The Wee Free Men. The Nac Mac Feegle. The ones who have been expelled from Fairy Land – after breaking up the place for the thousandth time. They steal, they drink, they fight, and are mortally afraid of their names being written down – ’cause of the lawyers you know. They are around 6 inches tall, blue and covered with tattoos of all kind, fast and strong – well, when you are small and you steal cattle, you must be strong, right?

You could say they are not the most likeable fellows – not to their face and not too loud though. Did I mention they like to fight? And they are strong? Right.

So, what can you learn from them? A lot. Especially on how they see life and the world around them.

“We’d best move on. We lost some of the lads.”

The excitement drained away.

“You mean they’re dead?” Tiffany whispered. The sun was shining brightly again, the skylarks were back..and people were dead.

“Ach, no,” said Rob. “We’re the ones who’s deid. Did ye not know that?”

No, I am not saying that we should think we are dead. I certainly feel alive. But please bear with me.

“Well, if you think you’re dead, then what are they?” she went on, pointing to a couple of small bodies.

“Oh, they’ve gone back to the land o’the livin’, ” said Rob Anybody cheerfully. “It’s nae as good as this one, but they’ll bide fine and come back before too long. No sense in grieving.”.

…

“But you are alive!” she said.

“Ach, no, mistress,” said Rob, helping another pictsie to his feet. “We wuz alive. And we wuz good boys back in the land o’the livin’, and so when we died there we wuz borned into this place.”

…
“You mean. you think.that you sort of died somewhere else and then came here?’said Tiffany. “You mean this is like.heaven?”

“Aye! Just as advertised!” said Rob Anybody. “Lovely sunshine, good huntin’, nice pretty flowers and wee burdies goin’cheep.”

“Aye, and then there’s the fightin’,” said another Feegle. And then they all joined in.

“An’the stealin!”

“An’the drinkin’an’fightin’!”

“An’the kebabs!” said Daft Wullie.

“But there’s bad things here!” said Tiffany. “There’s monsters!”

“Aye,” said Rob, beaming happily. “Grand, isn’t it? Everythin’laid on, even things to fight!”

Terry Pratchett – The Wee Free Men

Are the wee free men right? Or are they totally wrong? Who knows – we can’t state anything with absolute certainty about the Discworld -, but one thing is clear. The way they look at the world is refreshing.

There are nice things, just as advertised, it’s a kind of heaven after all, and there are bad things, worthy challenges for a real men. After all, if there were no monsters, no challenges to overcome, no fights to win, it is kind of boring. And if it is boring, it can’t be the heaven, right?

I am not saying that we should look upon every problem as a new, exciting challenge – thinking of war, famine, poverty, and such. But when you meet something more mundane, don’t roll over and play dead, whimpering softly.
After all, without having challenges, you won’t appreciate the moments when the wee burdies go cheep.

So, I got a very definite opinion on the root of the whole mess, and it was a really interesting thing that I found my thoughts echoed in a Terry Pratchett book from 1999 – well, actually from 2002, beause it’s the 2nd Edition of The Science of the Discworld, but that’s just a small detail.

A difficult but stubborn feature of human thinking is involved in all this: it’s known as reifying: making real. Imagining that because we have a word for something, then there must exist a ‘thing’that corresponds to the word. What about ‘bravery’or ‘cowardice’? Or ‘tunnel’? Indeed, what about ‘hole’?

What does it have to do with the current mess of the financial world? Well, skip down a few lines.

‘Debt’and ‘overdraft’are very familiar privatives, and the thinkig problems they cause are quite difficult. After all, your overdraft pays your bank manager’s salary, doesn’t it? So how can it fail to be real? Today’s derivatives market buys and sells debts and promises as if they were real – and it reifies them as words and numbers on pieces of paper, or digits in a computer’s memory. The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes: most of it doesn’t actually exist at all.

The problem with “as if they were real” and “doesn’t actually exist” is tha when you actually have to pay, and all you have is nothing, then it gets difficult. The whole market is based on the assumption that no real money will have to be paid, it’s a huge “let’s pretend” and “make believe” game for adults – something like AD&D where you can win and lose a dragon’s hoard of treasure overnight. On paper.

The world ran out of actual money, on paper we have trillions, but that’s only because the same dollar/forint/gulden is showing up in several places as debt/promise/insurance/security/coverage multiplied and predicted, and if you trace back a million dollar to the actually existing thing in the real world you end up with a hut 20 miles from Kairo with a real value of 30 dollars.

Ok, that may be a bit extreme, but you get what I mean.

Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”.

source: www.pjsmprint.com

I hope everything will turn out better, although Alzheimer’s is not a thing that disappears like the flu.
On the bright side he is optimistic, and that’s always good.

Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet :o)

The best wishes for him.