Blog Archives
INDIVIDUALISM TODAY
Individualism began with the philosophy of John Stuart Mill. He gave the people liberty of personal rights, without religion. Expounded eloquently by Ayn Rand, it is regarded today as extreme.
It became unfashionable when the social philosophies of Rousseau, Marx and Bentham were promulgated. They invoked equality and attended to the welfare of communities. Today they underwrite communal approaches that solve climate change, prevent pandemics and supply cheap energy.
Nevertheless, most human endeavour strives to remain under individual control. Family, home, education, employment and recreation are pursued for individual interest, resisting the incursions of corporations and governments, whose intents are to exploit it, for their own benefit.
Turkeys Not Bees traces the lives and philosophical bearings of two young people whose journey together makes a stand for their own individual interests. The fiction story is exciting, exalting individual achievement, responding positively to forced engagement with collectivism.
Available on Amazon. Reviewed at martinknox.com
STORY OF OUR TIMES
I am releasing my latest novel fiction Turkeys not Bees.
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
August 12th 2022
