Therefore Spud should control how you think

But your still alive mate. So it musn’t have much effect.

“‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello. It looks like you’ve had a bit too much to think!”

Talk about things you’d like to do
You’ve got to have a dream
If you don’t have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true

I think.

More’s the pity but is it really original thought? It seems at best fifth hand

That’s not why I am, as Descartes might have said, but it is certainly what I do, pretty much to the exclusion of all else.

That’s rather depressing all told. Wouldn’t you be happier doing something else?

And thinking is a pretty time-consuming activity, which is why I don’t and can’t do other things, even though people often ask me to do so.

But when you don’t have any thoughts that really either make coherent sense or exist in the real world the futility of it becomes an issue

I am dedicated to thinking, and there’s a good reason for that. I believe that thinking changes the world.

It might well do but there is no evidence despite your supposition that you have actually achieved anything of note.

I was reminded of this when I was reading a Substack by a person called Aurelien, who is a political commentator who, for good reason, writes under a pseudonym, and I would strongly recommend his analysis. It’s deep and thoughtful.

Sounds like we should steer clear of it 

His suggestion in a very recent post was that we are facing an increasing climate of fear around the world. Not just fear, in fact, but fear, bellicosity and apocalyptic anticipation that has overtaken Western pundits and politicians. Mix this, he says, with pundits talking quite calmly about a war with China, and we are dangerously close to suffering a war psychosis.

I’d argue that’s almost the case for Ukraine rather than China. And you forget about the Middle East entirely, beyond wishing death on Israel.

In other words, thinking about war can itself change the world by changing the prospect of war. The idea, in that case, that our thoughts and actions are independent of each other, is quite absurd. They’re not. 
They can’t be, and they never will be. And that’s why thinking matters.

I see geopolitics is another speciality 

Now, throw in another form of distorted thinking, and that is the paranoia about migrants into the UK. Maybe half the UK population at present thinks that migrants are the biggest problem that we face, when in reality, just over 10,000 people a year attempt to enter the UK without any entitlement to do so, and most of them are returned.

So 790,000 to 990,000 coming in illegally are ‘entitled to be here’? Even if that were true, which it patently isn’t , wouldn’t the influx of such people cause issues? 

The fact is, majority opinion is being inflamed by a tiny minority problem, at huge cost to everyone now because this paranoia – and that is what it is properly described as – is distorting everything about our politics.

I guess the victims in places like Rotherham didn’t have any issues – just ‘being paranoid’..

And then there’s something else to mention, and that is our fiscal paranoia because we are supposedly facing a fiscal crisis. If you look at the heavyweight newspapers, like the Financial Times, they’re saying that we are in trouble as a country, interest rates are rising, the government may have unsustainable debt, and we are going to, therefore, go to hell in a handcart. Not quite the phrase they use, but that’s what they imply.
And the fact is that all of that is complete and utter nonsense. The only reason why the UK is in trouble is because Rachel Reeves has, wholly inappropriately, adopted a fiscal rule that she now cannot meet, and which was always glaringly obviously going to be unachievable. City thinking is, however, being totally distorted by this.

I’d trust the wisdom of the vast majority of economists over some half baked. semi- retired accountant of questionable merit who has been forced to block over a hundred thousand commentators. 

But the fact is that the resulting cost of their paranoia is going to be enormous if they feed that back into the thinking of Rachel Reeves, who does, as a consequence, deliver austerity by cutting the spending on public services that the City is now demanding.

Public services do not need additional money thrown at them. The NHS has been hosed in Money and the results have been questionable

Thinking can be dangerous if it’s wrong. And that’s my point.

I am the truth, the way and the light

What we are seeing here is the power of thinking. And the power of thinking can be a force for good, and it can create harm.
When it creates collective paranoia, the danger of real harm to society is very high. And that’s what we’re seeing right now.
War paranoia.
Migration paranoia.
Fiscal paranoia.

Am I being too generous in calling this almost symptomatic of early onset dementia? 

All of these are significant distractions from the real issues that we face.
People going without because of poverty.
Services being underfunded.
Children being denied the education that they need.
Climate change being ignored.
Houses not being built.

Services like Net Zero, DIE and LGBT alphabet soup related services aren’t underfunded because we should be t be spending one solitary penny on them

How are children being denied an education – is this because you got kicked out?

How is a climate change being ignored. Is someone else paying your heating bill?

How much housing do you deem we need? Maybe we can build in your back yard

And all of that is happening because powerful people are framing the political issues of the day inappropriately, with their ability to frame the world in their way of thinking.

Who determines what is appropriate? You?

We need to be reminded of somebody called Viktor Frankl. He was an Austrian Holocaust survivor. As he put it, the last thing we ever have is our inalienable right to determine how we view the world. He used this to literally survive Nazi camps, out of which he came as a survivor.
We have the choice to decide how we frame things, he said.
We can succumb, or we can choose to survive.
We can choose evil, and we can choose good.

The idea of an anti- semite of rare viciousness, who characterises Israel’s existential struggle for as genocide invoking a Holocaust survivor will strike a few as grotesque 

We have the right and the power to think.
We do, as a consequence, have the power to frame the way we look at the world.
This is not the moment to give up on that power.
We do not need to think that war is inevitable.
We do not need to victimise migrants.
We do not need to believe austerity is required.
We can frame the world differently.

You can – just as people have the freedom you ignore you or suggest you are flat out wrong,
In the real world,you cannot simply ‘block’ people you disagree with, 

That, as Viktor Frankl said, is our right, our choice, and as I would suggest, our duty.
We have to fight back against negative thinking. And if we do, we can win against the forces that are lining up against us and which threaten us all

If you win it’s the end of humanity, that much is really the only true statement in the entire screed here. 

“we are facing an increasing climate of fear”

The man who constantly tries to scare us about climate change, neoliberalism, fascism and underfunded government services complains about a “climate of fear”?

And how would he know? He doesn’t appear to do any.