For example, although I am aware of the symbolism of a handshake as an embodiment of trust some of the examples you cite I either didn’t know, (“how many children …?) or had forgotten (the bow exposing the neck for beheading … despite having recently seen the episode of Merlin where Arthur places his head on the block).

I also have to admit that I hadn’t thought of the possibility that the silent protesters simply did not trust the press … which is odd because I always try to be so careful when talking with reporters – for preceisely that reason!

In terms of clarity, etc. there were a few small points which caused me a bit of difficulty. One was very minor: the phrase “ones-of-us” jarred a little bit … the first time I came across it I thought it was simply a typo, but then it is repeated … so it was obviously meant. I suppose it is shorter than saying things like “group membership”, “symbolising ‘one-of-us’” or some other such formula.

Although I follow the arguement, I am not sure that having lots of children is necessarily a sign of trustworthiness … especially in the milieu of modern society, but that is probably begging the question.

I wasn’t sure about the “must harm children” syndrome … it seems so alien a concept that I find it hard to imaging that anyone would/could have such an attitude.

I am also not sure about the Mandelbrot image … my immediate thought was of the “snowflake” curve of the standard Mandelbrot pattern. If we change magnification then we see the same pattern repeated. However, it is all part of one curve …. just seen at different magnifications. Here, on the other hand, I think that you are rather referring to the statistical notion of taking different sized samples and getting regression to the mean which often results in a “normal” distribution. Although we tend to think of the Gaussian Curve as a smooth bell-shaped curve, it’s very rare that when real world examples are graphed, they give exact matches to a normal curve – there will be peaks and troughs but it’s not a repeating pattern like in the Madlebrot set. Maybe I am just being pedantic because the image does convey the idea of repeatedly getting similar patterns depending on the scale (or magnification) … but that was my first thought, it brought me up a little sharp and, for a moment, I was a little confused.

I do appreciate how difficult it can be to compress complex thoughts into only a “few paragraphs” … for the record – you “couple of thoughts” are almost as long as the original postcard.

Normally, writing the weekly postcard is fairly easy. I have some notes gathered from news articles during the week and it’s just of organising them into some sort of order. When writing others or articles I normally have something I want to say and have a few headings for paragraphs and try to limit mysled to between one and two thousand words. Often, however, I fail. It’s either too long so I have decide if I am going to leave things as they are or go through and cut, precis – for example, to cut out the examples, (which often make the point better than I can say them). Just occasionally, however, it’s a pointed piece I am left with just five or six hundred words and I wonder if I should add something … usually, I leave it.

You say that you are prepareing a website, do let me know when it goes live!

You also said I could share this … so I have taken you at your word and posted it as a comment to the postcard on the site. I am not promising that anyone will read it, or comment … but you never know.

Thanks, once again, for the feedback and the food for thought.

Couple of thoughts on your most interesting reflections, Ian:

The handshake thing is about Trust, possibly the single most important aspect of the human condition and probably the oldest – going back to the times long before there was a need to perceive a spiritual dimension. In fact most species have some sort of contact process to confirm a) alikeness, b) competitive/social status, c) non-aggression, and d) hmm, ‘other opportunities’. In each case, there are some species that use these things to fatal advantage of course – and that behaviour can also be seen in our own populations.

Species that cannot easily contact one another physically usually have some visual or olfactory equivalent, and yes, we still use these too – we may not be able to identify and label specific pheromones; but (how shall I put this) just as some people would ‘die’ for the taste of chocolate, there are some who cannot taste it at all, and some who find it quite unpleasant. Most are in the middle however. If we plotted them on a graph, we’d get a bell-shaped curve – a few positive and negative extremes to either side of a more flexible average.

Some people can sense human and animal pheromones quite distinctly – even though we don’t yet have a language to describe them. Some people find their dog’s odours oddly pleasing or reassuring, yet others are obliged to wash their dog in order to achieve the same effect. The smells of ‘sweat’ can – self-evidently – be pleasurable or anti-pleasurable. The latter also tend to guide us to perceive the generators of such as ‘not-us’ (or in need of cleansing or purification) and may feature in certain perjorative descriptions of ‘other’ racial tribe groupings or lineages. Children also quickly demonise any child perceived as ‘smelly’ of course, because they are too young to understand the implications. Metaphorical smells still feature as spin in statements of ‘not-us’ in the propaganda of ignorance, because smell is our most ancient way of determining ‘us’ and ‘not-us’, and it still has great resonance in terms of our perception and communication of meaning – a subject that still rather tends to elude us because there are so many ways of interpreting it.

Whilst the West might be perceived to have moved to more cursory appreciations of acceptance or determination of ‘us-ness’, this isn’t necessarily true. For sure, if you’re an American in America then it’s generally safe to assume that a stranger or neighbour is quite likely to be ‘OK’, so a physical gesture of confirmation is not always unnecessary. With a wider knowledge of the world you might then assume that other nations/cultures haven’t moved – or have intuitively chosen not to move perhaps. If you observe these exchanges more closely, the Western ‘initial interaction’ still uses a remarkably broad set of visual signals and checks for trust and ‘one-of-us’ signs – even if only a single word transpires in the interaction. For example, ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ might be said, but without any visual affirmations of note. While that may seem to have little meaning on the outside, we are (internally) deeply analysing the verbal intonation of that single word to check for meaning, and for any clue that a state of ‘not-us’ might have come into being, and to deduce whether any other reason for concern may be present or implied.
We re-check for signs of ‘have they fallen out with us in any way we can determine/detect?’ – or read in to – the visuals we just witnessed; ‘has the level of “us-ness” changed?’, ‘would I like the level of us-ness to change?’ and so on.

The more Eastern approach is more formal and measured, a tradition from when we took more time over such things, and when hands were not necessarily clean. The bow signifies in a very complex visual language most of the things I’ll talk about here. There are combinations of bow and handshake in the Middle East of course. The gesture of putting your head forward (‘I know I can trust you not to damage my vulnerable neck’) is actually quite profound in this regard. Its primate antecedents are about submissiveness within a colony however, which is an extraordinarily important truth, but too profound to discuss in detail here.

OK, one detail perhaps, just to indicate quite how profound this really is: a common Middle Eastern/Med/African – maybe ‘cradle of civilisation’ nations is a better way of conceiving this one – is to ask, upon a first meeting, ‘how many children do you have?’. This is a multi-dimensional question, but its basic intent stems from a primate fact of life: there is one rule that all colony members seem to know intuitively, but it is more likely a learned behaviour, and it has two halves: ‘anyone who attacks the children must be punished’ and ‘the children must be protected at all costs’. This means that the communicated detail of ‘how many children do you have?’ is really one of ‘if you have children, you must be trustworthy, because all ones-of-us value children most highly, and I will be able to tell from your way of articulating your answer just how highly you value yours, and can then gauge just how much I may trust you in almost any matter we may now go on to discuss. Such things are the foundations of intuition.

Actually, there is a further profound detail worth mentioning here. We know that a small percentage of people in modern society – probably about 2-3% – are pathologically unable to comprehend the ‘don’t harm the children’ rule. There are several variants of this, ranging from simply not having the wiring or the programming constituent that goes with the positive protective behaviour, to the mentally ill state where the programming is subverted to a ‘must harm the children’ form. (In the chocolate metaphor, this would be like a taste perversion where the taste of chocolate is perceived as a positively bad thing, and that all chocolate should therefore be destroyed.)

Such things are rather like a Mandelbrot pattern. If I map a large population for the characteristic of ‘protect children’, I will get a bell-shaped curve where the average majority learn to protect children even if they don’t have any of their own – some may have a difficulty in dealing with children perhaps, but they would still rescue one in trouble. If I then focus on the 2-3% at the negative extreme, and examine a population made entirely of individuals with the more dangerous types of negative behaviour towards children – this curve might be called ‘doesn’t protect children’ – I will again see a bell shaped curve. The bulk of averagely-badly-negatives will still be more or less bad for one reason or another, such as I hinted at earlier, but there will be a more sharply defined set of murderously- or sadistically-inclined people in the 2-3% at the extreme negative side. If I were to go on to map a population made up entirely of such individuals, I would again get a range that would generate a bell-shaped curve, made up of even more sharply-defined characters. This curve might be called ‘always harms children’. The 2-3% of this curve are too unpleasant to describe here, but if you looked at any large nation’s prison population made up entirely of child-murderers, then you would find the ‘Hannibal Lecter’ equivalents, and so on, to exist in that 2-3%. Cannibalism was of course rather common in the times before missionaries sought to achieve behavioural changes across the world – in the times before anyone had come along and said ‘no’. The times when a tribe encountering another might have seen them as simply an alternative – or primary – food source. These were after all the times when eat-or-be-eaten applied to pretty much any other predator in the landscape.

If you close-read the Bible and Koran carefully, I think it’s a fair bet that this (and other characteristics of negative human behaviour) would be among the ones interpreted as the most devilish – at a time when neither mental conditions nor genetics were understood. ‘Devilish possession’ was the only way of expressing the unpleasant observations and realities of extremely negative behaviour. The data are also sitting in various other records, but the full picture emerges only when you take a view across several disciplines. I’ve done a fair bit of research now though, and I seem to have a robust theory. The implications are startling.

Back to Trust and handshakes. Whilst checking for the negatives, sometimes because they tell us more than the positives, we very much welcome the chance to assess the positives. The strength of the handshake can range from the cursory, to the ‘wet fish’, to the almost outrageously – yet not – sexual, to the two-hander and the not-letting-go. They can signify anything from a warm personality, to a need for contact, to a need to counter loneliness, to a need to communicate very positive intentions, or a ‘don’t know why we do this, but everyone else does so I do as well’. The experienced know that any of these can be used to deceive, whereas the naive can remain blissfully unaware until they are hurt – they may hear the tell-tale nuances in the vocals, and feel something is a little odd, but they don’t have enough knowledge to know that these are a sign for wariness, and so they suspend disbelief, and may become victims of one type or another.

You would be interested to observe children from your old school meeting at the bus stop on their way home. It’s an ethnically-diverse school, so handshakes are strikingly common, but the ‘native’ white youngsters also seem to have learned that it is a good thing to do. The variants of high-five are also in evidence – ritualised Masonic greetings for very specific ones-of-us. The traditional British unspoken assumption of ‘my word is my bond’ is still around, but words are cheap these days, and this form of trust has lost value – except amongst small circles of very close friends. Levels of trust are very much dependent on scale. The size of the group and the history of that groups’ actions are critical to this. The groups’ actions are then the equivalent of an ongoing visualisation of a collective handshake, in fact. The implications of this are again rather profound, and go to explain many international issues.

The silent protesters. I suspect that they represent a caucus of people who don’t trust the media any more than the politicians. They won’t speak to the media because they know that anything they say will be re-said in at least six ways (the six major chunks of a bell-shaped curve in fact) and this caucus of people is no longer content with that expansion of “truth” or dilution of trust. Trust has been lost then, and loss of trust leads to progressively larger disputes. Such was the meaning of the six blind men and the elephant metaphor in fact, and almost certainly why the metaphor came to be described in the first place. The view from the top of the elephant is no less worrying now than it was then however, and this is the subject of a forthcoming website on meaning and life, which I’ll let you have shortly.

The printed word has ever been subject to spin, and it has been elevated to an art form in most nations. Actually, it has always been this way, even before writing technology was invented. All the major religions’ texts started as oral traditions, but amongst all the good stuff we can certainly see some striking pieces of spin. The stelae, paintings and carvings of the ancient world also contain spin, which allowed its communication to pre-literate and multi-languaged populations. Images are profoundly important to our communications, that’s why 75% of human communication is non-verbal, and why the use of verbal imagery is so abundant in our cultures. You can’t always trust your eyes however, and this aspect is reflected in our ongoing fascination with mage-ic and illusions.

We are at an interesting, and somewhat dangerous, point in our social evolution. One where we can no longer shake hands with everyone with whom we need to test trust. One where even a handshake with a journalist is no guarantee of a veracity of transmission. One where a twittered comment can often be read in far too many ways to have trustworthy meaning – because it is not accompanied by any of the visual or verbal nuances that would guide our judgement. The protesters know this, and may use a video of their own to share on the internet perhaps, as a more trustworthy communication of understanding – and perhaps even a plea for help from like-minded others-of-us.

It would seem that we are entering an Age where a new form of trust communication will be needed. There are technologies arising which may answer this need, but in the meantime we are liable to see a degree of chaos develop. The longer it takes for a new form of trust communication to be developed, the longer that period of chaos will be, and the more enveloping it will become. It’s like a new form of Babel, in a way, except that in Mesopotamian times there were rather a lot of other places to spread out into.