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A Rare and Precious Thing

We interrupt this pre-recorded segment to bring you an impromptu message from our sponsor.

 

Sir Roger has been touched by the loyalty of one of his longterm readers and a fellow-blogger to muse on the importance of friends.

What is a friend?

A friend is someone who cares, fosters, encourages and shares; someone who is almost as excited as you are about your successes and supports you in your failures or sadnesses.

Many people believe a friend is someone who overlooks your crap in return for you overlooking theirs. This is bullshit.

A friend is someone who will always call you on your shit – in the most empathetic way, of course – and relies on you to do likewise about theirs, because only then can you make corrections and perhaps grow and achieve what you are capable of.

A real friend is a rare and precious thing.

A real friend is someone you feel comfortable with, that you can talk to easily at any time, whose company you can enjoy in silence. Real friends are the embodiment of loyalty.

Real friendships last through time and separation.

Sir Roger recently spent two weeks in a villa on the Continong with friends made over forty years earlier; and although they had led separate lives in different cities, towns and countries, concentrating on building careers and families, and flourishing in diverse areas, when they gathered together again their friendship was as fresh and real as it had been all those years ago. And the conversation picked up, as it were, just where it had left off as if the intervening years were transparent.

So friends and friendships need to be nourished and enjoyed and cherished.

And the only way to have real friends is to be one.

None of this is to be confused with mateship.

As Sir Roger has written elsewhere:

“ What is mateship? Mateship is pretending to be friends with someone who doesn’t want your job. A mate is someone who won’t sleep with your wife/girlfiriend without asking you first.

A “great mate” is a rugby league footballer who enjoys a gang bang with the other members of his team.

A mate is what men have who are incapable of attracting actual friends (see Tony Abbott, John Howard) or of forming any kind of vaguely intimate relationships (ibid) .

 

So mateship is how Australian men pretend to have friends.

 

 

Migently Mountain Manifesto: 2

Migently Mountain Manifesto: 2

 

6.

When we swear to something, that is kind of a proper commitment.

The word “swear” comes from an ancient word that means “to speak”; to say words.

In one of the most savagely beautiful and exceptional works of fiction, the Book of John begins:

“ In the beginning was the word…”

Sir Roger prefers his own variation:

“ In the Word is the beginning.”

Speaking your word — “swearing” — makes possible the real-isation of your intention or your desire.

When you “give your word”, do you mean it as a commitment, a guarantee?
Or is your word just something you said?

If you say you will be somewhere at 1 o’clock, can people know that you will be there at 1 o’clock?
Or do they make allowances for you?
Do they tell you lunch is at 12.30  because you’re always half an hour late?
How does it make you feel to be a person that people make allowances for, that other people “manage”?

How do you relate to your word?

When you make a promise is it just “aspirational”, or is your word who you are?

When what you say is guaranteed — when you are your word, when what you say becomes what you do — then you have enormous power, because what you say unquestionably comes to pass.

People will want to hear what you speak, so that they know what is going to happen in the world and make their plans.

7.

 

I don’t believe in capital punishment and I am not a murderer.
Nor am I remotely murderously inclined. 

But, like you, I know that if someone threatens or touches my child I am capable of killing them without compunction.

This might give you pause next time you bray (from a safe distance) for some poor bastard’s blood.
One day they could be braying for yours.
And in the circumstances you may suddenly not agree so enthusiastically that your own execution would be such a good thing.

Or that judicial murder in general is a good thing.

 

8.

 

Either you control your emotions or they control you.

You have your emotions or you’re at their mercy.

It’s up to you.

This thought gives you a place to stand outside your emotions.
There you can consider them from some distance if you need to.
It doesn’t mean you don’t have emotions — you always will — or that they’re bad (they’re good), or that you shouldn’t enjoy them (you should).

It just gives you choice if you need it.

And it puts you in charge of them when you need to be.

 

9.

 

Either you run your life, or plenty of other people are happy to fill the gap and run it for you.

To get what they want.

At your expense.

It’s your call.

10.

 

Thank the universe for hot showers.

Migently Mountain Manifesto: 1

Migently Mountain Manifesto: 1

 

S ir Roger is returned from the Mountain with the Migently Mountain Manifesto.
Here are Tablets One to Five: 

 

1. 

Do what is right.  

 

2. 

 You are safe.

Now, at this instant, you are safe.
You are safe, right here, right now.

This might allow you to calm down and get a grip to deal with stuff.

Nothing is promised for the next instant, however.

But right now at this instant you are safe.  

  

3. 

Most people are about as honest and ethical as they can afford to be.

Yes, some people are less honest than they could be.
Some struggle to be honest at all.
Some are frankly more honest than is necessary or comfortable.

The value of honesty is relative.
People will steal a loaf of bread if they really have to.
They may not want to but if that’s what they must do to feed their children then they will do what they need to.

Some things are more important and more pressing — in the moment in real life — than esoteric debates about morality.

It’s true that some people exhort you to be honest.
Other people want you to be honest. 
They don’t want you to be honest for your benefit. 
They want you to be honest for their benefit, so that they can make informed decisions based on reliable reports.

In reality, though, most people don’t make decisions based on facts anyway.

On the other hand, being honest places less stress on the memory.
And it (sometimes) makes you feel better.

Telling the truth is a different matter.

There is no such as THE Truth.
There’s my truth and your truth, for a start. 
What most people mean by ‘the truth’ is merely opinion and interpretation based on life experience, emotion, limited information, conjecture, flawed logic, magical thinking, and vague probabilities.

There’s the “whole” truth. 

No, just joking. If there is a “whole truth”, it’s impossible to know because — for just one thing — you would have to describe the velocity and position of every fundamental particle in the Universe from the beginning of time.
You
can’t tell both the position and velocity in any case, and if you could even get the information in a whole lifetime you wouldn’t get past describing the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second of the Universe. Let alone interpreting the data. 

The best you can do is describe the best interpretation of the motley collection of tiny random scraps of perception you can grasp as they rush by.

Then there’s the “ABSOLUTE” Truth.

There isn’t one.

So stop killing people because you mistakenly think you have it.  

 

4. 

A Job is trading time for money.

But your time — your life itself — is of immeasurable, incalculable value.

Your Job is something you do because you have to, to survive financially, pay the bills, feed the kids, pay the rent or the mortgage. 

Your Work is something you want to do, something you must do — so it is also something you do because in that sense you have to do. 

It’s something you “have” to do because it’s an expression of who you are.
It’s your contribution to the world. It’s the difference you make because you are you and because you can.

For example, a teacher has two basic jobs:

1) spend time in a room with people and

2) do paperwork.

Being in a classroom is how we know you are doing your job. The paperwork is how we know you did your Job.

A teacher’s Work on the other hand is growing people, inspiring them, helping them learn to learn, to love learning, to appreciate life, to contribute to the world, to experience the most of the world that they can, as richly as they can.

The “Dignity of Labour” is a myth.
It is born of a conspiracy cooked up by capital and colluded with by labour, probably beginning during the Industrial Revolution, if not even earlier in the feudal era.

Capital needed — and still needs — workers to be as close to compliant slaves as possible.
Long hours, dirty work, few rights and low wages stopped people getting notions too far above themselves, or amassing the savings to escape.
It kept them needing the employer and the job.
Labour needed a social mythology to justify its powerless dependency — and the degradation of selling its soul to make others rich.

The solution was to frame labour as bestowing “dignity”. 

And eventually it became a fact instead of a pretence.
And it didn’t hurt to have the (obscenely rich) Church bestowing God’s blessing on the charade.

Blessed are the poor, the meek, the hungry, for they shall eventually get all the good stuff.
Just not in this life. 

As a result “early to bed and early to rise” assumed a moral character to the point where anyone who gets out of bed after 6am or goes to bed later than 10pm is committing a “sin”.

This is all bullshit. Any job in which you give over your labour and your time and your life to make someone else rich is shameful, degrading and humiliating and not dignified at all. It would be a sin if there were such a thing.  

If there were such a thing it would be a sin not to do Your Work, the Work you must do, the Work you love.

Be the person you are who makes a difference in the world.  

 

5. 

Great leaders (and managers) don’t manage people (or boss them).

Leaders manage outcomes.
They do this by facilitating people in doing what they know how to do — which, after all, is why they were employed in the first place — and in developing skills to do it better.

Leaders share a vision which inspires and engages.
They provide meaningful goals and engage their colleagues in the value of the work they do.

People who work for coercive managers do the least they can in order to keep their jobs.
They have low job satisfaction and low productivity because they don’t own the work they do.

People who work for inspiring managers do the most they can because they want to and they want to because they own their work and they know why it matters.

That is why they have such great work satisfaction. And that is why they stay.

 

Most people want to do a good job.

A good manager doesn’t have to force people to do their best.

A good manager knows to get out of the way of people doing their best.

 

Almost everyone wants to do the best work they can. 

Mount Migently Manifesto

Mount Migently Manifesto

 Australian Values

 

Australian values have lately been enthusiastically asserted by some Australians and Sir Roger has been much impressed – in much the same way a washed-up prize fighter feels the repeated impressions of his opponents’ fists in his guts.

These assertions of “Australian values” tend to be energetically debated:

in Melbourne with French and Indian visitors to Australia on trains, buses and trams,

in university college meetings in Sydney,

in the halls, offices and party rooms of Parliament House in Canberra

and particularly on commercial radio breakfast programs everywhere

Sir Roger was reeling from the onslaught and disheartened by the proponents’ ignorance, illogic, idiocy and illiteracy; by their fear, spite, narrow-minded prejudice, stupidity and frankly pre-agricultural social views. 

Someone had omitted to convey to them that for their brain to operate as advertised it is necessary to update the database regularly and to calibrate it with reality

Someone had omitted to explain to them that the texts on which their ethics are based and with which they (selectively) justify much of their self-righteous bombast are not actually sacred but were all simple rulebooks written thousands of years ago to enable the social control of brutal sand tribes, to suit their primitive times and conditions, calm their existential terrors, alleviate their ontological horrors, excuse their ignorance and justify their brutality. 

Someone had failed to explain to them that the foundation myths, the stories of Australia on which they hang their narrative of Australian culture, are just that. Myths. It never happened, Bruce.

It’s just like when your girlfriend lied to you – you weren’t the first. 

Dismayed by the galloping erosion of the humane, generous, fair and tolerant values of his Australia Sir Roger therefore repaired to the mountain top seeking counsel and wisdom from the winds,  the silence and the intelligences of the cosmos. 

Sir Roger was generously granted that counsel and has returned from the mountain top bearing enlightenment. 

Over the next few days and weeks he will share with his world these insights into the best of human and Australian values. 

 

 

Malcolm Turnbull: Next Prime Minister?

Malcolm Turnbull: Next Prime Minister?

 

Backing into the limelight


Sir Roger believes
Malcolm Turnbull could easily be the next Prime Minister of Australia.
What do you think? Here’s why:

1) The coalition and the right wing media will bring too much pressure on Julia Gillard about the Slater and Gordon quagmire – either facts or compelling implications – so that either she can’t stay, or she becomes too much of a liability to the party’s electoral success, vacating the PM-ship by choice or force.

2) Rudd will decline to nominate for leadership of the party, so he will be drafted and oh so very reluctantly accept (as someone described T. E. Lawrence, “always backing into the limelight”).

3) With Rudd at the helm again, Abbott, who already is hugely disliked (and an immature fool), barely tolerated as “at least not Gillard”, will preside over disastrous poll results (because Rudd will easily usurp his role as “at least not Gillard”).

4) Abbott will be unceremoniously dumped and Turnbull, who is hugely liked, will replace him. Christopher (Politics Beats Values) Whine, by the way, will immediately explain that while he couldn’t say so he always hated Abbott, thought he was the wrong man for the job, and preferred Turnbull.

5) People are already angry at Labor which in most policies is indistinguishable from the coalition; indistinguishable even from those of the war criminal  John Howard. People are looking for an alternative but they are a bit fond of action on global warming and humane treatment of refugees, both of which might just conceivably be revived under Rudd.

6) Nevertheless Turnbull is better liked than Rudd and, promising to pursue good, moral and humane policies and good real Australian values, will win the next federal election in a landslide.

7) The Greens and Independents will disappear from the Reps – mostly because people are so bloody … we’ll stop there.

 

Why the Long Face?

Why the Long Face?

Joining the Elite

How do you think Australia’s economy is going, compared to the rest of the world?
Sir Roger wonders because some rainbow-lovers say it’s magnificent and some shrill hurricane chasers say we’re going to hell in a handbasket and doom is upon us.

Sir Roger had his servan staff do some forensic research. They discovered that only the following 11 countries (i.e. the top roughly 6%) have AAA ratings with stable or positive outlooks with all three “big” ratings agencies (Fitch, Moody’s, Standard and Poors):

Australia
Canada
Denmark
Finland
Norway
Singapore
Sweden
Switzerland
Germany
Luxembourg
Netherlands

This is nice…isn’t it? That’s an elite group! Even the UK and US aren’t in it.

Shouldn’t we be grateful and count our blessings, even celebrate?

So if we are doing so well, if the economy is so excellent and apparently we’ve really “never had it so good”, why are so many people (all right I mean Jolly Joe and Tony the Tool and all the Liberal Premiers) trying to convince us how badly the economy is being managed, how tough life is, how bad we feel, and how much we’re all struggling?

Remember it’s been 5 years now and they can no longer lay the wreaths at Costello’s door. Maybe they hope no-one will actually look at the facts.

Or did Sir Roger miss something?

You’re aware that a AAA rating is only about the money and in a “two-tiered economy” that may not mean a lot to the people on the lower tier (not being Andrew, Gina or Clive). But there is another list called the UN Human Development Index. It rates countries for Life Expectancy/Health, Education and Standard of Living.

Here are the top few countries (corrected for “inequality”):

Norway
Australia
Sweden
Netherlands
Iceland
Ireland
Germany
Denmark
Switzerland
Slovenia
Finland
Canada
New Zealand would be in the top ten (it is #5 in the uncorrected index)

So surely it can’t get much better than this? I mean, if we’re miserable and pessimistic and afraid of the future in this environment, when would we EVER be happy and appreciative and optimistic?

Sir Roger thinks it’s not the facts that are at play but the clash of perceptual “frames” being manufactured by each side, the optimists and pessimists, that is directing the narrative and the perception of how well we’re doing.

What do you think?