Americaworld, the land where everyone lives like an extra in a movie or tv show.
I see people in the world and realise there is no more substance in what they say and do than if they were extras pretending to interact. The insincerity and for-performance nature of all that they do is so ingrained they are not aware of it. If you do not conform, they hate you always, as a malefactor.
The confident Dave Lister, or rather the writer behind him, only willing to admit to one or two simple flaws whilst professing some profound intelligence known to those 'in the know' as 'street smarts', struts around enforcing what we should call "The Law of Numberwang". I refer of course to both the Mitchell and Webb sketch of that name and my observations on how the word 'anti-semitic' was being used, indeed by some among Mitchell and Webb and their friends, paymasters, servants, fans, buyers, clients, suppliers, etc, in exactly the same way Numberwang is used in the Mitchell and Webb sketch. Browbeating people with a stick which looks like both a word and some alleged act of reasoning which isn't really there and it's just Bilko picking himself, essentially, or whatever he feels like.
So why the perpetual confidence? Why the way corporate, consumer, 'professional', 'civil' society public and private veers away from ever being self-critical or admitting to errors? Well the fragile false system we live inside would break if people started ever being self-critical and therefore intellectually honest, so peer pressure keeps in place a false, very modern, practise of not rocking the boat, of always pretending that what 'should be' (according to 'rules') IS what is, and always ignoring all the data which normally, across millions of years of history, humans used to improve themselves.The idea apparently is that if people always feel confident and can present themselves as being in control then it may matter less that or when they are NOT in control and have no idea what they're doing and aren't doing anything at all, are literally, at that stage, just a filler. Almost like tv content, Chomsky tells us, is seen as 'filler' between the advertising, which is the primary purpose of tv in our societies.
The creativity, the use of free will, the real obedience to genuinely observable or knowable fact is lost entirely by the Johnsonian top-cornflake determination. For his method isn't really about the 'top cornflake' - it's about 'the cornflake on top' - in fact Feynman was a top scientist, because he persevered way beyond most others, same with Chomsky or Gershwin or any number of other names from every 'race' and 'gender' and 'time' you can imagine - but, as Feynie pointed out, at NASA it wasn't science 'on top' or any 'top scientist' on top, it was the saleswomen and salesmen and their profits and the governments' electoral needs. Political expediency, Feynman often takes shots at (in the docs of him we have), the bane of his life.
A slimmed down updated enhanced and boosted version of the Numberwang doc will return and I'll put a link to it right here and slightly adjust this text at that stage. I may entitle it "Owen Jones, Israel and Numberwang - what really stopped Corbyn from saving Britain".