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
STUDENT LEARNING SELF-GUIDED
The pole vault symbolises a skilled task requiring experience, as encountered in their daily work by performers, employees, athletes, students and artists. Coaching can bring Improvement. Self-coaching is a revolution that replaces trusting in others’ advice, with empirical analysis.
Megan is a pole vaulter directed by her lived experience, with feedback from her performances, following Heidegger’s method of phenomenological analysis. Educators know that there can be a wide gulf between the mind of a coach or tutor and his or her student. The student’s observation, intuition and self-analysis is most important.
Turkeys Not Bees is a story about a performer who relies on self-coaching and excels. Her input is complemented by her boyfriend Chance’s biomechanical digital modelling, creating a type of virtual reality for her to explore. Her solitary achievement is a microcosm of turkey-like human endurance, contrasting with bee-like colonisation by territorial aggression.
The book has philosophy, science, psychology, Debord’s spectacle and a romance, in an exciting story, including non-violent disobedience, protesting of overreach by a nanny state and Covid restrictions.
Book available on Amazon. Reviews see martinknox.com
MEGAN’S PHENOMENON CAN’T BE COLONISED
Megan has become a champion by training herself to be independent, learning from her lived experience, in the moment, selfish, seeking quality, professional and committed. She won’t be directed, controlled by others’ experience, not by clocks, not by false equality, not without purpose, nor obsessed by quantities, neither amateurish, nor detached. She is more like a brush turkey than a bee.
She has support from her boyfriend Chance, a renegade escaped from employment as a physicist, who was on a treadmill and now revels in his academic freedom.
They justify her characteristics with well known philosophies, psychology and science. She learns phenomenology and flow. Megan opposes greedy coaches, jealous competitors, narrow-minded researchers, sports officials intent on profiting from her performances and from health officials who want her vaccinated. Megan is non-violent. Can she win by passive resistance?
Turkeys Not Bees is novel fiction by Martin Knox. On Amazon. Reviews: martinknox.com
