

# Science is Ethics as Electics.

### (Democracy Science, 3.)

Copyright © 2016: Richard Lung.   
First edition.

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_"...a child-like wonder and a sense of humour...[help] to stay young in mind. The trick is to never stop asking questions and never stop exploring, whether it be new places or new ideas...Nearly all the great discoveries made by mankind have come from exploiting a lucky accident. But you stand no chance of encountering such an accident if your life is too neatly organised and routine-dominated..._

_And please don't fall for that propaganda about requiring advanced technical skills in order to be able to unravel the mysteries of the universe. It is true that in some specialist fields they are essential, but it is amazing how much is sitting out there, just waiting to be discovered, simply by using the naked eye."_

_Desmond Morris: The Naked Eye (2000)._

Spelling note:   
Morris was irritated by unorthodox spelling, of which this book has more than its share. For example, I some-times replace the digraph (digraf) ph with f, to spell: physics as fysics. Or, gh with f, to spell: enough as enuf.

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## Table of Contents

Introduction.

Getting Ideas: How I dreamt my life away.

### Effective elections model of scientific ethics.

A functional theory of elections.

Strategic Voting in Party List systems.  
Binomial STV.

Inter-active (Equilibrium) STV: (Hill PR).

### A constitutional basis for the Economy.

A nations decline with the aversion to democracy.

Plutocracy and Bureaucracy, or Democracy?

The Wakeham report on the House of Lords.

Open letter to the joint committee on Lords reform.

The Second Chamber Of Science (an economic parliament).

Constitutional Economics.

### Selection elections

Conditioning and instinct.

Sigmund Freud and CG Jung:   
seeking the whole man thru a democracy of ones selfs.

The Four Loves: romance, friendship, affection and charity. (From CS Lewis)

Scientific theories and methods modeled on natural selection.

A measure of evolution. Diffusion equation of natural selection and elections.

### Ethics and electics in science.

Max Weber work ethic and my student mistakes.

Pitirim Sorokin as The Invisible Man.

The moral sciences as the ethics of scientific method.

Science is Ethics as "Electics"

Physics and Freedom

Relativity of choice.

Measurement of language and logic.

Revelations of a math-moth and naive fysicist.

### Guide to five volume collected verse  
by Richard Lung

#### Guide to two more book series by the author:

Commentaries series;  
Democracy Science series.

## Introduction.

Table of contents

A boy of solitary rural origins, I thought "student" another word for revolutionary, when, in 1968, the year of world-wide student protests, myself short on qualifications and personality, a kind teacher urged us to apply early for a place at college.

I wanted to learn how scientific method might solve social problems, since it had been so successful in understanding the natural world. I was no revolutionary but I was most definitely among the social reformers.

A first jolt, I received to this personal project, came over the radio, in new lodgings, when a member of the Royal Society said, for the record, that he believed sociology was not a science.

A graduate engineer, who shared the lodgings, said I needn't bother about that. The Royal Society was a backward institution that didn't even accept engineers are scientists.

I was to find that this divide between so-called pure science and applied science also could not be crossed on my sociology course. Tho, its young lecturers did give me a good education in scientific method.

David Hume asserted an unbridgable divide between science and ethics. My tutor (who was a splendid teacher, in his way) urged, upon me, the logical impossibility of a moral science.   
The Kantian name for the social sciences, as the moral sciences, suggested otherwise.

Decades later, I met an Impossibility theorem purporting to prove that there is no fair electoral system. This was another not so impossible impossibility.  
An academic school does not understand that a paradox, of majority rule, is just that, and not a paradox of democracy.

The idol, of the sociology lecturers, was the scholar Max Weber. His method followed Humean dualism, that amounted to a deal with the German state: We'll keep out of politics, if you keep out of teaching. You leave us alone and we'll leave you alone.

As a student, I was unable to assimilate the dry-as-dust Weber scholarship and the academic style in general. It would be tempting to blame my academic student years for a barbaric style, that my literary friend Dorothy Cowlin took to task. (Echoes Of A Friend: Letters from Dorothy Cowlin. Comment by Richard Lung.) Truth likes to speak plainly enough to be understood.

Also, I've not had time to catch-up from my late discovery of Pitirim Sorokin. So, two chapters mainly describe the academic atmosphere when I was a student: Max Weber work ethic and my student mistakes; Pitirim Sorokin as The Invisible Man.

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HG Wells said values are facts. Wells, as a sociologist, was to be my personal contribution to the student protest years. Even so, it took me into old age to learn how much more he was of a sociologist and a social reformer, than I had guessed, or is generally known.

The modern history of science is its evolution from philosophy into successive specialisms. Physics was called natural philosophy. Biology broke loose from theology and is still religiously disputed, but its technical achievements make it indisputably another scientific success story.  
("Electoral" interpretations of chemistry and biology are in the chapter: A measure of evolution...)

In the nineteenth century, psychology was still the work of philosophers, like the utilitarians or a pragmatist like William James, or later introspective geniuses like Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. (A subsequent chapter, Sigmund Freud and CG Jung, discusses their work, especially with a view to mental health thru a representative democracy of the many aspects of human personality. See also the chapter: Conditioning and instinct.)

The slow progress of psychology as an experimental science has been greatly accelerated, in recent years, particularly by brain scan technology. Psychology is now set for revolutionary advances, tho it may be called neural science or some such thing.

So much for the sciences, that observe physical bodies. The social sciences of human relationships have proved intractable. Economics was once reckoned to be the specialism, first emerging as a human science. The successive theories of its great names have been more like a series of false dawns, than the march of progress by the physicists.

Adam Smith may have been a credible founding father of his science, like Galileo. Despite their scientistic pretensions, of finding the economic laws of motion of society, or a general theory of employment, Marx was not its Newton, nor Keynes its Einstein, as they respectively aspired to be.

A reason why Adam Smith remains a more credible scientist than his great successors is his basic recognition of the fact of human freedom, as in free trade, over statist puppet mastery. The strings attached were the toll tax. Nowadays, they are the value added tax, whereby the government successively takes a (large) cut on every transaction.

Smith also had a more balanced view of human nature, than is generally recognised, bearing in mind The Theory Of The Moral Sentiments, as well as The Wealth Of Nations. People are altruistic, as well as self-interested. Fairness, as well as freedom, matters in social and economic life. (See the tiny sample of financial parasitism, documented in the chapter: Plutocracy and Bureaucracy or Democracy?)

Too many electoral reformers have forgotten the converse, that freedom mattes as much as fairness in voting method. (See, for instance, the chapter: Strategic voting in party list systems, as well as my previous two books, on election method, in this series.)

Recent debate over economic inequality, led by Thomas Piketty, shows that there is little scientific consensus on its causes, or even its magnitude and unfairness, and less agreement on any cures. But there definitely is unease over continuing instability of the global financial system, and the threat of disastrous collapse.

The complexity of macroeconomics was no excuse for the fraudulent obscurantism of the dotcom bubble. Alarm was expressed against ever more reckless financial instruments, whose total paper value dwarfed that of the real wealth of the whole community. This was in the wake of the foolish lifting of the Glass-Steagall Act, separating the financial sector from the high street banks, to outlaw speculations on peoples savings, that resulted in the Great Crash of 1929.

My life-time approach to economic justice has not been a recently revived proposal of confiscatory (or even compensatory) state intervention, but constitutional economics, developed analgously to an effective version of political democracy.

I'm not a confiscator but a constitutionalist. Arbitrary state power over wealth distribution or Robin Hood justice is no more reasonable and acceptable than arbitrary managerial power raiding corporate funds. Rather, I advocate direct democratic debate by economic parliament, in expert second chambers to every level of political government, from representatively up-graded local chambers of commerce to UN Economic Security Council.

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Parasitism in economics was made possible by an accompanying parasitism in politics. In his 1914 essay, The Disease Of Parliaments, HG Wells spoke in these terms of the party organisations, which rig the rules of elections in their favor.

If politicians are incapable of "electoral honesty" in making the rules of the game, they are hardly capable of playing politics honestly either. They have failed the crucial test of their credibility.

In 1916, in The Elements Of Social Reconstruction, Wells claimed it would take any reasonably intelligent person only an hours study to realise there is one right election method of representation and any number of hopelessly wrong methods.

This may seem an unrealistic claim, but there is much truth in it. It does not seem so, because of the vested interest in wilful ignorance, particularly of effective elections that give incumbents honest competition. There is none so blind as those that will not see.

Also, there are a great many people who have not learned to learn. Like every other skill, thinking only improves with practice. And it helps to know how thinkers, of proven ability, have reached understanding. A certain amount of relevant study, such as Wells own scientific training, remains a fairly rare endowment, in a society divided and ruled by The Two Cultures, exposed by CP Snow.

A study of election method is a knowledge how to run the engine of representative democracy. Wells was right. This is a limited problem amenable to precise formulation and progressive solution by scientific method.

200 years ago, the French Enlightenment founders of election science knew there was such a thing as right and wrong voting method, and disputed it amongst themselves.   
150 years ago, the British philosophical radicals, led by John Stuart Mill knew it. 100 years ago, HG Wells knew it, and was one of its most able advocates.

In the ensuing century of anti-democratic reaction, about fifty years ago, some "social choice theorists" joined the political reaction with an academic reaction. A grandiose Impossibility theorem claimed: There is no fair electoral system.

The impossibility pronouncement was an academic veto on scientific progress in democracy, to legitimise the political veto on democratic progress.   
This anathema could be compared to a sanction or tabu, of religious, political and economic motivation, that affects the whole man of thought, feeling and action.

Piterim Sorokin studied the long-term cycles of societies between religion and worldliness, or asceticism and hedonism. How does one achieve liberation? Is it by freedom from the passions with self-control or free-running self-indulgence? Is it by self-release, as release from oneself or release of oneself? Perhaps a bit of both?

Sorokin thought there were rare periods of social transition in which religious devotion combined with worldly values to give a culture its ultimate artistic expression. He also thought it might be possible for mankind to sustain this glorious creative balance.

Sorokin predicted, with the historic trend towards materialism, that scientific prowess would decline, in the twentieth century. Later, he admitted he was wrong. Natural science went marching on (indeed qualifying its materialist determinism). It still seems to do so, despite some recent qualms expressed by Lee Smolin, in The Trouble With Physics.

Still, this cyclic turn to human fortunes is a great insight by Sorokin. Even science may degenerate with hedonistic decadence and social parasitism. At first, the advance of natural science may be only indirectly affected, by wasteful diversion of resources from imaginative and beneficial designs, into vanity projects, commercial seduction and deadly technologies of oppression and extinction.

Whereas the absence or downright denial of a science of political democracy and economic democracy represents fifty to a hundred years failure of academic and political institutions. (See chapter: A functional theory of elections.)

The affinity between science and democracy is fairly well recognised. But not when it comes to electoral reform and research, as the Establishment has made increasingly evident. (See, for instance, the chapter: A nations decline with the aversion to democracy.)

I developed the subject, Scientific Method Of Elections, title of my previous book in this Democracy Science series, a few years on from my further education. (Three early chapters, here, offer a brief resumption of this topic.) My whole lifes thought turned out to be a sailing against a gathering current of scepticism or nihilism, not merely denying but ignoring rightness in electoral method.

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My ideas matured, since leaving college, when only one proposal was on my mind, in answer to my original question: how may scientific method solve social problems?

This answer was that, for effective government, an economic parliament stands in relation to the political parliament, as experience or experiment stands in relation to theory, in scientific method. (See chapter: The second chamber of science. Also discussed in the preceding two chapters on the Wakeham report and Lords reform; and elsewhere.)

My reformism was at odds with the scholarly detachment taught on the course. Even amongst practical thinkers, representative democracy of the economy has become a marginalised idea.

Later, I realised that democratic politics in general could be translated into equivalent economic terms. I called this subject: Constitutional Economics (which title is given its own chapter). And I used as a model or framework, the same measurement structure, with which I determined the difference between good and bad election methods.

When I was thirty, turning out-door book racks, exposed a CS Lewis paper-back, The Four Loves, signifying varieties of special relations.   
I had much in mind that there are four kinds of measurement, which underlie scientific election method.

The four-to-four correspondence seemed as naïve as it was obvious. But voting or wishing expresses love, in some sort. And if I could use right political elections as a model for economic relations, I might do so for social relations. (This endeavor created another chapter: The Four Loves...)

My political, economic and social theories were very much "moral sciences." Right election method had become a precise scientific guide, in effect, a specialist off-shoot of "electics" from ethics or moral philosophy.

While still in my twenties, it also dawned on me, that an "electoral" perspective was relevant to relativity theory, which demands adaptability in choosing observational co-ordinates, so that the laws of nature still hold with complete generality.

In my twenties, I knew little relativity and less quantum theory, but it was obvious that choice was even more pivotal to the observational dilemmas of the Uncertainty principle. For decades, I kept reading popular physics books, to get some insight into their theories and how science works.  
("Electoral" interpretations of physics are to be found in later chapters, notably: Relativity Of Choice.)

Science is to electics, rather as theory is to method. But the method is moral, not merely a technical procedure without an imperative.  
Scientific method is itself a democratic ethic, which, applied to the social sciences, makes for a democratic society.  
(A chapter studies the relation of natural and social science: The moral sciences as the ethics of scientific method.)

Creating a specialist science, out of ethics, in terms of election method or electics, was not like the previous way, in which new sciences, like psychology or economics or political science, were carved out of philosophy. "Electics" was not like one more of many sub-divisions to philosophy. Science and ethics, as electics, are two sides of the same coin. If science was like looking at the moon, then electics was like seeing the other side of the moon.

This intimate relation of knowledge and freedom is a dynamic by which one helps the other to progress. This investigative model can also be conceived as a metaphysics of reality itself as a free universe.  
(This is considered in the chapter, from which this book takes its title: Science is Ethics as "Electics.")

The next chapter, Getting Ideas..., is a brief survey of my lifes thought. The occasion was a commemoration of forty years private study, after leaving further education. This book, like the former two, in the Democracy Science series, is based on my web-site of that name. Some chapters barely differ from their originals. Others show more or less extensive revision. Altogether, the books bring in considerably more material.

In the younger half of my life, it became apparent to me that every science specialty seems to have an "electoral" interpretation. Late in composition, I had an idea that this might apply even to mathematics.

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## Getting Ideas: How I dreamt my life away.

Table of contents

Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.  
_HG Wells._

0) Education.

1) English language reform: Early learning alfabet; rational past tense; measuring the power of a grammar.

2) Constitutional Economics.

3) Scientific Method of Elections.

4) A science of love: "sofily."

5) Physical and moral sciences.

### 0) Education.

How did I get ideas?  
Before you can get ideas you need to know things. That is education. Not until I was leaving school, and about to go to college, did I think about having ideas. I headed a page called: Nothing New. I don't remember the few notes I made but I imagine they were unsofisticated.

Then again, there was one amusing incident at secondary school. Our physics teacher said we could ask him questions after lessons. I once asked him: Is life possible without the sun?  
I still admire the true scientists way he gave my question a moments serious thought, before saying: No.   
When older, I berated myself for asking such a naive question.

In recent years. life was found locked away underground in Romania. Life needs energy but it doesn't have to come from the sun. Hence, the probes for life in the ice-capped seas of Europa, around Jupiter, and the methane-clouded world of Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn. And other of their obscure but active ice-world companions.

I regret that I did not become an inventor with practical ideas to lower the cost of living. I did not have that democratic ambition as a child.   
At secondary school, I showed little or no aptitude for science and the laboratory or the workshop. In my first year there, mathematics lessons were a misery. And my progress or regress yo-yoed with further teachers.

English education was rigidly divided into sciences and arts. By the time of sixth form college, as it is now called, it was a relief to escape the science side of things. The teaching of history was substantial, even before sixth form. The historians made decisive progress with the sixth form syllabus. They persuaded the education board to allow the teaching of modern British history and modern European history, right up to 1939. (Unfortunately, the girls were left deep in the Middle Ages, despite the teachers best efforts.) It was a positive advantage not to go further, because we were already saturated with propaganda films about the Second World War.

Our lessons were objective and analytical. The teacher would discuss whether it had been better to sign the 1938 Munich agreement or not, from the point of view of winning the war, or even being spared from it.

At home, there was the Parliamentary struggle for social reform. Progress was made, of a sort, against the deprivations of the people. Social reform caught my imagination and became a cause. I think, there was an even profounder effect. I suspect that, for the first time, it began to dawn on me that force need not be the prime mover in human affairs. I began to have a faith in reason.

It is ironic to think that peaceful change thru parliament should take some of the credit for this conversion. My life was ahead of me. I did not realise that it would see partisan parliaments as an obstructor, rather than a facilitator, in years to come.

If I could get a place at university or college, psychology was my choice of degree. Like the pre-1911 House of Lords, the headmaster vetoed this, saying I was too introspective. Instead, he offered sociology. I had to put up with this. Later, he tried to talk me into switching from sociology to history. But I stuck with sociology, hopeless tho seemed my chances of obtaining a place, in such a popular subject.

Modern history taught me that one might change the world without going to war over it. But sociology seemed the means to study how to make that change possible.

In the meantime, it didn't look as tho I was going to get any further education at all. My exam results were nowhere near good enough. And the head teacher talked to me about whether I could endure being a teacher all my life. Tho, it was known that "introspective" people or introverts make bad teachers.

The economics teacher, in whose subject I flopped, urged us all to apply early for places. As a result of his kindness, I did so, and was offered an interview at a city college.   
With uncharacteristic initiative, I picked up a library book about how to succeed in applications. I remember little of it, but one piece of advice sticks in my mind. The author said most applicants think it's best to sound modest - just what I usually did. Instead, you should have confidence in yourself.

I wrote my interview questionnaire full of confidence and decision. Afterwards, the lecturer held my questionnaire. He asked me had I any heroes.   
I mentioned Lloyd George. I suspected after, that the reason, I'd omitted his name, was an unconscious feeling that my headmaster would not have approved. (In later life, I was doubtful about the balance of his achievements.)   
Finally, the lecturer asked me whether I was satisfied with how I'd answered. Remembering what the author had told me about confidence, I said, with confidence, that I was!

Strangely, I was not really surprised when my application was successful.   
That three years social science course was my life-line to a further education and, what is more, shaped my intellectual life to this day. And ideas have been the most important part of my life.

There was a bit of a class divide among the students and I did not feel that I belonged to either side. For more basic personal reasons, my time there was a social failure and a career failure.  
I was so closed-in on myself, like a hedgehog, that I couldn't even relax and look around the museums and galleries, and generally recuperate.   
After the course, a lecturer told me that sociology had been the wrong subject for me. I guess you needed to be extrovert to take an interest in societies, and I just couldn't do that.

But I found a purpose, which was to understand how scientific method might reform society. Most of the lecturers were about 30 years old. I remember when I was 30, I still seemed to know little. So, I look back with respect for those young men, who taught us with authority but also youthful humor and enthusiasm.  
[I regret that, knowing what I didn't know, even as late as writing this chapter, has somewhat subdued my appreciation.]

From first to last, we discussed the very possibility of a science of society. This was not social reform, but was germane to it, as far as I was concerned. One or two of the lecturers were more or less Marxist. I was not attracted to this doctrine and found its writings dull. At the end of the second year, I was asked if I followed the Marx-Weber School of sociology.   
I settled for being "eclectic."

The inter-view must have unconsciously acted on me to come to a more considered response, because I became an enthusiast for HG Wells. My claims to his being a sociologist were received with more tolerance than agreement.  
Yet, the course education in sociology, as a European discipline, was a refreshing change from insular British opinion.

The education system has become an examination system that makes you think for other people, rather than yourself. The college staff had tried to minimise exams but had not been allowed to do more than get rid of the second-year-end exams.

There were signs that I was already thinking for myself at college. I disagreed with Max Weber, in his ethical accommodation, with the state, that academics should be ethicly neutral. I followed Immanuel Kant, against David Hume, in thinking science and ethics were not just two exclusive categories. Instead, there is a gradation from the more or less universal truths of natural science to the more individual truths of the moral sciences.

A later familiarity with the four increasingly scientific or powerful scales of measurement showed that Hume was using a classificatory scale, but Kant was using a more accurate ordinal scale of measurement, in relating science to ethics.

The mathematics lecturer didn't persist with his New Maths course, when, the attendance dwindled to a handful. I felt the loss.   
All were taught statistics for three years. I thought, at the time, that statistics was a poor substitute for the precision of calculus in the advanced sciences, and that I was hopelessly adrift of scientific mathematics.  
Long after, a mathematics teacher asked me if the statistics course was baby stuff.   
I had to admit that it was.

However, a course statistics book impressed upon me the importance of four levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio scales. They say science is measurement. And it so happened, when I came to invent a study, I called the scientific method of elections, that there is only one electoral system that satisfies all four scales of measurement: the so-called single transferable vote.

I was driven back to my old lecturers elementary statistics book, long since hidden away in my study, on the vaguest suspicions of other averages than the arithmetic mean. That seed of knowledge germinated the most difficult theme of my thoughts, spanning my fifties and into old age. I briefly refer to my personal studies as a "math-moth" and naive fysicist, at the end of the book.

It has turned-out that my life, as a citizen, could be described as the occupation of an amateur thinker. This counts for nothing by official standards that work is not work, unless it is paid. Of course, money had to be found - just enough to make the unpaid studies possible.

The following sections give some idea of my main studies for forty years. Most topics are of theoretical interest as systems of ideas. But the first subject, to be discussed, is different: Language reform was treated as a practical problem.

### 1) English language reform: Early learning alfabet; rational past tense; measuring the power of grammar.

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Bernard Shaw was a big early influence on me. Hesketh Pearson, on Shaw, made me a vegetarian shortly before my 25th birthday. As a student, I relied for protein mainly from eggs and cheese. (Such do food scientists change their minds, I'm not sure whether low fat cheese is much benefit, given that sugar is now regarded as the main cause of unhealthy obesity.) Raw meat was expensive, it would have to be cooked, and I didn't much like it, anyway.

GBS also converted me to English spelling reform. Soon after leaving college, I read a book about him, Shaw - the chucker-out, by Allan Chappelow. Shaw preached the economic advantage of rational spelling. This seems less compelling with the arrival of electronic publishing.

The most basic waste is of mental work. Formal education spends an inordinate amount of time, at primary and secondary schools and even in apprenticeships, just trying to make young people copy the irrationalities of conventional spelling. For failing to do so, insult is added to injury, by calling them illiterate. The poor standards of literacy are a chronic complaint of British industry. About a fifth of the population is deemed functionly illiterate.

A recent statistic claimed that 80% of prisoners have a literacy age of no more than about 10 years old. The frustrations of the illiterate also disrupt the work of other children in the classroom.  
The return to teaching phonics (which would be better spelt: foniks) has helped but that does not tackle making English a more sensible system of spelling speech.

This intractable problem has occupied my thinking life. Progress could be made, if only there were the will. The basic problem is lack of democratic values. I shall come back to this cause, not only of educational failure, but economic and political and general failure. One can chart British decline by it.

In terms of practical details, I think the biggest single obstacle to English literacy is the ambiguous use of vowel letter, e, also as an accent, combined arbitrarily with five vowels to make five diphthongs, for example, to distinguish "made" from "mad." Worse still, many parochial spelling reformers would make this e-accent a general usage, valuing the regular combination of vowel plus e-as-accent, even tho it confuses over vowel, e, which people will automaticly intone.

Generally, English speakers may unconsciously pronounce vowels and diphthongs the way they are spelt, even if spoken English does not fashionably follow that course. The fact is there are English dialects for most of the ways that English is spelt. And that is a very useful way to remember conventional English spelling.

The teaching of foniks needs to be spelt-out with an explicit Early Learning Alphabet, on the proven principle of the Initial Teaching Alphabet but without the burden of (cumbersome) extra letters, that doomed ITA.

Also, the English language would be simplified by recognising another possibility: what I call the English past tense spelling convention. The future tense is shown by starting with: I will or I shall. Likewise, the past tense could be shown by starting with either: I would or I should. Better still, the convention might be that the past tense was expressed by the contracted forms of I would or I should: I'd. This contraction might also serve for "I did go:" I'd go, as the same as: I went.

To show how much that simple reform matters, you only have to look at the problem that Ogden and Richards had with Basic English. This offered foreigners an opportunity to communicate with a small vocabulary of English. But all the most common and vital verbs in English have irregular past tenses. In effect, this means that they have to be learned twice over. This was quite a hiccup in Basic English.

The scientific perspective of measurement also has a bearing on the evolution of language. For all its need of reform, English has a more powerful construction than some languages, which preceded it, and seek to replace it. The grammatical meaning of English is understood by the order of the words in a sentence. But Latin and Esperanto have different endings to a word to show which part of speech it is.

A language that merely classifies words into parts of speech is less powerful than a language which gives the parts of speech of words by their order. In measurement theory, the nominal or classifying scale is followed by the more powerful ordinal scale of measurement.

There are yet more powerful scales of measurement. In scientific voting method, these (interval and ratio) scales concern the transfer of surplus votes, so they are not wasted, and their rationing among the most prefered "candidates." It may not be strictly correct to think of language in terms of these further more powerful scales, but, by analogy, language wastefully builds up surplus words or surplus prefixes to words, such as "co-conspirators," and "report back." Meaning can be rationed among words in a sentence.   
This is an art, as well as a science: the precision of poetry gives back language its vitality.

### 2) Constitutional Economics.

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From social science, a sense, of the importance of economics, became second nature. The first idea that presented itself to me, after leaving college, was a Constitutional Economics. This found economic analogies to democratic principles in politics.

For instance, full employment was conceived as a universal suffrage of work. Everyone, that can, has a duty to take a turn to maintain and keep running the social amenities, so that when people cannot look after themselves, they will be looked after.

This work suffrage is the plan of HG Wells 1912 essay "The Great State." This was a misleading title because he vehemently opposed Fabian-style bureaucracy. He meant great, in the sense of "great-spirited" or magnanimous.   
Wells did believe in international government or the World State against military and commercial warfare. Of humble origins, he remembered that the common man is at the mercy of the machinations of the powerful. At the height of his fame, the subtitle of his Experiment In Autobiography, was "Discoveries and conclusions of a very ordinary brain." That's a description I don't doubt some would not hesitate to apply to myself.

Money is given a democratic meaning, regarded as a vote for goods and services. This was not a new idea. During my trail round second-hand book shops and sales, I scanned it in an American book, written after the Second World War. But I had not seen the idea consistently followed.

Right back in 1927, Bernard Shaw (The Intelligent Womans Guide to Socialism and Capitalism) treated money, in a consistent, but, I'm afraid, one-sided way. His principle of equal incomes was held already by Lenin. He had to give it up for the New Economic Policy of 1921, allowing individual initiative. Tho, as Deng Xiaoping said: When you open the window, you let in a few flies.

In democratic politics, it is true that everyone has an equal vote. Then, the vote goes unequally to differently prefered candidates. By analogy, everyone might be given an equal income, for essential work, but there would be unequal beneficiaries from its spending, in a dynamic free market. So, one of the main problems of my study was to resolve this seeming paradox.

On the analogy of transferable voting, surplus incomes, to a basic equality, could be transferable to a pension. The greater the surplus, that went into their personal pension fund, the earlier they could retire.   
Including Bill Gates, forty multi-billionaires decided voluntarily to transfer at least half their wealth to charity.

More-over, the teaching of scientific method impressed, on me, the basic relation between theory and practice. And I saw that political laws, like scientific laws, needed testing, in this case, by economic experience. The British second chamber was traditionly a house of vocations. The occupations need proportionly representing, so they can all keep each other in check.   
HG Wells proposed this idea, in 1920, in The Outline Of History.

Government should not be controled by the lobbying of failed vested interests that are parasitic upon the general welfare. Scientific method requires a two-chamber representative democracy of politics and economics. The best test of experience is a fully representative experience. So, the most representative democracy is the most scientific, because it leaves open the most possibilities for finding out the truth.

Oligarchy limits experience to a few and ignores the rest. Oligarchy is ignorant or against science, except on its own parasitic terms. Self-protected elites forget that we are all in the same boat.

All representatives and the Fourth Estate of the mass media should register how much they owe to vested interests. And vested interests, in turn, should register the people of power and influence they have bought with places on their boards, and all other perks. There should be general transparency in lobbying and reasonable limitations on possible abuses.

A case study is nuclear power. [This section was not written with the wisdom of hindsight but in august 2010, before the Fukushima melt-downs.] A courageous former editor, of The Sun, confessed he was told to leave out the Liberal Democrats, who were anti-nuclear (until they joined the 2010 Tory coalition). Nuclear power is a prime example of a failed vested interest compensating with intensive lobbying and buying influence in government, the so-called "nuclear cronyism." The commercial media have been a mouth-piece for nuclear propaganda, vilifying and misrepresenting the "fanatical Greens," fanaticly censored from supplying their side of the debate.

Fission energy has failed to pay for itself in sixty years and leaves the public to pay for its deadly legacy of radioactive waste. And yet politicians talk about energy security thru nuclear power without subsidies, while, in doing so, they plunder and imperil the people for untold generations.

The scientists and technologists, who created this Frankenstein monster, have failed to apply their own reasonable standards of enough is enough. Nuclear power has been tried and found wanting for much too long. Government has failed to heed the lesson of the failed command economy and ignores the environmental case for decentralised energy, like the 2010 Greenpeace Energy [R]evolution document.

Nuclear power is a centralised control of energy that appeals to the power-loving, whereas decentralised energy allows the public economic self-sufficiency and hence political independence.

Nuclear weapons and the nuclear plants that produce weapons-grade material are the criminal folly of a terror technology that threatens global extinction thru a Nuclear Winter and subjects the home population to a police state.

Nuclear apologists typicly try to frighten the public into believing that not building more nuclear power stations will land them back in the Stone Age (of which atomic bombs and reactor melt-downs are more than capable). This is really a state ultimatum that neglects to protect people thru more conservation of energy and renewable energies, rapidly progressing thru private research, despite lack of government backing.

HG Wells foretold the atomic bomb in 1914. The World Set Free also foretells use of the Single Transferable Vote and the Recall. Wells warned of the squandering of fossil fuels, in 1922, The Secret Places of the Heart, quoted by Isaac Asimov during the 1970s oil crisis.  
Wells also lamented lack of ecological conservation of our fellow creatures, in 1923 (A Year of Prophesying).

Less well known is that Wells, in 1932, (The Work Wealth and Happiness of Mankind) discussed alternative energies: geothermal, hydrothermal, as well as hydro-electric, with modern turbines replacing the old windmill and water wheel. He predicted the beginning of a new epoch in the invention of the photo-electric cell (photovoltaic cell).

### 3) Scientific Method of Elections.

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In my first year at college, I was a most reluctant set-essay writer on proportional representation. When I brought myself to read a book, JFS Ross: Elections and Electors, I knew that the single transferable vote proportional representation (STV/PR) was the answer.

Research has confirmed that people react just the way I did. They don't appreciate the faults with a status quo, such as the simple majority system or First Past the Post, till it is pointed out to them. The situation is worse still with regard to those who stand to lose by the truth becoming common knowledge. The old saying is true: There is none so blind as those that will not see.

In answer to my old student debates about the difficulties of a social science emulating natural science, I would say wilful ignorance from vested interests has stalled social progress and risks disaster. The truth is kept from the public, and they don't understand the reason for their frustration. One cause is the crudity of elections with an illiterate X-vote and First Past the Post count, more like a gamble than representation.

The British February 1974 general election gave the Liberals fourteen seats for 6 million votes to their candidates.   
Something made me check if HG Wells had anything to say on election reform.   
Amazingly enough, he had advocated the STV/PR remedy way back in 1914, in his land-mark essay, The Disease Of Parliaments.  
The stalling, of scientific progress in election method, was a symptom of what Wells described in 1908 (The War In The Air) as the potential collapse of society from mans moral progress not keeping-up with his scientific progress.

Like Kant, Wells saw a gradation between natural and moral sciences, in his 1906 essay, The So-called Science of Sociology.  
Wells also followed JS Mill in supporting STV/PR as a definitive scientific discovery, in his 1916 work, The Elements of Social Reconstruction.

The National Campaign for Fair Votes, founded in 1975, used the 1914 Wells reference, I sent. They didn't mention that particular reform, he supported, because they were only interested in "some form of proportional representation," meaning: never mind democratic form.

In my twenties, I invented, what I was pleased to consider, two new subjects of social science. The one was Constitutional Economics. The other was Scientific Method of Elections.

At college, the first things I learned from books of philosophy of science were that science is divided into theory and experiment. Theory must not presume what one is supposed to prove. Experiment must not be ambiguous, so that it could mean anything you wanted it to.

Well, it was clear to me that Party List systems were a theory of choice that presumed partisanship upon people, without offering an effective means to disprove it. That is unscientific.   
It was also clear that elections with single member systems are an ambiguous test. They don't make clear whether the voters are voting for a candidate as an individual or just as a member of a party.

Typical excuses, of these presumptuous or ambiguous systems, were that people only voted for a party, anyway. In this, they were guilty of circular reasoning. People only vote for a party because the system does not allow them to vote for anything else, therefore they only vote for a party. Partisans believe people are partisan, because that is what they want them to be, not necessarily because that is what they altogether are. Such prejudice precludes knowledge of the truth. Science requires openness of mind or honesty to find out anything new.

As a student of scientific method, I learned that a scientific theory is based on a few principles that must be consistent to form a logical system from which new deductions could be made.   
On my own, as an amateur thinker, I applied the demands of theory to election system.   
The special case was a single preference, like an X-vote, that could choose one of two candidates, from a (single) majority count.  
The general case had to be a multiple preference, in a whole order of choices for a multi-majority count (which is provided by the Droop quota: from one representative wins on over half the votes, two representatives win on over a third the votes each; three representatives win on a quota of over one-quarter the votes each, and so on).

This general theory of elections, being a many-preference vote consistent with a many-majority count, is known as proportional representation by the single transferable vote.

(By the way, Arrow theorem, of the incompleteness of elections, does not allow for such theoretical and mensural considerations that make STV the definitive scientific method of elections. That is not to deny further problems, one of which is met by my method of Binomial STV.)

The unity in liberty, that transferable voting enables, ("scientificly") explains the popular will, like no other election system. Voters can rank a choice of candidates from each party, effecting primaries, and rank candidates from more than one party, effecting a prefered coalition.

John Stuart Mill MP gave the classic case for peaceful power-sharing, with due consideration to majorities but no more than their due, compared to the size of the minority. This was his mature conception of democracy, as against maiorocracy, the tyranny of the majority.

I've enlarged on this, many times on my web pages, revised for my first two free (Smashwords) e-books. It's not rocket science. And that's what bothers me. Qualified specialists do much more difficult things all the time. An amateur, such as myself, who has not had a private life, can try to serve the public interest. But people heed authority, which is an unscientific claim on their attention, and tend to ignore things that don't personly benefit them.

The British government realised the need for power-sharing when it re-introduced STV/PR for the Ulster assembly, during the troubles in the 1970s. But the two ruling British parties defended their own duopoly against the rise of other parties support.

Britain repeatedly made this mistake of being undemocratic: they forewent industrial democracy, while imposing it on Germany. Meanwhile, Britain became "the sick man of Europe," with its bloody-minded workers striking against exclusive board-room decisions.

Consequently, Britain, that had helped win two world wars in Europe, "lost the peace," surrendering to the Common Market, on terms of permanent subjugation, worse than the temporary reparations against a defeated Germany.

The lesson of Britains decline is that the elites have revolted against the public interest. Government has been negligent of promoting and representing the knowledge and skills of all its people.  
This revolt is not only a threat to the very survival of democratic values but also of scientific values in society, outside the privileged enclaves of professionals owing their livings to public or private corporations. Natural science itself might not preserve its integrity in a social sea of lies. Witness the climate-gate scandal.

Top-down partisan rule is strictly comparable to the top-down rationalism that prevented science from becoming effective, til checked by searching evidence from anyone, regardless of whether they were established authorities. The dogmas of failed but lavish vested interests are upheld by the party whips and media manipulators or spinners.   
Parliament is stifled as a learning forum of discussion and intelligent progress.

[Since writing this section, it has been depressingly confirmed by the hysterical reaction from the Tory party and most of the Labour party and the mass media against the minor democratic reform proposed by the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum.]

A two-party system is easier to buy than more pluralism. The dogmatic rationalism of dictatorial List systems of proportional partisanship are also top-down enemies of the balance of empirical rationalism that makes possible scientific progress.

Britains hypocritical partisan style of government is a self-defeating oligarchic ignorance, just as much anti-scientific as anti-democratic. It is a hypocritical reversion to Realpolitik of force and fraud, that is degrading a civilised society into a struggle.   
British public life seems to be woefully lacking in scientific or rigorous standards of honesty, something HG Wells recognised. In fact, Wells was criticised for setting too much store by science, by people who understood much less well what it is.   
GK Chesterton spoke of "our corrupt and undemocratic age."

[Not known to me at time of writing, Pitirim Sorokin, on a decline of science, is discussed later.]

### 4) A science of love: "sofily."

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After I left college, I went back home. I was glad it was over but suffered and regressed emotionly from the old isolation. There were no higher academic institutions and good text books were hard to come by. For many years, I followed the jumble sales. I was looking for both good non-fiction and fiction.

When I was six years old, my mother took me to a little private library, where I chose Noddy books, attracted by the colorful figures, with bell-topped gnome hats, driving a colorful little car. When I was seven, I asked her why she hadn't told me about the public library, where Enid Blyton continued my graduation, thru the Famous Five, to The Secret Seven.

When I was thirty, turning book racks, outside that same book-shop, that had seen better days, I came across CS Lewis, on The Four Loves.  
It reminded me of the four scales of measurement and I cautiously tried to make a comparison.

To my surprise, there seemed to be some correspondence. The four loves - romance, friendship, affection, charity - can be considered, in turn, as one greater than the other. They are all good and necessary but there is a progression from one to the other, which is successively harder to attain.

Also, the Bible says of Faith Hope and Charity that charity is the greatest, which implies a scale of values. And Charity is the greatest of the four loves.

This study was not so much philosophy or the love of wisdom but "sofily" or the wisdom of love. ("Sofily" is an unlikely term to catch on.)

Exhausted with the marathon of my formal education, in my early twenties, I wondered what had gone wrong with my friendless and loveless life. I tried to recall my earliest memories, more or less up to coming of age.

Influenced by the cinema, I tried to write, in a succession of images like film slides. Commerce dictated that writers write novels. I was really attempting a sort of experimental poetry without knowing it. In short, I was a failure as a writer.

This is not a story of my personal life but my thoughts had the virtue of being based on my experience. I was relating my own misfortunes to those of the history of mankind. I saw that fear and anger were related to each other in a sort of see-saw of depression and oppression. And I thought that human misery had much to do with this instability. All the persecutions and superstitions seemed to be examples of mankind mastered by excesses of hatred and terror.

I argued to myself that fear and anger were not the prime movers. The prime emotion was love. Fear was fear of loss of love. And anger was against those it was feared would take love away from them. People feel angry because they have been cheated of life. And, I am sorry to say, that is all too often the case. Anger may use force to try to rectify frauds. This takes the law into ones own hands. An abdication, of reason by peaceful discussion, perpetuates further injustices and revenges.

The good news was that it was possible to become more balanced or more rational. The bad news is that it is easier to knock other people off their emotional balance than it is to learn to become emotionly stable, oneself. That seems why social progress is so uncertain and old enmities persist.  
By "rational," I mean a balance of the mind, an equable state of mind. The body can do a balancing act, for instance, by learning to ride a bicycle. Similarly, the mind can learn to do a balancing act. For example, by restraining ones anger, one is less likely to have a later fearful reaction.

Consider why this might be the case. Suppose one is angry with someone. Unconsciously, one knows that anger is liable to rebound on one, and one is unconsciously expecting that to happen. Hence, the fear is liable to build up in one, out of that expectation.   
This is also the reason why one should not seek revenge, because it is liable to result in a vendetta or vicious circle of recriminations.

War does not just cause physical destruction, but causes emotional and mental instability. Millions of soldiers may take the war home with them. Social relations may become unendurable.

Fear and its counter-part anger can become addictive mood swings of the personality. Decisions made by over-mastering anger or fear tend to be bad decisions that cooler heads would shun.

All the inferior emotions, such as the so-called seven deadly sins, rush into the emotional vacuum, caused by a loss of love. Other emotions may be good servants but they are bad masters.   
Love is the only good master of ones emotions. Never the less, love, like light, has its own spectrum, and not all loves may be right for a given situation.

Generally, the so-called sinful or unwise emotions are excesses of necessary qualities. It is necessary to feel fear sometimes to prevent us doing foolish things. It is better sometimes to express justified anger than to suppress it and let it work surreptitious harm.

One might say similar things, say, of the deadly sins of avarice and sloth. To acquire or achieve things, one should have to work for them. Then one realises that greed is the result of being too lazy to work for what one wants. No doubt over-rewarded people are always saying how hard they've worked for what they've got.

There has to be the social conscience to keep rewards in proportion: that is to say, love of the well-being of others, as well as of oneself. And we are back with the golden rule: love thy neighbor as thyself. Do as you would be done by.

In my twenties, I was preoccupied with this kind of self-healing psychology. It is all very well thinking these things, but my experience, perhaps like most people, is that it has been a lot harder to live this way.

### 5) Physical and moral sciences.

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Being interested in a social science, as an engine of change, meant taking an interest in the scientific success story of physics especially. I thought sociology should study ecology, so I was enthusiastic about the new ecological movement. Those were the days of the Club of Rome, founded on an appreciation of the limits to growth.

A new environmental party was founded in Britain. This was first called: People. Then it was called the Ecological party. I wanted to take part but was too far out of its first urban centres of growth. Eventually, it became the Green party.   
Specialist organisations proliferated and it soon became apparent to me that I could not hope to match their professionalism.

So, I decided to specialise in election science. Perhaps from as early as my mid twenties, I seemed to notice analogies between transferable voting method and relativity theory. Even before that, I could see similarities between the logic of relativity and the principles of ecology. Environmentalists were also alluding a common way of thinking between ecology and modern physics.

I wrote-up some preliminary ideas about a triple comparison, in 1981, but did not develop this until 2004. (See chapter: A measure of evolution. Diffusion equation of natural selection and elections.) And this takes me too far forward in my story.

In classical physics, the observer does not enter the picture of the observed. Relativity theory becomes more general, the less limited the conditions upon which observers can share observations without apparent contradiction. Special and general relativity progressively lift the limits on consistent observations. These broader physical theories are, in effect, broader methods of choice of observation.

Hence the progress of scientific theory and election method are linked. To elect means to choose-out, the subject of ethics. So, scientific method is really a relation of science and ethics. With these ideas in mind, I was able to write-up, in my mid thirties, the problem that obsessed our undergraduate course: can sociology be a science?   
(My chapter: The moral sciences as the ethics of scientific method.)

Also by that time, I had fairly extended a relativistic physics model of good voting method. But it was no more than a metaphor really or poetic imagination. As late as 28 years old, I tried to teach myself calculus and other maths. These two endeavors spread over decades and were to become a wearisome burden to me.

The traditional basic branches of philosophy are ethics, science and esthetics. Aristotle called these the studies of the good, the true and the beautiful.   
Finding beauty is finding something to love or appreciate.

Love is an achievement of emotional equilibrium, or being equable in an intelligent governing of the passions.   
Superstitions are ignorant fears that tyrannise over the mind, such that people are persecuted, even by force of law, when they do not conform. Therefore, science or tested knowledge has a moral role in giving the human mind a better balance that can withstand social destabilisation thru panics and witch-hunts.

To be effective, science has to have the freedom to challenge prejudice, while recognising that some tabus are justifiable. It cannot be a coincidence that JS Mill was the author of On Liberty, as well as of System of Logic, on scientific method.   
His ethics of toleration held that if conduct does no harm, according to tested knowledge, don't persecute it. To punish harmless behavior is to court superstition or unjustifiable fears. This takes away the benefit of fear, which should be reserved for behavior with truly harmful consequences.

Liberty and science, in co-operation, can stabilise behavior, making for love, by doing away with unnecessary fears, reinforced by the ignorant prejudices of hateful persecutions. Love is the first principle, which the purpose of free knowledge is to safeguard and promote.

Jesus said that love is all he came to tell about. The first and the second commandments, the two most important commandments are of love. He also stated the relation of knowledge and freedom: know the truth and it will make you free.   
This ancient principle informs my studies.

I was brought-up in the Christian tradition but Jesus was not the only one or the first to say these things. I have not added a footnote to much of the ancient wisdom. I don't come from the Buddhist tradition and that is perhaps why I have not much to say with regard to the Buddha showing suffering and the end of suffering.

I have never become adept at the ancient psychology of meditation. Tho introspective, I have lacked the patience to meditate. I have justified this neglect with the belief that my studies have been my meditation, and that may have been the right way for me.

#### Postscript (June 2012):

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There is a symmetry of approach to all my fields of scientific study. Even my chapter on The Four Loves seeks understanding, not only in terms of increasingly powerful measurement scales, but also increasingly powerful election methods.

For example, transferable voting is the most charitable form of elections, because it gives the power to respect and elect candidates outside ones party or group, like a universal religion of love.  
A charitable principle of surplus transfer takes effect in the Gospels incident of the loaves and the fishes.

I have reproached myself for just using the logic of measurement as the gate-way to every study. But this is only half the story. I also approached every study from an electoral perspective. My inspiration, to Know the truth and it will make you free, really did come to mean a practical partnership between knowledge and freedom, especially in terms of measurement logic and election method.

#### 2016 post-script:

Pitirim Sorokin realised that society must adapt to balance the life of religious devotion with scientific technology.  
In middle age, I found a more personal balance in my life, when I was given some feeling for nature and companionship by a poet or maker, who made a maker of me. This book relates the scientific to the ethical dimension. It would also be possible to write about the esthetic basis of science, rather as I gained an esthetic dimension to my own experiences.

When young, I wondered what state I would be in, by the turn of the millenium. The first half of my studious life out-look was, crudely speaking, that science is (ethical and electoral) measurement. From about fifty, came a new phase, crudely speaking, of finding averages, in electoral and natural science (summarised in a last chapter).

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# Effective elections model of scientific ethics.

## A functional theory of elections   
to test mismeasured methods.

Table of contents

_"Changes in our political process -- in not just who gets elected, but how they get elected -- that will only happen when the American people demand it. It depends on you. That's what's meant by a government of, by, and for the people."_

_(Barack Obama, state of the union address, 2016.)_

19th century progress and 20th century reaction in electoral reform.

A functional theory of testing election methods.

Mismeasurement in dysfunctional election methods.

The fools paradise of first past the post. (My old address.)

### 19th century progress and 20th century reaction in electoral reform.

The faltering practice of democracy, in the past two centuries, is matched by a faltering understanding. Not only democracy but the science of democracy has faltered.

200 years ago, the French Enlightenment founders of election science had no doubt that there was a right method and wrong methods of elections. Laplace formulated a proof to decide between the Condorcet method and the Borda method of counting a preferential vote.

150 years ago, in search of legal equality for women, John Stuart Mill entered Parliament. Also, he expounded a new democratic power-sharing philosophy, practicly based on the Hare system.

100 years ago, HG Wells supported an attenuated version, recommended by the 1916 Speakers Conference on Electoral Reform. And he denounced Parliament breaking its contract in this respect.

Putting aside his own palliatives, JS Mill sought to save representative democracy, by adopting the new invention of Proportional Representation, also called by Mill, Personal Representation, to distinguish it from proportional partisanship, whose Party List systems would hijack the name of PR.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out that parties only favor a part of a country. The dictator Lenin favored Party List systems. The party boss picks the individual candidates on the list, while the voters can only vote for a party. This total lack of personal appeal of the list systems may explain why some of these depersonalised democracies were thrown aside by charismatic dictators, in continental Europe in the early twentieth century.

The Proportional Representation Society (later, The Electoral Reform Society) was set up, in 1884, to promote the system of proportional preference by the voters, not merely proportional preference by the party lists. The idea of reform was proportionally representative democracy not proportionally representative oligarchy.

One century ago, in 1916, at the worst crisis in British history, when the army was suffering horrifying losses on the Western front, the government agreed, while it got on with the war, to entrust the problems of electoral reform to a Speakers Conference, chaired by the Speaker of the House of Commons.  
(I discussed this in a previous free e-book, in this Democracy Science series.)

The Conference could only reach agreement by a process of give-and-take. That is why it was necessary for the complete package to be accepted, unconditionally, as the government promised it would. But when the Conference reported, the Lloyd George coalition, which replaced the Asquith coalition, singled out the unanimous recommendation of the Single Transferable Vote, to be thrown to the wolves of a safe-seats parliament. And an incumbents Commons has been sponging off this cheat, ever since.

This removal of the effective democratic content of the Conference reforms left a grossly distorted heritage to the British people. A huge lost deposit penalty effectively barred the common man from the Commons. The main exception was afforded by the collective funds of the trade unions, thus the puppet masters of Labour MPs. This hardened the mould of British politics into its two-party oligarchy.

For example, the conservative Labour leader, James Callaghan is said to have confided that following the unions was the way to get on. The Bullock report on industrial democracy allowed workers representation in the board-room to be a closed shop. This naturally alienated the Liberals and others. Once Callaghan became Prime Minister, he did resist union demands, more responsibly than imaginatively, it must be said.

The disgrace of the Lloyd George coalition governments unlawful breach of contract with the Speakers Conference was over-shadowed by the Conference provision of votes for women, enacted for the first time, in the 1918 elections, tho this did not include women in their twenties, the "flappers." Only one woman, one very rich woman, was elected.

PR by STV in multi-member constituencies would surely have elected more.  
Barbara Castle admitted that standing in a two member constituency helped her first get into Parliament. There were still a few of these left over from Englands historic two member system.

The consequence of the single-member system was to keep Parliament a middle class professional white males-only zone. So, women were only able to get in to the Commons, in large numbers, by undemocratic means of women-only candidates lists, like "the Blair Babes." Worse still, this has encouraged undemocratic attitudes in politics. Instead of changing the system, they merely want to work it in their favor.

Women-only lists, ethnic diversity lists or other such engineered election results manifest the party list mentality within a first past the post system. In truth, the single-member system has always been worked (rigged) behind the scenes, around a game of musical chairs that party candidates play for safe seats.

A great book could be written about the safe-seats hand-outs into Britains doss-houses of parliament, Old Corruption, up to the present day. Britains so-called representation of the people is a farce, with some parliamentary seats held by one party longer than the Communists monopolised the Soviet Union.

About 1990, in the UK, the Labour Party Plant report amounted to a declaration of war against effective elections, favoring any system but transferable votings abolition of safe seats. "The Peoples Party" (against democracy) sneaked oligarchic party list systems into various parliamentary bodies.

Early in 2016, one of their MPs moved a private members bill for the Additional (List) Members System, to be used for the House of Commons. The Electoral Reform Society responded with an ingratiating "Thankyou, Mr Reynolds." That from a chief executive also a Labour Party candidate.

In 2016, besides mourning the dead of the Great War, and the loss of their promise, we might mourn the death of democratic progress, in the sabotaged Speakers Conference.

The twentieth century reaction against democratic practice extended to a failure of democratic theory. The latter half of that century was taken up by social choice theory, whose icon was the so-called Impossibility theorem, claiming: there is no fair electoral system.

Common sense tells that is nonsense. They might as well say there is no such thing as fairness. (Not that they haven't! in the Plant committee preliminary report.) Asserting, that the possibility of consistent democracy was a myth, only perpetrated a myth. As the saying goes, the tree is known by its fruits, which presumably Jesus would have withered, had he seen it.

The technicians of social choice theory have produced no presentable new election method to the world, in half a century. Indeed, since this is held to be an impossible task, it is not clear what they're supposed to be doing, unless it is stalling in favor of the status quo, and prudently not biting the hand that feeds them.

I think it is fair to say, that in terms of the electoral machinery of government, the nineteenth century did more for democracy than the twentieth. Progress was followed by reaction.   
I must admit that the only major contribution to electoral progress, in the twentieth century, that I can think of, is Meek method, with a book-keeping concept of the re-adjustable keep value, with each stage of the count (which is what I took my cue from).

The centenary of the first Speakers Conference and its subsequent sabotage marks a centurys defeat of democracy, rather as the Versailles Conference marked a defeat of the peace, since the German request for a negotiated settlement (supported by HG Wells) was rejected in 1917, losing the chance to show that the Allies were not vindictively degraded to the level of the militaristic bully of Europe.

A historian called her book about the Great War: the war that ended the peace. This was a clever reversal of the HG Wells phrase: the war that will end war. Neither statement was conspicuously true, because the nineteenth century peace on the continent, was haunted by the Prussian mugger, and territorial sneak thief of Europe. Having started with Frederick the Great Pickpocket, the malpractice was continued by Bismarck, and only ended in the ruins of Hitlers bunker.

### A functional theory of testing election method.

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To honor this centenary of the Speakers Conference, and HG Wells anniversaries of his birth and death, I dedicate a new theory for the testing of election systems. This is a theory of whether any given election method is functioning properly.

This differs from the existing Social Choice theory, which is of standards of electoral design, according to certain criteria, thought to be desirable. Social choice is an axiomatic theory, based on certain preconceptions of how a logician thinks they ought to work, which then finds fault because they don't.

Axiomatic theory is modeled on Euclid geometry. Geometry was already a science thousands of years old, rooted in practical experience. Social choice theory or electoral axiomatics only had a hundred and fifty years of election science behind it. And they focused on the very first thinkers, virtually starting from scratch, and the single member contests studied by Condorcet and Borda. Curiously, they by-passed the nineteenth century developments in proportional representation.

The obvious explanation for this is that Hare system PR had been blocked in the English-speaking world. In America, it was nothing more than a relic.

And on the continent, the party list systems of PR, that were confounded with the English countries individual choice PR, had been helpless against dictatorships and war. Some contemporary electoral reformers insist on promoting these Continental European veterans as "modern" systems of democracy.  
They are neither modern nor legitimately democratic.

Iain Maclean, in Democracy and New Technology, describes how social choice theory frames its critique of democratic elections in terms of single majority counts of preference voting.

No doubt this is a squinting vision of electoral methods. One can see why these academics were mesmerised by the march of history, not appreciating that it was a march backwards. It would be unthinkable to them that single-member elections are only a special case of multi-member elections, and that they were remiss intellectually in neglecting the general case, no matter with how much mathematics they larded their deductions.

Even in modern times, the data-mining community looked back to the French Enlightenment for voting methods, to use instead of simple plurality, for purposes of representative information retrieval from data-banks.

As distinct from Euclid analysis of the millennia-mature science of geometry, a weakness of the axiomatic approach, to a new science of elections, is that no two theorists ever would devise independently the same set of axioms or fundamental postulates. It is a subjective choice. In effect, the theorist is electing his own personal choice of election theory. The social choice theorist is treating his vote on elections, as what counts for elections.

In principle, social choice theory mistakes a vote for a count, and is an example itself of a disfunctional election, and illustrates my functional theory of election method.  
To put it another way: The vote is a seeking and the count is a finding. Social choice theory treats its seeking as a finding. True, the theory arrives at certain findings to its seeking, but they are only the findings of its founders and followers personal seekings. That is not an election, in the sense in which Euclid is the inheritance of ancient civilisations worth of geometry.

A scientific consensus requires objective evidence, as to the universal nature of elections, that all observers can agree on. In the introduction to Elections and Electors, JFS Ross gives this deep and simple truth: all elections consist of a vote and a count. (At any rate, this is true of formal election procedures, which is all that is at issue, here.)

My functional theory of the fitness of any election method tests wrongful cross-over of vote and count functions. The functional theory is also itself testable, as to its limitations, in diagnosing potential faults in election methods, which might not be covered by vote and count functions misplaced with each other. This openness to new knowledge characterises the progressive purpose of a scientific theory.

My idea for a functional theory of fit elections came from a particular insight. For half a century, in the UK, the two-party system blackmailed the electorate against wasted votes for other parties or candidates. If one is not to be over-come by this political scoundrelism, what is the technical meaning of this so-called wasted vote? What is the nature of the dysfunction?

Well, it is this. The voter, who is told his vote will be wasted, because unlikely to elect anyone, is pressured into being his own returning officer, by excluding his first prefered candidate for a second preference. Or indeed the voter may have to fall back on a third or fourth preference, in which case the voter, as returning officer, conducts a personal count thru more than one exclusion round.

Note the peculiar inconsistency of this. The voter is obliged to suspend being a voter, while commandeered to returning officer duty. Note also that an election, of more than two candidates, is bound to become more than one stage or round of counts.   
This fact exposes the futility of all those academic election designs that seek to encompass elections within a single stage of counting. Indeed, it exposes the futility of nearly all the worlds official election methods, confined to spot voting, which is a voting instruction for one round of counting only.

This then was my first example of a functional theory of fit elections or conversely a theory of dysfunctional elections. The wasted vote blackmail is a feature of a dysfunctional election, in which a count function is illegitimately pushed into a role for the voters.

This also belies the falsehood that simple plurality voting is a simple operation, faced by more than two candidates. And that under-mines simplicity as a case for keeping FPTP.

There is also a counter-part dysfunction in election systems, whereby the count illegitimately acts as a vote. This is the case of party list systems. X-votes or spot votes for closed party lists go to individual candidates on the list, that the voters are not suffered to vote for.

Open lists allow voters to express a personal preference but that vote is still transferable to another candidate on the list, regardless of the voters wishes. The voters personal preferences are usurped by a partisan count. Party list systems are dysfunctional vote-usurping counts.

Whereas, the single transferable vote is a comparatively functional voters preference list not over-ruled by party list counts.

It was noted that for more than two candidates, that the single X-marks-the-spot vote, rather than be wasted, malfunctions as an exclusion count. Cumulative voting, which allows voters to choose how many X votes to give to each candidate, is another kind of count-usurping vote. It is similar to a points system (range voting or score voting) where voters are allowed to decide what number of points or "price" they will pay for given candidates.

Both these multiple vote systems have the disadvantage that the votes count against each other and more or less cancel each other out. This inefficiency has long been known, yet still finds promoters, acting on variants of old ideas under new names.

In terms of a functional theory, the inconsistency is in a voter being treated as a counter of many votes, as if that voter is many voters, to be counted by the voter, in a returning officer role.

The purpose of counting is to sum or aggregate the wishes of individuals into a community profile. Cumulative voting or point systems are trying to give a returning officer role of aggregating or summing the votes to voters, who are individuals not aggregates.

### Mismeasurement in dysfunctional election methods.

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So far, I have distinguished dysfunctional voting methods in terms of distinct vote functions and count functions being misclassified, as vote functions when they should be count functions, and count functions when they should be vote functions.

There is a deeper meaning behind erroneous election methods being functional misclassifications. For, classification is the first step in the logic of measurement, that goes on to measure order and proportion.

In 1981, I put forward a measurement theory of scientific elections, in my first surviving essay (in French) which received the acknowledgement of a UNESCO copyright from the editor, M. Jacques Richardson.

It has taken me all this time to come up with a converse mismeasurement theory of unscientific elections. The reason, why I eventually have done this, is the unsatisfactory nature of the scholasticism or dogmatic rationalism of the likes of Social Choice theory, as an arbiter of election methods, which yet seems to preoccupy academe.

It is said that science is measurement. And it seems to be of the very nature of intelligence. It is a "given" of existence, as if it were hard-wired into the brain. Or perhaps more to the point, it is as if there were some eternal rules of creation that all the chances and mischances of evolution would have to follow, somehow.

And so it is with election methods, whose creations are so many chances and mischances of right and wrong mensural logic. But here is the thing. All the dysfunctional voting methods still use the same logic of measurement, as functional voting method. They just use it in a wrong way, often without even knowing that they are using it at all.

The evolution of thought has remained stunted, in politics and the social sciences, in the form of crude binary classifications. This is shown in the dogmatic black and white logic of exclusive ideologies, like communism versus capitalism, two half-truths masking false societies.

This philosophical schizophrenia also is shown in academes radical dualism of ethics and science, ignoring Immanuel Kant, who countered with a bridging conception of the more universal natural sciences graduating to the more individual moral sciences.

This simplistic all or nothing logic, in the X marks the spot vote, dominates the worlds voting methods. In the logic of measurement, however, the next step is a graduated choice, of more or less prefered candidates. Generally, people do not prefer one candidate, or one party, absolutely, and nobody else, under any conditions.

Approval voting offers a binary choice between voting or not voting for every candidate. It otherwise says nothing about the voters over-all order of choice for candidates.  
In that respect, it has not got beyond the limitations of the Condorcet pairing method of staging binary contests between all the candidates.

The reality is that choice is relative. This is expressed in a preference vote of ranked choices. Its absence stunts the subtlety of thought to the tribal antagonism of "not one of us."

Thus, the terms of my theory of dysfunctional election methods, broadens from misclassifying the vote and count functions, to the misuse of order and proportion, in defective election systems. A general test of dysfunctional elections is of their nature as mismeasurement systems.

Opponents, of elections measuring preference in the vote and proportion in the count (which defines STV) cannot abolish measurement. They are merely supporters of mismeasuring elections.

Given a mensural perspective, I now continue the analysis of vote and count with their functions crossed, in elections.

With regard to simple plurality elections, this is a mistreatment of a relative majority (first past the post) stage of the count, as a definitive preference vote. This can be seen more clearly when first past the post is used in multi-member constituencies. In a three member constituency, for instance, there is an order of election of the candidate with more votes than any other, then a second candidate with more votes than each of the rest, and a third candidate with more votes than each of the remaining candidates.

Tho the voters are denied a preference vote, order of choice still has to be smuggled into the count, as first, second, third past the post. In this respect, Simple Plurality is a count-usurping preference vote.

The mis-application does not end there. Again, first past the post in multi-member constituencies shows the dysfunction more clearly. Partisans use all their votes for one partys candidates, typicly gaining almost equal numbers of votes. The party with more voters, than each one of the other parties, has the quota or elective proportion of votes (a roughly equal number of votes for each candidate of the same party) to win all the seats.

In this respect, a party vote has usurped a proportional count. The situation is less obvious but essentially no different in single-member constituencies. The largest faction, which can be quite small, as long as it is bigger than each of the others, effectively sets an – arbitrary – elective quota.

While, in Party List systems, a quota count (or its variants in divisor counts) is explicitly in terms of party votes: a party quota count usurps the votes of all those who are not blind partisans.

The innocents or ignorants, who oppose "proportional representation," are actually using it, in their own undeveloped voting systems, depending for their very legitimacy on some rudimentary element of it, in their own unreformed or malformed systems.

Anti-reformers can misrepresent proportional representation but they cannot do, or even think, without it.

Consequently, the Conservatives in Britain (and Canada) oppose proportional representation, even as they claim legitimacy by equalising single-member constituencies, which is nothing more than a feeble proportional representation between constituency electorates. Of course, it is no accident that a most partial kind of PR (which they would never dream of calling PR) maximises their number of seats, for the most disproportional representation they can obtain in Parliament, to form a single party government.

More, to the same effect, can be said of the United States. As Barack Obama said: "I think we've got to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around."

That's a beautiful example of how the wires can become crossed in the voting system. Transfering enough supporters to a district gives a congressman an elective quota. This malpractice known as malapportionment is a perverse or autocratic form of proportional representation by transferable voting.

That this is a system of proportional misrepresentation is clear from the malpractice of the incumbent party, manufacturing a higher quota per seat, that the opposition party needs to win. That way, the incumbents win more seats, needing fewer votes per constituency.

The single transferable vote more or less avoids the worst of other systems mismeasurements. STV elects candidates to representation on their achieving an elective proportion or quota of votes in a multi-member constituency. Their votes in surplus of a quota are transferable to their voters next prefered candidates.

STV has one flaw in common with other systems, if not to such an extent.  
When the surpluses run out, there is no other option but to exclude the candidate who happens to have the least votes, at that stage in the count.

This fault can be explained, in terms of our dysfunction theory, as the count short-cutting the vote, by excluding a candidate, without the voters direct say in the matter.

This drawback is known as premature exclusion. I solved this problem with Binomial STV, which introduces an equivalent exclusion count, to the election count.

The moral is clear that blocking proportional representation inevitably means proportional misrepresentation. Without scientific method of election measurement, there is only unscientific method of elections mismeasurement.

### The fools paradise of first past the post. (My old address.)

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The conventional wisdom about elections is perhaps about as wrong as it is possible to be.

The assertion that an X vote or spot vote is the easiest voting method is only true in the sense that it is easier to dig with a spoon than a spade, when you are using the sugar bowl. That does not imply you have to use the spoon to dig the garden. For, that is essentially the argument of those who insist on the X vote, for more than two candidates, instead of a ranked choice or preference vote.

Such ease, as the X vote has, is not because it is some better way of voting, but simply the fact that it is only a preference vote, restricted to the least possible choice.

An X vote, as an inadequate tool for multiple choices, does not make it easier to use. Nor is it necessarily a simpler choice, to cast an X vote among more than two candidates. All sorts of tactical or strategic considerations have to be taken into account, against wasting ones vote. A voter is obliged to be his own returning officer, counting out a first preference or higher preferences, unlikely to be elected.   
One needn't gamble about this, given a preference vote to make a straight-forward ranked choice.

Moving from the alleged simplicity of the X-vote to the so-called simple majority or simple plurality counts, the simplicity is really a misnomer for incompleteness. It is the failure to realise that there may be more than one stage, or round, to an election, both in the vote and correspondingly in the count.

Just as an X vote is only the limiting case of a preference vote, so a majority count is only the special case of a proportional count. The Droop quota is a rational generalisation from the over-all majority, winning half the votes, in a single-member constituency.   
For equitable elections, a two member constituency requires a quota of at least one third the votes, to elect a candidate, for a proportional representation of two thirds the constituency. Thus, a constituency returning three members, on one quarter the votes each, proportionally represents three quarters the voters. And so on.

A many-majority count of a many-preference vote is just the consistent generalisation from a one-majority count of a one-preference spot vote. Each order of preference, that the voters give on the ballot paper, is an elective instruction to the returning officer, for each successive stage of the count.

Lack of this functional consistency makes most of the worlds voting systems illogical. Social choice theory, and the like, prides itself on being nothing if not consistent. But academe is as wayward as the wide world in its election practice, because its consistency is "a priori" or before the facts. These deducers don't realise that elections are not obliged to follow personal preconceptions but rather abide by function.

The signal failures of these "a priori" schools, generally speaking, include not clearly distinguishing between the distinct election spheres of the vote and the count, and confounding their separate functions; not appreciating the functional relationship between the vote and the count, in general, a one-to-one or isomorphic relationship, of voters order of choice, governing successive stages or rounds, to an equitable count. STV uniquely follows this procedure, to make the most functional election system.

Without consistency, there is no standard of comparison, to make progress possible. One just wonders about lost, without direction. Consistency may not seem much but the whole of science is lost without it.

So, coherent election method requires not only that the vote and the count keep to their own functions but that those functions keep in step with each other, as individual voter profiles are transformed into a community profile.

Some election designs are based on a number of spot votes or a number of points, giving new names to variations on old election experiments, trying to build the count into the vote, to construct (or gratuitously constrict into) a one stage election.

Or they equally gratuitously confine themselves to a preference vote, without the proportional count that a consistent relationship, between the two functions of vote and count, requires.

Then they construct castles in the air, of proportionality, such as by vesting the votes for a candidate, in the candidates votes in parliament, which the voters have not voted for. This is yet another form of (anything-but-democracy) illegitimate vote transfering (as in single member malapportionment and list systems proportional partisanship) irrespective of the voters wishes. It is another way of transfering the vote, without giving the voters a transferable vote. It's another form of vote-usurping count.

Yet another misconception about genuine proportional representation is that its multiple stages of the count are too complicated. This is another misnomer. In this case, complicated merely means completed by specialists. And without specialisation there is no civilisation.

The vote is easy (a ranked choice) but the count is hard (summing vote transfers) so much so, that it can only be done approximately by hand count. New Zealand has already recognised that the future of the STV count (the most democratic system) is with computers. And I have worked out an extension of the Meek concept of the re-adjustable keep value, for a Binomial STV of systematic re-counts. This would rely further on computer counting.

If I had to choose between administering the single-member system and the single transferable vote, I know STV is much the easier and also much the cheaper, once bedded in. Yet "complicated, bureaucratic and costly" are ever repeated propaganda falsehoods, thrown against STV/PR, which actually apply to the single-member system.

The continual fragmenting and re-fragmenting of districts, to maintain more or less equal single-member constituencies, is a never-ending, destabilising, distorting, obliterating assault on community identities.

The very opponents of proportional representation rely, for their legitimacy, on precisely that principle, in the form of equal constituencies, which is to say proportional representation between single-member constituencies.

The single-member system is the irrelevant proportional representation of voting with ones feet, by moving the boundaries after how people move about.

Whereas the single transferable vote merely adjusts the number of seats in proportion to changes in the size of a stable recognised community. This properly respects local identity and autonomy.

Having sacrificed local integrity, to a national two-party system, a further confusion of thought claims that first past the post gives decisive majority governments. They are neither decisive nor majority. In the overwhelming number of cases, these are only make-believe majority governments, supported by declining portions of the electorate.

Moreover, they do not decide, so much as proceed under the inertia of their own opinions, without effective consultation with other factions, on which thoughtful decisions might be based.

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## Strategic Voting in Party List systems.  
Binomial STV.

Table of contents

Binomial STV over-comes residual strategic voting considerations.

### Strategic voting in party list systems.

I have been studying election method for over forty years and am still learning.   
If I may make a general criticism of how electoral reform is debated, in Britain as well as Canada, it perhaps falls too readily into two opposing camps of Ranked Ballots (Alternative Vote) or Proportional Representation (as Party List systems).

A Fair Vote Canada video said that the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system does away with strategic voting and wasted voting. (The graphics cross out both terms.)

If anything, party list systems or their hybrids make strategic voting more of a problem than ever.

Democracy is about the freedom that an order of choice, for individual candidates, gives voters from strategic voting (tactical voting), as well as about fairness by an equitable or proportional count.

Moreover, democracy is about the fraternity that a transferable vote can give, by allowing voters to transcend party divisions and vote, in all their diversity, as Canadians.

New research, for example, from the Swedish academic, Annika Freden specialises in strategic voting in party list systems.

The moral is that proportional counts, just as much as simple majority counts, should rely on a preference vote to control strategic voting.

#### Party lists wasted voting.

Like the simple majority system, party list systems waste votes, whether they have high or low thresholds. In the German Mixed Member Proportional/Additional Member System, a relatively high threshold of 5% meant that when the Free Democrats lost even a statistically insignificant number of votes, it was enough to lose them forty seats, and all representation in the Bundestag.

As the threshold is lowered, more party hopefuls enter the election campaign, and just as many votes are wasted.

#### Party lists split voting.

X-voting party-proportional systems are also subject to dysfunctional split voting. A more extreme right or left wing party that makes the threshold is likely to split the more centrist left or right wing parties, and hence leave the opposite wing with the biggest single party. This matters, because the biggest party gets first chance at forming a government.

#### Strategic voting for the party FPTP to form the government.

Consequently, in X-voting party-proportional systems, voters still feel obliged to vote strategicly for a large party, to ensure it is larger than a more disliked party. (Academics called this "strategic sequencing.")

This is strategic voting for the party first past the post, which compares to strategic voting for the lesser of two evils for a simple majority in a single-member system.

#### Helping-lame-dog-over-stile strategic vote.

X-voting party-proportional systems face the voters with new kinds of strategic voting considerations, such as "threshold insurance voting." Voters may prefer one of the large parties but feel obliged to vote for a small partner party, on the verge of the threshold, threatened with losing all its seats, needed for a coalition government, led by the voters prefered party. This was an incentive for Christian Democrats to defer votes to their Free Democrat coalition partner. They were using their vote to help a lame dog party over a stile.

#### Sweetheart parties.

It may be argued that the MMP second vote for a party, may be used as a second preference. But the two X-votes are so ambiguous or ill defined, that they can advantage some voters, as two first preferences. If two parties are sufficiently alike, giving a single-member vote to one, and a party vote to the other, is tantamount to one party disproportionately benefiting from two votes. This inequity was practised in Italy with the use of "fake" or "decoy" parties, such as Forza Italia.

This means that the MMP system cannot distinguish between parties conspiring or co-operating.

In the USA, "sweetheart gerrymandering" is where a Republican and a Democrat, pretending to be opponents, discreetly arrange their respective constituency boundaries, to ensure they each have a built-in majority of supporters.

An MMP decoy party is one of a pair of sweetheart parties, pretending to be opponents, for their fair share of party votes, really seeking a disproportionate majority for essentially one party. It is just a way of gerrymandering the MMP election system.

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#### Systematic inconsistency of MMP.

This is what happens from the unscientific construction of a theory of choice, using contradictory axioms, of a simple majority vote versus a party-proportional vote. MMP does not know whether it is a monopolising or a sharing system, and consequently can be manipulated either way.

Moreover, this basic inconsistency, at the apex of the system works its way thru the entire hierarchical structure to its pyramidic base. A fair amount, of my two free e-books on election method, were taken-up with teasing-out some of the innumerable paradoxes of this MMP anti-system.

#### MMP, the incumbents PR of a doubly safe seat system.

People are sometimes puzzled, as well they might be, by the paradox of dual candidacy. A candidate may be unlucky enough to lose a safe seat, in a single-member district. Some voters wonder: Then why is he still elected?   
Because, he has a second seat reserved for him on the party list.

Why is this? The Minister for Wales, Peter Hain, tried to abolish dual candidacy. Only to find, to his frustration, that it had been re-instated.

He had not understood (just one of) the paradoxical consequences of the supremely silly AMS/MMP voting anti-system: Candidates for small parties little hope to win a single-member district, so they have to be on their party list. Therefore, the lop-sided reasoning goes, it would be unfair for candidates of the more popular big parties to be left out, in the cold, even of safe single-member districts, without a reserve place up their party list.   
The doubly safe seat system of MMP makes it an incumbents PR.

The Richard report on Welsh Assembly elections recorded minuscule numbers of candidates failing to get elected. AMS/MMP was condemned as denying voters the fundamental democratic right to reject candidates.

Labour blocked the Richard Commission recommendation to introduce STV for Welsh Assembly elections, just as they blocked the Sunderland report, recommending STV for Welsh local elections. Just as they blocked STV for mainland Britain Euro-elections, even tho it was already used for Ulster.

#### Party list systems arbitrary veto on individual choice.

The independent inventors of proportional representation, Carl Andrae and Thomas Hare both recognised that a proportional count required a preference vote, so that the surplus votes for quota-elected candidates could be transfered to elect the next most popular candidates. And, likewise, the single transferable vote (STV) means there is no need to waste the votes of candidates, too far short of the quota.

Because most people vote on party lines, it was thought sufficient just to make the X-vote a party vote. This partisan dogma refutes itself in practise. If voters were really just party loyalists, they would remain loyal to fixed parties, at any given time. This is not the case. Merely make the system more proportional, with more seats per constituency, to be shared out, and more parties are formed, to take advantage of easier election on a smaller quota. This process can be continued indefinitely creating more and more individualised parties, showing that party list systems do not meet public demand for individual choice, but arbitrarily veto it.

#### "Open" list candidates FPTP over-ruled by proportional partisanship.

Many Canadian electoral reformers claim that Open lists will give voters individual choice of candidates. An X-vote may be placed for an individual candidate on the list, but it is counted first and foremost as a party vote, to decide each partys proportionate share of seats for votes. An Open list might "elect" a candidate with very few or, in principle, even no individual votes.

The British Home Secretary, Merlin Rees had to admit this, in the House of Commons, of the open list system called the Regional List, that the Labour government proposed, but was subsequently rejected, for the first British Euro-elections, in 1979.

Consequently, in 1997, the Labour government dictated a closed list for British Euro-elections. The House of Lords, half a dozen times, rejected the closed list for an open list.

As Karl Popper said, problems are not solved by abolishing them. Nor are they solved, as their lordships attempted, by vainly insisting on failed remedies.

#### STV is "Scientific Method Of Elections."

As properly explained in my two free e-books, Peace-making Power-sharing; Scientific Method Of Elections, STV is a theory of choice with a consistent generalisation, from a single-preference vote for a single-majority count, to a multi-preference vote for a multi-majority count.

STV does not tell voters they have to vote by privileged lists, whether of party or gender or language or ethnicity. STV allows voters to proportionally prefer individual candidates by any attributes whatsoever they may please, not least, personal character.

Robert Newland and Maj Frank Britton of The Electoral Reform Society spoke for STV in the UK NHS. First past the post elected all white male GPs to the GMC. From 1979, STV proportionly represented women, immigrants and specialists, much to the thanks of the medical profession.

Elections in the Canadian Federation need the unity in diversity that STV has to offer.  
Voters need to be able to prefer or rank a degree of support for individual candidates in a party and transcending parties, to vote as Canadians and not merely as partisans.

If Canada gets electoral reform right with STV, its citizens will value the achievement, just as the Irish Constitutional Convention expressed their over-whelming support for STV, after a centurys experience, including a recommendation that the minimum number of seats be increased from 3 to 5 for greater PR.

In Canada, STV gave highly proportional representation with a ten member constituency in Winnipeg. Good PR was achieved in the five-member constituencies of Calgary and Edmonton. Not so in the rest of Alberta, with only single-member districts, so that the preference voting could not take advantage of a proportional count.

In my opinion, the BC Citizens Assembly report for STV, with its comprehensive treatment, in familiar language, is Canadas best hope for genuinely democratic elections.  
They worked out a much more balanced distribution of members per district for its province, than Alberta had.

A vast wilderness district might retain only a minimal two member proportional representation. Districts could graduate with population density up to a norm of about five members per district, like Calgary and Edmonton, perhaps up to the classic ten member STV constituency of Winnipeg.

### Binomial STV over-comes residual strategic voting considerations.

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The Electoral Reform Society survey of "The 2016 Irish general election. PR and the local link." really should put an end to the myth that STV is inferior to a single member constituencies for representing local issues. However, STV is susceptible to a strategic voting practice, by which allied candidates seek to bolster the first preferences of their least prefered colleagues, to prevent their early exclusion.

"When deploying multiple candidates in a constituency it is advantageous for a party to 'balance' their vote. This is done by strategically encouraging supporters to put different candidates as their 1st preference in different areas of a constituency, in order to make sure that candidates have relatively sizeable numbers of votes, so that none are eliminated early on by accident."

The Healy-Rae brothers employed this balancing act in Kerry, where they were the first and second candidates to be returned, as Independents. This was a legitimate correcting of a deficiency in conventional STV with the unfortunate consequence of a more established candidate taking most of the first preferences, leaving a next prefered candidate, his ally, with fewest first preferences, and so getting prematurely excluded.

My invention of (abstentions-inclusive keep-value averaged) Binomial STV would do away with the need for this insincere voting, to prevent the premature exclusion of candidates. It does this by a minimum of two complementary counts: an election count and an exclusion count. The latter is a rational count, in its own right, conducted on the voters preferences in reverse order, instead of an arbitrary exclusion, when the transferable surpluses run out, in the election count.

To ensure that the exclusion count is not given undue importance, compared to the election count, all preferences are counted, including abstentions, which are generally at the end of the ballot papers, when voters cease to express a preference.

Hence it is possible for the abstentions to reach a quota, in which case, a seat remains unfilled. If a voter returns a blank ballot, that effects a vote for None Of The Above, counting as one whole vote towards the quota for a seat to remain vacant.

Binomial STV introduces consistently rational counts, both for election and for exclusion, by extending the Meek method use of the keep value, to candidates in deficit of a quota, as well as in surplus of a quota. The keep value is the quota divided by a candidates total vote. Hence, the keep value is one, if a candidates votes equals the quota.

Each candidates election keep value and exclusion keep value, inverted to provide a back-up election keep value, are averaged to arrive at resultant keep values.

This describes only the simplest first order Binomial STV, corresponding to the first order of the binomial theorem, consisting of just two terms: one election count of preferences and one exclusion count of unpreferences.

It is also possible to have a second-order Binomial STV, based on the four combinations of the second-order binomial theorem. And so on.

Binomial STV is re-capitulated at the end of this book.

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## Inter-active (Equilibrium) STV: (Hill PR).

Table of contents

Equilibrium STV (Hill Real-time PR).

Mistaking democracy for formal rules of mass elections.

Criticising a straw man method as democracy.

Mistaking information-deficient voting methods for methodological anarchy.

Social choice theory in context of mathematical physics.

Evolutionary transformation of count rules in transferable voting under real-time PR.

After-note on significance of Hill PR.

### Equilibrium STV (Hill Real-time PR).

Hill refers to Thomas Wright Hill and Rowland Hill and their early 19th century school childrens election by proportional representation.

Mass election methods consist of procedural rules often put into computer languages for speed and efficiency of execution. These formal rules of voting method are less flexible and efficient than the historic scenario of proportional representation.

School-children formed uniform queues or quotas behind their prefered candidates, till the given number of committee seats were filled. Candidates with too many supporters were elected but lost their surplus to next prefered candidates. And candidates with too few supporters were excluded but their voters went to their next prefered candidates needing more support.

This is a real-time election, an Inter-active STV, in which all the voters can see what each other is doing and, thus fully informed, act according to their best interests, until the equilibrium of a final result.  
Hence, another suggested name of this Inter-active STV, as Equilibrium STV (Hill Real-time PR) where STV/PR stands for Single Transferable Vote/Proportional Representation.

In a mass election, formal rules do their best to achieve an approximation to the ideal of Hill Real-time PR. In a manual count, the procedure must not become too complicated and prohibitory of replication.

It would be possible to do a computer simulation of Hill Real-time PR for large-scale elections. All the voters would have access to a computer network. They would cast a vote for their most prefered candidate and the computer screen would show the lengths of queues for each candidate, in the form of bar charts.  
All winning candidates, in a multi-member constituency would be those reaching a given finishing line or post, the elective (Droop) quota.

With Equilibrium STV, the voters could see on-screen whether their vote was not needed by a surplus candidate or would be wasted by a deficit candidate, with respect to the quota, as finishing line. If so, voters could transfer their vote to their next preference, in a multi-member constituency.   
This could go on til the required number of representatives, in the constituency, each had the required quota of votes.  
Equilibrum STV prevents voters being cheated of representation by First Past The Post.

The required minimum is the Droop quota. But the on-screen bar chart, of queues of support for each representative, might show greater than minimal support for some representatives. That is anything up to a maximum of Hare quota support, in the final equilibrium of the election result.

Moreover, the count history of the bar chart would show how support oscillated between the candidates before representative equilibrium was reached. This history would reveal which candidates were the most popular, before they lost surplus votes to help next prefered candidates. Indeed, voters would naturally first queue behind their favorite candidates before changing to help next prefered candidates.

In Equilibrium STV (Hill Real-time PR) the computer is programmed to become the eyes of the mass electorate so that all the voters know what each other is doing. This is essentially the same in principle as Hill school-children STV.

This system cannot be criticised as a system of formal rules, which every attempt, to make more reasonable, disproportionately makes more complicated.

Instead, the result is reached by the direct consensus of all the voters. Die-hard critics may not be satisfied but the voters are: they have reached equilibrium; the result is settled.

### Mistaking democracy for formal rules of mass elections.

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In the early 2000s, the social choice theorists gave themselves a 50th birthday celebration. In my opinion, a suitable after dinner speech might have been titled 50 years of going nowhere fast for democracy.

It seems to me, that social choice theory is based on misconceptions. Firstly, it is not a refutation of democracy, or even the limitations of democracy, from a logical point of view. There is no basic critique of the original practice of proportional representation, as described, by Rowland Hill, of the school of his father, Thomas Wright Hill. This was a real-time election by a limited number of children.   
The problem was how to scale up this kind of election for a large number of voters who can't see what each other are doing.

The need to reduce the complexity of mass elections, to a manageable set of rules, resulted in the gradually improving STV system, which was bound to be less flexible and efficient than the original Hill scenario.   
The main reason for inaccuracies is not attributable to the admittedly crude rules themselves but to the use of disproportionately small constituencies.

While STV algorithms are doubtless not completely rigorous, they are near enough to pass the tests of actual elections. Most peoples first preferences are elected with higher preferences accounting for nearly all the rest.   
It shouldn't be forgotten that such tests are as important as logical rigor in science.

### Criticising a straw man method as democracy.

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Now to the next basic misconception of social choice theory.   
To demonstrate logical limitations, of democracy, at least, pick on the best democratic model available. Iain Maclean, in Democracy and New Technology, states the social choice assumptions as preference voting combined with over-all majority counting.

A qualified mathematician may reproduce a paradox of majority countings, under the naive belief this was an inconsistency of democracy. As JS Mill said, democracy is not the tyranny of the majority. That is maiorocracy.

Single-member majorities over-look the rationalisation by the Droop quota into multi-member majorities. Single-member majorities of over half the voters generalise to multi-member majorities of two members with over one-third the votes each, giving a proportional representation of two-thirds the voters.  
Three-member majorities give a PR of over three-quarters the voters. And so on.  
The purpose of scientific theory is to generalise understanding. Social choice theory was built on the special case.

No one apparently but social choice academics believe that the alternative vote/instant run-off voting, or something like it, matches a generally adequate form of democracy. (AV wastes most first preferences, and that, from a much poorer choice than STV offers.)

It appears they have merely uncritically assumed a model of democracy that is no more than a poor substitute, or a straw man. The UK referendum on the Alternative Vote was a straw man referendum, that nobody asked for, or really wanted, but was all the two-party oligarchy was prepared to offer, before plunging into their coffers, to snatch it back, in a propaganda terror of the most minor democratic improvement.

### Mistaking information-deficient voting methods for methodological anarchy.

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Bob Richard said: Social choice theory is a branch of economics, not political science.  
I agree that developments often are conditioned by their origins.   
Civil nuclear power hasn't escaped for fifty years from its military shackles to uranium fission. If the policy of keeping people alive, instead of killing them, had been in effect, the nuclear industry might have a half-decent or not too offensive niche technology, such as thorium power or reactor model with a non-weapons grade by-product.

An other serious error about social choice theory:  
John Allen Paulos in Beyond Numeracy in the Voting entry uses an example of five different voting systems producing five different results. I see this scenario on several web-sites, which should know better.

It was an eye-opener that reputable academic authority could swallow whole this rigmarole. Election method is a specialty in its own right, that some, from other domains, whether mathematics or the economics background of social choice theory, have pronounced-on, lafably.

The worst of it is that the no-fair-elections fans don't like to admit their mistake. This requires a modest honesty, at odds with an assumption of professional infallibility, promoted by the academic closed shop, against out-siders. It's much easier to shun knowledge from an unknown.

An engineer related, on a physics e-mail group, how he made a prediction about general relativity. Physicists called him an idiot. When he was proved right, they called him a lucky idiot.

The bogus claim, that Arrow theorem determines there is no fair election system, just betrays an ignorance of the (statistical) nature of election systems.   
Different winning candidates with different voting systems (Simple Plurality, Second Ballot, Alternative Vote [aka Instant Run-off Voting], Condorcet Pairing, Borda method) merely supplied more or less voting information, that left more or less leeway for error in counting the winning candidate.  
This could be shown by substituting the Condorcet method with a more accurate version proportionly weighing by how much one of the pairings of candidates won.   
(I did that from my education in basic statistics, that taught me to weight data in arithmetic proportion. I didn't know that Kemeny had done something like it.) Anyway, the proportionly weighted Condorcet method agreed with the Borda method result. The two most informative counts did get the same result, in that particular example.

It appears that effective election methods are a function of the information they gather.

This brings me back to a theme (of my previous e-book) that the single transferable vote uniquely follows the widely accepted four scales of measurement. This really is another way of saying that STV has, by far, the greatest power of information collecting. STV tells what the voters want comprehensively and in detail.

Too many politicians hate that. They want a "mandate" from the public do do what their mercenary hearts tell them to do, and then tell us to live (or die) with it.

Brian Greene asked John Wheeler what he thought the coming thing of physics would be. He thought about it and replied: information.  
Information could become the central theme of voting method.

### Social choice theory in context of mathematical physics.

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Unqualified, I admittedly am to discuss this.  
Social choice theory with respect to Arrow theorem is an adaptation of Godel incompleteness theorem. This was a qualification on the completeness of the rigor with which logical deduction could be carried out, in the context of the program of Russell and Whitehead, in their Principia Mathematica, to base mathematics on logic from first principles.

Bertrand Russell tells, in his Autobiography, of the almost mystical enthusiasm that the Principia gave him in his youth. Hence, his naming his own main work after that by Newton. He says that he sought for certainty in knowledge. It is characteristic of the Newton world view that given certain conditions, then certain consequences may be determined.

Moving on from classical physics, quantum physics says that there is no unequivocal position for a sub-atomic particle. The particles are not stationary; they jiggle. Their measure of position is in terms of probabilities in one place or another.

On this analogy, notice how unsuitable the certainties of social choice theory may be, when it assumes that there is some definitive answer to which candidate is elected.

The single transferable vote does not assign voters choices to one definitive candidate or one preference position. The transferable vote is akin to a one vote sum of fractional probabilities per candidate in order of preference.   
The transferable voting system of representative democracy resembles statistical representation. The binomial theorem (invented by Newton) brings out the statistical nature of elections, in my method, Binomial STV. Statistics is an error-minimising approach that accepts the inevitable crudities in formalising preferential complexity.

If elections are implicitly statistical representations of choice, they do not measure the kind of definitive results, that the determinist world view of social choice theory inappropriately insists on. Truly representative elections are, at bottom, probabilistic measures of voters choice.

Methods of counting preference voting are recognised statistical techniques.  
Gregory method is a standard statistical technique for getting a more representative average from a range of data. It is known as weighting in arithmetic proportion.

Borda method of weighting also has a name, in statistics, as an assumed weighting in arithmetic progression. In statistics, you would never use the latter assumption, if you had the information for the former.

Points systems, like Borda method, are only estimates of the relative importance of each interval in the range of data. Indeed, JFS Ross, on Elections And Electors, thought weighting in geometric progression would be a better estimate, because arithmetic progression gives too much weight to later preferences. A third alternative is the compromise of weighting in harmonic progression (which was favored by Sir Robin Day!).

Transferable voting, using Gregory method of weighting in arithmetic proportion, as exemplified by routine statistical procedure, is more accurate than points estimates. These involve arbitrary assignments, after the fashion of their ancestor, Borda method.   
A social choice group did the reverse of good statistical practice, it banished the more accurate transferable voting system and promoted a makeshift points system - among other non-transferable voting systems.

### Evolutionary transformation of count rules in transferable voting under real-time PR.

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There is unscrupulous return to crude nineteenth century beginnings of corruption, by rigging electoral roll registration rules, to introduce demographic bias, affecting the political composition of the electorate.   
Greg Palast high-lighted this, in that great book, The Best Democracy That Money Can Buy. It was probably one factor in giving the 2000 US presidency to the loser.   
Conservative parties in the USA, Canada and Britain stand accused of this malpractise, which could be particularly effective in First Past The Post elections, where victory hangs in the balance, and is tipped by relatively small numbers of illicit voter disqualifications.

The biggest election fraud derives from deliberately restricting the rules of the election system, itself, much more than is necessary. For, it is true that, in formal elections, the voters choices are restricted by the rigidities of a pre-determined count.

The purpose of computer scaling-up the classic Hill playground PR to mass elections would be that they become choice-led inter-active elections, in which the count is taking place thru the transfering choices of the voters.

Some followers of social choice theory try to rule-out transferable voting, on the assumption that the count rules must be pre-determined and these rules show up limitations, if not inconsistencies, analgous in election procedure to the Godel theorem of the incompleteness of what a systematic theory may deduce.

But in a Hill (real-time) PR election, there are a minimum of explicit rules determining the way children move about from queue to queue behind the candidates. I called the process Equilibrium STV, because the transfers of allegiances resemble a damping oscillation of wave crests and trofs (surplus and deficit votes) about the equilibrium of the quota electing each candidate.

In other words, we do not know whether the voters are acting according to some set of fixed rules, which social choice theory might be justified in describing as irrational.  
Maybe the situation is analgous to that found in recording bird song of larks and nightingales. Analysis found their song already followed the rules, in Bach preludes and Beethoven symphonies.

If we look for scientific inspiration not only from classical deterministic physics but from subsequent statistics, there are at least two new options. The implicit election rules of real-time elections may be too complex to determine definitively. Every election is more or less subtly different, dealing with complex inter-actions of complex individuals.

For most occasions, most of the time, the rules can be determined but there may be a residue of indeterminate behaviour, which it would be at least premature to label as irrational.

A stronger option is that voters transfers of allegiance in real-time may not only be a shade too complex to reduce to rule in practice, but not completely reducible even in principle.

What does that mean?   
Well, it occurs to me to suggest, with some temerity, that real-time voter inter-actions may throw up spontaneous new choices arising from unforeseen, or perhaps unforeseeable, contingencies of the evolution of an election.

A real-time natural election, like natural selection, may throw up evolutionary surprises that cannot be pre-determined by sets of rules that know all there is to be known.

So far, ecologists do not know how to fully create sustainable eco-systems. Hence, the Biosphere 2 blow-out of toxified atmosphere, where the inhabitants had to open the hatches on their self-contained would-be Moon or Mars dome!   
But that is no argument against such investigations.

Likewise, the limitations of formalised transferable voting systems are no argument for excluding them, modest as their defects are, compared to non-transferable voting systems (which might be likened to non-evolutionary biologies).

### After-note on significance of Hill PR.

(7 february 2013.)

Perhaps Hill PR is a pragmatic, rather than a principled solution, to the problem known as "premature exclusion" of candidates. I was inclined to think that my principled answer to the problem, Binomial STV, was superseded by Hill PR. In practise, it is. But in principle, Hill PR tells nothing about the basis on which voters decide, if and when to leave the queue of a lagging candidate.

Social choice theorists would still be justified in saying that these are arbitrary decisions. Arbitrary in the sense that no-one could lay down any logical procedure for the voters transfering from vote-deficit candidates.

It's a subjective decision. Some voters are going to hang on longer than others. That says more about the differences in staying-power between voters than the justice with which their candidates are elected. Yet it is a justification of sorts, in voters commitment, if not logic, for the candidates who win out.

I think what we are seeing here is the break-down of election system by deductive determination. This seems to be what Godel theorem, for scientific theories, and Arrow theorem, for democratic voting, really imply.   
After all, at some point, determinism is going to find itself confronted by free-will, or actions freely determined.

Laws are necessary lest arbitrary decisions degenerate into tyranny. But not all actions can be reduced to rule, and Prussian attempts, to do so, generate their own kind of suffocating tyranny.

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# A constitutional basis for the Economy.

## A nations decline with the aversion to democracy.

Table of contents

_Adam Smith._

#### Sections:

Industrial undemocracy.

Intellectual stagnation.

British capitulation to Common Market and EU.

Unity depends on liberty.

Government refuses its own power-sharing medicine for Ulster.

Election-rigging stalled devolution and local democracy.

"Capitulism."

Worse than Watergate: 1970 Britains bought election.

General Elections as Marginal Defections between two handicap parties.

British history shows that it is not enough to be against dictatorship. You cannot push against something without having ground to stand on. The ground in question is a proper understanding of democracy, so much shirked and kicked-against.

### Industrial undemocracy.

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Failure to reform the Lords, in the previous two centuries is a source of British political woes. The historic role of the second chamber is, as Churchill said, to represent the interests of the nation. It failed to represent the working classes. This meant that labor had to get itself represented in the first chamber, which should be a House of Commons or communities, not a house of classes. The result is a politics ruled by special interests.

Economists, such as Tim Harford, know that economies dominated by special interests are the least successful. Business interests manouvred Britain into the Common Market, on terms that made the reparations of Imperial and Nazi Germany ephemeral in comparison.   
The Lords stayed medieval but is now the target for a modern cronyism by party politicians seeking to colonise it.

Labour was defeated as a social democratic party. After a 1974 general election, Harold Wilson made his victory speech to the nation sound like a defeat speech to the City. He seemed cheerfully terrified of the loss of share values with a Labour victory and the prospect of a third devaluation of the pound under Labour.

The Wilson government had some constitutional plans to make big business accountable, a sort of freedom of information of board-room policy. This was too much for business, like revealing plans to the enemy. It was dropped and the minister of state resigned in protest.

Likewise, industrial democracy was given too low a priority to become law, and in the Bullock report, the unions sabotaged its independence, by restricting representation to members of the closed shop.

In the Attlee government, Emmanuel Shinwell, a rare democrat, offered the coal miners industrial democracy. But its leaders prefered popular posturing to unpopular responsibilities.

The miners leader Joe Gormley was an intuitive democrat who made sure he won the argument for the support of the British people against the new Thatcher government proposals. Britains over-mighty executive knew they were beaten against that combination and had to back down. The greatest general wins without fighting a battle. Gormley even won the respect of his opponents.

His successor, "that well-known television personality, Arthur Scargill" wanted his strike regardless of not winning the public debate, even in all his own union.

Britain had imposed industrial democracy on Germany to strengthen the social democratic unions as the main opposition to the Nazis. On "the British disease" of industrial strife, a television representative of a thriving Germany pronounced: We don't have an Arthur Scargill.

Germany remains a considerable industrial nation amidst globalisation. The legendary self-seeking bloody-minded British worker was a blinding mirror to the British board-room as a worker-exclusion zone.

Japan, under occupation by General MacArthur, was given land reform. Spreading wealth gives more spending power to the general needs of the people. Britain remains one of the most unequally owned countries in the world.

In Britain, unlike Germany, wind turbines are sited on land, nearly all owned by a few, who benefit regressively by the subsidies. An often arrogant Press, like The Mail, smoke-screened this injustice with a furious barrage against renewable energies, and a nuclear power propaganda, that defied the Fukushima disaster proved the bumptious hacks wrong.

An American taught the Japanese quality control, which is essentially a scientific honesty in the general standard of their technological products. And Japan became an industrial super-power. Their mentor predicted correctly, that in five years, competitors would be demanding, from their government, protectionist tariffs against them. That is to say dishonest slanting the playing field against them, by rigging the rules against free trade.

Japanese decline is perhaps equally instructive, as caused by dishonest standards in the financial market, warning of later global bankers burst bubbles.

The Japanese also learned that popular participation of workers in their firms is the best specialist advice, for their development, that they could possibly have. The Japanese learned, as the British didn't, that nobody knows better than a firms own workers what are a firms weaknesses and what can be done to improve their business. Britain failed, in what might be called constitutional or parliamentary means, of governing business in everyones interest.

This left only extra-parliamentary conflict with capitalism in the Labour party. The failure of Labour, as a progressive party, led to the take-over war, from within, by the likes of The Militant Tendency.   
Was there ever a revolutionary organisation with such a self-effacing name? They are English. They only tended to militate. The two local Labour party-selected Militants, entering parliament, worked hard for the working class, even taking lower salaries to that end.

The Trotskyists infiltrated the same way that everyone else infiltrated the system, by getting a majority on a local selection committee, that already decides the MP, if their party has a safe seat in a single member constituency.

Failure to appreciate worker participation had the knock-on effect of weakening the British economy, til Britains leaders begged to be admitted to the Common Market on its terms.   
Britain, that had helped win two world wars in Europe, "lost the peace," surrendering to the Common Market, on terms of permanent subjugation, worse than the temporary reparations against a defeated Germany.

The English disease was not just industrial undemocracy that destroyed the industry. The Labour party aspired to the tradition of aristocracy, in such terms as: "We are the masters now." Wilson, followed by Callaghan, were only expressing the same determination, in more diplomatic language, when they claimed: "Labour is now the natural party of government."

The dysfunctional party system has excluded the public interest. The relentless decline in party memberships prove it. The public are still public-spirited but they find no scope for this in party politics.

The evidence (not confined to the Helena Kennedy Power Report) is that this most limited of choices, left-right left-right left-right, does not meet the modern aspirations of the British people. Even experimental pigeons would have got tired, by now, of pecking the red or the blue card. The moral is, as usual, the need for political and economic democracy.

Bicameral democracy, of communal and specialist representation, is not a luxury. It is the manifest of the nations knowledge, against the authoritarian ignorance and folly, perpetrated by the current Labor and Tory parties.

Lords reform is still dogged by the make-believe dilemma of appointed experts versus elected politicians.   
Why not elected experts? The specialist bodies that make up the countrys division of labor are required to elect their governing bodies. And these elections could include representatives to the second chamber.

This proportional representation of the occupations in the second chamber was suggested in 1920 (HG Wells: Outline Of History). It involves fairly including the under-represented vocations, such as the whole range of scientists and technologists (British government has direly neglected to educate and produce in the competitive modern world) besides the traditional incumbents like the armed forces, land-owners, lawyers, bishops, merchants, statesmen etc.

Expert advice is necessary in government and it should be given the legitimacy and authority of being electively representative of the members of a profession, trade or calling etc. The main obstacle to this economic democracy, a second dimension to one-dimensional political democracy, is the party politicians desire to control both Houses of Parliament for themselves and their pay-masters, the lobby kakistocracy.

One electoral system, STV, will do for both the political and the economic franchise. Indeed, STV is already used in many non-political or occupational elections. The single transferable vote is the democratic and scientific method of elections. The Tyler committee did recommend STV, for the Lords, tho not on an economic franchise.

An elected economic second chamber is justified as a conservative check from expert evidence on the radical political principles legislated in the Commons for community law. Radicalism becomes dogmatic, divisive and destructive, when general laws are passed, without due heed of all the possible special applications. The dynamic of science is the inter-relation of theory with practise. This is evident in the historic role of the revising chamber, which might be named The House of Callings.   
That is how science works and progresses thru a dynamic of radical rationalism with conservative empiricism: general theory checked by special practise.

### Intellectual stagnation.  
( _January 2011_ )

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On the Parliament channel, I caught the end of a motion debated in a hall by some of Britains most prestigous authorities. The motion was to the effect that an elected second chamber would be harmful for British democracy.  
The show of hands in the hall suggested the movers had managed to scare a few more people, by the end of the debate.

This so-called debate is like an ever-lasting trench warfare between one-dimensional democrats crawling in their party-political trench versus non-political undemocrats crawling in theirs. This is not so much a debate as like two rutting deers with their antlers locked.

One of the movers complained about a dead-lock between two elected political chambers but for some reason failed to suggest the possibility of the second chamber retaining its historic vocational nature while dragging its representation out of the Middle Ages to that of the occupations of modern society.

Another mover expressed the fear that democracy can lead to something else. And so urged appointees to exercise checks. This anxious state of mind resembles those people who so fear an undesired outcome that they are compeled to embrace the worst, because they can no longer endure that fear, hanging over their lives.

The first false assumption here is that the democracies that led to something else were really democracies. The assumption fails the distinction between democracy and maiorocracy, the tyranny of the majority. More-over, as JS Mill said, the maiorocracy soon degenerates into minority rule, because a majority of a majority can become a minority.

The democratic election system, Mill advocated, gives democracy within and across parties, as built-in safeguards to representation of the public interest.

It is true that this, by itself, is not enough. More than one dimension of democracy, economic as well as political, might have curbed the financial exploitation of the public, that culminated in the 2008-9 credit crunch.

More deep-seated problems need to be addressed, such as raising the general standard of literacy. Education would be much more effective, if it were enlivened by democratic values that would promote universal literacy against an English language that "never learned to spell." (HG Wells.)

Raise education to the quite simple standards of honest debate, that are essential to the progress that science itself can achieve. These standards are lacking, or absent, in the partisan and monopolistic mass media. Media opinion is in conflict of interest, with public interest, from advertising revenues.

We need the Fairness doctrine and media pluralism and judicial respect for the truth, that President Reagan dismantled in the USA.

The following was my comment on a Telegraph article by Simon Heffer (also january 2011):

Lady Boothroyd seems to believe, like Ken Livingstone, that the key to understanding politics is that it doesn't attract the best people.   
That is because the parties are top-down organisations that discourage independent opinion and render expertise worthless.

Had the coalition done what Tony Blair did to the European elections, there would be some merit in your argument.

He inaugurated closed party lists that allow the voters no personal choice of candidates. This is despite the fact that the system, that John Stuart Mill called personal representation, was already in use for Euro-elections. That is to say, the single transferable vote, the very system you are blaming on Nick Clegg for introducing into the House of Lords.

STV was recommended by the Tyler report for the Lords. STV is the consensus of 5 or 6 reports, in the last decade. This is the system in which people vote for individuals not parties to be proportionally elected, tho the latter is also a consequence.

Independents are not discriminated against in the proportional count, as they are with party list systems, where a vote for the Labour list, for, say, Ken Livingstone, might help to elect Tony Blair, or vice versa.

That couldn't happen with STV unless the voter expressly wished it, in their preferences.

STV is the best and only hope for a Lords of distinguished independent-minded members, free of party patronage.

It is true that the historic character of the Lords, as a chamber of vocations, is the proper franchise but at least STV would allow the public to prefer candidates on their vocational merits, with or without respect to party affiliation. Many professions already used this system to elect their governing bodies, without a party in sight.

[STV in the first draft was replaced later by a party list system, sacrificing democracy to oligarchy. But no reform, good or bad, took place, in "the other place."]

### Britains capitulation to Common Market and EU.

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After a quarter century of vain-glorious war movies, Britain surrendered to the Common Market. Neither the Kaiser nor Nazi Germany were expected to pay for ever to the victors. But because our leaders thought we had lost the peace, they accepted crippling conditions for entry thru the Common Market tariff wall.

These included betraying kith and kin overseas, as well as discriminating against Third World agriculture to intensify world poverty. The Common Fisheries policy sunk Britains fishing industry, which had not made war on anyone but the fish, unlike the German High Seas Fleet, scuttled on being impounded after world war one.   
The CFP also betrayed other maritime nations, which have as rightful a place as any in the councils of Europe, but had the courage or survival instinct to stay out or withdraw from Common Market blackmail.

Ted Heath signed the Treaty of Rome, and in the eternal city pledged eternal reparations. The Heath government terms of entry were recognised by Labour as no good but they couldn't do any better themselves, winning worthless concessions that they palmed off as acceptable.   
It is alleged from disclosed documents, that all along, the British government secretly knew they were entering a future European Union. Its bureaucracy has become invasively bold.   
Before the 2016 referendum, PM Cameron claimed a stay of execution for the UK. Nevertheless, international integration will relentlessly resume with a European army, for a super-state, to fight bigger wars.

The European Union is founded on its ungrateful injustice to its liberator, Britain, over entry terms to the Common Market. No wonder it is so unloved there. If France and Germany do not make amends, Britain would be sensible to escape from its selfish tariff wall against the world, and consider other international alliances on economy and security: the EU does not have a monopoly.

The EU doesn't come up to democratic standards and behaved like a monopoly that gave its British liberators a shoddy deal when joining the Common Market. Indeed, for its greed, it lost Greenland, which only seemed like a joke.

The European Union is a bureaucratic protectionist state, heir to Napoleonic Continental System and other absolutisms and dictatorships. Britain was traditionly a small-state free-trading nation. British politicians are drawn to the EU because they, too, are control freaks, who ignore or resist JS Mill tradition of scientific progress in democratic freedom.

British pro- and anti-EU politicians, alike, favor the linked policy of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, more destructive of freedom than EU protectionism.

I watched a shouting match on tv beween members of the three main parties plainly embarrassed and trying to noise over the unwillingness of the British people to be conformed to a federal Europe that, like the Bourbons, has learned nothing.

The UK Independence Party is the legacy of the Treaty of Rome reparations. UKIP was caught-up in allegations over financial donations going awry. This suggests they include the same sort of people as get into campaign financing difficulties in the main parties. First Past The Post has prevented UKIP from getting all but the odd defector in the national parliament.

Mr Rees-Mogg, former Times editor, didn't see what can be done about EU federalism. (His Tory MP son turned-out different.) Voting UKIP will only weaken the Tories. He was not likely to change a lifetimes allegiance. And that goes for the voting system that guarantees voting for UKIP will split the Euro-sceptic vote. It will split many other voting allegiances til the general election result bears only the most frustrating resemblance to the choices, people would wish to make, if their votes weren't wasted.

UKIP leader, Nigel Farage was a plucky fellow, to take on Establishment inertia. As he says, he has been demonised. He is never at a loss in debate. The UK owes Farage and Ukip much gratitude for provoking a national debate on European Union membership.  
The eye has its blind spot. And I guess the minds eye has its blind spot. I could sympathise with UKIP, but for their enthusiasm for ever-polluting nuclear energy and extreme enmity to renewable energy decentralisation.

There was a joke about the European Heaven, run by German engineers, British police and French cuisine etc. Then there is the European Hell run by French engineers and German police, British cuisine etc. The latter, the worst of both worlds, is what Britain is having pushed on it. Labour "nuclear cronyism," the Tories called it, before regressing. Their centralist hubris wishes British energy to be run by French nuclear engineers, instead of the wisdom of German engineering move to renewable energies.

### Unity depends on liberty.

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The world is becoming a "global village" if with severe dislocations to be corrected.   
The British political class would rather be Europeans than democrats, who could be either or both, as they chose.

Leon Brittan, the EU Commissioner once said that the international scope of business meant that international government was required to regulate it. In 1923, HG Wells made the same point, well over half a century earlier. Wells supported European government as one of the steps to world government. The new world society must have global rules made globally.

Wells initiated the 1940 Sankey Declaration on Human Rights, a fore-runner of the UN Charter. Praise-worthy was the sense of historical context, and the manner in which people were so widely consulted. Of first importance was the recognition that, for every expansion of state power, the freedom of the individual must be re-asserted.

The controversial section 11 even insisted on voting methods that give effective expression to individual choice, meaning proportional representation in the sense Wells always meant it: Single Transferable Vote (STV).

The law of society is that unity depends on liberty: agreement is only valid if freely made. This is frustrated by the cavalier way that politicians conduct their consultations with the people. Instead, they should be conducted with scientific rigor so that no-one can deny their legitimacy. That should exclude the possibility that money talks rather than the public talks at the polls.

This recognition that progress comes from democratic progress, or improved reconciling of individual freedom with a peaceful community, is what politicians of left and right fail to appreciate. You only have to look at how they try to correct their failures, by taking more and more power to themselves, til they become intolerable. The greatness of a nation is in the greatness of its people, not its leaders. The best leaders set the people free.

It is time for Britain to apply some democratic leverage to the EU, by pursuing free and fair, pre-Common Market international relations, even if that means being subjected to a Napoleonic Continental system. At least, we would see the EU in its true colors.  
The Adam Smith Institute once called the Common Agricultural Policy "criminally selfish" to the Third World. And a 2009 newspaper lead, from the Express, was about milk, that Britain had paid to subsidise, being poured away. It seems nothing has changed.

The Dutch, French and Irish, the only people given the chance to rebel against a European Union constitution, have done so. Ireland had to do it again, til they got the "right" answer, with big business advertising behind the second referendum, and the bankers credit crisis, focusing peoples minds on a European bail-out.

The British people have more in common with other peoples than they have with their rulers, who are becoming an international elite, impatient with popular aversion to their global ambitions of wealth and power. Ambition is the sin by which the angels fell. Some of the global elite are trying to dismiss democracy as an out-moded form of government, when it really hasn't been tried. The Czech president said the EU was in a state of post-democracy. (Straight from a condition of pre-democracy.)

The command economy and command polity has failed, as the EU is set to do. European union is not necessarily wrong in principle. What is wrong is the same thing that is wrong with national government, over-whelming regional and local administration.   
It is logical that national politicians, who thought the regions and the localities - the ancient folk settlements - had no right to a vigorous independent existence, should betray in turn the national government, as if it were a parish council.

Presumably, the same fate awaits the European "ideal" as Napoleonic ambitions decide Europe, the world... is not enough.   
CS Lewis, in a science fiction novel, has his narrative character translate in a satirical manner the naive and immature universal imperialism of a "conquest" of space.

Lack of democracy, the proper consideration for all, is the problem, whether it be in the reaches of space, or the reaches of time to the helpless unborn, baited with diffusing and proliferating dumps of radioactive poison, from the military nuclear industry and its subordinate civilian accessory.

The Sunday Telegraph commented on another metric martyr (12 october 2008). The editorial concluded that the verdict had nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with making people do what they are told.   
It is as if a random assault were to take place outside a police station, while the staff inside went quietly about their business. That is the barbarism to which public life in Britain has sunk. I know these are troubled times but had governments taken as much trouble over the welfare of the humble folk of the world, the world would not now be in such a financial mess.

The first duty of government is to protect the vulnerable. That current outrage, a transparently unjust persecution of an ordinary market trader, would be countered by making officials accountable thru elections (real ones with no safe seats to hide in). And in an extreme case like this, subjecting them to a process of a Recall. This was how Arnold Schwarzenegger came to be elected California governor.

There is a Prussian Tendency to New Labour government. At the turn of the 20th century, the gifted humorist Jerome K Jerome wrote an admiring book about the Germans. He could not resist satirising their mania for rule-making and doing everything by the book. He imagines a suicide consulting a rule-book in his endeavors.

Jerome told that German officials are given complete authority over the public, who are not allowed to question their decisions and that they can fine them on the spot.   
Does that land of little fuhrers ring any warning bells?

The Germans were quite right, during the current credit crunch, to turn round and lecture the British on economic prudence. Only one in thirty Germans owns a credit card. Liberals, like myself, are accustomed to regard the French as the political heroes and the Germans as the villains. In economics, it has been more the other way round. German economics is economic.   
At any rate, it is not the executive despoliation, encouraged by Tony Blair and New Labour on coming to power. Blair went on about "meritocracy" to the displeasure of Michael Young, who coined the term in a satire.

Yet, Euro-zone economics of austerity on debtor nations, like Cyprus and Greece, has financially paralysed the country and thrown many unfortunates into unacceptable hardships. The banking system is supposed to work for the people, not the other way round.

One day in 2009, The Daily Mail and The Guardian both had the same headline: The great EU stitch-up.  
Daniel Hannan picked-up on it in The Guardian. I repeated my comment in the former to the latter paper:

Of course, EU leaders are anti-democratic, but so are British leaders of the two-party stitch-up. (The Lib Dems, as well, let the country down with their EUphoria.) If you want to change that, you have to know what democracy is.   
What a pity Britains Left and Right cannot agree impartially to democratic standards. This country needs a new constitution settlement like that of 300 years ago, becoming the first major country to adopt free speech, that Milton justified; scientific evidence in the courts, and other civilised reforms.  
Today, we don't have free speech in the whipped Commons. That is because MPs are beholden to the parties rather than the people.

Following Milton, that great Liberal, JS Mill pioneered the case for representative democracy in his speeches on parliamentary reform in the 1860s, essentially the modern single transferable vote. STV answers all the democratic reservations against electoral reform...

As a [Guardian] postscript to my Daily Mail comment, that I couldn't squeeze in there, I don't mean to imply that STV is the only democratic reform we need. We need many radical reforms to strengthen the public interest against parasitic vested interests. So many, that it would be invidious to mention some of them. Another most decisive and (therefore) neglected reform is extending legally required elections for occupational self-government to their proportional representation (by STV) in the second chamber.

I mention this, especially to a Conservative like Dan Hannan, because it is the conservative check of expert experience on a tendency to dogmatism from the radical political principles of the first chamber, which follows the effective example of science for progressive achievement.

### Government refuses its own power-sharing medicine for Ulster.

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Another serious dereliction of democracy was the reaction to the troubles in Ulster. This broke out as a violent reaction to the nationalist minority demand for civil rights. It was originally just a peaceful protest, on the model of the American movement.   
The Irish premier, Jack Lynch went on tv to ask the British government to call in a UN peace-keeping force.

I had good history teachers and their impartial lessons, in England, of the English or British legal oppression of Ireland were still fresh on my mind some years after. This was not teaching political correctness. No judgments were made. Just the unembroidered facts were given. That was eloquent enough. So I agreed with Mr Lynch at the time. No credit to me, of course, just the excellence of my teacher.

The British government had the legal right to send in British troops to Ulster. They did not have the wisdom to heed historical hatred of their presence on Irish soil. They should have allowed for popular sentiment. It just needed something to go wrong, as it inevitably did - and it was no small thing, Bloody Sunday - for the whole vicious circle of violence to be repeated. In short, the moral of this sorry story was, again, dereliction of democracy.

When a neighboring premier, on an issue so close to home, that he undoubtedly knows what he is talking about, goes out of his way to publicly warn you and the world of a mistake you may be making, and offers advice of how to avert it, you don't just stand on your dignity and brush him aside. This is what premier, Ted Heath did, backed by opposition leader, Harold Wilson. The rarity of this agreement between British party leaders was only surpassed by how ill-judged it was.   
The trouble with British government is that it is not used to having to take notice of people, outside the ruling party, with its fake parliamentary majority.

The false majority, the legal fiction rather than the popular reality, was and is so dear to the British two-party system, that even for the sake of peace, they wouldn't practise the power-sharing they preached for Ulster.

I admit I have not read The Good Friday Agreement and cannot say whether it is good, bad or indifferent, for who or why. I listened to the speeches of the Irish and British leaders from all parties, and there did seem a humanity and humility that was refreshing to hear.

I believe it was necessary to make an agreement. Paddy Ashdown, who has the military background to know these things, said that a terrorist group, with substantial backing from the community, cannot be defeated. Waging more war would just recruit more enemies. This is an argument against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and war in general.

Power-sharing democracy is the only way, I know, of containing conflicts from breaking out into wars. Lack of sharing, even so much as lack of respect for others views, takes advantage of peoples tolerance, as the English are taken for granted, by their rulers. In this and many other countries, many people are simply not voting, in the first place, for want of effective voting method to make peaceful political participation worthwhile.

### Election-rigging stalled devolution and local democracy.

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"Apart from FoI and Lords reform (more done than for 100 years, but now stalled)..." Michael White claimed in The Guardian, in 2009.

The Lords may no longer look so much like the Middle Ages but at least the Middle Ages had some idea of what the function of a second chamber should be: to represent the character of the nation in its callings. Democratic representation could bring a House of Callings up to date, not the old corruption of favorites and appointees, nor a redundant colony for politicos.

Britain, with its indiscriminate Official Secrets Act, was conspicuously behind the rest of the democratic world on FoI (Freedom of Information). If only for sheepish reasons, the government had to act. As for Freedom of Information in 1978, the Callaghan government left it too late to pass.

Much of their time-table was taken up by marathon attempts to pass a Devolution Bill, twice-failed. This owed to government intransigence on electoral reform. At first, they tried to impose a multi-member FPTP system which would have accentuated, at the time, Labours over-representation, even more than single-member FPTP.

The Liberals were misguided in not insisting on PR for their support of a Scottish Parliament. The respected Scottish Tory, Lord Home supported a Scottish Parliament, reasonably stipulating PR, which is what Callaghans own Royal Commission on the Constitution (the Kilbrandon report) insisted on, despite his ruling out PR from its terms of reference - the truth Labour didn't want to hear.

Devolution would have passed twenty years earlier but for Labours abiding obsession with rigging the voting system.  
When they did get round to a Scottish Constitutional Convention, it was the Scottish Labour party that vetoed the Kilbrandon reports specific and unanimous recommendation of STV/PR.

A devolved Scottish Parliament was left to make do with the vastly inferior Additional Member System, a doubly safe seat system. That makes MPs virtually unrejectable - a democratic objection made by the Richard Report on the Welsh Assembly, which had been consigned to the same dire AMS. The Richard Report recommendation of STV was blocked by in the Commons by the Labour government.

Of course, the Tories also get away from anything democratic that would frighten an MP (Mouse of Parliament).

The Great Reform Act of 1832 abolished about 100 rotten boroughs. It was thought appallingly revolutionary.   
The Tory 1979 election winners created for themselves about 100 rotten boroughs, by boundary changes. And that was no less appallingly reactionary, for its time.

When challenged about the 1983 triumph of Distortional Representation, Margaret Thatcher replied "We aren't complaining."   
As if she didn't know they contrived it. Rigging the boundaries, for equal constituencies unequal representation, was the first thing the Tories did when they got back into power in 1979: All parties are equal but the Tory party is more equal than others.

In local government, the Tories went on to abolish the Labour-held metropolitan councils but kept the Tory-held county councils. Their motive was to stop Labours local over-spending. The Tories wreaked partisan destruction on local democracy, rather than improve it.

First past the post creates one-party states in local government. The Commission, on standards of conduct in public life, looking into local government corruption, was banned from considering proportional representation. This would make the opposition stronger and hold to account elected officials. Again, the truth, that the covetous Labour and Tory parties didn't want to hear, was PR.

However, it is to the credit of a Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition in the Scottish Parliament that they remedied this situation for Scottish local government in 2007. With STV, the four main parties are proportionly represented, as well as proper representation for Independents, important in local government, and a few small parties.  
Tho, this was a modest reform with an upper limit of four-member constituencies.

It is questionable whether the 1980s Tories were not as bad as their Labour successors. If so, it was only because they were rolling down hill when it was less steep. The Tories kept a democratic decline going that accelerated under Labour.

### "Capitulism."

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New Labour was militarist or Prussian in its attitudes of making officials, like military officers, whose ranks the public cannot challenge. Its media manipulation or "spin," the "sexed-up" evidence of a "dodgy dossier," did not stop short of starting a deceitful war, that might have been avoided by more consensual diplomacy.

The Labour government indulged a sharp increase in legislation over previous governments. In march 2005, an official advisory group said the government had developed a knee-jerk response to problems by introducing new legislation. This was perhaps part of their media-driven habit of: "Do something, even if it's stupid." (Simon Jenkins)

Dan Lewis in "Essential Guide to British Quangos 2005" said 529 quangos were costing taxpayers billions. Many are useless and duplicative. At least 111 were set up by Labour since 1997.

In april 2006, David Craig, a former managment consultant for twenty years, said the government had blown £70 billion of taxpayers money on management consultants. The government spent vast sums for "little or no value" to the public. Peter Oborne, in The Triumph of the Political Class, explains this waste, as New Labour turning to the private sector, in their second term, after the failure of their politicising the civil service to get results.

Not only State socialism fails on democratic legitimacy. Capitalist corporations, as fictitious legal individuals, are above the law of individual responsibility, allowing them to be the pirates of the planet and its inhabitants. Democracy is life itself for mankind.

The Gods That Failed, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson (reviewed by Simon Shaw, in The Mail 2, Feb 1, 2009) is about an arrogant elite, "the New Olympians" thriving at everybody elses expense, due to Right and Left governments complacent failure to regulate the economy.

This is "Capitulism," the capitulation to piratic capitalism, and debt nationalisations "socialism for the rich." Britain is £4.8 trillion in debt and the bankers, including those bailed out by the taxpayers, are still giving themselves huge bonuses. In the book, Fleeced!, David Craig and Matthew Elliott had estimated three trillion debt, and were rightly up-tight enough about that.

The coalition appeared divided on what to do. The Lib Dems led by Nick Clegg and Vince Cable thought the excesses must be curbed. Cameron seems closer to those represented by The Telegraph journalist, who urged Britains financial sector must remain competitive with the rest of the global bankruptocracy.

Many times, I received a long NHS questionnaire. Questions about was the clinic clean and could you talk without being heard, I regard as ironic. It reminded me of the Soviet system of informers. Stalin grew paranoid that state control wasn't working, in the belief that operators, like the engineers, were sabotaging his command system. The blame really belonged with the total denial of individual initiative, so that the command economy eventually collapsed under itself.

Masses of money spent on the over-managed NHS have left hospitals dirty. US hospitals are allowed to clean themselves and are "relentlessly clean" according to the example Richard Littlejohn saw. Simon Jenkins identified the British problem as out-sourcing. NHS hospitals aren't allowed to clean themselves (except in Scotland since 2008).

It is as if the Tories and Labour were to decide that the British could not be trusted to wash themselves. So, the politicians put out to private tender the cheapest hygiene solution. Say, the winning cut-price plan was that everyone is required to present themselves naked outside their homes at eight every morning to be hosed down by passing company fire engines (not available against fires).

After the 2010 election, the Tory-led coalition is still capable of doctrinaire privatisation, such as their much opposed plan to sell off Britains woodlands into private ownership.

Ed Miliband, as Labour leader, urged that his party has to change. He should have included himself in that stricture. In a speech (shown on the Parliament channel) urging investment to boost growth, the example he singled out for mention was Sheffield Forgemasters.

This would mean a multi-million pound subsidy for the manufacture of a nuclear reactor component. Nuclear power continues to swallow massive subsidies that the tax-payers will never see again. This is more of the same failure to learn from government failure to pick winners.

Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, in whose constituency the firm resides, was chastised, in a Mail article, for not bothering to go down the road to PM David Cameron to beg the money. And incidentally break yet another promise, that the coalition wouldn't subsidise nuclear power.  
Clegg was condemned for not serving the Sheffield firms employment special interest, and his own, against the tax-payer.

That silly journalist, and many others who raved against him, didn't know that it isn't an MPs business to pay special interests their ransom in votes to keep himself in power.

Then came the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Private business, unlike public-funded politicians, have to pay attention to economic realities. Suddenly, Sheffield Forgemasters didn't want to be in the nuclear business, and the government helped the firm with a more moderate subsidy for other work.

Nick Clegg, like Angela Merkel, actually thought we should think twice about supporting nuclear power, if we hadn't already done so. The unfortunate Clegg was turned-on by former nuclear sceptic, then energy minister, in their coalition with the Tories, fellow Liberal Democrat, Chris Huhne, as acting like a headless chicken. This, I would have thought, was rather a fitting description for Britains political class of uranium maniacs: the uraniacs.

Here is one of the reasons against single member constituencies. They make MPs too vulnerable to powerful interests. In large multi-member constituencies, you can be sure of a more representative sample of voters to back public-spirited candidates.

An American program noted how an air-line company (Lockheed, as I remember) had works in every constituency in the Union. The representatives were beholden to it for their constituents employment. As Ralph Nader asked: Who governs Congress?

Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have in common that their wives were bought by energy companies: Cleggs Spanish wife bought by a Spanish energy company; Ed Milibands wife bought by Eon (a German firm). Gordon Browns brother Andrew was bought by EDF (a French state firm). The last thing Britain needs is to be an energy hostage to Frances nuclear nationalised industry with its hands in the tax-payers pockets, as if they were a bottomless pit.

This is the nuclear feudalism of an imperilled and impoverished nation of energy tenants.

The wrong-headed subsidising, of the failed nuclear command economy and consequently a nuclear terror police state, as a necessity, is the argument of tyrants.  
It is lazy and ill-bred to foul the nests of your descendants with radioactive pollution.

There is no excuse for government by inertia, in a dogmatic ignorance of alternative and renewable energies, the progress being made in research for in-house energy generation, as befits a free people.

### Worse than Watergate: Britains bought 1970 election.

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If you are born to rule by force and fraud, it is hard to believe possible that people can freely come to agree. The House of Commons confrontation of benches was built at a distance of drawn-swords. This is the fragile progress of mankind from aggression to compromise.

A century ago, in The Servile State, Hilaire Belloc condemned the two party system as really only one party. Half a century ago, this was called Butskellism, after R A Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. There remained, what David Low called, "outmoded class war junk" to make the masses vote for the upper or the lower class party.   
British social life has been Americanised, into a sense of personal worth, regardless of station. It is only good and not evil, if it extends from oneself to others.

It's not surprising that there is a chronic lack of social mobility in Britain, because the country has been ruled by a political class that prevents social mobility into politics and Parliament, with its safe seat system and funding from interests in conflict with the good of the nation.

In my youth, you were still asked whether you were Conservative or Labour. You were a potential recruit for one of the two sides. That rare bird, a Liberal, was considered a joke, because they had no chance of winning a general election. Winning was, and still is, what it is about.   
There are deplorable instances of foreign election-rigging. It would be courteous to foreigners to remind ourselves of our own deplorable electoral malpractises.

The Tory party stole the 1970 general election. So it was reported, in the Mail on Sunday, by Simon Walters, (19 january 2003). (Some of this account may be a stray memory of a later article, by Walters, which I did not keep.)

A bribing Tory bought the Labour campaign plan, because he wanted Britain within the Common Market tariff wall to suit his business interests. A crippling entry deal resulted, after the Tories won the election.

Take Harold Wilson on national television before the 1970 election. By laboriously preparing refutations, the Tories could make him look like a simpleton. And it is a fact that the polls showed Wilson winning the 1970 election right till the last moment and that eve of poll tv appearance. It could easily have swung the result, which was a complete surprise.

Such subterfuge, of Labours bought election strategy, would be an impeachable offence, like the Watergate building raid. Heath was supposed not to have known, as if that were an insurance against retribution. It doesn't matter; the Tory party, as such, carried out this cheat. Meanwhile, the conceited but gullible British dismiss "banana republics." (The cliche is an undeserved slur on poor countries with only the odd staple product.)

We've never heard the end of Watergate. With monotonous regularity, new scandals have a -gate suffix to them.   
Of Britains election scandal, by bribery rather than burglary, we've scarcely heard a whimper. The British don't want to know of a British Watergate. Tho, the deceit did change history, and grievously for the worse, if its dying perpetrator boasted true.

A Labour contemporary pretended he was "a bit confused." (A curious under-statement.) A Tory colleague denied this. The claim is not so easily dismissed. Or do we have to settle for the fact that the country of Watergate is just more honest than Britain?   
And that boasted treachery seems scarcely the beginning of the fleecings that people have so far endured, with seemingly endless resignation.

So, there in the midst of all our naivety about progress, Britains conveniently unwritten constitution was being secretly under-mined (most probably).

We cannot be sure whether this story, published by The Mail, was true. Nobody seemed to care whether it was true or not. Despite protestations to the contrary, it appears that democracy doesn't matter in Britain. The country just goes thru the motions. It does appear that Americans are more honestly self-critical than the British.

I wrote the following unanswered letter to BBC Newsnight (in 2014, shortly before the Scottish Independence referendum, and wrote unanswered later to the BBC):

There may be a lead in the BBC archives, which I hope you would investigate, as providing a possible clue to whether a certain story by the political editor Simon Walters was true. (I wrote to him but have not received a reply.)

In The Mail on Sunday, Simon Walters wrote a story on 19 January 2003 effectively about Britains Watergate. (An abridged version from The Scotsman, the following day, can be found on the web but the whole article is worth reading.)

The Americans have never been allowed to forget Watergate. The British have never been allowed to remember the death-bed confession, or rather boast, of Geoffrey Tucker, that he bought Labour Party campaign plans and changed history.

The Labour opposite number claimed he was "a bit confused." An associate said he remained clear in his mind. Which is it?

Hence I'd like to relate an old memory of an interview just before the 1970 election day. Memory can play you false and I've no doubt this information seems dubious as a dream.

But there may be something in it.

Very shortly before polling day of the 1970 general election, there was a debate between Labour and Tory. The Labour politician I think was Wilson himself. And for everything he had to say, the Tory had an answer, which he put over in a didactic manner, making his opponent look a simpleton.

I was most impressed at the Conservatives apparent competence. Perhaps the nation was, too, and voted accordingly. The polls showed Labour was set to win, before a last-minute swing.

In your experience, is it not the case that in debates people do not usually have pat answers for everything someone says? A genuine debate, in which neither side knows what the other person is going to say, is more like a scramble, not a master-pupil relation.

Of course, debaters have to be versed in their opponents arguments. But this old memory stood out and possibly had a dramatic effect at the time, even as dramatic as Tucker claimed, if there was previous access to Labours script.

We should know the truth of the Walters story. 1970 campaign footage, particularly that memory, might afford a clue to such an important investigation. Is it just that the Americans were much more honest than the British, after all, in admitting their Establishment cover-up?

Yours sincerely,  
Richard Lung.

I didn't mention in that letter, a hazy memory of the Tory "teacher" of policy to Labour. This is because memory can be as deceptive as a dream, substituting fiction for fact. For what it is worth, the Tory teacher was of thin build, in a dark suit, his most distinctive feature being long blond hair curled-in at the neck.   
He was sitting leaning slightly forward, his legs crossed, with the socks showing.

Another memory, I only re-called after the above scene, making me suspect it might be an unrelated intrusion, as indeed might be the whole memory, was this: The announcer said that the billed Conservative debater had to be replaced at short notice.

Of course, in a real sense, elections usually are bought. That is the basic problem that wealth needs to be taken out of the balance that decides the direction of policy.  
There was a crude example of this, (january 2011), when Lord Sainsbury, a £13 million past donor, made it known that he had no more plans to fund Labour led by Ed Miliband rather than his brother David. Apparently, he thinks one old Labour and the other New Labour.

This state of affairs is a war, in which a war lord decides to make one side lose by depriving them of the power to be heard, since money talks, til they surrender to his will.

A civilised world has to move away from this political primitivism and parasitism, and move to scientific standards of honest debate and progress in every-ones interest.

### General Elections as Marginal Defections between the two handicap parties.

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Without class loyalty to fight their wars for them, the two parties have become one party of competing mercenaries. Those, rich enough, or desperate enough to circumvent the public interest, bet both ways.

Following the ancient Chinese saying that the beginning of wisdom is calling things by their proper name, then perhaps we should speak of a (First Past The Post) General Election as a Marginal Defection.

By the late 90s, the Lib Dems were beginning to succesfully work the First Past The Post system of targeting winnable seats, with their limited resources. Tho, they've since lost that art.

By 2007, a Tory millionaire, targeting marginal constituencies, may have put-off Gordon Brown from calling an election.  
The wittiest remark on the 2010 general election was made by a Guardian Comment Is Free posting. At the time an Icelandic volcano was spewing ash clouds over the UK and beyond, grounding air traffic. Lord Ashcroft was a Bermuda tax exile. It came out later, at last, that he was avoiding paying British taxes.  
The remark was to the effect that there was a cloud of cash moving from Bermuda over British marginals during the general election. Lord Ashcrofts long shadow was blotting out the light.

This verity is the back-bone of Tory electioneering by targeting key voters in marginal constituencies. For this purpose, they bought a computer program from US politics. These politicians don't want people to think for themselves, they just want to manipulate them, for their own ends.

New British or English parties hope to emulate the Keltic parties, who owe their success to local patriotisms that made FPTP work for them.   
This local loyalism further fragments the popular vote - and will continue to do so, until we replace this single non-transferable vote with a single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies.

Let us have a free Press debate on properly democratic voting method, instead of opportunist concerns with holding onto the present unfairness or trying to rig a new unfairness. Keeping power thru ignorance (of the logic of choice) is government by frustrating peoples wishes.

For elections, the Labour and Tory parties are the handicap parties, because they insist on giving themselves a handicap in the election rules, such that their votes count more than anyone elses. They dare not contest elections on equal terms with other candidates.   
The handicap is the two-party system, of First Past The Post in monopolistic single member constituencies.

Lib Dems, including their leader, pointed out a correlation between over-claiming on expenses and safe seats. The implication is that MPs in safe seats are less accountable in general and in particular have not counted their expenses as carefully.

A Channel 4 on-line assessment of the Liberal Democrat claim cavilled that a correlation does not prove a cause. (As if we needed them to tell us that.) And gave a 2 out of 5 rating as a consequence.  
It says more about this news programs aversion to the new than it says about the Lib Dems, doing something new here: in effect, denying to the mainstream media that safe seats are an act of God, and that the British can never do more than grumble about them, like the weather.

It is perfectly reasonable to claim lax expenses claims may well be linked to the lack of accountability inherent in safe seats. We may not be able to prove it, but it is a logical consequence of a belief in democracy at all. Certain journalists don't much believe in democracy, beyond the stale two-party rudiments of one, that is so alienating the public, as to be testing the safe seat system to destruction. Pretending that is "democracy" gives the poor dog a bad name.

When David Cameron was interviewed about the fall in the Tory vote at the 4 june 2009 county council elections, he just brushed that aside, as due to more small parties, and concentrated on the gap between Tory and Labour votes.

There is no sense of justice. Whatever happened to integrity?   
A Guardian article, by David Cameron, called for a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. This follows the tactics of New Labour, in trying to get back into power in 1997. The Lib Dems opined the Tories were not to be trusted. Labour fell short of electoral reform promises. The Tories refused to make them at all. Here follows my brief Guardian comment on the article:

Mr Cameron,  
As more than one party in government may be needed to face any national emergencies from the recession or other causes, your advocacy of a Tory-Lib Dem coalition makes some sense, especially if co-options are sought. A coalition depends on negotiations in which everything is put on the table by both parties. (Much to discuss there, which I have to skip.)

However, you have already precluded this possibility by stating in this newspaper [The Guardian] that you would not consider proportional representation.   
To add insult to injury, you did so on the spurious grounds that PR gives too much power to the parties.   
This is only true of the party-list corruptions of the original and genuine PR. As you must surely know, tho the general public does not, this is not true of the single transferable vote, which merely gives representative democracy, which is all that is required of any and every election.

Like the Labour party, who suddenly decide they want PR on their own terms, the Tories continue to steer clear of STV, despite six recent reports support of STV/PR. Labour and Tory are still in tacit coalition over the leading role of the two party system.

Postscript:

After the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Conservatives. They only secured a referendum on the Alternative Vote, which does not give proportional representation.

First Past The Post gave a gratified Tory party, in the 2015 general election, an over-all majority of 12 seats for 36.9% of the votes. This bounty or bonus has made them more determined than ever, to make dopey excuses against electoral reform, as it has lined-up the opposition parties for it.

In particular, the Tory government rejected, in the House of Lords, the call of David Steel for a Constitutional Convention.

However, this may be the price the government have to pay for Channel 4 News claims of Tory campaign over-spending in marginal constituencies.   
The party has already admitted to a "mistake" in disclosure of expenses. This was to do with battle-bus volunteers, with paid-for hotel accommodation, helping local candidates, and ambiguity over money spent on national and local campaigning.

The seeming cost over-runs may, or may not, be fairly marginal but marginal effects, on the swing of the votes, are what is at issue here. And constituency canvassing is, like a battle, about bringing more volunteers to bear on the conflict, than opponents can, by keeping to the rules.

The case has been refered to the Electoral Commission. The initial presentation of evidence suggests the Tory party may have played too loose with the rules, whether or not by intention.

I am not trying to assert guilt or otherwise of the Conservative party. I am saying that this dubious campaign conduct is a direct outcome of General Elections that might better be called Marginal Defections.

However moral or immoral the tone of the 2015 Tory campaign might be judged, I suggest that there should be a reckoning, whether it be deemed a penalty or a redemption, that the government pass, with contrite promptitude, a Constitutional Convention, they refused Lord Steel.

It should be independent, probably a random citizenry, with access to expert advice but not told what to think. Keep out the politicians conspiracy of antagonism for divide and rule on party lines. A constitution depends on agreeing the rules of the game to be played, whereas democratic consensus has proved beyond party.

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## Plutocracy and bureaucracy or democracy?

Table of contents

_Tony Hancock as The Rebel._

#### Sections:

Equality of lobbying vs "Lobbygate"

Financially caused loss of freedom

Robber Baron Capitalism

Bureaucracy holds all to account but itself

Parties on the dole

A beginning for economic democracy

### Equality of lobbying vs "Lobbygate"

Mid 2004, an anti-government paper, The Mail hired a New Labour insider, responsible for a scandal nick-named "Lobbygate." Derek Draper was "earning a fortune as a lobbyist." In a news-paper sting, he was taped boasting of his intimacy with the "17 people who matter in the government."   
This went beyond giving MPs "payments for questions" that typified the "sleaze" that discredited the previous Tory government. Because money talks, a few have privileged access to the state, to get what they want.

In parliamentary ombudsman annual report (10 july 2003), Ann Abraham complained she was not allowed to do her job properly, because government refused to comply with a recommendation to detail gifts to ministers. Freedom of Information campaigners condemned her being prevented from seeing key documents.

Cabinet ministers often retire to some highly paid boardroom position. Opening every conceivable public service to private contract has created new possibilities for such change-overs from influential government post to lucrative corporate position.   
Allyson Pollock ( _Mail on Sunday_ 18 july 2004) traces how New Labour has also become "the party of big business" after taking over Conservative policy on privatisation. Most of the resulting private profits are deemed "commercial in confidence." The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee twice complained of lack of evidence on value for money, after 12 years of Private Finance Initiatives and £37 billion of new public debt.

"From health, education and transport to prisons and defence, no area of the public sector is immune..." Small private armies, of security personnel in Iraq, make private profits from their publicly funded training in the army.

When a company, taking over an education authority, failed to meet educational standards, the target was lowered, so private profit, if not public education, benefited. Or a computer firm paid some thousands compensation for failing to meet its contract, whilst the public was left with millions to pay for securing the passport service.

One major private financing company, going bankrupt, could take hundreds of schools and hospitals with it. The public authorities, pressed into these deals by the government, would be contractually obliged to pay the private sector profits perhaps for 30 years. Instead of receiving government lending, the public authorities have been left to the banks and venture capitalists.   
One MP compared this to "taking your mortgage out on a credit card." City "poachers" have been allowed a Treasury "game-keeper" role. Consequently, hospitals were built with 30% fewer beds and nursing budgets lowered by as much as 25%.

Competing firms, for public contracts, are accountable to market regulators, another growth industry in bureaucracy.   
Directly accountable public services would require the direct election of economic representatives. To give priority, to the policies that are in everyones interest, everyone must be equally represented in lobbying the government. Equality of lobbying requires the entire work-force to be vocationly represented, in its own parliament.

The British constitution has a traditional place for the representing of special interests, the House of Lords. British politicians bungled attempt after attempt to modernise this medieval institution.   
Instead, Britain has "peoples peers" who are nothing but appointees. Their voting records are "exceptionally poor." There are "no hairdressers or refuse collectors" because the poorly paid couldn't afford to give up their day jobs on the Lords allowance. ("People's peers aren't working." Herman Ouseley _, The Sunday Times_ 23 november 2003.)

A BBC correspondent (on 18 march 2003) hailed "the latest inglorious indecision over the House of Lords." The government tried to prevent Robin Cook amendment for an elected House. (Politically elected, of course -- no contemporary politician has the imagination or the temerity to forward economic elections.) Failing this, the government dropped altogether the plan to remove the remaining 92 hereditary lords. This could be left to the manifesto, with its distractions by lots of other issues, when it would be easier for Labour bosses to get their way.

It's inevitable that big business should lobby to secure the legislation it wants. The Microsoft Corporation woke up to playing politics at last. Their breaking anti-trust laws could lead to a break-up of the company. Microsoft became one of the biggest corporate funders of political support. (Nick Mathiason, _The Observer_ 1 august 2004 "USA Inc pays cash for access.")

Politicians don't understand that others than politicians can be elected. They think, or they insist, that anyone, who is to be elected, must be a politician. They have not got so far as Winston Churchill, in 1930, on an "economic parliament."   
Experts could be elected. Reputation itself informally elects some of the most distinguished professionals. Professional bodies and trade unions could elect economic representatives to the second chamber as a routine part of their elections as legally constituted bodies. No worries about turn-out.

Economic democracy is needed to prevent the undermining of political democracy, as exemplified by "lobbygate." To be effective, both Houses of Parliament, and indeed all official elections need the democratic electoral system (the so-called single transferable vote). STV gives power to the people instead of the parties. Big business controls the Tory and New Labour parties whose control of parliament subverts the public interest.

### Financially caused loss of freedom

To top.

At the time of writing, a fair example occured of the need for the voters to have constitutional power over the economy. The Confederation of British Industry comes out with a recommendation that the state pension age should be increased from 65 to 70. What business is it of theirs, I should like to know?

As the Trades Union Congress pointed out, working people tend to have shorter life expectancies, and such a change is condemning many to work until they drop. Retirement at 70 would see nearly one in four workers and one in three men die before receiving a state pension. In some poorer areas of England and Wales, one in three workers die before 70.

The public should have the constitutional power thru an elected economic second chamber to veto any such embezzlement of five years of freedom. In that case, there would be no question of big business passing on to the nation - "nationalising" - the debts of its anarchic and bankrupt system of ecological destruction.   
The moral perhaps is that freedom should be a way of life, and not delayed til one is put out to grass. Otherwise, the fate, of the long-houred British, thanks to the CBI, may be that of Boxer the work-horse in Animal Farm.

Maybe, the French limit on the working week will improve rather than impoverish their quality of life. Similarly, the continental practise of shorter school hours might be adopted. There, they may start lessons early in the morning but they are finished by dinner time. In Britain, children were left to stupefy on their dinners, as the after-noon indoors drag on.

I remember, long ago, how we youngsters tamely received the news that school finished quarter of an hour later than half-past three, at quarter to four. Allowing for the journey home, it was getting on for tea-time before you got home. And then there was home-work to fill your evenings.

A short working week used to be the prophetic boast of the Western economic system, best known by its opponents name of capitalism. Instead, it invites people to ransom their freedom to usury. In october 2003, to the Treasury Select Committee of MPs, a major British bank boss admitted he would never borrow on a credit card, because the interest rates are too high. Jim Cousins MP replied: "Bare-faced cynicism can be amusing" but credit card debt is a serious issue.

The _Sunday Express_ Your Money (14 september 2003) demand for "tighter regulation of rip-off store and credit card providers today gets the full support of leading politicians and consumer groups." Liberal Democrat Vincent Cable said: "Britain is living in a fool's paradise, fuelling our economy with unsustainable levels of borrowing...As a nation we must stop mortgaging our futures. Aggressive lenders need to be reined in..."

Given Britains trillion pound debt mountain, it's a bit hard to believe the Institute for Public Policy Research, that there are fewer people in poverty in 2004 than in 1997. However, the UK richest 10%, who owned 47% in the nineties went on to own 54%. The Institute asked Labour to "publically advocate a fairer, more equal Britain."

There is much that one can do to save oneself some personal freedom, if one wants it and is prepared not to spend on what one doesn't need. The consumer society is hostile to this freedom in self-restraint, that ignores the advertising of pointless fashions. The pushers of the drug of economic growth, use up the resources future generations need. They poison the air, the water and the land, so that the best things in life, the enjoyment of the beauties and fruits of nature, are no longer free.

Like their elders, children, who are prone to every fad, are indoctrinated by tv adverts for an endless stream of expensive toys. So, families are made potential enemies as to what each and every one can afford. The papers advertise how many scores of thousands of currency units it costs to hold a wedding ceremony. Investment education group Proshare (in october 2003) said up to 40% of "laundered" corporate bulletins or press releases pass as "news".

The acquisitive society is biased against saving. Inflation breaks the promise of financial independence. Government subsidises spenders at the expense of savers, who have not drawn on the community fund. This encourages a dependence on state hand-outs, instead of a free people.

A third of the population will need care in old age. Anyone who has saved more than £19,000 will have to pay all their own nursing home bills. Up to 70,000 people a year have to sell their homes to pay. A local authorities means test can include the value of the patients home "however long ago it was given away." Children may be chased for the fees, if they received the home less than six months previously. The premiums on insurance are too high for long-term care of those on moderate incomes. Their option is to keep from physical or mental illness. (Sally Hamilton, _Financial Mail_ 9 march 2003.)

Those who saved for their pensions have been let down by firms going bust. Only back-bench MPs rebellion induced the prime minister to set up a fund for a modest provision, if spread around some 60,000 people affected. The Liberal Democrats pensions spokesman Steve Webb said the amount was little more than a tenth of pension losses. Government pensions adviser Ross Altmann stated "This is nowhere near enough. Many of these people have been saving their entire working lives and deserve 100 per cent of what they were told they would get." (James Chapman and Darren Behar, _Daily Mail_ 15 May 2004.)

Savings have fallen from ten per cent to six per cent of personal income, since Labour took office in 1997. The government failure to end means testing means that retired peoples savings are counted against the size of their pension. Savers are penalised. And many of the poorest would rather go without, than beg, as the government has them do.

National Pensioners Convention spokesman, Neil Duncan-Jordan says "The only people who are out of step with the argument that the basic state pension must be much higher are the Government." (When will Blair act to avert pensions disaster? Julia Hartley-Brewer, _Sunday Express_ 12 september 2004.)

The Liberal Democrats plan to abolish means testing for over-75s. Their manifesto also includes free care for the elderly, so that they don't have to sell their homes and deprive children of an inheritance. Funding will depend on a fifty per cent rate of tax for those on over £100,000 a year.

In 2003, the Health Service Ombudsman found that scores of local authorities refused to classify care for the elderly as medical rather than social. Many were wrongly means tested and charged for nursing. Thousands of the elderly are likely to face long waits for compensation. (Chris Torney, "Elderly caught in care fees scandal." _Sunday Express_ 19 september 2004.)

Market researchers Keynote said senior executives pensions self-payment of £5 billion during 2001 "is so huge that it amounts to a tax-free raid on company profits." Meanwhile, pension schemes were being scrapped for new employees. (Esther Shaw _The Express_ 2 february 2003.)

Jeff Prestridge (of _Financial Mail_ 14 March 2004) drew some conclusions after the Penrose report. First, the sell-at-any-cost culture continues to make a scandal of the financial services industry. For example, a top bank Lloyds TSB advising savers - not stock exchange gamblers - to take out risky "precipice" investment bonds, that, well...precipiced!

The Financial Services Authority intended to fine the bank. David Prosser (of _Financial Sunday Express_ 9 march 2003) said the FSA fine of £750,000 on Prudential insurance for mis-selling endowment mortgages, and such fines on many other insurers, are "no help to more than 5 million customers facing shortfalls of tens of thousands of pounds on the sums they need to repay mortgages."

Second, Prestridge points to profitable obscurantism in board-rooms, and "most alarmingly" the desire to save "is being systematically undermined by a complacent Government and greedy financial companies."   
Lawrie Homes of _The Daily Express_ summed up a report, by US investment bank Morgan Stanley, as Shares doomed to "five dead years." Norwich Union found three out of four of endowment mortgage customers, facing shortfalls, are not likely to invest further in the stock market. _  
Financial Mail_ (9 march 2003) found this to be overwhelmingly the case, with a turn to building societies and banks. Beside Richard Dyson article, Jo Thornhill reports on "Greedy banks and building societies" slashing interest rates at the expense of savers.

### Robber Baron Capitalism

To top.

The robber barons were medieval lords who plundered the country-side, before the development of constitutional constraints. Nick Cohen commented ( _The Observer_ 29 june 2003):

"Companies which were little better than criminal conspiracies flourished in the bubble market of the late 1990s. Auditors, who were meant to police business, cheered on everyone from Enron to WorldCom because they were receiving lucrative contracts for consultancy work...Governments, which were meant to protect the public interest, did nothing because they had fallen for the line that deregulation would bring a capitalist Utopia. When the dotcom and telecom bubble burst, it was followed by a bubble in the property market and record levels of consumer debt...and no one will have the right to be surprised if there is a crash when the final demands come in."

[Like Vince Cable, Nick Cohen here prophesied the 2008-9 credit crunch.]

Lord Evans is quoted in debate:

"Under today's insolvency laws, insolvency practitioners do not break any laws or regulations when they force viable businesses to close, sell assets at a fraction of their real worth and charge fees which are more related to the amount of cash available than the work which has been undertaken. Insolvency practitioners, in their guise as receivers, gorge themselves on the cash and assets at the expense of the main body of ordinary unsecured creditors and shareholders."

Cohen says accountants have no independent regulator or ombudsman and tend to be very easy on their own.   
Instead of an army of officials to check the standards of every profession, a publicly responsible parliament second chambers of all occupations would provide the balance of power to check excesses from any quarter.

The problem in making a case against the financial system is that its excesses beggar belief. Despite a sustained outcry against "Fat Cats", on 31 july 2003, a _Guardian_ poll found directors at the UKs top 100 companies received a 23% average pay rise compared to an average earnings rise of 3.2%. Whereas the values of these 100 firms fell 50% in the past three years. Chief executive salaries with bonuses and share options averaged £1,677,685.

The above figures were similar to those from _Management Today_ magazine, a month before. Chief executives of mid-sized UK firms were the second best paid in the world, after the USA, with Australia, France and Japan following.

In may 2003, Vodaphone chief executive left with a £5 million bonus. The firm revealed £6.2 billion pre-tax losses but claimed "underlying profits" of £8.43 billion. Sir Christopher Gent defended "fat cat" pay-offs: People aspire to greatness [I think that should read: grossness] in the US," he gratefully declaimed, while the UK was "bedevilled with envy."

David Prosser ( _Daily Express_ 10 october 2003) claimed:

"Britain's greedy bosses were yesterday exposed as money-grabbing fat cats who give themselves mammoth pay rises while offering staff miserly salaries....The independent pay analyst Incomes Data Services said executive pay at Britain's 350 largest firms had risen 288 per cent over the past ten years...Figures this week from...Payfinder.com show that many bosses are now paid the equivalent of the salaries of hundreds of their workers."

A _Business Week_ survey, in the USA, showed chief executives earn more than 280 times their average employee, compared to 42 times in 1982. Companies with the biggest redundancies, the highest short-falls in pensions and most generous tax breaks also had the highest paid bosses. (Heather Connon, _The Observer_ 31 august 2003.)

In the early twentieth century, in his book, Equality, RH Tawney condemned those who lived three or four peoples lives, as well as their own. This avarice has increased a hundred-fold - or more.

A financial journalist said that all the press campaigns against fat cat pay rises, despite poor performances, had done nothing to curb them. Whereas _Daily Mail_ (15 May 2004) Alex Brummer said:

"By and large the energy that drove the revolts over pay at so many AGMs last year has dissipated. What we now have is timidity and confusion. Pay and nomination committees continue to cock a snook at investors almost daily with seeming impunity...   
(He concludes, as timidly:) It is not corporate governance that is wrong but the flaccid way it is implemented."

The trade and industry ministry also seemed content to leave the problem to share-holders to defy the board-rooms at annual general meetings. They are expected to waste any spare time, as unpaid security guards of the funds they have placed in trust. Share-holders have been made as ridiculous and futile as the Keystone Cops in a chase after the corporate state.   
The public needs professional representation, in (STV) elected economic second chamber, to make the contest an equal one.

Like Brummer, Simon Caulkin, ( _The Observer_ 1 august 2004) answering his own question "Britain is a rip-off. Why?" concluded:

"If we get the service we deserve, the conclusion is self-evident. Stop suffering in silence...Go on: rant, rave, whinge, moan, shout, scream, and complain. Be as embarrassing as possible. It'll make you feel better - and it's your personal contribution to raising the standard of British management."

The democratic citizen is courteous and reasonable, following parliamentary standards of conduct. In my opinion, the incitements of Brummer and Caulkin are about as useful as the advice, that to make foreigners understand, you must stamp your feet and raise your voice. Aggression is the behavior of tyrants, encouraged in people given power without restraint. There is more than enough of that already, from those in authority.

Even Colonel Tim Collins has fallen foul of them. That is: "The Gulf War hero famous for his rousing eve-of-battle speech to troops in Iraq tells of his toughest fight yet - with the faceless parking ticket tyrants." ( _Mail on Sunday_ 11 july 2004.)

At present, freedom of information, imperfectly won in politics, remains to be realised in economics. As Graeme Beaton said (in _Financial Mail on Sunday_ 21 september 2003):

"...the New York Stock Exchange, 211 years after its foundation, is sometimes called The Kremlin.  
The princes of Wall Street who reign from the fortress-like building might like to make fine speeches about transparency, accountability and ethics, but they themselves don't seem to care much for such things.  
The privately run exchange, which exists to provide a fair, convenient and regulated environment for the trading of shares, has been rocked by insider dealing scandals. Yet it remains steadfastly against opening its books to the public."

The title of _The Sunday Times_ article (by Louise Armitstead, Peter Koenig and Paul Durman, 23 november 2003) asked "Is there an honest man on Wall Street?" The previous week, an FBI Swat team arrested 48 New York currency traders "in the latest scandal to rock the financial world." The suspicions of fraud "included allegations of shootings, violence and drug trafficking as well as money laundering, conspiracy and wire fraud."

Following the scandalous involvement of investment banks in once darling companies, such as Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, and the deceitful investment advisors, the office of the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer "obtained evidence of widespread illegal trading schemes that potentially cost mutual-fund shareholders billions of dollars annually." The article authors say he showed "how Wall Street's most sophisticated players were robbing the little people." The American scandal is also reported to have spilled over into the City of London.

Mutual funds are like British unit trusts, whereby small investors can hope to get better returns by spreading the risks of the stock exchange, thru buying into bundles of shares, looked after by an institutional investor, who takes a commission.

According to Richard Dyson ( _Mail on Sunday_ Personal Finance 14 march 2004) the Penrose report into the near collapse of a mutual insurer "exposed a culture at Equitable of autocratic, backward-looking management where board members rallied to support one another and squash outside criticism.   
Now the same accusations are being made of other mutual managements, including those at building societies."   
The same paper (Patrick Tooher, 4 may 2003) looked at how well the directorship network is represented on the CBI panel to curb "rewards for failure" and labeled them "the fat cat club."

To prevent their own collapse, thru law-suits, the big accountancy firms lobbied the government for limited liability or a cap on facing ruinous awards, due to negligence or incompetance.   
The Office of Fair Trading noted that Andersen, the worlds biggest firm, collapsed thru a collapse in reputation, rather than finances, as the failed auditor of Enron. (Sylvia Pfeifer, "The beancounters' bleat." _The Sunday Telegraph_ 8 august 2004.)

The corporate law of limited liability is a law of privilege. Unlimited liability is the law for the rest of us. In a democracy, rather than a plutocracy, there is equality before the law. In other words, no one should be made liable beyond humane limits that ensure decent living conditions for all. "There is enough for mans need but not for mans greed."

A British accountant on the Enron payroll, and member of umpteen boards of directors, the Tory, John Wakeham, was made by New Labour, chairman of the Royal Commission on Reform of the House of Lords.   
The award-winning "They Rule" website (www.theyrule.net) showed that, among 92 of the top 100 US companies, the same few directors were to be found on their boards. Josh On has created a further website that links politicians to powerful lobbyists.

Lord Wakeham was the last type of person suitable for opening the second chamber to the public interest. His committee were most anxious to prevent any other occupations than politicians, plus the entrenched lawyers and bishops, gaining occupational constituencies. (Politicians and lawyers often are the same people.) A documentary on the Enron scandal showed John Wakeham, at some ceremony, in an Enron builders helmet, looking like a lordly Mr Bean.

Appointing Lord Wakeham was opposed not so much because he represented a vested interest, whose Commission would be determined to keep out all the other special interests with a proportionate right to vocational representation.   
Apart from his being called "a fixer," the complaint was that the prime minister should be giving jobs to those in his own party, not the other side, which had just enjoyed 18 continuous years in office.   
Such was the message of a guest article in _The Independent._   
I wondered why an independent paper was wasting its forum on pork barrel politics.

Simon Caulkin of _The Observer_ (5 october 2003) wrote: "The problem is that markets currently reward 'bad' behaviour - businesses that maximise short-term profits by externalising environmental and social costs on to society as a whole - as much as 'good'."

A more combative earlier article (31 august 2003) covers The Green Alliance accusation of hypocrisy over corporate responsibility. The government lost its nerve over the climate change levy "as a result of a spectacular barrage of whingeing and special pleading by industry organisations." The scare-mongering avoids having to create more economical and innovative products that ensure general benefits such as clean air and water.

The utilities standing charges have long been a regressive tax of people on low incomes and low users. Since privatisation, they are, in effect, private taxes on essentials. Privatised British water companies planned to increase water bills by around £100 a year, allegedly to fund the ageing pipe network. Sean Poulter ( _Daily Mail_ 8 May 2004) reported:

"However, consumer groups rejected the proposals and warned that those on fixed incomes, such as pensioners, will be driven into debt. And there are suspicions that the increases are designed to line the coffers of the companies in order to fund a new multi-billion pound dividend giveaway to shareholders."

The report expected the government to soften the blow before a general election. No doubt the water companies didn't expect their regulator to allow them the full increase. Old people may only have a fone, to call when they are sick or need help or keep in touch with near kin. Their fone bill mainly consists of being forced to perpetually rent a line, regardless of value for money. This is financial enfranchisement of the rich by the poor.

After three years, only 40 out of a hoped-for 2000 companies signed up for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs voluntary scheme, Make a Corporate Commitment. This was to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and waste production, and pledge to cut them. Green groups said good environmental and social behavior should be incorporated into company law. (Conal Walsh, _The Observer_ 29 june 2003.)

At the same time (Nick Mathiason, _The Observer_ ) 40 of Britains most powerful firms were taking a group action, at the European Court of Justice, to recoup billions in tax from the Inland Revenue. Tax avoidance was attempted (successfully) by off-setting European losses against profits in Britain.

The average corporation tax in the worlds 30 richest countries has fallen from 37.5% to 30.8% between 1996 and 2003. Accountants KPMG used their findings to urge the Treasury to lower Britains 30% rate, to attract investment. "But the research tellingly indicated that as corporation tax rates plummet the burden will increasingly fall on individuals and small businesses - the little people."  
Governments have kept lowering the rate.

The reference to "the little people" comes from New York property tycoon widow Leona Helmsley, who was dubbed the queen of mean, for saying: "We don't pay taxes. Only little people pay taxes."

Joanna Blythman essayed "Off our trolleys" ( _Daily Mail_ 24 april 2004). This charts the course of super-market chains to run our lives and rule the world. Their warehouses in effect lay seige to town centres, depressing their businesses and setting off a chain reaction of closures.

To wipe out the rest, the super-markets set up their own "convenience" stores where "prices are up to seven per cent higher than in the supermarkets larger-format outlets." Saturation outletting and circumvention of planning restrictions, diversification into every aspect of life, down to the bus time-tables being listed according to the brand of super-stores on the route, are among the weapons of commercial imperialism.   
Another journalist commented, on super-markets processed food, that since he knew what went into some of it, he wouldn't eat it.

In one instance, like the Battle of Stalingrad, a monopolising super-market chain (Tesco) had almost completed a ring of steel about town, despite the locals organised resistance to further incursions, when the tide of the global war of commerce turned, and the firm had to cut back its expansion.

### Bureaucracy holds all to account but itself

To top.

Chris Grayling, the Tory Shadow education minister accused the government of "spending money on all the wrong things." Some schools and colleges were in cash crises. While all but one of the chiefs of 12 government agencies were earning over £100,000 a year, for a total of £1.5 million. The 12 bodies employ 8,521 staff. The Conservatives see double over some functions, for example, of the National College for School Leadership and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency. (Patrick Hennessey, _The Sunday Telegraph_ , 8 august 2004.)

"Labour loyalist" and donor Gavyn Davies, after resigning as BBC chairman over the Hutton report, "criticised the government for setting up countless quangos and its love of bureaucracy." He called this "New Labour's irritating tendency to design a new broom to sweep away every problem." (Tara Conlan, The Irritant Tendency, _Daily Mail_ 24 april 2004.)

In an article (in _Mail on Sunday_ Review 30 november 2003) Tony Saint satirised some of these new brooms. The public sector now employs one in four Britons, and is expected to increase the taxpayers bill from £203 billion in 1996-7 to £512 billion in 2005-6. The irony is that a miscellany of expensive petty official appointments are justified by titles with grand-sounding democratic functions of equality and diversity and inclusion. Tho, there is often no knowing from the pretentious job descriptions what, if anything, they actually do worth doing.

Appointing officials to look after minority rights is patronising them. If the government really wanted to empower minorities, they could start with the democratic electoral system (STV) for all official elections, so that minorities can empower themselves with their prefered choice of representatives, not applicants vetted by official committees.

Huge waste was admitted in a July 2004 parliamentary report on Information Technology, for example, in the Child Support Agency. Richard Bacon MP of the public accounts committee reckons there is a black hole in the public sector losing billions.

"The Department for Work and Pensions, for instance, loses between £3 billion and £7 billion every year through fraud and error. Each year taxpayers spend £100 million training teachers who never set foot in a classroom. The government itself thinks the NHS loses 16% - 20% of its budget through waste, mismanagement, incompetance and fraud, while critics would suggest a much bigger estimate."

"There are 40 new Apache helicopters worth more than £1.2 billion stored idly...at a cost of £6m, because the Ministry of Defence didn't train enough pilots in time. We have 103,000 civil servants to support 189,000 military personnel... And so on. It defies belief."   
(Minette Marrin, _The Sunday Times_ 4 january 2004.)

The unreformed government introduces more spy camera fines and instant penalties "and the excess of zeal with which they are being demanded is an offence against good citizens and good sense."

Uncompromising demands of petty authority - "You must pay" - has driven me a few times to my MP, as a last resort, twice against the depredations of the privatised energy companies, and against a parking camera fine. Minor case work shouldn't be the job of a member of the national parliament. Before Thatcher privatisation (plutocracisation) and Blair Prussianisation (bureaucratisation) I never had to appeal to my MP against petty authority.

The trouble is that the individual is powerless against the legal bullying of national organisations. More legal power might be given to the local council, provided it was elected by STV, as in Scotland. Or, the local chamber of commerce might be given democratic authority, in a local bicameral constitution.

People are being landed with political and financial identity numbers, as if their minds were electronic data dumps, that can automaticly cof-up their PINs, whenever the state or the banks require them. Human bodies are to become so many genetic identification prints.   
This making the individual into a cog in the machine is a "Brave New World" run by New Labour.

The _Financial Mail on Sunday_ (15 august 2004) did an article by Dan Atkinson on Pensions Roadshow "bullies." Tim Shipman articled official bullying ( _Sunday Express_ 22 august 2004) giving an idea of how many old people have been harassed with letters and phone calls and stressed with instantly forgettable PIN numbers and forms and phone hot-lines.

Steve Webb said that the government forgets that pensions are the pensioners own money. He says the way they have been treated is a disgrace.   
The pension book was being scrapped, with a drive to persuade the elderly to receive their money thru bank accounts. This turned into another Information Technology disaster with many pensioners receiving no payment or with others being over-paid and being threatened with court action, until the _Express_ took up their cause. An alternative of a cheque in the post is also less than reliable.   
The editor wondered whether forcing pensioners to forego their books owed to a policy to close uneconomic local post offices. Since 2001, more than 1600 have been shut. Another national injustice upon injustice in the ongoing misgovernment of Britain.

British Chambers of Commerce say small firms are cost £40 billion a year because of red tape. 40% of all the new regulations come from Europe. Small firms are victimised because they rarely can afford the legal and tax advice to minimise the impact of regulations on profits. (Robin Pagnamonta, _Sunday Express_ 9 march 2003.)

The Court of Auditors "failed to approve" European Union accounts, in november 2003, for the ninth year running. [Postscript 2016: It is currently twenty years running.] It is made to sound like the accountants failure to cook the books.   
How many years would the tax office "fail to approve" the family shops accounts or those of any other small and vulnerable prey?   
The National Audit Office "vowed" to increase scrutiny of EU spending, saying it was "hard to tell if matters were improving."   
Again, can one imagine such temporising on behalf of the family shop?

The persecution of the "metric martyrs" continued, since the failure of Steve Thorburn, on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, so-called. He died a month later from a heart attack. The fruit and veg trader obliged customers, with the choice to buy in the old Imperial weights, as well as the metric system.   
This, from a government, whose watchword is choice (short of the STV electoral system that actually gives voters an effective choice of candidates).

Tory Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paice said of such traders: "Pursuing them through the courts, which is the Government's favoured method, is a gross waste of time, money and resources all at local taxpayers' expense."

The Danish sceptic Pia Kjaersgaard called the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (to become the European Human Rights Agency) "a monstrosity set up by the EU to make freedom of speech and differences in opinion a crime."

Human rights are not promoted by administrative diktat, however that may be the prefered means of governments. Evil is pursued by suppressing the populace with bureaucracy, as legalised robbery of the people with plutocracy is promoted as the good life, rather than set the people free with democracy.

A survey in december 2003 showed support for the EU down to under 50% in all member countries and just 23% in the UK. The hope was expressed that the new Constitution would bring the EU closer to the people. As this document concentrates power further into the hands of leaders, the only way it can bring people closer to the union is by putting them under their European rulers thumbs.

Dr Dieter Helm, of the Independent Social Market Foundation (january 2004) said that beyond the problems with red tape, regulation itself has become an industry and a profession. More people regulate the utilities than when they were publicly owned.

Companies are loaded with expensive and time-consuming red tape, to have them watch themselves. Bureaucracy increases running costs and helps force firms out of business. _Financial Mail_ (27 july 2003) found a decrease in firms going public on the stock exchange. 60% of surveyed smaller quoted firms discussed leaving, and currently would not go public. Four out of five firms believe investors will not bother to read the explanations required by new regulations.   
This comes back to replacing the growth industry of regulators, administrative law or bureaucracy by economic parliament representing and co-ordinating the economy.

### Parties on the dole

To top.

In the 2004 state of the nation survey, a poll showed that 62% of those inter-viewed agreed "strongly" or "slightly" on the state funding of political parties. An academic said "This poll shows a breakthrough in attitudes towards state funding."   
Or as Disraeli said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." "Strongly" in favor and "slightly" in favor are not close enough to be lumped together. It is like saying yellow is the same as green, in contrast to red.

You could say that there already is a slight state funding of elections. Candidates are given certain minimum free allowances, such as for the cost of postage or finding meeting places. This and probably more should be done in the furtherance of candidates free speech.   
That has nothing to do with giving party politicians a free meal ticket for life. They have no more, and no less, right to be financially enfranchised for their job than any other occupation.

The academic, who talked of a "breakthrough" for state funding of parties, sounded as if this poll showed that it was at last getting thru the thick skulls of the public that there was some need for embedding these special interests, the parties, into the constitution of the supposedly public interest, the state.   
It should hardly need to be said that the countries that have identified the state with a party have been the most notorious tyrannies.   
Britain, it is true, has more than one party, and it is also true, as the state of the nation poll showed, that they are all disliked more than they are liked. In that respect, there is really only one party, as G K Chesterton said.  
A former employee, of a polling firm, remarked on The Guardian Comment Is Free: We did these push-polls all the time.

The contemporary by-elections in Leicester and Birmingham with their respective 41% and 37% turn-outs reinforced this finding of non-approval of the two main parties. This thumbs-down for party power politics was the real message of the state of the nation poll. So, it was telling of academic attitude, that on the slenderest of evidence, the statistics were treated as a thumbs-up for yet more power to political parties.

The 63% for proportional representation at Westminster was perhaps another indication that the public don't want parties to manipulate the voting system to keep themselves in power without majority support.   
Government has imposed proportional representation, so-called, usually by party lists, which give the choice of members of parliament to their party bosses instead of the voters. Tho, Scotland and Wales issued reports for introducing the democratic PR system: STV gives equality of choice to the voters.

### A beginning for economic democracy

To top.

"Give more power to the people," Simon Caulkin ( _The Observer_ 28 september 2003) wrote of plants, short-listed for the _Management Today_ manufacturing awards, that the lesson is the same.

"...the mystery is not accounting for the successful firms - that's obvious. It's why the majority do not follow them...  
At each and every level in the organisation, from the shop floor up, there are people who know what's wrong and can see ways of doing it better.   
But despite the rhetoric, in normal circumstances they are not empowered to act \- in fact the reverse: they are prevented from doing what common sense says. It's only when a crisis intervenes and some brave soul has the courage to challenge the rules that the spell is broken...At this stage the release of energy is typically described as phenomenal, and although it takes time - a few years - to embed the new assumptions and disciplines, the results are usually instantaneous and self-reinforcing.

So why isn't this the norm rather than the exception? The answer, regrettably, is that management, or rather its conventional assumptions, makes it so. Whatever they say, most firms are still organised on the invisible assumptions of the need for centralised command and control, most visibly expressed in the hierarchy...to keep in check the regrettable human propensity to cheat or skive, and make sure people do what they are told.

Unfortunately, this results in structures and attitudes that impede rather than encourage individual contribution and improvement. Humans are natural problem-solvers, but in most companies they are required to check their brains in at the door. People treated as opportunists end up acting like them, justifying ever more constraining sets of sticks and carrots."

These successful manufacturing firms have reconstituted themselves on democratic lines. Opinion in _The Sunday Express_ noted the interviewing of teachers, by members of school councils, before the Head was appointed. The editor says "This splendid idea is spreading around schools up and down the country. Many adults no doubt wish it would also be repeated in workplaces." Would that this hint became a positive campaign from the Press for employee participation.

The problem is, as pensioner Dennis Manfield said, that the government is "not democratic."   
The above tiny sample, of news reports, has been gathered haphazard. Everywhere one looks, one finds wrongs, especially money wrongs. To do justice to all the evils, that beset ordinary people, would be an over-whelming task. But one can safely say that their social cause is much the same.

To help make success with justice the norm for the nation, I have repeated, to the patient reader, these neglected reforms: improvements in political democracy, such as the democratic voting system (transferable voting), and creating economic democracy by constitutional means, including an elected occupational second house of parliament.

The need for democracy to replace plutocracy and bureaucracy, the private and public sector exploitations and oppressions of the people, is generally true, not just for a nations second chamber, but for a United Nations proposed "Economic Security Council," for "Regional Chambers" of stake-holders, and for local Chambers of Commerce.

There are ecological, libertarian, humanitarian and other reforms much better covered by others. My emfasis on the mentioned constitutional reforms owes to a belief that problems are solved by peoples much more than party leaders and magnates, or myself.

_Autumn 2004, with later revisions._

To top

## The Wakeham report on the House of Lords.

Table of contents.

#### Sections:

Committee work: a culture of consultation.

The practise of occupational representation and disproof of "practical obstacles."

Requiring democratic standards of vocational representation.

A two-chamber two-dimensional democracy of political economy.

The self-contradiction of independent appointments.

Resume.

The sham dilemma of appointed experts vs elected politicians.

Cross-wired reforms.

More chaos of undemocratic electoral method.

Conclusion.

### Committee work: a culture of consultation.

In january 2000, a British government commission reported on the role of the second chamber of parliament. Its recommendations touch on the theory of democracy, tho its purpose was solely that of a Royal Commission on House of Lords reform. The chairman was Lord Wakeham.

A tv reporter only had to speak of the 132 recommendations to impress on viewers what a new broom was at work in the Lords. Actually, many of these proposals are for little or no change. The document is concerned to stir up as little dust as possible.

For about the first half of the Wakeham report, this approach works well. It is worth reading for an insight from practical politicians of how government works. For governing or "steering" one might almost read "steering committees."

The move to permanent Select Committees of Commons back-benchers was largely the legacy of John Mackintosh. He also made the throw-away remark that Westminster was full of people disappointed they hadn't become Prime Minister. As a rebel, or man troubled by a conscience, he hadn't much prospect of party advancement. He took the US-style Senate Investigatory Committees as a model for calling the government to account.

The chairmen of equivalent back-bench British committees could be a power in the land against the reduction of parliament to partisan conformity. The Prime Minister or chairman of the Cabinet Committee needn't be the only important chairman in parliament. Legislative committees could be of some account compared to executive committees.   
The packing of select committees with MPs on the government pay-roll would be an example of over-weening party power.

Britain doesn't have the American independence, of legislature from the executive, as part of its separation of powers. Even so, permanent Select Committees were resisted, because it was feared their work would detract from the big debates on the floor of the House.

Certainly, the Wakeham report shuns the American model. But there is no hint that laws are passed by flashes of oratorical brilliance before a full house. Good orators have given way to good committee men. In future, this is more likely to be good committee women with their better social skills.

The speeches of elder statesmen in the House of Lords, such as Harold Macmillan on the miners strike, may mark the end of a tradition. Macmillan learned from no less a master than Lloyd George. Someone volunteered, in our local press, a half-century-old memory of the Welsh wizard, late in his career, holding an audience in the palm of his hand for one and a half hours - the length of a feature film. Whereas the modern unit of political attention is the sound-bite.

Orators may be just as formidable to governments as questioning committees. Another Mackintosh quip would explain why the latter have prevailed: Politicians are too ignorant to do their jobs. Special study groups have to be formed to keep up with social diversity. And the best way to learn is to ask questions.

Richard Feynman admitted as much about his own teaching of physics. Government enquiries, when televised, allow viewers to feel questions of public moment are being asked on their behalf.

_The Wakeham report might be summed-up as an attempt to improve and extend a committee system of government._

The Royal Commission has taken the chance to sit back and take stock of law-making procedures. In this they are pragmatists not pedants. Existing laws may not be drawn up with all the formal nicety, one now sees to be desirable. Provided that has not proved an obstacle, there is no point in inviting the over-haul of an entire Act.

(However, a government, desiring an appointed second chamber for the twenty-first century, would not want renewed attention to the 1911 Parliament Act, with its intention that the second chamber be on "a _popular_ instead of a hereditary basis.")

Recommendations of no change may seem timid but they are made thoughtfully. They are "conservative" in the sense of saving time and work for improving more pressing legislation. The main question is how can future laws be made better. The approach is positive. It is recognised that more chances for consultation, for instance, when a law is only in the draft stage, will help good advice to prevail.

There is an absence here of the dictatorial attitude, that blights party politics. The report version of committee politics is not some caucus trying to push thru its exclusive view of how the world should be. Instead of imposing dogmas, specialist committees are formed to learn more about issues. And instead of self-imposed isolation, by the party faithful, from demonised opponents, links are fostered.

Links and more links between committees, at every level of government, and every relevant agency and authority. Committees and more committees, til a flow chart would be needed to sort out how they achieve the complex co-ordinations of government.

The House style, of the Wakeham report, is Lords, rather than Commons. This reviewer realised that the report was written by experts in governing, and that, when it came to improving its procedures, they knew what they were talking about.

At some point, the politicians must come out of (what _The Guardian_ editor called) the reports "rabbit warren" of committees, into the wide open, and often hostile, space of public scrutiny, that elections involve.

### The practise of occupational representation and disproof of "practical obstacles."

To top.

In the Envoi, the report says the commission has argued from "first principles." That is to say they have decided what the "Characteristics" of the British second chamber should be (in chapter 10). Later chapters report what the commission believes the best means of applying those principles.

I believe the outlined Characteristics _are_ a basis for agreement. I also believe the report quibbles against the principle that underlies them. In looking again at chapter 11, it appears the report even holds a brief for the "principle" of "vocational" or "interest group representation" (section 11.18).

By definition, a principle is something which can be applied. To say it was impossible would have been a contradiction in terms. A principle is an objective means to avoid contentious decisions having to be made.

The report argues "serious practical obstacles." It speaks of an "unenviable" task of a commission having to decide between the claims of organisations, as distinct from individuals, for representation.   
But individuals are rated by the positions they occupy in organisations, largely as a result of qualifications such bodies have accorded them. (Outsiders, with no hope of a career, know how true this is.) So, the choice of individuals reflects on their organisations.

In any case, the new English Regional Chambers show there are _no_ serious practical obstacles to vocational or interest group representation. In his evidence to the Royal Commision, Cllr. Michael Johnston explains that these representative bodies act as advisors to the Regional Development Agencies. The Chambers consist of indirectly elected local councillors, mainly leaders, and representatives of stake-holders in the region, from industry, trade unions, higher and further education, the indispensable voluntary sector and new cultural consortia.

Logically, the two national chambers (political and economic) should be left to serve the national interest. No-one expects national representatives to occupy the other levels of government.   
The Commons is a national "federation" of local constituencies, historically the Commons of shires and boroughs. Similarly, the second chamber could be a "federation" of functional constituencies, including the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress.

The trouble with a federal second chamber of politicians is that, like the first chamber, it serves the parties, rather than the states or regions and their relation to the whole country. The editors of _Senates_ , Samuel Patterson and Anthony Mugham say many democracies are engaged "in an apparently incessant dialogue about how they should be reformed."

Obviously, the two sides of British industry have had their party, representing their social class. The Wakeham report considers the question of the parties being too much in control, rather than the other public complaint that the economic interests behind them are too much in control.

At any rate, the party affiliations, that the report requires, would be satisfied by an elected economic second chamber. The requirement, of more independence from party control, would also be achieved. Because, the special interests of the nation could be directly represented in the second chamber, without having to lobby or pay the parties to be heard and heeded.   
Economic democracy could check the richest and most powerfully organised from prevailing over the general interest.

Moreover, effective democratic elections already take place within various British professional bodies. I've often said that the General Medical Council proportionally represents immigrants, women and specialists. Their single transferable vote avoids the need for separate (cumbersome and largely ineffective) "party" lists for women, for ethnic or religious minorities, for each specialty or whatever.   
And that pretty well disposes of the obstacles described in section 11.22. A vocational franchise also makes a nonsense of the partisan argument that elections can only be party-controled.

STV also can cope with the problem (raised in 11.20) of representing a rapidly evolving technical society, with people frequently changing jobs. Multi-member constituencies, over broad categories of employment, would allow rises and falls in different occupations to be accounted for, by rises and falls in the number of seats per vocational constituency.   
Multi-member constituencies are also better for keeping stable local community boundaries of political constituencies. Because, the number of seats per constituency can be adjusted to keep pace with population shifts.

The Wakeham report says several lists of occupational organisations were submitted and they were all different.   
It would have been miraculous if they had not been so. Who expected otherwise?   
Consider the contentious mess politicians make by the continuous re-drawing of local boundaries to a single member system.

An Electoral Commission could have a remit for a second chamber of vocational constituencies, as well as for geographical constituencies. Its work would be enormously simplified and democracy greatly furthered, if it were appreciated that STV is the general electoral system, that applies to politics at all government levels (as is shown to be the case in Ireland) also to economic and all other non-political elections (as many organisations demonstrate).

### Requiring democratic standards of vocational representation.

To top.

Leaders have to learn to like and understand the democratic voting system (as Lloyd George failed to do, till it was too late). But the commission (in section 11.21) has no excuse for refusing to contemplate that vocational organisations, represented in the second chamber, "observe minimum standards of democracy."  
This is regarded as an "unacceptable intrusion," a phrase the commission seems to have borrowed from Chris Patten. He was consulted about the corporate representation in Hong Kong. In a seemingly vice-regal manner, he had his conversation conveyed, rather than wrote, himself.

It appears to have been an ill-considered remark and an ill-considered borrowing. Obviously, what Britain could do in Hong Kong was minimal compared to what Britain could do in Britain. Generally speaking, societies do require minimum standards of acceptable behavior from their members.

Voltaire was told the "pleasing" fact that even thieves have their codes of behavior. He replied that is more instructive than pleasing, in that no society could survive a single day without rules.   
The smallest club has rules, that must be kept, to join. This is increasingly true even of international law, which unlike national law, really has been "impossible to police."

The European Union requires standards of democracy and human rights from member states. The Commonwealth suspends member nations for violations of democracy. Their standards and their measures are doubtless highly unsatisfactory. But they don't shrink from the attempt of making them.

In Britain, professional bodies and trade unions and all manner of organisations have contacted or used the independent expertise of the Ballot Services business, a branch of the Electoral Reform Society. This is often used routinely to guarantee properly conducted elections - like an audit, which the government does _not_ think too intrusive to require by law.

The report cannot say it's not practical; it's already done. And by the same independent method, members of any vocational organisation could vote whether to accept minimal democratic standards required to become a "constituency" of the second chamber.

### A two-chamber two-dimensional democracy of political economy.

To top.

Section 11.23 makes a "serious objection" of the "risk of disenfranchising" people, often the disadvantaged, who do not already belong to a professional or vocational group.   
They _are_ disenfranchised - or unenfranchised. This is an opportunity to create occupational constituencies for them in the second chamber.

That is known as extending the franchise. That's how political democracy evolved and is how some have suggested economic democracy might progress.   
I am not making this up as I go along. I anticipated this and other questions in my evidence to the Royal Commission.

If the gist of section 11.4 is "an even more fundamental objection" to vocational representation, I cannot see that there is any real problem at all. The report has us believe that giving proportional representation, in the second chamber, to the occupations defines them as nothing but their occupations. They suggest this economic democracy _demeans_ lorry drivers and nurses as nothing else but lorry drivers and nurses.

At present, most countries have a one-dimensional democracy that moves from political left to right. The parties have parceled out this scale between them so that people can be only blue or red or yellow, maybe green or some other strictly official, but crude, color blocs. The uniquely individual color choices on the political spectrum are electorally disallowed (in effect by denying freely transferable voting).

As a matter of fact, I have always regarded the imposition of partisan choice, by list systems, as "demeaning" and have protested against it, most of my adult life - as I have favored an elected economic second chamber, all that time. I have never regarded menial work as demeaning, much less objected to being represented in it. The Indian Untouchables have _wanted_ more recognition of their caste in Congress, not to be forgotten about, as beneath dignified consideration.

After all, what could be more vital to our concerns than the way we earn our living? In going thru the evidence to the Royal Commission, I missed any group who didn't want their own employment, whether by profession or interest group, to be represented in the second chamber.

Alright, a political economy of the houses of parliament may still be only a constitutional flatland. But two dimensions are an infinitely better measure of a democracy than one: how much better to be allowed to cross a field than to be forever confined to a lane.

Most of us are not jet-setters. We don't much miss the third dimension. Maths and physics may deal in multiple dimensions. But for learning about them, we are much more at home with just two co-ordinates, say, two of space, or one of space and one of time.

That is not to say I oppose "higher" dimensions of democracy, whatever they might be, only that, for present practical purposes, two dimensions, not one, is the optimum for democracy. Seeing democracy trying to walk, with the walks of life, the report criticises it, for not being able to run.

In any case, the lucky people, paid for doing what they like best, that others may hope to emulate, can be as effectively represented as everyone else.   
Appointments would be hit and miss.

The transferable vote can prefer the most popular of eminent individuals, as well as proportionally representing their vocations, together with any social characteristic they possess of importance, according to voters orders of choice.  
For that reason, STV could give the peoples choice of vocational representatives to the second chamber, and it would be socially relevant, too.

### The self-contradiction of independent appointments.

To top.

The inability of an Appointments Commission to popularly represent is satirised by Polly Toynbee as: "Get me a Lib Dem Catholic woman chartered accountant with one leg from Cardiff! Never mind what she's like!"   
Whereas, other appointments, by a court of eight including three partisans, may stand out as the kings favorites. Against any suggestion of unfairness, self-respecting celebrities might prefer a vote amongst their colleagues to popularly confirm their right to represent their vocation in the second chamber.

The term, an "independent Appointments Commission," is a self-contradiction. Only an election by the general public can be independent of particular influences. If appointments were a better means of representation than election for the second chamber, the report needs to justify why they are not better for the first chamber.

Moreover, an election is a method. Its logic may be good or bad, in which case you have a good or bad voting system. At least, it is a method, whose procedure may be criticised and improved. To resort to appointment is to go back to decisions based on personal authority, rather than let agreed formal standards be demonstrably met.

The Plant committee (in its interim report on p. 6) wanted different institutions to have different electoral methods, so politicians could, in effect, appoint whatever method that suited them, as a matter of personal judgment. So, they denied from the outset that there is a general logic of democratic election. That led to a British anarchy of electoral systems, which the Lords Commission has imitated, with its _three_ "models" for electing a minority of peers.

To quote from Andrew Marr, _Observer comment_ (23 jan. 2000):

The reformed second chamber is to be made deliberately illegitimate, in the sense of being mostly unelected, because it must not undermine the mystic authority of the Commons...

It reminds me a little of my father's garden, when he once planted a stake to hold up a rose-tree; but the tree died and the stake grew. Instead of saving the Commons, it all reminds us of what a sickly institution it has become...

Robert Winston, the popular medical icon and New Labour peer, goes and tells the truth about the NHS to the New Statesman. He denies himself, but his words bite him back. Helena Kennedy, who once seemed to be the ultimate New Labour place-woman, a Blair baroness, turns on Jack Straw over jury trials in a display of magnificent, highly successful and gutsy disloyalty...

Much the same goes for journalists, actors, rock stars and business leaders enrolled at one stage or another as Friends of Tony... Look around and you will not find a group of respected, successful and varied people who would take a place there for 15 years and do what they were told. Life has moved on. Things aren't like that any more... Once appointed, why would they not (criticise and rebel)? And just what, exactly, would they be expected to show loyalty to?

So, when push comes to shove, Kennedy is a human rights lawyer, not a Labour Peer... and, from the health service to its anti-jury legislation, things fall apart,.. Better, therefore, to turn back to first principles. Better to try to create a reformed democracy, on proper political, liberal principles, which is what Britain needs. If doing the wrong thing isn't going to work, you might as well do the right thing."

Sadly, Andrew Marr thinks the right thing is the Charter '88 line of a party political second chamber (which most people don't want) elected by the pseudo-PR of some party list system (which is anything but "liberal").   
Charter '88 commissioned a poll that showed 75% of people wanted the public to have a role in deciding who was in the second chamber. Survivors of the twentieth century know: democracy good; dictatorship bad.

Sadly again, Marr doesn't take the hint that the qualities of the expert peers, he and the public admire, should not be abolished but given the true dignity of democratic legitimacy in formal vocational elections.

The value of the Lords Commission report, did they but recognise it, is in showing, that vocational representation is an idea whose time has come: 67% of respondents wanted to include "independent/experienced" people in the second chamber.   
It is much to the credit of the experts, among the life peers, that the public appreciates the need for more vocational or occupational representation.

From being the most backward of bi-cameral democacies in Europe, who knows? Britain might take the lead as a two-chamber, two-dimensional democracy of political economy.

Economic democracy must have an over-due contribution to make to basic human and ecological welfare. It may be the worlds best hope against the corporate excesses of privateer capitalism that risk the fragile environment. In Russia and Eastern Europe, fragile political democracies are likewise at risk.   
Hatred is growing against them, from a lack of basic democratic standards of economy. So says Anne Applebaum. (Red Time Bomb. _Daily Mail_ 20 nov. 1999.)

In 1947, Viktor Kravchenko dared to hope for "the long-suffering Russian people...that one day they may enjoy real freedom and real economic democracy." ( _I Chose Freedom_ chapter xxviii.)

### Resume.

To top.

This review shows that elections don't have to be party political. A system of vocational elections is perfectly workable for the second chamber. So, the public who made submissions could have it all ways, without any inconsistency. They could have independent, experienced second chamber representatives. They could be elected. And, with transferable voting, they could be proportionally represented as individuals, and not as clones on lists.

The public interest could be hardly more faithfully served. And this scenario is consistent with the recommendations of a comparitive study of second chambers.   
Quoting from Vernon Bogdanor, _Times Literary Supplement_ review (4 feb. 2000) regarding Meg Russell, on _Reforming the House of Lords: Lessons from overseas._

"Russell's central conclusion is that, for a second chamber to be effective, it must be composed differently from the first, it must enjoy sufficient powers to require a government to think again, and it must enjoy sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of the public, so that it can actually use its powers."

### The sham dilemma of appointed experts vs elected politicians.

To top.

To quote again from Bogdanor, _TLS_ review of the report on reforming the Lords:

"...the vast majority of those who, in evidence to the Royal Commission, favoured a directly elected second chamber also declared that they wanted, above all, to avoid creating a replica of the House of Commons with its confrontational politics and whipped majorities."

Concluding its introduction, the Wakeham report says:

"The evidence we received, while helpful, was conflicting and frequently internally inconsistent. For example, widespread support for elections to the second chamber was combined with near-universal cynicism about the role of political parties and a desire to limit their influence in the second chamber."

While the commission almost inadvertantly admitted the principle of vocational representation (in chapter 11) they regress to the assumption that democracy is only a one-dimensional representation of politics. They are back to climbing what Disraeli called "the greasy pole." A second dimension, that co-ordinates economics to politics, democratically, is beyond their perceptions. There's none so blind as those that will not see.

This tunnel vision was shared by _The Times_ submission of evidence. And in their coverage of the report, Peter Riddell (on 21 january, 2000) says:

"The commission is rightly concerned that the composition of the second chamber should be different from the Commons, and not simply full of career party politicians. That argues for the inclusion of some appointed members to provide experience and diversity."

Having made the same non sequitur, and fallen into the same trap, as the report, it is hard to see why Riddell gets so worked-up. He says the proposals are:

"a classic of British establishment evasion. The analysis is lucid and impeccable but every time a controversial issue is faced, it is dodged."

It turns out that Riddell complains that the balance is too much in favor of appointed to politically elected members, he has already admitted there should not be _too_ many of.

Donald MacIntyre of _The Independent_ led: "With all the dismal caution of an insider, Wakeham stayed well clear of democracy." He pointed out that The Labour party evidence didn't even mention a democratic element. (Neither did the Co-operative party evidence favor it.)

_The Guardian_ had more decisive grounds for chastisement, since its submission called for a politically elected chamber, with the experts relegated to advisors or stooges. Polly Toynbee, on the Wakeham twelve "losing the plot" might say the same of her newspaper, since experts could have the democratic authority of being elected by their colleagues. Whereas a second political chamber merely doubles the parties power of patronage. This is especially true of party list proportional elections, which is the undemocratic kind, favored by those in control.

An otherwise mild-mannered man, Robert Maclennan, the Liberal Democrats Constitutional Affairs spokesman, said the report is:

"shot through with dismal, old-fashioned, self-serving, clubby attitudes. If its recommendations were to be given effect, the Lords would continue to be illegitimate and the public would properly disregard it."

This ringing a bell compares comically with the unctious, if less eloquent, reception from the Prime Ministers office: "a very, very good report."

### Cross-wired reforms.

To top.

The chattering classes seem to treat the public like a lot of illogical children wanting the impossible. Bogdanor makes a "paradox" of democracy that competitive elections become dominated by political parties, themselves controled by unpopular "professional or career politicians." He credits a colleague and member of the commission, Anthony King, with having "discovered" this in a political science article in 1981.

You only have to look at Bogdanor book, _The People and the Party System,_ to know that the pioneering political scientist Ostrogorski formulated the problem in the late nineteenth century, while party organisations were developing. Not only that, he gave a necessary, tho not sufficient, remedy, as the single transferable vote.

I mention this, because electoral reform and House of Lords reform both await "discoveries" undiscovered by most of the influential.  
Electoral reform became polarised into a show-down between supporters of pseudo-majority systems against supporters of proportional systems. But proportional systems have either the freedom of transferable voting or are corporate votes for party lists, more or less ensuring party bosses alone choose which party candidates are elected.

Similarly, House of Lords reform has become polarised between supporters for appointed experts and supporters of elected politicians. Just as electoral reform was compromised with hybrid systems of first-past-the-post and party-proportional counting, the Lords report also goes for two wrongs that don't make a right. Namely, an undecided mix of appointed experts and elected politicians, with some provision (chap. 13.28; rec. 91) for appointing politicians for the sake of partisan "balance."   
There's no provision for elected experts, the one remaining possibility, which would create a second dimension of democracy, economic democracy.

Is this addiction to unreal dilemmas, contrived from half-baked "solutions" at cross-purposes, just a conspiracy of antagonism, for a theatrical quarrel, between show-business politicians?   
Not representatives, only presentatives.

### More chaos of undemocratic electoral method.

To top.

The _Daily Telegraph_ editor decried "Britain's greatest constitutional problem...the executive has too much power." Yet he thinks it sufficient to have "open list" elections, which effect little more individual choice than closed lists.

To make sure no-one thought the commission favored voters freedom, the report could bring itself, at best, to speak (non-committally) of " _partially_ open lists."   
And very partial to the parties they are, too.

Section 12.34 says: "...we do not want to see the number of electoral systems already in use in this country unnecessarily enlarged,.."   
With that warning, for the political election of a minority of the Lords, the report then offers _three options_ , all of them undemocratic, besides half a dozen undemocratic voting methods, already on the British mainland.

Labour set a precedent for disorder, both in the different voting systems and in their lack of ordered choice. The report obliged the rulers by following this unruly precedent. The rules were made-up as they went along. That is arbitrary power.

For just 65 political Lords, the reports so-called "complementary" voting system is a re-hash of the 1975 Blake report for an Additional Member System. That is, your X-vote for a single member in the Commons would be hi-jacked as a "party" vote, this time to help "elect" someone in the Lords.   
This is the least accountable version of AMS and is not a contender for electoral reform, even among supporters of this kind of system. Donald MacIntyre said this is neither direct election nor indirect election. It is virtual election.

The biggest faction of the Wakeham twelve propose 87 political Lords elected by the method for MEPs. That is a vote for a party with no individual choice.   
The third faction propose three elections of 65 political Lords, each time a Euro-election is held, til there are 195 political Lords. These, however, would be elected from "partially open lists." That phrase amounts to keeping the chain on the door, when you open it to strangers - as the Establishment _peers_ narrowly at the electorate.

Different regions would hold their Lords elections, in a confusing arrangement of five year cycles from 5 to 10 to a full 15 years (Section 19.7 and 19.8).   
The point about supposedly representative elections (which these proposed systems are not) is that they are held regularly so they do not become unrepresentative with time.

The report assumed that infrequent elections help to sustain a long term view. But it becomes the long-term view of a long gone past. It is an argument for bureaucracy, rather than democracy, in the second chamber.

A Gallup International poll (3 dec. 1999) was reported, the next day, in _The Mirror_ , as saying of the British:

"They have less respect for government than others. Nearly 70 per cent do NOT believe the country is governed by the people's will.   
Only 16 per cent regard government as efficient, while 44 per cent rate it bureaucratic."

The commission may understand committee procedure but didn't know what democratic procedure is about. This suspicion, that the commission simply didn't understand electoral method, gains credence from a remark about the single transferable vote.   
Section 11.12 begins with the blunder that elections, to the second chamber, would be dominated by the parties again. All this says is that elections on a political franchise would be party political. This is false of elections on an economic franchise, which elects vocational eminence, not community leadership.

Then the error is compounded with the following remark: "Very few independents, if any, would secure election, even using a highly proportional system such as Single Transferable Vote (STV)."

STV is only as proportional as the number of seats there are in the constituency. Other systems of so-called PR actually give _less_ chance for independents, the _more_ proportional they are made, because they only proportionally represent party candidates.  
Moreover, STV, as a proportional count of a preference vote, secures the proportional representation of individual candidates, without discrimination against independents - and secures some independence for party candidates also prefered as individuals.

Simon Jenkins of _The Times_ wasn't much help, with his dismissal of "the curse of proportional representation." That is about as sensible as saying the curse of democracy. They are only principles. The devil is in the details of wrongful applications, that are not what they pretend to be.

Jenkins denounces "Wakeham the weak" (rather good that) in the usual terms: "timid, confusing and conservative...a dispute over composition,..a confusion over election, a leak, even a split... a vaguely plausible fudge..." etc.

The Appointments Commission he sees as a re-vamping of the Honours Scrutiny Committee, producing a chamber hardly different from the old, but without the independence of the more colorful hereditaries.

And Simon Jenkins makes the most telling press comment so far:   
"The Wakeham report is deeply conservative. ( _Not that last bit - everybody seems to have said that - but the next sentence:_ ) It leaves clergymen and lawyers in place, yet rejects the claim of other professions."

Instead of building on this precedent for vocational representation, it was left as a relic. The commission has not even made a decision whether the principle was right or wrong and then acted accordingly. Jenkins criticism is the more revealing in the one respect it is inaccurate.   
There is _one_ profession that the commission admits to the Lords. In section 11.40, any party with, say, over 2% of the national vote, in general elections, would be entitled to seats in the second chamber.

So, more party barons with coats of arms, besides the blue torch, red rose or yellow bird, would control what interests were on their lists and in whose person. Whereas campaign money would control the party managers. This strengthens the oligarchy of party over all other social and professional life, even as it encourages partisan divisions in the nation.

### Conclusion.

To top.

George Jones of _The Daily Telegraph_ conceded:

"The 216 page report is worth reading and has genuinely tried to create a second chamber that would retain many of the qualities of independence and originality of the present House of Lords rather than becoming a clone of the party-politically dominated House of Commons."

This reviewer tried to sustain that view. But I came to the conclusion that the report avoids any assertion of principle. Knowing too well the ways of official recommendations, my evidence to the commission advised on clearness of principle, or their report would not be well received.   
Even so, I was taken aback by what Bogdanor called the near universal hostility of the press reception.

That the report has no direction of its own is summed up well by its varying stance on vocational representation. The commission is "sympathetic" to the "principle" but does not actually believe it practical, even tho the historic House of Lords was a medieval society in miniature, with land-owners, soldiers and merchants, as well as clergy and lawyers.

It has been found practical to represent the church and the law, but the commission cannot bring itself to believe this could be true of other professions - except for those electoral monopolists, the political parties, everyone else believes have too much power.

Where the vocations need principled recognition as organisations, electing their individual experts to the second chamber, the report would only appoint those experts, it regarded suitable, without recognition of organisations professional right to be represented.

Where the voters need principled recognition as free individuals, this right is even denied in political elections, where they have to vote for corporate lists of "parties," the only profession officially registered for elections - also, in the second chamber, if the report has its way.

In other words, the parties have a uniquely privileged legal status as a professional organisation, in elections, which the Lords reform would carry over, even into a broadly professional second chamber.

Really, the report is a register of all the conflicting pressures. It is a battle-field, yet it is also a record of the public state of the argument. The infuriated press themselves put forward no new treaty for lasting agreement. They only amplify the different sides of the dispute within the commission, which their frustration blames for a failure that is just as much their own.

Deep causes for another disappointment with Britains rulers are sought in the historical mind-set of the English. The Wakeham report follows British empiricism in the respect for expertise and experience, in the second chamber, which was recognised by the commission and most submissions of evidence.

(The answers to the questionnaire should have been in a separate category to the submission letters. Put on a CD, the cumbersome links made them practically inaccessible: a symbol of the impracticality of the report and its destined obscurity.)

The report showed empiricist slipperiness of principle. The English distrust rationalist dogma. The latter had a minority voice on the commission, in the politicians fallacy that proportional representation means proportional partisanship (at the expense of human unity in individual diversity thru transferable voting).

The press showed the same uneasy co-habitation of rationalism with empiricism, usually refered as radicalism and conservatism, respectively. It can be a mistake to assume, in this context, that radical means progressive and conservative means obsolete.

The success of science owes to the modifying of rational theory by empirical method. The two chambers of government could represent a similar relation of rational political theory checked by experience in economic method.

To top.

## Open letter to the joint committee on Lords reform.

Table of contents.

### Dear Chairman Dr Jack Cunningham, Peers and MPs.

#### Sections:

Opposing half-truths are mutually rejected.

Expertise and democratic legitimacy in the second chamber.

The Wakeham report objections to vocational representation.

### Opposing half-truths are mutually rejected.

In february 2003, Parliament, on House of Lords reform, voted against an appointed second chamber _and_ against an elected second chamber. And they rejected compromise by being more against a 60% elected chamber than an 80% elected chamber.  
Nor did MPs decide to abolish the other place, the "retirement home" for so many of them.

As the Press documented this "farcical" indecision, the february 2003 votes on Lords reform were a renewed instance of a country failing to act as a community of interest.   
The triumph for machine politics was deplored, with its "sneers" against "constitutional obsessives," namely those concerned with the rules of the game, if the cheated are not to kick the game over. A symptom of such discontent may be seen in the publics exhausted patience with politics.

A Labor whip admitted a huge operation to scupper an elected upper chamber and was reported as saying about the prime minister: The machine saw Tony thru.  
Whipping tactics played a ritual war, with force of numbers, that made no sense.

Merriment was observed among the Tories, in the lobbies, whose mischievous spirit, it was believed, helped add to the hopelessly confused voting for Labors various Lords reforms.  
But, as Tory MP Andrew Tyrie said: "We will not be taken seriously if we reject democratic options for reform."

Lords reform is not proving a transition from a feudal society, but a continuation of the feudal system, with subservient politicians as party tenants, paying homage to their barons.  
The only new profession that the Wakeham report would add, to the medieval line-up of bishops and lawyers, was a quota for party politicians.

No wonder, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine tutored Tony Blair on an appointed second chamber. Their profession is already abundantly provided-for, not only in that respect. Their message is: Never mind about every one elses equal right to be represented in their working lives!

The prime minister, who once admitted he would rather be called a dictator than weak, made sure the Lords would be too weak to oppose his authority with any of its own.   
Simon Jenkins followed the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor, who proclaimed that the second chamber must be weak, to prevent dead-lock with the first chamber of government, as happened in the past.

Bogdanor has talked about a "paradox" of democracy producing a party oligarchy. But his own thinking is akin to that which actually produced the historical conflict between upper and lower house. Because, the upper orders believed the lower orders should be kept weak, by depriving them of education, decent working conditions and franchise rights. This was the upper ranks idea of how to keep the order of things, to which they were accustomed. Instead, weakening the lower orders promoted the long and bitter class struggle, and constitutional crises.

Saying one needs a weak second chamber is like saying one needs a weak heart. It is because of perceived weaknesses in single chamber government that the value of a second chamber is recognised. One does not strengthen one chamber of government with a weakling of a second chamber.

That would be like the sentimental falsehood of saying a man needs a womans weakness. Women may not have the immediate physical strength of men but they have more endurance, as their life-spans testify. The man used to be regarded as lord and master and the woman as "the weaker vessel," and "no better than she should be."

Nowadays, the democratic demand of equal rights require that men and women respect each others strengths, and use them to mutual advantage in partnership.

Another partnership analogy with two-chamber government is the relation between theorists and experimentalists in science. Even science has been tainted with a prejudice that practical work is for work-men and pure science for the gentleman of leisure, like that distinguished amateur scientist, Lord Salisbury.

Theorists don't demand of experimentalists that they make their tests "weak" so that they don't challenge the pre-eminence of theorists as the proper scientists.  
This is a fair comparison with bi-cameral government, because making the second chamber "weak" prevents it from doing properly its job of informative representation or representative information.   
(This constitutional fiasco is itself a lesson in the folly of rigid or dogmatic conflicts, between a governing few, ignoring informed participation.)

When governments build weaknesses into their working arrangements, they are asking for break-downs, and at the most inconvenient times, whenever the system is stretched by emergencies. The leadership may make the first chamber relatively strong but they do not make it stronger, only, perhaps, more head-strong, head-long into disaster.

The logic of Bogdanor and Jenkins case for Lords weakness would be to maximise the relative strength of the Commons by abolishing the second chamber. Their fear of rivals is of the mentality that "Carthage must be destroyed." A wise Roman senator retorted: "Carthage must be re-built."

Suppose the second chamber is cobbled together by "Breakages Ltd." Simon Jenkins suggested weaknesses typical of the constitutional sabotage proposed. Half the peers are indirectly elected from councils and regions. Jenkins began his _Times_ article with the emptiness of elections by single member constituencies or party lists, because they put politicians more in the power of their parties than the public. That witty first column, especially, was worth quoting.

By the second half of his article, Jenkins has managed to argue himself into further alienating the public. He would have local and regional councillors, who, on his own admission, voters were granted little or no chance to elect personally, transported completely without regard to the voters wishes, to another level of government altogether, irrelevant to the responsibilities for which they were elected. This subordinates local and regional elections to national appointments.

Simon Jenkins would have the other half of the Lords "nominated from the leaders of specific interest groups and professions, however the commission chose." In that last phrase, speaks the dilettante. "Don't trouble me with the details," it says. How often principle has foundered, in practise, on that attitude!

Jenkins chosen opponent, Robin Cook was a man to be reckoned with, who faced a reckoning. Defying his leader, he risked dismissal, for such differences of opinion, as are necessary to the search for truth. The executive imposes loyalty on its party vassals to prevent the legislature doing its job of independent investigation.

The leader of the legislature took a stand on democratic principle, about which Cook says some fine things: The appointment process was "tested to destruction. Indeed, it was such a major public relations disaster that two years later we've not dared ever repeat it."

"I do not think we can make the second chamber accountable by privatising the process of appointment to any number of independent bodies."

"If we exclude the public from the process of elections we should not be surprised that the public is then cynical about those who oppose the people's peers. Trust is a reciprocal quality. If we want the public to trust politicians then we must trust the public to elect the right people."

In practise, as Simon Jenkins explained, Robin Cook, on the constitution, however fashionable among reformers, would be deadening to democracy. Such naive reformers propose, firstly, safe seats to parliament with the single member system. Secondly, should a politician be so unlucky to lose his safe seat, they propose a back-up system of safe seats on party lists, whereby he can still be elected as an "additional member," without any interference of personal choice by the voters.

If even that can't keep the career politician in parliament, never mind, with a second chamber of just such party-rigged "elections," this caste has the same doubly safe seat system all over again to give a job for life.

Peter Mandelson objected to proportional representation. He believed if the Lords used PR, the Commons would have to follow suit:

"How long do you think it would take for it to become perfectly clear to everyone that to have two separate electoral systems for the two chambers would be absolutely untenable?"

Mandelson was implying that one of two systems would be deemed more democratic and therefore confer more legitimacy on that chamber. This also implies the Labor party is wrong to use different systems for different assemblies, as advocated by its Plant report, instead of the democratic electoral system (the single transferable vote).

Politicians, such as Leader of the Commons, Robin Cook, thought they were rebeling in the cause of democratic legitimacy, in seeking an elected political second chamber. Others, such as Gerald Kaufman, stated the obvious, that those elections entrench "party hacks" and people can't be bothered to vote (at least with the party-controled electoral systems politicians favor).   
Lords reform showed politicians to be atavistic, even in their notion of progress.

A policy war is based on the false reasoning that two chambers must both be political if they are to be elected and therefore an elected second chamber would conflict with the first.

### Expertise and democratic legitimacy in the second chamber.

To top.

I asked the joint committee on Lords reform to realise the Wakeham Report was wrong to rule out the election of experienced vocational representatives to the second chamber.

The report, that so gratified the prime minister, if hardly any one else, left Parliament a dead-lock between two half-truths: the right composition of the second chamber and its democratic legitimacy.   
There must be other interest groups than parties, in the second chamber, to check the parties law-making in the first chamber. If all the main interests of modern society were represented, then the second chamber would have democratic legitimacy, that appointed experts cannot give.

The House of Lords already contains experts, respected by their professions and the public. The fact that they were appointed was superfluous and detracts from the legitimate authority they've already earned thru recognition in their lines of work.

Politicians and academics of all persuasions have spoken for vocational representation. In general, its case can be supported by looking to the past and to the future (if the country has a future). From ancient times, the second chamber has been a senate, in which not old age but its experience is valued.

The House of Lords is historicaly the chamber which represents the vested interests seeking to prevent the laws going too much against them. There is nothing wrong in that, provided that all interests are fairly represented, to that end. Of course, that never happened. The Lords stuck in the middle ages, until, as Tony Benn said, Tony Blair modernised the House of Lords into the fourteenth century.

The argument from the future, for vocational representation is the same as the case from the past, but made clearer by the success of science as a procedure. In science, generalisations are amended, as necessary, by experience. It is this partnership of rational laws, checked by those with the expertise to know whether the laws will work properly, for which two chambers of government have stood, and should stand.

The historical and yet scientific argument is the strongest case for a vocational second chamber.  
The Commons, for the general community, and the Peers, in specialist work, could complement each other in a two-chamber political economy. This would be much as science works in a partnership of theory and practise.

### The Wakeham report objections to vocational representation.

To top.

Systematic occupational representation is required for the countrys practical knowledge to be brought fully to bear on the problems of government. This need not require a new round of elections, only that peers be chosen as part of the routine of professional or union elections. So, the dire warning of low turn-outs for Lords elections is irrelevant. New rounds of elections are not needed, only a modification of existing occupational elections.

In this and other objections, the Wakeham report was a weak devils advocate against vocational representation. The report objected to "unacceptable intrusion" in occupational bodies affairs to ensure they met proper standards of representation in the second chamber.  
Back in the nineteen fifties, was it unacceptable intrusion to ensure that the Communists didn't take over the electricians union by ballot rigging?

Likewise, the government requires that societies meet proper accounting standards to prevent financial fraud. Minister, Patricia Hewitt considered a more frequent turn-over of accountants, as a feeble "safeguard" against corporate corruption, on the scale of Enron and WorldCom, which stung the Americans into a more credible reaction.

The British government proposal, to shuffle round accountants between firms, would excuse them, as knowing even less (if that were humanly possible) about fraud in firms they were supposed to be supervising.

Given that electoral or financial fraud, of economic executives against their members, is unacceptable, anyway, where does that leave the Wakeham report excuse against requiring standards of vocational representation in the second chamber?

Indeed, financial accountability should be one of the specialised tasks of the second chamber, where accountants and financiers should have their share, and no more than their share, of occupational representation. Andrew Marr pointed out that, in the Commons, billions go thru on the nod.

The Wakeham report had the laughable assurance that a Lords committee was a sufficient legislative over-sight for developments in science and technology. Here is this huge intellectual force revolutionising the world for good and ill. No hand-full of individuals, however eminent, can hope to represent the vast fields of research continually developing.

MPs back-grounds show the Commons to be almost completely out of touch with science and technology. These require independent thought, which party politics regards as the peculiar enemy to its self-assertion. The moral of this, for a country, may be likened to the true story of the captain, who hung a sailor for mutiny, because he advised that they were heading for the rocks. The crew drowned.

The nations second chamber is needed for a representative knowledge of its entire work and the freedom to assess its implications, given by elective authority of colleagues.

In a letter to _The Times_ , Lord Alexander thought the joint committee on Lords reform should be joined by people outside parliament "healthily lacking in complacency." The Parliament profession has proved hopelessly incapable of reforming itself. He reminded us that Bernard Shaw called professions conspiracies against the laity.

Adam Smith said the same, but he believed in free competition instead of government monopolies, today exemplified in electoral systems made for party oligarchy, and its hold over parliament.

_February 2003, open letter to the joint committee on Lords reform._

Yours sincerely, _  
Richard Lung._

P.S. If any one still needs converting to an elected second chamber (on a vocational franchise), as well as effective elections to the first chamber (on the political franchise), I can recommend a visit to the official Westminster web-site, when you want to make its in-mates answerable to you. I found a list of names of the peers. I found e-mails for the MPs. But they were nothing more than forms, plainly wanting nothing to do with anyone outside their little electoral districts.

The web-site, to the Lords reform joint committee, also defeated my attempts to contact it.   
Apparently only one member of the committee had his own web-site. "Politician" is a maligned term, not least by me, but at least Paul Tyler MPs web-site was canvassing the public on actual _policies_ of the day (namely not going to war before all the lawful avenues of a peaceful solution have been properly explored).

Post-script (2015):

Paul Tyler didn't respond, either. The unresponsive Dr Jack Cunningham, known as Tony Blairs "enforcer," moved on to membership of the Lords, he was supposed to be reforming, where he won the attention of The Sunday Times, on one of its periodic stings.

The doctor, at last, responded to a language he understood, with the immortal words: Make it twelve thousand and you've got a deal.

To top.

* * *

## The Second Chamber of Science: an economic parliament.

### Proportionally Representing Vocational Experience to check Political Theory.

Table of contents

#### Sections:

Why There Should _Not_ Be Another Political Chamber.

The traditional second chamber of interests given democratic strength.

Cross-party support for an "economic parliament."

Bi-cameral representation of the rules and rewards of society.

Consistency of an economic parliament with Labour government policies.

Note: Siting an economic parliament.

Relation of an economic parliament to the judiciary.

The Interests chamber and the Commons "pre-eminence."

To evolve interests representation.

Human rights depend on both political and economic democracy.

Conclusion.

### Why There Should _Not_ Be Another Political Chamber

Two chambers exist to serve two different functions of government. If this were not the case, half the 650 MPs could be re-housed in the Lords. And all MPs could take part in one or other of two current debates, taking place in two chambers, between a managable number of some 300 MPs each. Britain already has enough national politicians.   
(The need to make room for more facilities in the Palace of Westminster is another issue. See end-note.)

Each chamber could check the others work. But the question would arise, which chamber had the decisive role. Half the MPs moved into the Lords could not be demoted for no good reason. Yet, to start a politically elected second chamber from these, or other party candidates not already MPs, would create inferior MPs just because they were elected to the second chamber. It is a widespread, but thoughtless fix that condemns second chambers to be second-rate.

As a consequence, the Plant report copied the bad example of countries with second chambers having a less democratic voting system (meaning a party list system). So, second chamber MPs would have less electoral authority to challenge the first chamber. Any effect, they do have, is that of a less democratic body, in effect making the Constitution, as a whole, less democratic. List systems are notorious for being party boss systems, with powerful interests behind them.

Moreover, this option is based on a wrong idea about different voting systems having different functions. There is _one_ Scientific Method Of Elections (as I submitted to the Independent Commission on the Voting System) that fulfills nearly all, and potentially all, the recognised democratic functions.

Another attempt, to pack the nations second chamber with politicians, is to confound them, as both national representatives and either local, regional or European representatives. What is the point of weighting the declining nation state with the other government levels?   
All this does is to create another duplication and conflict of function.

Federal constitutions do exist but the second chamber could give no more than a token place to the thousands of local representatives (who are supposed to be in their localities dealing with local business, anyway).

The US Congress has only 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, from federal constituencies, well placed as Presidential candidates. To prevent British federal second chamber candidates making bids for the party leadership, they would be elected on list systems, under-mining their personal authority.

Again, the Constitution would be left wide open to oligarchic manipulation from a corporate voting system. As people realised their electoral impoverishment, the second chamber would become discredited. Both chambers must be properly democratic, which creates no conflict of authority, provided the second chamber performs a complementary function to the first.

### The traditional second chamber of interests given democratic strength.

To top.

Modern science is neither a dogmatic rationalism nor a pedantic empiricism but a partnership of empirical rationalism. Theory needs to be checked in practise. Practical work is no longer disdained as the job of lower classes. Physical theorists postulate general laws. Experimentalists check their generalisations, as they need must, in as large a variety of special circumstances as possible.

This is exactly analgous to the work of two-chamber government. People come into politics believing in broad general principles, which they seek to implement thru the parties that stand for them. They are the law-makers of society and are appropriately elected from local communities, that cohere thru generally understood and accepted rules.

Communal interests, as a whole, would be better served thru the historic constituencies of "the Commons" or communities, of shires and boroughs.

To know how well political laws will work in practise, on people from all walks of life, requires their systematic representation. Politicians, as a body, are not qualified to provide this. (Occupationally, they are an unrepresentative sample. But then their purpose is different.)

The vocations themselves, democratically electing their professional leaders from each field of special expertise, are the most qualified to make informed choices of occupational representation.

Party patronage is liable to exclude such as union leaders, perhaps associated with some embarrassing strike. Great characters like steel-workers leader Bill Sirs or railway workers leader Sidney Weighell would have been democratically elected.

Professional leadership does not conflict with, nor challenge, political leadership, which is outside its recognised sphere of competance.

The proportional representation of the economy could largely be achieved as part of the electoral procedures of trade unions and professional associations. Vocational constituencies might have to be created for the weakly organised, such as shop-keepers, hoteliers, small businesses, fishermen, inventors. Their voice would have a moderating influence on the rich and powerful lobbies exclusive access.

### Cross-party support for an "economic parliament"

To top

I don't suppose there's anyone nowadays who believes an "economic parliament" would lead to a "dictatorship of the proletariat" by a workers soviet. Russian democracy is a two-chamber Duma and Soviet. I don't think it's as systematic a political and economic representation, as the names of the two houses would suggest. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his "Letter to Soviet Leaders," advocated a revival of the soviets, that is genuine workers councils, instead of the monopolisation of the state by one party.

The term "economic parliament" to come to terms with the most pressing of modern problems, "the economic problem," comes from a proposal by Winston Churchill in 1930. This was taken up by Peter Walker (Lord Walker), in his autobiography, The Ascent Of Britain, with the idea of democratically extending its economic franchise.

Leo Amery, in Thoughts On The Constitution, also advocated a "House of Industry" and discussed the more ambitious plans of political opponents, such as the Webbs, for a "social parliament."   
One could add GDH Cole for "guild socialism."

One of the best early formulations, in 1920, is by HG Wells, in The Outline Of History:

"...a community may with advantage consider its affairs from two points of view - through the eyes of a body elected to represent trades, industries, professions, public services, and the like, a body representing _function_ , and through the eyes of a second body elected by localities to represent _communities_. For the members of the former a man would vote by his calling, for the latter by his district of residence. They point out that the British House of Lords is in effect a body representing function, in which the land, the law, and the church are no doubt disproportionately represented, but in which industrialism, finance, the great public services, art, science, and medicine also find places; and that the British House of Commons is purely geographical in its reference."

Wells also mentions possible "labour peers." Soon after, the first were appointed.

Harold Macmillan, in the "National Economic Development Council," brought together the leaders of industry from the CBI and TUC, chaired by the Chancellor. (The political parliament had its origins in such a great council set-up by William the Conqueror.) But the big boys already have a platform. And a director of the Council had a rather Neddy-like aversion to a more inclusive economic parliament.

Macmillan also created life peers, in 1959, and likened the Lords to "a Senate." Not old age but, again, experience is the factor that points to the second chambers true function and required personnel.

Moreover, a reformed "functional" Lords has a history of cross-party support, necessary for a Constitutional reform. The Liberal party conference got as far as to debate an economic parliament, elected by the single transferable vote, tho they didn't pass it.

In 1999, "interest group affiliates" elected by STV were also a feature of David Sinclair pamflet "Putting Our House In Order" from the Conservatives Bow Group.

In his 2015 book, Inequality. What can be done?, amongst many other playing field-leveling proposals, Anthony B Atkinson included a "social and economic council." He told Eduardo Porter, of The New York Times, "We are stuck in a narrow set of ideas. The most important thing is to broaden the agenda."

### Bi-cameral representation of the rules and rewards of society

To top

Following Macmillan, Sir Ian Gilmour, in Inside Right, argued for a "public industrial forum." Then, all those with pay demands would have to face up to the obvious fact that their truly "special case" is one among many. All need their own kinds of consideration, such as to work conditions.   
As the first chamber makes the rules of the game, the second chamber could mediate or referee the rewards of society. A game is a competitive co-operation.

Those, who argue the strong always win against the weak, are repeating the defeatist doubts expressed to Solon, creating a new rule of law in ancient Athens. The defeatist was justified in his scepticism but Solon was still right to try to redress the unequal struggle.

An economic second chamber should be a powerful force for economy, by detailed scrutiny of government expenditure. The Commons abandoned this in 1986.   
This undid a more than century-old reform by John Stuart Mill MP, who ensured that Parliament properly checked expenditure.   
Andrew Marr, in Ruling Britannia, cites that, today, billions are passed on the nod. The peers, as economic MPs, could help draw the Commons attention to wasteful or unnecessary spending.

Lord Hailsham noted, in a reply to me, that the Commons should retain control of the budget.   
This should not be a problem. The legislature, in keeping with its concern for general laws that define community activity, would over-see budget levels, the basis of its power against royal absolutism.

The second chamber would have a strong incentive to economise to help improve the investment and pay in the professions they were accountable to. With open and reasoned debate, for all the nations interests, savings could also come from a much reduced need for lobbying and counter-lobbying. All those corporate campaign funds splashed about, ultimately, come out of the pockets of ordinary citizens.

The nation needs a representatively informed, forward-looking body in a high-tech world. Doug Ross, the US Assistant Secretary of Labor, in 1994, at a global learning conference, estimated only 10% of his country folk would be manual or blue-collar workers by early in the 21st century.   
In 1996, Britains Campaign for Learning thru-out life was concerned with the need to keep up with changing skills needed in the economy.

Douglas Hurd complained of pressure groups overwhelming MPs personal constituency responsibilities.   
Pressure groups complain of government departments being tools of the corporate giants: non-renewable energy monopolies, the farmers union, the road-builders etc.

Keeping-up current stock exchange ratings may not be in the long term public interest for quality of life. Drug companies, to say nothing of the illegal market, are profit-driven, as well as health-seeking.

Watch-dog agencies are prone to regulatory capture. Gordon Rattray Taylor, in The Doomsday Book, quotes evidence "so well documented in the social sciences that...who watches over the custodians of the commons is: the regulated interests that make incursions on the commons."

Robert Blackburn, in The Electoral System In Britain, lists pages of quangos. (Paid members don't have a political vote, which makes them a democratic anomaly.)

In this endless miscellany of politically appointed monitors, we are "Missing Our Connections," as Sir Peter Parker would say. Many quango members have to be paid-for by the public but are not accountable to them: taxation without representation. Direct economic democracy, nationally co-ordinated in the second chamber, is needed to yield economic, as well as political, power of consent to the British people.

Politicians, serving the public interest, are in a discrediting conflict of interests ("sleaze") from their power of patronage over, or dependence on sponsorship from, special interests. The British Labour party has had this problem acutely, being created precisely because its special interest was excluded from the system.

The Constitution needs to be opened to all the interests, in their own right, in the second chamber, rather than subverted by some of them without it.

Becoming a politician should not be an expensive business but depend on popular support for candidates (say, 200 signatures, as in Germany). Election campaign spending rules should level the field for the less well off.

### Consistency of an economic parliament with Labour government policies

To top

In 1976, I wrote to the local Department of Employment suggesting a scheme of "Environment Employment."   
Shortly after, Anthony Steen, then MP for Liverpool, Wavertree, introduced a private members Abolition Of Unemployment Bill (23 June 1976) with the same provision.   
BBC Panorama (7 april 1986) reviewed the same policy working in the USA as "Workfare." In West Virginia this was supported by the American Mining Union.

"Welfare to Work" was introduced in the first budget of the 1997 Labour government.   
HG Wells clearly stated the principle in 1912 (in a misleadingly titled essay, The Great State). Members of society have moderate responsibilities for its up-keep, as well as a right to the generous freedom that co-operation should bring.

For example, bad housing, needing repair, has been reckoned to be the main cause of illness. This is "only" a "social cost" but it shows up financially as the main burden of the NHS bill. People also lose by days off work.

[Many years after this submission to the new Labour government of 1997, a great coalition of organisations, the Energy Bill Revolution, campaigned for properly insulated and affordably warm homes. Not yet forth-coming from the dozy Tory party entrenched in government on under 37% of the 2015 poll.]

Full employment does not have to be full-time employment. This also leaves people more time for learning new skills. France introduced a statutory 35-hour week to reduce high unemployment there and promote workshare.

Workfare, so everyone may be employed, means that all can be represented in vocational constituencies of an economic parliament. The right to work can so be considered as a "universal suffrage" of employment.

The other Labour government policy, of a minimum wage, is the guarantee that this right is genuine. Like workfare, it is socially and environmentally beneficial. A basic income to the poorest is spent on essentials, rather than extra luxuries.

Welfare to Work and a minimum wage serve essential individual needs.   
[PS: In 2015, the new Tory government introduced this, as "a living wage." Labour opposition ungraciously accused them of seeking political advantage from promoting their policy.]   
An economic parliament would have the power of combined action to representatively promote those needs.

### Note: Siting an economic parliament

To top

By 1930, HG Wells, in The Work, Wealth And Happiness Of Mankind, described the cramped and out-of-date facilities of the British parliament.   
In the 1990s, a well-known northern food retailer, made a peer, had the ears of Labour advisors for a whole range of constitutional reforms, including a new House of Commons, somewhere in old London docklands (where the Millenium Dome is now sited).

It is bad policy to have authority all in one spot. Since Scottish and Welsh devolution, only the north of England remains "unassembled." With its old industrial associations, this would be the best place for an economic or vocational parliament, either in an existing building or purpose-built (but not on a green site).

The north needs a draw away from the over-loaded south-east. With tele-conferencing, a second chamber would be virtually as convenient in northern England, as next door to the Commons, which could have the whole Palace of Westminster to itself. Tho, given its decrepit state, the Commons, too, will have to relocate before too long.

_(Evidence to the Labour Cabinet Committee on House of Lords reform, 1998, and to Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Royal Commission on House of Lords reform, 1999.  
Further evidence to the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, June 1999, follows.)_

### Relation of an economic parliament to the judiciary

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Statute law needs checking by represented interests. For example, the public has statutory rights as consumers. In particular, the small claims court is supposed to allow complaints to be made cheaply. At present, the judge or arbiter may over-rule those rights in the interests of sellers rights. The misled consumer can find he has hefty costs to pay some defendant firms lawyers and experts train fares.

To remedy this situation, a vocational parliament could represent the general public, as sellers, to qualify the statute law for that same public considered as consumers. Thus a definitive statute law of consumer-seller relations could be passed by both houses of parliament.

Then, big firms might be less obstinate in challenging consumer rights. The judge or arbiter would interpret the statute law rather than over-turn it, in the name of Common Law.   
Nothing would be lost to case law by this, in the small claims court, when the judge merely cites some alleged precedent. Presumably, such cases are too minor to take the time and expense of citing actual case precedents for the judges ruling.

Broadly speaking, the small claims court should be the work of arbiters, who interpret a two-chamber consumer-seller statute law, and the higher courts, the work of judges also trained in Common Law.

A lot of legal disputes concern technical questions that judges are not qualified to understand. If you have an occupational parliament representing every field of expertise, the supreme court, whether or not integrated in the second chamber, could call on this vital missing ingredient to just resolutions!

### The interests chamber and the Commons "pre-eminence."

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In reply to my recommendation (The Second Chamber of Science: part one of this essay) to the Labour Cabinet Committee on Lords Reform, I was sent a summary of the government "position." This concerned the Commons "pre-eminence" as in the subsequent Royal Commission terms of reference. No-one wants a repeat of the historic struggle for dominance within the Constitution.

We shouldn't assume there is only one kind of pre-eminence that allows of no other. By analogy, over the past century, the pre-eminent scientist (or kind of scientist) is perhaps Einstein. There is a tradition, going back at least as far as ancient Greece, that the contemplative thinker was somehow a class above the practical worker.

One contemporary of Einstein was as great a scientist, tho an inventor. His advances are still not widely or fully known. Who has heard of Nikola Tesla? [PS: More people than previously.]

Theory and practise are equally necessary to science. One is not, or rather should not be, pre-eminent over the other. They are just different kinds of pre-eminence.

My impression of the government position, in 1998, was that the Lords reform debate hadn't moved on from the Wilson government "seraglio of eunuchs," as Michael Foot called it.   
Trying to have its cake and eat it, too, the government wanted a Lords that was independent yet subordinate, representative yet appointed (at least in part).

If one recognises that the Commons has pre-eminence in the general laws of the commons or communities, including over-all budgetary control, the second chamber may still have pre-eminence in the special application of those rules to all interest groups.

Democracy is not a luxury for either chamber. For social rules to be broadly made, in the first chamber, and for them to be properly tried and tested, as they apply to particular occupations, requires systematic two-chamber representation of communities and vocations.

### To evolve interests representation.

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Winston Churchill, A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples, characterised the Lords as the chamber of the great vested interests of the nation - "even labour," as he put it. The Labour party had to be formed because it was left out of the system. And this has further confused the distinctive roles of the two chambers.

If Lords reform had not stalled in the twentieth century, it might have evolved beyond merely appointing life peers, who have achieved career distinction.   
In this respect, the Irish Senate, as a working model, would be preferable to the political ghosts most second chambers are.   
The British second chamber wouldn't have to be on as narrow a vocational franchise as in Ireland.

Millions of British people already use the democratic voting method, the single transferable vote, which Ireland uses for political elections.

Nor need the second chamber involve yet another election campaign with likely low turn-outs. STV is flexible enough to combine usual union or professional elections with sending reps to a national body, to co-ordinate the economy. Vocational candidates on the ballot paper merely need show whether they are standing for the national economic parliament, and the most prefered of those candidates would be proportionally elected.

After all, the Interests MP (or IMP!) would be parliamentary spokesman for a vocations ruling body, as well as a leading representative of that occupation, so such an integrated election could be justified.

The same principle could be extended to the EU, if one of the three European parliaments became a vocational chamber, integrated into union and association elections, when that stage of organisation was reached.  
The Brussels parliament should be vocational, so they would be on hand to transform the European Commission from a bureaucracy to a democracy.

If the generic term for specialised second chambers is Churchills "economic parliament," the British economic parliament might be named "The House of Callings."

### Human rights depend on both political and economic democracy.

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One could make a good case that the twentieth century tragedy stems largely from failing to realise that both political and economic democracy are needed for justice and quality of life.   
This relates to the Royal Commission terms of reference on the relevance of a reformed second chamber to the Human Rights Act.

One sees a democratic one-sidedness (or uni-cameralism) in Britain as far back as 1834, when a Chartist "House of Trades" was to replace the House of Commons. (Source: EP Thompson: The Making Of The English Working Class. Ch.16 v.) This can be traced more or less up to GDH Cole "Guild Congress" (quoted in AH Birch: Representative And Responsible Government).

The Marxist attitude, that parliament is "the executive committee of the bourgeoisie," lingered on in Britain, thru the 1970s, with the supposed Trotskyite infiltration of local Labour parties.

Bernard Shaw, in the play, Major Barbara, advocates pure Tito, or Castro, of political rule by a strong man, scornful of the parliamentary "talking shop" but with a sincere belief in workers rights and participation in industrial management.   
Yugoslavia, after Tito, resembled the Soviet and Nazi genocides. The moral of that is not the need for a strong man. Arbitrary power is weak, for lack of a constitutional order of succession.

CS Lewis said he was a democrat because no man is good enough to be another mans master.   
Did history really need to prove economic justice cannot be secured thru political tyranny?

How long is it going to take to learn the need for an economic parliament to give equality of lobbying the political parliament? For, political democracy is also subverted by corporate capitalism, indeed, the very survival of world ecology is endangered by unrestrained greed and exploitation.

Even financial journalism is alarmed. Melvyn Marckus warns (in The Express, april 4, 1998) of The Fat Cat Threat To The Economy:

"The figure of £66 million does, however, raise the question of just how much loot is required to galvanise the chief executive of a public company?...  
Such tales merely strengthen beliefs that, although senior executives responsibilities may be onerous, the rewards, in the shape of lavish salaries, bonus payments, barrowloads of share options and plush pension arrangements are, in a word, unjustifiable. Another word is: obscene.   
What the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England should ponder is how ill-equipped so many boardrooms are to argue against employees' demands for inflationary pay settlements."

The democratic rights of small shareholders usually are a sham. For example, nobody votes for fund managers giving themselves an increase in commission (on poor performance as well) but surprise, surprise, their grab goes thru by default.

The law sometimes requires companies to seek a vote on changing their financial arrangements. Busy and inexpert shareholders can only decide by what the company tells them. An independent Interests MP might be consulted by the public in such cases.

How hard it is in a usurious and parasitic society to live in decent poverty! Everyone has to have so much capital in hand to meet the demands of everyone wanting their cut from everyone else.   
Even the basics include various tariffed utilities, expensive insurance covers, public and private pension plans, and the inequitable council tax.

One policy of an economic parliament should be to lower the cost of living (partly thru encouraging domestic renewable energy sources or low impact technical innovations) especially for people who prefer simple and independent lives to the credit card or consumer society.

### Conclusion

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I didn't think it would be helpful, to attempt to answer every detailed question of the Consultation Paper on Lords Reform, issued by the Royal Commission. Many of the answers would be determined by the broadest principles of reform. What, if any, franchise, for the second chamber, wasn't decided in advance.

Political appointees or second chamber second-rate political elections would pack the Lords with party careerists, irrelevant to the nations vital needs.

The last quarter of the twentieth century has shown how electoral reform has resulted in a mess of half a dozen or more (if you count important differences of detail) undemocratic voting methods on the British mainland, because most committees (as high ranking as the Lords Royal Commission) were more concerned to secure the positions of various parties, in the electoral procedure, than to find out what the voters really want.

Party organisations should not be an oligarchy. They are only one of the countrys professions, only one constituency, in all of the occupational constituencies, for the purposes of a proportionally represented special interests second chamber.

Some hotch potch composition, recommended for the second chamber, will only mean the Royal Commission can't make its mind up about the principles involved.   
The feeble muddle of an electoral "system," introduced by the Independent (Jenkins) Commission on Voting Methods, was not well received.

That the life peers must stay on (and might have been elected) is evident. Their best service would be to point the way for systematic representation of unions, professions and all vocations.

Post-script, june 2015.

It may be seen from my review of the Wakeham report, in a previous chapter, that it did not heed the advice of this conclusion of the evidence, I submitted.

Just like the Jenkins report on electoral reform, the Wakeham report on Lords reform, was indeed a feeble hotch potch that pleased no-one and solved nothing.

I remember John Wakeham introducing his report, on tv, by saying, that the second chamber doesn't have to be second rate, which remark came with my submission.

I was ill-pleased with this coincidence, not so much because it was unacknowledged, but because its implications were not followed. The remark was not meant to be merely some handy catch-phrase to advertise a report that was not worthy of such an assertion.

Labour government policy of Commons "pre-eminence" was to make the second chamber a second rate political chamber, packed with party hacks, instead of a complementary national chamber of first rate expertise, given democratic legitimacy by being elected, during the legally required elections to occupational governing bodies.

To top

## Constitutional Economics

Table of contents.

#### Sections:

Socialism and bureaucracy.

Capitalism and plutocracy.

A parliament for "the new industrial state."

A "basic income" as a finance franchise.

Democratic paradox of spending equality and earning inequality?

Transferable voting model of financial enfranchisement.

### Socialism and bureaucracy.

The term "constitutional" implies that the nature of an economy be decided, in a parliamentary manner, by agreement. That is to say not by war, civil war, revolution or any tradition of mastery and servitude.

Capitalism and socialism both claimed to be fairer ways of conducting economic relations. Liberal economics claimed private enterprise in a free market answered the wishes of the people as consumers. Socialism claimed that capitalism subverted the state with private monopolies that dictated the distribution of earnings.   
Capitalism led to plutocracy. State socialism led to bureaucracy.

Many socialists, like the Fabians, believed the economy would be better run by officials than business-men, despite an ancient saying that no official ever put his job on the line for the public interest. It is evident that a state monopoly only takes economic dictatorship to corrupt extremes. State socialism was an unlearning of the lesson in competition taught by Adam Smith.

The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, mentions someone brokered a deal, that would have benefited both sides. He was put away for capitalist activities.   
If individual initiative is terrorised out of a nation, to be left to "the great teacher," it is not surprising that more tolerant countries get ahead.

This is the weakness of The Intelligent Womans Guide To Socialism And Capitalism, by Bernard Shaw. He sees an essentially static society smoothly run by officials. He considers individuals who really change things to be rare enough not to unduly affect the infrastructure once fully nationalised. There is no place in his system for a dynamic market economy. State socialism resembled nostalgia for a rigidly hierarchic society, in which everyone knew their place.

Stalin banqueted during the forced collectivisation famine. Alexander Zinoviev communicated an over-whelming revulsion against the system. Milovan Djilas was jailed for exposing The New Class. The steady build-up of evidence on corruption came from other persecuted writers in Eastern Europe, such as Georgi Markov.

Ten years before the twenty-strong European commission resigned, on a European parliament vote of no confidence, there was ample evidence of plunder on the public purse.   
"Fiddles, fraud and fatcats" was a page spread by The Sunday Times (26 March 1989).   
Brian Moynahan reported:

"With customary and heroic indifference, officials in Brussels were last week shrugging off the latest assault on their bureaucracy as anti-European Commission hysteria. The accusations of mismanagement, incompetance and massive fraud levelled at the community...by Sir John Hoskyns, director-general of the Institute of Directors, was dealt with in traditional style."

The Brussels "perks mountain" has promoted inequality, too. Neil Kinnock, European Commissioner in charge of reform, was reported (by BBC Ceefax 28 feb. 2001) to be targeting "militant complacency" thru perks, rather than salaries. Perks cited were a £1,200 per year "typing allowance" to secretaries and cash for fictitious railway allowances.   
The unions are showing their militant complacency by "threatening to take industrial action, including strikes."

Anyone, who didn't know "industrial action" is a euphemism for strikes, might think they were threatening to work, as well as strike. The news-flash called this a protest by Eurocrats. It sounds more like their minions squeeling at being deprived of crumbs from the high table.

### Capitalism and plutocracy.

To top.

George Orwell reviewed The Managerial Revolution, by James Burnham, appreciating its importance. His thesis was one of the candidates, in a lecture on where power lay in modern society, when I was a sociology student. It is a combination of managerial Plutocracy and Bureaucracy, with Democracy trailing badly. Instance the sample of evidence from my chapter on the subject.

"Recent research, based on matching declared income on tax returns with corporate compensation records, allows me to state that the vast majority (60 to 70 percent, depending on what definitions one chooses) of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy in 2000–2010 consists of top managers. By comparison, athletes, actors, and artists of all kinds make up less than 5 percent of this group."  
(Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.)

Corporate capitalism also poses the problem of irresponsibility.   
Reminding one of a Michael Moore tv show, The Awful Truth, with Crackers, the corporate-crime-fighting chicken, the website, rtmark.com, is supposed (in the words of Douglas Rushkoff, april 15 1999, The Guardian) to be a practical joke against

"those giant companies who...enjoy the privileges of citizenship without any of the responsibilities. (And according to rtmark)...continue polluting our waters and murdering thousands through negligent industrial practises. Even when caught, the offending corporation needs only to pay a fine in order to continue business as usual. No one goes to jail. Meanwhile, with more money at their disposal than most countries, these multinational corporations can donate to elections and pay for lobbyists who give them more access to and influence on public policy than any group of 'private citizens'."

The stagnation of American politics is apparent from a Republican "landslide" with 20% of the electorate; the "safe seats" of their voting system; the pride, even, with which some congress-man is in the pockets of a lobby.  
One Michael Moore theme was to the effect: why vote for the monkey instead of dealing with the organ-grinder?

The answer to that is the need for a second congress to democratically represent individual occupational interests, so the first congress (electorally reformed from safe seats) can keep to its business of community interests represented by local and state leaders.

Perhaps the economic justice of an economic democracy would be approachable, if the law were simply as impartial as it is supposed to be. UK Chancellor Nigel Lawson thought that the law unduly favored institutions. He said he had never experienced the like of the furore this caused against change.

Simon Rose, in Fair Shares, says, of Britain in 1957, two-thirds of shares were owned by individuals, and 18% by institutions. Thirty years later the position was reversed. In the top 100 companies, individuals owned about 10%. This was, to a large extent, due to pension funds tax privileges, causing a bias in savings.

Simon Rose says, in another book, The Shareholder, that, in the City, there are many jealously guarded ways of making money with almost no risk.   
Share dealing became instant after the second computerisation of the Stock Exchange - the second so-called Big Bang. Rose suggested the electronic market could do without the stock-broker and his commission.   
In general, fending for oneself could be an option in everyones education, at any time of life.

The Guardian index of top executives pay, in Britain for 1998, showed rises of more than 26%. That is five times the growth in average earnings and ten times the inflation rate. More than thirty executives basic pay and bonus topped one million pounds.

The ordinary earner has to form a militant organisation that appears rowdily on the media to threaten the continuance of society, for the odd extra per cent income. Directors quietly help themselves, as well as dispose of huge funds in other ways, regardless of their investors wishes.

In an interview, Margaret Thatcher defended capitalism, by saying that there was even greater inequality in the Soviet system. It was not for want of trying, if this were not so.

Michael Heseltine flatly stated that capitalism means inequality. Television exchanges don't make for refined argument. That is to say capitalism makes no sense as a system unless its inequality is justified by some standard distinguishing it from freebooters or embezzlers.

The democratic defense is the right of free enterprise to be rewarded by how well it meets consumer wishes. Hence, the most successful entrepreneurs will have the highest incomes. These incentives of a free market ensure the popular will is properly served.

### A parliament for "the new industrial state."

To top.

JK Galbraith under-mined this case with his theory of The New Industrial State. He argued a theory of convergence by corporate capitalism towards the state-managed economy.   
Big projects come from lobbying politicians. And what's left of the "free" market cannot be left to make up its own mind. There are too many development costs at stake to permit the public to turn down firms new products. Moreover, big money can best afford the commercial conditioning called advertising, the imposing of the latest fashion line on peoples social need to conform.

People who say mass media advertising isn't very effective might as well say Christianity wasn't very effective, when every one went to church. The fact is the adverts on tv are sermons every few minutes for the materialist religion, not of good we hope to be saved for, but goods we hope to save for.

Nowadays, consumption is likely to be the devils bargain of buy now, pay later, with the help of the credit card companies. (These people want to own the world.)   
The First Circle, by Solzhenitsyn, has a Russian nationalist trying to purge foreign words. For instance, he replaces "capitalism" with the Russian word for "usury."

Galbraith deprived corporate capitalism of the democratic apology for liberal economics.   
To regain democratic legitimacy, capitalism would have to accommodate a constitutional economy. An economic parliament lobbies the political parliament. Lobbying the production needs of the community should be a full and open consultation of the community. That is, it should be parliamentary.   
Likewise, lobbying the consumption needs of the individual should be via their rational representation. Consumers should be able to advertise their wishes, in a feedback relation with industry, not merely an indoctrination by big business.

Alvin Toffler became influential in Republican policy-making. His famous sociological work, Future Shock, advocated essentially the same idea:

"Such 'social future assemblies' might represent not merely geographical localities, but social units - industry, labor, the churches, the intellectual community, the arts, women, ethnic and religous groups, students, with organized representation for the unorganized as well. There are no sure-fire techniques for guaranteeing equal representation for all, or for eliciting the wishes of the poor, the inarticulate or the isolated. Yet once we recognize the need to include them, we shall find the ways."

### A "basic income" as a finance franchise.

To top.

Constitutional interpretation of the market economy in terms of political democracy is at least as old as the second world war. I mean the idea that consumer spending is a "vote" on resources. Margaret Thatcher aired this view.

In a democracy, everyone has an equal vote. Does this mean that the Shavian theory of equal incomes is correct? (in The Intelligent Womans Guide To Socialism And Capitalism.)

In the second preface to his book, Shaw clowned that he had written it for everybody but that the only person who understood it was Albert Einstein.  
Many a true word is spoken in jest. And that's usually true of Shaw.

Einstein said his theory of relativity is a "principle theory." So is thermodynamics, which recognises in principle that a perpetual motion machine is impossible.

Shaws principle theory of equal incomes is analgous. There is no sufficient justification nor necessary rationalisation to be found for any unequal income distribution, which is, therefore, not a basis for lasting social agreement. That is the sum of Shaws theoretical achievement.

The open-ended growth economy is a would-be perpetual motion machine. Conservation of energy is the principle both of technology and ecology, with regard to the machine and the environment, respectively.

The unstable economy is one of leap-frogging pay awards and bonuses, plundering all available funds to any given occupation. There is no principle of differential payment, only a question of which jobs are in the best position to take most, despite public disapproval.   
In his novel, Marriage, HG Wells said : Life's a scramble and will be for hundreds of years yet.

Resources are limited and it makes sense to share them peacably, rather than destroy them in fighting over them or trampling and wasting them in the stampede to get there first. This can hardly happen till everyone has enough, represented by a basic income.   
(Not even this is possible til the peoples of the world agree on the respective limits of their populations, instead of going to war over their share.)

A basic income means a basic equality of economic rights and duties, when translated into constitutional terms. If this is an economic franchise, it should come with its own kind of responsibilities, just as the political franchise does. Having an equal vote, to be represented in the countrys law-making, means one is expected to abide by and serve those laws.   
Similarly, the right to a basic income should be as a modest duty, for a basic wage, to do basic maintanance work for society. Such work should not be for its own sake but just such as is necessary. Workfare is (or should be) a basic income in this sense. Moreover, paying a basic wage is a widespread legal requirement of private employers.

[The UK Greens 2015 election manifesto includes a basic income policy.]

### Democratic paradox of spending equality and earning inequality?

To top.

Are, then, capitalism and socialism coming together in a constitutional framework for incomes, considered as an economic franchise? The political model of democracy can go some way to reconciling the two doctrines. Everyone has an equal vote but they give unequal numbers of votes to the candidates.   
One could argue that consumers are the voters and businesses are the candidates for their spending power. Unequal profits register popular preference. (This supposes an economic parliament to redress unfair advantages of corporate capitalism undermining the free market.)

A democratic paradox of the mixed economy remains. In politics, when a candidate is elected with a big surplus of votes, those votes don't become his own to elect who he pleases. Tho, a show of popularity will further his political advancement.   
A democracy of consumers may decide what producers get the most profits. But producers are also consumers. Producers unequal profits will make consumers incomes unequal and prevent market choice from being strictly democratic, as a rule.

Can a constitutional economy work with democratic consistency? Can free markets work like free elections? It may help to consider that universal suffrage evolved out of lesser franchises. The Chartist William Lovett ridiculed the complicated and expensive list of voting qualifications.

The nineteenth century economist, Ricardo distinguished three kinds of income: rent from land, interest from capital, and wages from labor. These may be spoken of as "franchises." They are freedoms confered by law, that not all societies grant to everyone. Land nationalisation abolishes rent. Muslim law forbids interest. And slaves are not free to earn wages.

RH Tawney, in The Acquisitive Society, quotes Mr Justice Brandeis that property, used for an "industrial absolutism," confers a private franchise or jurisdiction. And Mr Hobson was quoted on a functionless " _Im_ property" confering what Tawney himself called a "private tax."   
These expressions, a private franchise and a private tax, contain an insight, that is more important than disapproving unjust advantages of the few over the many.

Rent, interest and wages are the rights to raise private taxes, which, in effect, grant finance franchises to the private sector.   
There are also public sector franchises, notably in welfare state benefits. These are raised by taxes, by which we mean implicitly, _public_ taxes.

Public and private taxes may be compared to the miscellany of voting restrictions in nineteenth century Britain. The rationalisation of both private and public taxation to an income franchise would compare to the evolution of universal suffrage.

Hermione Parker (Instead Of The Dole) reckons that it would be more cost effective to replace Britains immensely complex social security system, which probably no-one wholly understands, with a basic income.

[PS: Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions minister, who resigned from the Tory government in 2016, believed in rationalising welfare into a system of Universal Credits. This may be compared to the rationalising of the nineteenth century political franchise, eventually a Universal Suffrage.]

Parker says social insurance starts from the premise that only those, who have been in paid work, deserve income security. This creates a rat race society in which those, who work for nothing, are second-rate citizens. For instance, (writing in 1989) women who give up work (that is paid) to raise a family; those who look after sick relatives or the elderly.

### Transferable voting model of financial enfranchisement.

To top.

In politics, an effective vote for all depends on a rationalisation of the electoral system thru proportional representation, properly speaking. (That is a transferable vote.) With this system, candidates are elected on receiving a quota or elective proportion of the votes.   
Consider a basic wage as a quota of income required of every worker to qualify in their occupation. Some will receive surpluses from their (Ricardian) private sector franchises. Others may have their income supplemented, by Welfare to Work, up to the income quota or basic share in the communitys consumer power.

Higher levels of government require higher quotas to elect candidates. To continue the analogy, you probably want a bigger financial quota than a basic wage. This may not be enough to pay for a pension.   
A pension is a clear example of a surplus income, that is not spent but transfered into a pension fund. This surplus goes towards the income quota sufficient to "elect" ones sustenance in old age. The income surplus transfer may also go to ones personal, family and business or other resposibilities to other people. There are inheritance transfers or bequests to family, friends, dependants or for good service.

[2015 Post-script:   
The Tories would release state pension funds, as a lump sum. The argument goes that it is the pensioners money, so they should be able to obtain it as they wish.

The reduction to the absurd of that argument is that they shouldn't be obliged to give-up their earnings in the first place, as an old age pension provision.

A constitutional interpretation provides some guidelines on such issues. A law-abiding citizen is provided with a vote for periodic elections. That does not entail the liberty of sacrificing future votes, to have them counted in some current election.

The Tory allowing of pension wind-falls reveals their usual blindness to social responsibility. Allowing the irresponsible destroying of ones livelihood in old age is to put a burden on the rest of the community.

Even the means testing Labour party pretends to show some belated awareness of their bad reputation for punishing responsible savers.

The John Lewis Partnership was the bequest of a business-man with democratic ideals. Profit-sharing offers another way for big earners to spread their spending power, to make consumption more representative of the peoples wishes. This further promotes a free market, in which the most popular products earn the most. Because, the public is better served when profits are being re-invested to look-after the work-force. And the pick of skills are attracted by the most successful firms that also have the best terms of employment.

On 11 december 1869, John Stuart Mill replied to the Employés of Messrs. Brewster of New York:

"The plan of industrial partnership seems to me highly worthy of encouragement; as uniting some of the advantages of co-operation with the principal advantages of capitalist management. We should hope, indeed, ultimately to arrive at a state of industry in which the workpeople as a body will either themselves own the capital; or hire it from its owners. Industrial partnerships, however, are not only a valuable preparation for that state, and transition to it, but might probably of a long time exist by the side of it with great advantage; if only because their competition would prevent co-operative associations of workmen from degenerating, as I grieve to say they often do, into close joint-stock companies, in which the workmen who founded them keep all the profits to themselves.

The proposals of Messrs Brewster is in some important respects a considerable improvement on the English industrial partnerships of which I have any knowledge; because it takes the employés themselves into council to determine the share of the profit to which they shall be admitted, instead of fixing its amount by the sole will of the employers, and because it gives to the council, elected by the employés, an important share in the government of the workshops, even to the extent of allowing them, by a two-thirds majority, to overrule the wishes of the employers."

Robert Ardrey novel, Worlds Beginning, is about an inventor, whose partner raises the money for production, by persuading his workers to risk invest in the firm for a share in the possible profits. Even by 1946, the idea of mere wage earners as capitalists was revolutionary. Ardrey felt compeled to say that the US Constitution was not contravened.

Since then, attitudes have changed towards the old Ricardian demarcation of the economy, into land, capital and labor. In common with a detested socialism, doctrinaire capitalists like Margaret Thatcher, followed by John Major, claimed to want "a classless society."   
The inequitable society remains.

Michael Moore, in Downsize This!, refers to one of the polite terms or euphemisms for making corporation redundancies. Workers are fired to improve profits to share-holders. Employment is exported to other countries for cheaper labor costs.   
Communities compete with public money to induce big firms to provide local employment. There may be no guarantee they won't up-sticks to follow the profit motive, leaving a jobless ghetto.

Moore found office space and staff at more competitive rates for a sizable chunk of the US administration, south of the border, down Mexico way. This would release prime real estate in Washington and downsize the government pay roll, thus helping, mightily, the American tax-payer.

To top.

# Selection elections.

## Conditioning and Instinct.

Table of contents.

#### Sections:

Science Fiction dystopias.

Totalitarian and hedonist conditioning.

Ethology.

Instinct psychology and an "opposition instinct."

### Science Fiction dystopias.

HG Wells, the "constructive socialist" made the attempt to renew the world in _A Modern Utopia_. It is almost the most boring book he ever wrote. As a critic pointed out, Wells protested against a static conception of society but his own social plan has no dynamism or sense of going any where. And I say that as one who found Wells works, in all genres, consistently intelligent and enjoyable.

Wells did write dystopias, too. Like Huxley, his name is linked to at least one of them, _The Time Machine._ The term, dystopia, was used by the Russian author, Yevgeny Zamyatin. _We_ (1920) is his crucial contribution to the genre. Its collectivist prophecy and all its authors writings were banned in the young Communist state. Zamyatin was influenced by Wells science fictions. He was even known by his country-men as "The English-man."

_We_ directly influenced Huxley for _Brave New World_ , as well as George Orwell for _1984._ Orwell picked up the Zamyatin message of total control and conformity and dwelled on what a dreary uncreative business it would be.

Zamyatin had an other message, which is what Huxley picked-up. Human society may not need to be forced to conform like a hive, because a hive may be made honey sweet. That is to say, a ruling class may sanction pleasures as inducements to conformity.

A striking difference between _We_ and _1984_ is the two dystopias attitude to sex. In the former, sex is a recreation, provided-for in the couples hive-like cells. In the latter, sex is a stolen pleasure, sought away from the all-seeing television eyes of Big Brother.   
A shabby puritanism, and the seeking to deny it, seemed so much a part of Orwells own character. This is testified by writings on his forays into the lower middle class ( _Keep The Aspidistra Flying_ ), working class ( _The Road To Wigan Pier_ ), or unemployed and drifters ( _Down And Out In Paris And London)_.

_Brave New World_ (1932) develops Zamyatin theme of hedonism as an instrument of social control. Sigmund Freud stressed the importance of child sexuality, which was a pretext for the open encouragement of its expression in play.  
The movies have been superseded by "the feelies," which anticipate virtual reality. This gives a fantasy, rather than a reality, of control. Even self-control is lost, when the hedonist society ensures the habit is formed of never being able to deny pleasure.

The basic purpose of society is perverted. Instead of individuals benefiting by co-operation, which makes society worthwhile, individuality is subverted. People are cloned like spare parts for a social machine, according to an elites preconceptions of the good society.  
The old hierarchy has used cloning as a tool, to fit people into higher or lower stations of life, as it pleased our Lord to call them to. (In the brave new world, Our Lord has become "Our Ford," a god of a mass production that includes human beings.)

Aldous Huxley gives a savvy account of genetics. Only his poor eye-sight prevented his entering the biology profession, like other famed scientists in his family. In fact, about sixty years after _Brave New World_ , cloning of a mammal was achieved. Dolly the sheep was not blessed with longevity.

Huxley has his future folk look young til they are fifty, before suddenly cracking-up. My mother told me how rapidly women aged, in the thirties, from mothers into little old women. It is remarked in the sociological work of British mining communities, Coal is My Life.

I am old enough to remember it myself. More-over, as a child, in the movie audience, I watched, the nineteen year-old prowlings of a leggy Joan Collins, suitably impressed by such a parade of dangerous glamor. "Our Joanie" did not follow the old pattern. She remained glamorous into old age. The young Huxley would have been astonished at the well-preserved womanhood of the near future.

The tone of the satire is rather bumptious. Coming from an intellectual aristocracy, Aldous Huxley perhaps didn't appreciate the benefits to the masses of mass production, pioneered by Henry Ford. And the movies were a bright spot in the lives of millions in the Great Depression. Huxley reviewed the first big "talkie," _The Jazz Singer_ (1927). He shows-off his knowledge of the development, or rather degeneration, as he would have it, of opera into popular music.

This is surely wrong. No one period of composing is made up solely of master-pieces. The aristocratic patronage of the arts surely had its full complement of derivative work, no longer around to hold up to ridicule. America has its own twentieth century classical repertoire of popular music. The younger Huxley was a creature of the blasé twenties, determined not to be impressed by this entertainment revolution. Yet his review betrays a suppressed excitement from seeing his first talkie.

Pioneering American popular culture and technology deserves a good word. But _Brave New World_ remains prophetic against Western hedonist society and its addictions, destructive of self-control and the entire well-being of the planet. Huxley was among the first to bemoan the heedless plunder of natural resources. And it features in the plot of _Island._

When the year 1984 arrived, the British Prime Minister, of the time, Margaret Thatcher announced Orwell was wrong.   
She was wrong. Science fiction isn't about the future. It is about the preventing of futures, as Ray Bradbury said.

Utopias and dystopias are "ideal types" of the good society or the bad society, by taking social trends to realistic conclusions. Max Weber explicitly used the word "ideal" purged of any value judgment. He considered himself a pure scientist, like a taxonomist of social structures.   
In contrast, HG Wells accepted values for what they are, in his sociology of utopias and dystopias, as plans or warnings. Wells said values are facts.

In the last days, leading up to the 2001 election, Thatcher, of all people, warned of an "elective dictatorship," if Labour won the landslide that the polls were predicting.

Early in the campaign, Labour leader Tony Blair said, in an interview with David Frost: If he had to choose, he would rather be called a dictator than weak.  
Of course, Orwell didn't mean his warning against the power of the party to apply to any one year in particular. He said the only reason, he called his novel 1984, was that it was 1948, when he wrote it, and he just changed round the four and the eight.  
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

Actually, _1984_ is like 1948, in bombed-out, run-down and austere Britain, still not recovered from world war two. Eastern Europe also endured that war and its dictatorial one-party states took much longer to emerge from its trauma and end the Cold War. So, _1984_ seemed prophetic against war dictatorship, because portraying its bleak inception.

### Totalitarian and hedonist conditioning.

To top.

The Zamyatin SF classic is not just a warning against collectivism, as the title would suggest. Orwell only picked-up half its message to elaborate on. In behaviorist psychology, there are two types of conditioning. One is Pavlovian or classical conditioning. This is the one that straps a dog so it cannot move and is only the passive receptor of stimuli, that it has to learn to discriminate. The dog learns a conditioned response, such as to salivate at just the signal that dinner is about to be served.

If the psychological tests of discrimination become too hard or fine, the helpless animal eventually suffers a nervous break-down. This can occur by excess inhibition, like the trade union "go-slow" in protest at management treatment. Britain, with its lack of industrial democracy or worker participation, was a fertile source of this type of response. The other possibility is excess excitation or revolt. The poor dog can only go barking mad, to show how impossibly it has been treated.

Obviously, this is an extreme model of totalitarianism and might be called totalitarian conditioning.   
There is another kind of conditioning, called Skinnerian conditioning or operant or instrumental conditioning. This originated not with Ivan Pavlov in Russia but with BF Skinner in America. The watch-words of these two types of conditioning might be "obedience" and "pleasure." It is said that Russian president, Vladimir Putin wanted to instill obedience.

Conditioning, American style, has its prototype in the laboratory rat in a box, who learns by chance that if a lever is pressed, food will be released. Frequently, this leads to obsessive behavior. The wee beast keeps frantically pressing for more food. This (like sex) offers the maximum of pleasure for the minimum of effort. Our rat has been conditioned to become a hedonist: we have hedonist conditioning, as it might be called.

Unlike Pavlovs dogs, Skinners rats and pigeons are free to move about but only in the narrow confines of a box or the laboratory. They are free only to pursue their pleasures. Like totalitarian conditioning, hedonist conditioning has its frustrations. If the lever doesn't produce any more food rewards, chimpanzees behave like people who kick a vending machine, when it doesn't supply the food or drink for their coin. They keep kicking, more out of rage than with any hope left of results.

### Ethology.

To top.

Some psychologists themselves revolted from the frustrations of the laboratory conditioning of animals, with its restriction from learning behavior in the wild. Hence, the science of ethology was founded to study animals in their natural habitat. A founding father was Konrad Lorenz, led on the path of this scientific revolution, perhaps, by a little morality tale. This Austrian was held as a prisoner, after the second world war. While in his lab, the psychologist observed rats. In his cell, the psychologist Lorenz was observed by rats.

Zoologist and former zoo custodian (I almost said inmate) Desmond Morris gave a good survey of the subject in his run-away best-seller, which he had the sense to call _The Naked Ape_. I don't think he mentioned the name, ethology.

Skinner certainly believed in his own psychology, writing a book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" to propose it, not only for laboratory rats but for human society. I have not read this book, nor Skinners fiction of the good society, "Waldo 2." Our college tutor said it wasn't much good. And I'm sure Ralph Waldo Emerson would have disapproved of his name being taken in vain.

Nevertheless, I regret shunning the opportunity to see Skinners traveling circus. Yes, I know this student did the politically correct thing, by staying away, and I don't deride that. But sometimes a man is better than his philosophy. (This was true of our own college Behaviorist.) And I might have learned something - if not by conditioning!

During the Cold War between the super-powers, the rivalry of the USSR and the USA extended to their respective Pavlovian and Skinnerian psychologists. When a summit was held, the Soviets and the Americans each had their own commemorative monuments. Doves, being symbolic of peace, were trained Pavlov-style onto the Soviet statue and Skinner-style onto the American statue.

Someone in the Soviet camp had the idea of conditioning all the American pigeons onto the Soviet monolith, as if they had a monopoly of peacefulness. That gave the American monument a monopoly of cleanliness.

Immature rivalry bodes ill for peace.  
Totalitarian and hedonist forms of Behavioral conditioning were like satires on their respective societies.

Ethologists found cause to reflect on the super-power rivalry, from their studies of the ways animals deal with their conflicts. Niko Tinbergen studied herring gulls, caught between fight and flight, having to spend their nervous energy on seemingly irrelevant activities, like simulated nest-building. This involves violent activity such as pulling at grass or violent pecking the ground. The agitated gull would even pull at the guy rope of Tinbergens hide. "The result was rather like an earthquake." Tinbergen also comments:

"Man, who keeps himself 'under control' (or at any rate prides himself that he does) can suspend action more or less, though only with considerable strain."

Lorenz deemed the space race a displacement activity, whereby aggressive rivalry was re-directed into hopefully harmless channels. Werner von Braun said his rockets were aimed in the wrong direction. He meant they should have been aimed for journeys into space.   
("They aim for the stars" -- but hit London, as was sarcastically said of the biopic of the German V1 and V2 rocket inventor.)

Lorenz, _On Aggression_ , said that animals which have grown powerful weapons, in their claws or beaks, also have powerful inhibitions against using them damagingly against their own kind. Human beings are not powerfully armed creatures, so they have not evolved these inhibitions.   
Their sudden ability, to use tools as weapons, has not given human evolution time enough to develop correspondingly strong hereditary restraints against their use. Face to face relations are something of a restraint but weapons have become long-range and impersonal, so that using them is not impeded so effectively as seeing closely the effect of ones aggression on another person.

### Instinct psychology and an "opposition instinct."

To top.

Rivalry extended into the life sciences themselves. Besides the super-power rivalries between behaviorists, the behaviorists dismissed the ethologists, for not working under laboratory-controled conditions - the same argument they used against psycho-analysis. Of course, some of the oldest science, including astronomy, is not conducted in a laboratory. Ethology, like astronomy, is essentially observational.

In the little college, where I found myself, the Freudian and the Pavlovian were in opposing camps. They were both psychologists but didn't seem to have much to do with each other, like two castaways who have demarcated a desert island between them.

The behaviorist had an inconceivable contempt for the ethological school, rubbishing the speculations of Lorenz on aggression. I seem to remember a debate, in somewhat aggressive denial that humans are aggressive. Meanwhile, wars raged on, thru-out the world.   
A key lesson of scientific progress is learning to respect the evidence, rather than clinging to pet pre-conceptions, about how wonderful one is, tho things are a bit bad.

Our resident behaviorist defiantly held that Freud merely observed the peculiar inhibitions of Victorian-age Viennese society.   
I politely and prudently kept my head down. Tho, I was something of an innocent with regard to academic politics.

However "unscientific" the speculations of Sigmund Freud, he had a refreshing vision of realities. The command: Thou shalt not kill, he said, only had meaning, because of murderous impulses in mankind.

A fore-runner of ethology was instinct psychology. Freud was a contemporary of the instinct school. He emphasised sex as an instinct, observing its influence, especially on family behavior from early childhood. His treatment of mental disorders is to make patients aware that their behavior is governed by instinctive or primeval sexual motives. Their civilized values may forbid such animality. Patients, who don't want to relinquish tabued wishes may merely forbid themselves to recognise them in themselves.

Hence, the conflict has not been removed and the forbidden desires remain active for mischief, manifesting themselves in neurotic behavior.  
Such personality disorders are personal rituals, which symbolically go thru the motions of the repressed wishes, as an emotional release. The psycho-analysts experience may interpret these emotional expressions and tactfully try to get the patient to come to terms with their real meaning.

I read that Freud was not a scientist but a physician. Here again is the artificial divide between pure science and applications. Freud was quietly liberal in politics and liberating from neurosis in his psychiatry, even wishing, in his rationalist view of social rituals, that psycho-analysis might free mankind from its mass neuroses.

Ritual neuroses compare to the "displacement activities" observed by ethologists. Indeed, Lorenz was influenced by Freud, such as on the basis of aggression in sexual competition.

Instinct psychology went out of fashion because pioneering psychologists tended to compile arbitrary lists of instincts.  
Never the less, I've noticed a shock reaction, in myself, when a piece of hose has twisted like a live snake or something tumble-out like an attacking insect or spider. There was no time to think what these things might be and there was no past experience of poisonous spiders or snakes to condition me to such instant reactions. So, it seems reasonable to suppose that there is an inherited fear of these dangerous creatures, that programs an instant and possibly life-saving response. Such a genetic program could have been subject to natural selection.

Likewise, dogs chase after someone running, which activates their instinct for the chase. Men and women seem to have a hunting instinct. If you are running in the street, you may notice passers-by automatically make a move to block your way. They instinctively react to prey to be caught. This obviously would have survival value, that might be naturally selected. Those with good manners check themselves from causing an obstruction.

Those who are a prey to their instincts may not realise the real reason they cause trouble. The urbanised hunter may rationalise his behavior, as justified against someone he sees as an enemy or moral inferior. Altho women do appear to share the obstructive reaction to a runner, a hunting instinct appears to be far less strong in them, judging by how much less warring they are. Their admiration, of the martial qualities in their men-folk, is another matter.

Besides the conditioning of conformity, there is reason to believe that the herd instinct, as basic as the behavior of a shoal of fish, would be a primal instinct, because of its survival value of safety in numbers. Even the convoy system, from its first adoption in world war one, proved a dramatic success.

Unscrupulous advocates often attempt to discredit opponents, as a powerful persuasive influence on an undecided audience. So serious is this and other prejudicing factors, that trials require them to be suppressed by the "sub judice" rule, against making people a prey to their instincts, rather than the less securely acquired faculty of objectivity.

I would also argue that there is a balancing instinct, to the herd instinct, in an instinct of opposition. I believe this is a response to physical or emotional attempts to drive others, which automaticly trigger evasive action against being hunted down.

Even trying to drive away a fly may cause it to go the opposite way, because there is survival value in going against an antagonists wishes.   
I once saved a dragon-fly from drowning. It stayed by, on the grass, being swayed by the breeze but not otherwise moving. A male chaffinch arrived and persisted in edging towards the insect, despite being waved away and told to shw!  
But when I resorted to bribing it, with a substitute meal of crumbs, it took off in a fright.

Just as the herd instinct is deployed in debate, so the "opposition instinct," as I would have it, makes itself felt in disagreements. When people talk of "contrarians," I take this to mean: people who are a prey to their opposition instinct. There is an instinctive distrust of anyone, who cares much about anything, making multi-millions or billions of years of evolution kick-in, that heavy persuasiveness is predatory and threatens ones security or very survival.

The previous example of people automaticly moving to oppose one looks like a perfect example of an opposition instinct. It appears to be a hunting instinct or herding instinct, by hunting groups herding the prey together in catchments.

This is distinct from the instinct of the hunted to herd together, to conform, so as not to be picked out as individuals, confering "safety in numbers."

With opposing, perhaps, comes territorialism, which must go very deep. Even our friend, the fly is territorial. The Territorial Imperative was popularised by Robert Ardrey. The hunting and gathering and cultivating territory protects a surplus margin of food resources, which would be crucial in tiding over its owners, in the lean years. The territorial instinct stabilises survival.

Ardrey was three-times subject to academic disapproval: firstly by championing a mere observational subject, new to the scientific pecking order; secondly by not being a qualified member of the academic closed shop; and thirdly by making a popular success of it, with the non-specialist general public.

Behaviorism was a perhaps excessive reaction against instinct psychology, believing most behavior traits could be explained as conditioning by the environment. An exception is Hans Eysenck, a Pavlovian behaviorist, who believes heredity a much more important determinant than environment.   
The traditional behaviorist believed the difference in human beings is merely that some take longer than others to learn. This was taken to ridiculous extremes in the idea of chimps producing chance master-pieces on type-writers, given the time. It reminds how Dean Swift satirised scientists in _Gulliver's Travels._

Swifts influence can be traced on Wells early scientific romances. And Huxleys SF novel, _After Many A Summer_ , follows-up Swifts portrayal of longevity, in one of the later stories of the Travels.

Noam Chomsky criticised the behaviorist theory of language that infants were conditioned to learn language. Children do make random sounds that happen to be the phonemes of certain languages. RG Collingwood once remarked he had heard a baby, that couldn't talk, trying out a sound peculiar to Arabic. The behaviorists pointed out that the parents are likely to reward a baby with attention, when it happens to make sounds meaningful to their particular language.

Moreover, children don't learn language by being tutored in the finer points of syntax. The learning is largely unconscious.

The learning of grammar seems to be like imprinting. It takes effect only if it takes place at a fixed time in a creatures life cycle, as with chicks imprinting the first seen image, normally the mother bird, as who to follow for sustainance after birth.

Children, especially open to social influence, while not strong enuf to do heavy work, seem to have become instinctivly programmed to speech instructions. If they are lost and survive, they become the fabled wild boy, found alone in the woods, who has forever missed the childhood chance to be fully human. He cannot learn to talk in sentences, if managing words.

So it seems that there is an in-born language-learning program that is part of human development, and must be activated in childhood or it will not operate. The implication is that there are universal rules of language, somehow coded in the genes, which enable every child to pick up any human language they are exposed to.

To top.

## Sigmund Freud and CG Jung:   
seeking the whole man thru a democracy of ones selfs.

Table of contents

_Sigmund Freud._

#### Sections:

Jung breaks with Freud.

On the social inertia of blaming, psychology reaffirms religion.

Freud disturbs the slumbers of the human mind.

Jung for a democratic psyche. Archaeology and anthropology of mind.

Development of personality and the archetypes.

JA Hadfield: Dreams and Nightmares.

### Jung breaks with Freud.

Carl Gustav Jung was thought too esoteric. But he has been well served by his followers. Several women doctors were in the forefront. His ideas form the back-bone of many a popular psychology book. Jungian analytic psychology is now most definitely main-stream.

Jung himself defied his reputation for obscurity, as in the Tavistock lectures, that got his main ideas across, with some panache.

A sort of guerrilla warfare against his reputation persists, however. After world war two, an English doctor expressed some irritation that Jung was still associated with anti-semitism.

His book pointed out that Jung was guest of honor next to Winston Churchill when he visited Switzerland. Churchill was in a position to know and would not have entertained a racist or Nazi sympathiser (especially right after the Holocaust revelations).

So, it is rather sad that a recent biography of Jung took his anti-semitism as read. The allegation has become a legend. Jung is not the only innocent man stuck with a stigma.  
Churchill himself is still dogged with the condemnation that he shot the miners.  
If it were true, you can be sure that his enemies would have made it stick as a matter of historical record.

A writer on Jung traced this stigma to Freuds short history of psychoanalysis, where the visiting Jung is said to have put aside his anti-semitism for the occasion.  
(This assertion over-looks it not being there, to put aside, in the first place.)

This student got the impression that Jung was a disciple, who turned away from the leader who elevated him, making him a sort of Lucifer figure.

Jung was moved to point out that he was already an established psychologist before he ever met Freud. Jung distinguished his researches as "Analytic psychology" which suggests a merely derivative school of a less distinguished practitioner. Yet, Jung had great professional experience with institutionalised mental illness, which Freud never had.

Freud lived in anti-Semitic Vienna. And Jung was a German-speaking Swiss. Freud lived and breathed Germanic anti-semitism. It might have been no big deal for him to assume that Jung was just another of the same ilk.

Freud was anxious for his school of psychoanalysis to break out of its adversely discriminated confines.  
Likewise, some followers of Jesus wanted to take Christianity to the Gentiles. Jungs visit would naturally chime in with Freuds hopes.  
Freud, the man trying to break out of an encircling prejudice, scarcely would have been human, if his disappointment, with Jung, did not breed some token resentment.

Peter Gay, biographer of Freud, reveals that late in his life and in danger from Nazi persecution, Jung was responsible for sending emissaries. They offered to help him get away before it might be too late.

Freud is quoted as saying that he would not be beholden to his enemies.   
There was something of the old Adam about Freud. He had an attitude problem towards Jung. It is a revealing statement of an intellectual tribalism from Freud. His doctrinal purity appears responsible for much of the schisms into psychoanalytic sects.

The babel of psychoanalysis is just another example of, what religious people call, the fallen state of man, historicly succumbing to tribalism, instead of transcending it.

It is to Gays credit, that his thoro intellectual biography does not shrink from certain blemishes in Freuds character, which could be disdainful yet presumptuous (in his attitude to American money) for all his proud integrity.

He was not above gloating at the humble demise of his dissenting rival Alfred Adler, as tho it were divine retribution for straying from his psychoanalytic party line.

Yet when Jung admits that Freud was "a superior personality" to himself, you know what he means. There was more than the noted appearance of the Swiss peasant about Jung. There was a trace of a coarse manner. Perhaps he lacked Freuds sense of his own dignity.

### On the social inertia of blaming, psychology reaffirms religion.

To top

The social function of stigma is to ostracise the unrepentant. Stigma becomes dysfunctional when it is attached to the blameless. Too often, blaming others is a lazy distraction from examining ones own short-comings, which can be an arduous and uncomfortable task.

One of Jungs leading morals is not to rush to condemn. Once, he put it in conversation to a colleague, who was angry with someone: Even if they are nine-tenths wrong and you are only one-tenths wrong, there is nothing you can do about the nine-tenths. But there is something you can do about the one-tenth.

This shifting blame is a great obstacle to human progress. The temptation is always to blame others, rather than to concentrate on the hard work of self-improvement, and turn away from the inertia of ones bad habits.  
This is Jesuses message of the mote and the beam.

Much of Jungs teaching is the Gospels in psychological dress. Jung came from a large family of pastors. He was the psychological exception to the religious rule.

He realised that religion had lost its numinous power over mankind. It had to be recognized that science was now mankinds mentor. Intellectual understanding had come into its own.

A Jungian term sometimes has its Christian equivalent. It is always a good exercise with Jung, that whenever he presents you with a new concept, to try to think of its religious equivalent.

Jesus rebukes hypocrisy. Whereas, Jung warns against having an "Inflation" meaning in common parlance, getting a swelled head. This may be likened to what the ancient Greeks called hubris, or pride before a fall.   
Like hypocrisy, it involves thinking one is better than one is. The hypocrit gets an inflation, if he is taken in by his own act.

"Enantiodromia" is something like a religious or Damascene conversion into an opposite frame of mind.  
I thought that something like that happened in South Africa under Apartheid, before "Truth and Reconciliation" could take place. It was almost as if the African National Congress had to degrade to the violent level of their oppressors, before the oppressors could match the humane standards of a Mandela with a de Clerk.

This is not to advocate violence. It may be admitted that the ANC was pushed too far, til it felt left with no other recourse. Even so, the ANC was lucky that the course of violent resistance did not rebound on them, as happened with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

An act of PLO sabotage resulted in the accidental death of children. It was no use being sorry. They had taken a risk and been unlucky. (Not so unlucky as the children.) The Israeli state called them terrorists and would not negotiate with them, on that pretext.

Just imagine had the fortunes of the ANC and the PLO been reversed. Suppose there had been accidental victims of the ANC acts of sabotage. In the early days and later, the right wing British Press was all too eager to take sides with the Apartheid government against the ANC. The reputation of Mandela might never have recovered.

Whereas, had the PLO attention-attracting violence, to the plight of its people as permanent internal refugees, not come with innocent deaths, the charismatic Yassar Arafat might have attained the world status of a Nelson Mandela, and achieved a Palestinean homeland.

One would hope for better ways than violent spectacle to attract peoples attention to a cause. I liked the wittily imaginative protests of the early Michael Moore.

In the Gospels, some people asked for nothing less than the uncanny, before they would listen to a profet. Jesus is asked for "a sign" to prove his powers. He rebukes the doubters for their lack of faith.   
Such a sign now goes by the famous Jungian term of "synchronicity" the meaningful coincidence that defies the laws of chance.

The reader may think of such uncanny happenings in their own life.   
The following incident may be a personal example of synchronicity, assuming there was no ordinary communication between two women, who responded the same way, when I described a book about The Lost Gospel by Burton L Mack:   
"Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?"

Burton Mack claims that a reconstruction of a lost original gospel, that scholars call Q, shows the sayings of a cynic sage, perhaps influenced by the near presence of Greek colonial cities. He has no truck with the notion of Jesus as an idealistic religous reformer, let alone the uncanny.   
So, that possible case of synchronicity, in connection with Macks book, is ironic or amusing, as if saying: God is not mocked!   
Because, the academic Mack seems to see Jesus thru secular spectacles. But there are more things in heaven and earth ever dreamt of by your filosofy or mine.

Jung is associated with his borrowed term, the archetypes, which he made so much his own, as the numinous idols of the unconscious mind. He himself translated the archetypes as a simile for the gods.

### Freud disturbs the slumbers of the human mind.

To top

There are other rival schools of psychology, like the behaviorists, who would deny that either Freud or Jung are scientific. One may differ from that. If anything, Freud was too great a thinker for the big prizes that merely give men over-grown school-boy reputations. He did win the Goethe prize - for literature, not science - if Goethe was a man of some scientific accomplishment.

My anthropology lecturer rubbished Totem And Taboo, where Freud claimed that the tribal patriarch was overthrown and cannibalised.   
Nowadays, excavators of the past say cannibalism was universal.

Only the other day (december 2010) bone evidence from a Spanish cave was given in Current Anthropology. A million years ago, prehumans cannibalized one another for their "nutritional value."

This lecturer was not anti-Semitic. (He was Jewish, which is actually only one of the semitic races.) He had no antipathy to Freud. He once asked me what were his three most important ideas.

Like a school-boy reciter, I replied: the Unconscious, and infantile sexuality, and I forget the third point. I guess it should be the psychological meaning of bodily expressions. Yes, I remember now: "psychic determinism," to use the jargon. (I had just labored thru Baldwin text on personality theories.)

Other people had these insights, too. Peter Gay biography, Freud, a Man for our Times, notes a British psychologist, who sternly pointed-out, in Victorian times, that childhood has its sexual nature. (I met one of his descendants.)

It is remarkable how Freuds last work, Moses and Monotheism, has gained modern currency with the belief that Achnaton sun-worshippers led the Jews out of Egypt.

19th-century materialism, of Freud or Marx, lacks idealism. Marx stressed the economic motive, the meal ticket. Freud emfasised sex rather than love.   
Some thinkers attempted to synthesise their ideas. Freuds theories might have benefited from putting the instinct to eat, at least on a level with the sexual instinct.

One thinks of babies having to be prevented from instinctively putting things in their mouths, however inedible, in our highly manufactured environment, about which instinct knows nothing.   
Birds are particularly vulnerable from trying to consume human litter that their instincts cannot discriminate against.

In human society, securing a livelihood is a primary motivation, rendering hollow so much of high-minded intentions.   
Freud could not be expected to appreciate the Christian message of love, so conspicuous by its absence towards his race, or, for that matter, in the Crusades against Islam, or in the ruthless and barbarous suppression of the heretics within Christendom.

Freuds inspiration was not traditional religion but the materialist science of the 19th century. The church had put man at the center of the universe. Freud saw science as a progressive realisation of our insignificance in the scheme of things, however we dislike that humbling our "naive self love."

Copernicus had shown that the earth was not at the center of creation. Darwin showed that man was not the center of creation, but just another species as liable to extinction as any other in the integral struggle of life.

Freud reckoned psychoanalysis showed that mans reason is not the center of mental life. Not only was man not master of the universe, nor master of creation but not even master of his own mind. The conscious mind was no more all of the mind, than the tip of the iceberg is all of the iceberg.

The over-whelming importance of this observation is apparent from a glance at the state of the world. If reason were the master, as rationalists like Bertrand Russell said, mankind could set about with a will to making the planet a haven, a heaven, or at least a resilient world eco-system, for the whole human race and our fellow creatures.

Instead, mankind is full of over-mastering passions and quarrelsome factions. Planetary life could be irrepairably damaged or destroyed for profit by nuclear weapons and nuclear fission power and other irresponsibly introduced technologies.

Opposition seems a fundamental quality of life. Seeing something coming, then going the other way would no doubt have considerable survival value, thru-out the history of evolution. But the unconscious assumption of hostile intent, instinctively acted upon in every social relation, is a drawback to co-operation, even deeply damaging to a childs ability to mature into a social being.

If there is indeed an instinct of opposition, it perhaps has something to do with Jungs concept of the Shadow. Instinctive opposition may explain the politics of Reaction, which is by no means always confined to those who have the most to lose.

Unconscious motivations will continue to dominate mankind until they are placed in the critical spotlight of the conscious mind to ask: Is there no better way?

After Copernicus demoted man from the center of the universe, fysics did not stop there with the humbling of mans supposed Lordship of creation. The Sun itself proved to be only an insignificant outlier to a whole Milky Way of suns. And then the Milky Way proved to be only itself one among an uncounted multitude of galaxies.

We don't really know how large the universe is, only what we can see of it. It is, in any case, so staggeringly large that nothing less than light-years can begin to measure it.

The fantastic notion, to really cap everything else, is the growing suspicion that the universe itself is perhaps but one amongst a universal array of universes, a multiverse.

If fysics persuades us of the multiverse, it will have a certain resonance with the psychology of the multitude. Because, multi-verse and multitude have in common that we cannot pass between them.

By definition both a universe and an individual are self-contained. And this is not just a matter of definition. No one can become somebody else. No one can live or die for someone else.

I am not talking about the sense in which RH Tawney said that there are people living other peoples lives. He meant, quite rightly, that gross inequalities of income allow the very rich to cram several lifetimes experience, while impoverishing the life-styles of the poor.

Nor am I talking about those heroic folk, who have sacrificed their lives, so that others might live.

I mean that ones subjective consciousness must forever remain ones own and nobody elses. Even in company, we live and die alone.

Perhaps the key point is that we learn our own sense of self so well, that learning a sense of self, that extends to others, is never nearly so efficacious.

You could describe the whole life of service by Mother Teresa as an attempt to abolish the distinction between her own self and that of others in need. It is a religious attempt to transcend the life and death of the individual self.

The individual self is re-inforced by instinct and conditioning, not just one life-times self-identification but the life-time of life itself coming to a distinctive self-awareness, thru-out the history of evolution.

The multi-verse concept is so vast that it must even run to universes that approximate to our own. That implies that it must contain people more or less like ourselves. We ourselves change very considerably from childhood to old age. Tho, we remember ourselves subjectively thru-out all the fysiological changes.

So, in an indefinite number of other universes that reproduce ourselves to some extent, we have recognizably the same subjective experience of life as in this universe.

Would that really be any different to the subjective experiences of other people in this universe, where we are just as much separated subjectively from sharing their lives?

Our self in other universes is subjectively as great a stranger, to us, as others in this universe. The multi-verse separates us from our subjective self, as the universe relates us objectively to the subjectivity that we share with others.

This line of thinking seems to lead to the primacy of subjective experience rather than to objective personal identity. In practice, we strenuously insist on the latter, despite conjectures of filosofical idealism. Tho, the religions of universal brotherhood insist that everyones needs must be met, because their needs are no different from our own.

### Jung for a democratic psyche. Archaeology and anthropology of mind.

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Despite the authoritarian church, Christianity is a democratic teaching. And Switzerland is a remarkably participatory democracy. I believe, Jungs psychology is suffused with democracy. His psychology is not a rational decision to make democrats of people. He is not a doctrinaire democrat. The value of his message, in this respect, is increased by being under-stated; by leading you to it, rather than commanding you to it.

Sociology is founded on the insight that people are actors who can take on different roles. Jungs psychology is based on man as a microcosm, the cosmos writ small. All of society contends within him and, in effect, that requires, towards ones self-conflicts, a mature democracy, such as the human race hardly yet knows.

The notion of man, as a microcosm of the cosmos, is summed-up in alchemy in the phrase: as above, so below. Lacking definitve theoretical foundation, the materialism of alchemy would be liable to spiritual imaginings run wild. What it lacked in modern chemistry, alchemy might furnish as a natural history of the mind, and material for the psychological researcher. Or, as Anthony Storr put it, alchemy afforded a vast Rorschach test.

Fysical embodiment of the cosmic mirror may be found in the three pyramids of Giza, whose relative positions match the stars of Orions belt, with the Nile representing the Milky Way.

The Nile in annual flood was associated with the rise of Sirius just before the sun at the summer solstice. Sirius is fixed like a guard dog at the bridge of the Milky Way. And is just above the constellation of Argo, the ship, on the river of stars. (The Crystalinks site says that the dog star symbolises steadfastness and the bridging of lower and higher consciousness.)

The very obscurity of what alchemists called "the work" might offer an insight into the unknown depths of the common primitive mind or collective unconscious. This was the preoccupation of Jungs later years.

Freudian depth psychology seeks to explain neurotic aberrations of conduct unconsciously expressing socially suppressed personal wishes.

Jungs psychology sees the instincts take on images of numinous power, the famous archetypes of dreams. Instincts are not only rooted in behavior, they are rooted in the imagination. Jungs contribution is to emfasise how the mind is as archaic as the body, with as many primitive evolutionary levels, as the re-evolving embryo in the womb.

Life is a product of its environment. The motion of creatures depends on being able to balance in Earths gravity. The lunar tides probably facilitated the transition of life from sea to land. And in menstruation perhaps facilitated the birth process.

Sir Charles Darwin, son of the great naturalist, reckoned that the Pacific ocean was about the volume of the moon which had once been part of the Earth.

When the astronauts brought back lunar samples of rock, it was discovered to be earth-like. It is suggested that a collision must have knocked the Pacific portion of the Earth out to become its moon. But the exact cause of the division is not known in 2015. (Stuart Clark: The Unknown Universe in ten chapters.) Currently, it is not certain that the early earth did not split of its own internal nuclear reactions.

Presumably that is why the Pacific is surrounded by the so-called ring of fire. That is the volcanic wound, so to speak, from the wrenching apart of the moon from the Earth.

It is interesting that parturition or birth seems to mimic this wrenching apart of the planet itself. The moon, that has been wrenched from the Earth, still acts as a wrenching influence on the Earth and its life-forms.

Jungs later psychology was concerned with getting glimpses into the archaic structure of the mind, by studying its naïve expression, not only in dreams but in the fantastic symbolisms of alchemical texts.

Jungian research went beyond the metafysics of occult experiments in medieval Europe. It stretched from alien ancient mind-sets, such as the Chinese I Ching or the lost Christian spiritualism of the Gnostics.

Jung travelled in Africa and aboriginal America to study the remnants of the tribal psyche of our ancestors. He studied the old universal way of thinking fossilised in the tradition of folk tales.

When he was an old man, Jung was visited by an interviewer, who expressed, with some surprise, that he had the appearance of a Swiss peasant.  
Jung replied equably that that didn't entirely miss the point.

The interviewer soon got on to asking him about Freud. Jung took the questions in his stride. As a final point, he merely added to the effect that a certain patience in research was needed.

Without actually saying so, Jung had pin-pointed a weakness in Freuds work. His observations, however profound they might be, were parochially Viennese. His excursion into anthropology, Totem and Taboo, leans heavily on The Golden Bough.

When asked if he had ever met a savage, Sir James Frasier is said to have responded: Certainly not!

Jung met his own savage in the Shadow.

### Development of personality and the archetypes.

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Jung psychology was concerned with the development of the personality into maturity. Common to cultures, a typical early trait, or what Jung would call an archetype, is the Trickster.

A prime example is the Charlie Chaplin tramp. He is like a child, powerless but with a certain charm, which may help to excuse the lafable dodges he employs to survive.

Chaplin once had Stan Laurel as his understudy. It was said of Chaplin that he was respected but nobody liked him. Whereas Laurel could do everything he did and everybody liked him.

Chaplin later moved away from his slap-stick comedies. M. Verdoux was still a trickster of sorts but a decidedly sinister one. This black comedy rather illustrates another Jungian archetype, which he called the Shadow.

In The Gaiety cinema, I remember when a trailer announced Mr Chaplins new film, as a new kind of film. As a small but growing child, I got it. I knew he had to move on, to grow or progress to something novel or different, if not better, rather than stagnate.

In an under-stated black comedy, the great artist goes avant-garde, of, it turns out, dubious entertainments of gratuitous violence.

The Shadow is perhaps most famously described in Robert Louis Stevenson story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where Hyde is the fysically and morally hideous dwarf side of the good doctor.

Again, Jung has invented a psychological term for a religious one, namely a devil. A distinction between a demon and a daemon, for instance, allows a possible measure of redemption, even in the most negative-seeming of characters. A furious or demonic passion may have its misguided energy salvaged to be of positive value.   
Treatment by depth psychology has its religious equivalent in exorcism.

The Shadow is an undeveloped part of the personality. It may be an archaic substratum of the mind that has not been socialised. It may be neglected potential for a more rounded personality.

The Shadow may be repugnant but it is not to be shunned. Shunning it will only make it more powerful, thru our lack of awareness of its influence on our actions. Nor must we project our Shadow on to other people, blaming our faults on them.

This is only an excuse for avoiding the hard work of self-improvement. Making-out other people, to be worse, does not make ourselves any better, it just deludes ourselves into thinking so.

The appearance of the Shadow, for instance, in our dreams may signal the need to negotiate with it, to produce a more balanced personality.

It is inevitable that most of us will grow up with one-sided personalities. Our various Shadows are the weaker sides or selves that have gone to the wall (or gone to the devil). This is because competition is the way of life and we are best able to compete by leading with our strengths.

Family responsibilities mean further sacrifice of personal potential. These life-time factors for psychological imbalance are liable to seek redress, analgously to re-asserting any lost balance of fysical posture. Jung borrowed from the biological concept of homeostasis, whereby the body has feed-back mechanisms, that regulate it as a stably functioning organism.

The mind gets tired of always doing what it does best or what social routine demands, and needs to take holidays, retirement, or even saturnale-style activities.

Over a life-time, childish charm diminishes, to be replaced by the greater capacities of adulthood. The Trickster gives way to another archetype, the Hero, again common to all cultures. To leave childhood behind, and fly the nest, requires a certain heroism. It means going out into the world and establishing a position for oneself. Each new generation is a colonisation.

Another common feature of the Hero is that his triumph only takes place with sacrifice. Just as in ordinary life, marrying and raising a family is the sacrifice of a life of ones own. This can be said to be truly heroic. You only have to listen to the courtship songs of popular music to catch the high heroic tone.

The sexual instinct captures the imagination in the respective romantic archetypes that men and women harbor in their minds. A woman has a male archetype, the Animus. A man has a female archetype, the Anima.  
The bodies of male and female have the physical features of the opposite sex, in undeveloped form, so the minds of man and woman may have mental counter-parts of the opposite sex.

These sexual archetypes are like ideal plans wired into the brain, which serve as a guide for the desired partner. Because this is an instinctive process, a man may unwittingly find himself powerfully attracted to some woman. She may fit the mould in his mind, so to speak.   
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Conversely, the strong masculine man can be a powerful attraction to the kind of woman who is looking for a protector.   
Perhaps a symptom of this was the urge of some women to give white feathers, signifying cowardice, to men not in uniform during World War One. It was an instinctive reaction more than a rational one. And it resulted in a British post-war era of three women to every man. Women took to lipstick, as an artificial sexual signal, previously confined to prostitutes.

The man, who is easily over-whelmed by attractive women, is in the grip of his Anima. Rich men, who can afford to indulge their passions, often have mistresses. Film stars are particularly liable to be over-come by the opposite sex, as their trade is to play at just such encounters. And play may soon give way to being over-come by their Anima or Animus.

The Freudian concept of transference refers to this falling in love, that typically happens at some stage of a psychological patient being treated by an analyst or therapist.

As such, transference is like the activation of an instinct under unsuitable circumstances. It resembles that imprinting of chicks on a substitute mother but fortunately is not as irreversible!

Personality development comes to a stop, if he or she can never get beyond the romantic illusion. Life has to be more than a perpetual falling in love with one person after another, that does not do justice to their real selves, but just uses others, as a stimulus for wonderful but temporary feelings.

Part of the problem, it has to be admitted, is the monotony of monogamy. As John Donne said, there is a need for variety in relations. At present, those who can afford it, enjoy -- if that is the word -- a serial monogamy, in other words, a staggered polygamy or one spouse after another.

Maintaining a show of monogamy, by the requirement of divorce, before another partner can be taken on, is a hard-hearted compromise. It is dictated by the competing tyrannies of covetous and jealous passions.

In my chapter about the four loves, love cannot stop at romance but should progress, as well, to friendship, affection, and charity.

Jungs psychology is one of balance. In terms of balance, love doesn't stop at romance between courting couples. Love is also the friendship of shared interests in the world beyond personal attraction. Love is the affection of family that familiarity engenders. And love is the charity of disinterested caring for the sake of others.

All this implies a far wider range of endeavor, that can only be achieved by a fully rounded personality, who is not just a romantic.

Shelley is regarded as an archetypal romantic. His doctrine and lifestyle of free love has been criticised as selfish indulgence, that can destroy those abandoned for the latest fancy.

However, things were probably not quite so simple. Someone of his precocious ability might well provoke jealousy. Someone of his rare breadth of interests, as in the possibilities of science and betterment of the lot of mankind, wasn't going to have an easy time to find soul-mates, except perhaps amongst few, if any, as gifted as himself,

Shelley, no doubt, was a romantic not just towards women, however deficiently, but as a visionary of human progress. And since he died so young, he hardly had a chance to mature, to atone for youths amorous selfishness, as the case might be, and consolidate that amazing promise.

Jung belies his name, which is German for young. It would be truer to say that Freud is the psychologist for the problems of the young, as they are predominantly sexual problems. CG Jung is the psychologist for the old.

A typical instance of this might be his interpretation of patients dreams. He was quite capable of disregarding their obvious sexual symbolism, so obligatory to the Freudian psychoanalyst.

Rather than dwell on any hang-ups of childhood, Jung would focus on the problems at hand, the life chances of the older person, that their dreams might signify.

Jung found that, by the age of forty, people were already concerned with the coming of death. Whereas, youths preoccupation is with giving birth. This requires material considerations of being able to support a family. Whereas old age has a spiritual orientation towards what comes after this life.

Besides his own Christian family heritage, religion, from all over the world at all times, profoundly guided his psychology.

Immersed a life-time in mystical wisdom, Colin Wilson, in his biography of Jung, leaves as an open question the validity of Jungs alchemical interpretations.

Freud quite reasonably says in his essay on war and death, that the injunction, Thou shalt not kill, is a counter to a human race all too disposed to kill. Mankind has to recognise that ancient predispositions linger on, in the recesses of the mind, and can and do burst out again, without due care.

Freuds negative warning, of the selfisness of the deep-seated primitive in mankind, is valuable. And so is Jungs positive affirmation of human spirituality, which he believed, in his life-story, Dreams and Reflections, may transcend space and time to immortality itself.

### JA Hadfield: Dreams and Nightmares.

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JA Hadfield first published in 1954 a modest introduction to the psychology of dreams. It stands on the shoulders of giants, Freud and Jung. So far so good. Then he comes up with his own biological theory of dreams. This is actually a misnomer, or at any rate, too vague term, for what turns out to be a problem-solving theory of dreams.

Christopher Evans, the computer scientist and nineteen-seventies profet of the coming micro-processor revolution, saw the brain as an extra-super-computer. I don't have fotografic memory (or computer memory!) so I cannot do justice to his work, Landscapes Of The Night. I think my feeling was the obvious criticism, that it was too intellectual. I dare say it still has a lot of good things in it, if not as balanced a treatment as the earlier book by Hadfield.

Being able, to solve problems, must be a biological imperative. The things that have made the biggest impression on one, by definition, are still churning around in ones mind. It seems inevitable that dreams must be those impressions, those disturbing factors of life, contending within one, even in sleep. Just so, we see dogs running in their sleep, presumably having exciting chasing dreams.

The vagueness of that last paragraph marks me out as a denizen of the old-time black box psychology. That was the era when we didn't have the technology, that has emerged in the last decade or two. Now physiological psychology, I mean neuro-science, can see the brain almost like an open window, if not yet an open book, picture book even. They can closely track the minds subjective experience with concurrent electro-chemical activity in the brain.

In the past, we talked of people, in life-threatening situations, seeing their whole life flash before them. Now there is talk of brain scans that will be able to up-load a life-times memory, so that it can be down-loaded and shared by anyone as a subjective experience, similar to the memory of the person who lived it.   
Then perhaps onto living other peoples lives as virtual realities.

Black box psychology must seem pretty tame and hopelessly out-dated in comparison. It will no longer be possible to make a virtue out of necessity, by pursuing introspective psychology.

In the past, insight, into the physical workings of the brain, were largely afforded by accidents causing brain injury. There could be exotic and weirdly eccentric, behavioral loss of function, or occasionly some enhancement, likely with draw-backs.   
Deliberate probes, into the skull, were often so crudely invasive, that it must have been a relief to turn to purely introspective psychology. That is turning the mind upon itself by reflecting on our mental activity.

I believe Hadfield master-minds the full flowering of this introspective innocence in psychology, which has been lost. His masterly understanding of scientific method comes with a suppleness of thought, that seems to me completely without dogmatism, which may dog even the greatest thinkers. Hadfield reasons in a way that is my idea of a scientific mind, that is a pleasure to follow.

This is a book that will repay reading more than once, which is compliment enuf! The best book on dreams I have ever read and I have read some far-out stuf, as well as Freud and Jung. I regret that the work was too introductory for more than a brief last chapter on paranormal dreams.

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## The four loves: romance, friendship, affection and charity. (From CS Lewis).

Table of contents.

#### Sections:

A "science" of love.

4 loves: 4 scales of measurement.

Romance.

Friendship.

The debt of romance to friendship.

Affection.

Charity.

### A "science" of love.

A science of love means the normal use of scientific method, to achieve a greater understanding of the subject, hopefully, with practical benefits to society.

It has been assumed that the divine emotion of love is not amenable to a coldly objective analysis. That seems to stem from a misunderstanding of scientific method. It has been argued that you cannot measure whether different peoples subjective feelings are the same. Whereas, any number of people can measure, say, the motion of a body down an inclined plane, or of a planet in the heavens.

Any system of knowledge must have a starting point that can be related to experience. In classical geometry, this primitive concept is a "point." It is the basic undefined term, used to define other concepts, in its terms.

Similarly, "love" can be taken as a basic concept, in terms of which the other emotions can be defined. For example, fear is of losing love. And anger is directed against those we fear will take love away. The so-called deadly sins, or the mental illnesses can also be considered as blocked or unbalanced loves.   
In this way, one could build up an emotional "geometry" or geometries of love.

The Bob Dylan song, All I really want to do, is about enjoying someones company, for their own sake, not for any ulterior motive. All the hang-ups that Dylan lists in that song are about subjugating or dominating, not partnership. They are self-loving corruptions of genuine love for another person.

Bullying and bossing, manipulating, rather than relating, may have more practical motives than self-aggrandisment. The innocent seeking friendship may find that they are really being baited. If the prey knew right away, that their desire for friendship was being exploited, to make them a client, they would turn away before getting emotionally involved.

That wouldn't serve the purposes of those under-cover mercenaries, who imagine they are informal business men or women, rendering a service, for which they expect to be paid or extract an income somehow.  
If the "client" is attracted to them, that is but a transaction value to their escort agency, in disguise.

We may think we know what love is, only to find our feelings were rather limited on the subject. By not defining love, we assume nothing about it, and admit our ignorance. And making love a concept, universal to our system of emotions, is to admit there is everything to know about it.

That is as much to say that knowledge of the basic concepts in any subject, love included, does itself evolve. The basic concept of the point, in geometry, was adapted by Newton, who was very much a geometer, to gravitation, as the "mass point." Modern physics studies the possibilities of yet more basic concepts, such as "strings," which have a Planck scale minuteness, but at least are not an immeasurable point of zero dimension.

Geometry or earth measurement is one of the earliest kinds of measurement. The logic of measurement has been studied, as it applies to the sciences in general. For instance, I used the four main scales of measurement to define the single transferable vote as "Scientific Method Of Elections." Each successive scale brings an increasing power of measurement. In the case of electoral method, this represented greater freedom of choice resulting in "power to the people" or democracy.

This fulfilled the prophecy: know the truth and it will make you free. The fashionable segregation of science and ethics, or knowledge and freedom, had to be challenged, first. I was at odds with "value-neutral" or "value-free" science from my student days.   
In middle age, I gave my alternative view, in the chapter: The moral sciences as the ethics of scientific method.

My college teachers educated me to the debate and provided me with the essential clues, from which I could, quite properly, make up my own mind.

The relating of voting method to scientific method made it possible for me to contemplate a science of love. Not before I was given an essential clue. This time my teacher was from a book, The Four Loves, by CS Lewis. He was already one of my favorite authors.

### 4 loves: 4 scales of measurement.

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I would caution against naively playing a numbers game, as seemingly I did, by relating four loves to four measurement scales. For instance, there are three primary colors, red, green and blue. One might think these stand for three dimensions of color, whereby one could locate all the other colors as relative mixes. In fact, this idea has no basic significance. It is just a by-product of the way the human eye works. Other creatures have more primary colors.

Lewises publishers claimed this was the first time all four kinds of love were treated in one book. The ancient Greeks had four names for love. As in so many other things, they were pioneers. A new science begins with classifying the kinds of thing under study. Indeed, the first scale of measurement is called the classificatory scale or the nominal (meaning the "naming") scale.

Thus the Greek knowledge of love distinguished _eros_ , which name Lewis also used; _philia_ or friendship; _storge_ or affection; and _agape_ or charity.

Lewis treats these four loves as a progression thru life. One starts off with affection, in the bosom of the family, as it were. One begins to find friends, as one moves outside the family circle. Sexual growth certainly promotes eros, by which Lewis means romantic love. This is not necessarily sexual love, which he calls "Venus." Finally, a sort of growth of the soul, thru lifes trials and tribulations, may achieve charity.

This is a perfectly reasonable way to approach a discussion of the four loves. Lewis shows how love may gradually widen out in these four ways. He denies, tho, that ones experience of love must always follow this path in life.

My out-look, on the order of the four loves, may have lacked in personal experience. However, I looked for some progession of the four loves, to match the logical progression of measurement, in four scales. A growing power of love with maturity might correspond to the growing power of progressive measurement.

We have already met the first of the four scales, the nominal or classificatory scale. The next is the ordinal (or ordering) scale, followed by the interval scale, and finally the ratio scale.

_The ordinal scale_ simply means that when one has decided what boxes, individual items belong to, one can then arrange the boxes themselves into a scheme, like a frame of pigeon holes. For example, colored lights might be broadly classified according to, say, six basic colors.   
These colors might also be _ordered_ on the lines of the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.

The choice of colors to mark out _intervals_ on the rainbow is somewhat arbitrary. Tradition has seven colors, including indigo between blue and violet. Different cultures have different names for different ranges or intervals of color. One could objectively compare different cultures different interval scales of color, by marking out each cultures color-name segmentation of the rainbow, as the common standard of observation.   
Similarly to light, so with heat, different temperature scales, such as fahrenheit and centigrade, can be translated into each other.

With respect to _the ratio scale_ , we know much more than this. Different light colors correspond to different wavelengths. Red has the longest wavelength on the visible spectrum and violet the shortest.   
All light moves at the same velocity, because light velocity equals wavelength times frequency. And the shorter the wavelength, the greater the frequency.

To show how this works, suppose you see Abe Lincoln and his wife - "the long and the short of it." They are walking together, that is going in the same direction at the same speed (which means moving with the same "velocity"). Abes stride, that is to say his "wavelength" is three feet. His "frequency" or how many strides he is taking per second, is two. Therefore, Mr Lincolns speed is wavelength times frequency, in other words, length of stride times number of strides per second. That is, his speed is three times two equals six feet per second.

Mrs Lincoln is also walking with a speed of six feet per second. Being much smaller, her stride or "wavelength" is two feet. To keep up with her husband, her "frequency" or number of strides per second must be three strides per second.   
She has to use more energy to keep up. Likewise, violet light with its faster frequency is more energetic than red light.

Frequency, or the rate of wavelengths per time, is an example of a ratio scale of measurement. You would know two cultures had a similar perception of a color, their languages had different names for, if they measured similar ratios of velocity to wavelength, that is similar frequencies, for a shade they'd differently named.   
Exactly similar or equal ratios define proportion. The ability to measure proportion is characteristic of the ratio scale.

_Sarah Bernhardt._

### Romance.

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The question is: can some progression of the four loves be matched to the progressively more powerful four scales of measurement? To answer this question, do the four loves possess an order of greatness?   
The Bible gives us a clue when it says of faith, hope and charity, that the greatest of these is charity. Charity is sometimes rendered as love, in bible translations. It is perhaps not too fanciful to relate hope to courtship or romantic love and (keeping) faith to married or family love.

Lewis himself treats charity as the last and greatest peak of the love range to climb.   
At least in one important respect, Lewises own love life is misleading. He admits that the romantic love most people find in their twenties, did not happen to him till his sixties. Romantic love is also treated late, in The Four Loves, just before charity.

Lewises late marriage was made into a play, BBC drama and a film, which starts off by saying, this is a true story. (True in the sense, I suppose, that "Hollywoods version of history" is a true story.) However, "Shadowlands," in one version or another, is still worth watching.

Lewis, sticking to the original Greek term "eros," for romantic love, is unhelpful. We think of eros as meaning erotic or sexually charged. Lewis doesn't mean that. He means when a couple have "a romance" - a passionately exalted regard for each other.   
Romance had a much wider meaning for Lewis. He lists ten differing definitions in his later introduction to his first book, The Pilgrims Regress.

The joy he eventually found in his wife, Joy Davidman, was only the culmination of a life-times hoping to be "Surprised By Joy." Joy was in the soul-expanding vistas of time and space that the old northern legends and modern science fiction intimated. That includes the Wellsian and other romances that Lewis wrote to such poetic effect.

As the best English term we have, I shall use _romance_ , here, as short for romantic love and what Lewis meant by eros.   
In trying to match four loves to four scales of measurement, I already had help from matching the logic of electoral procedure to the logic of measurement. That is to say the progressively greater measurement of freedom of choice could be compared to that of loving relationships.

The basic principle of elections was the classification: "one man one vote." Mindful of womens rights, we say, one person one vote, nowadays. The older phrase puts one in mind of "one man one wife." Dr Samuel Johnson said the reason for monogamy was so there were enough marriage partners for everyone. At least nominally, monogamy is a sort of universal suffrage of marriage.

The one-to-one relationship is characteristic of the classificatory scale of measurement. At this level of measurement, it doesn't matter which man chooses which woman, or vice versa, or - bearing in mind gay rights - which person chooses which person, provided they all have one partner each, by mutual consent.

[After this essay was written, at the turn of the century - tho conceived nearly a quarter century before that - in june 2015, the US Supreme Court made equal marital rights, for gays, the law of the land.]

Once the choices have been made, the relationships are exclusive and every partnership is equal in worth or equivalent to another. This is strictly what the classificatory scale of measurement means. It also describes the ideal of courtship between couples. Keeping faith with one partner is still widely regarded as the test of a romantic relationship or a marriage.

Even while teenagers are dating different partners, there is a "going steady" and finding who one will "settle down" with. Accepting a night on the town with a new date might send a signal that the current boy-friend or girl-friend is not taken seriously. He or she could respond in like manner and so wear away a tie, that there may be no way back to.  
(This is the theme of the rock classic "See you later, alligator" by Bill Haley and the Comets.)

"Two's company and three's a crowd" is above all true of lovers. It is true that the loved one may regard the rest of humanity with a benevolent glow of feeling. This is from the fortress-like fastness of a secure relationship. Yet, it is a possible base for wider relationships, which can be thought of as "loving," in a non-romantic sense.

I once looked-on as an elderly couple asked to join a discussion circle. Standing in parallel, they looked-on the group, with about as much reference to each other, as two eyes in the same head. The couple were as one person seeking friendship elsewhere.

### Friendship.

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'Two's company and three's a crowd' can also apply to _friendship_. Partnership and friendship can be hard to tell apart. Two childhood friends are "inseparable," when they have a passion for each others company. This is perhaps a "romance" that puberty hasn't intervened yet to give a sexual bias.   
It is a romance surely in a wider Lewisian sense of adventure at the prospect of an enchanting new world that the two strangers amiable qualities offer each other.

There is, however, a distinct fashion in which fast friends are not really romantic couples. Tho, it is noticable that children will deride (perhaps unfairly, out of jealousy) friends as being too fast. A friend, however much ones latest craze, is never more than ones "best friend." There is room for other relationships of that sort. It is just a matter of priority, such as: my arrangements with my best friend come first. It's alright to meet at some other time, if you don't mind.   
British Telecom had a "best friend" discount greater than the discount allowed for a given number of other friends.

Friendship, even at its most clamorous, is not essentially an exclusive relationship like romance. Friendship is a matter of degree, the liking of some people more or less than others. Our friends company is prefered to others.   
Thus, our scientific measurement of love starts with romance on the classificatory scale, as the basic exclusive relationship of our lives.  
Second, comes friendship on the ordinal scale, by which we order our friends, according to whose company we most like to share.

We don't hear of second or third best friends etc. That doesn't mean to say they don't exist or that we have never made such lists up in our head about who we could best rely on. After all, a second or a third or lesser friend might become a first friend, should the others desert one. This is not uncommon in childhood, to say nothing of back-stabbing professions like politics.

The best friend is the prominent friend, rather as the elected candidate is the prominent candidate, at least for a term of office. Romance is also competitive but once it elects for marriage, the term of office is the hereditary one of raising a family.

### The debt of romance to friendship.

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If we said no more about romance and friendship, it would reinforce the common impression of our culture that friendship is a sort of second rate love, made up of minor time-passing meetings with people we quite like, just to make a change from being with ones mate or family.

CS Lewis thought romance and friendship about equal in value. How could this be? Firstly, the value of romance as a kind of love is the sheer worship of the partner. This is valuable, if only from a practical biological point of view. Raising a family is the process of superseding oneself. Perhaps this has to do with post-natal depression in a woman, for whom the sheer physical effort of child-rearing is burden enough.   
But a wife, loved for her own sake, with a selfless service, by the husband, regardless of desire for an heir, is not evolutions drudge. If heaven is a state of mind, the true lovers already have a share of it.

The power of romantic love is such as to put heart and soul into making a relationship work. The really practical people are those who say: marry for love. That is the single most important factor. Tho, the belief "Love conquers all" is liable to disappoint. Much of literature is about how it may not be enough, if all kinds of social circumstances are too much against it.

No wonder friendship seems pretty tame in comparison to romance. Actually, amity is a progression of sorts. The focus is no longer a shared wonder at each other but a shared wonder at the world. The wonder of friendship, like the wonder of romance, is specific, only it is not specific to each other; it is specific to some interest, such as a shared hobby or passionate pre-occuation.

The word "hobby" provokes scorn as the triflings of amateurs. The greater the obsession, the crazier the outsider is likely to consider those obsessed. The hobbyist, like the man in love, is a puzzle to people who do not share his feelings. What does he see in her? She's perfectly ordinary. What does he see in it? What a boring pursuit!

At this point, however, friendship has one big advantage over romance. Friendship feeds off an exchange of interests. Someone who would be a friend encourages participation in a pursuit, but not the pursuit of his intended. A mania, in common, for one woman, is not a passion the rivals would wish to share. Each suitor wants to believe that his feelings for the beloved are the most special he has. Each brings his own individual appreciation, in the hope of making a unique love match.

The enthusiasm of friendship is not for the friend but for the shared interest, they like to talk about. The greater friends tend to be made in finding they have most in common.   
You notice this in John Stuart Mill "Autobiography." Friends who seemed to agree about everything important suddenly find a rift of opinion open up before them. Or, Mill finds a passage to the terra incognita of his opponents. This somewhat separates him from old friends but helps make new ones.

Nor was this the fate of a mere doctrinaire, who judges people by how much they agree with his pre-conceived notions. He was a radical liberal, who wrote with appreciation about the traditional conservatism of Coleridge; a logician who valued poetry. It was said of him as an MP that he could put his opponents point of view better than they could, themselves.

Romance may start by seeing a world of interest in the partner. Then it may dawn that that world is rather impoverished. This is especially the case where women have not had equal rights and opportunities. They have been left with the narrowest of horizons. The husband may leave her lonely in her domestic confines.

It has also led to a low opinion of woman, like the lower classes, deprived of education. A character, in Bleak House, by Dickens, doubts but the squalor of a family is too mean a condition to be worthy of generosity. The effect of denying equal rights is to make the deprived seem unworthy of them.

According to Lewis, married love, in ancient Greece where women had no rights, was the exception, to be laughed at. The Allegory Of Love is about courtship, CS Lewis says originated, as courtly love, in medieval France. Certainly, it was directed at the woman of position. Modern courtship in romantic fiction, including science fiction, is still of some "princess" - someone who comes first in our loyalties and devotion.

Beyond that, the court lady was educated in the social graces. Her accomplishments were to be admired. The peasant girl was regarded with no chivalry and sexually exploited without scruple. Even today, the word, peasant, is used as a term of dismissive contempt for an honorable, not to say essential, occupation.

So, romance, from the start, owed much to a ladys training in the arts. She'd been to medieval charm school. Courtship was not merely snobbery. The lady could interest and entertain. She was not merely an uncultured object of sexual desire. The fact that she was educated enough to be the friend of any man made her seem worthy of courtships special considerations.

How self-sufficient couples seem in the fullness of their love! This may promise the unworldly power of love. Yet it is evident that romance, by itself, is not enough even for our short life-times. Romance is desired as much as ever. And some folk never grow beyond wanting to repeat the experience, as soon as they get tired of their old partner.

Perhaps we had better distinguish between romance sustained by having different partners, to refresh a jaded sexual appetite, and romance sustained by friendships common interest in staying together. In the latter case, couples are not only partners but allies. They don't forsake each other, because they also value each others support, in the way they see the world and relate to it.

The trust, expected of a romance, is strengthened, if it also has the qualities of friendship to sustain it. The Hindu marriage ceremony appreciates this as a celebration that ones wife is also ones best friend.

_Wedding of William Wordsworth to Mary Hutchinson, at Brompton church, Yorkshire, 1802._

### Affection.

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Friendship is a vital adjunct to romance. Yet, that may not be enough to secure a loving relationship. For that, you need _affection_ , the third of the four loves. Affection seems a mere sentiment of good will.   
That is its strength.   
Romance starts so strong because of what it does for the lover. The loved may not return the passion, and even hate the lover for being on an emotional high, that the loved does not share. All someones passion may inspire, in one idolised, is to make the idol go away and idolise someone else, if only for how good it feels to worship.

Friendship escapes an exclusive passion between two people for each other. Friendships are passions for anything that can be shared by anyone. But people are still particular about who they are friends with. They must share the same interest or hobby, much as religious people may keep to a sect. Someone talking about a hobby, one doesn't share, is liable to bore and drive away from his company.

Affection has the power to transform a bore into a pleasing eccentric. You aren't interested in their obsession. You just like them anyway, for their own sake. They have grown on you.

Affection can also grow out of romance. A girl, who has always enchanted you, one day loses her glamor for you. You don't know why. To your disbelief, she looks just like any other girl. One observes, humbly, that she is happily secure in your complete attention.

You realise that, of course, everyone is just anyone. But she is the one, who made you believe that everyone _isn't_ just anyone. She deserves your gratitude and loyalty. You have come out of the trance her mere presence put you in. And you find that you love her, for once, not because she is magical but because she is ordinary. Before, you loved the individual, now you also love her as the universal girl.

Affection is a mature love. That makes it sound unexciting, tho, in truth, people get excited enough about it. Romance says "to know you is to love you," actually meaning the opposite: that just meeting you was enough. Romance is often love at first sight. And you don't have to know much about anything. Cupids arrow can strike in kindergarten. An infant with a pious look, picking flowers, can be enough to make a class-mate fall in love, without ever knowing there was such a fate.

Friendship comes later than romance, because it takes time to learn what one can do and who one can get on with. Friendship comes before affection, because, in earning a living, one has to play to ones strengths or natural aptitudes and that puts one in the company of kindred spirits, to compete or work with.   
Admittedly, this assumes a society that takes advantage of its members natural bents and allows them to do work, fairly close to heart.

Romance is the most intensely personal love. The personal element of friendship is incidental to something about the world at large, that the friends see with like mind. Affection doesn't require an enthralling personality or matching mentality. All affection requires is the experience, in which understanding can create sympathy for another human being.

Affection is first and foremost family love, if only because that is where familiarity is most likely. With any luck, family love is already built on both romance and friendship between the parents.   
Small children will find sufficient romantic interest in their peers, if the society is not repressive about "puppy love." Likewise, friendship is natural between those at the same stage of development. Families are likely to share aptitudes and provided this is so, it is a tremendous advantage for a child who is an able and willing apprentice to a parent. Tho, for some children, the family business (getting rarer) was a dead-end.

Churches, nations, parties, and suchlike social in-groups depend on affection for familiar language, ritual symbols and custom. Less personal again than family love, they draw on a pride in belonging, and a (perhaps misplaced) feeling of mutual support.   
However, persecuted groups may be drawn together into real communities.

Affection, then, is perhaps the leading love in world affairs. But it was the purpose of the founders of the world religions to bring all people together in a brotherhood of mankind, under one god, that comes before all the more or less personal loyalties of the lesser loves.

### Charity.

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The fourth love, _charity_ does not supersede the other loves. Rather, they are part of a progression, that the planet must realise, if disaster is to be avoided. The affections for the old tribal and super-tribal loyalties will and should remain. Beyond that lies a loyalty to God and Gods creatures.

There is a distinction between God or the creator and the creation, perhaps like that between a work of art, as a creation, and what the artist meant to express by it. Gods myriad creatures may more or less freely express their more or less exhalted passions but they are not themselves those passions. Rather, they are the evolutionary works of "art" or skill that have gone into expressing their passions.

So, it is the love of the creator (if you like, God) we should worship, and the creation for the love it is meant to convey, in so far as it does so. We appreciate those of Gods free creations, who are good rather than bad "artists," in living as the art of loving.

In the Christian gospels, the two greatest commandments are the love of God and the love of others as oneself, that follows from it.   
Lewis says, in The Four Loves:

"It is probably impossible to love any human being simply 'too much.' We may love him too much _in proportion to_ our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy."

In this passage, Lewis, who had no pretensions to "science," is taking the measure of human love, in terms of controling two of its four scales: the ordinal scale, which measures priority, and the ratio scale, which measures proportion.

Just as they are a measure of love, the ordinal and ratio scales also measure freedom. To be precise, electoral freedom is defined by a preference vote and a quota count, the ordinal scale voting and ratio scale count in proportion, that defines the so-called single transferable vote.

One can see why a measure of freedom should also be a measure of love. After all, freedom is to follow what one truly wishes. A true knowledge of measurement makes this possible. Ones wishes are the hearts desire, not merely in the narrow sense of voting. An "election" is not just the institution that registers opinions. To elect means to choose out. This includes everyday decisions that affect what we do now or thru our whole lives.

The scientific method of electoral freedom can serve as a formal model to help distinguish the difference between affection and charity. The typical expression of affection in voting is to vote for candidates on group lines. That is to say for a given party, or the body that is behind it, whether economic, ethnic, religious, ideological or some other social factor.

It is perfectly natural to vote in this way, to start at ones point of origin, as it were, and work ones way outward towards those we have less in common with. The main obstacle electorally to the growth of love in the world is the restriction to kinds of voting method that only allow the expression of affection and not charity.

In fact, only the scientific method of elections (the transferable voting system) gives the freedom to vote an order of candidates across party lines, that measures (proportionately) a societys degree of unity, or the charity towards those who don't belong to ones own group.

Yet more remote than affection, charity seems to mean helping faraway folk, about whom we know little. Love, concentrated on one person, usually as romance, teaches us the numinous. We graduate thru loves less related to ourselves, ultimately perhaps to a universal love.

The overwhelming power of sex dominates the first half of life. Tho, that is not to reduce romance to sex any more than a flower can be reduced to its seed.   
Freudian psychology covers the youthful concerns with survival in this life. Jungian psychology covers older folks concerns with survival in another life.

Carl Jung found that many patients, by the second half of life, were already becoming pre-occupied with death, and the religious meaning of a life so short. For Jung, psychology had to come to the aid of an age in which it had been observed that "God is dead."

He held that this was because the old religious forms were losing their potency. New beliefs had to be justified in accord with a scientific age. Technology had given men a sense of coming mastery over nature. But it was all too evident from the twentieth century that man lacked mastery of himself.

Man had evolved an idea of God. That did not mean man had created God. Jung held that we do not have the power to make the gods. Rather, all we can do is choose our god. In our little lives, we run the gamut of emotions that everybody else has and will have. We don't have emotions, they have us. To some extent, we can choose between these emotional masters. Hence, the great world religions of a god of love.

_Booker T Washington, charity founder._

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## Scientific theories and methods modeled on natural selection.

Table of contents

_Charles Darwin._

### Sections:

Manfred Eigen: theory of inorganic natural selection.

Environmental selection in memory, connectionist computation and neural networks.

Evolutionary reform of English speling.

Lee Smolin: theory of cosmological natural selection.

Evolving robots and programs.

### Manfred Eigen: theory of inorganic natural selection.

The most basic difference between life forms on earth is not between plants and animals but between cells with or without a nucleus. There is a fundamental difference of emphasis in the ways which the two kinds evolve. Cells without a nucleus, such as bacteria, evolve partly by random mutations of genes, some of which are naturally selected over others. This is the traditional conception of evolution since Darwin. It is an important cause for bacteria, because they can reproduce and multiply so rapidly, that small mutations to their heredity soon take effect over their whole gene pool.

The other important factor in the evolution of bacteria is called DNA recombination or global trading of genes. This is rather as if humans had a natural capacity for genetic engineering, being able to splice bits of each others genetic inheritance.

However, creatures with a cell nucleus were originally separate creatures that have permanently combined. Lynn Margulis suggested that this incorporated symbiosis, or "symbiogenesis," is the main way higher organisms have evolved. The claim is that life achieved its global empire not by combat but by networking.

It has long been questioned that life arose simply out of the natural selection of chance genetic variations. Likewise, the natural selection from a menu of randomly combined chemical soups has seemed wildly improbable. This is despite Miller, whose famous experiment produced, in a flask, some basic constituents of life, by electrolysis, simulating lightning on a few chemicals, present on earth in its primeval state.

Manfred Eigen suggested that life-like, but not living, stably reproducing systems of chemicals evolved thru natural selection, before evolving into life itself. The metabolism of living cells depends on catalysts, mainly enzymes. Catalytic reactions form complex networks, including closed loops or catalytic cycles. Enzymes produced in one cycle act as catalysts in a further cycle, a so-called hypercycle.

Eigen proposed this mechanism for self-organising chemical systems, with inorganic hyper-cycles in competition for natural selection. These systems are far from equilibrium, being "fed" by an energy flow. This may force instabilities in the system. Like the Chinese word for "crisis," it can also mean "opportunity" for new development, which may be amplified thru positive feed-back loops.

### Environmental selection in memory, connectionist computation and neural networks.

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Western thought has depended mostly on analysis but there are revivals in the holistic approach. Kurt Lewin made gestalt psychology an alternative interpretation to that offered by behaviorism. Behaviorism, itself, has been likened to a Darwinism of the environment. (Talcott Parsons: The Structure of Social Action).

The brain has been compared to a computer. Computers or thinking machines have been based on linear thinking, starting with a few basic principles and then following these to their logical conclusions.

In the 1980s, a different kind of computer became fashionable as a model for the working of the brain, seen as a neural network. Connectionist computation is a descendant of the nineteenth century associationist psychology, which comes from British philosophy of empiricism, rather than the rationalist philosophy which seeks to derive knowledge from first principles.

I can best describe the difference between the two approaches, from my personal experience as a child. When learning to read, I didn't much bother to consult a dictionary. It will define the meaning of a word you don't know. But that is a bit of an interruption of an adventure story.   
For that matter, when adults use an obscure word, it would be a very scholarly child, who went off to consult a dictionary. One would lose the rest of the conversation and be worse off, than staying put.

Similarly, this child stayed put at his book. Funnily enough, I learned the meaning of words I didn't know, tho I never found out their meaning from a dictionary. I believe this was because I gradually picked up the meaning of a strange word, from coming across it several times in books and building-up a sense of what it meant, from the slightly different contexts in which it was used, without ever having been told its meaning.

To some extent, I was selecting the books I read. But the chances, of which books I happened upon, were naturally selecting for me the meanings of words in the particular environment of books, where I found them. These chances -- more or less -- reinforce certain contexts of word-usage and discriminate against inapplicable usages.

Passing from one book to another, the reader inherits an accumulation of slightly varying meanings to any given word. These meanings will vary about a norm, with some tolerance for deviation from that most usual meaning of the word in question. This tolerance of variation allows words to adapt their meanings, appropriately to a changing society.

In a living language, no hard and fast definitions are laid down by some text with a monopoly of authority. Instead, all the authors, one reads, are competing authorities, by which a consensus of meaning is reached. Even dictionaries compete as guidelines.  
Just as shared speech is a democratic usage, so is the shared authority of many authors.

Words derive a species-specific meaning from their contexts in a semantic ecology of words. As language evolves with a changing society, the meanings of words may be adapted to new situations.   
It has been claimed that the evolution of language and of tools are the two traits of human society most akin to species evolution.

As a child, learning a new word was a bit like pegging down a tent. Each time one came across it, was like a peg in ones memory, until one had its full meaning securely anchored in ones mind. One may move the pegs about a bit, in relation to each other, to straighten the tent construction. Likewise, ones idea of a new word may shift about a bit, as one builds up a knowledge of its varying usage, into a settled pattern.

Margaret Boden compares the mechanics of connectionist computers to a class of children. ("Computers" used to be the name for people, who could do extra-ordinary calculations in their head, without even knowing how.) Some of the children know bits of information but not the whole "story": they are like input units. The output units are the children who announce "the story so far." Other children are the "hidden units" that neither have any input or output to offer but mediate between those that have.

This so-called "parallel distributed processing" is like a guessing game, in which some children have clues, which they pass on to others. Guesses may be reinforced by repetition of the same clues or thru associations. Other guesses are dismissed as they depart from the pattern, building-up. A consensus or equilibrium is approached on the basis of probability of what the object, to be guessed, is.

An object is not defined by explicit rules, leading you to conclude examples. Rather, glimpses or bits of knowledge, exemplifying an object, are amassed, till regularities are implicitly learned, in a build-up of sensory associations. Thus, the nature of ones environment acts as a selector on the rules one takes in.

It is like the difference between formal academic education and "learning by doing." Indeed, the traditional class-room has a poverty of environment to experience, because one is, or was, not meant to learn from ones surroundings but from a syllabus. In this respect, the class-room restricts learning rather than promotes it. A classic criticism of formal education is that it is irrelevant or not adaptive to learning the rules of survival in the real world.

Mathematicians tend to see fields of study in terms of "fields," in the sense of abstract spaces. These may be visualised in three dimensions, say, as a memory "landscape," tho the actual mathematics, as used by John Hopfield, generalises the idea to multi-dimensions of memory associations, perhaps simulating the neural networks of the brain.

Trying to remember a name is likened to setting a marble rolling on a hilly terrain. In one of the valleys of memory is the correct name but there are closely associated, over-riding memory basins that the marble insists on rolling into, instead. For example, the Scottish inventor of television was not called Yogi Bear but it was something like that. (Logie Baird, in fact.)

Like a scratch on an old vinyl record, a deeper memory cuts across a closely related memorys impression, and causes the needle of recollection to slip in its tracks and go round and round the wrong way, till one finds a way of putting it back on course to where one wants to be.

The memory landscape, that experience builds from lifes chances, may be a fairly reliable map of the past. But a confusion of tracks on the mind, left by the senses past traffic, can play us false. The point is that the nature of our experience builds a memory landscape that selects our memories for us. Memory becomes subject to our experiences environmental selection

The world, as a whole, does not stamp a formally correct impression, like a record, on our minds. Rather, it is a huge mix-up that we have to more or less make sense of, as far as possible, and with doubtful success, judging by the current state of the planet.

### Evolutionary reform of English speling.

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A dead language is one in which meanings are fixed, because approximating to a form of society that no longer exists. The success of English depends on the extent of its democratic evolution. English is a hybrid of languages that welcomes new worlds of experience by freely adopting the words of other languages. Critics of English, as a possible world language, protest it isn't a language at all, because it doesn't conform to their standard of a classical language, that is a dead language, with no new input.

The idea of a world language is the misconception that would impose some rigid form on the whole world. Why English most looks like a potential world language is precisely because it has abandoned the idea of some fixed linguistic form and is evolving out of itself, all the time.

Whereas, the failure of English is precisely in its failure to evolve a more rational spelling that would enfranchise the twenty per cent or more of its speakers, who are functionally illiterate. This failure is due to the fallacy of "correct" spelling usage, the dogmatic insistence on some monopoly of authority, such as Dr Johnson, lexicographer. In fact, different English speaking countries have typical spelling variations from each other.

The Oxford English Dictionary has adopted both British and American spellings.  
I remember some orthodox-minded English insisting on English spelling according to the Oxford dictionary, without even knowing this. The world moves on.

The problem of English speling reform is two-fold. Partly it depends on tolerating freedom of spelling, so that anyone not spelling the same way as Dr Johnson or Teddy Rooseveldt is not looked-down on. Partly, it depends on the need for an education in how to spell English as it sounds, with a tolerance of accents. We don't insist that Australians should drop their species of Cockney twang. So, we shouldn't insist that all English speaking people should conform to one peculiar spelling "accent." But to be able to speak in _any_ accent depends on an education in basic English fonetics. Besides the orthografic pedants, the other problem, to saving English literacy for all English speakers, would be the fonetics pedants.

Rational English spelling, for general literacy, needs not only to ensure a close approximation to one letter one sound. It also needs to ration the number of letters in the reformed alfabet to about the same number as the existing English-Roman alfabet of 26 letters.

Suppose educators achieved a short rational English alfabet tolerating accented variations in spelling. This would not lead to anarchy any more than Dickens does in his novels, with their fonetic transcriptions of accents. (The renderings, by HG Wells, in The Dream, of small school-children, at rote learning, are a joy.) Moreover, people who wanted to be understood, as widely as possible, would spell in the most universal English accent, "mid-atlantic" or whatever.  
A sort of natural selection would operate, where writings, in the most standard accents, would be the most widely understood and therefore the most widely read.

English could evolve in its speling, as in its grammar, which arose from a "natural selection" of the simplest syntax, between ordinary people of diverse back-grounds, with limited understanding in common. This contrasts with the highly inflected languages elaborated by scholars, or with monitoring by a language academy, justifying its existence by imposing a supposed classical excellence, purging popular introductions of foreign words.

The section below, on evolved computor programs, has a lesson for language reform. "Correctness" of programs can only be achieved by total control over its writing by the programmer, who knows every logical step of the way.   
For complex programming problems, this "correct" approach ceases to be practical. The reason is analgous to why the "command economy" has to give way to the market economy. Economic relationships are too complex for a totally top-down management. Dictatorial control has to be relinquished for individual freedom of initiative.

### Lee Smolin: theory of cosmological natural selection.

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Classical physics would suggest that black holes draw matter into infinitely dense points or "singularities." Lee Smolin firstly assumes that the modern rules of quantum fluctuations would over-ride this notion. Black holes gravitationally attract matter, beyond a bound of no return. The mathematics of this process were studied in reverse, as akin to the explosive origin of the universe, in a "big bang."

It is one step further to Smolin assumption two, that quantum uncertainties might bounce back matter from a black hole to explode a new universe. "Black Holes and Baby Universes" is the title essay of a popular book, Stephen Hawking wrote after "A Brief History of Time."

Hawking comments on the well known paradox of "Shrodinger's Cat." He says the paradox depends on assuming the view-point of classical physics, where the principles of quantum physics apply. The classical notion is that an object has a single definite history, such as: Is the cat, in the box, alive or dead?

The whole point of quantum mechanics is a different view of reality in which an object has all possible histories. Probabilities of very slightly differing histories, in most cases, cancel out. But, in certain cases, the probabilities of neighboring histories reinforce each other; one such, being observed as the history of the object.  
Schrodingers cat has two histories reinforced: one as alive, the other as dead.

Our universe may be considered as only one of many universes, or a "multiverse."  
To continue the analogy, of baby universes, the great majority of universes are likely to be still-born. This is assumed because the only reason this universe can exist depends on an incredibly delicate adjustment of physical conditions. (Paul Davies discussed this, in The Runaway Universe.)

Therefore, most universes, born out of black holes, are likely to get little further than the sub-atomic scale of initial quantum fluctuations. And most of the remainder are likely to be largely unstructured and, therefore, incapable of meeting the conditions that make life possible in this universe.

Smolin assumption three is that the baby universes inherit the same laws of physics from their parent universe but for small random changes in the physical constants or parameters, such as those that are found to obtain in this universe.

A kind of multiversal memory landscape, or "mind of God," as Stephen Hawking would put it, is implicit in this assumption that a baby universe remembers, with high probability of accuracy, the physical laws of its parent.  
Smolin uses the same sort of mathematical landscape for cosmological natural selection, as is used for memory selection from environmental experience (mentioned in the above section on memory).

The current best theory of our universe, on which most physicists are agreed, is called the standard model, which eventually received substantiation from the discovery of the Higgs boson, at CERN. This cannot explain every thing from first principles. There are about twenty parameters or arbitrary constants, which cannot be deduced, but are measured by experiment, and plugged into the theory, to fill in the gaps in its reasoning.

The cosmological theory of natural selection would only conflict with a totally unified theory of physics, that had no parameters. Einstein attempted a unified theory and he assumed quantum theory was incomplete because of its statistical nature. Natural selection is a statistical theory, which Smolin has adapted to cosmology, on the assumption that the multiverse is not absolutely determined, but contains one or more free parameters.

After the fashion of Darwinian theory, which takes many generations to much alter species, many generations of universe would be needed to make big changes to their initial conditions. Highly restricted is the range of parameters, or conditions, for which atomic nuclei, and therefore stars exist, and the black holes that form from some of them. But such universes with many black holes are likely to have many progeny. Given that this is a black hole-rich universe, its existence is explained as having the conditions of a typical universe.

Out of the twenty or so physical parameters, Smollin gives a simplified model of his theory with just two parameters, say, proton mass and electron mass. He treats these as length and breadth co-ordinates, like the two sides of a hilly field. The heights of the hills are proportional to the number of black holes that any given combination of values for these two parameters is likely to produce. In turn, the number of progeny, from each universe, is proportional to the height of the parametric "landscape," where it is situated.

Lee Smollin makes an analogy of physics parameters to biological genes. The space of parameters (which would be of a very high dimension) is compared to the collection of all possible sequences of DNA.

The average number of universes produced by a universe with a particular set of parameters is compared to the average number of offspring from creatures with a particular set of genes. This "fitness" of creatures depends on their situation on a "fitness landscape" in an abstract space of genes. The rate of reproduction is measured for how strongly it varies with variations in possible gene combinations.  
Smollin qualifies his analogy as only approximating to the simplest or crudest of biological scenarios, a single species evolving in a fixed environment.

### Evolving robots and programs.

To top.

A robotics researchers work was shown on tv. This appeared to consist of a flock of little metal toys moving around the floor. Some official thought this was a waste of time and the funds should be cut. But I had read Kevin Kelly, _Out Of Control_ , so I knew what this apparently childish researcher was about.

Robbie the Robot, in _Forbidden Planet_ could do humdrum things like produce a pile of bootleg vintage, besides all the out-of-this-world effects. The old movies have made us imagine that robots are large, if not human-size machines that pioneer engineers can at least begin to make do useful jobs, like hoover the house. There are robots, coming into commercial use, that can do routine tasks like clean a hospital floor.

A more recent approach to robot development is to copy how life has evolved, from the simplest to more complex organisms. As robots are essentially mobile computers, this also involves a radically different way to create programs. Traditionally, programs have been written for a specific purpose, achieved by following a set of rigidly controled instructions, that can only work in a definite environment.

The alternative is not to define the environment for one complex machines operations, but let the environment define lots of simple machines operations. This is akin to natural selection. Gradually, more complex jobs can be done, when the simple jobs have been learned. And, like insects, many small robots can do big jobs.

The evolutionary approach to robots and to programs compares to the toy contruction game, "Lego." As in object-oriented programming, many small existing programs, like lego bricks, can be used to put together a program for any new purpose, instead of having to write a whole new program from scratch, to fulfil a given goal.

Also, problems may be too complex to solve easily, or at all, by rational design. But they may yield to massive random trials. For instance, a molecular form must be found for a drug needed to neutralise a disease mechanism. By the evolutionary method, billions of random molecules are tried till one fits against its lock, the rest being washed away.

Karl Sims programmed "equation-genes," which are small logical units of a computer language (LISP). Each module is an arithmetic command, like add, multiply, cosine, etc. Logical units are evolved and randomly flipped, to create new functions, that the computer drew into often stunning patterns. Sims selected and bred variations of these, by swopping branches of their logic trees, analgous to the sexual exchange of genes.

Dr Robert Smith, at the University of the West of England, uses such genetic algorithms, or assortments of code, set the problem of test-flying planes. They are selected and bred like "animals," until they become species-specific to their problematic new "environment."

Evolved solutions involve a great deal of trial and error. The criterion for such complex solutions is not that they are error-free, the property of small systems, but that they work or that they are flexible enough to survive the tests they have been set.

Like the genetic code, itself, evolved computer codes contain much redundant material. One reaches the solution, by giving up total control of how one arrives and without knowing how one got there. God is believed to have given free-will to his creations, according to their evolving complexity. So, evolved problem-solving gives up complete control of ones logical creations development. This helps one to be creative beyond ones preconceptions.

References.

Margaret Boden: The Creative Mind. 1992.  
George Johnson: In The Palaces Of Memory. 1992.  
Fritjof Capra: The Web Of Life. 1996.  
Lee Smolin: The Life Of The Cosmos. 1997.  
Stephen Hawking: Black Holes And Baby Universes and other essays. 1993.  
Kevin Kelly: Out Of Control. The new biology of machines. 1994.  
Sanjida O'Connell: Those magnificent genes. (The Guardian, 21 June 2001.)

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## A measure of evolution. Diffusion equation of natural selection and elections.

Table of contents.

_Thomas Henry Huxley._

### Sections:

To freely know is to know freedom.

Electron Transfer.

Heat Transfer.

Lyell and Malthus.

Mendel.

Genetic Information Transfer.

The territorial surplus.

Measures of nature.

Natural selection and elections.

Diffusion equation of natural selection and elections.

### To freely know is to know freedom.

Despite philosophic differences with the physicists of sub-atomic uncertainty, Einstein natural philosophy is akin to theirs, in a theory of relativity that is also a method of creativity, in the technique of infering each others observations (rather like an election result) called "changing the co-ordinates."

The idea that we exist in a finite universe is the logical outcome of a finite method, creative of a universe manifestly conditional upon observation. Relating observations is creative of more adaptive observation. This transformation may be considered an evolutionary development of observation. The observer measures from a transferable choice of co-ordinates. The theory of relativity is a scientific method of elections or "choosing-out."

Sub-atomic physicists accepted that their experimental observations may be to selective effect, rather than completely determinate.

### Electron Transfer

The philosophy, of matter made-up of atoms, led to the knowledge of nuclear fusion between lighter atoms to form heavier atoms, in the stars. This was a chemical evolution of the elements, starting from hydrogen, of atomic number one, transformed into helium, number two, followed by Lithium, number three, and so on.

The helium nucleus has less mass than its constituent four hydrogen nuclei, the lost mass being converted into solar energy. The chemical table of elements follows the four main scales (classifying, order, interval and ratio scales) of measurement. Each element is _classified_ by name and _ordered_ , by relative weight, with an atomic number, which turned-out to be the number of electrons in an atom.

Mendeleev periodic table of the elements derived the regular _intervals_ for the elements with similar properties. Bohr related these chemical regularities to the physical types of orbits in an atoms outer electrons. In the meantime, Einstein equation of (atomic) mass to energy amounts to a _ratio_ scale of measurement. It was used to calculate the rate of energy release for the solar mass. This agreed with the measured amount the sun radiated, verifying the equivalence of the conservation laws of mass and energy.

The periodic table co-ordinates the elemental order to a sub-order of stable "shells," containing full "quotas" of electrons. Taking the elements in order of their increasing number of electrons, after hydrogen and helium, a group of eight elements follows. Each has a first full shell or stable quota of two electrons. They also have an incomplete second shell of from one to eight electrons more. The next eight elements have complete first and second shells of two and eight electrons each, respectively, as well as the makings of a third shell in from one to eight electrons more...

It was known that some elements more readily combined, like friends who choose each others company. Such elements were said to have "elective affinities." Goethe used the term, as a title for a literary work. Preferential bonding takes place between an element, with an easily transferable surplus of electrons over a quota, and another element, with a corresponding deficit, so that their respective outer shell complements are at stable quota strength.

Carbon has a strong nuclear attraction, surrounded by only a first shell of two electrons, plus four more electrons, which are half-way to making up a second shell quota of eight electrons. So, carbon most readily combines with itself and other elements, especially to evolve lifes complexity.

Electrons in transition, from outer to inner energy orbits, requiring lower energy levels, emit quotas of surplus energy, in light-quanta or photons.   
The "quantum" is a minimum energy quota. Planck conceived this quantum concept was required when calculations based on an assumption, that radiation is continous, down to the smallest measurable quantities, conflicted with observation.

Compare the mensural structure of atomic physics with that of electoral system in the single transferable vote. The Droop quota is an elective minimum of votes. We distinguish between the normal electoral procedure of transfering a surplus over a quota and the extent this involves transfering quotas themselves as surpluses.

For example, 50 votes out of 100 are treated as one transferable quota, from the voters to the one majority candidate.  
(If there are only two candidates with 50 votes each, they both have the minimum votes needed for election, and the winner is selected by chance, such as drawing lots.)

100 votes out of 150, that might be won as first preferences by the most popular candidate, may amount to two transferable quotas. As such, 150 out of 200 are three transferable quotas.

The classifying scale simply counts the votes: 1,2,3, etc. This is followed by the ordinal scale 1,2,3,.. order of choice, the preference vote. The interval scale dimension is of 1,2,3,.. transferable quotas. The ratio scale is a rational series of 1,2,3,.. member majorities, in multi-member constituencies. This makes up the set of all four scales of measurement, expressed in terms of the natural numbers.

### Heat Transfer

Molecules are the smallest physical particles of substances made up from proportions of atoms of the same or different elements. Heat is molecular motion. Heat is transfered in proportion to the concentration of molecules, because the greater the concentration, the more probable are collisions between molecules, and the greater is their resulting dispersion or diffusion.

Likewise in elections, the probability, of how many votes are transfered, is in proportion to the "concentration" or "conservation" of votes, in terms of the size of the quota required to elect representatives and the number of seats to elect them to. Candidates, with votes in a transferable surplus or in deficit of a quota, may be said to have a positive or negative dispersion of votes about the quota. Statistics can estimate the probability that the size of the dispersion shows a significant preference or corresponding lack of preference for those candidates.

Molecular motion tends to zero at the extrapolated absolute zero of temperature (-273°C), beyond observable reality -- reality being observed in relative terms.   
Electorally, something close to an absolute zero of choice, between one candidate or none, is no real choice, because unrelated to any other candidate as an observable alternative.

### Lyell and Malthus.

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Charles Lyell, in _Principles of Geology_ , explained the appearance of the landscape by small cumulative changes, wrought mainly by aqueous and igneous agents, on the earths crust. Lyell theorised less on the importance of catastrophic natural changes. However, the Bible contains examples of devastating ordeals by flood and fire and probably asteroid impact. Hence the Bible doctrine of "catastrophism." Modern science has largely moved back to an emfasis on drastic transformations, of Biblical proportions, as well as gradual transformations.

The Bible was taken as the authority on life, in terms of sacrosanct special creations. John Milton envisaged such a spontaneous outburst, of the animals ready-made from the Earth, in _Paradise Lost._ Darwin loved these books. This was a great and painful mental bloc to his conceiving an evolution of life forms, thru small cumulative changes, as Lyell conceived geological change.

Darwin knew that clerical authority would oppose this idea and planned only to publish after his death, like Copernicus with his heliocentric hypothesis.  
Meanwhile, Alfred Wallace independently came up with Darwins theory, actually trying out his ideas on Darwin, without knowing Darwin had long held the same opinion. This forced Darwins hand. Unlike Wallace, Darwin would put man in the evolutionary picture.

Thomas Huxley relished defending the new theory in public debate with the clergy. Fundamentalists have continued to oppose "Darwinism."

The Bible had set man above the general run of creation. Hence, the religious reluctance to claim mans heritage as relatives in the family of life. This is reflected in Darwins publications. _The Origin Of Species_ only intimates that man, too, might be just another product of the evolution of life forms. He didn't really tackle this question till his later work, _The Descent Of Man_.

The Scholastic philosophy of "Realism" meant the reality of logical classes. Their opponents, the Nominalists insisted that classifying was but the naming of things to identify them and become more familiar with ones surroundings. Nominalism implied testing ones knowledge against experience. The scientific attitude is based on this.

Linnaeus had conceived a general and special classification of species that broadly stands to this day. Linnaeus stands in relation to Darwin rather as Euclid geometry stands to Einstein: Variations on straight-line geometry and variations on distinct species were long unquestioned, because resting on classical Greek and biblical authorities.

But taxonomists disagreed with each others judgments, so one had to admit of "doubtful forms." Darwin said:

"I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties...   
there is no infallible criterion by which to distinguish species and well-marked varieties...

I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms."

The classification of species was a convenient way of bringing ordered understanding to the diversity of creatures. It didn't correspond absolutely to observation. Darwin was arguing like those descendants of the nominalists, his contemporaries, the American philosophers of "pragmatism," from Charles Pierce onwards. Classification works as a useful approximation to reality rather than its complete determination.

Darwin pointed out that creatures have individuality that can cut across hard and fast distinctions between species. An under-lying unity could be found to the divisions between life forms. For long, Darwin wondered on the mode or mechanism or means of growth to evolution as a tree of life branching out into different species.

Darwin theory of natural selection combined the ideas of the reverend Malthus and Lyell. Malthus noted that population growth out-paced food production, rather as a geometric rate of increase exceeds an arithmetic rate of increase. The reverend advised "moral restraint" in ones number of off-spring.   
(Warning against over-population, Isaac Asimov was aware his readers would be wondering how many children he had. So, he gave the number in a foot-note.)

Independently taking their cue from Malthus, Darwin and Wallace realised there must be a competition between too many mouths chasing too little food. Those individuals with slight advantages over their fellows, in finding sustenance, would be more likely to survive and have their advantages passed on. Thus there was a prospect of advantages accumulating, til descendants became so differentiated that they became whole new species.

In one of his popular series of books on ethology, Robert Ardrey cites the case of animals doing sentry duty. This puts them in danger, by delaying flight, while thumping a warning to the herd, being ambushed by predators coming up to full speed.   
He suggests that there may not only be a hereditary selfishness to promote individual survival but also a hereditary altruism to promote collective survival.   
Kurt Vonnegut remarked: I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue.

### Mendel.

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Gregor Mendel experimented breeding plants, which showed a statistical re-distribution of genes in reproduction. This provided a mechanism for the appearance of individual differences in species. Their natural selection would take place according to which differences confered a survival advantage.

The gene is a simple hereditary characteristic, such as eye color. Dominant and recessive genes may be likened to governing and opposition hereditary preferences for variations in that characteristic, such as brown or blue eyes. There are four logical possibilities of combination between dominant and recessive genes: one pure dominant, one pure recessive, one dominant-recessive and one recessive-dominant. The latter two count as two hybrids.

On grounds of chance, the combinations will appear in approximately these proportions of 1:2:1, which is known in statistics as an example of a binomial distribution. The Mendel ratio is an apparent three-to-one ratio, because the recessive gene, say the blue eye color, only shows up when two blue recessive genes combine.

I'm told that, in early infancy, I had blue eyes, before they turned brown. I assume that means a hybrid of dominant brown and recessive blue eye color.

Genetics was one of the earliest and most important refinements on Darwin and Wallace theory, which has under-gone much qualification -- "evolved" -- ever since.

### Genetic Information Transfer

Obviously modeled on the suffrage of one man one vote, "one gene, one enzyme" means a gene, which is a DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule, from a body cell nucleus, governs a protein catalyst of the chemical construction of life.   
A one-to-one relationship distinguishes classification, as measurement.

On the ordinal scale of measurement, the genetic code is one of preference permutations in the four bases, found in living organisms in different proportions, for combining (by electron sharing from bases to acids) with the twenty amino acids found in proteins.

Prof. Bronowski said: "It is the number of amino acid differences which is the measure of the evolutionary distance between me and the other mammals." This suggests, on the interval scale, a "periodic table" for biological species comparable to that for chemical elements. The difference in the number of electrons of elements may be analgous to the number of amino acid differences in species. The mammals could be one of the periods in a biological table. Man, perhaps, begins a new period, if not merely ends an old one.

The living cell nucleus divides in the form of chromosomes. Each species chromosomes have a specific "quota" of DNA, the double helix molecule, modeled on spiral steps of two pairs of bases. But the respective sums of the base partners exist from organism to organism in a variable proportion, called the "base ratio," obviously a ratio scale of measurement. This was found to signify any order of base along the spiral strand.

The double helix splits with each side actIng as a mould or template. Such is the means of genetic information transfer, from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, when cells divide or when the genetic message is copied from the nucleus into the cell at large, and from nucleic acid to "body-building" protein. But not vice versa. The latter case would mean, in chemical effect, the Lamarckist inheritance of environmental adaptation, going against what Francis Crick called the "central dogma" of molecular biology.  
Tho, this dogma has been somewhat modified by the growth of epigenetics.

### The territorial surplus.

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Malthus advised the prudence of populations reproducing within the limits of subsistence afforded by their territories. Ethologists showed some species achieve this prudence thru territorial mating rituals. The territorial portions, to which reproduction is limited, furnish quotas of survival, within which nature selects slight individual advantages to accumulate by heredity.

Wynne-Edwards said:

"...evolution has favoured _conventional_ modes of competition which limit numbers well below the carrying capacity of the habitat. Maybe animals do not compete for such direct rewards as food or females. They compete for symbols, like territory or high rank in a hierarchy which in turn present them with first access to food or females."

There was a hint of "the territorial imperative" when Darwin published, _Voyage Of The Beagle._ This is his first and most enjoyable book of adventure round the world as ships naturalist, gathering the evidence on which his theory would be based.   
In a foot-note, he says he was puzzled why horses never left the east end of the East Falkland Island. On a simple Malthusian notion, they should cover all the grazable land available till no further population could be fed.   
Gauchos said the male possession of mares forced them to follow for their life, leaving foals to their death.

Territorial creatures resemble the medieval farmer who left some land fallow to recover its fertility. Having a territorial surplus of land, to that being used for sustenance, affords a safety margin of survival.

Mr Micawber advised: Live just within your means, result: happiness. Live just outside your means, result: misery.   
Like most people, the Micawber family didn't enjoy a large enough safety margin. Capitalism is such an inefficient system because of its irrational wealth distribution, with a few financiers seizing piratic wealth surpluses from the productive work of the masses. In a dysfunctional order, the hard work with the survival value, like farming, too often isn't enjoying enough of the rewards, to sustain that survival.

Humans ignore the prudent law of life, that is the territorial imperative, at their peril. National borders are like the water-tight compartments of a ship. If one compartment is breached, the water floods only it and doesn't sink the whole ship. Of course, attempts are made to save as many as possible from the drowning compartment. But rescue is not achieved by abolishing safe-guards.

A failed state, without border controls, learns nothing by exporting its failure to its neighbors and beyond, till the whole ship of state is threatened. The nation state is lifes harsh teacher of a people to manage their own affairs or sink without dragging others down with it.

This was the basis of traditional diplomacy. Also, in the original future-looking Star Trek series, this non-interference, with alien civilisations, was called "the prime directive."

The failure, of the Versailles treaty after WW1, was blamed on fragmenting nations with respect to their ethnic and cultural populations. Renewed German territoral aggressions were carried out under the pretext of redressing such wrongs to ethnic Germans in other countries. Disregard of ethnic home-lands has been blamed not only for European but also for African strife, after the colonial carving-up of its continental map, into administratively convenient blocs.

Yet the compartment analogy for nations can be dangerously misleading, because it suggests nations are rigidly partisan closed communities: "My country right or wrong." Such chauvinism fosters aggression. Nations have to be open to free speech and free trade, for mutual understanding, and commercial co-operation, as antidotes to war.

### Measures of nature.

David Attenborough said: Life can be measured in the order of different species capacity to inhabit the most limited environment over the longest time to the most diverse environment in the shortest time. Evolution is then defined as this capacity of life on earth to "change the space-time co-ordinates," as it were, from the most simple to the most complex motor-sensory forms of "observers."

Time was believed to bear life in a deterministic stream of events, thru a fixed bed of space, issuing from a Prime Mover or God outside Nature, who is the only agent of free-will, setting in motion the machine of creation. Newton mechanics implied such a theology.   
A relativist space-time, in natures transferable selection of lifes motor-sensory co-ordinates, rather implies an evolutionary god of free-will growing out of nature.

The time taken for this evolutionary transformation follows a logarithmic interval scale. At first, the intervals of change are very far apart but each succeeding interval follows closer than the last. Evolution is measured on a logarithmic scale, as decreasing intervals represent accelerating stages of lifes adaptation from the most limited to more diverse environments.

### Natural selection and elections.

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Like the pragmatist, Darwin, in biological classification of species, pragmatism in politics also requires parties to be considered no more than as broad classifications of continuous degrees of policy difference between individual politicians. And we may remember our political community, by voting for an individual order of preference, that can transcend party lines.

A partisan error is that all voters vote solely for a party. The product of this error is partisan voting systems that don't allow voters to prefer candidates, whether or not of the same party. This partisan fallacy is as if a biological variety, that can inter-breed, within a species was confused with a separate species that cannot inter-breed.

Cross party fertilizations of ideas would help parties to adapt and politics to evolve or transform itself thru the agency of transferable voting.

As Enid Lakeman concluded, in the standard work, _How Democracies Vote_ :

"A co-operative spirit is fostered, and its application is in the hands of those men and women most trusted by their electors; with the single transferable vote sharp divisions into mutually hostile factions are discouraged. Sweeping changes resulting from trifling causes are prevented, and gradual evolution in any direction desired by the bulk of the voters is facilitated."

Lyell theory of slight cumulative changes on the earths crust, led Darwin to search for such an agent on heredity. Like the gradations of choice in preference voting, it was easily ignored by dogmatism but vital to the understanding. This is an analogy of natural selection with STV elections by preference voting for individual variations, in or across rigid party classes, and quota counting the prefered individuals political survival as representatives.

By analogy, the more natural selection (or seats to elect to) and the more survival quotas (or vote quotas for differingly adaptable opinion patterns) the more variety of life (or voters represented in their true variety of choice).  
The more specialized species become, the more interdependent they become as an eco-system. A species relying too heavily on one vulnerable food source or a one-product economy is unstable because it is so dependent on fluctuations in its one products fortunes.

The more competitive diversity in an ecology or an economy, the more possibilities for adaptation to adverse circumstances and therefore the more stability. The more division of labor, the more inter-dependence of services and the more of a premium put on co-operation.

An ecological electoral system would have to combine these functions of competition in adaptive diversity and co-operation in stable inter-dependence. The unity in diversity, in transferable voting, qualifies it for electoral democracy, or the rule of the people, considered ecologicly, as "biocracy" or the rule of life.

### Diffusion equation of natural selection and elections.

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The diffusion equation may frame an analogy between elections by transferable voting and evolution by natural selection.

Darwin theory appeared in 1859. The original version of STV appeared in 1857, as Hare system. This was probably independent of Andrae in Denmark in 1855. Hare might have been influenced by the antecedent work of Thomas Wright Hill, in his own country.   
Darwins work had been unpublished for many years. And Wallace, the long-time explorer of global wilderness, would hardly have been influenced by Thomas Hare.

Yet it is curious that, in mid nineteenth century Britain and nearby Denmark, two pairs of thinkers should independently make two first-rate discoveries, both following the logic of measurement.

The single transferable vote (STV) consists of a preference vote for a proportional (or quota) count. Darwin theory of natural selection was made-up of Lyell principle of small cumulative changes applied to animals evolving ultimately into new species, thru the accumulation of small hereditary advantages. Thus, nature wields a "preference vote" in the form of genes with a survival order of value.

The reverse is also true. Many genetic mutations have an adverse survival value, which effect a reverse "preference vote" for individual "candidates" in the contest to survive.   
(My Binomial STV introduces a reverse preference count for exclusion of candidates, as well as a preference count for their election.)

Besides the Lyell factor, Darwin theory consists of a Malthus factor based on the limits of sustenance, which only supports a given quota of a species. Natural selection is natures genetic preference vote for a survival quota, that is evolutions "transferable vote."

The naturally selected individual "candidates" become hereditary "representatives" of the next generations genetic make-up or "votes." Biologists consider "the gene pool" typically as a normal distribution of all the genes of a given species. Likewise, votes form a normal distribution, of left, right and center opinion.

The diffusion equation, or heat conduction equation, solves in terms of a normal distribution of about average molecular activity with smaller proportions of the fastest and slowest molecules.

The central mass of a popular distribution of votes may be treated as a dependent variable on the average number of candidates prefered per voter. By analogy, this could become the distribution of advantagous genes, dependant on the average number of individuals nature prefers with an advantagous gene.

The diffusion equation is of a distribution spreading over time, as well as in space. A (geometric) growth in the number of voters may correspond to (arithmetic) growth in the number of candidates prefered per voter. A (geometric) growth of the advantagous gene pool may come with (arithmetic) growth in the number of individuals prefered by an advantagous gene.

STV elections are a multi-member system that often allows different numbers of representatives (or "seats") per constituency. Densely populated cities have more seats than sparsely populated rural areas. This keeps constituency boundaries true to natural communities.   
This forms another statistical distribution: The distribution of constituencies depends on the number of seats per constituency.   
If most communities have an average of, say, 4 or 5 seats per constituency, then there will be few single or double member constituencies for the sparsest areas and few 8 or 9 member constituencies for the densest areas.

Constituencies can be thought-of as made-up of communities which contain randomly mixed proportions of rural and urban districts. The population extremes are those few areas made-up solely of sparse districts or solely of dense districts. On theoretical grounds of chance, most communities will be more or less a mixture of sparse and dense districts, the average being half and half.

This situation readily carries over into an ecology of fertile and barren habitats, supporting greater or lesser proportions of population. Constituencies as "environments" combine more or less districts as "habitats." Such environments carry different numbers of hereditary "representatives" of a species.

The diffusion equation has a constant factor, as well as variable factors. When habitats are classed into sparse and dense, the simplest assumption is a constant (of probability) of a half of each kind of habitat. The resulting distribution gives the dependent variable in terms of the binomial distribution.   
Slightly less simple assumptions take into account skewed distributions, and field-like distributions of two dimensions.

The constant of probability can be increasingly refined. The constant could be set at probability a third, for each of three kinds of habitat, say: forest, grass-land and scrub. This would solve the dependent variable in terms of the trinomial distribution. In general, a multinomial distribution is arrived-at, depending on how the constant is adjusted to measure the lie of a land.

Voters and candidates, or genes and individuals, have a geometric to arithmetic relation in time-dependence of the diffusion equation. The same applies to constituencies and representatives, or environments and survivors. On the assumption of randomly distributed fertile and barren habitats within environments, geometric increase in environments only sees an arithmetic increase in survivors.

In physics, the diffusion equation only works as a simple closed system, wherein the same amount of heat is conserved in the whole, even as it gradually disperses thru the system. Whereas, in ecology, the inter-relations between species can be too complex to be experimentally reproduced in a conservation zone.

Life is sustained on the feed-backs of an eco-system, even with some continual external input, such as sun-shine.   
Economics, adopting an open system of unlimited economic growth, chasing "insatiable" consumption, using-up non-renewable resources, degrades Earths life-carrying capacity. We know that species populations can be subject to catastrofic collapses. We do not know how drastic these may be on a global scale of deforestation, soil erosion water run-off and pollution.

_Sources:_

Krauskopf and Beiser, Fundamentals of Physical Science. 1969.  
C D Darlington, Genetics and Man. 1966.  
J M Smith, The Theory of Evolution. 1966.  
O Gillie, The Living Cell. 1971.  
Wells, Huxley and Wells, The Science of Life. 1938.

_The age of the sources, above, relates to the fact that the basic ideas of this chapter were made by 1981, in conjunction with my first essay on scientific measurement of elections, which survives in a French translation, found at the end of my first book in this Democracy Science series, namely: Peace-making Power-sharing.  
In 2004, I up-dated this chapter in terms of a mathematical description of evolution by natural selection and elections by transferable voting._

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# Ethics and electics in science.

## Max Weber work ethic and my student mistakes.

Table of contents.

To: Max Weber "value-neutral" or "value-free" method.

### My student mistakes.

There is no getting away from it. I was a bad student. That was because I didn't know how to study. In my time, you were provided with long reading lists on your course subject. The implication was that you were somehow expected to get thru them - before the next set of lists were put before you, in a sort of mental forced feeding.

I had the wrong idea. I thought that making detailed notes of the key works would see me thru the exams, in the end. All I was doing was wasting my youthful reserves of eye-sight.   
JB Priestley, on American tours round colleges, said that he always came across the graduate, who had poured out his youth like dirty dish-water. I was worse, being so inept that I couldn't even aspire to a position to show for it.

Copious note-taking was my magic ritual to pass exams, themselves a rites de passage of dubious efficacy for society. Failing the wisdom to know ones calling and get oneself apprenticed to it, rather than examined, I should have done differently.   
Supposing one knows the course one most wants to do. A great list of titles needn't give one readers block. Instead, one treats it as a _choice_. Try all the books (electronic or traditional) to find out which ones you can read, and leave, at least for the time being, those that are indigestible.

Students will have different tastes and may learn from each other. Discussion should help to fix subjects in ones mind. If ideas occur to one, noting them down may provide material for exams or theses. Even on a scientific course, where certain subjects must be learned, different books, students, teachers may be approached, if necessary.

When there are definite methods or formulas, to master, there is no substitute for practising with examples. As a student, that was the only thing I did well, and would have failed the whole course, otherwise, as I deservedly nearly did.

The bulk of that course was empirical: the reading of endless "monographs." I tried to get to grips with a few and just stalled on them.   
I seem to have been laboring under an unconscious assumption, from the old scholastics, that any author is an authority, I was too rigid to put away.

I should have chucked the books that made no impression on me. I should have wasted no time on them. If I had kept on searching thru the course lists, I would have picked-up scraps of intelligence, on the way. And, by the law of averages, I would assuredly have found enough books that I liked and found memorable.

I think it was Theodore Sturgeon who said nine-tenths of science fiction is rubbish.   
That is true of every genre from teenage romance to mathematics text books. The romance or the maths may not be wrong but the way, that it often is written, assuredly is.

Some favorite works, I could have written about, in glowing terms, for the set essays, and pleased my tutors! No mean consideration.

Of course, one may be on the wrong course, after all. Or one may not be made for courses. The moral is, as ever, that one has to know what one is doing in life.   
Some of us may know it only intuitively. Religion may say that having faith, in what one is doing, is enough. At any rate, I don't think that one always has to be able to consciously articulate ones intentions. One cannot already fully know what one sets out to achieve.

### Max Weber "value-neutral" or "value-free" method.

To top.

I've allowed (a little) for my grotesque deficiencies as a student. As is the way of things, I saw a fault in academic convention, when I couldn't see my own faults, let alone any remedy for them.

The idol of the sociologists was a scholar called Max Weber. He was a sprawling empiricist, who saw typical social patterns in history. He called these "ideal types" but he really just meant types. He did not mean to imply that a type should be regarded as an ideal or utopia. He did call his ideal types, utopias, but only in the sense that they were discernible trends found in several societies and no-where perfectly realised.

Everything to be studied was to be de-moralised, did I but know it, in the fullest sense of the word, demoralised!

Weber saw Western rationalisation as leading to a bureaucratic future, tho this was not his personal wish.   
Nowadays, I would say that democracy is a type of society, studied, so it may be better _realised_ in the fullest sense of the word, mental and moral.

In my dim and distant student past, the academic line was one of pure science. The sociologists job was to study social facts, not espouse social values. The orthodox repeated David Hume, that you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is."   
Noam Chomsky remonstrated that he could hardly open his mouth in American academe, without someone asking: Was that a fact or a value?   
For Chomsky, a "value-judgment" could be a fact.

Max Weber, _The Methodology of the Social Sciences_ , had not got beyond Hume to the answer of his great country-man, Immanuel Kant. There were six copies of this book in our little college library. This unheard-of extravagance had its appalling effect on young and impressionable minds.

I disagreed with the sophistry, as I saw it, of "value-freedom" or value neutrality. My lecturers disagreed or dismissed this "non-issue," as one of them put it. My (rather persistent) point of view was tolerated and probably redeemed my exam papers as one of the few passages of debatable interest.   
After all, exams are about the last way one would seek to make good use of intelligent young minds.

There is a certain poetic justice in doing a social study on a sociologist, or at least running a scan on Max Weber for methodological motives. Weber traced an exceptional relation of protestant ascetism to capitalist labor. He, himself, was an ascetic in his self-denying ordinance of facts without values.

Robert Merton researched on religion and science, to confirm the puritans progress to pure science. Pure science could be called puritan science in its determinism, hostile to ethics and with an ascetic animus against esthetics.

It can be contended that Humean dualism does not have a happy effect on much Weber wrote. His method is full of conventional distinctions, on the ground one cannot be too pedantic for claritys sake. Whereas, his empirical writings are full of allusions only specialists can be expected to understand. He might have made clear what most students needed making clear, not what they didn't.

His magnum opus, translated as _Economy and Society_ , was an appallingly expensive three volume set, which found pride of place in our little college library, as soon as it came out, near the end of our course.   
Reading it, I felt like being given a jig-saw puzzle, in which, if not quite every piece came from a different jig-saw set, they might as well have done.

His political writings leave behind the "sober empirical analysis" he valued above the interesting values, that, he believed, spoil a students "taste" for it.   
Weber is outraged by the bungling attempts of the young Kaiser court to out-do Bismarck. He has ceased to be the barrel-bellied student, whose duel-scarred face, his mother slapped. Weber has a gut reaction to the follies of up-start rulers.

The roots of his changed values are in shallow soil. One feels that if a Bismarck were always available, he could do without constitutionalism.   
It took Weber contemporary, H G Wells, in _The Outline of History_ , to point out that Germany achieved unity, with the Frankfort Parliament, in 1848. The United States recognised the new government.

Bismarck couldn't tolerate democracy and sent the Prussian army in. The German states achieved unity, by peaceful agreement, nearly a quarter of a century before Bismarck imposed the Prussian monarchy. His realpolitik was the belief that force and fraud are the realities of politics.

Hitler launched the battle-ship _Bismarck_ to its name-sakes faith in "blood and iron" as the motive force in human affairs.   
In his 1934 Experiment In Autobiography, Wells said that he was going thru his "Hitler phase" when he was thirteen. He roamed about the country-side, directing phantom armies of conquest.

Around that age, in the aftermath of the second world war, I was just another such war-gamester. No doubt, I remained a prey to all sorts of failings, and added some new ones. But I have given some thought to why parliament is the genuine approach, and militarism the false approach, to unity.   
Tho, parliament itself has succumbed to the false values of force and fraud, when it is corrupted by militant partisanship and mercenary lobbying.

Weber political writings lack much sign that his new-found belief in the liberal democracy of a representative parliament has been informed by his scholarship.

Webers studious neutrality was as close as his south German university was to the French border. He nods approvingly to _Das Kapital_ , as a monument of erudition, to assert his independence. His comparative studies, of religions in relation to economies, were an idealist refutation of Marx on "the materialist interpretation of history."

A Marx-Weber synthesis became a main current in sociological thought. I was asked at end-of-second year course inter-view, if this was my view. I settled for the panel of lecturers alternative option, "eclectic."  
Perhaps, in unconscious response to this challenge, I became an enthusiast for HG Wells as a sociologist.

"Highly undesirable," Weber judges, the appointment of "professorial prophets," who do not touch conventional values. Of course, that is itself a value. Academic freedom goes beyond wishful thinking.   
As we live in a commercial world, that holds life itself to ransom, so the Prussian army was the model for Imperial Germany. Treitschke was a highly successful pounder of the chauvinist pulpit.

In this social context, Webers method amounted to a manifesto seeking a mandate from the government for academic freedom, as the privilege of being protected from militarist propaganda driving the masses.   
This is fair enough. But later sociologists, in much freer countries, were not being sociological to treat Weber more like an academic messiah with a message, than a colleague in a compromise.

#### After-note

(july 2015)

The above essay comes from about 2000.

Nearly half a century after the sociology course, I was privileged to be on, an article, in The Boston Review, about ethics and social science, paraded the views of David Hume and Max Weber, "the usual suspects," as I called them, in my comment, mentioning, for alternatives, Immanuel Kant and Pitirim Sorokin.  
A researcher of values, the most cited sociologist in the world, Pitirim Sorokin was department head at Harvard University, in their back-yard.

This just goes to show that my sociology lecturers were following a global academic party line of value-neutral social science.

To top.

## Pitirim Sorokin as The Invisible Man

Table of contents.

_Pitirim Sorokin_

#### Sections:

The road not taken.

The career academic vs the world changer.

Value-neutral vs values-primacy sociology.

At cross-purposes.

### The road not taken

No other college would consider me. (After they accepted me, another college made a token gesture but that was all.) I thought this non-response was because my A-levels were too poor. There may have been more to it than that. I believe there was. Anyway, this one place was gutsy enough to give me a chance, despite off-putting reference.

At first, everything went swimmingly. In the course of three years, they get to know you better. Ones personality defects become apparent, in my case, not having a personality. And the kindness and good will may become somewhat strained.   
So, it is with some little sadness, that I realise the disappointment I must've been to them, for all their good intentions.

The truth, as I see it, is that I was the worst possible student they could have chosen. Not so much because of my total lack of social skills. I could have managed somehow as an unsocial sociologist.

Nor because sociology, as they finally said, was the wrong subject for me.   
No, the real reason is that my purpose for the subject was at odds with theirs. It was an incompatible union. Something that should never have been, tho not without its uses.

As a new college student, already fed-up of set essays, I only reluctantly allowed the course to relieve me of my ignorance of voting method. Even so, my indifference lasted a good many years after that.  
So, I cannot really blame the general public for their chronic gullibility and stupidity, as only chance eventually redeemed my own, on that issue.

This limitation extended to my value-neutral tutor, who thought values were decided by citizens. As if the political system let the public decide anything that affected the status quo. (I don't except the once in a generation decision of the 2016 UK European Union referendum, important tho it is.)

It is so easy to be deceived. Little did I know how guilty of three years gullibility and stupidity I was, on that entire course.

By my sixties, I came across a book called Holding Up A Mirror, by Anne Glyn-Jones. The subtitle is: How Civilisations Decline.   
Her inspiration is the sociological theory of Pitirim Sorokin. As one of the near victims of the Russian revolution, he had a personal interest in this question, culminating in his four volume epic, Social And Cultural Dynamics.

Jones explained that this was not the value-neutral sociology of Max Weber. Sorokin had a competing values-based social science.   
When I read that, I knew that I had made a big mistake, a lifetime ago, in not traveling the Sorokin road.   
This untimely discovery made me think I should have known this, at the start, not the end of my working life. There I was, feeling worn out, and on the point of retiring age – if I'd had any career to retire from.

Long ago and far away (by my standards) in my early student days, I recall a fellow student asked a lecturer about Sorokin.   
This is my only memory of Sorokin ever being discussed, for so much as a minute or two, in three years.  
(That's not to say he wasn't, of course, but the conviction is surely some indication.)

The lecturer replied that his was a cyclical theory – which already put a question mark over it – and a vast undertaking to be left for post-graduate work.

The standard (1960s) reference on sociologists, Don Martindale, on The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory, draws heavily on Sorokin study of pioneers, but is not particularly revealing on the theorist himself. Martindale ends his book: "statements have usually approached the problem wrong end to - in terms of the distinctive features of the theory rather from the stand-point of the humble platform of basic agreement."

Martindale expressed a somewhat forlorn hope: "Sociology may yet produce a Newton or a Maxwell..."   
Sorokin has become the worlds most cited sociologist. The discipline may yet agree that Sorokin is perhaps, no less, its Galileo.

The young have to take much on trust, because they know nothing of the real world. I had faith in my teachers, because they had faith in me.   
The moral is not to take authority on trust.   
(Richard Feynman learned that well from his father.)

Early days, I was under the delusion that I might have a future in sociology. Sixties Britain was a hopeful time, in which linear progress seemed more believable than cyclical decline.  
I thought, maybe I'll come to this ambitious work after graduating. That is how I squared my conscience, and so dismissed Sorokin from further consideration.

That was the road not taken.

For, it has to be understood, that this sociology course, that I had the great privilege to be on, was an exercise in purely factual scholarship, that excluded all values.   
Max Weber was its idol, on whom we were invited, by example, to vent such enthusiasm (for academic lack of enthusiasm) as we had.

This academic detachment was accompanied by an irritating affectation of out-of-hours trendy leftism. One party-time story, possibly apocryphal, had two leading lecturers steal a crate of drinks from the Conservative club.

Whereas, Sorokin theory is based on conflicting values, of religion versus materialism, whose limitations eventually bring down the unbalanced societies restricted to either of them.   
The hope is ruinous conflicts may be transcended by an integral values system for society.

### The career academic vs the world changer.

To top

The possible advantage of not knowing about Sorokins Herculean labours on the fall of civilisations may have been that I was not so over-whelmed as to be unable to think independently.

What do you do when you suddenly read a candidate for the Darwin of sociology?   
Ones petty conceit may self-congratulate on finding minor improvements, or contrive to dismiss it.

These alternatives correspond, in Darwins case, to the whippersnappers and the fundamentalists. HG Wells, in his Experiment In Autobiography, describes as whippersnappers those researchers who prided themselves in finding things that Darwin didn't know.

It's taken me a working lifetime to stumble upon the fact that Sorokin was doing just the kind of sociology that I'd hoped to study as a young man, using scientific method to learn how society can reform.

I'm not aggrieved by this missed opportunity. I'm not academic by nature. And I've never had the emotional development to make me a team player for any career (or, dare I say it, even for family life; personal limitations which I regret).

Sorokin did have the required personal maturity, I didn't, which induced world-wide colleagues to help him with his statistical compilations, for his masterpiece, Social and Cultural Dynamics, that charted the sacred or profane pre-occupations and tendencies of societies, across the world, thru-out the ages, as reflected across the range of the arts, and in the pre-suppositions of the sciences, and indeed all the major institutions.

This kind of universalism is a world away from the objective of a career.

The following incident, when we were new students, was revealing of a lecturers mind-set. An academic, with learned and popular publications to his credit, and, we were reminded, had got his name amongst a few colleagues in a footnote of a standard text-book, honored our little concrete pile of a college with a visit.

When he set eyes on the back of the conference room, where I was lurking myopicly, in my mis-prescribed dark green glasses, he gave a loud sigh and heaved himself in his seat.

The next time my tutor set eyes on me, he couldn't restrain a sniff of dismay at this letter-down of the side.

No doubt, it was all justified. I may perhaps mention that my optician seemed to mistake a sensitive eye, damaged by a ball, as a need for my wading about in bottle-green tinted glasses. This I did, for the three years of the sociology course, til I got back and remonstrated with him.

He still talked me into glasses with a slight blue tint, until I got him to replace those, as well. Then he gave me some bottle-bottom thick lenses, which created light scrawls all over my vision, so that I had to insist he give me back my old lenses, which he graciously permitted, all at my own expense.

The moral of that anecdote is: youth is pliable.   
This may be because the young have to be adaptable to any surroundings that they happen to be born into. It has the disadvantage that youth may be sadly misled.   
(Don't I know it.)

To get back to the subject, career science with its publication credits and prestige prizes suggests that scholars are still at school, like over-grown children, happy with praise and presents. Few of them are going to challenge the system, as Noam Chomsky complained.   
Yet questioning assumptions is how problems are solved. (The fysicist, David Bohm, for one, found this to be the case.) And one cannot deny that the social system has problems.

Sorokin was different to the usual graduate from school to scholar, who knows nothing of "the real world" (to use our course teachers term). He had a harsh working life and high responsibility in political service. He had known personal hardship and danger.

### Value-neutral vs values-primacy sociology.

To top

Some years ago, I mentioned my student disagreements with value-free or value-neutral sociology, in a little essay on-line [the previous chapter] called: Max Weber work ethic and my student mistakes.

I didn't bring out my eventual one-man contribution to the sixties age of protest, by campaigning for HG Wells to be recognised as a sociologist.

Staff and students alike did not agree. (There were incidental exceptions to this.) Afterwards, a course graduate at London University found a thesis on The Sociology Of HG Wells.

I told my tutor about his essay, The So-called Science Of Sociology. He had the grace to admit he'd not heard of it. He was obviously so wonderfully widely read that I just thought: Well, there had to be something he didn't know.   
Wells advocated sociology, as the synthesis of the good, true and beautiful, in the imaginative and critical construction of Utopias.

Wells followed Immanuel Kant in regarding the social sciences as "the moral sciences," to refute David Hume on a radical dualism between ethics and science.  
Sorokin, the disregarded, The Invisible Man, was in the same tradition, also emfasising an integration of the good, the true and the beautiful.

I had followed this debate, in The Structure Of Social Action by Talcott Parsons, who charmingly had tea with Max Webers widow. This great scholarly work was the book that our tutor enthusiasticly recommended, when we were beginning our studies. I was given the distinct impression of being let into a great secret.

In my opinion, others no doubt would disagree, the real secret was Sorokin.

Hume famously woke Kant out of his "dogmatic slumbers." Unfortunately, Kant did not wake academe out of its. Naturally enuf, academics took the line of least resistance, first set down by the Royal Society, when they promised to keep out of politics.

The Parsons classic came out about the same time as the Sorokin magnum opus. Sorokin wrote many books. His late book, The Basic Trends Of Our Time, is an over-view of his lifes work.  
He also made a gallant case against the demonisation of his countrymen, and threat of devastating war, when it would have been understandable, if he had shaken the Russian dust off his feet.

Yet, in all of three years, not once was I set any of his books for an essay or discussion topic. Nor was any lecture, that I know of, given on his work. And I was a diligent attender, if nothing else.

We were set Parsons follow-up work, The Social System. Fellow students generally found it unreadable and there was what amounted to a passive but unyeilding mass rebellion against doing so.

C Wright Mills disparaged it, in The Sociological Imagination, meaning the lack thereof, in the profession.  
The academic gossip was that Parsons tried to outlaw Mills from the profession. (When I mentioned this to a tutor, he regarded me with amused unfriendliness.   
I can understand that, of myself, as a clueless solitary.)

FR Cowell, in Values In Human Society, complains that Mills was apparently following in Sorokin foot-steps without acknowledging it. Sorokin had already written a critique called: Fads And Foibles In Sociology.

No wonder our lecturers were not eager to discuss Sorokin. They were only following a wide-spread studied inattention, that provoked Sorokin to his critique.

Not til I read it, from Sorokin himself, did I learn that Parsons was a member of his staff at Harvard. (I have a feeling this snippet was given passing mention, on the course, my not attaching any significance to it, because no significance was attached to it, to make it memorable.)

Now that I'm, at last, in on the secret, I think our sociology course was highly remiss, in its value-neutral dogmatism.   
That can't be helped. I regret being so critical of a further education, I wouldn't otherwise have had. Naturally, lecturers, you owed such gratitude, hardly would take kindly to so ungrateful a return. Not that it should affect them, professionly, long after retirement age.

Perhaps as much as three years after leaving college, I wrote enthusiasticly to a former tutor, with filosofy back-ground, of Principles Of Art, by RG Collingwood.  
Defensively, he replied that he had covered Collingwood. I had no recollection of this, nor any such expectation that esthetics should be covered by sociology.

I was surprised by his reaction. Perhaps he was none too pleased to hear from me again! It gives an insight into the kind of reaction, I might have got from actually making an accusation that Sorokin, not Weber, was the man for sociology.   
He did have to put-up with posting-on, to me, a former students post-course find of a London University thesis: The Sociology Of HG Wells.

My real complaint is against academic life in general for still pursuing a filosofical dualism of facts and values.   
(I studied this question when I was about thirty-five, and working as a shop assistant. This is my chapter: The moral sciences as the ethic of scientific method.  
At sixty-five, a further chapter, also this books title, was: Science is ethics or "electics." A new metafysics and model of reality.)

The course agonised whether sociology could ever become a science.   
So much did they do so, that I was astonished, at course end, by our lecturers dismissal of the issue as "of very minor importance."

I gaped at this seeming about-turn but then kept quiet. He spoke with such an assured impersonality of deliverance, to our academic destinations, that even I could not fail to get the message: Course over.

What then exactly was sociology for?

Sorokin could have told me, if he'd been given a lecturer spokesman. He died in 1968, the first year of the course, I was on, but this did not prompt any colleag to commemorate his lifes work, beyond, no doubt, a passing mention.

### At cross-purposes.

To top

Subsequently, Stanislav Andreski brought out: Social Sciences As Sorcery. This was another critique of their sorry state. It also failed to tip me off about Sorokin.

Andreski found some easy targets, such as "the cult" of Ethnomethodology, which its founder, Harold Garfinkel, once described, in a flash of lucidity, as to see what can be done to make trouble.  
An "ethnomethodologists" sister rebuked: Please, no more experiments. We're not rats.

I remember a lecture, even on this unworthy fashion-monger. But not on Pitirim Sorokin, now the worlds most widely cited sociologist.

Andreski surveyed political states, in his book, Latin America: Parasitism and Subversion. As the title implies, stability was generally lacking. Chile was an exception, with a long-standing, if limited, parliamentary constitution. Were that to fall, it would be a disaster.   
About two years after the book was published, a CIA-led coup replaced the elected communist, Allende with the atrocious Pinochet regime.

Had I read Andreski before, instead of after, leaving college, I might have made a grade less humble an exam result. That just goes to say that I could engage with a writer about the moral realities, the world over, behind peoples hardships, which are not academic.

That belated reading was my own fault, because Andreski was on the course reading lists. (Sorokin must've been there, too, tho I don't remember how prominently.)

The lecturers were not examination fiends. They even talked the education board into dropping end-of-second year exams. Never the less, having grown-up under relentless examination, I was left in a mental strait-jacket: I was forever writing copious notes, in a failed attempt to remember unmemorable set work. This copy-book ritual severely restricted the range and enterprise of my reading and learning.

Not that exams matter, except of course for a career. Despite my frantic attempts to indoctrinate myself by laboring at notes, little sociology sank in, to churn out in exams. And I really knew, at the time, that I deserved the result I got. That didn't lessen a bitter feeling of injustice - I couldn't justify.

An other student ironicly observed, I only came to life, talking about HG Wells.  
Certain Pacific islanders wilted away under the Western importation of a mechanistic world-view. This was told, in Ends And Means, by Aldous Huxley.   
When I urged the book upon my tutor, he dismissed it, as trendy socialism, he'd read when he was seventeen.

I was scandalised by the belittling of the works aims and scope.  
(By the way, Huxleys studies of Eastern religions were comparable with Sorokins investigations, especially: The Ways and Power of Love. Types, factors and techniques of moral transformation.)

Sociology, my tutor informed me, had parted company with its socialist beginnings. I had not been advocating socialism, but an intelligent social problem-solving. It occurs to me now, that to him, there was no such thing, just left-wing doctrine.  
Any moral or imperative was to be politicly branded and banned from the subject.

Our sociology lecturers also followed the Parsons line that sociology was mainly continental European. So, promoting HG Wells, an Englishman, (not to mention Huxley) as a sociologist, was a further challenging of premises being taught.  
More could be said about Wells, the social researcher as intelligent social reformer. (I've already said some in other books.)

One may wonder how I learned about that under-rated thinker, "tainted by literature," HG Wells.   
Well, it was not from college. After a year, I came across some street-side book-stalls of second-hand books, offering an independent source of learning, that would soon become my only source.

I never dreamt that there would be a thinker, to complement Wells, within the recognised ranks of sociology, none less than the august Harvard departmental head, Pitirim Sorokin.

What an exposure of my rigidity or limitations of enterprise to not find this out! Granted, I lacked belief in academic radicalism, what a proof of my failure to do a proper search of the literature, without necessarily having to absorb the nine tenths of stuff, unreadable to the average person, that makes up every genre from formula romance to mathematics text-books.

I remember a lecturer, or two, not initially hostile to me, trying to help me, by explaining I had to be selective in my approach to reading.  
As Sorokin would say, I did not have "the grace of understanding," to profit by their good advice.

Near the end of the course, one tutor invited me to abandon course, for a literature course. I believe that is likened to the offer of a poison chalice. Other lecturers also followed this line, that I was literary rather than sociological - a demarcation dispute, used against Wells himself.

This tutor once said, in so many words, that the people, who wanted to change things, never did any good as academics.   
That left Sorokin out of the picture.

Another confidence, he made, was that the social services would keep poverty going in this country another twenty years.  
I think we were expected to be incredulous.  
Of course, it is unfair to pick on casual words someone said, at any time, let alone nearly half a century ago.

We all say short-sighted things, not being able to see the future. I'm merely high-lighting a nineteen-sixties state of mind, that seems almost utopian in its Victorian and un-Sorokin-like assumption of linear progress, that had survived two world wars and chilled-out in the cold war.

Another tutor, early in the course said: When we've tackled the problem of poverty in the world, then we must see to curing mental illness.   
This was a bit confusing, at first, because it gave the impression that sociology, as they taught it, had something to do with this. I suppose, it did, if you went into the social services option of the course, in the second year.

This tutor was a tonic. His good spirits and humor were the soul of the course, if a career-academic blinkered one.   
Aren't we all in harness to a living?  
He made a laf of the superstitions against the mentally ill. And was none too complimentary about their healers.

I probably had this stigma hanging over me, in my school reference. Recently, I found out that a doctor had labeled me, as a child, with the standard tag that was used to excuse institutionalisation.   
According to a tv documentary, in the same period, a woman, with this same tag, had been psychiatricly incarcerated and exerimented on, because her parents didn't like her boy-friend.

Taking the sociology second-year option, on the course, avoided the social service or civil service options. It was clear even to me, in my youthful ignorance of the world, that the service would have you, not only under the governments wing but under the governments thumb.

Still, one didn't entirely escape. The sociology second-year option, still posed for me the dilemma between a given lecturer in sociology and a lecturer in criminology. This was no choice for me, because I couldn't learn anything from the fragments of muttered allusions, from that particular sociologist. He was as cryptic in speech, as Weber writing on Economy And Society.

At the meeting for course year two, when we students were practicly deciding our futures, a fellow, who blew his nose at me, every time he passed, suddenly came up close, in friendly manner, to talk me into joining the civil service option of the course.

A tutor also tried this tactic at course end. I don't mention this incident out of lasting resentment or for taking and giving offense, but in wonder. And to warn others, that there are those, who will come at you, especially when you are young and vulnerable and your life is at a tipping point for your whole future.

They may be benevolent and a blessing, like the kind economics teacher, who got us to send off our further education applications early. Or, they may not be so kindly disposed to your best interests. Or, whatever their disposition towards you, they may not value your freedom, or their own, as much as you do.

I suppose there was enough petty contempt to get down someone as defensive as I was. In contrast, some few folk were consistently kind, and people in general were civil.

At course end, the criminologist mercifully let his students out on bail, so to speak, with an essay or thesis on prisons, instead of an exam. That was one less ordeal. There were plenty more.   
A considered essay is more thoughtful than scribbling at a desk for a couple of hours. As Bernard Shaw said of exams, tho it applies just as much to the alternative of set essays: You musn't say anything original that will put-off your examiners.

Later, the supervisor asked briskly why I hadn't come to see him about the prisons dissertation.  
I hadn't sought his company, and didn't want to be bogged down in the tedium of penology. So, I reminded him that the last time I called to ask, if he wanted to see me, he replied: Not particularly.   
That got me off from tutorial super-vision. But he hadn't quite finished with me.

I made a case for releasing inmates from "The Human Zoo" of prisons. Nothing, than this inspiration from Desmond Morris, which had the audacity to be popular, as well as ethological, could have been more anathema to the Behaviorist lecturer.

Beatrice and Sidney Webb were the backbone of British welfare literature. Most likely, the criminologist pointed me to their prison reform work. Anyway, this led me to the Shaw preface to their volumes on prisons. Shaw called them: these dreadful books. If I remember rightly, he rejected the dustbin treatment of crime, that throws every offense into prison. Physical restraint should be confined to assaulters. People as dangerous as tigers, yet can be studied when safely caged.

Shaw likened all social confines, the home, the school, the work-place to prisons also. Shaw hated school because it wasted time when he could have been reading.   
He anticipates Irving Goffman, the sociologist of institutions, especially rigidly routinised ones like traditional asylums, which render the inhabitants unable to adapt to the outside world.

The classic example of institutionalisation is the prison, whose walls have been pulled down, only to leave the most conditioned inmates, sitting amidst the ruins, not knowing any other life to lead.

The fact that I searched for books by Shaw, straight after I left college, and was converted, in short order, to spelling reform, assures me, that this enthusiasm resulted from using the Shaw preface in my prison essay.

I am more clear, than of Morris and Shaw, that my thesis quoted HG Wells (who else?) from A Modern Utopia, where he ships off the drunkards to an island of insobriety and the thieves to an isle of no honor, or something like that.

No wonder, my academic minders responded patiently that my work was "literary" rather than sociological. That became my lecturers party line. But what was sociology, if it was neither scientific nor literary?

An associate lecturer made the "literary" assessment, during the last college break, over the fone. We didn't have a fone, at home, and I had to use a public call booth. Then the supervisor himself came on the line, telling me to obtain a certain HMSO pamflet on prisons to inform my submission.

That wasn't obtainable in my home town, without sending away for it. Would I be there when it arrived? He was putting me to some trouble.   
What he didn't know was that I knew he had given a lecture on this pamflet. This was, I don't exaggerate, almost the only lecture I didn't attend at college. (I think I absented myself, for a token sense of exercising choice.)

But I had asked a fellow student, if I could borrow her notes. Even so, I didn't go to the trouble and expense of having my essay re-typed by a secretarial service (not having a type-writer). Instead, I jammed a very minor inclusion of the reference, into the text. The supervisor could complain if he liked.

He never did. Presumably he expressed his feelings satisfactorily on my degree grade.  
It wasn't a good essay. Despite "literary" influences, it mainly kept to orthodox citations. I did make early attempt at publication. Callow tho I was, I soon discarded the work.

I still have my first-year essay on proportional representation, because it is so bad, having complacently ignored the set books, til half way thru the writing of it.

An other tutor surmised that I was idealistic. He told me that, tho women were sympathetic to idealists, they wouldn't marry them.   
I couldn't help feeling that this was prudent of them.

He also asked me why didn't I apply for the civil service? I replied that, not having gone in for that option, I would have to apply for a lower grade.   
He received this apparent openness to the idea, with an accession of friendliness. I was too polite to let on, that I wanted to be a free agent. I had enough of hierarchies at school. I was too insubordinate to accept subordination.

He knew this well enough. He once greeted my uncustomarily belated appearance at his lecture with the greeting: Go away!  
He had a filosofical education, that disdained the rival French school of Existentialism.   
We were once in some out-in-the corridors dispute, of which I forget the issue, that drove me to slip-in: I take an existentialist position on that. (That was the academic tone we adopted in conversation.)

That served as a rag waved at the bull, to make him angrily retort: If you take an existentialist position, then why don't you leave the course? (Only a month or two left. He didn't mind wasting my three years time. Another tutor resembled a mountaineer at the summit, jeering away a struggling late-comer.)  
My response: Don't sound so eager.

This was an ironic reflection on my own innocent initial enthusiasm for the course, which I caught from him, and his colleags Weberian misdirections (for me).   
The next day, he talked to me, in a calm manner, that didn't arouse my suspicions, which may have been deliberately lulled to a continued antagonism.

At about this late time, yet another lecturer asked me what friends I had, to demonstrate that I hadn't any. As he was playing me a game I couldn't win, I left off trying.   
It was none of his business, anyway.   
I suppose, he was just letting me know that they didn't want to know me - an experience, with which I was long familiar, and old age confirmed.

Before school, I lived on a farm far from other children. At village school, in those days, they put you alone in separate columns of desks, so that all you saw was someones back.   
That wasn't so bad. But later, I wasn't so much, as Charles Causley says of Timothy Winters, "a blitz of a boy," but a blitzed of a boy. As Bernard Shaw would say of his childhood: a loveless life.   
I cannot complain, in such a world as this.

Near close of course, we students were considerately shuffled-off to a careers officer, or whatever the current jargon was for the post. He said that he expected, by my name, that I was Chinese. He soon had this quiet introvert measured-up for a librarian. When I asked for a choice, he had none to offer.

Over my life-time, I had many occasions to rue my not taking-up his offer of a nice secure and peaceful job. That is to say, voting myself into this one-candidate post of librarian. But, I think, being in the pay of the government would inhibit one from independent thought, which would be like biting the hand that feeds one.

A private service, such as selling to people, teaches one to respect individuals wishes, regardless of what one thinks is best for them.   
I'm not talking about some mega-corporations, that may over-ride personal complaints, and even take on governments.

I don't agree with Bernard Shaw that independence is middle-class blasphemy, and that "an honorable servitude" is to be prefered.   
He meant a servitude, in the gift of the rich and powerful, which prevents it from being honorable, where their interests are concerned.   
And I doubt there was anyone more evasive of servitude to anything but his art and his mission, than Shaw himself. Deeply tho he influenced my twenties, there was too much of the servile state about that mission.

The striking thing about current government is the crushing disregard, of those place-holders, for personal independence of the people. Backward British government, in particular, sabotages peoples independence from locally owned renewable energies and self-sufficently insulated, healthy homes and other buildings.

Government nuclear power ambitions, to build more of these catastrofes waiting to happen, are an uneconomic folly, that seems only explicable, as a tacit (dishonest) accessory to renewing nuclear weapons, that threaten planetary life.   
The nuclear lemmings have no conception of the CND call for agreeing to end the inter-national scamble for power over life and death, only re-joining it, to make universal death more likely.   
Barack Obama wanted a nuclear-free world, for which he received the nobel peace prize, much to his and every one else's surprise. He hadn't got there yet!

Sorokin was much wiser than we were. While Western sociology followers of Max Weber were complacently explaining, after the fact, the predominance of the West, Sorokin early saw the rise of the rest of the world, now so over-whelmingly obvious. He also saw the coming chaos and studied, in his thoro way, how it might be redeemed.

At course end, I was surprised to hear of lecturers scrambling for new posts, giving an insight into what academic careers are about.

I realised then what a transitory phase (fase? fa's? feiz? feyz?) this three-year course really had been. To me, it was everything that turned to nothing. To them, it was a staging post.   
I felt left alone without a future.

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## The moral sciences as the ethics of scientific method.

Table of contents

_Immanuel Kant._

#### Sections:

Philosophy of science.

Scientific theory as language.

Social science as the study of democracy.

History as the history of democracy.

Conditions of democracy.

### Philosophy of science.

"Science" has meant mainly the achievements and methods of natural science. From the seventeenth century, its model became mechanics, the science of the laws of motion. These few general laws were not really questioned and qualified, till the turn of the twentieth century.

Deeply under the same influence, many pioneers of social science also tried to explain their studies in terms of a few guiding principles. This esthetic passion of the theorist explains much of the charm of science for that kind of scientist. It was sought to generalise history from comparable chains of individual events. This is the notion that history repeats itself.

Why do we never learn anything from history?   
This lament implies we make the same mistakes, that could have been avoided by breaking from that harmful pattern.

Some historians and philosophers, notably German scholars, continued to stress the importance of unique circumstances, as against universal factors, in social science, as compared to natural science. Foremost was Immanuel Kant, woken from his "dogmatic slumbers" by David Hume.   
Hume said it was illogical to derive ethics from science: you can't derive an "ought" from an "is."

This is true but irrelevant. Kant transcended the fundamental distinction made by Hume. He gave unifying answer to Humean dualism. Kant distinguished between the natural sciences and "the moral sciences" or social sciences, as seeking more or less universal or individual knowledge, respectively.

Nineteenth century biology lent some credence to the importance of particular knowledge. As life evolves, it becomes more specialised. Differences between human beings are most significant of all.

Natural science itself has become natural history, as RG Collingwood said was happening. The history or true story of the universe is of an increasingly individual creation, perhaps one of many individual creations in a multiverse. Physical laws, once thought universal, are beginning to look like chance divergences between this universe and possibly other more or less related individual universes.

By definition, the universe is one, a whole and not a part, that could be acted upon by some other part. There is nothing to determine a universe but itself. Therefore, the universe implies its own freedom or self-determination. Likewise, the universe is individual, in the sense of "not to be divided." It is no less than its whole self. The universe has the freedom of the individual.

On balance, human individuals should have more freedom in society. This might also be true of the multiverse as a society of universes.

The logic of a universe being a free agent also implies an informed intelligence. The freest choice knows all the choices to make: universal knowledge is of individual freedom.   
Yoga or the unitive life, whose goal is liberation from self (or perhaps selfishness) likens independence to oneness (or "kaivalya") of God. Sir James Jeans remarked that the universe seemed less like a great machine and more like a great thought.

_The deductive model of science_ conclusively explains an occurence, in terms of a universal principle, that may be said to apply, if certain particular conditions are met.

For example, Darwin infered the unity of life from perceiving the individual diversity of life forms. Biblical theory was that species were exactly similar special creations. Darwin remarked on slight differences, even between individuals of the same species. And there are gradations of difference between different species. He suggested all species were more or less closely related. This led him to conclude their evolution from one another.

Darwin showed that even the most exotic and unusual species had "natural" reasons for evolving that could be traced back to some common ancestor to other species. That is not to deny the wonder and mystery of species variety.

G & L Beadle, also Jacob Bronowski, talked of "the language of life." Species, like words, translate into diverse new meanings or go out of fashion and become extinct.

An interpretive science of particular events was also the main concern, especially of nineteenth century German historical scholarship. An interpretive element is also hinted at, in modern physics, from the start.   
For Galileo, the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. He saw geometric forms as symbols, representing shapes observed in nature, such as trajectories following the paths of conic sections.

A modern astronomer called the Crab Nebula a "Rosetta Stone" to decifer the language of the universe, because the fate of this destroyed star was believed to somewhat resemble the explosive expansion of the cosmos.

Nucleic acid, as discovered in the simple virus, also proved to be a "rosetta stone" of the "genetic code." The nucleic acid coil of the virus is the means it bores into, and takes over, other cells, to reproduce the virus instead of the host cell. Nucleic acid was thus interpreted to be the general mechanism of cell reproduction.

"Science" means "knowledge," a word which shares the same Latin root as "nominate," which means "to name." Naming is the essential function of language, and, at root, science.   
_Nominalist philosophy_ held that knowledge is merely naming classes of things. Things that differed least between themselves were conveniently classified to bring order out of confusion.

Darwin realised that the classification of species was to pigeon-hole the infinite variety of life. His nominalism (which may have influenced American pragmatist philosophy) led away, from the Biblical idea of special creations, to evolution.

This philosophy of more or less difference, or relative rather than absolute differences (say, between species) leads to more scientific measurement. For, the measure of knowledge is not merely to classify things, but order classes of things across their whole range of diversity.   
A science progresses along these and further scales of measurement, or recognised stages of more accurate knowledge.

To take another example of progressive measurement, candidates may be classed into parties. But, as individuals, their opinions will merge across party lines, in a political spectrum. If every voter for a party candidate is classed by the counting system as a partisan, the result will be a foregone conclusion in terms of the voters commitment to the parties. For, such a system disregards the represented and the representatives as individuals.

Nominalism is such individualist doubt about how valid are rigid classifications and their consequences. Perhaps the first lesson of scientific method is: Don't presume what you are setting out to prove. A theoretical assumption, such as that voters are unqualified partisans, must be open to unambiguous refutation.   
Having made the usual distinction between theory and experiment, in scientific method, the text-books soon advise the reader to remove presumption or prejudice from theory and ambiguity or dilemma in testing it.

### Scientific theory as language.

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As a student, reflecting on The Structure of Science, by Ernest Nagel, I realised that a scientific theory is really a language.   
(I soon learned that my insight was common knowledge. Also, one of our lecturers, John Phillips put us on to the importance of language, in philosophy and social science.)   
Like a language, a theory is a world of words. It holds together, in a logically related structure or "grammar," and anchors securely at many points to the common ground of our experiences. (Karl Pearson wrote: The Grammar of Science.)

Even the disagreements, as to the nature of theories, lend themselves to the idea of a theory as a language:

The _descriptive_ view of theories suggests the purpose of language, which is to describe things. Also, the word "script" means written language.   
This view is held to have the short-coming that several apparently different theories, such as the different quantum models of the atom, give quite different descriptions. Their importance, therefore, is put down to their use as "tools" rather than descriptions of "the truth."

This competing theory of theories descends from nominalism and is called _pragmatism_ or _instrumentalism_.   
However, language and tools have in common that they "evolve." Tools reproduce and mutate as they are adapted to a new environment of usages, they are instrumental in creating. Indeed, language and tools are the common sense fore-runners of science and technology. So, it should be no surprise that theories are considered as either descriptions or tools.

HG Wells made the amusing evolutionary assumption that the human mind is no more an instrument of truth than a pigs snout. And that was before it was his bitter lot to be one of the few people intelligent, informed, honest and bold enough to condemn, in public, how British politics did turn and rend democratic election method, chosen by the 1916 Speakers Conference on Electoral Reform.  
In my resigned old age, I do wonder whether enlightenment ever will prevail against atavism.

A rejoinder, in turn, to instrumentalism, is the _realist_ view of theories. This argues that, in the history of science, there have been concepts or working ideas, which had no known reality at the time. They were merely found to be useful ways of looking at a thing. But increased knowledge over-took ideas, which had only been useful "tools" and made them realities.   
This was the case with atoms and genes, and quarks. Murray Gell-Mann believed from the start that quarks are real.

Ernst Mach, the _positivist_ made realism into a program that concepts always should positively identify real things to our observation. This was so theories were not vague and could be properly tested. This basis for clear acceptance or rejection was meant to serve scientific progress.

Max Planck criticised this extreme exclusion of all creative concepts, whose reality was not immediately known. He justified his position in practise, in 1900, with the most revolutionary concept in twentieth century physics, the quantum.

Planck held a view akin to that of theories as _analogies_. These are foreign patterns of thought that may not be literally true of the subject, to which they are introduced, but could help to understand it better. A helpful analogy is like learning to speak the language of a problem.

Mach view of theories, balanced by Planck, may be illustrated by voting methods.   
An x-marks-the-spot vote, for more than two candidates, cannot ensure any one candidate will get an over-all majority. Only the candidate with the most votes "first past the post" is elected. The truth is that he may not be past the post of a democratic majority. Election of only the largest minority makes a fictional concept of first past the post as a majority system.   
Mach doctrine would rightly require here a voting system with a real conception of majority representation.

In this respect, the Planck experience of theory construction need not conflict with Mach, because a real majority system required creative new concepts both in the vote and the count of elections, namely preference voting and quota counting. This was the system invented independently by Carl Andrae and Thomas Hare, nowadays known as the single transferable vote.

As explained elsewhere, the Droop quota generalises the single majority count to the new conception of a "many-majority count." This is consistent (as theories should be) with the conception of a preference vote actually offering many preferences, instead of the one preference offered by an x-vote.

Proportional representation, if without a personal preference vote, merely rations the voters to a party choice of candidates. Voting for "a party" is, from Mach, a presumptive concept that has no reality, except in the individuals who comprise it. A party vote is a fiction that denies the reality of personal support.

There are different notions about theories but they seem compatible with the idea of a theory as a language.

The _structure of a theory_ is held to consist of, firstly, a formal stage. One or more abstract general principles derive a whole system of ideas by logical implication. This grammar of science doesn't mean anything by itself but can be used to say any number of different things.

Secondly, an operational stage states rules for testing a formal systems implications in practise. One goes thru this kind of thing in learning a language. I remember my excitement as an infant, finding out the practical rule of pointing at things, to ask the formal question, "What's that?" It was a new world, in which everything had its name.

Thirdly, an interpretive stage imagines the formal system in as many ways as meaningful models can be found to suit it. A model may indeed be a model for theories in other fields, if it has a mechanism of broad application.   
In this respect, Darwin theory of natural selection is one of the most "creative" models in science. It has been adapted to "evolutionary" theories of molecules, conditioned reflexes, memories, neural networks, even of universes, as well as languages and tools.

Measurement is a formal progression of logical stages, that operate as the successive scales of measurement. The practise of electoral method has been "evolved" to the single transferable vote, which broadly meets these standards of scientific measurement.

### Social science as the study of democracy.

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Looking at science as language can bridge natural and social science. If natural science is the universal language of nature, social or moral science is the individual meaning or purpose of life.   
As a previously mentioned sociology lecturer told us at a party: "language is the key." Language offers a universal knowledge to the community that uses it. Science stems from that. The social use of language is in freely sharing that knowledge. This is the prototype of the so-called _social function of science_. It is the recording, publishing, explaining, discussing of discoveries, the parliamentary side of science.

Peter Winch, in The Idea of a Social Science, said that "social science" is more akin to the social function of science. If natural science is knowledge (of freedom), social science is freedom (of knowledge). Freedom of information is essential to both science and democracy.   
The social function of science is really the operation of a parliamentary democracy in science.

Under the "common law" of language, or shared grammatical rules, everyone is free to represent their meanings.

Even if social science should be primarily about human freedom, some general law of society, however trivial, should be implicit in it. After all, it's been argued that universal knowledge is of individual freedom.   
Suppose _sociologys universal law_ **is** society or the community of human individuals. Then a deductive theory or explanation of society will be in terms of the community, as its universal principle. The individuals, who make up the community, are the condition of its existence.

This condition to the principle enables the deduction of a conclusion. The truism of a condition that individuals make up society rules out corporatism, as in party list voting for a group instead of individual candidates, or legal privileges to corporate finance.

Now, the community is a common understanding between individuals, or a shared language, in the wide sense, not only of shared speech but customs and rituals with their symbolic meanings. Individuals can interpret the meaning and purpose of their community, because they are more or less representative of it.

An individual is socially representative of the people, he has lived-with, and who have influenced his character. These people become the "constituents" of his personality. This basic outlook is used to justify the science of sociology, as distinct from psychology. That the personality is social is how sociologists justify their existence.

If sociology studies the social representation of the individual in the community, then, for instance, political science studies the political representation of the individual in the community. And the social sciences, in general, study kinds of representation, such as the representative "economic man." This makes the branches of social science special studies in democracy.

To be consistent, the sociologist has to study society as (more likely) she, for a fact, considers herself: a free agent. As the sociologist expects others to be responsible to her, she has to be responsible to them. Logically, the studied have to be on equal terms of freedom with the studiers. Socio-logic is of democracy.

The alternative is an oligarchy of knowledge or kind of secret priesthood, advocated by Auguste Comte, sociologys founder, at his worst. The barbarous jargon of a pseudo-science is a symptom of elitism. At the most basic level of learning, inconsistent English spelling privileges those with more time and money to waste, as Thorstein Veblen remarked.

Since societies are conditional upon language, then the democracy of language is a general law of society. Democracy is, to that extent, like the general laws in the natural sciences.

If language is the democracy of thought, then a democracy of action should follow from it. But political (or economic) democracy may not be the case. Then the conditions are not fully met for the democratic principle to work properly in a society.

This is as if, in natural science, the conditions, that a general law applied in, were not properly specified. But it is part of the "social function" or democratic process of science to do this. As a necessary complement to this, social scientific progress is a process of making society more democratic.

Such progress is not for some ideology to presume. All sorts of politics claim to be "democratic." We are three times warned of dubious credentials, by a "peoples democratic republic." This is no good, unless recognised scientific standards can be satisfied for democracy.

To say there should always be democracy in society is a moral law. A moral law is unscientific if it is only an imperative or unconditional statement, such as: you should do this or not do that. But an ideal of democracy can be progressively re-stated, as in natural science, by ever more precisely specifying the conditions for a general rule (of the people) to hold.

### History as the history of democracy

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Force of conquest has attempted human unity. But the importing, for instance, of a religious symbolism, or language in the broadest sense, paid lip-service to cohesion by peaceful means. Benedetto Croce is the philosopher of history as the history of liberty. Heinrich Heine also spoke in such terms.

HG Wells meant the Outline of History, to educate world unity and its democratic conditions. Thorstein Veblen was coming to similar conclusions, in The Nature of Peace. Wells tells history as one story of mankind, like a novel, in which the characters are introduced separately, before their paths cross.

Wells and Croce together make for a history of unity in liberty, that is history as the history of democracy.   
Both Wells and Bertrand Russell said that rulers have sought to impose unity and the ruled have sought to liberate themselves. (Hence the current struggle for and against a Euro-state.) Wells saw representative democracy as their only possible peaceful reconciliation.

Wells began the debate resulting in the 1940 Sankey Declaration of Human Rights:

"It has been the practise of what are called the democratic or parliamentary countries to meet every enhancement and centralization of power in the past by a definite and vigorous reassertion of the individual rights of man."

Section 11 includes: "electoral methods which give effective expression to individual choice."

Human history has the story-telling interest of not knowing how it will turn out. Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. Wells wanted democracy to make the world safe. Historical turning points have influenced the world for better or worse.

Sociologists consider what might have happened, "if only" some crucial event had gone the other way. Max Weber conducted imaginary experiments with history. The Greeks only won the battles of Marathon and Salamis against all the odds. So, it was realistic to consider what might have happened had they lost.

Weber knew by other Persian conquests, such as of Judea, that priestly authority was asserted over the prophets. Likewise, Greece would have lost its intellectual independence. Weber argued this would have been fatal for the development of Western civilization. (Such as it is!)

Weber used exactly the kind of thought experiments Einstein used with nature. Einstein imagined an accelerated spaceman, who, in dropping a weight seemingly acted upon by gravity, was leaving it behind by its own inertia. From this, his "principle of equivalence," of acceleration to gravity, was derived for prediction and test.

Whether Weber was right is debatable. (Zoroaster advocated progressive religion, and he may be the main source of the worlds monotheism.) The real point is that Webers contrary-to-fact statement, of orthodoxy ousting free thought in ancient Greece, implies a law of the progress of knowledge depending on freedom.

Webers historical conjecture can neither be proved or disproved. It was a unique event that cannot be repeated with a probable difference of outcome. But the general statement that knowledge depends on freedom is like a scientific law that can be tested in principle by checking the effects on knowledge of the presence or absence of freedom.

Knowledge is language in that "to speak the same language" means seeing the world in the same way. Unanimity is over some common ground, which offers a starting point for the freedom to differ and achieve ultimately a broader measure of agreement.

### Conditions of democracy.

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Science, consisting of theory and experiment, must respect both logic and evidence. The logical dependence, of unanimity on liberty, is that if people are not truly free, they cannot truly agree. But without some way of testing this statement by the evidence, it becomes a meaningless assertion or dogma.

The evidence might well show that allowing liberties destroyed unity. This could be explained as "taking liberties" that upset a countrys equilibrium of rights. When liberty appears to end unity, we cannot merely say it was "license," to suit our argument. That proves nothing except ones prejudice, which is unscientific.

Likewise, if one said the appearance of solidarity without dissent wasn't "true" unity or liberty, without explaining what one means by the truth, one doesn't allow oneself to be proved wrong. So, nothing meaningful or scientific about the world has been said.

From a critical survey of the evidence, we might decide which was true, unity with or without liberty. But a general rule of observation, one way or the other, if one could be found, is different from a logically deduced conclusion. For, we have no reason to believe that an empirical generalisation is more than a long, if suggestive, coincidence, that might cease to continue.

For example, a long unified people might decide to split up. There might be special reasons for this, such as a new threat that their integration somehow posed to their having enough elbow-room. But this could only be judged with regard to the evidence.

A coincidence of evidence might be no more than an _accidental generalisation_. One cannot make a logically certain deduction from it. One could not say for sure that if such a thing were the case, then something else would have to follow.   
Most people are familiar with this kind of statement as: "If only I had known then what I know now, everything would have been different." This is saying that knowledge gives freedom: know the truth and it will make you free.

These _"If only..." statements_ of contrary-to-the-fact conditions (counter-factual conditionals) are used, in the philosophy of science, to tell natural laws from accidental generalisatons, because only laws can imply them.

An overwhelming one-party vote is an accidental generalisation, due to the "accident" or contingency of the people being allowed no other choice. Therefore, no disproof of this apparent monomania is possible. In 1987, Izvestiya "officially admitted that the 99.99% _yes_ vote at Soviet elections was a farce." (The Sunday Times.)

A false unity can thus be defined as one commanded by a monopoly of power, as held by a one-party state or established church. An engineered unanimity is not some determinist law of history that people march thru as one party in one mind - historicism, as Karl Popper called it. In science, a law-like statement is conditional, such as: unanimity only in liberty.

The simplest test, of whether a country was truly united behind a single group in power, would be to ask public opinion, allowing independent groups and individuals to compete with the rulers for the popular choice of government.

As a test for evidence, free elections are a result of the scientific attitude. This work began because most people still do not realise that a free electoral system is required for a proper test of popular choice. The electoral test of true unity would be effective only with elections that truly gave freedom of individual choice.

The condition of unanimity in liberty could be precisely tested when it was put in electoral terms by Carl Andrae and Thomas Hare.   
Suffice to say here that John Stuart Mill, perhaps the leading philosopher of science in the nineteenth century, immediately realised its significance (in Representative Government, ch.vii, footnote 1):

"In the Danish Constitution...the equal representation of minorities was provided for on a plan so nearly identical with Mr Hare's, as to add another to the many examples how the ideas which resolve difficulties arising out of a general situation of the human mind or of society, present themselves, without communication, to several superior minds at once."

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## Science is ethics as "electics."

### A new metafysics and model of reality synthesising the deterministic & statistical world-views.

Table of contents

_Galileo Galilei._

#### Sections:

Preface.

The paradox of Archimedes.

The clockwork universe and the sub-lunary world.

Statistics from convenient approximation to reality description.

Electics of science.

The Droop quota as a (statistical) tie-break quota.

Harmonic Mean quota as ethical model of science synthesising the deterministic & statistical world-views.

Is art representation?

Note on panlogs.

Speling note: out of the technical limitations of the age of the moon borderland cosmos.

Conclusion: liberation science (science as liberation) in the equilibrium evolution of nature.

* * *

### Preface

To top.

Not only Britain perpetuates an education system that divides the nation into arts people and science people. This is what CP Snow called The Two Cultures. The politicians and the mass media are mostly the literati. The ruling class shows little critical understanding and less willingness to accept the discipline of scientific method. The Establishment rules on an ignorantly top-down basis of "elective dictatorship."

Science is by democratic consensus, or should be.  
Discovery is for everyone, not just specialists.

It's fairly well covered that science is a democratic enterprise. HG Wells started not only the Sankey declaration of Human Rights in 1940. He followed it with a Charter of Scientific Fellowship, which recognises, in a simple constitution of the profession, its democratic and progressive nature.

Lee Smolin points out the similarlity of science with democracy, in The Trouble With Physics (which I reviewed in my e-book, Science and Democracy Reviews).

It's one thing to see scientists working democraticly together. It's another to express a liberating electoral world-view, which is the destination of this discourse.

_"The True History" by Lucian of Samosata, on his moon journey._

### The paradox of Archimedes

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The work of Archimedes marked the culmination of the ingenuity of the ancient world. The Martian heat rays, from The War Of The Worlds, by HG Wells, had a portent. Archimedes focused the sun-light thru giant lenses, to burn the Roman warships besieging Syracuse.

The Crystal Sun, by Robert Temple, found artefacts languishing in museums, that turned out to be ancient lenses. In the preface, Arthur C Clarke remarks that one would think that someone like Archimedes would think of looking thru two lenses, to discover the telescope.

That earliest of science-fiction writers, Lucian of Samosata, in The True History (c. 180 AD), says, after his ship went on a whirl-wind journey to the moon, he looked thru a giant lens to magnify the sights on earth, so that he could see them.   
When I read that, I realised that the magnifying property of the lens, but not the telescope, was general knowledge, at that time.

No scholar told me that. I worked it out for myself, from the evidence that the story incidentally presented to me. That just goes to show that any-one, on the look-out, can find out interesting things, often unexpectedly.   
(Hence, the quotation from Desmond Morris, at the start of this book.)

We do not know for sure whether Archimedes did not discover the telescope. It is reasonable to assume that he didn't, because the aligning of two lenses is an easy concept to pass on.   
In any case, it doesn't affect the moral of this story, which is that the greatest of us can over-look the obvious. This moral has an important consequence, namely that the least of us may stumble on the obvious. Science is a democracy.

Recently, lost mathematical writing by Archimedes was re-discovered, as the underlying text of a palimpsest. Apparently, he made further progress with the calculus, than had been thought.

A favorite extravagance of mine, originating from AN Whitehead, is that the history of science is a foot-note to the work of Archimedes. A reviewer, JL Berggren, of The Archimedes Codex, by Reviel Netz and William Noel, takes this claim seriously enough to dissent from it. Yet, it does not seem such an extravagance, since the research into the origins of the planetarium, found in a Mediterranean ship-wreck by Jacques Cousteau.

The instrument is believed to have come from Syracuse, presumably the work-shop of Archimedes, who had the mathematical ability to measure, to scale, the planetary orbits in a mechanical model. An out-standing feature was the use of differential gears, not re-discovered til the seventeenth century.

In one of his (televised) books of this mysterious world, Arthur C Clarke reported the claim that had this skill not been lost, Earth, by now, would already be a space-faring planet (about two thousand years ahead of what Earth is now).   
Tho the clockwork model did not survive in Europe, it found its way round the Islamic world, eventually re-emerging in Moorish Spain, to inaugurate the Renaissance.

Here again, in the case of Archimedes, we are struck by the fact that even the most out-standing of geniuses has its limitations. The planetarium was a geocentric model, not a heliocentric model. Admittedly, the heliocentric hypothesis is only obvious to us, because we are familiar with it. The idea arose from Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-230 BC), who was about twenty-five years older than Archimedes, who mentioned the hypothesis, in a letter. (Bertrand Russell: History Of Western Philosophy.)

The paradox of Archimedes is that the more stupendous the range of his genius is revealed to us, the more curious its apparent omissions.   
Isaac Newton knew that he was but a child playing on the sea shore, with the wonders of the universe jostling all around him. Those wonders are there to be shared by all.

Karl Popper, in his books on The Open Society And Its Enemies, prefaces his work with a quotation from Edmund Burke, to the effect, that, in his experience, the legislation of the greatest never failed to be improved, in some measure, by contributions from among the least of talents.

Seven Cups For The Searching Soul, partly written by a popular psychologist of the 7 Cups Community, states, as a finding, that a group of the best minds does not do as well as a group representative of the range of human intelligence.

The ancient world-view of Aristotle was scientific in spirit, in that it was based on an observation of two apparently different kinds of reality. Everything on earth seemed to be subject to decay and change. This was designated the sublunary world, because everything, in the heavens, from the Moon outwards seemed to revolve in an unchanging order. With regard to the Moon, this isn't so far from the truth. This dead world doesn't have even the meteorology of Mars.  
CS Lewis recalled this dual out-look, in The Discarded Image.

James Michener, in Space, remarks that every human-inhabited continent but Europe left observation of the twelfth century nova, whose remains lie at the heart of the crab nebula. The Chinese, with their charming Confucian courtesy, called it a guest star.

This concept would conflict with European scholars heaven-earth dualism of perfect and immutable versus temporary and changable. That may be why the nova was never recorded in Europe, because it couldn't have happened, according to their current conceptions.

Trying to find facts that contradict existing theories, to shake them up and improve them, is basic to modern science. I don't know, tho, that we are any less prone to rigidity of mind, ignoring and down-right rejecting new ideas that break with convention.

And the right ideas have to be found by the right people. Only the scientists "peers" are up for "peer review." The profession sound like the barons of magna carta, with its right to be judged by ones peers. Its rights append "except for the common people." Politicians and academics play a blind mans buff with democracy, political and economic.

It was not til snubbed and intimidated pioneers, like Galileo, started looking thru telescopes that similarities, like the mountains of the moon, between the heavenly and earthly worlds became apparent.

### The clockwork universe and the sub-lunary world.

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We now know that the clockwork universe was well and truly originated by the ancient Greeks.   
The Archimedes planetarium was a model of the known heavens. The model may be used as a metafor, when the whole universe is thought to be rather like the model, in some points of comparison, without being the same thing.

The clockwork model becomes metafysics, when the universe is actually thought to run like clockwork, as in the filosofy of the mechanical universe.

The Renaissance and the Newtonian universe were only a much belated revival of mechanical determinism, as a metafysics or metafor or model for the construction of creation.

Right (R'it) into our own times, when I was a student, nearly half a century ago, our social science course discussed whether this natural science of universal laws, science par excellence, as it was conceived, could ever be discovered for a science of society.

We were aware that society defied scientific prediction, like Aristotles sublunary world, full of fysical corruption and change.   
Then there is the moral corruption of power politics, with a deceit that defies reliability.

Sociologists were reconciled to the study of statistics to find, in human behavior, approximate regularities that extend, in the mass, to irregular individuals.   
Influenced by Ernest Nagel, in The Structure Of Science, which was already out-dated when it came out in 1960, I was lagging in the modern conception of natural science, whereby the statistical explanation of quantum physics is the more general and exact explanation than the clockwork model of supposedly exactly determined motions.

The seal of this, on the public mind, was made quite recently, when Stephen Hawking asserted that God does play dice, in contradiction to a famous belief of Einstein.

For Isaac Newton, JD Bernal observed, God was like a constitutional monarch, who set the wheels of creation in motion, letting them run on, in their determined course.

### Statistics from convenient approximation to reality description.

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Nineteenth-century thermodynamics determined that the wheels of the mechanism of the universe eventually would run down. The whole of creation was deemed to fall under the observation that there is no perpetual motion machine with complete efficiency in converting energy to work.

In the case of a true or completely self-contained universe, the conservation of energy law would prevent any energy loss outside the universe (by definition without an out-side) therefore a universal perpetual motion machine.   
There might be energy loss from the universe, as one member of a multiverse. Therefore, a running-down universe would imply it was not truly universal. (I derived this implication for myself. It is not an idea repeated from physics. That is the case with a lot of this book, for instance, the whole idea that science is ethics.)

The random molecular motion of heat energy always dissipates, so it was apprehended that the universe was similarly fated to a heat-death, in the extreme long-term, when there were no more concentrations of energy, such as life itself manifests, to be harnessed.

Thermodynamics could only measure molecular motion statistically in the mass. This still assumed that all the individual molecules hit each other as deterministicly as balls on a billiard table.

In 1900, Max Planck introduced the quantum, as a concept to mathematicly explain black-body radiation. He didn't actually believe in its reality.  
In 1905, Albert Einstein used the light (l'it) quantum or foton (photon) to explain the foto-electric effect. Instead of explaining the different wavelengths of l'it as waves, he explained them as low to high (h'i) energy fotons. Many low energy fotons could not knock the electrons out of the atoms of a metal but even a few h'i energy fotons could.

Einstein broke with Planck, by believing in the reality of his quantum concept. Quanta are real, the h'i energy quanta are energetic enuf (enough) to knock electrons out of atoms.

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford proposed a planetary model of the atom, with a nucleus like the sun, orbited by electrons like the planets. This was still in terms of Newton prediction of individual motions of heavenly bodies. Like the case of black body radiation, classical calculations did not fit observations.

Instead, Neils Bohr modeled the atom to predict statistical probabilities of electron positions, at increased or decreased energy levels, from absorbing or emitting a foton or light quantum of given energy. These light quanta are discrete energy packets and the energy levels of the electrons are subject to discrete moves of position, the so-called quantum jumps.

Whatever the magnitude of quantum energy, it was always a multiple of an irreducible minimum quantity, the quantum.

Quantum fysics broke with the classical conception of continuously observable and predictable motion.  
Here, Bohr broke with Einstein, who still believed mechanical determinism the more basic kind of explanation than statistical determinism.

The view of Bohr and later quantum fysicists prevailed. Statistics in fysics had moved from being a convenient approximation, used in thermodynamics, to an essential description of the fenomena in subatomic fysics.

The existence of irreducible quantum (kuantum) fluctuations of energy meant there was no absolute zero of temperature, no absolute "heat death" because of energy coming in these minimal packets or quanta.

Consequently, the classical empty vacuum of space becomes a "sea" of virtual energy, transitorily creating particles and anti-particles, which yet conservatively add up to zero.   
The magnitude of this spontaneous, probabilistic energy creation, only obeys energy conservation, on a scale of borrowed time, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

There are better explanations of modern fysics than mine, by those qualified to give them. But that may just about do, to give a hopefully not too misleading impression of how the metafysics of fysics has changed from that of God the law-giver to God the gambler! or God the chance-taker. It is as if the constitutional law of the universe had passed over to the random selection of legislators!

It is perhaps a sign of the times that some political reformers, increasingly seriously, speak of extending random jury selection to random legislature selection. This, after all, assumes a gamble, on the quality of your law-making, is probably better than the determined selection of representatives.

It worked well for the British Columbia Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform. But the parties could not contain themselves from kicking over the table, when the game didn't go their way.

This legislative gamble over-looks that single transferable voting is the essential scientific theory and method of elections. Yet, STV was precisely the recommendation of the BC CA report, much to its credit.

CS Lewis says the idea of a natural law actually comes from the law that society makes to keep itself in order. Natural law is a metafor of the universe, as a well governed society. Taken seriously as such, natural law is a metafysics.   
Coming from Aristotle, "metafysics" literally means his book after the fysics.

Sceptics seemed to jump to the conclusion, that because metafysics is not the reality of fysics but an after-thought to reality, it is therefore irrelevant. Hence, the move by David Hume to have metafysics consigned to the flames. That is rather like abolishing dress because it hides nakedness.

Hume abolishing metafysics is rather like abolishing theater, because it is only make-believe. The puritans did abolish the theater, and pure science may be not so far removed from puritanism.

Perhaps we should see, in the vaunting of pure science over applied science, the over-sight that science is not only relative, but creative. In understanding the universe, science unavoidably brings-in something new. It would be more scientific to come to terms with this fact.

### Electics of science.

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This chapter suggests a new metafysics and model for science. It isn't trying to introduce metafysics into science, because metafysics has always been there.

The insight (ins'it) for this initiative came from one of my simpler discoveries about election method, which combined previous metafysics or models of determinism and chance. The study of election method, the realisation of many peoples choices in representation, effects a science of ethics. Ethics wouldn't be a problem, if there were no social conflicts from our individual choices.

That one ins'it, by itself, wouldn't have amounted to much. The theme of this book is that it was backed by a life-times successive finding, that all the sciences, I touched upon, have an electoral interpretation. Hence, my new metafysics and model suggests science is ethics or "electics."

This consistent finding of electoral perspectives, on the sciences, is why I call this approach a model. I mean an example, that may be followed in future researches, because it has held in previous investigations.

A metafysics may be likened to a dress upon reality, rather than reality itself. Its value depends not on it being reality but on how good a fit to reality it is or how suitable it is; how well it wears in all circumstances. In this respect, a good metafysics becomes a model, in the sense of a practical program directing research more fruitfully.

A metafysics may say we live in an elective, literally a "choosing-out" or a moral universe. There is good reason to think so, since a universe, meaning the whole, must be, by definition, self-determining and free of other influence.

The logicly free universe reminds of the Buddhist notion of Godhead as Liberation. When I thought of that idea, as a young man, I had just read Vedanta for the Western World, edited by Christopher Isherwood.   
I might (m'it) also mention Liberation theology, but admit to knowing little about either.

However, reason alone is not enuf. Does the program or model, the metafysics engenders, illuminate all areas of scientific experience?

The sense, I am using the words, metafysics and model, comes close to the standard scientific distinction between theory and experiment or practical test. But the latter terms usually apply to precise specialist work, in a given science. The former terms are what the jargon of scientific method calls a "heuristic" or loosely useful approach before, hopefully, getting down to brass tacks.

### The Droop quota as a (statistical) tie-break quota.

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The old filosofical wrangle, between determinism and free will, comes into my innovation of a Harmonic Mean (HM) quota, for a proportional election count.   
(This is discussed in my previous e-book, in this series.)

The HM quota is an average of two variations on the harmonic series, the Hare and Droop quotas, The relation of the three quotas supplies a practical basis for balancing determinism and chance, so that choice is not unduly swayed by either.

The merit of this three-quotas conception is that it defines otherwise slippery filosofic terms, by clear relations of simple arithmetic. This construct provides a basis in evidence for a working relationship, between determinism, chance and choice, upon which science depends to progress beyond foggy disputes.

When candidates get equal votes, or tie, there has to be a tie-break, for instance when two candidates each get 50 out of 100 votes seeking one seat. Or when three candidates get 33 out of 99 votes, seeking two seats, there is a tie to be broken by chance means such as drawing the short straw.

These examples are the minimum votes required for election as specified by the Droop quota: votes/(seats +1).

A tie-break is a chance settlement of an election, when there is no difference in votes between candidates.

I describe the Droop quota, as a tie-break quota, statistically speaking, for want of a better description. I mean that it allows election of candidates that may not be prefered, at a statistical level of significance. In other words, the Droop quota allows elections in which chance fluctuations may decide the outcome.

Even tho the result may not be an exact equality of votes between candidates, from a statistical point of view, it might just as well be.

For example, the Droop quota would elect one candidate with 53 votes out of a hundred against 47 votes to the other candidate. That would not be a very significant victory by the laws of chance. Whereas, say 55 votes might be significant, especially if it is 55% of a much larger electorate, minimising the possibility that the win was a chance result.

Hence, the characterisation of the Droop quota as a (statistical) tie-break quota.  
Some happier term may be forthcoming, but that is an attempt to capture the gist of a democratic inadequacy in the Droop quota.

That is not to say the Droop quota may not be needed, and obviously much more often than an exact tie-break. Never the less, that is its essential function, statistically speaking. That is to say, the Droop quota is not an ideally democratic quota.

The opposite fault characterises the Hare quota, defined as: votes divided by seats, or, (votes)/(seats), or, v/s. For a candidate to monopolise all 100 votes out of 100 would be improbable. The improbablity decreses with the number of seats per constituency. Under the Hare quota, two candidates have to duopolise 75 votes each out of 150 votes.

The Hare quota implies some suspension of individual choice for a power by one, or a few, to determine group choice.  
(It brings to mind Joe Chamberlain of the Birmingham caucus, marshalling supporters votes to take all the Birmingham seats.)

As I suggested before, the two contrary influences, in the Hare and Droop quotas, both to the detriment of democratic elections, can be neutralised by taking their average. The suitable average for a harmonic series, in terms of votes per seat, is the harmonic mean. What I call the (simple) harmonic mean quota is: votes/(seats + 1/2).

This is no mere idle theoretical consideration. The allegation (due to the Droop quota), that STV is not proportional enuf, falls down when the HM quota is used. And the notion of a completely proportional system (required by the Hare quota) is delusive from a democratic point of view.

### Harmonic Mean quota as ethical model of science synthesising the deterministic & statistical world-views.

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About a century or more ago, scientific filosofers like Bertrand Russell were laying the foundations of mathematics in logic. Russell paradox of classes was an early hiccup in that program.   
Godel theorem of incompleteness, of theoretical deduction, followed from studying Principia Mathematica, by Russell and Whitehead.   
Following on from that, Arrow theorem led to the social choice theorists critique of election method deficiencies.

The deterministic world view of Newton Physics inspired Russell to name his work on foundation mathematics, after Newtons great work. This determinism was also idealised by Einstein, but successfully contested in his debates with the likes of Neils Bohr, who, with Einstein himself, pioneered statistical predictions of sub-atomic behavior.

My apologies again for this crude and cryptic recapitulation of classical and modern models of science.  
My innovation of a Binomial STV, is itself an example of elections, like physics, being basicly statistical.

The virtue of a filosofical appreciation, of the assumptions behind proportional representation, using my other innovation of a Harmonic Mean quota, is that it relates in a very simple and precise mathematical way how determinism (represented by the Hare quota) and chance (represented by the Droop quota) can be neutralised by statistical averaging (thru the HM quota) to produce or liberate choice.

The implications of this are, firstly, that the new and old models of science both have a legitimate role, because they complement each other. But that legitimacy depends on the purpose for which they complement each other, which is to liberate choice.

In short, a more complete combined model of science serves freedom of choice.

Know the truth and it will make you free. This post-modern science is profesied by the Gospels. (You don't have to be a fundamentalist or bibliolater to appreciate early human wisdom.)

Science is truly ethical. This goes against a wide-spread academic dogma, stuck in the dualism of facts and values, from parroting David Hume.  
HG Wells followed Kantian answer to Hume, that there is no sharp division between the natural sciences and what Kant called the moral sciences, usually called social sciences.

I remember my tutor repeating to me Hume slogan that you cannot derive an "ought" ("ot") from an "is." "You really can't" he added, as if I needed specially convincing.   
That seemed a straw man argument even then. In the light of the subject of this chapter, I would respond (after less than half a century delay) that deriving an "ot" from an "is" would be treating ethics, as if it could be determined. But ethics, by definition is not deterministic; it is (freedom of) choice.

My experience confirmed, that English education is dogged by this dualism between humanities and science. Charles P Snow called it "the two cultures" believing it to be a cause of bad government. Typicly, scientists are absent from the British government, and its media.

The Harmonic Mean quota gives an example of how choice emerges from a balance between determinism and chance. Therefore, choice doesn't come from determinism alone, as Hume refuted; nor does it come from chance alone.

Scientific method relies not only on the classic logical determinism, of such as Isaac Newton, but on chance evolution, as pioneered by Charles Darwin. Just as deterministic mechanics was used as a model for aspirants to other sciences, so the stochastic theory of Natural Selection has been adapted to other sciences. (I surveyed some of these, in a previous chapter.)

Not only body, but mind also, is subject to effects of random sensory stimulations on memory. And this is where we come to this curious limitation of memory formation thru reinforced response to more favorable of chance conditionings. The baby says ma-ma and mother picks it up and hugs it, til the baby learns that calling the sounds, ma-ma, will bring its mother.

Yet, language (as mentioned at end of chapter on Conditioning and Instinct) appears to depend not altogether on rewarding chance noises, but on an inherited sense of grammar that early falls into abeyance, if not picked up in the company of human speech. This led to the structural linguistics of Chomsky. (I know he thought English orthography almost perfect. But we don't have to agree with him about everything.)

Language structure or grammar is the prototype of the logical system of classical science. It is of recent provenance in human evolution. Mathematics is its advance guard, not yet well established in most peoples minds. The quality of teaching also varies extremely.

There are people, who used to be called computers, in effect, human calculating machines. Studies have been conducted on what algorithms their brains are using, of which they themselves are completely unconscious. The operation is too fast for observation, perhaps rather as a bubble bursts too quickly for the eye to see.  
Human computers are a rare minority. Likewise, the lyre bird is not typical even of birds, in its capacity for perfect imitation of sounds, however unnatural.

This instinctive recording and replaying seems to have its basis in fysical properties of lifeless materials.   
Long ago, I was surprised that I could hear my typewriter start clacking when I was not typing. I had just put-on the fire. This heated iron bars, guarding the fire, which energised the vibrations that had passed thru the bars when I was typing.  
Heat is random vibrations but it amplified a determined pattern of vibrations.

One can guess from the evolution of computers how brains, like bodies, have gained some degree of specialised or structured function. The weaving loom, with its cards for different weaving patterns, is the prototype of the computer hardware with different programs (the software) installed.

Even so, computer models of the brain include unspecialised neural networks, which are mapped thru weighting configurations, according to patterns of behavior.  
Studies have shown that most people are good at guessing approximations to the numbers in a group, rather than the exact number.

Even mathematics, the stronghold of certain proof, has had to cede results to the natural selection principle, applied to the fittest of random mutations in computer programs, gradually but speedily, to arrive at results.

Mathematics, at least, felt it had to be consciously aware of each step of the way, to ensure a proof was absolutely true. Now this is no longer true. The four-color problem was solved by working out more combinations than unaided human endeavor could ever hope to verify.

There is something of a double standard in decrying the unconscious manipulations of machines. Humans may be conscious but are also fallible. I suppose, the feeling is that people can be conscious of errors, unlike machines. But people also lapse into relatively mindless habit, in routine or protracted checking.

And consciousness may not guarantee correctness, even from the properly qualified. In this respect, a properly qualified man is similar to a properly qualified or programed machine. Some mathematicians have claimed that computers can be unreliable because full of bugs. Machines like men may not be always reliable. That is all that criticism amounts to.

Correct procedure may be distinct from more or less awareness of the fact. In that respect, the use of a human, instead of a mechanical, checker is not essential and mostly not even possible, nowadays.

This consideration brings to mind the mistake that believing a thing to be true makes it true. Human checking a computer calculation doesn't make it any the more true. The contrary is the case. You would trust an electronic calculator much sooner than yourself, to do sums, tho it may be good mental exercise.

Within its existing capabilities, the machine is generally much more efficient than the man. That is the point of machines. And why we fear they may replace us.  
In 2016, this fear materialised in the announcement of an over-ride to the possibility of Artificial Intelligence over-riding human programming instructions.

To further sum-up, the drift of human knowledge appears to indicate that the sciences are all of a piece. Mathematics is no longer quite the bastion of certainty and sure-fire rigor, we once did think. Whether or no, the queen of the sciences, mathematics is like the rest of the sciences, in being a play or dialog between order and disorder.

This structural play goes right (r'it) thru the subject matter of the sciences and may be the genesis of ethics in the natural world.

How that play or dialog is followed, more or less rigorously or randomly, may be defined as choice, the balance of the steering between the two extremes of law and lawlessness, or the rule book and personal initiative, or principled decisions and intuitive motivations, or analytic thot (thought) and holistic comprehension.

Thus, choice itself ranges from extremes of objective choice to subjective choice, according to the nature of the information before the choosers, whether well defined or vaguely dependent on the sum and balance of feeling experience. Subjective feeling may not be reliable experience itself. But it is the emotional weightings we have accumulated thru the layers of experience that life has put us thru.

The dismissal of subjectivity as "unscientific," notoriously unreliable tho it is, does not do justice to its importance in contributing weights of feeling to knowledge assessment, comparable to the information-weighting procedure of connectionist computors.  
Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence expert approved of robots being given emotions.

Mathematics, in particular, has increasingly become reconciled to the instrumental value of indeterminate or groping means of arriving at determinate results.  
Maths still seeks results, which are of the nature of objective elections, or choices made that everyone can agree are proven true, on the basis of a selection or "election" (including exclusion) procedure of proof.

### Is art representation?

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I admit that this scheme or paradigm, Science is Ethics as Electics, cannot itself afford a comprehensive picture of human experience. Science and ethics cover only thinking and doing, and not feeling, the third part of a trinity of life. Aristotle defined these categories as the true, the good and the beautiful. So what of beauty, the subject of esthetics?

Scientists have testified to the esthetic nature of theories, in terms of the beautiful simplicity of their ruling ideas, that logicly develop an elegant structure of explanation, connecting many disparate phenomena.

A previous chapter discussed scientific theory as a language.  
Following Benedetto Croce, RG Collingwood, in Principles Of Art, characterised art, in terms of a language of imaginative expression.   
He rejected the notion of art as representation.   
With the advent of the camera, there was not the demand for painters to do realistic representations, that left exact memories of individuals in portraits.  
In that narrow sense, art was no longer representation.

Herbert Read pointed out that abstract art, in its colors and shapes, still expresses feelings and actions, action painting no less.  
Lurid colors and primitive images may forcefully represent shocking emotions. They may go below the rationally perceived out-lines of surface reality and still represent some deeper unconscious reality. Or indeed, art may remove itself from mundane objects to give a sense of spiritual realities not otherwise easily conveyed or represented.

This appears to be the secret of ancient cave art, as described by Nigel Spivey, in How Art Made The World. Such art may or may not represent mundane reality but it is representing altered states of consciousness.

A further theme by Spivey is how art was used in the service of empire. From ancient Rome to the present, art has been not only representational but presentational. Architectural advertising and theatrical spectacle has projected the man of power to the people, as distinct from giving power to the people.  
Esthetics over-comes ethics.

On occasion, the reverse is true. Esthetics promotes ethics. Nehru acknowledged how HG Wells, the Outline Of History, reminded the world of Asoka. In revulsion from the butchery on field of battle, he vowed to promote only the peaceful ideals of Buddhism, leaving monumental testaments to its teachings, thru-out his empire.

I'm not going to try to do justice to Pitirim Sorokin on how the arts have reflected the changing nature of civilisations perceptions of reality. Over the centuries, the focus changes, say, from heaven and hell to earth - or heaven and hell on earth.

Painting and music have gone thru phases religious and mundane. Sorokin thought that painting, becoming more abstract again in the early 20th century, was a deceptive blip, in the trend from spiritual to mundane.   
I'm not sure that he recognised the value, in its own r'it, of representational tone painting, such as the magnificent heavy-duty railway engine journey, Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger. Trains seem to have been a sort of secular religion of awe for Honneger, like child train-spotters perhaps.

Not to mention Strawberry Fields Forever, by The Beatles. Their producer George Martin got the effect of the analog fone lines, Lennon endorsed (if not in later years) and as I am old enuf to testify. When I was a young child, with excellent hearing, walking alone on a quiet country lane, I tried to decifer the weird burblings in the over-head wires.

Art remains representational, tho it may change to, and from, representing realities of which we are less aware, whether instinctual or spiritual.   
One could characterise the whole of life in thinking, feeling and doing, or science, esthetics and ethics, as representation.

I guess the greatest achievement of social science was that Pitirim Sorokin recognised, from comprehensive historical research, (especialy in his master-piece, Social and Cultural Dynamics) that civilizations need to integrate religious and secular values, rather than dismiss religion as a primitive social phase, if they are not to destabilise, swinging from one extreme to the other, in the way they hold things sacred and profane.   
This comes out, with respect to contemporary values, in The Sensate Culture by Harold OJ Brown, a theologian on Sorokin.

One mundane or secular, rather than religious, means of social stabilisation can be found in the JS Mill tradition, of liberty in science, including Carl Andrae and Thomas Hare discovery of proportional representation by transferable voting.

### Note on panlogs

Any word chosen as a panlog or universal term is going to have a history of usage, which associates it more with one of the three basic categories than the other two. Representation is perhaps most closely associated with democratic action.

An alternative panlog, coming from an artistic background, might be the word, imagination, or perhaps: symbolism. The image represents or is the symbol of reality. So, the representative is the symbol of the people, in the sphere of action. And in the sphere of intellect, science is the formulation of abstract symbols representing reality.

A further alternative panlog, maybe coming from a scientific background, might be the word, information. Science becomes a hierarchy or pyramid of knowledge that researchers climb, from the basis of experience, in the hope of reaching ever more concise formulation of information towards its pinnacle of first principles.

Information is also the function of the democratic representative, who is supposed to inform himself and others, thru debates and investigative committees in Parliament.

And information is also the function of the arts, albeit a personal disclosure of individual states of mind, intent and feeling, that does not lay claim to universal truths or generalities or precise probabilities, we seek in the sciences.

Other candidate words might be: form and measurement. "Science is measurement." Measurement represents observations. The logic of measurement is the key to the logic of elections.   
Architectural proportions satisfying the golden mean are found from classical times.

People were tested by comparing the abstract paintings of Mondrian, shown anonymously, with arbitrarily proportioned alternatives. Those of Mondrian were judged the better formed.  
Mathematical intuitions of form under-lie esthetic values.

One could invent a new word (like the word, panlog, is new) and define it as the universal word, equally applicable, or neutral, to the three basic categories of thinking doing and feeling. But that approach, in itself, would betray an intellectual predisposition.   
Not that that is wrong, so long as one understands what one is doing.

Similarly, an artistic predisposition might seek to portray the basic categories, in a sort of trinitarian mandala, reminiscent of illustrations found in CG Jung books on the psychology of alchemy.

A spiritual exercise of Vedanta induces trances by repeating the "language Brahman," the sound AUM, usually spelt OM, signifying the complete range of fonemes (phonemes) to human speech, in a single fonemic representation of the whole of language, repeated til it resounds thru the universe of consciousness.

The language Brahman is a sound version, like the mandala is a visual version of an esthetic panlog.

* * *

### Speling note: on technical limitations from the age of the moon borderland cosmos.

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I did not simplify the spelling of Stephen Hawking to Steven or Stefen, because that's a personal name. In speling "fysics" with an f, I'm following a European languages practise.

This chapter uses the apostrofe to mark a missing vowel in a dipthong. Hence: light as l'it. This has fonetic rendering as: lait. Hence: high as h'i. Or indeed, the colloquial speling: hi.

In how we maintain our language, we are still technologicly in the age when the Aristotle moon borderland cosmos was the intellectual reality of European man.

The apostrofe may replace a technical anachronism dating back to the first English printer. William Caxton used the most common letter type he possessed, e, to distinguish five dipthongs from the five vowels. This confuses the vowel e, with an accent e, which is not a foneme at all.

Hence, we all follow the Caxton printing press limitation, technicly out-dated by more than half a millenium, in distinguishing, for example, the words: mad & made.

The apostrofe could replace accent, e. Hence: made becomes ma'd. This is foneticly the same word as: maid. But the alternate ways, of speling ma'd and maid, preserves their separate meanings.

### Conclusion: liberation science (science as liberation) in the equilibrium evolution of nature.

(4/09/2014.)  
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While absent, our lecturers put us sixties students on a three day course in computers. (As far as I got.) Passing mention was given to a new science called systems analysis. When I came across a book with this title, I found out it was about the background mathematics for computer scientists, namely things like symbolic logic and statistics.

This subject was more akin to a method or technique, or blueprint for physical systems, like computers, rather than theory. When I think of systems, I think more of theories. To me, systems analysis would be a study of the array of theories in the sciences and their structural similarities.

In this latter context, I briefly consider the place of electoral science in relation to the established sciences.

I considered democratic method, in terms of scientific method to determine voting system that is both a good electoral test or experiment, and a good theory of choice.

I also compared scientific method of elections, as I conceived it, with the leading theories of the sciences, whether they be relativity or the periodic table or evolution and ecology.  
As knowledge and freedom depend upon each other, a scientific theory of choice is implicit in election method.

I've gone over that many times, and don't wish to repeat it here. I now want to take this outlook a step further.   
Without fully realising it, my (web-site) essay, on Physics and Politics, may have been a first naive exploration (and also my last) of a new stage of understanding the place of election studies in the sciences, and more generally of science in relation to ethics and religion.

I touched upon different election quotas, giving different proportions of representation, as more or less stable outcomes of different electoral situations. This compares to a chemical element, like water, having different states of equilibrium: ice, water, steam.

Cosmology has adopted such thinking, in terms of transitional states, in the evolution of the universe. The four known forces of nature were thought to have been one, from an original condensed cosmic fireball that proliferated the forces in a cooling expansion.

I felt like someone with the key (equilibrium liberation) to a cupboard full of jumble, that he could not open, lest it tumble all over him. He is too old to put it all back again, in good order.

Yet, a pattern emerges in the panorama of sciences as studies of more or less independent states within the independent state of the universe itself. By the same token, the universe may be just one more or less independent state of the multi-verse.

When I left college, I had something of an emotional relapse, I suppose, from the lack of stimulating company, as well as not having learned how to love, while youth was still on my side.

In my twenties, I read the gospels and was struck by the prevalence of superstition, that Jesus the liberator of love defied, and the persecution this brought upon him. Then I considered the history of so-called Christianity, in terms of its persecutions and superstitions.

This led me to a simple theory of emotional imbalance or instability, that hadn't sufficiently learned how to co-exist in stably loving relations. Societies, like individuals, could be mentally ill, in violent swings between hateful oppression and fearful depression. Unstable individuals are themselves liable to be destabilising of others. There is a domino effect, of the emotionly unstable, on society.

Other unstable pairs of traits, like avarice and sloth, envy and pride, are also profoundly demoralising of social cohesion.

CG Jung taught the importance of emotional equilibrium. For example, foregoing too much egoism or self-praise could prevent an "inflation" or swelled head, as its commonly known.  
His psychology is of a life-time attainment of equilibrium of the personality.

When young, to make ones way in the world, one has to lead with ones strong suit, to establish a place for oneself in a competitive society. When one gets older, one wants to make-up for the undeveloped aspects of ones personality, to become a more complete human being.

This is what Jung called the integration of the personality. He took the idea of homeostasis in physiology and pointed-out a psychological equivalent. It's essentially the idea of learning to regulate emotional swings back and forth, back and forth.   
A person may integrate all the makings of several lives, otherwise regretably neglected. One-sidedness of personality may incite opposition from lesser selfs, leading to internal conflict, instead of a harmonious community of selfs, that makes for a fulfilled and interesting individual.

Just as equilibrium is the core of Jung psychology, so it is of Sorokin sociology. For the society to have a lasting stability, it must integrate sacred and secular values, lest society become hopelessly unbalanced, in one direction or the other, ultimately driving it, from one extreme to the other, in a series of revolutionary disasters, if not ultimate collapse.

By learning to become dynamically stable but adaptive, or in dynamic equilibrium, the individual and society are liberating themselves.

Thus, science becomes an understanding of liberation, as thru the evolution of equilibrium states, in cosmology, chemistry, ecology, psychology, sociology. Genuine science perhaps is no different, in intent, from what might be considered a scientific philosophy of liberation, in a religion like Buddhism.

This, then, on retiring age, was my (sketchy) conclusion as to the nature of science and its proper role in civilisation.   
I have attempted a unitary filosofy, imperfect but not dogmatic, muddled but suggestive.

I am reminded of EF Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful. To show that economics is a moral science, he playfully posits a Buddhist economics, based on different principles to Western capitalism. Gandhi economics were a foremost influence on him.

Jung and Sorokin were among the great reconcilers of a mature conception of science with religion of love (such as defined by CS Lewis in The Four Loves).

In qualification, I would say that continental European thinkers generally have over-looked the practical application of liberation to society in the representative democracy advocated by the filosofer of science, John Stuart Mill.

Fair play, as in the abolished US Fairness doctrine, is required in the political arena, just as in a private legal case, including scientific evidence free from prejudice and contempt of due process.  
This is a huge problem for society, as a whole, even for survival itself.

We know much of the answers that would make the world a better place to live in. We can improve our understanding of what needs to be done, reducing or marginalising parasitism in government. Ultimately, the very condition of freedom itself ensures that humanity cannot altogether eliminate the possibility that people will make disasterous choices.   
Mankind can determine how to improve its chances, tho.

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## Physics and freedom.

Table of contents.

#### Sections:

Special relativity principle.

The Uncertainty principle.

Conclusion: a general theory of choice.

### Special relativity principle.

Since news-papers started their Green columns, ecology has rivalled astrology, as a concern with intimate influences on our lives, from near or far.   
The natural philosopher used to think of himself as apart from nature. He prided himself in being a detached observer of the world around him. He didn't see why the way he looked at things should change what he saw.

He searched for the laws that governed the motions of the stars, and other projectiles, to make them predictable. Laws are statements of precise conditions, under which a general law operates.   
Chaos theory was to show how the tiniest change in the conditions produced a different result, that was unrepeatable and unpredictable. The classical science of the pendulum swing is repeatable enough. But under certain forced oscillations, non-repeatable swing patterns emerge, in these and allied phenomena, as strange and beautiful as the intricate contours of butterfly wings.

Long before chaos theory, classical physicists were obliged to accept a new rule that took into account the different times and positions, in which their observations were taken, if they were to agree that the motions of bodies, they observed, followed laws of physics.

This new rule was the special theory of relativity. It postulated that nothing can move faster than light. Trying, to over-take a light ray, slows the clock down; the space-measure or ruler shortens, and one becomes more massive, in ones frame of reference, relative to another observers frame.

The Lorentz transformations were equations devised to relate observers different space and time co-ordinates, as demonstrably the same observation. Actually, their different measurements could be shown to be the same measurement, from the point of view of a four-dimensional "space-time," so-called. That is a generalisation of Euclid classical geometry in three dimensions to a distinct fourth dimension, a function of light speed.   
A measurement in terms of the Pythagoras theorem minus a distance, in terms of an observers local time multiplied by the light speed, all squared, came out the same measurement, for all possible observers of the same event. This is called the (Minkowski) Interval.

Reality becomes relativity.   
Einstein objected to a glib fashion in thinking in relativist terms. Misunderstandings, also, have beset the Uncertainty principle, that other most renowned principle of twentieth century physics.

### The Uncertainty principle.

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Relativity showed that observers must make explicit their conditions of observation, for their respective observations to agree. The Uncertainty principle showed how observers must take into account the influence of their observations on what they observe.

A physicist can measure, more or less accurately, the position or momentum of a sub-atomic particle, but not both together. Focusing a very short wavelength of light (an electro-magnetic wave) on such as an electron, its position will show-up precisely. But the high energy of short waves will boost the particle momentum.   
A low-energy long wavelength (like a gentle swell) must be used to measure the particle momentum. But the longer the wavelength, the less clearly defined the particle position.

The more certain you make of position, the less certain the momentum, and vice versa. The measure is one of probabilities. And to choose to measure the one is also to choose to change the other. In effect, science and ethics are as inter-dependent as space and time.

In an interview with JWN Sullivan, in _The Observer_ 13 april 1930 (quoted by CEM Joad, _Guide To Modern Thought_ ) Erwin Schrodinger commented:

"the fact that we cannot predict the behavior of individual atoms is not a mere practical disability; it is due to the actual nature of things. Thus something like free will is placed at the basis of natural phenomena."

Shrodinger may not have held this view, always, but the fact he entertained it, at this early date, is perhaps significant.

The uncertainty principle refutes the purely passive observation of "pure science." A minority of physicists refused to accept that, in principle, the observer must affect the observed, tho this was first noticable only on the very small scales of experiments in quantum mechanics.

The rebel physicists, including Einstein, argued that the theory of quantum mechanics, derived from the uncertainty principle, was incomplete. In the nineteen thirties, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment was actually a "thought experiment" or imagined situation, in which they believed the quantum theory would be disproved.   
By about 1980, Alain Aspect developed sufficient experimental technique to settle the argument.

Take a system of two particles, whose attributes cancel each other out. One is in an equal and opposite state to the other, such as spin-up versus spin-down, or spin-right versus spin-left. An experimenter may turn a magnetic field to a particle, to change its spin from up to right. To be conserved as a system, the other particle, no matter how far separated, will change with it, from spin-down to spin-left.

Those devils advocates, the creative critics of quantum theory objected that this would not happen, because it would be a violation of the principle of local causes, for "spooky" action at a distance, as Einstein joked.

I am intrigued by a parallel argument over voting methods. Some contend that elections must be tied to single-member constituencies. I have claimed that elections are not to be confounded with locations. In other words, a universal choice over-rides its restriction to small local constituencies.

The champions of quantum theory said the local causes principle would have to go, instead. That raised the question of how one of the two particles could re-orient itself to the other, when they had not even the time to exchange light signals?

The idea of a quantum is that of a "packet" of energy. Sub-atomic particles don't gain or lose energy gradually, but in a "quantum jump" between energy levels. (Schrodinger loathed this term, presumably because he thought it misleading.) If this quantum jump was limited to the speed of light or less, the transition between states would not be a jump, but (could be followed as) continuous change of energy.   
So, super-luminal connections between the two-particle system seems logical. And experiments, by the 1970s and 1980s were beginning to confirm these faster-than-light connections.

However, other explanations were sought, and the assumptions underlying these tests were examined. The experimenter throws a switch, to affect one of the particles one way, and thereby its distant partner in the opposite way. But was that experimenter really free to switch the way he did?

These issues were discussed by Gary Zukav, in _The Dancing Wu Li Masters_. Free-will is given an operational meaning, that should be testable, in terms of free variables, being the choices of two observers or experimenters, in different locations, between the two possible states of the two-particle system.

Alternatives were considered: that there is no freedom in the universe, but that it is one super-determined whole, that never could be any different to what it was. Or: every possible option, facing us, has a reality of its own. For instance, the experimenter may have turned the switch up in this reality, but in another reality he turned it down.

Thus, reality would no longer mean our unique existence in _the_ universe but many existences in a "multiverse." Hence, the many-worlds theory, indulged by science fiction writers. (Indeed, every guess is a science fiction until shown a fact.)

A multiverse, in which every possibility happens, suggests infinite choice. Conversely, a universe, in which only one possibility happened, offers zero choice. These two extreme scenarios suggest a whole range or spectrum of choice, from zero to infinite choice.   
Does having choice define the existence, to that extent, of a multiverse?

Einstein, essentially remaining in his convictions, a Newtonian or classical physicist, believed in a determined universe. Tho, he admitted we are conscious of feeling free. Quantum physics tends to believe in a multiverse as a statistical distribution of universes with varying parameters controling their development.

The previous chapter discussed a similar scenario between a range of election quotas from the determinstic Hare quota, to the Droop quota, as a statistical tie-break quota. These upper and lower quota limits of choice were averaged by a Harmonic Mean quota, which offers a representative choice.

In electoral terms, the Hare quota is a deferential vote, of some voters giving-up personal preferences, to the will of an authority, so candidates may be elected with the complete agreement required to fulfill that upper limit quota.  
The Droop quota is a lower limit quota, the lowest hurdle of votes to ensure all the seats are filled, tho margin of victory may not be statistically significant.  
Real choice, afforded by the HM quota, depends on steering a course between the deferential detrminism of the upper quota, and the chance victory margins of the lower quota.

Applying this three-quota logic of elections to whether the cosmos is a deterministic universe or a chance multiverse, there is a third option of a choice cosmos, representative of the range of choice from zero to infinity.

One physicists generalisation, of the physical universe into a multiverse, is argued by David Deutsch, in _The Fabric of Reality_.   
In the double-slit experiment, when one foton at a time is fired at the two slits, one would think, fotons would find their way thru one slit or the other, at all angles, and form a random scatter pattern, like a normal distribution, on the light sensitive screen, on the other side.

But no! As one foton after another hits the screen, it gradually builds up a regular pattern of bright and dark alternating bands, which represent the succeeding crests and trofs of a wave interference pattern.  
This apparent interference of a single foton with itself, passing thru the double slit, has been defined as the basic paradox of quantum physics.

David Deutsch resolved this paradox by postulating another universe, in which another foton, not observable in this universe, interferes with the observable foton, in our universe. For Deutsch, the double-slit experiment is evidence of another universe, and hence a multiverse.

I was impressed by this idea but had another take on the situation. Timelessness or time independence is the difference of the double-slit experiment from normal timely interference, like water wave disruption, so that crest and trof interfere to magnify or neutralise each other.

Feynman diagrams allow of alternative interpretations, within inter-actions, of some events, including a particle moving backward in time.

It is possible to compare sub-atomic physics, the soap-box of the very small, to relativity physics, the arena of the very large, because they have, in common, very high energy events significantly approaching light speed.

By Special Relativity, time stops entirely at light speed, which is energy in motion with no rest mass.   
The double-slit experiment might be a quantum-mechanical version of special relativistic time-dilation.

### Conclusion: a general theory of choice.

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It should be possible for physicists to make explicit and generalise the logic of choice, which conditions their observations and, therefore, what they know. We have seen this process in relativity theory, which allowed observers to choose wider conditions of observational agreement, under generalised laws. Further, the uncertainty principle showed choice of observation itself an actual condition of what we could know.

The most general theory of physics should depend on the most general theory of choice. To be truly general it must be a theory not only of physics but all human activity, including, of course, elections, political or otherwise.

A general theory of elections has been evolving since the early nineteenth century.

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## Relativity of Choice.

### Relativity theory and election method.

Table of contents

_Albert Einstein._

#### Sections:

Additional Member System "epicycles."

Galileo & Newton: passing motions as election counts.

Unobservables.

Dimensions of proportional representation.

Electoral conservation law.

Law of relative majority choice.

General Relativity in the equivalence of accelerated choice to social gravity.

"Gravitational red shift" from pure self-representation.

Measurement structure of Relativity.

### Additional Member System "epicycles."

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Astronomy teaches the moral of learning to see other than our own point of view. Star-seers started as partisans of the Earth, being the position we were put in.

Ptolemy, the master astronomer rotated a heavenly shell about the Earth. This was the firmament, with all the stars firmly in place, like speckles on an egg shell.  
That is except for a few Wanderers back and forth on the ecliptic plane.   
Ptolemy explained away these rogue orbits, with their apparent reverses, in terms of epicycles.

Even epicycles have a moral, which can be seen by an analogy of fysics with elections.   
A single-member election system is uniform as the motion of the stars of the firmament. Yet this system has its own Wanderers, who are not represented in the firmament, yet remain to be accounted for.

These are the small party candidates, who win no seats, or fixed positions, in the starry assembly, but wander like lost souls, back and forth, on the plane of the Milky Way.

A Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) or Additional Member System (AMS) is Ptolemaic, in its attempt to satisfy this short-coming of a single member system, by those conditioned to the local out-look.

Localised single member constituencies are modified by "epicycles" of list candidates. Whole party lists of candidates have been "rotated" or given a turn in parliament, like epicycles within cycles of elections.

That is power to the parties, not the people. Star-seers started partisans of planet Earth, their single home. A moral of astronomy is to see other points of view. The heliocentric or sun-centred theory of Nicholas Copernicus guessed that Earth is just one in a many-member constituency of planets, that is the solar system.

Political opponents, of multi-member systems of elections, claimed they are too "remote," "breaking the link" with just one representative per constituency. They treat the single member constituency as sacred as the Ptolemaic system was once so viewed, by the Church hierarchy, with Earth as the sole representative, the only astronomic point of view.

Dogmatic politicians, like high priests of an earth-centred universe, treat as heresy any challenge to their representation in a single member system. Their monopolies amount to a local monotheism over Earthly constituents, as patronised by the holy church of party, at most, allowing additional members, in ad hoc "epicycles" of party lists.

Going a step further than Copernicus, Herschel guessed the sun to be in a disk of stars, but honestly admitted he hadn't proved the shape. That took til the twentieth century. The sun is about two-thirds the way to the rim, from the hub of this Catherine wheel of a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way.

### Galileo & Newton: passing motions as election counts.

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We don't have to seek an understanding that reduces men to machines, in the name of mechanical science. On the contrary, in _The Discarded Image_ , CS Lewis says the idea of natural laws owes to man having to make his own laws for society.   
Physical motion enters the language in a moral sense.   
Passing a motion means voting on a choice of action. The advocate ends with: "I rest my case." The physical terms, motion and rest, which Newton used in his first law, are morally shadowed.

To measure body motion, over a space of time, the exact position of a body, of any size, at a given time, is at its center of gravity. So, the body is treated as a "mass particle." In classical physics, this mass is an absolute quantity, not related to the positions of other objects.

Likewise, x-marks-the-spot votes can but prefer one candidate absolutely, saying nothing about any voters relative weight of support for other candidates, as if these others were all out of the question.

The law of inertia, that Newton made his first law, states: A body at rest, or in uniform motion in a straight line, will remain so, unless acted upon by an out-side force.

The simplest elections are such an all-or-nothing affair, to choose or not to choose, a given candidate. You are moved to put a mark by a name in the ballot, and then must rest from further options. The spot vote offers a straight choice, typicly between one of two uniform groups or parties.   
Under absolutism, force rules the masses, tho the masses may get votes, that restrict to absolute choices for candidates.

The law of (motion) inertia suggests an ethical law of inertia of choice: a vote follows a party line or remains at rest (un-cast or wasted) unless acted upon by an outside force of choice. This outside force might be the contingency of a compromise candidate, with a greater force of support. Supporters of the weakest candidates may gravitate towards this more forceful out-sider, by voting tacticly or strategicly, against a less prefered front-runner.

The two-party system gains inertia, from fear of the other side coming to power, unless one-shot spot votes gravitate to the most likely rescue candidate. Such is an "out-side force" of tactical voting for a second or lesser choice, to stop the least prefered candidate from one of the two main parties. Otherwise, votes remain at rest as abstentions, or those default abstentions called "wasted votes" on minor party candidates and independents.

To hang in the two-party balance of power, voters polarise in a system of divide and rule. Newton makes the third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.   
Politics of the dual, or duel, lends itself to the parody that for every left wing action, there is an equal and opposite right wing reaction.

Fysical masses have become political masses, choosing sides in a "campaign" with "victory" for the side with most votes.   
War, continued by political means, leaves about half the population unrepresented. The campaigns losing half are laid to rest as wasted votes. They might as well abstain.

Velocity, as speed and direction in a straight line, goes on but for external and decellerating force of friction, or gravitys external and accelerating force.

Gravity and friction take social forms. The social gravity of crowd attraction exerts conformity on individuals.   
The man carries little weight against the mass.   
Whereas the social friction of customs and mores grind rough edges (ruf ejes) off individuality.

Galileo recognised that force, like force of friction, does not cause a bodys velocity but _change_ in its velocity, in proportion to how massive the object may be. Newton states this in his second law of motion: A force on a body changes its velocity, in proportion to its mass.

This law, in ethical guise, has a mass of votes given a proportional force of partisanship in the electoral count. This conserves proportion for partisans. (Proportional partisanship is not truly proportional representation, tho misrepresented as such).

Conversely, a non-proportional system that elects individual majorities, as in a simple plurality system, conserves representation but not proportion.

Acceleration is observable. And, in terms of the third law, the (inertial) mass of any body measures as a constant factor in collisions between bodies. Force is merely defined in terms of mass, and not directly observed.

Election law may also be less than evident. Party list systems are a proportional count of spot votes for parties, rather than persons: the mass of spot votes is presumed under a proportional force of partisanship.   
But parties are defined by their members. Only people are real, "the observables," that voting really should be in terms of.

The notion of force, as distinct from mass, might be an arbitrary distinction between the active and passive parts of an inter-action.   
Rulers and ruled might be arbitrarily put into active and passive categories, to excuse the lack of inter-action, that there should be between them.

## Unobservables.

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In its original form, the Galileo principle of Relativity states the laws of motion hold equally for observations on a bank or in a boat: in rest frames or relative motion.

Albert Einstein took up the Galilean relativity principle that the same laws of motion hold for observers whose relative motion is a constant speed in a straight line.

Newton didn't abandon the idea that the universe is absolutely at rest at some fixed point, relative to all movement. He only considered relative motions as convenient and "sensible measures."

Einstein made a scientific virtue of motion as an observation of the changing motions of things relative to each other: Einsteins relativity principle kept fysics within observable bounds. The classical belief, that the law of inertia held thru-out the universe, could not be proved, and so was metafysics not fysics.

The special theory of relativity goes on to say that all natural laws, including the laws of optics and electricity, unified by Clerk-Maxwell, also hold for observers in this so-called uniform relative motion.

Clerk-Maxwell calculated electro-magnetic waves moved at light speed, so he guessed light is this kind of wave. Sound and water waves are a traveling disturbance thru a material medium. Light waves were supposed to transmit thru an "ether," universal even to the vacuum of space.

The universal ether was thought to be a frame of reference, absolutely at rest compared to all others. Only therein would the speed of light be constant all ways. Other reference points, moving with or against the ether, such as the Earth, should add to, or subtract from, the speed of light.  
But the Michelson-Morley experiment always measured light speed at a constant value (of about 300,000 km/sec.).

In politics, people fall into certain assumptions about "the People" similar to those about "the Ether," when both are actually unobservables. HG Wells described a belief in "the People one and indivisible, a simple mystical being, which pervades and dominates the community and determines its final collective consequences."

One could substitute "the Ether" for "the People" and "the universe" for "the community" in that phrase. It's wrong to treat the people as a corporate concept.

The ether was thought-up merely to make light seem less mysterious as a wave but only created another mystery, that could not be observed or even infered. Instead of an elusive ether, the special relativity principle is based on the evidence of constant light speed.

Observers cannot see the speed of light differ with respect to a velocity difference between them. So, the way they see each others velocities must vary in keeping with both observing the same constant speed of light. Velocity is only a uniform rate of distance traveled in a given direction over a period of time. Therefore the measures of space and time, as well as velocity, will be mutually affected between observers, in the context of light velocity.

To go to extremes, if one observer could move at light speed, his measures of space and time, rod and clock, would be seen at zero by another observer. This is because no speed can be added to lights maximum limit to motion.  
As one observer approaches light speed, to another observer, his ruler or rod would contract and his clock slow down. The formula for this process is the "Lorentz transformation" of respective observations, so that their measurements, of a given event, correspond.

Only at mundane speeds, of classical fysics, can common sense safely assume that different observers effectively work within the frame-work of one absolute space and one absolute time.

### Dimensions of proportional representation.

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Classical fysics and Relativity compare to classical democracy and Representation. We are used to acting for our-selves, rather than being represented, and so tend to think of absolute self-representation as true democracy, like the Greek city state.

Like classical fysics, classical democracy is thought to be universal, when it is only an adjunct of our limited experience. In the forum of our daily lives, every one counts as their own representative, for an absolutely proportional representation.

The self-rep. says "count me in" for a quota or proportional count of ones own vote. No election, or choosing-out, of one person by another, much less a mass vote, has taken place.  
This count is by the Hare quota, which divides total votes by number of representatives. In this case, one is a voter for one representative, oneself. Therefore, one is bound to achieve the Hare quota of (one over one equals) one vote, to "elect" oneself.

Light is a maximum constant speed, because pure energy in motion, needs no impetus. Whereas bodies imply the possession of mass. Likewise, pure self-representation has no electoral "mass" of support from other voters.

The self-rep compares to an observer at light speed, in that others observe neither vote of preference nor (the transfer of preferences to the self-rep in) proportional counting. Thus the self-rep is observed to have zero proportional preference, analgous to a zero space-time.

There are three dimensions of space and one further dimension, sometimes attributed to "time." Electorally, there are three or four dimensions of proportion. One dimension is expressed in the requirement of equal constituencies or proportional representation between constituencies.   
(The Hare quota ensures that electorates have the same number of representatives.)

Straight after the 1979 election (and after the 2015 election), the British Tories, behaving like one-dimensional democrats, instructed the Boundary Commission to fulfil this objective of equal constituencies. This is actually proportional representation between single member constituencies, to the exclusion of other dimensions of equal representation, namely proportional representation within constituencies, across constituencies and without constituencies.

Within constituencies, proportion, defined as an equality of ratios, applies to voters per representative, given by the (Droop) quota. That is the proportion of the votes, in a multi-member constituency, that each of the most prefered candidates needs to take a seat.  
This one dimension of proportion, within-constituency PR is supposed the only proportional representation, out of context from the other dimensions.

From 1979, much local protest was also caused by over-ruling the third dimension of proportional representation across constituencies, in uniform member constituencies. JFS Ross, in Elections and Electors, showed a single member system had to allow a proportionate variation from equal representation, to best keep local communities together as representative units.

If the required average constituency size is 60,000 electors per single-member constituency, for (nominally) equal representation, then the permissible variation is plus or minus 20,000 voters. A constituency cannot be allowed more than 80,000 constituents, because two constituencies, of more than 40,000 constituents each, would be more equitable. This is a ratio of representation across single member constituencies of one-half (from 40,000 divided by 80,000).

For a fourth electoral dimension, analgous to the fourth dimension in Relativity, there is the remaining logical possibility of proportional representation without constituencies. This fourth dimension makes no reference to constituencies, found in the other three dimensions, only the national bounds, or over-all community boundary. Comparably, the fourth dimension of the Minkowski Interval makes no reference to observer velocities, given in the three spatial dimensions, only the light velocity, which is, to velocity, the corresponding over-all bound.

The dimensions of PR transcend both constituencies and parties. In this respect, physics also has a mirror image treatment of kinematics and dynamics.

### Electoral conservation law.

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The Hare quota was used to show an analogy, between the maximum limit of representation, and light, as maximum limit on velocity. The Droop quota supplies an electoral analogy to massive bodies not being able to reach light speed.

As a body approaches a significant fraction of the speed of light, it significantly gains mass. This mass would have to become infinite to reach the limiting speed of light. All the energy in the known universe would not be enough.   
Mass and energy are gained together and may be considered as equivalent terms. Fysicists commonly measure mass in energy units.

The Hare quota tells how many voters are to be shared between representatives. The Droop quota tells the least number of voters needed to elect a candidate, relative to the remaining votes, that other candidates may have amassed. The Hare quota allocates representation to the voters. The Droop quota elects representation from the voters relative majorities.

These (Droop quota) relative majorities start with half the voters prefering one candidate to the others. Then, in a two-member system, two relative majorities, of one third the voters, prefer two candidates over any others. That is a PR of two-thirds the voters. In a three member system, the PR is three-quarters the voters, and so on.

Thus, the Droop quota achieves a high degree of equal representation, together with great freedom to prefer the candidates. But the community, or universe of the constituency, would need an infinite number of seats for completely proportional representation.

The residual portion, of however few unrepresented voters, is a function of the right of relative majorities to prefer candidates. This infinitely extendable freedom of choice is a limit on absolute equality of representation. But the more seats, the more choice and proportion, the more freedom and equality of representation. Like energy and mass, they are commensurate, being gained and lost together.

The conservation of mass and energy were two basic but separate laws of classical fysics, united by special relativity theory, into one conservation law of mass-energy.

Analgously, different political cultures have followed separate conservation laws of electoral practise. At least til recently, English-speaking countries mainly kept to a law of the conservation of (individual) representation. But equal electorates in a single member system merely give one dimension of proportional representation between constituencies. This can be at the expense of the other dimensions of PR, for a low over-all PR.

The first past the post system is irrational. Time-warped politics are the result. Old parties are over-represented for too long, til their support dips below a certain level, when they are suddenly exterminated as an effective force. Conversely, new parties have to wait too long to put into effect urgent policy messages.

First past the post is prone to taking snap-shot elections, often foto-finishes, which give undue recognition to short-term fluctuations of support. The undue power this gives, to one of the main parties, ushers in a new era, that is not in keeping with the times.

Continental Europe turned to a conservation law of proportional partisanship. Party list systems involved constituencies so large that they became unimportant as assemblages of locally known individual representatives.

There was a trend for states to copy the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system, with two votes. One is for a single member system, the other for a party list system. These nations thus combine election laws of individual representation and of partisan proportion.  
Their election law compares to a classical fysics that recognises the conservation laws of mass and energy but has not learned that they are one conservation law of mass-energy.

That is to say Additional Member Systems (AMS, sometimes known as MMP) are not truly a system of proportional representation, in which freedom and equality grow together, but one in which they are at monopolistic cross-purposes with each other. Individual representatives monopolise single seats: no equality of representation there. And party candidates on lists monopolise the proportional count: no freedom of choice there.

### Law of relative majority choice.

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The single transferable vote proportionally elects, by the Droop quota, the most prefered individual candidates as representatives. STV thus provides a unified conservation law of proportional representation, properly speaking, as a rationalised liberty.

A majority is not simply one members majority. The single member majority count is generalised, by the Droop quota, into a multi-member majority count.   
The vote generalises, in a similar way, from a one-preference spot vote, to a many-preference vote, in order of choice.

The simple majority system is sometimes called a relative majority system. But it is only the most limited kind. First Past The Post elects one candidate on a majority relative only to the runner-up. Therefore, most voters may go unrepresented. Transferable voting elects as many candidates as constituency seats, each with the same majority, relative to all the runners-up put together. Then, the over-whelming majority is represented.

A majority means "greater than," being relative to what it counts as greater than. Choice is also relative, in that voters more or less favor some candidates in relation to others. This is allowed expression in a preference vote, from greater to lesser choice. So, magnitude of choice transfers from the vote, as preferences, into the count, as majorities. The count of the community corresponds to the vote of individuals, in greatness of support for candidates.

Einstein favored Relativity as a "principle theory," which makes logical deductions from a firm empirical base, that motion is relative to a co-ordinate system.   
Similarly, choice is relative to a co-ordinate system of the vote to the count. An empirical order of preference 1, 2, 3, etc corresponds to a rational order of 1, 2, 3, etc member majorities.   
This is the view of science as empirical rationalism.

Einstein had the atom bombings (he opposed) on his conscience, making him wish he had been a plumber, rather than a fysicist.   
He was skeptical of all the facile adoptions of relativism, that followed his theory. Never the less, there is a case for Relativity for ethicists as well as fysicists.

This is not to be confused with the doctrine of "moral relativism," which states that morality is defined by the community. CS Lewis found, from an encyclopedia of ethics, that values of the good, such as compassion and mercy, exist universally among communities, in time and place.

If democracy is relatively realised, then the electoral law, to be observed, is that of the majority preference. This is a general law that extends from a single-preference vote for a single-majority count, to many-preference vote for many-majority count.

### General Relativity in the equivalence of accelerated choice to social gravity.

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Special relativity only holds between observers, of fysical laws, in uniform motion. Albert Einstein asked why should laws hold only in a uniform, not a non-uniform, reference system, or for relative velocity not relative acceleration?

Einstein used an imaginary model, of planetary gravitation, to seek an answer. This thought-experiment supposed someone let go a weight, inside an upward accelerating "lift" or space-ship, in outer space, with no nearby stars to exert gravitational force. Einstein imagined the lift being pulled up, like an ordinary lift. (Rocket propulsion was still a radical new idea, in waiting.)

The space-man, in the lift, sees the weight drop to the floor, as if under the influence of gravity.   
To an observer, outside the lift, the weight stays put, under its own inertia, while the pulled lift left it behind at an accelerating rate.

Einstein imagined a light ray, passing thru the accelerating lift windows, would appear bent slightly down, since the lift moved slightly upward, before a light ray reached from one side of the lift to the other.

The accelerating lift, effecting a gravitational field, enabled Einstein to predict that light, passing thru a gravitational field, would be curved.   
This is the "principle of equivalence" of accelerated motion to a gravitational field.

Translate this fysics principle, into ethics or election science ("electics"), and the question becomes: why must the law of majority preference hold only for a uniform reference system of choice, such as a single member system, that is with single-majorities of single-preferences?

Presumably, the same question would apply to any uniform-member constituency system, with equal number of seats in every constituency.

A vote for party, without individual preference, moves voters by some mystical force of partisanship, just as a mystical force of gravity was assumed to drag a planet out of a straight line into solar orbit, because classical fysics only measured with straight line geometry from Euclid.

A straight line may be considered as having zero curvature, making Euclid geometry into a special case of Riemann geometry of curvature. A single (or any uniform) member system has zero "curvature" or no variation in seats per constituency thru-out the nation.

A flexible multi-member system compares to Riemann geometry, as a more general and convenient geometry, evidently based on the geografy of real communities,   
to allow for the varying "gravitational fields" of population density "accelerating" choice.

Winston Churchill said: I would rather be one-fifth of the Members for the whole of Leeds than one Member for a fifth of Leeds.

Likewise: I would rather make my own terms of choice, among many candidates, than have the terms of choice made for me, between few candidates.

This choosing among the choices (in ranges of choice) rather than just choosing a given (range of) choice, is an "acceleration" of choice.

This Ethical Equivalence Principle is of an "accelerated" choice, equivalent to population "gravitation," whose masses geometricly "curve" constituencies, from uniform to non-uniform member systems.

In the lift thought-experiment, the inside observer becomes voters in the city, or citizens, who feel the social gravity of mass opinion, influencing decisions and taking shape, in many quotas, needed to elect to the many seats, in a large multi-member constituency.

The outside observer, say, a rural on-looker is free of the social gravity of the city, only observing its acceleration of choice, that allows city dwellers to choose among ranges of choice, rather than just one range of choices, the latter being zero acceleration of choice.

### "Gravitational red shift" from pure self-representation.

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General relativity made famous prediction that light will bend in a gravitational field, as observed of a light ray, from a distant star, passing close to the mass of the sun.

The outside observer, of the light ray passing thru the windows of the accelerating lift, sees, in his frame of reference, the light going in a straight line.

In his view, the fact, that the light passes thru the out-going window at a lower level than it enters the in-going window, has nothing to do with the light being bent. It is purely because the lift is accelerating up-wards, during the time the light takes to cross from in-going to out-going window.

From the reference frame of the man inside the lift, pressed to the floor by the upward acceleration, as if being pulled down by gravitational mass, the light ray is also under this apparent gravitational downward pull.

Here, I hazard a most speculative translation of fysics to electics.   
A comparison has been made of light speed with self-representation in the city state.  
The out-side observer, of light passing, from one window to other, thru the lift, compares to a rural out-side observer of a city state, with citizens being their own representatives.

The assembly of this city is a self-representative democracy. Representative democracy requires a mass of voting support for citizens to get elected to the deliberative forum or meeting.

Outside observers or rural on-lookers of the city-state see the electoral equivalent of light moving in a straight line. That is to say they see simply self-representing citizens.

Inside observers, as citizens, are differently placed from the uninvolved view-point of the out-side observer. True, the citizens self-represent but they also feel the mass of others opinion.

You only have to attend a local meeting, where anyone may speak, to feel the difference in reception, that greets each speaker, whether a scatter of polite applause or spontaneous cheer of unanimous support.

The inhabitants of the city-state, tho they be all self-representative citizens, completely equal in formal rights, still feel the social gravity of their mass proximity.

Light speed, which has constant velocity, measures as frequency of vibrations times wave-length. High frequency and short wave-length light, like blue light, is more energetic.   
This is like the walker who takes short but quick and energetic steps, yet walks at same speed as someone taking longer but slower steps.

When light comes under the pull of gravity, it slows down the light frequency, thus lengthening its wavelength, towards the less energetic red part of the light spectrum or electro-magnetic continuum. This is the famous "gravitational red shift."

To make the electoral analogy with fysics yet more far-fetched, there is a corresponding election formula to that for light speed, as frequency times wave-length.   
Basic formula for proportional representation is given by the quota times number of seats in the multi-member constituency. Using the above example, a (Droop) quota, of one sixth of the votes times five seats, gives proportional representation of five-sixths of the votes in the constituency.

The Droop quota is not the only possible election quota but exemplifies the basic idea. The Hare quota is more analgous to the formula for light speed, because it is constant at a maximum proportional representation, just as light speed is a constant maximum limit on speed of objects with mass.

The Hare quota is a constant, because simply number of seats times number of votes per seat. In theory, its PR always is of the total vote. At its most basic, the Hare quota describes self-representation of one candidate needing only a quota of his own vote to elect him as one representative.   
Thus, a quota of one vote (ones own) times one seat (ones own) gives a fully proportional (self-) representation, of one times one equals one.

The number of seats per constituency is akin to the frequency of representation. The quota corresponds to the wave-length.   
Applying the analogy, of gravitational red shift, to self-representation, would slow its frequency and increase its wave-length.   
Instead of a "frequency" of one seat times a "wave-length" quota of one vote, the frequency would become less than one seat, with wavelength more than a quota of one vote, to keep the balance of a constant proportional representation of one vote.

Most simply, this situation might mean that, on average, each person needs a quota of slightly more than one vote to be elected, so there are not enuf votes to go round for every-one to be self-represented.   
The fraction of one seat (corresponding to the increased quota, to maintain one-vote self-representation) would represent the ratio of unrepresented to represented citizens.

A transferable voting system has no problem dealing in fractional votes, either by Gregory method (of transfering an elected candidates surplus votes, to help next prefered candidates to the quota) or Meek method keep values.   
This ensures order of election determined by popular choice.

Thus, gravitational red shift suggests that social gravity, of citizens in close proximity, inclines many citizens to first prefer their votes, to a better choice of more eminent candidates, that the greater choice in a city may offer, at the expense of asserting their self-worth, as number one choice. Citizens may give themselves a lesser ranking, in their ballot paper order of choice, to some more able fellow citizens.

While an honest look, at oneself, shows one to be frail and selfish. we may recognise others are better than ourselves for any number of tasks, even within our specialities.

### Measurement structure of Relativity.

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In denying the reality of time, Julian Barbour, of The End Of Time, finds himself at odds with other fysicists, wishing to develop the space-time frame-work of relativity theory.   
I would like to suggest that the Minkowski Interval has an independent reason for being taken as a basic structure. Namely, it seems to fit in the logic of measurement, as devised by SS Stevens.

Stevens distinguished four scales of measurement, the nominal or classificatory, the ordinal or ranking, the interval and the ratio scales, "on the basis of the principle of invariance under transformations" -- however that applies.  
(It may mean that symmetry of the natural numbers for all four scales, I described in my chapter, A measure of evolution... section: Electron transfer.)

I illustrated how these scales apply to logic of choice, in book two, Scientific Method of Elections." (Both natural and social science haven't emphasised the dynamic between knowledge of freedom and freedom of knowledge.)

Compare measurement theory, of Stevens, and some basic features of fysical theory. Newton laws of motion appear to have two out of the four measurement scales. Relativity theory can be considered as supplying the other two, so that physics employs a more completely logical system of measurement.

There are quite some differences in formulation of Newtonian laws. Allan M Munn (From Nought To Relativity) didn't think the law, postulating every action has an equal and opposite reaction, was operational, because forces other than the mutual ones will always be present.

Law one states: Every body tends to continue in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled by an externally applied force to change that state.

Law one illustrates the classificatory scale of measurement. A bodys state is put in two mutually exclusive categories, rest or uniform motion. Newton assumed that ultimately the universe did have a spatial frame-work, which was absolutely at rest, in relation to all motion.

The ordinal scale of measurement is a logical refinement or progression from dualistic classification. Instead of saying rest is rest and motion is motion and never the twain shall meet, rest is not considered an absolutely distinguished state. There is but one range or order of motion by which observers relate. There is only relative motion.

Zero motion is not a true rest but the result of an arbitrary choice of co-ordinates between observers in relative motion.  
(As East and West may be more accurately represented in an ordered cultural continuum than as a sharp dichotomy.)

There is an absolute zero temperature, which does not necessarily mean molecular motion ceases, only that it cannot transfer to other systems. Like light having the absolute maximum speed, this absolute minimum speed is a limit that can only be approached.

Hence, temperature scales also have no true zero. There is no such thing as one temperature being, say, twice as hot as another. (The fourth scale, the ratio scale, takes the next logical step in possessing a true zero.) The various scales, named after Celsius, Fahrenheit, etc are arbitrary but they do have the property of being in proportion to each other and translatable by formula. This is characteristic of interval scales.

There may be a sense in which Minkowski Interval geometry is actually an interval scale. (The shared use of the term, interval, is, as far as I know, not deliberate.) The Interval is akin to arbitrary temperature scales, which can translate between each other, because it allows arbitrary co-ordinate systems in relative motion, to translate between each other, according to a common space-time formula.

The Interval is Euclid geometry of three-dimensional flat space extended to a four-dimensional space-time. General relativity adopts Riemann geometry of curved space-time, to allow observers in relative acceleration to translate co-ordinates. Relativity generalises from Minkowski space-time, now considered as of zero curvature, in a new ratio scale geometry of curvature.   
The metric of geometry meets the theory of measurement. Einstein geometrised fysical theory, in accord with the Stevens logic of measurement.

Of course, Newtonian fysics is rationality par excellence, as in the law, which says "Rate of change of momentum of a body is proportional to the force acting upon it and it has the same direction."   
From the start, a concept such as "force at a distance" was criticised as mysterious. Newton himself said it was an apparent nonsense, apart from the fact that his law of gravity worked. General relativity replaces force with geodesics to determine a bodys path.

Progress in classical fysics, from Newton to Einstein, was made by its becoming a more fully integrated measurement structure, borne out by the logic of progressive scales in measurement theory.

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## Measurement of language and logic.

Table of contents

Section: measurement of logic.

### Measurement of language

As a student, I read that the social sciences were not as advanced as the natural sciences, largely because of the difficulty of applying measurement. Simple measurements, such as classification and ordering of data, which are the first two scales of measurement, characterise a science in its early stages. More rational measurements, the so-called interval and ratio scales were supposed to be rare in behavioral studies.

Sometime in the mid nineteen-seventies, I realised that the single transferable vote (STV) was the one electoral system that was built on the logical progression of all four measurement scales, given by SS Stevens. (There is a 1981 version of this theme -- in French -- at end of my e-book: _Peace-making Power-sharing_.)

Also in the mid nineteen-seventies, I was considering STV as a model for use in Constitutional Economics. This seemed right for economics as a science, because the structure of measurement is implicit in that voting method. The transfer of surplus and deficit votes made one think of incomes, in these terms.

At the end of my last chapter, Relativity of Choice, I mention the four measurement scales, in the context of special and general relativity. This had occured to me from early readings of popular science.

Not until 1979, did I come across CS Lewis, on _The Four Loves_. At first blush, it seemed too far-fetched to relate the four loves to the four scales of measurement.

I didn't try to do more than show the sort of direction, in which a system of ideas might be based, on an undefined concept of love. Unbalanced emotions may be aberrations of love, indeed, with respect to lesser or greater love, up to its most broadly balanced condition.   
I didn't want to dogmatise but encourage a new research science of love. I didn't know that Sorokin had done that.

Experimental psychology has been coming of age, as described by Guy Claxton, in _Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind_. This shows how psychologists are testing the nature of the Unconscious mind, theorised by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Years later, I picked up the clue to a possible measurement of language. Languages may be classified according to the parts of speech, they more or less possess. English language structure differs from Latin. In English, the parts of speech may be recognised, for grammatical sense, by the order they appear in a sentence.

Latin depends on different endings to a word to signify the part of speech. Esperanto is based on this principle. In the 1960s, well over a hundred, I think, nearer two hundred British MPs favored Esperanto as the world language. This modern man-made language -- man-made in that it was made by one man -- reckons to be an efficient reformed language.

The grammatical sentence order of English involves an ordinal scale of measurement. This is a more powerful scale of measurement than classification. You don't have to remember a different word-ending for every part of speech. There could be still less inflexion in English by just relying on the word order in a sentence.  
For example, all the personal pronouns need not have an object case as well as a subject case, as the word "you" does not.

As the years passed by, I tried to think of language structure with respect to the interval and ratio scales. In fact, my ideas for language reform were waiting to be considered in mensural terms.

I long noticed the tendency for language to lose its fluency, with redundant usages, much as ships lose their stream-lines with barnacles. American immigrants have rubbed off the ruf ejes (rough edges) of English, when it wasn't their first language.   
For example, the adjective "good," also stands in for the adverb "well." Americans tend not to modify adjectives, when used as adverbs. American (and British) English might use the adjective "quick" as an adverb, instead of "quickly." To some extent this happens in traditional English, speaking of whisky he drank "neat."  
Or, the word, because, in colloquial speech is: cos.

There is also a contrary trend of redundant speech, largely American, that loves important-sounding catch phrases.  
Americans and many British imitators don't plan, they have "forward planning." They don't report, they "report back." To plan is by definition forward looking. The prefix "re-" means "back."   
"Check" is sufficient for "check it out," and "listen" for "listen up."

Other examples, not necessarily American, include "co-conspirators" for conspirators, "sympathise with" for "sympathise;" "co-operate with" for "co-operate;" "allude to" for "allude." Prefixes tend to lose the force of their qualificiation and so are liable to "barnacle" words. Instance "entrap" or "entrapment" for "trap;" "entice" for "tice."

Ogden and Richards, the promotors of Basic English, found that most English verbs could be paraphrased by a core of 18 common verbs, without prefixes, followed by modifying words, mainly 20 space or time directives. They hoped the few hundred words of Basic English would be simple enough for everyone in the world to make themselves understood. Their attempt to make English more analytic contrasts with the German practise of running words together. Many web addresses follow the latter practise.

The Basic English approach has the advantage that words are not barnacled with prefixes, merely because that form has become customary. Wherever joined words are used, out of habit, one of the joined words may not be doing any meaningful work towards the message being conveyed.

Nearly all the Basic English verbs are irregular in the past tense. I have suggested a past tense convention to make all English verbs regular in the past tense, as they are in the future tense.

English has a regular future tense, with either auxiliary verb, like: I will (or I shall) before any given verb or doing word. This can be shortened to: I'll, as in: I'll go.

Likewise, English could have a regular past tense, such as: I did go; I would go. In English, the two past tense auxiliaries, suggest having gone, once or several times, respectively. The short form, I'd, as in, I'd go, might serve as a useful regular past tense convention, especially when it does not matter how many times, in the past, is being indicated.

Poets are concerned to pare off superfluous words. This works against the wear and tear to the language, as an instrument of communication, from those naturally more concerned with the communication than the instrument.   
Good English is not over-burdened with adjectives. I should say: not burdened with adjectives. The phrase, safe haven, is redundant. A haven is, by definition, safe.

Redundant usage in language may be compared to redundant votes, those over what a candidate needed to win an election. The single transferable vote (STV) transfers these surplus votes to next prefered candidates. The third scale of measurement, the so-called interval scale, rations out the surplus vote between the proportions of all an elected candidates voters for next preferences.

By analogy, joined words can have their surplus meaning transfered to a separate word: go out, for: exit. Or a word can be eliminated, if it has no further meaning to convey: report, for: report back. The latter case compares to a candidate, who is excluded for want of further preferences.  
(It is not always the simpler words that are more compact. For example, defenestrate, for: throw out of the window.)

Words in a sentence may not make uniform intervals, in that some words will group together meaningfully. When the surplus meaning of a joined word is rationed out to a separate word, the two words still form a meaningful unit within the sentence, like "co-operate" becoming "work with;" "excise" becoming "cut out."  
I sometimes put a hyphen (hyfen), like cut-out, if the two words are best understood as a unit.

The fourth scale of measurement, the ratio scale operates, in STV elections, to determine the proportion or quota of votes, that each candidate needs, to win a seat, in a multi-member constituency.   
Analgously, the sentence may be considered as a multi-member constituency of words, to which meaning is rationed out. Each word is "elected" as an equal representative of sentence meaning.

The parts of speech can refer to their ordered position in the sentence. Words need not have special status as nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Nor need words have special forms for each part of speech. The same word for four parts of speech would only be recognised as one or other part by its order of appearance in a sentence. It's not unusual, in English, for nouns to become used as verbs or adjectives or adverbs. For example, the noun, man, can become: to man (verb); man-hole (adjective); man-made (adverb).

An unnecessary feature of English grammar interferes with a possible remedy for clumsy English spelling. Words have the plural form of adding letter, s, to the singular form. This is complicated, in English, by also adding _s_ to denote a possessive form of a noun. Also: _'s_ or _s'_ denote singular or plural possessive, as in: The boy's sister, or the boys' sister, if several boys have the same sister.  
Sometimes sentence context can make the singular-plural use of the apostrofe redundant.

This is as well, because the apostrofe potentially is very useful for replacing the letter, e, when it is not used as a vowel, but an accent, to tell any of five dipthongs from the five vowels.

Middle English spells "late" as "lait." An alternative rendering might be: la't, just as similar words like, fate, could be: fa't.   
As a fonetic speling, "lait" is Cockney or Australian pronunciation. This is the same pronunciation as the word, "light," which may be simplified to "l'it," as alternative to its fonetic speling: lait.

The letters, k and g, that have fallen silent in English, are still pronounced in German. So, I don't think there is a need to spell words like knee, as: nee; or even: 'nee.   
This word is just one of many examples how awkward English speling reform can be. I would replace the misleading double-e, which has no fonetik value, with y: knee, as kny (rhymes with: key).

The apostrofe might replace the silent digraph, gh. This gh digraf tends to be used for irregular past tense of verbs: bought, sought, fought etc. There is also the option: I'd buy, you'd seek, we'd fight; short for either: I would buy or I did buy, etc.   
"Fight" could be spelt: f'it, where the apostofe marks missing vowel, a.   
Compare, fate, with missing vowel, i, rendered: fa't.

A sentence need not have just one subject and one object or predicate (what is said about the subject). Tho, there is much to be said for simple sentences. These are the fashion, unlike the convoluted styles of nineteenth century novelists.

Take an "ecological" sentence, like the theme to the nursery rhyme, _The House That Jack Built_. An extremely high correlation was found between the number of spinsters living in an area and the abundance of its clover. This was because: spinsters kept cats that ate rodents that reduced bees that pollinated clover that populated fields that surrounded houses that sheltered spinsters that...

The point of this circular sentence is that it breaks down the rigid division (in a sentence as in life) between subject and object. And in doing so, it replaces the need for clauses with their connecting words. The seven-times said word "that" could be left out of the circular sentence about the spinster.

In conclusion, the grammar of language promises some considerable identification with measurement structure.

### Measurement of logic.

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Watching "black and white" films, as a child, I thought they were mainly grey. A fuzzy neutral color was more prevalent than sharply distinct black and white. This is true of reality in general, which does not consist of sharply defined categories. The forms of things tend to merge into each other. In taking account of the grey areas of experience, "fuzzy logic" is more accurate than classical logic, not less.

Classical logic deals in extreme contrasts, which tends to make for polarised thinking and dogmatic opposition. Fuzzy logic allows for extremes approaching each other by degrees and encourages compromise, where applicable.

Author of _Fuzzy Logic_ , Bart Kosko comments:

"Fights break out when some person or some group or some government tries to round us off their way, tries to make us all A or all not-A...In this sense voting just asks for trouble."

This attitude was typified by premier Margaret Thatcher. When asked about some-ones politics, she retorted: He's not one of us.  
Her "resolute approach" brought about her own down-fall, when it became nothing but doctrinaire rigidity against over-whelming opposition to the poll tax. Mrs Thatcher was only one of the most obvious cases of the orthodoxy of leaders.

Kosko is really criticising the divisive effect of the all-or-nothing X-vote. The 2016 US presidential election confirms the polarisation engendered by a dogmaticly divisive vote.  
Preference voting admits of the saying Kosko coins: everything is a matter of degree.

As a simple example, Kosko grades apples by the fraction they are red or green. (Grading is on the ordinal scale and the fractions, as there used, are on the ratio scale of measurement.) In this respect, he is applying more powerful measurement scales, in fuzzy logic, than classical logic, which just reasons in terms of the basic measurement scale of classification.

Critics have claimed probability theory would do the job just as well as fuzzy logic. Indeed, Kosko used it, in the form of weighted decision-making (which is on the interval scale of measurement) to show how people make choices, when several more or less important considerations are involved.

Kosko has the intriguing idea that the part contains the whole: A sub-set, vanishing to nothing, contains zero per cent of the whole, increasing in size to the whole, contains all of the whole. In between, the sub-set contains part of the whole, more or less.  
Nowadays, his pioneering notion would be called holografic logic.

This view is used to explain the paradoxes of self-reference in classical logic, such as the paradox of the liar or Russell paradox of classes. The fuzzy view is that they are half-truths, due to the imprecision of all-or-nothing logic.

### Classical and fuzzy logic in terms of the binomial and multinomial theorems.

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Classical logic is based on a sharp distinction between statements as either true or false. There is no room for half-truths. Whereas Kosko was always asking his audiences to lift their hands up, by just the amount they thought a given statement true.

We could make T or F stand, respectively, for when it is true or false that certain candidates are a voters choice. For a given number of candidates, k, there are a certain number of logical possibilities of voters choice. This can be expressed in a truth table of all the logical possibilities, as shown in texts of logic or finite mathematics.   
After explaining how the binomial and multinomial theorems can give the lay-outs of truth tables, it is indicated, below, how they are used to determine correct reasoning.

The truth table shows all possible combinations of choices (T) and non-choices (F) between the different candidates. The table has a column for each candidate, with a row for each possibility, starting with all Ts and ending with all Fs, respectively meaning all are choices, and none are choices, of candidate by the voters.

For the two options, true and false choice, and three candidates, there are two, to the power of three, which equals eight, possible combinations of choice. Two, to the power of the number of candidates, expresses the sums of possibilities given by the binomial distribution. One could express the binomial theorem in terms of (T+F)^k where the notation means the bracketed value is multiplied by itself k times, or, to the power of the number of candidates, k.

Expanding the binomial theorem in the normal way, in coefficients and powers of both T and F, gives an algebraic representation of the truth table of choices for a given number of candidates. The powers of T and F show how many choices or non-choices, respectively, there are in a given row of the truth table.

For example, row one of a truth table for three candidates, is symbolised by 1T³. This means one logical possibility that all three candidates are a true choice of the voters.

The coefficents of the binomial expansion give how many of the rows of logical possibilities have a given number of true or of false choices for the three candidates. Thus 3T²F means there are three rows in the truth table, with two true choices for any of the three candidates.

Thus, the classical logic options of true or false can be used in a binomial expansion of their logical possibilities. Fuzzy logic options admit of at least three logical options, crudely speaking, true, half-true and false.

Consider a binomial distribution of constituencies according to the logicly possible combinations of rural or town districts.  
To put it another way, some districts could be called truly rural. Whereas it would be false to say the town districts were rural. Fuzzy logic admits of other categories, more or less rural and town. There might be three categories, rural, suburban and town, or four categories, rural, suburban, town, and urban (r, s, t, u,) and so on.

Instead of the two categories in a binomial distribution, three categories imply a trinomial distribution. Multiple categories imply a multinomial distribution from expanding the multinomial theorem. If you like, this is a way of showing the vastly increased number of logical possibilities afforded by "fuzzy logic."

Instead of two added terms, the multinomial theorem has many added terms (r, s, t, u, v, w...) to self-multiply their bracketed form, any number of times (say n times).

The expansion of (r + s + t + u + v + w)^n is found by adding all terms of the form:

(r^a)(s^b)(t^c)(u^d)(v^e)(w^f){n!/(a! b! c! d! e! f!)}.

This form means r, to the power of a, times s, to the power of b, and so on, multiplied by the curly-bracketed term. There, n! is the factorial number of n, or a given whole number multiplied by all its lesser whole numbers, which is divided by the factorials, of a, b, c, etc, multiplied by each other. The whole numbers a, b, c, etc, whatever they are, must add up to the number n.

The simplest example is the trinomial theorem: (r + s + t)^n where n can be any whole number, say three. Hence:

(r^a)(s^b)(t^c){3!/(a! b! c!)}.

Then a, b and c are all the possible partitions of the number n. If n equals three, one partition is: a = 3, b = c = 0. Bearing in mind that numbers to the power of zero equal one and that factorials of zero equal one, this gives:

r³.{3!/3!} = 1r³.

The coefficient, one, says that there is just one case of a cubic power of r. The cube of r means that r combines only with itself, in this one case. When b = 3, that is the one case when s combines only with itself. When c = 3, then t combines only with itself.   
In terms of our electoral example, these three cases mean one constituency made up all of rural districts, another constituency made up all of suburban districts and a third constituency all of town districts.

Another possible partition of n by a, b and c, is three split into two, one and zero. Note that either r, s or t can be two out of three districts in a constituency. That means three options or possibilities. But also when, say, there are two r-districts, either s can be the one other district with zero t-districts, or vice versa. Therefore the three options each have two options of their own, making, in all, three times two equals six options.

For the possibility of two r-districts, one s-district and zero t-districts, the formula is:

r²(s^1)(t^0){3!/(2! 1! 0!)} = 3s.r²

Besides the chance that r can be two out of three districts in a constituency, the coefficient three in 3sr² says that there are three ways that r can be two out of the three districts. Three objects can pair in three different ways.

(This becomes apparent if one has to do the expansion without the formula. If the terms in the brackets are cubed, the exhaustive -- and exhausting -- calculation writes the bracketed terms down three times. The first term r in the first brackets is multiplied by r in the second set of brackets, then by s in the third brackets. First-brackets r also multiplies by r in the third brackets and s in the second brackets. Thirdly, r, in the second brackets, multiplies by r, in the third brackets, and s in the first brackets. All this, just to get the term 3sr².)

This applies to the other five options, 3tr², 3rs², 3ts², 3rt², 3st². In all, there are three times six equals eighteen possibilities from the split of three into two and one.

There is one more split or partition, of n = 3, namely three ones, whereby a = b = c = 1.

The formula gives: r'.s'.t'.{3!/(1! 1! 1!)} = 3!r.s.t = 6rst.

This gives the six permutations of r, s and t. For instance, there are six possible ways that a constituency could have one each of three districts to be rural, suburban and town.

Add these six possibilities to the previous eighteen possibilities, as well as the three constituencies each all rural, all suburban or all town, and there are a total of 27 logical possibilities. This checks, taking one r plus one s plus one t, or three, to the power of three, equals 27.

Thus, the trinomial theorem, say, for three candidates gives a three-columned truth table with 27 rows of different possible ways of deciding whether to make the candidates true, half-true or false choices. In other words, there are 27 ways for the voters to make the candidates first, second or third preferences. The third preference does not help elect a candidate, because there is no fourth candidate to express a preference over. The third preference is, thus, no preference or a false choice.

For the case of only two candidates, who are simply true or false choices, there are four possibilities. Voters prefer both candidates or neither, or one or the other. But not all of these four cases constitute a true election. To "elect" means to choose out. Some candidates must get excluded in favor of others. Therefore, if both candidates are chosen or neither are chosen, then no election has taken place. These two non-exclusive possibilities are false statements of an election.

True elections are the other two possibilities when one of the two candidates, but not the other, is chosen. These are two true statements of an election. This is an example of how truth tables decide false or true reasoning, when statements are linked by certain logical connectives.

The logic of an election uses a connective that goes by the text book jargon of "exclusive disjunction." There are a few other such connectives: conjunction (and); inclusive disjunction (either...or, including both); negation (not); conditional (if...then); biconditional (if and only if...then) found in texts on symbolic logic or finite mathematics.

Preference voting is of more than the X-votes single preference. An order of more or less true choice, in ranked choice or preference voting can be set out in truth tables, of many candidates, expanded from the multinomial theorem. As the number of candidates increases, the number of preference permutations becomes astronomical.

Indeed, preferential elections generally exercise maximum exclusiveness, with the condition that voters may express no equal choices for two or more candidates, whether equally liked or equally disliked.

For the case of three preferences for three candidates, maximum exclusiveness reduces the possibilities from 27 to 6. The latter are the six permutations of preference or ranked choice. An increase in candidates soon renders the number of straight permutations of preference more than astronomical enough.

There is the qualification that voters may not be obliged to state more preferences than they wish. With the honorable exception of Tasmania, Australian government compeled voters to rank a multitude of candidates or just X-vote for a party list that the patronising bosses have ranked for you.  
Voting above and below the line has made a confusing mess of Senate elections, despite some relaxing of the compulsory statement of all preferences.

### Conclusion.

Classical logic was seen as a tool for determining the truth. The quest for logical certainty was followed by the study of all logical possibilities to estimate probabilities. The logic of universal truths and laws of chance reveal that logic is really the logic of choice, ranging from zero-choice determinism to a choice of astronomical, if not infinite possibilities.

Science is measurement and measurement is a mathematical logic of choice, the more powerful the measurement the more effective the choice and the greater potential for knowledge from it.

In English-speaking countries that cannot entirely ignore a Single Transferable Vote tradition, selfish anti-democratic anti-scientific Establishments hate STV, because it offers the greatest and clearest choice that gives the most accurate information, the most scientific representation of the general will. (And Binomial STV shows that transferable voting can be improved.)

Sources:

Sidney Siegel, _Nonparametric Statistics for the behavioral sciences_.  
Kemeny, Snell and Thompson, _Introduction to finite mathematics_.  
Bart Kosko, _Fuzzy Logic_.

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## Revelations of a math-moth and naive fysicist.

Table of contents.

#### Sections:

Mathematical proof as objective election.

Binomial STV.

The Harmonic Mean quota.

The geometric mean for the M-M expt.

Statistical algebra and amplitude symmetry.

Statistical Differentiation and Interval acceleration.

Farewell.

I passed middle age, left earning a living and hoped to concentrate on my studies. Poetry with Dorothy was a welcome diversion. I was learning and, it must be admitted, badly failing to learn.   
I was also self-conscious enough to consider that I had stagnated as a thinker. Science may be measurement but, it seemed to me, that I had relied too much on the logic of measurement, for my inspirations.

After leaving college, in the early 70s, fifty years after it was written, I read HG Wells: Men like Gods. It is not one of his better fictions. This utopia allowed everyone to publish their writings. I could not see that ever happening. Britain did have free speech but there was no way for an ordinary person, like myself, to be heard.

By 1995, it was evident that the Internet would make electronic publishing possible for all. Not thru lack of study preparation, but thru lack of commercial experience and poor judgment, I did not get on the web til 1999. Not until then did I realise the advantages of a word processor for organising my thoughts.

Not only did I up-load writings no-one wanted to publish, I was inspired to new web pages that explained better to myself topics, such as special relativity.   
Yes, and I made lots of mistakes, in the process. Hopefully, I corrected the worst of these, later. It was unnerving to have revealed how mistake-prone I am.

### Mathematical proof as objective election.

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The internet can be self-educational, as well as mutually educational.  
To understand, before I might do anything with the subject, was the motive for my putting up a page about the "magic dodecahedra," by Roger Penrose (from Shadows Of The Mind). This involved separated observers making selections, on their respective dodecahedrons, proving that the rules of quantum physics excluded the possibility that the classical laws of physics could be in operation.

I think it's fair to say that Penrose proof was elimination or exclusion of classical physics possibilities.   
I attempted a proof with respect to the consequences of first preference selections, and, thus, an "election" proof, rather than an exclusion proof. There was also a prediction, if my assumptions were valid.   
My train of thought was way-out, but it gave me the insight that mathematical proof might be achieved by "election" rather than, or as well as, the classic technique of exclusion of possibilities, that Penrose used.

Mind you, conventional elections don't have true exclusion counts. My invention of Binomial STV is the introduction of truly rational exclusion counts complementing the election count.

Besides proof by exclusion of alternative possibilities, possibly, election counts might also be recognised as a standard technique of mathematical proof.   
Mathematical proofs, as objective elections, may be given more power by progress in election method.

Thus, mathematical proofs may be considered as objective elections, tho the meaning of the phrase needs clarifying. By "elections," I mean voting system that may involve both election count and exclusion count. By "objective" elections, I mean one end of a continuum of elections that stretches to subjective elections, at the other end.

By subjective elections, I mean the usual political elections or referendums. Here, a subjective or personal choice is made by the citizens. At the subjective extreme, the choices may be intuitive, without explicit reference to rules or guidelines or political programs that might determine decisions.

The personalities of candidates may be too elusive to make conscious decisions about them. The issues in referendums may be too complex and indeterminate to allow of any definite scientific resolution. So, the only agreement is to abide by the hunch of the majority, the emotional "weight" of collective experience, since society must decide some direction or other, including, by default, no change of direction.

Mathematical proof might constitute the extreme case of objective elections. Such elections are objective, because everyone can agree which competing well-defined sets of rules, as "candidates" or options, to choose between. That is provided the mathematical proof or disproof is a powerful enough election or exclusion to determine a clear result.

However, modern mathematical proofs become probabilistic, sometimes relying on statistical computations. Simon Singh discusses, in his book, Fermat's Last Theorem, how some mathematicians have become disturbed by computer proofs.

Genetic algorithms are the natural selection principle of evolving computer programs, by randomly varying and mixing their sub-programs or lines of code, successively concentrating on the ones that chance mutations make most successful. This may be indispensibly more efficient, if less understandable, than the limited human ability for conscious rational deduction, the classical ideal of mathematical proof and programming.

Traditional mathematics logicly determines a route of proof. Statistics arrives randomly, like wandering unknowingly to a destination without making a map, doing so by benefit of a super-fast vehicle (the computer) crazily going every which way, too speedily to observe its routes and discriminate which were redundant or not.

Equilibrium STV, or real-time Hill PR, is akin to genetic algorithms. This is not merely a systematic covering of all known possibilities. It allows for unknown possibilities to arise in the voter inter-actions, as they assess each others behavior, in forming queues behind rival candidates.

The rules are implicit and fluid. As new patterns of voter intentions emerge, new rules may be formulated to characterise them. These may be new wave patterns, new oscillations, new disturbances in the voters approach to election equilibrium.

This is a mathematical form, which, far from falling a victim to Godel incompleteness theorem, assumes, from the start, incompleteness of known rules governing behavior.

This then is a key idea, that relatively unco-ordinated behavior may generate new forms of co-ordinated activity. More or less random movements may throw-up new patterns of conduct. Some goals may only be achieved, by not too rigid means of determining them.

A good analogy is the debate on a universal language. On BBC radio, a member of a party list to the European Union, a descendant of the Hapsburg dynasty, dismissed English as not a language at all. He meant that it was just a rabble of words from every which language.

That's a top-down partisan (or dynastic) perspective, if ever there was one. The classical ideal of a pure language, like ancient Greek or Latin, is only possible, because they are dead languages. English is open to foreign words, because it is open to foreign experiences. In that openess, it is a progressive, democratic and scientific language. It is an evolving language, capable of growing out of itself into something else, almost as unrecognisable as a butterfly to its grub. The classicists prefer to stick with the grub.

It is true that English empiricism, so lacking in continental classicism, could learn from their rationalism, without the top-down dogmatism. For instance, English speling needs to be simplified with a rationalised Roman alfabet, that won't create unnecessary dificulties for users of other European languages also based on the Roman alfabet.

From long experience, I know what a thicket of inconsistencies obstruct English learners, and the pit-falls speling reformers routinely fall into. But effective reform is practical.

As Einstein said, empirical rationalism is the essence of science. That is deducing and testing the consequences of principles, established on a sound basis of evidence.   
The trouble with politics is that it has not learned this basic lesson of science. Instead, politics rests on deference to dogmas of party interests, which are defended, at all costs, regardless of the evidence, against the public interest.

A case in point is (oligarchic) British governments fanatical adherence to planetary life-threatening nuclear weapons replacement and its hyper-polluting spin-off and accessory of (uranium fission) nuclear power. As Nicola Sturgeon says, it is "immoral," the immoral choice of death over life for the future of this planet.

Empiricism relies on finding things out by chance, with little guiding principle. This may produce many trivial experiments that lead nowhere. Half a century ago, that summed-up a text-book of social psychology, full of meaningless tests of small group behavior, that was on a social science course.

Even with the advent of computers, to enormously increase the checking powers of investigators, it may be doubted whether the question, solved with the help of computers, was productive of further interesting areas of study and discovery. This is precisely the doubt expressed by mathematicians (quoted by Simon Singh) over the solution of the four-color problem:

"But when I received the answer, 'They did it by breaking it down into thousands of cases, and then running them all on the computer, one after the other', I felt disheartened. My reaction was, 'So, it just goes to show, it wasn't a good problem after all.'"

In the four-color problem, all the logical possibilities of combination were so great that only a computer could check them all, to show that only four colors were needed to distinguish separate areas. Many mathematical problems are of this nature. And so are many elections.

Meek method is a computer counting, of voters preferences, too exhaustive to be done by a hand count. Binomial STV hints that is scarcely the beginning of the complexities of a scientific election count.

Rationalism deduces consequences of basic assumptions. These may be tenacious beliefs, just because they are assumptions, meaning that we have never questioned them.  
A basic tenet of scientific method is that believing a thing to be true, however strongly held the belief, doesn't necessarily make it so. It still has to be checked by the evidence for its truth or not.

Profound discoveries may come by chance finds, that long might have been over-looked by the scientific community.   
Alice Stewart found a completely unexpected correlation between cancers in the unborn and x-ray scans of their pregnant mothers. The medical professions favorite toy, of the time, was a killer: That was not looked-for or welcome news.

Alternatively, scientists may be moved by strong intuitions, of important new discoveries, shunned by their contemporaries. This was somewhat the case with Alice Stewart, having first discovered, by chance, a danger in low-level radioactivity.

The US government was moved by strong convictions that the truth might not be to their liking. They desperately prevented her repeating any discovery of harmful low-level radioactivity to workers in nuclear power stations.

Before microscopic evidence of infection was available, the conviction of Semmelweiss of the need for hygiene, to lower the mortality rates in hospitals, was a thankless task. His controled experiments were sound scientific procedure but not in themselves proof by explained cause of the results. This left a loop-hole for a lamentable disbelief and disregard of circumstantial evidence.  
(This was discussed, in The Philosophy Of Natural Science, by Carl Hempel.)

That lesson seems to be lost on the British government, whose dogma of out-sourcing, despite its poor hygiene record, does not allow hospitals to clean themselves.

In summary, mathematical proof appears to have become not merely rigorous but a composite or dynamic of the rigid and the random, like a true form of election, or system of choice, is a steering between determinism and randomness. This appears to be widely the case, in the sciences, as well as maths.

### Binomial STV.

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Here follows a recap. on an earlier chapter section about Binomial STV (also discussed in my previous book in the Democracy Science series: Scientific Method Of Elections).

A direct criticism of an STV count is technically called "premature exclusion." The point is that when there are no more winning candidates surplus votes to transfer, that count has to exclude the candidate, who happens to have the least votes at that time. This may not be strictly fair, because that candidate might have gone on to secure a seat.

This is a minor fault compared to the short shrift that First Past The Post gives to candidates. Simple Plurality, as a one-stage election, is the most premature of premature exclusions. That is the hypocrisy of attempts by politicians and academics to discredit STV.

More-over, I devised an STV system that got round premature exclusion. This innovation extended, to candidates still in deficit of a quota, the count, by re-adjustable keep value, of candidates votes in surplus of a quota, original to Meek method STV.

The keep value is a candidates popularity rating. The candidate is elected on reaching unity. A keep value of less than unity means the candidate is in surplus of a quota. A keep value of more than unity means the candidate is still in deficit of a quota.

Binomial STV is a keep-value averaged system of re-counts. That is a statistical idea of the count, requiring a computer program count. This is what some modern mathematical proofs have been reduced to. The advent of probabilistic mathematical proof is more in keeping with the true statistical means of arriving at election results, than classical deductive proof to a certainty.

The term bi-nomial refered to two kinds of counts, an election and an exclusion, respectively for the most prefered and the least prefered candidates.

These counts each give distinctive keep values or elective weights to the candidates votes, as a ratio of the quota. In the case of the exclusion count of the voters preferences in reverse, the keep values are inverted, as a back-up election count. The keep values are then averaged, for each candidate, to give an over-all election result. (The appropriate average is the geometric mean.)

All the preferences left blank are counted as abstentions. These occur as the voters run out of preferences. In the exclusion count, last preference abstentions must not be ignored, for just counting the last stated preferences, first in the exclusion count, would then give them undue importance. A quota worth of abstentions would leave one of the seats vacant, in the election result.

Averaging the keep values and inverted keep values, respectively, from one election count of prefered candidates, and one exclusion count of unprefered candidates, is first order Binomial STV, corresponding to the first order binomial theorem.  
A series of qualified counts may be held like a series of experimental controls, based on the preference-unpreference logic of higher orders of the binomial distribution.

An example of how first and second order Binomial STV work is given here:

http://www.voting.ukscientists.com/Binomial_STV.html

The example is drastically over-simplified, for a system requiring computer programming, as does Meek method. Unlike Meek method, all the abstentions are counted, so there is no requirement to reduce the Droop quota, as the preferences run out. Otherwise, the way to code Binomial STV is to start from the Meek method program and adapt to the modified rules, extending the use of the keep value, and so forth.

I am looking for some organisation that might take up this work of implementing Binomial STV and running preliminary trials.

### Harmonic Mean quota.

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A further more simple discovery in election method, I was pleased to make, was Harmonic Mean quotas. The simple Harmonic Mean Quota is more representative than the Hare or Droop quotas, of which it is the appropriate average or statistical representative of the range of votes between the two quotas. The Hare quota tends to be too high to secure candidates election to all seats, without regimentation of voting. The Droop quota is low enough to ensure all seats filled, but the margins between winning and losing candidates may not be statisticly significant.

I used the three quotas to make a simple arithmetic definition of how choice may emerge as a balance between extremes of totally determined and chance results. This consideration entered into a metaphysical chapter on a freedom creation: Science is Ethics as "Electics."

### The geometric mean for the Michelson-Morley experiment.

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I noticed that the calculation for the Michelson-Morley experiment (MMX) would have made the correct prediction, had they used a different average for the return journey of the light beam with respect to Earth motion.   
Really, there was a relative acceleration involved, as the beam was made to change direction, by being reflected back to source. And that requires averaging by the geometric mean, and not the arithmetic mean.   
The Minkowski Interval supported this interpretation, because it actually has a geometric mean form and gives the correct prediction, when applied to the MMX.

### Statistical algebra and amplitude symmetry

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Julian Barbour, in The End Of Time, seeks to end an inconsistent observation of the universe from outside. It seemed to me that mathematics itself should be a self-contained universe. Every number should be representable by other numbers. This includes complex numbers, that complete the number system of mathematics. (See: The New Mathematics, by Irving Adler.)   
The mathematics of representation is statistics, which represents ranges of numbers as their averages. Every number is a potential average of other numbers.

Michio Kaku, in Physics of the Impossible, says that mathematicians have avoided Godel incompleteness theorem by avoiding the distinction between the observer and the observed.  
Statistics, in the way I used it, breaks down this active/passive distinction, because every number can be treated as representative or represented.

Geometric means of complex numbers turn-out to have an application to the Interval in special relativity. It resulted in my caldera model: our universe is inside the crater walls, with a tachyonic universe on the outside, possibly subject to quantum tunneling effects. The walls are of infinite height and never quite meet, in the model.  
This approach to the Interval led to further concepts, in an application of the geometric mean to algebra, of a statistical quadratic equation and amplitude symmetry (or radius symmetry) to go with the Interval phase symmetry (or rotational symmetry).

The Minkowski Interval has rotational symmetry, with a corresponding conservation law of angular momentum.   
I found out that you could give the Interval equation an extra term, as a quadratic equation, analgous to a wave equation being given an amplitude-varying term. Solving the Interval quadratic equation, with or without this extra term, gives the same answer, provided you take the geometric mean of the quadratic equation alternative solutions, thus treated as range limits to be averaged.

This uniformity of answer meant one thing: amplitude symmetry. So, the Minkowski Interval has not only (rotational) direction symmetry but magnitude (of amplitude) symmetry. Magnitude and direction are the combination that characterise a vector. So, the Minkowski Interval has not only rotational symmetry but magnitude symmetry, which is to say, vector symmetry. Presumably the corresponding conservation law is vector momentum.

### Statistical Differentiation and Interval acceleration.

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It appears that other branches, of maths beside algebra, have a basis in statistics. One can see how geometry might be founded on statistics by the Buffon needle trials to estimate value of pi.   
I tried to apply the geometric mean to differential calculus. Eventually, I deduced that traditional or conventional differentiation is effectively either arithmetic mean differentiation or harmonic mean differentiation. Differentials, or whatever the standard term for the traditional change-variables (which I call variations) become items in a statistical range, even if the range consists only of one item and is, in effect, its own average.

In investigations into basic operations of geometric mean differentiation, I considered the exponential function as geometric mean derivative of Fibonacci algebra, where the undifferentiated ratio of variations is a ratio of successive terms in the Fibonacci series.

Special relativity only correlates observations in velocity frames of reference to each other. Acceleration frames of reference are usually dealt with separately by general relativity theory. Geometric mean differentiation, as I conceived it, might turn the Interval into an acceleration frame of reference for observers, perhaps derived in the form of a normal distribution (with its suggestions of both flat and curved space, along its bell-shape).

My geometric mean derivative of the normal curve might be applied to universal origins, just as General Relativity is so applied. For, the Big Bang is an exponential growth of Creation and the normal curve is an exponential function. The normal curve can be rotated round its norm to form an hour-glass shape. Its middle can be considered the origin of a balanced expansion two ways of a matter universe and an anti-matter universe, in keeping with conservation law. This improves on my caldera model, which just gives one-half of an hour-glass model.

### Farewell.

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When I reached forty years of independent study, I hazarded it all in one sentence!

_Moral science is the truth of knowledge in freedom as a balancing act of love against socially destabilising force and fraud._

I'll let that stand. My studies were a lonely task. May others find them useful in ways that will benefit everyone.

Politicians showed, for a century, that they cannot be trusted to referee themselves on the electoral rules of the game.   
Sceptical academics have supplied politicians with an ideology of reaction, by implying that voting methods are a matter of arbitrary choice, with no agreeable standards to choose between them.

That is just the opposite to my youthful hope that the scientific community would recognise elections are subject to a general method, and so be more inclined to referee honest standards of elections in politics.   
My early intentions were to draw the attention of scientists to election science as a complement to natural science, because more general choice of observations would lead to more general theories to cover them.

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## Guide to five volume collected verse by Richard Lung.

Table of contents

Dorothy the maker made a maker of me.

#### The five books:

The Valesman

Dates and Dorothy

He's A Good Dog." (He just doesn't like you to laf.)

In The Meadow Of Night

Radical!

## Dorothy the maker made a maker of me.

I described (some of) the comedy of errors that got me onto a social science degree course. My state of mind was too backward and unimaginative to make good use of this youthful opportunity. Nearly twenty years later, still somewhat inept, I had another stroke of luck. This also came about in a comical way. A day or two before the 1987 general election, I went to attend a Liberal candidate speech. In the Liberal club, I blundered into the wrong meeting. This turned out to be a writers group.

In the interval, I was approached by an elderly woman. I remember her asking what my politics were. I said I was independent. She seemed heartened by this. It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship that was to last over twenty-two years. I suppose that I met her for no longer than the time taken by a full-time three-year course. But it's much less pleasant to have ones education crammed in to a course for an examination.

Dorothy was like having a personal tutor for a friend. She was a tireless critic of my writings. In the early 90s, the Labour Party produced a report on electoral systems. Dorothy came from a Labour family and she provided me with an introduction, as well as a time-consuming commentary on my submission.

She made the biggest impression as a poet. There is an aloneness about Dorothys poems that puts me right in her place. Her poems of the Keltic wildernesses are the most obvious examples. When my time is done, these poems might speak for me.

In the sixth form, I had a good English literature course, the bulk of which was classical poetry: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Webster, Milton, John Donne, Herbert and other metaphysical poets, Wordsworth, and Hopkins, that precursor of the moderns. It was not the sort of literature that I had wanted to read in my late teens. It did not occur to me that poetry was something that I might write. It was just exam fodder, or I was just exam fodder, and wasted on me, who knew nothing of life, stuck in school-rooms all day.

After leaving college, I tried write some traditional poetry, without any knowledge of the 20th-century poetry, which I hadn't studied. I gave-up trying to write poetry at 30. A decade later, it was a revelation to read Dorothys poems and, what is more, hear how she read them to an audience. Dorothy wrote traditional nature poetry in modern free verse. Knowing Dorothy, I could see that these poems were an expression of her personality. They were relaxed and reflective and usually had some point to them. They were Dorothy.

Dorothy also went to a poetry group and had taken me, one evening. I provoked lafter, by reading one of Dorothys poems. I suppose the lafter was to rub-in that Dorothy was not famous enuf to be so distinguished.

After that, I stopped going. And it would be a year or two before Dorothy told me to go again. She also crossly said not to read her poems; they all laft and she didn't like it!

Shall I compare Dorothy to a summers day? There were occasional thunderstorms. They were impressive, while they lasted, but you knew they would soon blow over.  
This contrasts sharply with those temperaments, on which anger seems to have settled like an ice age.

I soon realised that I was only conscripted to the poetry group because of falling membership. The irony was that my belief in Dorothys work gradually infected everyone else, until they came to share my conviction that Dorothy was one of the best poets in the country. The fact that she nearly always won our little groups poetry competition trophy also helped.   
And Dorothy won Yorkshire tv competition for poet laureate of the north.  
I am pleased to say that, later still, I was also the means to getting a poem by Dorothy noticed nationly.

Dorothy didn't just teach me poetry by example. She was a rambler and knew all the out-of-the-way places in our district. We must have gone for one or two hundred outings together. They inspired our poems. She brought me back to the countryside of my childhood. I re-worked my earliest memories.

She paraded, before me, all the sights that imagination needs to be able to work on. Poetry, like science, needs experience and imagination. It is well known that poetry is debased, because people don't realise that, like every other activity, it is a skill that requires practice.

Science is about learning to think. People may think that they think but in fact it also depends on much practice. Scientists are imagined to be laboratory technicians in white coats. It is true that the bulk of science is remotely specialist from anything that most of us could hope to do. But essentially a scientist is only someone who has learned how to think, tho the thinking tends to become specialised.

In my forties, Dorothy inspired me to want to write many beautiful poems. Few of them really come-off and one never seems to have written enough.   
Till then, science and ethics or the true and the good had preoccupied me. As a thinker, I was something of a two-dimensional card-board cut-out, until Dorothy showed me the third dimension of beauty.

The evening I first met Dorothy, I heard her mention in conversation the influence of Thomas Hardy. There is the same country remoteness, and a secular pessimism combined with a dour kindness. Dorothys poems give the impression of as lonely a person as myself. That and my own farm-land infancy explain their attraction to me.

That, in itself, wouldn't be enough without Dorothys unique qualities. Thomas Hardy was a reticent man but he did once say that his life story was in his poems. I don't think I could say that about Dorothy, because she was a more sociable and popular person than her poems would lead you to believe. Perhaps companionship is too prosy to make much good poetry.

It is profoundly true, especially of my earliest years, that my life is in my poems. Before Hardy, Wordsworth made natural a poetry of rural toil, rather than the professionals holidays or court affairs of state.   
Otherwise, I drew on further experiences, as one must, tho too literal an interpretation would be misleading. I respect the kitchen sink dramas. My sixth-form literature syllabus included contemporary plays. A teacher took us thru Arnold Wesker and something of the Angry Young Men.   
Most - not all - of the worst things would get left out of my poems, and much else put in!

* * *

### The Valesman.

To top

The first volume is mainly traditional nature poetry.   
(160 poems, including longer narrative verse in section three.)  
The nature poet Dorothy Cowlin reconnected me with my rural origins. Many of the poems, about animals and birds and the environs, could never have been written without her companionship.

The unity of themes, especially across the first two sections, as well as within the third section, makes this volume my most strongly constructed collection. I guess most people would think it my best. Moreover, there is something for all ages here.

1. How we lived for thousands of years.

Dorothy thought my best poems were those of the farming grand-father, the Valesman.

2. Flash-backs from the early train.

More memories of early childhood on the farm and first year at the village school.

3. Trickster.

Narrative verse about boyish pranks and prat-falls.

4. Oyh! Old Yorkshire Holidays.

Features playtime aspects of old rural and sea-side Yorkshire.

* * *

### Dates and Dorothy

To top

Book two begins with an eight chapter review of works, plus list of publications & prizes by Dorothy Cowlin.

This second volume continues with the second instalment of my own poems, classed as life and love poetry.  
The Dates are historical and romantic plus the friendship of Dorothy and the romance of religion.  
169 poems plus two short essays.

Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin.

Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:  
1. dates.  
2. the Dorothy poems.  
3. loves loneliness loves company.  
4. the romance of religion.

The hidden influence of Dorothy, in the first volume, shows in this second volume. The first two sections were written mostly after she died. Thus, the first section, Dates, reads like a count-down before meeting her, in the second section, as prentice poet.

She was warmly responsive to the romantic lyrics of the third section. This was reassuring. Those that originated in my twenties received some drastic working over. (I gave-up writing formal poetry during my thirties, to all practical purposes. There were only about three exceptions.) Most of my subsequent out-put also under-went intensive revision.

The fourth section probably stems from the importance attached to religion at primary school. Here humanitarian Dorothys influence only slightly made itself felt by her liking to visit churches.

The prelude, reviewing Dorothy as a professional writer, is freely available, at present, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin.   
Nearly all the text is there, except a preface and last section, which I didnt upload before losing access to the site in 2007.  
The fotos, I took of Dorothy, are published for the first time.

The continued availability of my Dorothy Cowlin website is not guaranteed, so I welcome this opportunity to publish my literary review of her work, as an extra to volume 2.

* * *

### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

To top

The third volume is a miscellaneous collection of 163 poems/pieces, making-up sections, one, three and four, with the arts and politics the strongest themes, as well as themes found in other volumes. There is also a story in section one, and a final short essay.

1. with children  
2. or animals  
3. never act  
4. the political malaise  
5. the lost  
6. short essay:  
Proportional Representation for peace-making power-sharing.

The first section includes a sort of verse novela and dramatic poem with an eye on the centenary of the First World War. The idea stemmed from an incident related by Dorothy Cowlin (yet again). Her uncle was stopped flying a kite on the beach, because he might be signaling to the enemy battle fleet.   
No kidding!

In this miscellany, previous themes appear, such as children, animals and birds. Verse on the arts comes in. I organised these poems on the WC Fields principle: Never act with children or animals.  
The fourth section collects political satires from over the years. The fifth section reflects on loneliness.

This volume is classed as of "presentatives" because largely about politics and the arts, with politicians acting like performing artists or representatives degenerating into presentatives, on behalf of the few rather than the many.

However, the title poem, He's a good dog..., hints how eccentric and resistent to classification is this third volume. This title poem is based on a true war-time air incident. The good dog is also derived from a true dog, whose own story is told in the poem, the bleat dog (in volume 1).

* * *

### In the meadow of night

To top

The fourth volume is of 160 poems and three short stories on the theme of progress or lack of it.

part one: allure.

The allure of astronomy and the glamor of the stars.

part two: endeavor.

The romance and the terror of the onset of the space age and the cold war.

part three: fate.

An uncertain future of technologies and possible dystopias. Ultimate questions of reality.

This fourth volume is of SF poetry. SF stands for science fiction, or, more recently, speculative fiction. The verse ranges from hard science to fantasy.  
This literary tradition of HG Wells and other futurists exert an influence.  
Otherwise, I have followed my own star, neither of my nature poet friends, Dorothy and Nikki, having a regard for SF poetry.   
Yet science fiction poetry is a continuation of nature poetry by other means.  
This may be my most imaginative collection. Its very diversity discourages summary.

* * *

### Radical!

To top

Volume 5 opens with a play about the most radical of us all, Mother Teresa: If the poor are on the moon...  
This is freely available, for the time being, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. (Performers are asked to give author royalties to the Mother Teresa Mission of Charity.)

Previously unpublished content consists largely of fairly long verse monologs, starting with artistic radicals, in "The dream flights of Berlioz and Sibelius," which is a sequence of The Impresario Berlioz, and The Senses of Sibelius.

Next, the intellectual radical, Sigmund Freud, followed by short poems on a sprinkling of more great names, who no doubt deserved longer. (Art is long, life is short.)

The title sequence, Radical! is made-up of verse about John Stuart Mill, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, George Orwell and JB Priestley.

Volume five ends with an environmental collection, some of it, in earlier versions, currently available on my website (Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin).  
Should that website close down, I hope the green verses and the Mother Teresa play can still be obtained in this volume five.

#### The Valesman.

_Published on 3rd august 2014._

#### Dates and Dorothy.

_Published on 2nd september 2014.  
_

_Available from Smashwordshere. _

#### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

_Published on 14 november 2014.  
_

#### In the meadow of night.

_Available from Smashwordshere._

#### Radical!

_Available from Smashwordshere. _

_If you read and enjoy any of these books, when they are published, please post on-line a review of why you liked the work._

_My website: Democracy Science.  
has current URL or web address:_

_http://www.voting.ukscientists.com_

_While preparing this series, I have made minor changes to arrangement and content of the material, so the descriptions of companion volumes, at the end of each book, might not always quite tally._

To top

* * *

## Guide to two more book series by the author.

Table of contents.

## The Commentaries series

#### Commentaries book one:

### Literary Liberties

Literary Liberties with reality allow us to do the impossible of being other people, from all over the world. Our imagined other lives make the many worlds theory a fact thru fiction.

This book of books or illustrated reviews span fiction, faction and non-fiction.  
It goes some way to substantiate the belief of Benedetto Croce that history is the history of liberty.

I only wrote of books that I appreciated, so that I could pass on that appreciation to others. It must be admitted that I went with novels that looked over horizons confined to family values. (Family is, of course, a basic trial of liberty, compromised by obligations to partner and children.)

Likewise, these reviews themselves need not be bounded by the horizons of literary criticism but reach out to solutions for the problem novel or the non-fiction book with a cause.

In promoting others writings, I hoped to promote my own, any-way, the liberal values that inform my writings. It took a lot more preparation than I had anticipated. This is usually the case with my books.

Literary Liberties is the first of a short series of Commentaries. This author also has a Democracy Science series. The series of Collected Verse was the first to be completed.

* * *

#### Commentaries book two:

### Science and Democracy reviews

As they separately pursue their shared ethic of progress, scientific research and democratic reform conduct themselves as two different journeys, both here followed, as the evidence mounts that they depend on each other to meet the stresses that survival poses.

Works reviewed and studied here include the following.

The physicist, John Davidson under-took an epic investigation into the mystic meaning of Jesuses teachings, for our other-worldly salvation, supplemented by a revelation in non-canonic texts of the gnostics.

The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, 1876 autobiography of the "moral force" Chartist and author of the famous six points for equal representation.   
Organiser who anticipated the peace and cultural initiatives of the UN, such as UNESCO.

Jill Liddington: Rebel Girls. Largely new historical evidence for the role especially of working women in Yorkshire campaigning for the suffrage.

"How the banks robbed the world" is an abridged description of the BBC2 program explanation of the fraud in corporate finance, that destroys public investments.

David Craig and Matthew Elliott: Fleeced!  
How we've been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers and how much they've cost us.

The political system fails the eco-system.  
Green warnings, over the years, by campaigners and the media, and the hope for grass roots reforms.   
From Paul Harrison, how expensively professionalised services deprive the poor of even their most essential needs. Also, the developed countries are over-strained, on this account, drawing-in trained people from deprived countries.  
Why society should deprofessionalise basic skills important for peoples most essential needs, whether in the third world or the "over-developed" countries.

The sixth extinction  
Richard Leakey and other experts on how mankind is the agent of destruction for countless life forms, including possibly itself, in the sixth mass extinction, that planet earth has endured in its history. Why world politicians must work together to counter the effects of global warming.

On a topic where science and democracy have not harmonised, a few essays from 2006 to 2010, after "nuclear croneyism" infested New Labour and before Japans tsunami-induced chronic nuclear pollution. There's a 2015 after-word.

Some women scientists who _should_ have won nobel prizes.   
Lise Meitner, Madame Wu, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell, Alice Stewart, to name some. Reading of their work in popular science accounts led me, by chance, to think they deserved nobel prizes; no feminist program at work here.

Julian Barbour: _The End Of Time._   
Applying the Mach principle, to an external frame-work of Newtonian absolute space and time, both in classical physics and to Schrödinger wave equation of quantum mechanics, by which the universe is made properly self-referential, as a timeless "relative configuration space" or Platonia.

Murray Gell-Mann: _The Quark and the Jaguar._   
Themes, including complex systems analysis, which the reviewer illustrates by voting methods.

Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe.   
Beyond point particle physics to a theory of "strings" that may under-lie the four known forces of nature, and its material constituents, thru super-symmetry, given that the "super-strings," as such, are allowed to vibrate, their characteristic particle patterns, in extra hidden dimensions of space.

Brian Greene: The Hidden Reality.   
A survey of the more extravagant physics theories that have invoked many worlds or a multiverse..

Lee Smolin: Three roads to quantum gravity.   
Reviewing the other two roads (besides string theory) namely black hole cosmology and loop quantum gravity. All three approaches are converging on a discrete view of space and time, in basic units, on the Planck scale. General relativitys space-time continuum is being quantised, rather as nineteenth century thermo-dynamics of continuous radiation was quantised.

Lee Smolin: the trouble with physics.   
Impatience with the remoteness of string theory and hope for progress from theories with more experimental predictions. How to make research more effective. Smolin on a scientific ethic. Reviewer criticises the artificial divide academics make between science and ethics.

### Commentaries book three.

### Echoes Of A Friend: Letters from Dorothy Cowlin.  
Comment by Richard Lung.

Dates And Dorothy was a literary appreciation of the professional writer, traveler, nature walker, and poet, combined with my second book of verse, that includes the story of our friendship.   
My second book, about Dorothy, is a memorial, she graces. by speaking thru letters to me, as well as assessments of this writer, she made into a maker, and aided as a reformer.  
In widowhood, she yet became companionable and widely liked. Her quiet and sunny disposition held in reserve a deeply serious nature.

### Commentaries book four.

If and when time allows, it is intended to gather a final note-book, consisting largely of tables, graphs and diagrams, too large to conveniently include for e-book readers...

Table of contents.

* * *

## The Democracy Science series.

To top.

The Democracy Science series of books, by Richard Lung, also is edited and renovated from this authors material on the Democracy Science web-site.

### Book 1: Peace-making Power-sharing.

The first, of two books on voting method, has more to do with electoral reform. (The second is more about electoral research.)

"Peace-making Power-sharing" features new approaches to electoral reform, like the Canadian Citizens Assemblies and referendums. I followed and took part in the Canadian debate from before the assemblies were set-up, right thru the referendums.  
This was a democratic tragedy and an epic in the dashing of idealistic hopes.

Some developments in America are reviewed.

The anarchy of voting methods, from the power struggle in Britain, is the issue of over a century of ruling class resistance to electoral reform.

A penultimate chapter gives the simplest way to explain transferable voting, on to the more formal treatment of a small club election.

The last chapter is the earliest extant version of my work on scientific measurement of elections (in French).

#### Peace-making Power-sharing

_from Smashwords in epub format:here free._

* * *

### Book 2: Scientific Method of Elections.

The previous book had a last chapter in French, which is the earliest surviving version of the foundation of this sequel, Scientific Method of Elections. I base voting method on a widely accepted logic of measurement, to be found in the sciences. This is supported by reflections on the philosophy of science.

The more familiar approach, of judging voting methods by (questionable) selections of basic rules or criteria, is critically examined.

This author is a researcher, as well as a reformer, and my innovations of Binomial STV and the Harmonic Mean quota are explained.  
This second book has more emphasis on electoral research, to progress freedom thru knowledge.

Two great pioneers of electoral reform are represented here, in speeches (also letters) of John Stuart Mill on parliamentary reform (obtained from Hansard on-line). And there is commentary and bibliography of HG Wells on proportional representation (mainly).

Official reports of British commissions on election systems are assessed. These reports are of Plant, Jenkins, Kerley, Sunderland, Arbuthnott, Richard, and (Helena Kennedy) Power report.

The work begins with a short history on the sheer difficulty of genuine electoral reform. The defeat of democracy is also a defeat for science. Freedom and knowledge depend on each other.   
Therein is the remedy.

* * *

### Book 3: Science is ethics as electics.

Political elections, that absorbed the first two books in this series, are only the tip of the iceberg, where choice is concerned. Book three takes an electoral perspective on the social sciences and natural sciences, from physics to metaphysics of a free universe within limits of determinism and chance.

Table of contents.
