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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

If I was a Despot

[3 minute read ] 

If I was a despot I could fix the country's problems. Here are some edicts:

       'Everyone must be weighed and if you are too heavy you must park your car half a mile from your home. If you still want to carry your favourite processed food you will get exercise with it!'

       'You can only use the water you carry from a mile away. Water for children will be delivered, half a litre per kilo of child.'

       'Everyone will get an interest-free £5,000 loan to start a business or contribute to a money-making scheme at the age of 21. You can pool the money with other entities. The most profitable new business in specified regions, each year, will be awarded £100,000 to use for outreach purposes, training and apprenticeships. The locals will be taxed to pay for this.'

       'Every week there will be a lottery to determine who must visit the local elderly person in their street. Teenagers will be exempt from this on the grounds of safety. £5 every week should be paid to a Christmas hamper fund for the benefit of elderly people, for exemption from the lottery.'

       'All tax-payers will contribute fifty pence per week to the RNLI.'

       'All able people over the age of 16 and under retirement age who do not work or are not in training shall be conscripted until such time as they find alternative work. Conscription shall be for a minimum of two years. Wages will not be paid. Payment shall be in the form of training across a wide field of activities and skills, from figure-skating and skiing to electronic and chemical engineering.'

       'All persons over the age of 11 years old will have a Binet-Stanford IQ test every ten years and career advice given accordingly.'

       'Cannabis shall be a class B drug and custodial sentences shall be given for a second offense.'

       'The national speed limit on motorways and dual carriageways shall be 50mph / 80 kph. The fuel savings from this adjustment shall pay for enforcing police coverage of our roads.

       'Points may be accrued for good neighbourly conduct which shall be redeemable against your annual tax bill.'

       'Every pound spent abroad must be matched by a similar amount paid to your local school or college in your town or city.'

       'Maypole dancing in villages shall be compulsory.'

       'Long Skipping ropes will be provided to be shared by every twenty homes. A skipping rope monitor shall be elected for each rope.'

       'No powered tool or apparatus shall be used on Sundays.'

       'Leaders of political parties must be elected by the public from a shortlist of candidates formed by the party politicians.The only people eligible to vote shall be those who voted for a politician of the appropriate party, even if that candidate was not elected in a General Election or By-election.'

       'Utility businesses shall be nationalised and prices made uniform across the country.'

       'Under sixteens shall be financially rewarded for reporting previously unreported potholes. Creating potholes shall be punished by deletion of social media accounts and a custodial sentence for one parent or grandparent of the perpetrator's choice.'

       'The sentence for Burglars, Robbers and thieves shall be increased to be a maximum of life imprisonment. Upon the arrest of thieves and burglars all their possessions shall be seized. Whenever a burglar or thief is given a custodial sentence one other non-violent prisoner who is not a thief shall be released on curfew, and compulsory training at a regional college or The Open University shall be undertaken. There will be a televised event wherein the convicted thief or burglar's possessions, including cars, properties, watches, jewellery, and banked money, shall be legally transferred to the newly released prisoner. Within two weeks the newly-released prisoner must donate either all the possessions or £1000 to a local youth or community group. They may sell some or all of the possessions to meet this mandate. If no qualification is achieved they shall be returned to prison and a different prisoner released in their stead. The prisoner to be released must personally thank the burglar or thief every day for a week prior to release and the televised event. Probation following their release will continue until the subject has been in full time employment for a full year following achievement of a relevant qualification.

       'New parents must attend parental training to achieve a strict standard of competence. Training shall continue in perpetuity until the standard is achieved. Assessments shall be conducted every five years and re-training administered where necessary.'

       'The only entities that shall be allowed to own more than one property for the purpose of residency shall be Councils.'

       'Private rents shall be capped across the nation commensurate with a value per square meter of available space, including cupboards.'

       'Anyone who says 'haitch' instead of 'aitch' shall be subject to a full year of education, which shall include British history, English, Celtic, Gaelic and Welsh grammar, dialect and regional accent training, and enforced extraction of Americanised words and spelling from their lexicon. Re-offending shall incur a further year of modern language training. Further recidivists shall be compelled to undertake singing lessons and must appear on Britains Got Talent for public pillorying.'

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[ 7 minute read ]

Me in a fantasy Medieval Village

I am confused. I already know that if I saw myself coming towards me down the street I would cross the street to avoid having a conversation. Yet, I would love to have an identical twin with the same thinking characteristics as me; we would have such fun. Of course, I am able to stand outside of myself and have deep discussions with myself; you know, one of me sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cup half raised to my lips, and the other paused from doing the washing-up, while we hone in on a fine point. I am an old hand at that. We all do that, to some extent. In fact, sometimes I refer to myself as 'we'. Don't go distancing yourself from that. Whenever, you ask yourself a question; as in, taking a moment for solely pondering an issue, hands on hips or hand to chin, you are doing just the same. It is merely looking at something from a different perspective.

Yet, I would still avoid myself in the street. 

Because I know that, whenever I notice an anomaly and can be bothered to shunt it to 'Processing' I rewind the tape to see what I just did. My local shopkeeper, while I am at the counter trying to 'meet' him periodically looks away, just above my left shoulder. Does my breath smell? Is he offended by the bent of my words? Should I have washed a little better? Paranoid or observant? It is no secret that I have (I was going to write 'suffer from') Post Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD. In most cases, I understand, people with PTSD have attendant hyper-vigilance, I think because danger might jump out at us at any time. 'Once bitten, twice shy.' I have hyper-vigilance. It turns out that there is a CCTV monitor on the pillar to my left, that makes up part of the shop counter. Yep, definitely paranoid that time.

Hyper-vigilance with a high IQ is a super-power, if one wants to combine the two for good practical purposes. A driving job is enhanced by hyper-vigilance and a high IQ offers creative solutions to sudden unusual events. Good problem solving skills on my CV doesn't mean the same on my CV than on my neighbour's when I am interviewed for a job. Most of the time, I am trying to not skip a few steps in conversation so the interviewer can keep up. I once met a woman outside ALDI and as usual, I intellectually ambushed her. Don't worry, everybody gets the same treatment. Yes, I know, it is as rude as that - ambushed. However, you realise I am in charge of these words and I could rewrite a sentence or two to make it seem as though I am nice; I didn't. We'll come back to her.

Intellectually ambushing someone is a shortcut to a conversation, and for me is not at all consciously deliberate. 'Lovely weather' is an accepted opening for a conversation. I don't do that - waste of time. My autopilot is set to seek like-minded people as rapidly as possible. In a supermarket setting there are only a few seconds to displace the distractions of the supermarket shelves with something that compels the shopper to disengage from their collecting task and engage with me. I am not rude about it though, outside of interrupting people's thoughts. Guilty!

Back to the the intellectually ambushed woman (everybody gets the same treatment). Only three per cent of the worlds population (when it was still seven billion) have an IQ that matches or exceeds mine. For some context, Madonna, the eighties pop queen has an IQ ten points higher than mine. The woman outside ALDI - It was really hot last Summer, and she had bought a multi-pack of ice-lollys to take home. Yet, she was so fascinated by me; and it was keenly reciprocated, that she let her ice-lollys almost completely melt before she tore herself from our mind-meld over two hours later. There was no physical attraction between us and we openly discussed how we fancied someone or other. In other words, the pursuit of a physical union between us was far from our thoughts. That would have been the most shameful waste of our time. Our conversation took the form of making bullet points that the listener instantly filled in with content; skeletons of conversation that the other person fleshed out; connecting the dots. The rapidity of our conversation was intense while the breadth and depth seemed boundless. We, obviously, could contain it, because she, plainly, could match my IQ, or even exceed it. This was something I had longed for all my life; this conversation. She told me about how she fancied a man that all her friends warned her was a narcissistic psychopath. 

Let me just take a moment to colour-in the outline and shape of the meaning of the word 'psychopath'. Don't think 'mad axe-man raging through the woods'. Instead, think about the car driver who cuts-in at the last moment at dual carriageway narrowings, or someone who doesn't understand the impact that their actions has on others. I rather think I have described a narcissistic psychopath in the driver who cuts in at the last moment. Another metaphor is a driver who overtakes a cyclist immediately before braking for slow traffic (the cyclist will not be impeded by slow four-wheel traffic; narcissistic psychopath).

Back to the woman in the car park: Her friends had warned her that her beau is a narcissistic psychopath. What they mean is: he is a drain on everyone's resources; spiritual, financial, physical, emotional, spatial. He, being a psychopath, doesn't realise he is a drain, and he, being a narcissist, believes everything should come to him. I have deep experience of being held down and physically, mentally, and psychologically throttled by just such a person. I have PTSD from just such a person.

Let's make it colourful. we are all familiar with Disney cartoons, wherein the characters are enhanced for fun, like Baloo in 'Jungle Book'. Most of us are familiar with darker characters in video games. Let's imagine a fantasy medieval scene in which the characters have a market and the houses are oak-beamed. The woman and I are chatting in the market place while chickens in woven willow cages cluck nearby. Other women are nodding and pointing at us, though not maliciously. A few come over and say to the woman, 'Mardor is evil, stay away from him' and 'Don't fall under Mardor's spell'. They don't mean me. Right before this woman is me, known for my wit, also saying to the woman, 'Stay away!' 

This woman talking to me in ALDI car-park is that woman. I know she had never met anyone like me; she was in awe of me. She didn't realise that she was beyond equal to me. 'You're amazing', she told me. I was finding it hard to keep up with HER! You also have to understand that both of us are not good at convergent thinking, and tend to operate using largely divergent thinking. Fuzzy lines and fairies rather than grids and maps. You would think that she would listen to the women in the fantasy market and me in the real world when we say 'Stay away!' yet, she told me she was still not sure. Mardor is a Wizard. If this woman and I stood together as the 'Power of Two', no Witches or Wizards would succeed. Needless to say, she had already confessed to having PTSD and other mental disturbances. She was adrift, just like I am; remember I am confused. The chances of finding a healer in the fantasy medieval village that was cleverer than either of us is slim, at best. With only three percent of the world's population matching or exceeding our IQ any advice she gets from the local herb-gatherer will only be wheat to her. She had told me that she has hyper-vigilance, yet in love and attraction, she has none.

Most people think me a fool. I am a fool; having a high IQ doesn't make me clever. Indeed, many people can tie me in intellectual knots. For me, with divergent thinking I will probably outmatch near everyone who leans heavily on divergent thinking, but in everyday life, me with low convergent thinking, any person with uncluttered convergent thinking and an average IQ is my senior, if they have some divergent thinking (I believe it is called imagination).

I am fairly certain that the woman in the ALDI car park will be a constant source of nourishment for her 'Mardor', for some years to come. She and I were speaking an 'ancient language' well, and still she was not convinced. The 'ancient language' is the same as everyone else's and a poor attempt at a language that aliens speak.

But, I am still confused.

The Stanford-Binet method of IQ testing gives results for 40 - 60 in large parts of Africa. Without too much research it can be understood that this method of testing is for The Global North. Africans are highly adaptive, and I would perish within days if I suddenly found myself in their environments. My understanding is that someone with an IQ of 70 or less needs 24hr support to survive in the West, so go figure! as the Americans say. Since a huge part of the world's population is in Africa and Asia it should be considered highly improbable that my IQ is matched or exceeded by only 3% of the world's population, since testing for parts of the world should be conducted with a different approach to survivability in the Global North.