These were Simon Kuper’s Chums and Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men. Over the Christmas holiday, I read two books that embedded this in my mind. The notion of law and order is an irritant in a game where strategies of cheating reign supreme. He shows disdain for the concept of punishment and consequences. His abdication of responsibility is based on the idea that a grudging apology can distract from serious intellectual failings. These traits have played a material role in the failings of modern Britain, and they are laid bare in the Zahawi affair. This system of education perpetuates certain personality traits in its alumni. The tone of Zahawi’s resignation letter is a product of a particular system of education which I and many contemporary Oxford students know all too well. I attended that school and that ceremony. Zahawi was educated at three London private schools, one of which he returned to in 2019 as the keynote speaker at the prize-giving ceremony. It is hard to see the relevance of an unprecedented moment of national mourning to the sordid circumstances of his dismissal. The death of Queen Elizabeth II is reduced to a bullet point providing colour to Zahawi’s CV. The remainder of the six-paragraph-piece is an inventory of imagined achievements. The word “sorry” features only once in the letter, as part of an apology to his family for “the toll this has taken on them”. In this latest iteration of ‘Tory sleaze’, it is Zahawi’s resignation letter rather than the details of his misdeed that best exemplifies the darkness which currently engulfs the heart of British politics. The public has become so desensitised to scandal in recent years that the exact sum of money, the preferred colour of wallpaper, and the number of ‘booze suitcases’ have morphed into objects of satire. Yet the particulars of the scandals which have embroiled the Conservative party as far back as memory stretches no longer feel especially important. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s promise to govern with “integrity and professionalism” left him with no choice but to wield the axe. It emerged last week that the former Conservative Party chairman had failed to disclose HMRC’s punishment of his capital gains tax avoidance on shares worth £27 million in Balshore Investments, an offshore holding company. are all individuals.įrom this reasoning it is derived that individuals are only the intersections between sets ( Universal).Nadhim Zahawi’s slippery handling of his tax affairs represents another droplet in an ocean of dishonour. When I think of this problem, it occurs to me that universals are probably sets while individuals are the elements of sets, for example in the case of cats if we take C = as the set of all cats then C is the universals and c1, c2, c3. However by definition the universal catness must be devoid of shape or color, otherwise it would be reduced to a Particular. When our mind thinks about the concept of cat, thought is inevitably accompanied by a shape and a color and other properties. What I am trying to understand without result is how such a thing can exist. Now " Catness" is a universals, the pure ontological concept of "cat". If I have a cat (let's call it Steve) I understand that Steve is an Individual but shares several properties with other cats, among which there is also the " Catness". I was thinking about the ontological problem of Universals versus Particulars and there is one thing that I can't understand well about the concept of Universal.
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