It was 0630 in the morning, still morning twilight. The glow of the promised sunrise still lesser than the monochromatic red lamps on the ship’s bridge, providing dim silhouettes to work by.
The four piercing digital beeping noises, hurriedly pressed into the keypad let me know the captain was coming to the bridge early, and in a hurry.
‘Where the hell could it be!?! It’s unbelievable! We need to find it. Someone needs to be fired for this, I can’t believe’….
‘Oh, I know, I know, it’s terrible. Don’t worry, we’ll have the guys search the ship in the morn…’
‘But it’s theft! We need to punish whoever…’
‘Yes, yes, come over here’…
‘But where on earth is my bloody rabbit!?’
The captain was able to console the General Manager and Cruise Director, who were absolutely devastated that the 8-foot-tall paper mâché Easter Bunny that they had spent weeks building and decorating for the passenger’s Easter Party had suddenly disappeared overnight. They were absolutely fizzing! In full witch-hunt mode.
The Captain and the Staff Captain (2nd in command of the ship) were both charming Frenchmen and managed to calm the GM & CD enough to get them off the bridge with a promise of a search. Then they retired to a corner of the bridge wing for a cigarette and a little giggle.
For you see, the search was a big joke to them. They knew nothing would be found because they had – as the responsible adults on the ship – taken it upon themselves to switch off the CCTV cameras, sneak down in the wee hours of the morning and perform a Bunny-Overboard float test.
Why would the most senior officers on board a 6-star luxury cruise liner engage in such petty theft and vandalism?
Superstition.
Sailors don’t allow rabbits on their ships, and rabbits are so feared by sailors that even the word ‘rabbit’, must never be uttered on a ship. To do so would be to invite all manner of bad luck and evil upon the fate of the ship and its crew.
Instead, only the term ‘underground chickens’ is permitted when referring to Beatrix Potter characters.
This is an ancient European seafaring superstition going back to pre-Roman pagan times when bunnies were seen as mysterious go-betweens. Living half in the underworld and half in our world, they visit the dead. And if you weren’t careful, they might whisper the displeasure of your ancestors in the earth and call you to join them on their next trip down below.
So that’s why the Easter Bunny had to go in the drink, you see. They were protecting us all from those naïve American landlubbers, who knew not of our ways.
Superstitions like that, many thousands of years old, are alive and well at sea.
Another one that is maintained universally by sailors is a prohibition on whistling. Not that we have anything against a merry tune. Rather, to whistle a tune from your lips is to ‘call up the wind’.
Modern types like to dismiss this as a ‘common sense’ superstition from the age of steam, where ships would signal warnings to each other by whistles. Avoiding whistling was sensible and avoided interfering with important safety communications.
Well, that’s wrong, because nobody uses whistle signals anymore, but you still won’t find a real sailor tooting and hooting away the hours with wetted lips.
We don’t whistle because that big muscly chap who lives at the edge of the map might be offended at our mortally feeble attempts to generate wind and decide to come and show us how it is really done. And once you’ve seen the full force of the storms that King Neptune’s wind will bring, you’ll never want to get into a competition with that spirit again.
I was on another ship that had been converted from an old Soviet spy ship. There were many mysterious chambers contained in the steelwork down below, and the ship had some quite scary enclosed spaces. The Filipino deck crew were convinced it had been haunted, and they had had a number of incidents and fatalities to back their claim. The previous Russian owners had clearly desecrated the souls of sailors here, and they wanted revenge. There were fires and accidents all the time.
In response, they took the coffin that is kept on board passenger ships and filled it with objects from the days of the previous owners. A priest was summoned, and the coffin was cremated on deck, ghosts exorcised. Another coffin was never permitted on board that ship, despite all other ships in the fleet being required to have at least one.
The result? That ship never had another fatality, despite her design troubles, and went on to star in Hollywood movies! No passenger ever died on that ship, and believe me, that is miraculous, given the high proportion of coffin-dodgers among its patrons.
Ancient solutions, to ancient fears? Or sensible precautions?
Why take the chance, right?
I hate superstition, so I’ve always gotten into trouble for this at sea. My favourite form of joking is saying things that aren’t true. People hate that at sea. They are often the type that believes if you say something, it will come true.
Pigs should be tattooed on your feet, but only ever called ‘curly tails.’ Seasickness is cured with a bucket of seawater over your head. Red sky at morn, sailor be warned. Never sail on a Friday. The banishment of Black Cats and Bananas. Step on board with your right foot because your left foot would be disastrous. Never let a woman on board, or say goodbye, or cut your hair or nails.
Well, call me Jonah and pass me another Albatross burger, because I’ve never bothered with any of that and I’m not dead yet.
Jeremiah 10:2
Thus says the Lord,
“Do not learn the way of the nations,
And do not be terrified by the signs of the heavens
Although the nations are terrified by them…
https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Superstition
The Bunny Overboard incident made me laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed at an illegal discharge of waste to the sea before.
But superstition isn’t funny. It’s a result of a deeply human capacity for extrapolation and part of our survival kit. It has its place in discovering cause and effect, with a healthy margin for error on the side of caution. But it is a wide margin that we need to manage carefully.
I know all about extrapolation, and interpolation, not just from the tedious Astro-navigation and ship stability calculations we had to do at nautical college. Rather, from watching human beings.
For example, my wife is a worrier. This means she is more of an extrapolator by nature.
What if the boiler goes off when you’re away, and I don’t know how to fix it? And it snows? And the kids freeze to death in the night? And they take me away to jail because I can’t figure out how to connect my stupid phone, to our stupid WiFi, and login into the stupid online thermostat app!?! Eh, what then, Scott?
That’s what worry is. We look at a small thing going wrong, and our amygdala, the highly evolved threat detection system in our brains, does an extrapolation calculation to imagine just how wildly wrong things could get.
It can be useful. For example, when my wife is watching me (not a worrier) and my 3-year-old son (also, not a worrier), play with my axe in the back garden, helpful suggestions abound. And where would we be without her? A&E, that’s where! J
However, this tendency can also be very harmful. For example, when people tell you that ‘leaving your house and breathing will spread invisible symptomless plague and kill grannies everywhere, and then mutations, and it will never end, and eventually, eventually our selfish ways WILL make this a dangerous disease that kills everyone’.
So, you see, to live freely can mean different things to different people. For some, it means living free of illness, or free of disapproval from peers and society.
For me, freedom means freedom from arbitrary injustice.
I accept that I will never be free from illness, hunger, death, emotional pain, sorrow, loss and fear. Those things are what it means to be human. Ideologues and political cults will promise to take those things away, so long as you pay attention to them, and give them your permission.
The state is a superstition. It is a corrupt priesthood with no special powers or access to truth. We need to free ourselves from it in the same way that we need to know that saying the word rabbit on a boat is not going to sink us.
And when our immune systems banish illness, but Boris Johnson takes credit for that by claiming booster jabs did the trick, we should view his unscientific claims as we might view an Aztec priest claiming that the sun has risen once more, thanks to his nightly booster rounds of child sacrifice. The cart cannot ever come before the horse.
Their superstitious power lies in magical category thinking. ‘Your scientist or doctor disagrees? Well, THE GOVERNMENT scientist is better. Did you commit credit card fraud and money counterfeiting? Well, that’s totally different from the Bank of England and the National Debt’. ‘You stabbed someone to death because of their nationality? But you weren’t wearing a uniform when you did it? Jail, not medals for you.’ Etc.
Superstition is extrapolation and false correlation.
So, what is the opposite of Extrapolation? The opposite of the tendency to look outside of the known poles, peer into the unlimited potential for chaos in the void, and cling dearly to ‘what we have’?
Interpolation.
That is, looking in between the known two poles.
Everything we are is grounded on this earth. Our location. Our ancestry. Our biology. Our spirit.
We must look within to find solutions. God, who is truth, will be found within.
It feels as though we have turned our back on our friends and become superstitiously fixated on the power of the state, like pagan fire-worshippers. I mean, why are people still listening to Tony Blair, but nobody cares about Matt Le Blanc? They’re both just 90s throwbacks? One is associated with extreme socialism and state violence, the other brought joy to millions. Who do people revere most?
The love of power is a dangerous element that we need to guard against in our own hearts.
We have given over the battleground of our hearts and minds to the false idols of state power. We equate their power with truth and virtue. We equate their authority with benevolence and competence.
That is the superstition of the state. A religion of faulty cause and effect, swapping the harsh reality of standing on our own two feet for comforting narratives. At great cost.
This is where the real Faultline lies today in British society, and what explains the deafening silence of the professional classes. I think knowing which people didn’t hold any assets before all this monetary inflation, versus those who did, largely predicts your attitude toward the outrageous authoritarianism we’ve seen in recent years.
When I started to fall out of favour at my previous employer, I held fast, believing they wouldn’t sack me while I was keeping the show on the road. However, they didn’t want me to travel, meet people or join the company’s ship because I wasn’t willing to take a covid-19 vaccine. They were even scared I’d tell anyone, lest I embarrass the company. Stepping carefully, I avoided being fired. However, one day I was sat down for a ‘talking to’ by a friend of mine who was my immediate supervisor.
‘I think you should get it. I know we disagree on the vaccines, but it will just make your life easier. You’re setting yourself on a path now.’
I was not for moving. The appeal to comfort had no effect on me because I am not comfortable. I struggled, working twice as hard as many that I know to get out of poverty, get married, have kids and get onto the property ladder. And I only managed that because I married well.
I’ve been poor before. I know I can be poor again. That is a nice little feature of growing up poor that you don’t appreciate at the time. It gives you an unshakable inner strength, later on. They can’t bribe you by withholding holiday privileges if you never had such luxuries in the first place.
What I told my friend was simple enough:
‘I don’t care if I die from this disease. I’ve already had covid. What they are doing is wrong. If I put things I don’t need into my body because my boss or a politician says so, then that changes my relationship with them forever. I’m not having that. Whatever the consequences are. I am a grown up. Let the chips fall where they may’.
The comfortable people in this country are the camels. Personal sacrifice is the eye of the needle.
The extrapolators are often not practical people. They belong to the managerial classes. They have become wealthy over three generations of money printing and believe in their conceited way that their house price somehow went up 5 times what they paid for it because of their IQ and shrewd judgement. These are the people who believe inflation is ‘prices going up’ AND, that if we’re in a recession you can ‘inflate your way out of it’.
Ettiene de la Boétie described how the benefits of martial success from the warrior class of old, trickled down and bought compliance from the lower classes who stayed in line with the hierarchy. Although now we have nuclear weapons so sustained nation-state conflicts are no longer such a part of the business model. I believe that’s fundamentally why we’ve moved to 5th Gen warfare and a one-world government at war against the people. As such, we are now ruled by the technocracy of corporate/civil service/NGO/activist types. The Worrier Class, instead of the Warrior Class.
These people, like Boétie described, live firmly on the beneficial side of the equation of the current sins of our governmental model. And they don’t really need the state for anything other than the occasional passport for a trip to their house in France, or a bit of regulatory capture and grant funding for their tax-efficient constructs.
They look at the situation and trust government because they have benefitted wildly from the status quo, for many years. When they get worried and extrapolate, the cost-benefit analysis of not believing the government would be too detrimental to their well-fed coffers. And so even those who know better, allow themselves to go with the flow.
The interpolators are different. We are the younger professionals who struggle to join the asset holding classes. We went to university because Gordon Brown and Tony the Tiger signed us up for a life of indentured servitude on the promise of greater lifetime earnings. Except, when we graduated in 2008, it was 300+ applicants for every vacancy on a salary of £8k or more. The NHS has never worked for us. In Scotland, our villages filled up with English people who bought their council house in London for £10k and sold it for a million. Then they come up here where we can’t do that and sneer at the poverty of a people who’ve lived here since the last ice age. We remember the WMD lies, Northern Ireland being the source of terrorism, Sierra Leone, Libya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq and we have noticed these spectres to be a fairly permanent feature of life. (Despite having several Ukrainian friends, I actually breathed a sigh of relief when the narrative switched from Covid to Ukraine. It felt like getting back to normal levels of evil.)
We are the ones who saw our school chums join the armed forces pay full income tax on their paltry £18k army salary. All while Drummer Lee Rigby was decapitated by terrorists living on taxpayers’ money in our capital city.
We look at the limits of what we see, and we know that we are working harder, for less and less. And we knew when lockdowns started that the government didn’t give a hoot if we died, as soon as they started to praise us as ‘heroic’ essential workers of the Soviet Union. Ahem, I mean, the Untied Kingdom.
The interpolators of the working class and below know that are being lied to, and that the state does not care if we live or die. Only that we stay in our lane. That’s because we look at the facts of our own lives and infer from there. The cost-benefit calculation of believing the state has never worked out for us in the past, so why would it now?
You can’t wake a man who is pretending to be asleep, as the old saying goes.
However, what can we do?
I will continue to do what I’ve always done. I managed to elevate myself from a poor single parent divorced household. The skills I’ve gained on my way up the social hierarchy are the same skills you need to survive the predations of the doomsayers and the state.
- Switch off the television – BBC newsreaders are the modern-day false prophets, promising invisible forces like microplastics, carbon and covid mean the end is nigh. Every story is urges you only to pay attention to the high priests of the civil service and the technocracy. SWITCH THEM OFF.
- Don’t ever confuse rank with authority – Just because Elon Musk or Bill Gates said something, and they are wealthier than you, does not make their opinion truer than your opinion. Look to the facts around you and infer from those. The social world is not the real world.
- Lead by example – Speak to your neighbours. Show them you are unafraid. Tell them you are not vaccinated, and why. You’ll be amazed at how many people will come to you later in confidence and tell you they are the same but have been scared to say.
- Be unafraid – if they are trying to scare you with something, look at the facts that you can observe by yourself, with your own eyes and interpolate from that. Do not believe in ‘runaway feedback loops’, or ‘future variants’ or the myriad of invisible far away evils that are used to keep you paying attention to those with their hands in your wallet.
Know this – we all must die. But that doesn’t mean you should worry your life away. We’ll get there when we get there. If you worry all the way, you die many times.
The way to win the battle over the forces of darkness that seek to make life worse in the meantime, is to inoculate yourself against their lies. Do not concede your mental territory to the doomsayers.
Do not let the worrier-class rule your mind. Only listen to worriers, like my wife, who love you deeply and have proven they care about you.