Occasionally Random

Why older people are happier and what we can learn from them [from Psyche]

I reconsidered the other concepts Dr. Bredsky had taught me: Deferral, Accession, Cipher, Kataluin. I did so in a new, willfully stupid way that matched our new, stupid England. The word “Cipher,” for instance, I’d previously understood as a highfalutin idea about consciousness, a notion of the mind as a vessel for experience of the world. It now amused me to take the concept literally: The mind was a zero. Nothing. I visualized a nation overrun with empty minds, braying and hollering their emptiness, and despairingly, I laughed.

“It’s a context problem,” … “People have much narrower knowledge bases than they think they do.” What they mostly know about police and intelligence work they get from the media. This is why it’s easier to infiltrate political groups than criminal ones. However revolutionary they think they are, they see police officers as slightly thick bovver boys in big boots. When a personable middle-class guy turns up in a khaki jacket, a CND badge and smelling of patchouli, they’re practically invisible. Criminals, on the other hand, deal with the police all the time and know what they smell like. All of this, Silver reckoned, went double for Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it. “Not deep down where it counts,” …