Blog Archives
DO PERFORMERS CREATE OR OBEY?
Megan is a champion pole vaulter who self-coaches using phenomenology to identify potential for improving her performances. She is held back by event organisers who want close finishes to sell tickets and media advertising. Athletes are constrained by regulations and industry hype to provide crowd-pleasing performances and camera shots with the appearance of fair competition. The sporting juggernaut rolls through a season with athletics, soccer, gymnastics, cricket, tennis, swimming, golf, cycling, rugby and horse racing. Only horse racing has handicapping to obtain closer finishes but other sports prevent innovations by athletes who are paid to entertain.
When an Australian national sporting body tries to prevent Megan using an effective new training technique, developed by her partner Chance, based on his PhD research, they are opposed by levellers who want all ability levels to be able to succeed in competitions. Megan is an individualist who is prevented from doing her best by collectivists who subscribe to a nanny state that is running amok. The ethos of affirmative action is spreading to education, employment and arts.
The restrictions on Megan become intolerable during an outbreak of Covid. Faced with mandatory vaccinations, they lead a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience. If they succeed, future society can be individual, like brush turkeys, who live independent lives. But if they fail, collective living could assign them to slave-like worker roles, like honey bees. Which human destiny do people want? What action can you take to mend society? Turkeys Not Bees is novel fiction by Martin Knox. Available on Amazon. Reviews at martinknox.com
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
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
Moving away together?
Job relocation out of town can bring conflict if one of a couple is reluctant to move. To stay together, there is a fair and scientific way to resolve the impasse that can respect their ‘inertias’: different propensities to keep on doing what they have been doing. This method is explained in my novel ‘$hort of Love’, Chapter 66 Relocation Refusal. When a couple cannot agree, should it be for want of trying? Book information: http://www.martinknox.wordpress.com
