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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
EQUALITY IN OUR NANNY STATE
Our nanny state in Australia is a tool of capitalism. It cultivates mass markets and has the appearance of economy and efficiency. Market and state work side by side, giving the appearance of providing for individual choice and community. The partnership is unhealthy because the market passes unprofitable supply to the state, for example rural telephones and rail, because inequality is a breeding ground for politics. Conversely, when the state develops a profitable business, it is expected to stand aside for the market to adopt it, for example the internet, for which equality can be branded. The nanny state serves public welfare as well as capitalism.
People want to have opportunities equal to others’. If they perceive conditions as fair, they enjoy competition when it benefits them and disadvantages others,. There are many types of equal opportunity, from equal status, equal rights, equal education, equal employment, equal pay, equal healthcare, equal hours, and so on.
They also want some facets of their lives not to be equal, to be individual, unique and distinctive. They want jobs to be individualised for them and made unequal, with specialised access and technologies. They want unequal pay, that recognises their voluntary contribution. They want unequal hours that allow them to flex. They want to be able to choose aspects of their job unequal with others.
They want to be able to take unequal holidays on different days. They want personal treatment by their supervisor. They may prefer to have a choice of dress, rather than a uniform. They do not want their home to be the same as everyone else’s. They want to be able to save at their rate, amass their own amount of wealth and will their estate to the beneficiaries they nominate.
They do not want long queues for privileges, such as promotion, cars, houses and transfers. They do not want available products and services to be equal for everyone.
Equality is easily recognised in competition, whereas inequality may be wanted secretly. Equality is easily regulated, but inequality may have to run the gamut of envy, jealousy and complaint. Being unequal, the nanny state could be charged with unfairness. It can become a whipping post for competition between individual employees.
Whereas all employees are supposed to be on the same side, that idea is supplanted in many workplaces by team allegiances, or alternatively, by selfishness. A nanny state can lubricate workplaces with equality by raising awareness of its dimensions. One approach is least common denominators. Fostering of inequalities is less well-suited to mass management. An approach is ‘levelling’, whereby individuals’ competitiveness in wanted dimensions is equalised by attempting to equalise outcomes.
In the novel ‘Turkeys Not Bees’ a nanny state and sports industry want an appearance of more equality and less elitism. They begin levelling performers. High and low performers are equalised by handicapping them like horses in a race.
Levelling also starts in employment, health provision and education.
The protagonists Megan and Chance oppose the nanny state.
Will they succeed?
‘Turkeys Not Bees’ is an exciting fiction story by Martin Knox on Amazon. Reviews: martinknox.com
