Threat detection, empiricism, relativism, and authority.
It’s been a busy old week! Since joining my ship on Wednesday I’ve had nine arrivals and departures, shifted berth twice, went alongside a ship in harbour for cargo, and pushed on to so many ships and towers offshore that I’ve lost count. And I’ve been training a new Captain at the same time. Engine trouble. Cargo with wheels on it!? Oh, and I spilled coffee on my laptop last week and had to replace the keyboard with a new one. Not so easy when you’re camping offshore on a big rolly-roundy thing in the North Sea.
The good news is, the new skipper I’m training is an old friend from college, and we’re having a great time. Even though it was very sad to leave the kids behind, just before my son’s fourth birthday, I’m having a great time. My friend has been a captain on bigger ships, for longer than I have, so it’s been nice to compare notes and share experiences as I teach him the particulars of this sector.
We both agreed on one thing about becoming a captain. Nothing about it is that hard, apart from learning to control your fear. You should always have a bit of a dry mouth when handling a ship in confined waters, but the more you do it, the more you master the fear.
Self-directed exposure therapy.
Much has been made over the years about how people of a conservative disposition have an enlarged hypothalamus, and similar observations, purport to expose conservative impulses as irrational or driven by fear. However, the hypothalamus is not the tabloid-press ‘fear-centre’. It is in fact the ‘threat detection’ centre of the brain. And what the science (possibly) shows is that people with better threat-detection centres tend to be more conservative. Conservativism increases with age, index-linked with the internal encyclopaedia of bitterness and injustice we call experience.
This is why you always listen to old sailors when they give advice. They didn’t get old by accident.
Seafarers are pretty good at threat detection. A skill that is sorely lacking in our political, academic and managerial classes these days. But when the consequences of misjudging a signal or action could be immediate death, destruction or incarceration, you tend to pay more attention.
Navigation, collision avoidance, risk assessment and accident investigation all hold important lessons that can be applied to everyday life, as a modern citizen of the UK or the US.
Lesson 1 – Relative Vs. Absolute Risk
Perspective is everything. A hazard may appear to be catastrophic, ‘red-alert’ level dangerous. In fact, if you look at almost any instrument on a ships’ bridge, at any given moment, something will be flashing ‘Red-Alert’, ‘Danger’, ‘Run Away’, ‘Aaarrggh’!
Everything looks alarming on paper because it is removed from context. Look out the window, and see, that you are passing clear of danger because you are not an idiot. You have instincts of self-preservation, and you will use them. And so will everybody else.
This life lesson allowed me to not be afraid of Covid, about 4 weeks into the first lockdown. After the initial precautionary phase, when facts started coming in that made sense – baby steps into the world that didn’t result in sickness or death – satisfied me that the ‘Red-Alert’ could be safely ignored. The fact that supermarket workers didn’t die in droves, for example.
While something may be ‘absolutely definitely dangerous’ – that doesn’t mean it poses any threat relative to you. In detecting this type of threat, it is important to switch frequently between the ‘absolute’ perspective (the radar warning), and the relative perspective (experience, tolerance of threat, and the view out of your own window).
Claims of empirical authority which talk only of absolutes, and never of relative perspectives, are being hi-jacked by alarmists. And when you are feeling a little precious or narcissistic, beware of conflating your relative self, with the absolute. Unless, like many of us, you just love a bit of drama?
Lesson 2 – Know Your Limits, and Use Their Entire Range
A straight course to steer may appear to be the quickest route between two points on a map. But if the weather is rough at sea, there is no advantage to being hammered broadside on the entire way, or pounding head first into the swell. You’ll reduce your speed, trash your ship, damage your cargo, wake up the nightshift guys and generally end up worse off.
Instead, identify your operating limits – legal or practical. Then take up all the space you need. Adjust your heading by degrees, until you find a tolerable heading – one that balances safety with propulsion, seasickness with speed, risk with reward. And don’t be afraid to zigzag all over the place if it makes your life better!
Within, the aforementioned limits.
So whether we are talking about navigating a ship, dealing with climate change, becoming self-employed, or living with your conscience in a world that disagrees with you and your entire right to exist. Navigate carefully, without fear of deviation. Attenuate your aspect to the environment around you, and don’t be afraid to step out of line! You’ll get where you’re going. Worry not.
This is how we ‘Arrive, Alive!’
Lesson 3 – Steer By Leading Lights
A ship entering harbour is subject to many unseen and dangerous forces. Tidal streams, counter-currents, gusts of wind, unpredictable traffic, fog, mist, rain, sensor failure, and so on. Radar, GPS, ECDIS, AIS and every other type of electronic aid to navigation is subject to delay or interference. Y the time your wonderous yet fallible equipment has identified that you might be off-track, you may already be running into danger.
The ‘Mark-One-Eyeball’, however, remains your greatest ally.
Why?
Not only because threat detection by the use of vision travels literally at the speed of light. But also because your eyes don’t lie.
In the vast majority of circumstances, vision cuts through all of the noise and distraction and lies. Vision is empirical. Direct. Authoritative. Instant.
This is why ships performing the most safety-critical of tasks, like dry-docking, doing ship-to-ship transfers at sea, or entering harbour, use visual navigation as their primary method of ensuring safety.
Leading-Lights are the most commonly used aid to navigation for entering a very narrow channel. The rear light is placed higher than the forward light and is visible many miles out to sea. A second – vertically lower – light is placed in front. They are placed so that when a ship sees the lights in alignment from seaward (the offing), the ship is aligned with a safe track to steer through the narrow channel.
Each light, and the safe water in the channel, is fixed absolutely. However, from the observer from the ship’s point of view, when drifting off course to port, the front light will appear to move to starboard. When drifting off course to starboard, the front light will appear to move to port.
The corrective action in each case is to steer in the opposite direction to which the lower light appears to be moving.
This is a tenuous metaphor, I know. But bear with me.
Imagine the elevated rear light is your highest value. Absolute truth, virtue, morality, peace, love, God, whatever. It is your guiding reference. All other points are referenced to it, at least for a time.
Next, imagine the lower down front light is a light of lesser value. A secondary ‘proxy’ for your higher virtues. Scientific literature, the police, your priest, social feedback, etc.
And your life is a ship at sea, trying to steer a safe course, into an unfamiliar harbour.
Learning to identify when the lesser authorities in our lives are ‘out of alignment’ with our higher values, is the same as learning how to identify our institutions have lost their authority.
And when you know exactly where your higher values are, you can detect even the most minute deviation by lesser authorities. And you correct your course immediately, by doing the opposite of what those lesser lights appear to be doing.
Actions speak louder than words. When our inner selves and our outer actions are in alignment, we actually stand a chance of survival.
Sailors do not wait for the conclusive evidence that the ship has run aground onto the rocks, ripped itself open, killed and injured its passengers and destroyed all trust in its captain. Instead, they react instantly to every deviation from alignment, and steer proactively, before they end up on the beach.
In the same way, the ‘anecdotal evidence’ witnessed in your own life, must be trusted as exactly that. ‘Evidence’.
You don’t have to have degrees in economics to know the government is fleecing you, and currency-inflation is making your life worse. You don’t need to read every scientific journal paper on the subject to know that Covid actually isn’t as serious as the airborne Ebola the ‘experts assured us it would be’. Or be a ‘climatologist’ to know that four days of warm weather does not an emergency make.
Here’s a picture of 7000-tonne diesel-burning crane barge dropping the giant metal base of an offshore wind turbine onto the heads of some unsuspecting fish, and making your energy more expensive by losing 90% of it in transmission, for no reason:
You do not need to be omniscient, to have a valid opinion. You are an empirical being, with your own data-gathering and processing abilities. Your instincts have been honed for two-million years to navigate both the physical and the social realm – and survive! You can figure out when you’re being lied to. You do have a right to go the opposite way from others if you feel you’re being led into danger. You are the captain, responsible for your own life. Nobody else will pay the price for it going wrong.
Tune out the noise, focus on the danger signals in your own life, and deal with what is in front of you.
When I am driving a ship alongside, most of the time there will be noise on the radio, distractions, and people shouting and screaming and giving you orders that are completely incorrect. It’s the same as adjusting the ‘noise-to-signal’ ratio on your radio. You have to tune out the noise and focus only on what matters. The same applies to the total lies being spouted by our government and media. Tune it out.
Lesson 4 – The Cover-Up Is The Crime
I’ve been involved in several marine accident investigations recently, involving quite minor collisions and groundings. In each case, however, one element was common.
The captains who owned up to their mistakes and reported their incidents fully kept their jobs. The ones who tried to minimise it, or cover it up, were dismissed.
Why?
Because a cover-up is worse than an admission of guilt.
Remember that, as it now comes out that the risk of vaccine injuries is not the ‘one-in-a-billion’ that that 20-year-old squaddie who stuck your arm full of junk promised you. As it now transpires that a person receiving four covid jabs has a one in 1200 chance of serious injury or death (far higher than the risk of the disease), ask yourself, where is the person taking ownership of their mistake?
And remember the censorship.
What right do these people have, to censor the stories of victims of vaccine injury? What right do they have to control their speech, or your thoughts?
No right at all.
Never forget the corporate, social media, mainstream media, and taxpayer subsidised censorship that interfered with danger signals being sent to your loved ones in good time.
The cover-up is the crime.
Lesson 4 B – it’s The Same Thing
As it is the last day of July, my thoughts naturally turned to Christmas.
Something every sincere parent wonders about is the ethics of telling their children that Santa Clause brings gifts to them, so they better behave. There is internal debate over whether the metaphorical introduction to the judgement of God is worth the inevitable discovery of deception (circa age six or seven) and violation of trust.
The ‘lower-light’ answer to this is that Saint Nicholas was a real man, who did anonymously donate gifts to children. We keep his tradition alive because it is nice for children to enjoy presents, without it being about the gratification of the ego of the giver. Celebration in winter, light in the darkness, pagan rebirth, etc.
The ‘higher-light’ answer is a little more interesting. The miracle of Christmas that happens every year is the acting out of a shared commitment to an ideal. If we all act as if Santa is real, and then real gifts do appear under the tree, the effect is the same, as if the story were literally true. And this means that if we all act in a heroic, virtuous, self-sacrificing and Christ-like fashion, then the effect will be the same as if God himself walks the earth and dwells in us.
The effect is the same.
This line of argument is an effective inoculation against the time-wasting distraction of a debate that is taking place in the independent online media at the moment.
Did they know they were going to kill 10,000 people with these shots or was it a failure due to moral panic? Was it conspiracy or incompetence? Evil or opportunism?
The effect was the same.
No wonder people believe we are ruled by lizards, eh?