Ranto! Introduction

I think the arch of my intellectual inquiry has taken a typical route; as a youngster, I was hooked on mythology. Then came Jurassic Park in 1993 and I turned my attention to dinosaurs and natural history. With high school came a fascination with classical music, comic books and ancient history. A chance purchase of a book about freemasonry when I was 19 lead to a long fascination with that subject, which fed on my existing love of history and mythology. When I was 21, I picked a political side, unsurprisingly leftish, and began investigating liberal causes- globalization, the downside of civilization, anthropomorphic climate change, abuse of labour markets, and so on.

Religion has always been a big thing too. I was brought up in Melbourne's cozily incestuous Jewish community, where everyone knows everyone and that girl you have a crush on might very well be your cousin. I went to Jewish schools and had a passing competency in all things religious, from Hebrew to texts and traditions. But it was only after high school that I started to become interested in Jewish civilization, Christianity and the wider world of religious belief. This probably co-incided with my first attempts to get into the pants of someone who wasn't possibly a cousin.

Back to politics. I became vegetarian for a while after reading Fast Food Nation. I read all of Daniel Quinn's books, and still agree with his basic hypothesis- man has been tribal for a lot longer than he's been urban, and that exclusive agriculture was probably a mistake. I even read The Communist Manifesto, but even my soft, impressionable brain found it a bit eye rolling.

When I was 24, I picked up a copy of The Economist, because Time had become a sadly predictable rag, cycling through the following 4 topics every month: Iraq, DNA, How bread can kill you, and new speculation into the gayness of long dead US presidents. Not that those things are uninteresting (Hahding wuz a queeah), but I was just sick of seeing a double helix graphic on every second cover. The Economist was a refreshing change, and with Fox News already setting the ungracious tone for political discourse all around the world, I needed something that actually seemed fair and balanced. I was impressed by the depth of reporting, the sparseness of the editorializing, and the anonymity of authorship (there are no bylines). I studied the Economist style guide, and I subscribe to the audio edition, where I get to hear it read in clipped Queen's English by men and women with syrupy voices. I listen to/read most of it, though I blank out during the Asian and African sections. Get more interesting, Asia and Africa!

So I began to expand on my political knowledge. I did an Open University course on International Politics, to get a handle of the basics. I read Atlas Shrugged, which is a valuable read if you want to know where the radical right gets it's talking points and attitudes from. My dad, a far more avid novel-reader than I, had always pushed me to read some Ayn Rand. I know why now- her ideas are thought provoking, compelling and utter shit. It doesn't take a particularly keen mind to put two and two together- she was a homely Jewish-Russian girl, whose family was persecuted for being middle class. She became a fierce advocate for meritocracies, talent, patriarchy, competition, weird sex and disturbingly, a fetishist for tall, fair, Germanic physical qualities. I'm not going to suggest she was a self-hating jew (I don't think her ethnic heritage was really part of the conversation), but she definitely seemed to buy into the master race ideology.

So this brings me to the subject of markets. Also, the left-right divide, the culture war, the end of history, the new world civil-war and what it is that bothers me so much about the world we live in.

I'm not good at due diligence. I won't make any footnotes or references. I'll paraphrase. to sidetrack for a moment- I read an interesting idea recently, that western philosophy has always taken a hypothesis-antithesis-synthesis approach, in contrast with say, the Jewish approach to debate- hypothesis-antithesis-antithesis-antithesis approach. In a nutshell, this means that goyim like a result and Jews like to sit around and argue. I don't think either group would quickly deny that, but for rebuttals to this crackpot hypothesis you'd have to speak to their respective leaders; Queen Elizabeth for the goyim and Boss Jew Herschel "Hank" Rosenblatt of Teaneck, NJ.

So yeah, I'm looking for an argument here. I don't expect any real conclusive answers, because we're talking about history, government, the market and human endeavour. These are fluid things that we live in, not fixed things that can be readily observed and quantified. I'm really just putting out ideas and observations here, to put my thought processes on paper and make sense of it all.

I'm not looking to synthesize a Grand Unified Theory of everything, because through early cultural osmosis I picked up a wise-alecky, stubborn, stiff necked tendency to immediately switch positions on something once it has been conclusively settled on. I suppose I am suggesting that this is something that has been baked into my thick, garlicky jewish blood. Basically, if I ask for chicken, and you agree that chicken is the meal of the day, I will then argue why fish is better. For one thing, it's healthier. And what, you no like fish?

This post is just an introduction, while I form a cogent argument for my next post. I'm going to try and take a chronological approach, because a) it helps me and b) it'll help me workshop some ideas for a book I'm trying to draft. It's also easier.

I'm also going to steal ideas without giving their originators their proper due. Thankfully, no-one is reading this.

Next: Cavemen!