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Bigger is Better

[ 5 minute read ]

Opinion

So Africa is bigger than we thought, huh?

Apparently the Mercator maps represent Africa as being the same size as Greenland which is in reality about fifteen times smaller. That should deter some day-sailors from trying to sail around the coast of Africa in a weekend. Africa should be taken seriously. From my perspective, I already wouldn't lie down on the ground to sleep in Africa without at least something between me and the ground; something I have done countless times in Europe. I had an officer friend in the RAF Regiment who told me about his training in Belize. Although Belize is far from Africa I think there are similarities in that my friend's story related to one of the soldiers lying down on the jungle floor and then days later finding that larvae were erupting from his arms. Whether this is a true story, now I look at it in hindsight, is highly suspect. In fact, I now realise that it is a fabrication to scare trainees to NOT lie down on jungle floors without some kind of barrier. On a training exercise they would, of course, been scratching their arms and the larvae would not be allowed to erupt before medical attention was administered. In the 'wild' when you are fleeing the enemy or creeping up on them, you can't just stand up and pop over to the medical clinic or field doctor. In any case, the point was made and no doubt well received. My officer friend did say it happened to someone else; always someone else, eh?

The move to represent the size of Africa in two dimensions, as it relates to the size of other countries was almost unanimously voted for by the UN except for one country which voted against it and six abstentions. I shan't name that country that voted against it because their National Security Agency is hot on the tails of independent thinkers, including those outside their own borders. Suffice it to say that 'size matters' and the concept of demonstrating the true size of Africa on two dimensional maps relates to the consideration of investment. There is, I presume, more opportunity for savagery in a big country than a small one. Rapacious desire has more room to develop where there is land that no-one can see from the nearest town. You know; digging a small hole in the Lake District to bury your dead pet will get noticed by the locals or the visiting walkers. Scraping off square miles of the earth's crust to look for ilmenite ore, the source material for making titanium dioxide (the whiteness of paint and toothpaste among other stuff), in Africa won't be noticed by the town dwellers hundreds of miles away. Mineral poachers only have satellites to hide from.

The potential of Africa being a good investment due to its size was the UN's focus, but this was first conceived by the African nations. All they have to do now is make sure corruption is reduced to a manageable level for outside investors to feel comfortable. My understanding is that when diamonds were first found and the locals were employed to dig, the locals stole the rare big ones and handed in the myriad small stones. If I was a treasure hunter I might not need a boat to look for Spanish gold or sunken pirate ships, I might just need to know a bit more African history and speak to the right people in small villages. Yet, surely, I am being prejudiced by snippets of information I have egregiously stitched together to form a flimsy heuristic, which rule of thumb, in the light of day, many people would call out as racism. I wouldn't argue against them. I wouldn't because the one member country in the United Nations that voted against revealing the true size of Africa wants to be shown as more important than Africa, and has in the past been shown as almost as big as Africa on Mercator maps. Jealousy I have no time for and denying an entity any approbation or validation for potential is, in my eyes, just plain wrong. But, I am not considering the new world order when trade significantly shifts from the Global North to Africa. In the development of Africa we have another potentially cheap Asian-type workforce with access to rare earths and modern technology banging on their doors.

I was lucky to be able to ask a PhD graduate about his chosen field of study. It was Romano-Britain, I think. I floated a few layman questions and eventually understood that the reason that after the Romans left Britain the locals went back to their old ways and did away with underfloor heating and building with lime, was because the Romans took with them their ability to organise and specialise in singular tasks. Entering into an agrarian society with organisation could, I suggest, potentially produce a larger entity that could be a considerable threat to the rest of the world, both economically and physically through armed combat. But what do you do? Suppress the African nations? The African?

If we consider that China has a lot of investment across the world in developing countries and other countries want to stymie China's economic takeover effort, we might need to understand that allowing the manifestation of a potential superpower continent is not necessarily in the hands of the Global North. It is organisation that is the key to the opening of an African Pandora's Box. Taking the blindfold from the eyes of the African innovators may be only a few years away if creativity outside of necessity becomes available to a wider population. Reducing poverty in Africa would, no doubt throw up some interesting and novel work-arounds in hostile environments that currently cripple improvement. 

The Global North is indubitably a jealous entity which, I suspect, will be reluctant to hand over any significant control on economics and combat capability and so fairness is, I suspect, coloured by an executive decision to control growth; likewise China and India should be equally alarmed about the potential labour-force of Africa becoming organised, if it is not themselves who are the puppet-masters. Yes, I have just maligned the African and reduced them to being controllable wretches but what do you do? We saw the same in England during the Industrial Revolution when country-folk leading agrarian lifestyles 'upsticked' and handed themselves over to industrialists, future liability to debt and workhouses and even prison. While I have no reason or desire to offer African country workers as being two hundred years behind England, I do feel that a loose comparison to the plight of poor people in the past is a valid one and bears consideration. While many comfortable people bemoan the colonialism of empires past, I might metaphorically stand at their rallies with a placard that says 'See the present and look to the future.'

Perhaps though, the single UN member who voted against showing Africa as having even more potential by dint of its new perceived size is presenting a reality that the rest of the charitable world chooses to ignore simply because they want to share and be fair. Unfortunately, I feel that having an emotional force contribute to decision-making can create a manifestation that has a life of its own and will one day bite the hand of its feeder.

Just like lying down on a Belize jungle floor, any Global North entity is going to want a barrier between it and the tooth and claw of an African jungle. A jungle that is now likely to be considered more interesting than it was previously perceived as being before a new map becomes the standard.

The link to all the my posts https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

[ 8 minute read ]

You make me want to be a better person

Because we cannot hear what our voices sound like to others we are surprised to hear it when we first hear a recording of our own voice. Similarly, I once heard that if we met ourselves in the street we would always thereafter cross the road whenever we saw ourselves to avoid another meeting; such is the distaste we would have at our own selves. In other words, we would not want to be friends with ourselves.

The man in his fifties

      'What, you don't need me anymore?', said the man in his fifties to me as he came down the library stairs. This man did not seem to be offended nor surprised, merely bemused. I suspected he was not significant in improving my day, and he seemed to be wondering what he would do before he finally disassembled after gradually fading, if I continued to ignore him. At least, that is what I was wondering.

I ignored this familiar, though not recognised man. I had no idea who he was, simply because I had never seen myself before without prejudice, and never heard my own voice coming from outside my own head, without the resonances in my mouth and nasal passages acting as feedback.

At the time I didn’t realise that I had imagined and created him to guard me and warn me of impending danger, which he had so far done exceedingly well, though not in a language that I understood, more as an uncomfortable feeling, of concern in a particular direction. I knew that it had been useful, really useful, to be somehow connected to someone unbiased and disconnected from the world by a slight phase shift; a delay of a few milliseconds. I had also used him as a counselor, or just someone to act as devil’s advocate; a sounding board, if you will; this was, after all, someone I had never met in the real world, would never be punitively accountable to, or ever expect him to tell my secrets. But at this time of first meeting a visible, seemingly solid, manifestation I was still clueless.

Later, when I was talking to an elderly lady, the man in his fifties came back, talking nonsense, well, almost nonsense; certainly interjecting himself in a boorish manner. He seemed to be someone else's idea of confident and open, and desperately, though dismally, trying to demonstrate some kind of learnedness that encompassed the current situation and everything in it.

Disgusted, I walked away and left him to it - not wanting to become engaged in any kind of difficult dialogue with him. I felt sorry for the elderly woman, leaving her talking to, what was really just obfuscation of her slight problem with a shopping trolley; a bit like inclement weather. I didn't know it was myself she was talking to, me just a few days, weeks, years ago, but now projected as a probable future outcome. It was that same person, me in the past and recent present, compressed into a single moment. I had, in fact, two decades ago as a teenager, created a manifestation to fill the gap in my own emotional mis-education. No wonder no-one liked me now if I was going to be like that.

During the next few days a few people, strangers I met, looked at me a bit too long as though they recognised me, or  puzzled as though I had sworn out loud for no reason, or saw a change in me. How could they? They had never met me. No, but it soon became apparent they had met the man in his fifties. To be fair, they hadn't actually met the man in his fifties. Instead, their own being, imagined, created or organically existing, inside of these strangers, who in their cases happened to be the same age as themselves, had met the man in his fifties; this being my future self if I did not change my ways. They knew each other, and on days off had sometimes met and wildly pontificated their theories on everything; they were, after all, not bound by a fear of failure and consequently were supremely confident.

Later that day, I met the elderly woman again. The wheel on her stolen shopping trolley was still about to fall off, much like it had been ‘borrowed’ in the 1990s and had never been properly maintained up to today. That in itself was strange, but that she looked like how my wife might look in forty years was overwhelmingly disturbing.

       ‘Who was that awful man?’ she asked. I had a strange feeling then that I was not going to remain married. This fleeting feeling of deja vu and prescience broke the veil of incomprehension. I understood in a small way who the man in his fifties might be.

Hakim, my outrageously handsome childhood friend met me at the bar in the pub that evening. He was much more sanguine about how my day had played out. When I say handsome, I mean that I try not be seen with him in public because, although my features are plain, in comparison with his, I would be arrested for being in possession of an offensive face. My only advantage was that being slightly taller than average height I towered over his diminutive one metre fifty stature.

We stayed sitting at the bar, our usual place. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing’, he said, ‘I have had whole conversations with animals about re-incarnation.’ He climbed down from his stool and flambuoyantly limped over to the docile dog in the corner.

      ‘Jean-Paul', he said, ‘When will you give me that ten Francs you borrowed from me twenty years ago in Paris?’ Hakim has a sense of humour that makes it difficult for me to know when he is joking or just crazy.

While Hakim was in the toilet, the man in his fifties came in, stood briefly at the bar, then took a stool there, two stools away, waiting to be served. My heart sank. It plummeted into depths of despair when Hakim walked jauntily back in without his limp and climbed his stool again. Please don’t talk to him, Hakim, I prayed.

‘Long time no see, Martin! Have a beer?’ My name is Martin but Hakim was not looking at me. I was beginning to realise that Hakim might actually have whole conversations with dogs, and why he is supremely confident; he could see my older self, just as I could. For the first time, I regretted reading that book. ‘Mind Games’, when I was fourteen, and particularly the chapter titled. ‘How to manifest a being’. A kaleidoscope of jigsaw pieces fell into place as developing thoughts in my mind. Most of these I knew to be only suppositions, such as virgins have a greater ability to manifest in the spirit world, like Oracles in ancient civilisations. I had manifested ‘Martin’, my avatar, before I had scratched the itch of carnal desire with someone else. ‘Martin’ was consequently, not a temporary being.

Alarmingly, it seemed that my manifestation now had agency over itself. I suspected that Hakim already knew this. I knew that I would not shake ‘Martin’ off, as me in thirty years time, without help. I looked hopefully at Hakim, who ignored me.

       ‘Get Martin whatever he is drinking, please.’ he said to the barman, gesturing to the man in his fifties.

Oh no! I thought, This is the being that guided me, without tripping, through a completely dark wood, after I fell in a ditch. I didn’t like this manifestation but I should.

- end -

Are these the persons who precede us? 

Do these persons judge us before we ever arrive? So when first impressions in the real world count, they really don't?

Realistically, I think first impressions in the real world do count, yet not necessarily in the ways that many people postulate. We can tell if someone is fit by the way they walk. We can tell if someone is polite or merely aware of social protocols. I am fairly certain that it is how we perceive ourselves that causes us to shape ourselves to a reasonable conformity of our expectations. I slouch, not so much because I am tall, but because I am jaded. I make mock gestures of tipping my hat to strangers to let them know I have a sense of humour and a recognition of manners past, because I feel isolated. There are a myriad of tiny things I do which I do not recognise because I have not met myself and can’t see them. If I met myself coming down the street, I would see a man tipping an invisible hat and jauntily and happily moaning about his perception of the world. I would cross the road to avoid myself. The little story is about how awkward I would feel if I had to introduce my embarrassing invisible friend (me) to my other friends, as someone I love and respect. Strangely, this invisible friend is someone my friends and family have already met.

‘Old Martin, You make me want to be a better person.’