Darkness.

Enigma.

Secret.

Curiousity.

Surprise.

Paranormal.

Superstition.

Rapture.

Riddle.

Myth. Magic. Mystery.

* * *

The definition of mystery, though multi-faceted, is a good place to start:

Anything that arouses curiosity or perplexes because it is unexplained, inexplicable, or secret.

That [which] is not fully understood or that baffles or eludes understanding; an enigma.

But it goes further. I’m not the only one that has noticed the prevalence of mysticism in contemporary civilisation:

The skills, lore, or practices that are peculiar to a particular activity or group and are regarded as the special province of initiates.

A religious truth that is incomprehensible to reason and knowable only through divine revelation.

An incident from the life of Jesus, especially the Incarnation, Passion, Crucifixion, or Resurrection, of particular importance for redemption.

The derivation is even more interesting:

From Latin mystērium, from Greek mustērion, secret rite, from mustēs, an initiate, from mūein, to close the eyes, initiate.

So you can see, the concept of mystery is old and likely prehistoric, pre-dating all forms of modern civilisation. Though Christianity is the only religion mentioned by name in the definitions, all theistic religions rely solely on mystery as their driving force; their ‘hook’, if you will. That’s why those few that actually communicate with God (or gods) are referred to as ‘mystics’ — they’re dealing with mysterious, inexplicable, unprovable phenomena. Gods are mysteries, in other words.

The fundamental axiom of all advanced lifeforms can be generalised as ‘What’s around the next corner?’ On a low-level it might be as simple as finding new hunting grounds; for humans it might as complex as finding a new partner, a new job — either way, it’s about moving. Not necessarily forward or back, but moving. There are higher concepts but at the end of the day it’s exploration and horizon-hunting that really does it for us; what really satisfies us.

Why then are we so damn addicted to mystery? Mystery is the polar opposite of exploration, science, truth. But we embrace it! We find comfort in the not-knowing. We set out on epic journeys to seek out new continents and new civilisations, all the while seeking solace in the gods that illumine starlit skies. There’s something about that which we do not know.

And these mysteries will forever remain because we don’t try too hard to solve them. No matter how hard we try, a mystery remains just beyond the reach of our grasping fingertips — or rather, we don’t stretch our hands too far in case we actually reach the mystery. The moment we close our fingers and find it to be nothing more than insubstantial smoke and deceptive mirrors — we shatter. Our world-view contorts and shifts and finally buckles under its elusive enormity. The shattered fragments of mystery lay limp and unravelled between our fingers. There’s nothing there. There never has been. There never will be.

Gosh.

Why do we keep reaching? Why do we raise our hands to the sky in search of salvation and heavenly oases?

Why does it hurt so much when we find out that a mystery is really nothing more than random chance or laws of physics? Because we’re rational creatures; we feast on order, reason. For every effect we must attribute a cause.

Someone somewhere once prayed to the very first heavenly and inexplicable body: the stars. The constellation of Orion perhaps. ‘Let tomorrow’s hunt be a success’ he prayed. And you know what? It was. The hunt was a rave success. Forever after, he prayed to the stars.

Then one day, sometime in the near future, the hunt wasn’t a success. In fact, some of the hunters were gored by the wild boar and died. So of course he prayed harder. What other option was there?

Yesterday I laid the ground rules for mysteries and why they have played such a huge role in the development of our society.

Note how I say ‘huge’ rather than important or vital.

Are these mysteries a good thing for survival? Better yet: is this incessant hunt for the unknowable a human-only trait? Did we evolve this love of mystery?

The general argument goes like this: we like to see patterns. We attribute cause to every effect. We like to believe that there’s something more to life than just 80 years of humdrum mundanity followed by death and burial and rigor mortis. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know if animals and plants feel the same way, but it’s often stated that only humans ponder the existence of an after-life (though who knows if this is true…) So it’s something in the brain — our brain — that sets us apart from the rest of them. We must’ve evolved that functionality, or been given it by our Creator — whatever, I’m not going to get into a theological discussion here.

The point is, at some point in time, we grew to love mystery. Like, seriously adore. You can look at certain times in history when almost everything in your day-to-day life was ritual. Wake up; pray. Hunt; pray. Eat; pray. Old wives’ tales. Turning three times widdershins before crossing a cursed threshold. Naming of children. Gods! Astrology! It’s all attributing cause to effect.

I sometimes wonder if people realise how feeble it is to be nothing but a pawn of the universe. You are merely the result of billions of random-chance-and-cause-unknown effects. Only, wait a second, the cause isn’t unknown! It’s the god of war! Of the hunt! Wine! The Israelites — God!

But, hang on, we’re not all mystery junkies. There are some people that hate the idea of mystery. They’re called ’scientists’.

And that’s the bit I don’t get. There are people that can only sleep at night knowing that God is looking over them, that Jesus makes their miserable, sinful life bearable — and then there are those that are the complete opposite. There are people that find the idea of spirituality or immortality repulsive: ‘that which can not be proven does not exist, so why give such concepts such credence?’

Are these scientists, these doubters-of-mysterious-coincidence, an evolutionary creation? Are they relatively new — the last few thousand years or so — or have there always been questioning, discerning doubters since the dawn of time? Was fire really stolen from the gods, or did Ug the Caveman create it through trial and error? Throughout history there have always been a few that question their surroundings. Rarely are their voices heard — usually only for a split, blood-curdling second before the guillotine drops or the tinder is lit. In fact, today and for the first time in history, scientists seem to finally have gained more respect and gravitas than theologians. Thank God.

The sad bit is that mystery, or at least those that ‘believe’ in mystery, far outweighs the truth, the cause-seeker, the scientists. The vast majority believe in the omnipresence and omnipotence of God or gods. On top of that there a lot of people that are apathetic to the discovery of knowledge and truth. It seems to me that ‘mystery junky’ is the dominant genetic trait. Maybe we can genetically engineer our DNA to remove such a trait…

I’m going to attempt to tackle the tricky and turbulent subject of racism. I’m not going to cover its entire history. I’m not going to pretend that I’m entirely objective — no one is — though I will try my best to be as neutral as possible. If I say something upsetting, apologies; this a sensitive topic, one that most people tend to stay well away from.

As always, we’ll start at the beginning. Not many people know where racism actually begun. The slave trade? No. Eugenics and ultimately the Holocaust? No. Religion? Getting warmer, but still not quite.

Racism begun way back in tribal times. Racism is effectively synonymous with tribalism, which is itself similar to the concept of nationalism. It’s all about selfishness.  Racism can take many forms: religious, cultural, skin-colour and are all equally ‘bad’ — but at one time, they weren’t. They were a matter of self-preservation. It’s you or them. Insular tribes and their inbreeding reaffirmed genetic and physical traits and thus ‘races’ were created — but even the term ‘race’ is, ironically, racist! Race is an American term coined hundreds of years ago to describe the difference between blacks and whites. It sadly gained credibility and traction, and was then exported around the world. It was borrowed from the French razza which means ‘lineage’.

Racism is all about lineage — all about blood, and the purity thereof. Racism is the act of erroneous differentiation of humans into different species. It’s about the justification of maliciousness and unfair, unfounded prejudice to those of different colour, culture, heritage or lineage.

We have the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview to thank for this little gem. For 500 years now we’ve been living in a world governed by the laws of physics. Action and reaction, cause and effect. Mechanics. Gravity. Cold, cool calculation of calculus. The control, utilisation and abuse of energy. The last five centuries have been all about physicality; it’s been all about what we can see and touch and push and stretch. Racism existed before of course, but it wasn’t the kind we see today — it was religious. For 1500 years racism was religious — though back then it wasn’t called racism of course. It would’ve been ‘persecution’ or ‘religious intolerance’.

Did you know that when Columbus first landed on what would become Mexico, the Portuguese and Spanish sailors did not hesitate to mate and marry the Indians, the native Americans? As long as they converted to Christianity via baptism, colour didn’t matter one iota. Only their religious beliefs mattered.

But that’s a topic unto itself and I’m not going to go into it here. The rise of contemporary racism is more interesting.

Let’s go back to skin colour. Other than the Holocaust, almost all modern examples of racism have stemmed from the concept of White supremacy and superiority. How on earth did those of white skin end up at the top of the food chain?

The Declaration of Independence, that’s how. But don’t stop reading yet, my dear American friends! You probably wouldn’t have drafted the Declaration if it wasn’t for the British.

The Declaration of Independence was the pinnacle of The Enlightenment. The single most important period for philosophical and scientific advancement ever also created racism. All it took one was one theory-treated-as-fact: Dr Charles White (what a name…) scientifically reasoned that Blacks were the stop-gap between monkeys and Whites. Voltaire and Kames — both bigwigs of the Enlightenment — proposed the idea of separate human species.  Hume and Kant, Jefferson and Washington — almost every big name of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were White supremacists.

Here were the most influential thinkers, scholars and scientists the world has ever seen. It was their thoughts, mental machinations and ideologies that formed the world we live in today. And they were racists. They thought of Blacks as not-quite-human.

And I dare say… it’s not a very big surprise that they arrived at such a conclusion.

The Enlightenment was about culture; a big damn celebration of art and science and thinking — in essence, it was a riotous exaltation of everything that makes us human and not monkeys.

And Blacks didn’t have that culture. American Indians didn’t have that culture. Or, rather, they didn’t have any that we could see. So we subjugated them. We made them our bitches. We justified our brutal abuse of fellow man by declaring them sub-human — after all, would a fellow white man allow himself to be forced into slavery? God no, his intelligence and tenacity would prevent it.

We’re talking about a group of intellectuals that ranted and raved about the benefits of liberty and equality; freedom from tyranny and the virtues of democracy and representative government. Later, they even drafted a declaration formed from the tenets and axioms of these great thinkers. They formed a new, mighty nation that, at its very core, ratified slavery.

As Thomas Jefferson scrawled out the fundament, lynch-pin and rock-solid bastion of the New World, as he illustrated his idyllic imaginings on the loose paper that would later become the Declaration of Independence… he was writing it for the whites. There was just no way their way of life could continue if non-whites were afforded the same rights and privileges as the whites. Think about it.

But it wasn’t really Jefferson’s fault. Science had told him that blacks were little more than apes devoid of culture and intellect. Or perhaps science merely suggested it and human nature enforced it. I suppose we’ll never know.

But how do we fix it?

Racism is a pathological contagion. It passes from parent to child. That can never be changed.

What we need is a new worldview. We need to shift our perspective through 90 degrees and move towards a new frontier. I hesitate to say that we need to ‘re-find our spirituality’, because there are issues associated with organised religion: intolerance, persecution, zealotry. Oour infatuation with the physical nature of the world needs to change. Never again must we single-out and tunnel-vision a sole strand of science.

What we need is another Enlightenment…

Unfortunately I’m going to cite the contents of a long, three-page story in this blog entry. Fortunately, it’s an absolutely awesome story about the curious history, convoluted present and hopeful future of the placebo effect. Even if it takes you a while to read, it’s worth reading — it takes you from the origin of placebos (salt water instead of morphine during World War 2) through to modern day drug trials, where placebos are beating pharmaceutical drugs such as anti-pain meds or anti-depressants.

It’s crazy stuff — really bat-shit crazy. The story doesn’t really go into the why, as we don’t know the answer yet — it’s amazing enough that a group has finally been formed to look into it (pharmaceutical companies, the ones with all the money when it comes to research, obviously want the placebo response to just… go away. ASAP.) – Since the beginning, the placebo has been Big Pharma’s number one enemy. To pass drug trials a new product has to beat out the placebo effect by a significant margin. In the olden days, this was apparently quite easy.

Today… well, the expert that the story focuses on, William Potter, goes as far to say that in during modern-day tests, Prozac is being beaten-out by placebos, and thus would never make it to market, if it had been invented today. The story actually begins with a story about Merck, a big pharmaceutical company: they’re testing a new anti-depressant (MK-869), and they just can’t seem to beat the placebo effect. Both the drug and the placebo effect had an equal success rate! The placebo effect is so strong at the moment that very few drugs are making it through testing and into the greedy, self-medicating hands of the public.

It’s definitely a weird one that needs to be sussed out. It’s sad that it has been ignored for so long because the body’s self-healing functions are the enemy of pharmacology. Pharmacology’s sole purpose is to dominate the central nervous system, not to aid or assist it in its curative powers. What has caused the increased placebo response? Now this is the funny bit: in realising that placebo response is different, depending on where you are in the world, Big Pharma is actually going to other countries where the placebo effect is weaker, to get their drugs approved.

It would seem that the placebo response is based on culture, society. It’s long been known that we have more faith in the trustworthy, the responsible, the professional. If I tell you I’m going to fix your computer, you’re relieved and walk away happy. If I tell you I’m going to remove your tooth, you’re going to adversely react, scream, run away — and rightfully so!

The story seems to surmise that it’s the pharmaceutical’s massive marketing campaigns that have pushed up the power of the placebo. We’re surrounded by so many reports and surveys and commercials that tell us of the efficacy of anti-depressants that we will them to work: if it works for him, it will work for me — of course, the funny bit is that most drugs have side-effects, and the placebo does not… so with placebo tests we’re told that we’re taking Prozac, our body expects it to work… and so it works. Without any of the side-effects.

And it turns out that doctors have long been prescribing placebos to patients! This one might shock you a little. If you’re on anti-depressants right now… you might actually not be on them. Doctors have long known the power of confidence and good bed-side manner. Doctors often prescribe under-powered doses to patients and tell them that it will work. And, unsurprisingly, it works — with all the potency of actual, drug-based medication. Awesome.

We can walk away from this story with two great things under our belt: a) we’ll be seeing more research into the placebo effect and the body’s self-healing powers. We’re not talking about the body’s ability to fix physical damage, but when it comes to biological imbalance, brain chemistry and ‘rewiring’, we’re capable of a lot more than we think — and b) don’t stop believing in medication. It is your belief in the power of anti-depressants that make them work, not the chemical compound itself.

If that’s not food for thought… I don’t know what is.

A few weeks ago I watched through the 1980 series ‘Cosmos’, written and narrated by the master himself, Carl Sagan. It was re-released on DVD recently, and with western society’s infatuation with ‘popular science’, as made famous by the likes of Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough, I figured it was time to give it a watch.

It might be almost 30 years old but it’s awesome. It’s the best grounding in science, philosophy and (astro)physics that you can ever hope for. It’s dated, sure (check out his turtle-neck jumper), and it’s very out-of-this-world in places (Sagan was a dreamer), but it’s so, so awesome in its entirety. It’s the kind of thing I would force my children watch as soon as they can read and write. With matchsticks to prop their eyes open.

Cosmos got me thinking. A dangerous pastime, I know. [Name that musical...]

We all seek solace in wildly different things.

Why?

Solace means, literally, ‘to solidify’. Consolidation, console, solid — they all have the same Latin root. Finding solace is finding solidity in the world. Solace is when you feel stable. Finding solace is searching for that ‘rock’, that bastion of hope, courage, safety — whatever — it’s something that makes you feel safe. Solace is discovering that reserved spot in the world’s cosmic parking lot that no one can take away from you.

No one’s doubting that everyone wants solace. Heck, we might even need it. Most people go through life looking for it and when they finally find it they don’t (can’t?) let go. Scarily, people seem much more fatalistic once they find their real solace. It’s as if our life purpose, as humans, is merely to find a place to live, reside, be. Then once we get there, we can weather an awful lot with our solace-powered resolve.

But what is the driving force behind that resolve?

It seems to vary from person to person, which is odd. You can easily imagine the preacher undergoing extreme duress and displeasure, while seeking solace in his God. But what about the man that derives his strength from science, from the knowledge that we are no more than physical meatbags that are predestined at birth to live, exist and eventually die. Harder to imagine, eh? I think the usual argument here is that we’re ‘programmed’ to seek faith and mysticism… but why are some people are satisfied with no repentance, no God, no afterlife?

The obvious question you then have to ask is: have there always been people that can’t find solace in faith alone? Throughout history have there been agnostic solace-seekers? You can certainly have faith in science, that’s for sure — that’s kind of a prerequisite for scientists — but maybe the various churches throughout history were too strong, their mysticism too alluring?

For the first time in history science is pitched in a fair fight against religion. The mysticism of religion is at an all-time low. Scientific understanding of the cosmos is at an all-time high.

I think the underpinning of solace is belief. There has to be something you really, really believe in. Be it science, god, philosophy, money, love, it doesn’t really matter. The problem for religion is that it’s becoming harder to believe in. There have always been those that found some solace in science, but the church quashed them. Or burnt them. Either way, belief in non-deity was disallowed (were emperors deified for this reason?)

Nowadays religion is a bit easier going: you’re free to believe in God (or whatever else) while it makes sense to, while you see through a rough spot perhaps. It’s very easy to believe in faith and mysticism (we’re programmed to do so, remember?) so it just comes naturally — having problems? head down to the church! But now, without the draconian Churches, without the belief-under-duress, wouldn’t it make sense to seek solace in something else, something tangible, something like… science? A lot of people are doing it. Dare I say there are more atheists and agnostics than ever before. Why don’t religious types cave and listen to the truth of science?

It would make sense to move on, no? No. People don’t like to lose their solace.

I’m sure you’ve heard stories of those people that have ‘lost God’, or the love of their life. They’re broken. Disbelief really shatters you. It seems solace is highly conservative. When was the last time you heard of a devoutly religious person dropping the word of God in favour of Darwin? I mean a happily-engaged-and-solace-fully-sought practitioner, not a neophyte or extremist, incidentally. It would seem you only get one solace — one love-of-your-life — unless you are forcibly sundered.

Once the older generations die out and today’s children, our progeny, are free to seek a solace of their own choosing, the end of religion and the rise and dominion of the machines — er, science — might actually be upon us.

Ah, now this is a meaty one. I’m not going to name any names, and I ask you kindly to do the same. I’m going to speak in general terms and hope I don’t offend too many people. But if you’re a believer of some kind and I make you question your faith… don’t hurt me! It’s a good thing to re-evaluate your environment occasionally. Things change, don’t forget. Something that made sense a while ago might not make sense now. With that said, on with the show.

* * *

Religion is technology. Something — something new, some kind of data — is discovered. It’s then honed and refined. And then it becomes a religion. Religion is simply ‘high-tech’.

Along the way there are fads and cults but ultimately, if it passes through its trial by fire, it becomes a religion.

Big pill to swallow, and I need to provide an example. Let’s take Jesus (sorry Christians), as he’s as close to omnipresence as things get. Look at your surroundings right now: your computer, iPhone, TV, keyboard. Pretty awesome eh? Do you know how any of them work? Maybe. Mostly they just work, you don’t question it. You sure as hell don’t call your computer a ‘box of miracles’ — well you might, but most of you probably don’t.

But that’s what it is. The fact that we can send data from one side of the planet to the other in a fraction of a second is a frackin’ miracle. We have the knowledge and power to surgically replace faulty hearts and perform crazy experiments at a sub-atomic level — that’s a damned miracle.

Only it’s not. It’s just technology.

Do you really think Jesus was a miracle worker? The son of God?

Just because I control the flow of electrons and fly through space at the speed of sound… does that deify me? Do you prostrate yourself before me; am I the Messiah? No — at least I doubt it. I’m merely harnessing technology.

You see, all these fields, spheres of thought and belief are really, really closely entwined. I’m close to a resolution, an epiphany: I can just about put my finger on it but it’s… slippery. Magic is the key to belief — mystery, that is. You don’t believe in something tangible, something real — you don’t believe in your car. You believe in true love, God, UFOs.

But there’s no such thing as magic, beyond impressive use of technology or new inventions. It’s magic until you learn how it’s done… and then it becomes mundane.

Is religion the same thing? Was talking to God, receiving divine prophecy and turning water into wine what passed for ‘high-tech’ 2,000 years ago? Did Jesus have some sterilised bandages or knowledge of Eastern medicine that cured large swathes of sick people? Does that make him a work of wonder, or merely a nice guy with some great tools? Why don’t we drop to our knees and deify Sagan or Einstein, our modern-day masters of the universe?

Our understanding of the universe is so great and our critical analysis now so exacting that magic and mystery are finding it impossible to gain a foothold in today’s society. Fads will form, and cults will climb to power and become religions, but as technology improves and shines a light on their inherent fallacies, they will fall — as soon as the curtain is whisked back and the truth revealed, the mystery will melt away. The magic castle will crumble and the religion, cult or fad will perish.

Without magic, there is no no faith, no prayer, no belief. Without mystery — the single most powerful force in human nature – there is no no religion.

In 50 years our understanding of the universe and humanity will be so great that I’ll be able to zap your body and fix it of all maladies. No side-effects. No caveats. What will existing religions do then?

I don’t know where to start with this, the subject that surely supersedes all others. It — life, necessity and peace — begins and ends with education. With a good education the world is your oyster. Without education… God, it’s so tricky to put into words, but I’ll try.

The expanse of your knowledge, your wisdom, your skills and ‘working set of data’ is only limited by your ability to learn, to educate yourself; or to be educated. But it’s a feedback loop: you can’t emerge from a dark cave at the age of 40 and suddenly be wise. Knowledge must be accumulated, wisdom and skills are cumulative — they must be continually renewed and refreshed or it becomes the stuff of stale housewife tale. Because it’s a feedback loop, the longer you stay out of the loop the worse it gets. Even worse, the further out of the loop you are, the less chance you have of realising it…

The world is moving fast. Really, really fast. Every day we uncover new data about the world we exist within, and new rules and relationships that elucidate and underline the lives we live. Every day the goalposts move back a little bit. In the past it might’ve taken a century for a significant change in world view to occur, but now it happens quickly – not so rapidly that we can’t keep up, but fast enough that things can change in the blink of an eye.

And therein lies the problem. We can’t keep up. We’re not trained by school, state or society to keep up. Sure, there are a few individuals that sit on the ever-expanding cusp of new knowledge, but not enough. More problematic is the fact that these great thinkers don’t have anyone to share their knowledge and thoughts with.

This problem is so endemic that it’s almost impossible to think with. How do you think outside the box when you’re in the damn box? You’ve probably all had run-ins with ignorant people — or maybe you’re ignorant yourself. Ever met someone that’s not exactly dumb, but totally unreceptive to information they don’t already know?

There are people out there, 40, 50, 60 year-olds that are still parroting stuff they learnt at school, or hand-me-down ‘wisdom’ from ma and pa. Not for a moment do they think that their knowledge is stale, out-dated or simply wrong — that’s their world view and they’re sticking to it. But they’re not dumb people! I might have just described your mother or grandfather, I might even have described you. But it’s not your fault; it’s endemic to society. It’s inescapable; you enter the infinite loop simply by being born.

It’s all because we lack critical thinking. We don’t question what we learn. We don’t interrogate our surroundings, nor do we question the credibility of arbitrary authority — just because someone says it is so does not make it so. The world didn’t turn out to be flat, nor does the Sun orbit Earth — but would you like to take a guess at how long it took for those two beliefs to leave the body of common knowledge?

We’ve long known the danger of false information. We know that sometimes it is distributed with propagandistic intent, and sometimes it’s just a half-truth or something that we can’t yet measure. But for some reason these things stick. For some reason we find it very easy to ignore new data that doesn’t align with what we already know to be ‘true’. There are some that believe the science of 2,000 years ago still supersedes that of today.

That’s insane! It’s utterly insane. After almost four millennia of modern civilization we’re still uncomfortable at throwing out old knowledge so that it can be replaced with the new.

Most of the world is currently operating on stale knowledge. Our mothers and fathers and teachers, and even our military generals and world leaders are trying to use incorrect data. The implications of this fact are numerous; all of them are scary. Most importantly, it perpetuates, from mother to child, from teacher to young person, and ultimately from society to adult.

It’s a loop that’s almost impossible to break without a complete overhaul of how we think, and thus how we educate. Currently we’re taught what we need to know. What we need to be taught is how to think.

The method we use now — teaching what we think children need to know — could work in theory, with a syllabus that is updated very regularly. In fact, that’s probably how this method came to be in the first place: discovery of knowledge and new facts was once so slow that a syllabus made sense. ‘These are the facts. We have known them for centuries. Go learn them.’ If you could somehow devise a list of ‘everything that you need to know’, a contemporary list that kept pace with modern technology, then this method might work. But lumbering under the bureaucratic umbrella, such a system would never get off the ground. The syllabus would be outdated by the time it made it through the first two committees — who knows what it would look like after the fifth or sixth…

That leaves the other method — teaching kids how to think. Don’t misconstrue this — I don’t mean instilling ideologies of thought. I simply mean that school, at the moment, doesn’t require a lot of actual thinking. You read what you’re told to read, you write what you’re told to write — there isn’t a lot of thought actually going on. In school we study for the singular purpose of passing exams and, through the rewards of university, a job and affluence, such behaviour is actually enforced. If you try to go your own way and actually learn something pertinent, God help you — you’re on your own. Critical thinking, thinking outside the box, is simply a waste of time — why bother jumping in the deep end when it’s not necessary? Don’t you have an ‘exam-writing technique’ class to go to anyway?

Because this situation is both omnipresent and self-perpetuating, it’s incredibly hard to fix. You need new teachers first — teachers with parents that have instilled them with free thought. And then you need those teachers to pass it on to children. You only have to do it once, for one generation, because it too would be self-perpetuating. In 50 years you could have a world where everyone has the potential to be the next Einstein or Edison.

* * *

This expands on the basic framework for Education in my Empire’s Manifesto.

Healthcare (or health care if you’re a colonial) means different things to different people. Depending on where you live, your background and your income, it might be synonymous with either insurance or the treatment of illness — and in some cases, it can even mean the public health of a nation or zone.

It’s important to think about these three things as separate entities: despite prevailing culture, you can’t mix up health insurance with the actual treatment of illness — they can both exist, but must be independent of each other. Health insurance, in countries without publicly-funded systems, is simply the way health care is paid for. In countries with ‘universal coverage’ like the UK, health insurance is used to pay for private care, or ‘complementary medicine’ (i.e. new/weird science). Public health is the overarching effort to improve health through improved knowledge and awareness, such as eating five portions of vegetables a day, ‘got milk?’, and so on.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s tuck in.

Healthcare is vital in the most true sense of the word. Without it we would die, immediately in a blaze of flame, or in a laboriously drawn-out fashion — it doesn’t matter: health care stops us from dying. Healthcare is so vital (there’s that word again) that about 10% of a Western nation’s GDP — 10% of its entire income — is spent on it. Some would argue that’s a small price to pay, for longevity of life. By comparison, most nations spend between 2 and 4% of their GDP on military/defence, and education comes in at about 5-7% of a nation’s GDP. So, as you can see, and have no doubt heard from Obama, health care is the biggest human issue.

But it’s all a damn mess; a horrible void of misunderstanding and overspending. And it all derives from a ‘knowledge gap’, between the doctor and the patient. The same can be said for most professions, but with healthcare the distance is most significant. Even if you don’t know the basic fundamentals of household plumbing, or how data traverses the Internet, you can still sleep soundly at night. But what if you’ve just been told you have cancer? Or that you’re being treated with Interferon beta-1a? You get a little jumpy, a little nervous — because you might die.

If we’ve learnt anything about the human body in the last 100 years, it’s that we should fear the inevitable onrush of death. Somewhere along the line we made the switch from ‘the most rugged and tenacious mammal on the planet’ to ‘wuss’. We used to live — and die. Now there are many more steps on the meter: alive, stressed, ill, broken, comatose, dead — and thousands more slotted in between.

Something doesn’t make sense. Why are we more afraid of our health now than 100 years ago? I’m not saying no one cared about death back then — people certainly put a lot of effort into making sure things were left tidy, and that the relevant gods would receive them into the afterlife — but it was just part of living. I think it has something to do with knowledge, and thus certainty and confidence. If you’re brought up with the knowledge that you will die by the age of 60 and you will die if you mistreat your body, that’s some stable knowledge that you can operate with. You can go out and live life.

What do we know about life and death today? Do you know how long you will live for, or if the quality of your life is assured? If I eat this burger, will it shorten my life — does that even matter? Should I be worried about senility, or will biotechnology/biopharmacy save me from that feckless fate?

It’s pretty weird to be confused about your own mortality, eh? A long, healthy life is the single most desirable wish — yet it is the one thing we are most uncertain about! I want to tie this in to the downfall of faith/belief and the rescinded promise of eternal (after)life, but I’m not sure I can yet — but it would make sense that, up until the last century, death was just been a temporary setback… but now it’s personal. (I kid, I kid, but you get the idea.)

To fix this problem, we need to close the gap between bleeding-edge research, the doctors, and us. We have to know more about our bodies and what they’re capable of; education obviously ties in at this point. I think we’re regularly reminded, and amazed, by what humans are capable of and how resilient we are — but at the same time, we have never been more aware of just how defenceless we ultimately are. Back then, we just died. No one knew why, we just died.

Now we die of cancer, heart disease, sclerosis, embolism — all invisible, all able to pounce at any time with little or no warning. But they’ve always been there, just like gravity or hydrogen. If we want to live long and healthy lives, we must teach about healthcare in schools. We must learn more about the body than the knee bone’s connection to the thigh bone, more than veins and arteries — like ancient Rome and Athens, education must be contemporary and hot on the heels of research.