Blog Archives
COMPETITION COULD BE LIMITED
According to philosopher De Bord (1967), sport, entertainment and arts have audiences on media that are part of the Spectacle, profiting investors and governments, moulding performances for profit. Remuneration of performers is probably exploitative, possibly controlling who will win. Performance venues have been levelled, but not for equal competition.
Turkeys Not Bees is the story of two fictional individualists whose career prospects in athletics and academia are threatened by government over-reach, preventing them from competing equally with others.
Chance and Megan are PhD students. She is a champion pole vaulter and he researches the condition ‘flow’, enabling timeless optimal achievement.
When they meet, he encourages her to vault ‘in flow’ and the two soon become a couple. He helps her self-coach using phenomenology, developed by philosopher Heidegger. She improves but when she wins consistently using ‘flow’, a psychological technique, she is opposed by the athletics authority. Megan’s performances are controlled by anti-elite rule changes and levelling of competition by collectivists and governments.
Chance and Megan resist other government controls, with non-violent civil disobedience to mandatory Covid restrictions.
Turkeys Not Bees is a philosophical tale of two individuals who strive for freedom and respect.
Will their campaign to assert their rights to walk in the streets of the City succeed? The story presages a future where individual rights of the many could be limited by the few.
On Amazon. Reviews see martinknox.com
FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO COLLECTIVISM AND BACK
This novel story of Chance’s personal journey commences in his 20s, when he suffers within the corporate morass of a job where competition is constrained by wokeism. Failing to conform, he quits the capitalist treadmill and goes back to university for a PhD to investigate risk-taking behaviour. He meets Megan, a champion athlete, who is researching motivation in employment-seekers.
Together they become absorbed in Heidegger’s phenomenology, which enables Megan to self-coach to success with elite performances. But the ‘Spectacle’, described by Debord (1967) takes control in many fields, including sport, with competition transformed into profit-making and to gain political control by the nanny state. Chance and Megan resist, opposing mandatory vaccination during the Covid pandemic and ending with non-violent civil disobedience. Their examples advertise individualism based on the thinking of some famous philosophers.
The novel Turkeys Not Bees is available on Amazon. Reviews are at martinknox.com
CAN TWO INDIVIDUALS UNIFY?
When an individualistic man and an individualistic woman combine talents as postgraduates, they are very successful until nanny state ‘levellers’ force them into competition with ordinary folk. They become reality entertainers, earning media profits and gaining obedience for government pandemic restrictions. Will they and the elite be able to resist, with non-violent civil disobedience? Turkeys Not Bees is an action-packed story, in which Megan and Chance discover each other and philosophies that shape their lives together.
Book available on Amazon. Reviews are on blog: martinknox.com
PERFORMING BETTER IN OWNED TIME
Living in my time, not wearing a watch and doing things when I feel like it, seems to run against the self-control and personal interdependence that Norbert Elias, 1897-1990, called the civilizing process. He identified a dramatic reduction in homicides in England. The trend became the theme of Pinker’s tome ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature.’ He explained that youth rebellion worldwide is a counterculture against social time, when timeliness has become a personal battle, from A Clockwork Orange to the hippy movement.
In 2022 we have achieved historically low homicide rates worldwide, without the stress of obeying ‘Slessor’s little fidget wheels’ which would impose clock time. We can choose to have our cake of time freedom and eat it too, by allowing ourselves to flow timelessly, by optimal achievement, according to Mihaly’s theory of that psychological condition.
My novels ‘Time is Gold’ and ‘Turkeys Not Bees’ tell stories about high achievers who have let flow take over their time. Reviews: martinknox.com
