A) Some of you may remember a sci-fi film in which aliens gradually take over the world by sucking out human souls from their bodies before taking them over. I’m afraid that I now have firm evidence that this is no longer fiction – but fact! A real human being is able to sympathise, empathise and think – not just in a binary, logical way, but laterally, analogically and imaginatively, i.e. Joined up creative thinking. In contrast, although an alien can be extremely intelligent, it can only think in straight lines. Operating like a computer, it will have a separate program for X, and a separate program for Y – but will be unable to make connections between them.
Dear reader – there are aliens on Torridge District Council. How else to explain how their program X – trying to win a Mary Portas Award to revive Bideford Town Centre, and their program Y – considering planning permission for an out of town McDonald’s and Premier Inn, etc. on the woodland site opposite Atlantic Village?
How else to explain their program A – ‘consulting’ whether to spend over half a million pounds widening a road and building a café and BBQ area on Northam Burrows, and their program B – how to prevent Northam Burrows being inundated by the sea and stop the toxic old tip site washing away and poisoning the Taw Torridge Estuary?
As I say, aliens don’t do joined up thinking; they lack the human gift of imagination.
Part of the training for an Outward Bound Course involved showing a client how to make a shelter in which he would live alone in the wilderness for two or three days. No mobile phone or TV – just the person alone with nature. They might be visited by a tutor during this time, who would sit with them for a while, and listen to anything they wanted to share, which had been repressed by the scramble to compete in the noisy, frantic world. For many, this was often the most memorable part of their Outward Bound challenge.
B) Chips, But No Fish
We are fortunate in N. Devon because we have the Marine Reserve aroundLundyIsland. It is proving hugely successful. Not so elsewhere, where alien intelligence in the E.U. and other government organisations in the world are engaged in mass piscine extermination.
Consider the following. In order to conserve fish stocks, trawlers, some trailing nylon, near invisible nets miles long, catch a huge tonnage of fish. However, only those fish of a certain size are allowed to be kept – the rest being thrown back into the sea, dead! Only an alien is unable to understand that small fish grow into big fish, and thus ploughing the oceans in this way inevitably leads to the wholesale destruction of fish stocks.
Consider – in September this year Marine Scientists suggested that there could be as few as a hundred fully mature cod left in the North Sea – because no cod over thirteen years old (their breeding age) had been landed inUK ports in 2011. In the early 1970s 360,000 tonnes of cod were caught in theNorth Sea. The E.U. has just put a quota of 32,000 tonnes of cod to be caught this year, but many think that even this figure is unsustainable, and will lead to a complete collapse of the cod fishing industry, as happenedNorthern Canada 20 years ago.
It is a similar story for salmon. Before 1950, which is when the feeding grounds of salmon were discovered offGreenland, salmon in British rivers such as the Taw & Torridge, were plentiful. Having almost trawled out theGreenland feeding grounds, an angler now considers himself fortunate if he catches a salmon in a British river.
There has also been a 95% collapse in eel numbers since 1980, but they can still be caught commercially. Ditto bass, which can only breed when they are about 42cm long – yet commercial fisherman are still allowed to bring them to market at 36cm in length!
The aliens can’t see a problem with all of this. They are already subsidising commercial fish farms, cramming salmon into cages like battery hens, and seem surprised when disease breaks out. Naturally, for them, they believe that antibiotics will eventually solve this difficulty. As alien control of the planet accelerates, anything free-range is considered uneconomic and rather primitive.
Dear Reader – how human and free-range are you? Don’t let the aliens suck the soul out of your body!
Don’t Send Me Information – Communicate
Once upon a time, a huge liner was constructed and launched with great fanfare and celebration. For the first time in history it was generally believed that this ship, unlike all other vessels which had sailed the world’s oceans in previous times, was unsinkable. The ships of other empires – Greek, Roman, Spanish, British, etc. – were all vulnerable, but now the latest science and technology had produced a vessel that could withstand any storm or accident. Mankind was quickly harnessing nature, and the Titanic was the hubristic expression of his new power.
When the Titanic hit that iceberg, there was stunned disbelief – but as reality broke in, trust in the ship and the relaxed routine of life on board, quickly dissolved. Reactions varied from outright panic and a desire to save oneself at any cost, to brave acceptance and self-sacrifice.
Imagine now that our consumer/technological empire is the Titanic. Most people, particularly in the ‘developed world’ have put their trust in the productive power of scientific invention. Despite the finite nature of the planet’s resources, they nevertheless subscribe to the idea of ever increasing production and consumption, entranced by the magic of technological gadgetry which allows them to instantly access and exchange information. This information revolution, it is believed, can now help overcome the ignorance of previous generations, whose leaders tended to keep the power of knowledge to themselves, and were able to manipulate and brainwash their subjects into accepting a subservient position.
But information exchange is not communication, whose meaning is rooted in the words ‘community’, ‘communion’ – the mutual knowing that lovers and poets do best ‘with sighs too deep for words’. I can know masses of information about someone I’ve never met, e.g. a celeb or politician, but until I spend time with them, talk, and above all listen to them – commune with them, I can never really know them.
Can more information make a nurse more caring? Just because you have an Oxbridge degree in Mathematics, does it automatically mean you are able to teach Mathematics to a class of thirty 15 year olds? An empathetic nurse may help me get better quicker, and an imaginative Maths teacher with no degree might well be able to enthuse me.
This is the great myth of the information revolution: it is assumed that the more people can access information, the more rational and intelligent will be their decision making; but all we are doing is training brains to process more and more information and assuming that the most intelligent people are the ones who can memorise or access the most, and regurgitate it in the required formats. Today you are seldom asked to think for yourself, place values on information, or attempt to see and respond to the relationships between things. Thus today, there are people leading big companies employing thousands of people, with degrees in accountancy or computer programming, who are emotionally semi-literate and have no feeling for history, poetry or the needs of their workers, or the Earth itself, i.e. They view their company like a machine – a computer program which they control, with regard to nothing else but profit. This is another example of alien intelligence at work.
In contrast, the analogy that I often find myself thinking about is that of the tree. Gales of information are blowing through the leaves and twigs – the brain. More and more people merely twitter and tweet, trying to respond to every nuance as the foliage is blown about: they feel they have no time, indeed many would be afraid to be still and silent, and let the deeper meaning of the branches and unifying trunk, let alone their spiritual roots, feed their minds and help them make creative sense of the swirling world of information battering their brains.