My name is ############.

I am a 16 year old student from King's Lynn, Norfolk. Before contacting you, I wanted to read most, if not all, of your site. However, I have decided that this is impossible within the two weeks before I return to school and need to apply my intellectual capacity to remembering my new timetable, etc.

On Thursday, I will receive my GCSE results. I am pretty sure I want to take English, History, Religious Ethics & Philosophy, Psychology and Classics for A-Level.

This is probably of limited interest to you, and no doubt you get a fair few people telling you their life story. But it forms a basis for me to tell my story. My reasoning is that by knowing who I am, you can better appreciate who reads your site (thus tailoring future content), and view the comments that I make in the context of my circumstances. From first glance your site won me over. It was easy to navigate, and when I read a sample article, I bookmarked it forthwith for future perusal. It has been thought provoking and to an extent inspiring. Your job, as you say, is "what" you are, not "who" you are. It is bordering on quasi-poetic in an almost perverse way, that a thinker like you should be an electronics salesperson. But as you say in your advice for the young, we have to be careful about what message people are giving, and who pays for it. Your work on the site is in pursuit of the truth, and it is trustworthy because of who you are more than if it came from a "scientist" or "professor" or "official".

I think basically what I am attempting to say (although in trying to do so, I have veered off at a tangent) is keep up the excellent work, and I hope that I can bounce ideas off you as part of my Ethics & Philosophy course, as need necessitates.

I am an atheist. I do not believe in a god, and this has come about through a self-decision that the decision was utter bullshit. My parents never attempted to indoctrinate me in any particular way (this includes AGAINST religion), but let me come to my own conclusions. My primary school, however, did try but failed to impress me.

Just in the same way that when my school-chums in Year One believed in Father Christmas, I dismissed the concept as ridiculous in the extreme and proceeded to pick holes in it. My parents didn't tell me one way or another; they waited for me to ask THEM. For this, I am appreciative. It has always encouraged me to be analytical FIRST in my approach to a concept or theory, come to my own conclusions then cross-reference these with other peoples' beliefs.

I understand that I am still young, impressionable and to an extent naive, but your thoughts have been a source of amusement and stimulation throughout my otherwise work- and drink- filled summer holiday. And to think I just stumbled across your site. I can't even remember where from now! Your down-to-earth nature is particularly appealing -- you seem approachable. You are not a "Big Thinker" with his head stuck in the clouds. You are an intelligent bloke who happens to have a real life too.

Perhaps my favourite quote would be your opinion on Christianity. Couldn't "Mostly Harmless" simply be a label for the earth in general? ;-) I was 10 (I think) when I first read The Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy and loved it. It's on this note of the larger galactic picture that I move to my next point.

Your idea of a Global Government, but it would be difficult to ever implement for the reason that the people in power love it too much to willingly give it up. It IS the only true solution for a progression into the 21st Century, but we will be hard pressed to achieve it in an age of global monopoly and bought-influence by multi-national giants. My friend Jamie and I (after a few pints) joked that it would take an extra-terrestrial (alien possibly, or a big comet or something) threat to unite the people of the earth. We would have to be faced with a situation so serious that the implications of NOT acting together and joining as one would mean our destruction as a species. This, I fear, could be the only practicable way for us to unite. Is there any way you could think of that could result in a proper global government ever being instituted? Not that I actually believe in UFOs or abductions. I am proud to say that I wasn't taken in by the Blair Witch Project, and how many people can say that, huh?! LoL.

Well, thank you for your time. No doubt I've taken up enough of it!

Yours,

“GUS”

Thank you for the message. Encouragement like that is my royalty cheque.

I do think that I have a slightly stronger claim to be able to seek the truth than many other people who are stuck in professional positions. Imagine that some media star like Howard Stern or Kilroy discovered the ultimate truth of the universe was dull and mundane (it's 42, that's it) what would he do? It might be the end of his career to reveal it. If you are in the media what you want is a continuing controversy. You don't want pot legalized because that would end the debate. Scandal sells. MTV presenters would not reveal that Eminem is a wuss who drinks milk and goes to bed by nine every night, or that his music is massively overrated. Music that is selling must be good and the artists that make it must be credible. They can only afford to puncture the egos of a handful of stars at one time or they get kicked off the air. They would certainly never dare to say that the speed of record sales over a seven day period was anything less than the most important thing in the lives of any teenager.

Your lecturers would not tell you that the subject they are teaching is not as intellectually rigorous as the one's they failed their exams in or that the qualification it leads to is relatively worthless.

Where are the academics studying the differences in human groups in relation to intelligence and other behaviours? Avoiding the issue, somebody else will ask, or might do, or probably won't, but still, they won't go near it. Things are so much easier if we gloss over them and imagine the issue was decided at some time in the past. Some debates get buried because they are too politically incorrect to discuss. If I was an academic I would feel drawn to such areas, like a moth to a flame.

"I want to study so called racial differences in intelligence, I need money."

"Are you some kind of racist?"

"Is that a no? Do you have to be? Would you prefer it if I was? Sorry to disappoint, I am just curious, I thought curiosity was the stock in trade of universities, I am sorry I have wasted your time."

Global government

I don't have a blueprint for a short to medium term strategy. The best I can offer is using the power of the internet to keep asking the question. Why is a world government unthinkable? Who would suffer? It seems obvious to me that a world government would stifle creativity. This is an advantage. Most things that need inventing have been invented, many things that should not be invented are about to be developed. In a world with competing powers everything is allowed to develop because some country will see a short-term advantage in it. Human cloning for research will happen, it is a certainty. Somewhere there will also be human reproductive cloning. Perhaps Switzerland or Liberia or some other place that claims the absolute right to tell the rest of lifekind to bugger off and mind its own business. We need to erode the basis of that presumed absolute right, sovereignty needs to be wrestled from the hands of nation states and given to the people of the world.

Technology is a genie that demands to get out its bottle. When that technology offers fewer practical advantages than harmful side effects it would be better to have one single bottle so we only have to worry about holding in a single stopper. Think about the biological and chemical weapons being developed by the UK and USA, the logic seems to be "we must because others might". That does not follow. By having a global government there would be no need to make such weapons. The only people who might make them would be terrorists, and they cannot be either deterred or fought by weapons of mass destruction.

A war of the worlds would be a way to harness the world. A short-term threat might not suffice. I wish I had a simple solution to get the world united. The best I can offer is the idea that if enough people talk about it the people will listen and eventually the benefits will become clear. All I can do is to keep that debate going as best I can.

Understanding that you are young and impressionable is a good start. We are all impressionable to a degree. I have found that I have been cynical and analytical for many years, but age improves the skill. No doubt this ability will plateau shortly and then decline at some stage as I get older and begin to lose my faculties, but my experience of other people is that critical faculties grow with age and can remain sharp for quite a long time after other signs of reduced function. At your age creativity and energy should be near their peak. Many poets are past it at 25. The greatest breakthroughs in physics seem to come to people in a narrow window between the learning of the basic tools of analysis and mathematics and the declining ability for the highest possible creativity of thought. There is no ideal age. At 16 a man is at his sexual peak, but he will probably not learn half the techniques and strategies he will eventually master until he is twice that age, maybe more.

Feel free to ask me anything you want, but don't ask me to write your essays.

The following was sent in response to a Forum posting in which “GUS” confessed to being a little the worse for drink. At the time so was I...

Feel free to contribute material when drunk. Some of my best email was sent while I was scarcely able to discern the difference between the keys. The only problem with emailing when drudgery is that your spellchecker mighty contraband your errata with mistresses of its own. And then the excrescence will reality hit the extramural. But fuchsia hit, I say, jest go foul it. By the way, what is your tittle? I fancy a bit of west count rocket fuel myself. Scrumptious is goad, but not that whinge library stuff, it is for windows, teenage and Studebakers. In the morning your head feels like somebody has used it for foolscap practised an your tong tastes like an orange uterus has shot on it. Martin