Category Archives: COVID-19
INDIVIDUALISM ON THE ROPES
Are you uneasy about nanny state overreach and becoming encultured with ambiguous meanings, like George Orwell’s Newspeak in his totalitarian satire ‘1984’: oldthink; ungood; goodthink; doublethink; thoughtcrime; unperson? In 2022, individualism is under threat. That is the theme of the satire ‘Turkeys Not Bees’. Chance is an ambitious young physicist who, in frustration, quits a good job and goes back to university. His career is interpreted by the philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Nietzsche. His girlfriend Megan becomes an Olympic athlete, self-coached with philosopher Heidegger’s phenomenology and Mihaly’s flow. When the two are threatened with Covid vaccination, they adulate the solitary independent lifestyle of the brush turkey and reject collectivism. They campaign by non-violent civil disobedience to stop the profit-driven sport, health, employment and government industries from taking over. It’s not too late.
Book available from Amazon. Reviewed at martinknox.com
COACHING PHENOMENOLOGY AND FLOW
Megan is a future champion at pole vaulting but her further improvement is limited because her coaches cannot stand in her shoes and know what she is experiencing. They make and interpret observations through the prism of their own earlier experiences, which are irrelevant. Applying the phenomenology of philosopher Martin Heidegger, she refocusses, recording, analysing and modelling her lived experience. She self-coaches, helped with biomechanics and psychology by Chance, her physicist boyfriend who researches risk taking and flow.
Turkeys Not Bees tells their personal philosophical journeys, becoming opposed by new regulations of the athletics and Covid authorities. They are leaders in a campaign, with non-violent civil disobedience, against takeover by a Spectacle, created by media, capitalism and nanny states, of overreach in sport, health, academia and employment. This an exciting story of individual fulfilment that achieves excellence.
The latest of my six novels on Amazon, it is reviewed on my blog: martinknox.com
Individual Versus Collective
Turkeys Not Bees is a new book about individualists who, like Australian Brush Turkeys, enjoy lives of independence and freedom, tolerating others. They are opposed by Honey Bees, who are enslaved by the rulers of their collectives, stopped from breeding and have enforced treatments.
Many humans, influenced by Debord’s spectacle with its appearance of egalitarianism, are brainwashed to accept nanny-state overreach with bee-like servitude. The book has an exciting philosophical story about Chance, a physicist and his girlfriend Megan, who resist takeover by the nanny state with non-violent civil disobedience.
Available on Amazon. Reviewed on my blog: martinknox.com
IS SOCIALITY PROMOTED BY THE SPECTACLE?
I am releasing my new fiction novel: Turkeys Not Bees. It explores a near future of capitalism and totalitarianism controlling human evolution.
The story tells how two young people take on the establishment when their sport and then their health are threatened by emerging totalitarian control.
Chance wants to apply his physics training in his job and resists being coerced to run in the hamster wheel of meaningless work and futile consumption. Analogous to Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, he wants autonomy. Returning to university he meets a champion athlete also doing a PhD, in psychology. He encourages her to coach herself and with Heidegger’s phenomenology she investigates her lived experience of pole vaulting. She improves using Mihaly’s ‘flow’, a psychological condition of optimal achievement.
The Athletics Association, pursuing a policy of levelling outcomes for profit, ban her from using flow. The couple resist.
At the Olympic Games they both catch Covid. The subsequent restrictions on them are oppressive and they join with others in a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.
Reviewed by
David P Jones – Philosophy Student
August 12th 2022
My blog: martinknox.com
