{"id":906,"date":"2020-01-29T20:58:59","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T20:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/?p=906"},"modified":"2020-01-29T20:59:01","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T20:59:01","slug":"force-fields-explorer-racing-home-the-ancient-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/29\/force-fields-explorer-racing-home-the-ancient-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Force fields explorer racing home the ancient star"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\">SALLY SALT: Who are you really? Baron Munchausen isn't real. He's only in stories.<br \/>BARON MUNCHAUSEN: Go away! I'm trying to die. <br \/>SALLY: Why?<br \/>BARON: Because I'm tired of the world. And the world is evidently tired of me.<br \/>SALLY: But why? Why?<br \/>BARON: Because it's all logic and reason now. Science. Progress. Laws of hydraulics. Laws\u2026 of social dynamics. Laws of this, that\u2026 and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops\u2026 in the South Seas. No place\u2026 for cucumber trees\u2026 and oceans of wine. No place for me.<br \/><br \/>   The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam, 1988)<br \/><br \/><br \/><\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p>Increasingly, I see myself morphing into a latter-day version of Baron Munchausen, the fictional fabulist whose tall tales and extraordinarily impossible adventures seemed to paint the rationalism of his Eighteenth Century into sharp relief. Terry Gilliam\u2019s 1988 production starring John Neville is one of my fondest movies and, at heart, I\u2019ve always stood on Munchausen\u2019s side of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My child-like view of things just doesn\u2019t cope well with the weird, authoritarian and quite joyless ways that people in charge of other people construct purposeless, labyrinthine and abstract methods of controlling work. I have no grasp of the rigid, tightly-structured world they inhabit. I\u2019ve long believed that this was done to simply provide those in charge with their psychopathic fix of exerting humiliating power over others and wanting to stamp their PowerPoint-bulleted brand on the souls of those whom they command. I saw it as a result of individuals &#8211; a <em>lot <\/em>of individuals, mind you &#8211; rather than something systemic. Now, I\u2019m coming to the realisation that it\u2019s something even darker: it\u2019s a viral joylessness. An infection of the spirit. One that insists on rules and laws and narrow, reductive ways of doing things. It spreads on the tongues of managers and festers in the very desperate being of those who\u2019ve been relentlessly taught to servetheir whole lives. It feeds on apathy and fear. And it is wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If something is joyless then it is definitely something to resist. The choice is stark: resist or serve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I will continue to resist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the movie, the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson, the rationalist leader of the war campaign against the Turks encounters the Baron and tells him \u201c<em>I&#8217;m afraid, sir, you have rather a weak grasp of reality.<\/em>\u201d Without hesitation, the Baron retorts: \u201c<em>Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash\u2026 and I&#8217;m delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Your reality, sir&#8230; <em>Your<\/em> reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SALLY SALT: Who are you really? Baron Munchausen isn&#8217;t real. He&#8217;s only in stories.BARON MUNCHAUSEN: Go away! I&#8217;m trying to die. SALLY: Why?BARON: Because I&#8217;m tired of the world. And the world is evidently tired of me.SALLY: But why? Why?BARON: Because it&#8217;s all logic and reason now. Science. Progress. Laws of hydraulics. Laws\u2026 of social [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":908,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions\/908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}