you may be aware, the idea of the nativity scene has varied considerably over the centuries. However, aside from Christ being born in a manger, the only other element that has remained consistent for 2000 years is the depiction of Jesus being born between an Ox and an Ass.
This detail comes from a first-century tradition, and not from scripture. So it can hopefully be understood symbolically without upsetting the purists who believe that their creator was all-powerful and all-knowing, but somehow incapable of metaphor and visual poetry.
The Ox was a Kosher animal and is said to have represented the Jews. As a beast of burden, the Ox represented the Israelites’ burden as ‘those who wrestle with God’. The nominal descendants of Jacob, the precursor to every hero called ‘Jack’ in our storybooks. Little Jack Horner, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jolly Jack Tar, etc. You might think it literary laziness that Jack Bauer, Jack Sparrow, Jack Ryan and Jack Reacher all share a name with a little boy who was really bad a fetching pails of water. But trust me, culture isn’t coincidence.
The Ass was not a Kosher animal. It was ‘unclean’ because it did not chew the cud. Not chewing the cud meant asses were more likely to eat scraps from a manger (trough), which made them impure for human consumption. They were thereby known for their exceptional unquestioning loyalty to their masters, who filled their mangers with food scraps. It was forbidden to yoke an Ox and an Ass together for work, though not to house them together. Their unclean nature is so deeply rooted in our psyche, the word ass has been transmuted to something vile, and we almost exclusively use the term donkey these days for the same animal.
The ass in the nativity scene represents the gentiles. That famous Jewish word, like ‘Goy’, that refers to the icky mass that is all ‘non-jews’. I.e., the ‘out-group’, or the stranger.
You are beginning to see the intractable associations between what is close, innermost and familiar being ‘clean’ or ‘good’, and that which is distant, foreign and unfamiliar as being ‘unclean’ or ‘bad’.
The necessity for categories of hygiene is obvious. As is the need for pregnant women to be hyper-sensitive to hygiene, with enhanced olfactory senses and increased disgust sensitivity being activated temporarily in the reproductive mode. Men, also by evolutionary necessity, are far less disgust sensitive on average. That’s why, after twenty years (on and off) of camping on boats, I know that you can eat blue mould, but you shouldn’t eat green mould.
Ritual hand washing, burning, fumigation and baptism are cleaning rituals. Cooking allows us to purify food before consuming it and making it a part of our body. In the same way, purification rituals prepare us, we strangers to truth and love, to be integrated with God.
The symbolism of ritual activates and uses parts of human nature, as universal tools of communication and insight.
The human brain is a deep and difficult place to fathom. It is physically limited to the length, breadth and depth of the cranium. Expensive to grow and maintain, the hard-won circuitry of the mind must by necessity be multi-functional.
From this simple fact of human limitation, we see a kind of biological opportunity cost, akin to original sin.
This intractable element of humanity is why masses of illegal immigrants turning up on English beaches and filling up every hotel in the land, can activate a visceral reaction of distaste, repellence and stress. Why for some people, foreigners turning up on our shores like this is akin to a pathogen that needs to be repelled.
The dehumanisation of the other, or the foreigner, is not just simple ‘bigotry’ that can be nagged out of existence by the poster slogans of well-meaning bureaucrats. It is an evolutionary response that has been retained over millennia because it keeps you alive.
Ponder that, before you think the government can ‘solve’ racism.
Being told that ‘diversity is our strength’, and ‘hate’ is a crime, etc., is no solution. That is like trying to clean your kitchen counter after de-boning a raw chicken, by shouting ‘be clean’ at the chopping board.
What process of mediation has taken place to integrate these newcomers to our culture? Only a neo-Marxist attempt to destroy the host culture, and all its categories.
Part of the reason we are living in such dangerous times is because of the denial of fundamental categories that reflect reality.
The blurring or destruction of the boundaries between categories like ‘Citizen’, ‘Male/Female’, or ‘Nation’ necessarily leads to the destabilisation of our fundamental security and prosperity. The cessation of trade and commerce during Covid restrictions, in contrast, put barriers up between the primary means by which categories like foreign and domestic are traditionally navigated. The psychological and financial damage caused by making the trading of food and products between nations is still being accounted for.
The destruction of boundaries and categories in our progressive politics has unintended consequences. The destruction of categories brings chaos, fear, disgust, and actually endangers the very people it claims to promote and protect. For in the long run, those on the margin of society can still benefit from the centre. So long as it remains extant as a cohesive whole. But if there is no ‘whole’, then where can so-called progress even manifest?
Instinctively knowing this, the destruction of categories within a society diminishes the natural boundaries of family, community and neighbourhood. By necessity, these boundaries must be reinstated for existence to continue. But once natural ties are oppressed and shattered, the state takes the opportunity to replace them with artificial ones.
Our culture is by nature rebellious. It is based on a God who defies all explanation or human will. It is descended from those who dare to wrestle with God himself.
There is no ‘Left’ or ‘Right-wing’ in what is left of the West. There are those who wish to rebel against reality itself – the Luciferians. And there are those who wish to rebel against the pride, sin and hubris of our own wicked nature – the preservers of the spirit of the Exodus.
Leftists wish to be free of the consequences of their actions and will use authoritarian force to achieve it. Libertarians wish to be free of authoritarians, even if that means the freedom to fail and to be poor, so long as it allows freedom of conscience.
There can be no such thing as a conservative in our nations, where the social contract – that was only ever worth the paper it wasn’t printed on – has been thoroughly destroyed. Where the rulers have inverted every category of reality and deny the very nature of nature itself.
Where even the categories of sex and gender have been so disrupted and denied, that it is now seen as virtuous in Scotland, that seven-year-old girls should be forced to ‘tolerate’ forty-year-old transgender male penises in public bathrooms. Where a sexual preference has become the entire identity, as opposed to an everlasting soul. Where the category of ‘diseased’ has been changed to mean people free of the signs or symptoms of illness but decreed ‘contaminated’ by state-mandated PCR tests. Or where ‘selfishness’ and ‘greater good’, take no account of individual costs when determining the aggregate ‘good’. Where ‘safety’ has become an absolute binary.
How many people’s brains have been broken by being forced to accept these false categories? Like the people who divide the world into ‘Binary and Non-Binary’, but fail to realise that that is itself a ‘binary’ categorisation?
It still astonishes me how complete the 1930s Nazi agenda has become, by convincing people that reality is wrong and must be overcome by the force of the State. Our governments are sterilising gay people with puberty blockers, subsidising unnecessary abortion and euthanasia, funding the genocide of the few remaining indigenous Christians in the middle east, and locking people in their homes like open-air concentration camps. And they have convinced people to fly communist banners, and foreign flags and bang pots and pans together to support it all. And people call for more of it.
The destruction of categories themselves has been the mission of the political left for decades, but their underlying motivational desire is as old as time itself.
So, are we doomed?
As the tabernacle sat between two beasts in the ark of the covenant, the anointed Jesus was born between the Pure and the Impure animals. Uniting the Jew and the gentile. The familiar and the foreign. he embodies the mediation between the separators in our societies.
This is a divine pattern. Noah carried both the clean and the unclean animals in his ark. John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey. The nativity brought together high-born Kings, Magi, and lowly shepherds. Jesus healed the lepers and brought sailors, prisoners and prostitutes to virtue and love. He taught us that dietary choices are between a man and his God (evangelical vegans take note), and not a matter of societal diktat. His death tore the veil in the temple, permanently destroying the mystique of the wizard of Oz priestly class and ending the separation between the common man and God. He shows the way by teaching love for the enemy and the neighbour, as requiring as much action as love for the familiar.
We are called to mediate between the categories, as he did.
This cannot be done by the sword, only by resolve, words and deeds.
In the same way, we cannot defeat the enemy by removing a single politician or political party. We must defeat the bad ideas that drive them, to solve the category of a problem, rather than just a particular manifestation of it.
The first problem to overcome, however, is the tendency toward disgust in our own hearts. Something difficult, and perhaps only temporarily achievable. But something which I can assure you is possible.
This is done by understanding that disgust is contextual. You must notice it. It is the force that makes you look away from your enemy, when in fact you should be facing him, studying him, and engaging him.
Although biologically innate, disgust is learned.
Ask anyone with children or observe any inquisitive toddler. They will think nothing of reaching into a festering garbage can and pulling out some grotesque curiosities to play with. Or reaching into the toilet to see what that fragrant play-doughy substance feels like, on the first day of potty training. And the etiquette of when and where it is or isn’t appropriate to drop-trow and gallivant naked needs to be taught and re-taught at home, in the supermarket, and even on a wintery Scottish street.
Disgust is category-based, and the categories are learned.
I had to get over my own disgust when I apprenticed on cruise ships. After a tour of the Far East, every scupper and drain was filled with dust, crickets and grasshoppers (alive and dead) that had to be manually removed by the fistful. Periodic inspections of the Grey-Water and Black-Water tanks were required to ensure the steelwork was OK, and paint was touched up to prevent corrosion. Draining the sewage, pressure washing, and ventilating can only remove so much smell in a tank the size of an average semi-detached home in the UK. And quite frankly, I don’t care how fancy or wealthy some of you round-the-world cruise passengers think you are. I’ve personally seen and cleaned as much filth from your restaurant tables and cabins as I saw in every dirty working-class pub I ever worked in.
But the beauty is, once you’ve held your nose and cleaned out a galley fridge full of rotten liver, expired chicken and disintegrating carrots, nothing will ever feel so bad again.
I eat ‘expired’ food all the time, much to my wife’s disgust, because I know what ‘expired’ actually looks like. And it rarely relates to the little numbers printed on a supermarket package.
So, who cares? How does this relate to you?
Well, in this brave new world we are entering, many of you will face harder times. Many of you may already be facing a drop in living standards and are tightening your belts. Although some of you may find it harder than others.
One of the traps of modern life, or of elevating yourself up the financial hierarchy, is that as we get used to improving our standard of living, almost continuously year on year, we quickly adjust our expectations. Huge flat-screen televisions, exotic fruits like avocados and unlimited access to entertainment are now seen as a birth-right base level of existence for many native Brits. And don’t get me started on my American friends and family, who view having a central or south American cleaner running around after them as a ‘necessity’.
It is too easy to indulge in the narcissism of our age, and assume that because you are doing well financially, it’s because you are virtuous. The spirit that points to a garbage man on the street, and says ‘Son, do your homework so you don’t end up like him’, instead of ‘Son, show respect for that man who clears harmful objects out the way of strangers, and does whatever it takes to make a living’, is the spirit that scripture (and the koran) warns of when discussing wealth and virtue.
You’re going to have to toughen up, some of you. And part of that is being aware of your own ‘RPB’. And if you’re on your way up the ranks, like I am, keep your tastes simple and constrained. It will give you a competitive edge and freedom that many people who grew up wealthy will never understand.
Despite what Waitrose and M&S have taught you, salt isn’t toxic. You actually need it. And no, you won’t die if you don’t eat five avocados per day. And sausages taste better when they’re full of fat.
And here’s the real kicker for those who’ve grown up in complacent families in the inflationary Western world of recent decades. It is not shameful to be poor, or weak, or to need help. You may need to ask for it yourself at some point. Make sure you’re not too lofty to have people who know you well enough to know your weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
Men, stop being alone so much.
Love is a verb. It requires action, reciprocity, repetition, and renewal to stay alive. It requires trust and an absence of disgust.
If you would wipe the snot from your toddler’s nose, cradle a crying and vomiting child, or clean their bottom without disgust, then you know that aspect of love.
So please, remember that sentiment as we move into a new year. As more and more people see the light over coronatarian lies. As more and more people are forced to confront their mistakes. As new tribal and political alliances form, and reform. As our economy collapses, climate communism advances and your own state turns on your ability to make a living.
Your job is not to ‘purify’ your nation, your little internet tribe, or your group of friends. That is prideful folly that leads to dehumanisation.
Your job is to integrate the pure and the impure. To love your enemy means, in this case, to face them without disgust and teach them how they are harming themselves by denying reality. To love means to bring the truth to those poor fools who seek to rebel against reality.
I don’t usually wait for New Year’s Day to come up with resolutions. I started mine last week. If you’re serious about making a difference in your life, or the world, in any way at all, please don’t delay. Start today.
And please, resolve not to worsen the purity spirals that discredit and degenerate movement toward a better world. Dialogue and discussion do not equate to defeat, capitulation or contamination. And to engage in conversation is not to compromise.
PS:
One friend of the Captain Yankee Jock blog, John, has expressed an interest in learning more about the ‘Dark Fleet’. That is the oil tankers who disable their tracking systems and defy international sanctions by operating in an offshore black-to-grey market. Particularly topical as the Bosphorus and Black Sea sanctions now need to be gotten around.
One of my resolutions is to better plan my content this year and to develop more consistent value.
Are there any topics, maritime or otherwise, that you’d like to hear more about?
- Perhaps:
- · Stowaways and human trafficking at sea
- · Modern slavery, kidnapping and murder at sea
- Wildlife
- Real environmental problems, like overfishing
- · Maritime safety, including the statistics on the total loss/wreckage/sinking of ships
- · Life in Scotland/UK/USA
- · Family matters/parenting/philosophy
- · Drug smuggling/trafficking
- · Search and Rescue at sea/what it’s like to do a rescue
- · Bulk/container/oil & gas/offshore sector
- · Law of the sea
- · Etc?
Only you can tell me what you’re curious about, so please hit like, and leave a comment below with any topics/questions, personal or professional that you may have. I’d love to hear from y’all. If I know more about you, your background and your interests/concerns, then hopefully the blog can be more conversational.
This blog started as a way for me to exercise my writing muscles, and I’ve found it enormously useful as a means to clarify my thinking. The discipline of writing every week has been a pleasure in itself, although I have found it impossible to keep to a regular schedule at times. I hope you’ll forgive me, as I abandon a strict Sunday/Monday schedule in the future. I can only promise an average of an article per week, although I’ll aim for a bit more this year.
Happy New Year, all, and I look forward to hearing your curious comments on Substack.
Thank you for your continued support and encouragement.