Tag Archives: Azanian Quartet

Konfession Time.

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Last week I was ambushed by a glib well practiced Flat-Earther, who left me, frankly, gobsmacked: and almost impossibly, to me: without an answer.

 

                          The experience made me realize something I had forgotten about in a rush of enthusiasm. It was this. Over the past year I have presented an argument with far too much seriousness, regarding Basic pay: and how to finance it….

   

               The sheer effrontery of my efforts have left all my readers so similarly gobsmacked, that to this moment, writing this, no one has yet raised any refutable argument against the idea. In a world almost committed to trolling the aisles of lunatic ideas I have been soundly almost curiously ignored. [Technically it is just part of the futility of being a Saharan/Namibian] grain of sand that thinks it can start a sandstorm. Not some conspiracy.]

 

                   So here is my apology for ranting on about something almost no one on the planet has ever given any thought to; and is, in its own way, as bizarre an idea as being earnestly informed, out off the blue, as it were, that the Earth is Flat, despite all protestations to the contrary.

 

                  That my ambusher last week could suggest, in all seriousness, that everything we have ever learned about the Earth, being a relatively solid ball of  tangible rock n mud flying through an ever expanding Multiverse, was/ is, disinformation… Or, in the language of our times: “Fake News”.

 

                    So here too is a full konfession. I write fiction. The piece of fiction about basic pay is an idea based on a phrase that emerged from an ‘out of body’ experience that I believe I had, nearly 25 years ago. That was when I apparently flatlined, for an inordinate time: during surgery for multiple gunshot wounds. In the language of that arch-fictioneer Lobsang Rampa, I took an astral journey that may, or may not, have been anything other than a morphine, whatever, induced hallucination.  That idea was what is today referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI].

 

                   So what am I on about? Firstly:  I write poetic based Sci-Fi crime stories. I am also not a literary novelist.  My story, “The Jonker Memorandum” is set sometime between Now and Then.  Now is whatever it is when you read it [unless] Then is about a hundred and nineteen years later. The “unless” note, means you may read this after many things that were predicted to have happened along the way, have in the meantime become Now.

 

                    One of the things that becomes ‘Now’, is basic pay, something that  I wrote about in 1994 that has in the meantime begun the journey to become NOW…. only now, is referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI]. In the marketing language of Product Life Cycle curves, UBI is in the Pre-Birth stage now after [from my perspective] gestating for a quarter century. The idea itself in its various forms has a much longer gestation time. And as we know, about 90 % of all disruptive Ideas, unlike babies, abort before birth occurs.

 

                   UBI is such an idea, that is currently experiencing some prospective miscarriage at te hands of its fondest semi-supporters.

 

                   So: What is UBI?

 

                   For me it is a fiction that solves an accounting and economics based problem that troubled the professional me, about a world running on credit [as our world does presently].

 

My present set of three stories: i.e. Part Four* of the Azanian Quartet is set over three eras: some parts of the first half of the 20th century, and two set in different parts of the 21st.  

 

 

                    In one of those latter two, Basic Pay [UBI] has become real… and as I have routinely repeated I write poetic fiction. It follows the realization that just as Marxist economics reached its apotheosis in 1989, so too [so-called] Neo-Liberal economics reached its own ideological sell by date in 2008, with the invention of Quantitative Easing [QE].

 


QE has spurred the global economy into a global casino economy; favouring oligopolies of all varieties: infesting things that once worked well. And as we all know it doesn’t matter how screwed up the political economy becomes: if you are one of the working ‘prekariat’: you still have to pay your rent and buy your own lunch.

 

                   The problem to be solved in the story was: how is Basic Pay financed. And that is the conundrum. Some of my ‘up to date’, favorite writers have come out in favour, in principle, of Basic Pay: f.i. Luce, Harari, Acemoglou among others. All have however expressed major reservations, in some cases on moral grounds; and more broadly, pure financial affordability grounds. The widely followed socialist economist Prof: Richard D Wolff on the other hand is adamantly opposed to UBI… and anything associated with it… not to mention how it could never be financed….

 

             Ironically Wolff completely validated, for me, an observation made by Professor Guy Standing, who is a fervent advocate for solving the pending widening and growing reality; of what he calls “the dangerous class” … “the New Prekariat”… a term he has coined: through the use of UBI.

 

Standing argues, that spokespersons for the left had an ideological blindspot, about the entire concept of UBI

 

           And indisputably in the old world we all lived in, UBI could not be comfortably financed with the instruments thatr we have used to fund “welfare” through the 20th century.

 

However we no longer live in that 20th century world: and haven’t now for nearly a dozen years. We now live in a world financed by QE…. aka Quantitative Easing. So how did we manage to finance a world using QE. QE btw is, for the uninitiated, is a polite term for mass printing of fake money on a scale that defies reason… without fueling hyperinflation. In fact what should have fueled a Zimbabwe or Venezuelan surge of prices has, to everyone’s confused horror, seemed to produce Deflation or at best Disinflation. Depending of course on what one chooses to measure.

 

            So the US dollar that should have made Venezuela look tame has simply pottered about…. Nonetheless the inflation is there albeit the effect has been a massive asset price bubble, world wide that is, in part, fueling the huge popular discontent noted globally.

 

            Had I encountered all my above informants varied financially founded oppositions before last year, then their thinking and mine: would have been broadly congruent.

 

           However it is now my opinion [for reasons I have shared with you] that their and my objections were /are pre-revolutionary. I mean, the FIR* transformation changes all things … Again.  And since I hardly think I am smarter that any of those aforementioned excellent writers… I choose to keep my proposed solution method, as a private fiction that I have tested on all of you on behalf of the character that introduces the financing idea, in the second part of the story mentioned above.

 

         Ok. So you can all relax. I haven’t gone mad and flat earthly-ish type weird: I am simply progressing with the background to my story with your tacit participation.

 

What predictions next then, when asking: What If?

  

            So when it comes to predictions here’s one for the road: so I can say Yay later.

 

Based on the current line up; I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is the only person the Democrats can field, who can beat the Trumper in 2020: assuming she could beat the ‘Tweeds’ and secure the nomination.

 

*[The podcast ‘Jonker’ you will remember, is Part Three]

 

Cheers

 

!NiK[’19]

Our Invisible friend

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Over the weekend I caught the tail end of a BBC interview with an Iraqi Jewish American artist, Michael Rakowitz, who has had an impressive piece of artwork assembled; and mounted on an historically vacant, fourth plinth, on London’s Trafalgar Square.


The artwork is a retrospective reproduction of a vandalized ‘Lamassu’: [“a Winged bull and protective deity”] that stood for 2800 years at the gates of Nineveh, awaiting the eventual arrivals, of the new barbarians, in the form of Daesh: now rebuilt from the detritus and discarded leftovers of modernity.


He calls it “The invisible enemy should not exist.”


The interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked if his work had a political meaning, and was he therefore a ‘political’ artist since he couldn’t truly be a ‘commercial’ artist. According to Mr Sackur’s Q sheet, much of what he did was not saleable, reproducible, or scalable: or whatever the current re-interpretation of ‘commercial’ is.


In his answer, he indicated that he was an artist, who worked with his interpretation of his milieu, and therefore there would be an inevitable ‘political’ stream in the back-story. [Personally, I do suspect his Lamassu is infinitely scalable and reproducible, but that is not relevant to my point here]


His answer though caused me to pause and ask myself the same question. Am I a commercial writer of commercially satisfying stories that I aim to put in a place where their scalability will enable some form of remuneration… yes? OR. Am I an artist, in the vein of the late New York Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor………..described as a “visionary pianist” in the NY Daily News, and referred to in a different, earlier BBC newscast, as a person who followed his own path? As obviously does the Iraqi Jewish American artist Mr.Rikowitz …………


I was unable to arrive at a conclusion to that: considering myself a simple working class wordsmith. I am also not certain that most people would consider a poet to be an artist.


Nonetheless, I did have to concede that, on two levels, at least I am a completely ‘political’ writer. My evolving Azanian Quartet has two specific political purposes. I am going to share one of them with you now. I’m doing this because today is possibly the most auspicious opportunity that exists, for the human race to ascertain, that it discount’s the late Stephen Hawking’s gloomy prediction: that we would be lucky [the human race] to emerge intact from the 21st century.


I am referring to that glorious entrepreneur, Mr. Zuckerberg’s immanent Congressional Hearings … and the immensely elusive opportunity those hearings present for constructing a solution, to what is already, and going to be even more of, a problem of immense magnitude, by the time we reach the part of my quartet that is set in 2037.


I refer to the inevitable specter of mass scale, long-term structural unemployment, for which we have to create a remedy, that contributes to growth and developments, rather than subtracting from it. Currently everything being suggested is regressive.


My remedy, and #1 political issue of choice, was to identify and provide a viable [fictional] solution for this problem in the future. That remedy I called BASIC PAY: is now more popularly called: Universal Income.


I was always intrigued, as a life long ‘nonprofessional’ reader of science fiction: Asimov, Heinlein, Bester et al, by a particular feature of science based fiction writing. This was the use of the term “credits”, when the text called, somewhere, for how people lived in the future [now arriving at speed] They always spent ‘credits’… And since Credits suggested debt how did they pay for the debt?


What are these ‘credits’, I would ask me… where do they come from: and how are they financed? [Declaratory Note: I am not a scientist, I am part of an educator class of financial economist with a bent towards the history thereof and who writes poetry, because it ‘happens’.]


So: in many ways, my entertainment podcast, prose poetic cyber serial, The Jonker Memorandum, exists to provide that answer [as a by-product to telling you what I hope is a cool story]. I call it “Basic Pay”. After many years basic pay is now gaining traction as “Universal Income’: and as such has featured in the current political agenda’s of at least half a dozen countries, and is being punted by such glorious entrepreneurs as Mssrs: Gates and Musk. The problem however remains: how is it financed?


In the cyber serial, my solution of choice was the Transaction Levy [aka Tax]. However: that was then. And it is also on the subtraction side of our growth equation. That was though, before the tech revolution gave us DATA… and me: a writer of fiction, the new Tilling fields that yield the “New Gold”. Something Mr. Zuckerberg has so deftly demonstrated: and regrettably, so brutally abused. DaTA is/are the “New Goldfields”.


So the message that Mr. Z’ and the rest of the new tech ‘Wunderkinde’ should be getting from the Congress is simply this… Their discovery of the power inherent in DATA, contains and illustrates the legitimacy of ‘Universal Income’. Billions of people are contributing quadrillions of Data measures daily for remunerative algorithmic exploration which thus provides the basis for a complete reinvention of fundamental economics. Yes: i shall invoke such an extreme statement


Currently Mr. Z and his Silicon cohorts are implicitly [with no offence] the greatest slave-owners in human history. In the same way however that Spotify [for instance] pays a kontribution to each kontributor from each access, so too must those who ‘slave’ to provide content to the marvelous inventions of Mr. Z’s [and the rest] receive a similar contribution…. I.e. It is time that data starts to pay rent. #DATA must pay rent…


I call myself a poet so I conclude with the poem that will open the second stanza of Part 4 of my Azanian Quartet… My assumption is that by 2037 [the setting] … this moment [NOW] will have been the turning point in this, amazing new journey, on which we are kolektively embarked.


We gave our DATA freely to Mr. Z et al… they in return gave us free use of the toys they made. Then he/they found a way to collect rent… from our contribution… now we must be reimbursed our share for our belief in them. For the data freely given is still ours.


To rephrase Mr. Rakowitz: [with respect]


“The invisible friend that must
Be shown to exist”


Hear ye
Hear Ye


Some will strive
to
Achieve
Nietzschean validation – the
Povo*
Will become automatonotik
Fiddling witheir [sic]
Mobiles
Seeking to affirm their intrin
sic irrele
vance.


Nonetheless
Machines don’t buy things!!
They dispense.


On what basis should we
Perceive
Value.


Given the thrust of
a digital economy that
Konsrukt kalled
DATA
Is the land that must be
Mined for
GOLD.


Peepil become
Products
To be exploited for their
DATA value
Should they not
Receive their
Rightful
Fee?


In Gold?
Yeah gold
You say data is
The new gold.
No… I said it was the new land
Waiting to be mined: for what is in it.


Does it pay rent?
Not yet.


!NiK[‘18]


So there you have it. All Kongresspersons: the most truly
bipartisan goal it is possible to achieve,
on behalf of all humanity.


Thank you on their behalf.


Povo: Shona [Zimbabwe] meaning the ‘masses’ or ‘Mass’
pronounced PorVor.

Confiscation without compensation: Good idea/bad idea

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Something has arisen in my world regarding an issue that has jumped out of the political woodwork with all the same shock that President Trump has generated with his idea that Trade Wars are fun. Guess he forgot about Smoot/Hawley. We forgot why we put that clause in. So our version of the “let us mess with the system” theory of government threatens to hold back all eco/social development activity in the country in which I live, for yet another year; [we lost last year dealing with a recalcitrant President.] The key demand is to nationalise the land.


Our neighboring President did it about 16 years ago [long time to remember that] and successfully took his country back to the 17th century where he believed it all went wrong: and that it was time to start over. So far it is dissappointing to those it was supposed to benefit and so a few million have moved here to make a few bucks.Eventually his own Generals tossed him last year so they could get some traction on developing the place. How do you come back from the 17th century in less than a another one or two.


Next year is election time and everybody wants to grab the election spotlight on their terms.


The issue: Confiscation of property without compensation. A proposal to toss the embedded Konstitutional clause, that forbids konfiskation of property [land] without kompensation, was heavily approved by most parties with populist enthusiasm, in Parly’ last week.A decision, many would say, that could rank with Brexiteering, and the mellifluous Mr Trump, as wrongfooted, unless amazingly cleverly handled… something we are not above successfully achieving once or twice in a century.


Now. I write fiction and currently I am half way through phase five, in a twenty-five year, five phase project. In the process I have become curiously aware, of how the restrictions posed by the Konstitutional provision, can cause potential harm?


For instance: I have just finished an exhaustive final proofreading, of the newly edited version of a novel I published in paperback in 1996. I completed this, preparatory to a new launch of the book, as a follow up to 7Ways, onto Amazon, during this month: by those excellent people at MYeBook.co.za.


The story is called The Buffalo Hunters. It was written initially to exorcise a terrible experience I underwent during the year of our Revolution, on a day that, if it wasn’t already a date of infamy in RSA, [it was] subsequently became a day of infamy for much of the planet: 9/11.


The story, that I call a ‘”brutally allegoric crime story”, subsequently became Part One of a set that I call ‘The Azanian Quartet’… a series that covers the period 1994 to 2136. [Part three ‘The Jonker Memorandum” exists as an 84 episode podcast cyber serial on the website:nicholasjakari.com]. Part 4 is presently three quarters done and four more quarters to go: allowing for errors and omissions and rewrites.


1994 was a year [you may remember]in which our national murder rate went to 66/100,000 people [it is currently still unacceptably high, albeit now down in the 30’s]. The Buffalo Hunters, a vehicle hijacking gang on the run, is a story about one such weekend filled with murder… many murders, with multiple players set in post revolution JoziUniCity.


A particular scene in the violent graphic story, was set in the streets of a high rise region of the inner city, where the ‘night lights’ were more specifically camp fires in the sky, as residents of multiple, electricity free, hijacked, high rise tower block buildings, lit fires in their upstairs spaces to cook and keep warm: a scene written empirically during the winter of ’95.


And today, almost a quarter of a century later, as I’m re-reading what I wrote, the problem of inner city degeneration has morphed into a massive conundrum: with hijacked buildings listing in huge multiples possibly even thousands… across the city.


Apparently, close to none of them can be simply expropriated by the city, and converted to low cost housing, because non-existent, or absentee or even the absentee estates of absentee, now deceased owners, are relatively untouchable, due in part to the existence of the konstitutional clause prohibeting the uncompensated confiscation of landed property.


It seems the City has to rescue the buildings first, then struggle to contact owners, negotiate forever; and at prices that shift reality, and the moment their eye is off the ball: which is obviously often… the places are ‘re-hijacked’ … and the city is the loser.


According to the Mayor: Mr. Herman Mashaba, on radio 702 this morning, [5 March] the city has managed to restore 18 [Eighteen] buildings to their rightful owners… out of the many, many hundreds hijacked over decades now, given that it was already an established practice when I wrote the story [and that scene] in the first place during that winter of ’95.


So it does seem that we have had ‘expropriation without compensation’ now for more than a quarter of a century. I would imagine that many citizens have become immensely wealthy on the cash they were able to garner, by not paying rates [municipal taxes], electricity, personal tax, company taxes and/or royalty fees to anyone much over the 22 years, since I published the original story.


On the debit side, presumably their bribery and konektions accounts are pretty heavily loaded: such are the sources of wonderful meat for crime stories; and such ‘entrepreneurial’ people and their minions n marks form the base for many of the characters in my bloodthirsty story, of a period in history, when as one character puts it: “ There has never been a better time than now: to commit murder.”


Launch date to be confirmed during March, although you can place orders off my site at https://www.amazon.com/author/nicholasjakari with more details as they alter.


Enjoy.
PS. Should there be any problem with that last idea let me know so i can take action.

The Evolution of Tulba.

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The Evolution of Tulba.
 
Some of this blog was originally written in August 2010 and found by me in one of my notebooks while searching through many of them, for material, written randomly over many years, as maybe having bearing on the story, on which I am currently working. This story is part 4 of what I call: “The Azanian Quartet.” [The Buffalo Hunters , The Ashanti Raider and the Jonker Memorandum are respectively 1,2 & 3].You are warned that this [generally excessively long] blog will travel across a range of ideas on route to a conclusion.
 
A low key feature of the “Jonker Memorandum” was a background reference to a cult form called Tulba. As those who have followed the story of the “Jonker Memorandum” will remember, a part of the story happens after the world, as we know it now, has ended: and we are [in some minimal respect from the story’s perspective] in a post apocalyptic: hence post ‘Revelation’ phase… after “The End”.
 
Regarding ‘Revelations’, a subject on which I have commented in blogs over the years. The ‘Jonker’ is heavily flavoured in some of its mystery: most specifically the mystery of “The End”. I have a venerable copy of the old King James Bible, presented to me by a ‘godfather’ uncle and signed “Easter 1947”. After the final words in that closing chapter, “Revelations” the words “The End” appear. I have never found that in other editions [Well one does say “End of new testament”, which seems reasonable, since it is.]
 
But the baldness of “The End” is not in any other version. It has been something that puzzled me more and more as I got older. What do you mean it “The End”? What happens after the End was my unanswered question. There are now stories written about that time after “the end” that demonstrate that it was a ‘relative’ end. So for me though; eventually I understood that “the end”, was as always… Life goes on. Before this [so-called] Common Era, we had Mithraism as a dominant ideology which came to “The End”: and prior to that Dionysus, Horus, Krishna and various others ad infinitum through the mysteries of time itself.Each in turn came to “The End”. And yet here we still are.
 

In the ‘Azanian Quartet’ The world effectively goes through a period of revulsion at the extreme destruction waged on ordinary people, by those who seem increasingly obsessed with the end game of Ideological madness. The drama of “The End”: the Apocalypse [as it came to be known]; began to be seen as an unintended outcome of a ‘war’ between factional Irrationalists. Think of a conflict between supporters of the Tooth Fairy and those of the Easter Bunny regarding who gets what… two irrational but nonetheless widely subscribed ideas.
 
And so people sought the sanctuary of Order. Tulba is concerned with robotic machines [aka computers in their expanding range of forms] and their capacity to replace authority. To become, as it were ‘The Supreme Being’in place of the current crop of popular “Supreme Beings”. As this blog evolves i shall return to this idea of “Tulba”, after walking through a few themes, in the form of a poem to the rational world of the irrational: and if that makes sense prepare to meet thy doom.
 

“Tulba” was someone’s jocular response to the question: What happens when Computers run everything? And Tulba it is, was the answer I came up with eventually. So some of this blog which started with an idea prompted by Terence Kealey’s book: “Sex, Science and Profits”, moves into the evolution of the Tulba construct … As with the ‘Jonker’ it [Tulba] is essentially a background development and is not the focus of the story, which as always is concerned with other things, of a more grounded nature… like how machines are becoming more dominant features of our world and what happens when they are smarter than humans. And of course what happens when someone falls in love and discovers that someone [hopefully but not yet certainly] has to die in order for the love to be fully consummated. And then, as with the ‘Jonker’, where the story is ‘Set’: ie: happening? This is a key scenario to be konstukted, dekonstrukted and then rekonstrukted… and of course using all these “K’s” in place of “C’s” is part of the process.
 
Thus, as to ‘Scenario’. Those who are familiar with the titles i mentioned above will know that “The Buffalo Hunters” is entirely set in ‘Jozi’, in the place i call “Zone One”. “The Ashanti Raider” and “The Jonker Memorandum” are both partially in Jozi and mostly in the Outlands or Auslaande of Mzansi, in places that generally are otherwise nameless: as i refer to all the regions outside Zone One; which gradually disintegrate into disrepair and neglect and are abandoned as they cease to supply sustenance, and return to their natural state. Again these are simply backgrounds to the story and are not the story itself… like the scenes in a movie are set somewhere and there are ‘extras’ running about to make up the ‘wallpaper’ of the tale, but are otherwise not part of the tale.
 
Now in this Part 4, the entire story will return to Jozi… the difference to the Buffalo Hunters [BH] being that it [BH] consisted of a number of disconnected tales, that merge around a central “RASHOMON STYLE” event and through the amorphous synergy of that madman “Murphy”, construct the illusion of plot. In Part 4 the ‘Rashomon’ event is a single action that changes things… maybe, and while most of the action takes place on the same day in the Buffalo Hunters it will do so again in [Part 4… as yet untitled]. The difference being that the same event occurs, in different ways, in three time eras, or as i prefer, in parallel multiverses [or maybe even in the Virtual Reality Game.].
 
So, in other words, we have Jozi past tense, Jozi intermediate Future tense [the time that will be called NOW], but withing a decade or so of the ‘Apocalypse’ described in the Jonker Memoranum, which i will also publish sometime soon as a digital book. And then another part will be set in Jozi in a ‘timeyet to come’ …maybe a century or so from NOW.
 
So what this means of course is envisiging how “Jozi” will be a dozen or so years from now but also how it will seem around the time dealt with in the Jonker: about century or so down the line. Which brings us back to what i said at the beginning of the blog; and to Mr Terence Kealey’s book: “Sex, Science and Profits.” the subject of the forgotten blog i found written in 2010. And what do `Mr Kealey’s observations have to do with “Future Jozi” and why the setting must somehow correlate with reality in a few places.
 

Mr Kealey, in his book [“Sex, Science and Profits”], confirms something most recognise as true even though they had never thought about them in exactly the way presented. He tells us: “Most trades in an advanced economy are ‘risk’ trades’, because an advanced economy is based on long term investments.”
 
By “Trades” he is not referring to, for instance, carpentry or boiler making; but rather to the mass scale exchanges that take place between economic entities that have long term configurations and relationships. For instance: the decision to build the Lesotho Highlands water scheme decades ago, goes ahead, even should the country in which WATER is sourced, and thus originally located, falls apart. The fact that it [Lesotho] is in a presently threatened condition is, as you well know my happy followers, part of the history of post-Apocalyptic Mzansi: as presented in the “Jonker Memorandum”. Another example would be the issue with Mzansi’s power supply: and with who will take on the financial risk of remedying the problem.
 
For instance; currently we are tossing a $100 billion [US dollar] bone out in the form of a proposed nuclear deal with China [ChinNya or general ‘friends of BRIC’]. What could be the priority “Risk” element in such a ‘Trade’? Bearing in mind that [US]$100 billion is 50% of the ‘real’ income of the Mzansi for any contemporary year: after extracting that part of GDP that represents State expenditure.
 

Risk you will remember is as fundemental to Trade as oxygen is to breathing… taken for granted often: ignored at one’s peril. In considering a future Jozi, one would have to factor such a ‘risk’ consideration into one’s vision: in order that the picture could be realistic. On the other hand the essence of Zone One is that it is the single overwhelming part of Mzansi that is market driven: notwithstanding Kolektivist pretensions. And much as Kolektivists hate to admit: The Market always rules [as Komunist China, for instance, is busy rediscovering]. So as part of my own more empirical investigation i shall visit one of, arguably, two of the world’s most modern cities next year with intent to put a constuction ethos to go with my ‘Five Towers’ constructions [ref Jonker Momorandum.] So as an example of where this could end. Could part of the RISK play be the arrival of a few million workers from SE ASia into Mzansi: to carry out and manage the Nuclear activity being presently and how would that change things.
 

Building cities, like that I described in the Jozi Unicity series, [see: forthcoming new poetry kolektion “travelling by hand”] to handle the rapidly evolving information age, would be another such trade, as much as would be the development of new energy sources, like power stations and whatever evolves to replace them in their present form.
 

Because advanced [or advancing] economies need long term investments to grow and thrive they are dependent therefore on people keeping to their agreements [As Socrates observed some two and a half thousand years ago.]
 
In short for an economy to be successful, at its most intimate heart it is dependent on millions of ‘strangers’ adhering to, or rather, trusting each other to honour their respective words.
 
In summary: Mr. Kealey observes: “Trade depends on trust.” A point made centuries ago by Adam Smith: a prime architect of the modern capitalist world. The economist Mancur Olsen demonstrated in his works “The Rise and Decline of Nations” “Power and Prosperity” and “The Logic of Collective Action”, that Kleptocracy amongst the power elite retards the development of poor countries. Wierd isn’t it the way we always have to prove that which seems obvious. And of course the issue of a [possibly] Kleptocratic Mzansi is one that must figure in the background to that future perspective. And it is noted that some believe it to be presently already Kleptocratic while still others believe that it always was Kleptocratic and that ‘Kleptocracy rules’.
 

Part of the argument that I shall develop here is that, notwithstanding that an objective assessment would assume that trust is peculiar to a rational world [and is anything more rational than the existence of money itself?] [Especially given that much of it now is inherently “FAKE’] it [trust] is nonetheless an inherently irrational and emotional decision and hence behaviour.
 
In other words Risk assessment is a rational response to questions relevant to an irrational emotion called “TRUST”.
 

According to Spengler, the Western world is ending and we are witnessing the last season — “winter time” — of what he called “the Faustian civilization.” In Spengler’s depiction, Western Man [sorry: he predated gender sensitivity] is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached. And trust is hard won and easily lost, as Mr Tsipris of Greece is busy discovering right now. These ideas are some of the elements that need to be dealt with in Part 4 of the Azanian Quartet… as part of the background to a story derived from one of Mzansi’s most colourful and problematic historical events.
 

To return to the joint issus of Risk and Trust; The heart of our Faustian western Capital structured model was initially constructed by the previously mentioned Mr. Adam Smith [He of ‘Wealth of Nations’]. Kealey quotes Adam Smith when he observes that: “In a rational world no company would survive because no rational employee would honour the contract to work while the boss is away… rather, the rational one would play”.
 

He [Smith] continues, that in a society constituted solely of rational people everybody would cheat on their contracts and thus no risk based contract would be sustainable, especially one spread over decades.
 
Kealey reinforces this argument quoting a Professor Douglas North saying that: “ … a strictly rational world would be a jungle and no society would be viable.”* [Welcome to Mzansi and the brand new urban jungle].
 

Mr. Kealey perhaps suggests, by inference more than intent, that a central dilemma of under-developing countries is that they are governed more and more, by supremely rational people. And that self-interest motivated Kleptocratic behaviour is a rational behaviour form.
 

Thomas Hobbes; he who famously described the circumstances of Stone Age persons as being “nasty, brutish and short”, argued that all persons were inherently unreliable, due to the ‘fact’ that all significant players were rational, and hence unreliable. Question. Are we today governed by people driven by rational self-interest.[Is this the sign of 21st century Person] This idea too will be explored in this tale, which shall as before be about love and daring deeds, mysterious bodies and nasty tricks: and the silliness of Being.
 

Thus it was his [Hobbes’]opinion that the citizen should be controlled through Tyranny: because rational people are by definition untrustworthy. Rationality it should again be noted is a counter intuitive response to emotionality. And therefore since emotion is contrary to reason it was by definition “irrational”. IE: Emotion is by definition “Irrational”.
 

As already stated; In his [Kealey’s] opinion Trust is an inherently emotional construct and is therefore ‘irrational’. It is also an appropriated term, given that often in ourstory/history tacitly cooperating/ tacitly competitive business organisations known to Economist as Oligopolies, are routinely referred to as Trusts. So the word has a double meaning contributing to ‘contradiction and conflict’, which, as many observe, are the “deepest truths of reality.”.
 

One such [unreliable hence rational] Trust was bust recently in Mzansi, with some smacking of hands, regarding the case of Konstruction Kontract Kollusion over Football World Cup Stadia in 2010. In a rational society run by rational people unrestrained ambition and self-interest unregulated by power produces a negative trust factor, in that all systems gradually become unreliable and then dysfunctional. Many people feel this has happened post the SONA episode in Mzansi’s Parliament earlier this year.[see my blog “Our own Mugabe Moment”]
 

So with respect to Mr. Kealey’s thesis: Naturally, and notwithstanding Oligopolies, [Ie: Economic dominance of selected markets by a handful… ie: two to four/six corporations, that dominate the market and tacitly collude on pricing] that he perceives as the cornerstone achilles heel of the Capitalist system, he nonetheless fixes his support on the Private sector for growth in all respects and argues most convincingly, using a veritable cascading barrage of evidence, that Government funding of anything distorts the market for whatever it finances: with a consequent fall [decline] in performance in those financed sectors. What was that we said about a State controlled electricity supplier?
 

In this regard; Evidence of the accuracy of his hypothesis may be found [in Mzansi/RSA for instance] by those living in a now permanent world of routine electricity outages sponsored by a monopoly State entity. Add to this the bankruptcy of the State Postal service, the National Airline, The Passenger Rail Agency of SA [PRASA] and routine revelations regarding the financial impecuniousness of many other State monopolies. Even the normally sacrosanct Revenue [Tax] authority has felt the brush of disruption. Readers in other jurisdictions may find head nodding examples, in those, in your own turf.
 

Mr. Kealey’s work is a testament to the power of the market to solve problems … It is however realistic about the conundrum faced by most societies that finds themselves plagued, with a vested establishment position that abhors the idea of private sector activity facilitating growth. Control means control. Rationality prevails. Oligopoly … Capitalism’s nemesis, becomes de rigueur.State control compounded by Oligopolistic control. Argentina has been regularly cited as an example of an Oligoply driven society that simply trundled down the economic performance ladder from lofty heights to a nugatory and unremembered performance.[The fact that their Rugby Team beat Mzansi’s rugby team recently for the first time ever, demonstrates the numbing effect of ‘oligopoly meets oligopoly’.]
 

The respected Late Economist JK Galbraith says of Oligopoly: ‘There is no longer any certainty of technical advance….prices no longer reflect the ebb and flow of consumer demand….and it leads to profitable and comfortable stagnation’ [ref: ‘American Capitalism’ JK Galbraith]
 
Thus naturally Mr. Kealey’s ideas and proofs are not popular especially amongst the geometrically expanding flotillas of parading minions who derive their funding by chipping off a slice of the public pie, facilitated by vast oceans of regulation. These will fight tooth and nail [naturally] to protect their sinecured fiefdoms.
 

On the other hand [as economists like to point out] the most routine alternative to comfortable and profitable stagnation is seldom pretty. Ask any Zimbabwean/Somali/Syrian traveler you come across.
 
So we can assume that many of the facts of his presentation have been carefully airbrushed out of consideration by his critics, to avoid inconveniently coinciding with truth. I have been party to this ‘spin management’ myself, it is almost routine. This real world barrage exists, notwithstanding and in spite of the collection of alternate proofs provided by Mr. Kealey. And all of this has to be catered for in preparing the the final installment of The ‘Azanian Quartet’. This means that somewhere in the space between rationality, irrationality, risk and trust; lies that confusing idea called TRUTH… what is TRUTH? And what does it have to do with Tulba, a new evolving ‘ideology’? Tulba derived from the prospect of a computer controlled world: aka. ‘Robots Rule’.
 
What is TRUTH anyway other than a set of confusing opinions masquerading as belief: isn’t it? Isn’t it?
 

In essence TRUTH is a dogmatic assertion of REALITY. Which raises an intriguing question? regarding matters relative to REASON and UNREASON.
 
Tulba: The Post-Modern alternative.
 
Is reason capable of
Knowing reality?
What is reality?
Death, Hunger, Pain?
 
Kant tells us that the “dog
Matic solution is there
Fore not only un
Certain- but-imp
Possible.
 
Riposte Stephen Hicks “Thus
Kant – that great cham
Pion of reason
Asserted that the
Most
Important
Fact
About reason is that it is
Clueless
About reality.”
 
Kant quibbled:
“I have found it ne
Cessary to de
Ny Knowledge
In order to make
Room for
Faith” – the absence
Of reason
Gives us
A reality that
Simply
Is….
Isn’t it?
 
Heidegger affirmed his ‘friend’
This Reason thing
Is simply skin
Deep beneath which is this
[Alleged]‘Being’
 
What is this Being
Beneath
The skin?
What makes “Being” Be?
Why is there even a
Being at all?
 
Why is there NOT
Rather
NO THING since every
Being [it seems] is made
Out of No
Thing
 
Hysteria abounds “No
Thing!” cries Hicks:
“In the
End all things
Are No Th
Ings… No Thing is
All!”
Concluding: “Meta
Physi
Cal Ni
Hilism.”
 
Welcome to Tulba
Order be with you.
!NiK[‘15]s
 

For David Gordon: Mathematician/Musician and my late collaborator who,
in his mathematically pure manner, considered Post-Modern thought to be vituperous.
With thanks to Mr Orwell, who originally gave us the ‘Newspeak’ that so comfortably modifies our lives.

**J J Wallis and DC North: ”Measuring the transaction sector in the American Economy 1870-1970” Part of Long term factors in American Economic growth. University of Chicago 1987