A Pre-Mortem of Western Civ

Why the cracks go to the foundations.

Our politicians prefer playing cowboys and Indians on the other side of the planet, while the country falls apart and puberty has been deemed a fascist plot. What gives?

We tend to look at all the problems in isolation, but the crazies seem to get the attention in all of them. Life is complicated, but we want the simple answers.

Dealing with the problems without looking into the causes is like a bandaid over a bullet wound. Yet most people can’t change the situation even if they know the reasons and those who could, most likely like it the way things are.

Yet it does seem the mother of all reality checks is in the mail.

Debt doesn’t matter, until it does and the bill is coming due. The party is about over and the hangover is going to be all too real.

So what is this reality we hoped to wish away?

Is it money, or matter?

Or just fear and greed?

Physics or biology?

The fact is, this world on the surface of this little orb has been evolving for billions of years, but few of us are willing to look much outside our own little shells. We have experts in all the various fields telling us how it is, but often it seems like a Tower of Babel and little actually adds up.

As a thought experiment, I will offer a description of this reality that the average twelve year old can wrap their mind around, though it might explode the heads of those with a lot of higher ed.

As these mobile organisms, our bodies have this sentient interface with our situation, which functions as a sequence of perceptions, that we refer to as mind, or consciousness. Its purpose is to allow us to navigate our world, gathering resources and avoiding dangers.

Consequently we have this sequential experience of time, as the present moves from past events to future ones. Physics codifies it as measures of duration. As Einstein explained, “What a clock measures.”

Though the evident reality, for those of us who don’t spend our lives in classrooms and conference halls, is that activity and the resulting change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. That culture is about synchronizing the community into a larger social organism, based on the same languages, rules and measures, it might seem like there should be some universal Newtonian flow of time, but the reason nature is so diverse and yet integrated is because everything doesn’t march to the beat of the same drummer. Different strokes for different folks. Multicultural, not monocultural.

Energy is “conserved,” because it manifests this presence, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So energy goes past to future, because the patterns it’s generating coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Now consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it’s the digestive system processing the energy, the nervous system sorting the information and the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

Consider how our consciousness is always looking for ways to push the bubble of our world. For most, to strengthen the structure of their bubble, but some to find the cracks in it.

Now take into account that galaxies, the largest observed formations in reality, are feedback loops between the energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in. We exist on this little orb, somewhere in the middle.

Physicists, being the intellectuals they are, like to focus on the most ordered and structured aspects of this reality, so they look at the most microcosmic, macrocosmic and abstracted(math) aspects of the evidence, but that is furtherest from the most complex, which is in the middle, where life is.

If you have devoted your life to attaining a higher education and you have actually read this far, I’m sorry, but heads will explode, if the box is broken.

For those of us having to deal with reality, we live in this tension between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement. The energy radiating out, as the structure coalesces in. The gut and the head.

In society, government, as executive and regulatory function, serves as the central nervous system of the community. Synchronizing it into one larger social organism. This often entails coalescing efforts in one joint direction and that requires shedding what doesn’t fit. Signals from the noise.

Now the actual process of distinguishing what is best for both the community and the environment in which it exists, is the tricky part. Short term desires and long term goals don’t always match.

For one thing, culture tends to treat good and bad as some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, in order to synchronize the group as one, but in nature, they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

Obviously this sets different groups against one another, but the more complex reality is that what can seem bad, or painful at the moment, will prove to be beneficial and healthy in the long term, as it strengthens the entity. As well as the fact that too much of a good thing can be bad in the long run. Everything in moderation.

This is where our cultural paradigms start to break down. Where they run up against reality. As our linear, goal seeking human nature has to come to terms, willingly, or unwillingly, with a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality.

For instance, how our desires for wealth and status lead those with a little wealth and power and limited scruples, to leverage more wealth and power, irrespective of the damage it might be doing to the larger system.

Normally when we engineer systems, we have to build in circuit breakers, where the feedback loops might spin out of control, but the system for doing this in society, government, tends to be compromised by the wealth and power.

While government serves as the nervous system of society, money and banking function as blood and the circulation system. We have come to understand that government, no matter how much it is focused on the executive, works best as a form of public utility, with input from the rest of the community. Much like our mind is not distinct from the body, but is an expression and focus of it.

We are now facing the fact that banking also needs to be an expression of the larger society. As the circulation system, it can’t just tell the hands and feet to go suck dirt, because it’s keeping all the blood for itself.

While people see money as signal to extract and store, markets need it to circulate, so Econ 101 describes it as both medium of exchange and store of value. Yet a medium is a function of the networking, while stores are nodes. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store.

Money is a contract, between the individual and the community. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies. We don’t hold the copyrights, it’s not our picture on it and we are not personally responsible for its value, like a personal check.

It is a public utility and needs to function as one. For one thing, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so the more that is pulled from circulation in order to save, has to be replaced and ever more unstable and corrupted methods of storing the excess have to be devised.

The simple fact is that there isn’t the investment potential for everyone to save individually, even if the banks were not skimming off the top. We do save for many of the same reasons, so various forms of public commons and public works would be a useful method of establishing a healthy society, in a healthy environment.

Yet that would require recognizing the basis of a healthy society is communal responsibility, with rights as reward, not rights as ordained and responsibility as optional, as much of our political spectrum seems to assume.

Consider that the one public works project the entire political and economic establishment can agree on, is the military. Why?

The history of it goes to World War 2. Consider that the Federal debt has been growing since the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well. Then WW2 came along as the greatest public works project in history.

Remember that at the time, the United States was even more of a “melting pot” than it is today, given much of the population was at most third generation. So there was this enormous public effort, not only bringing everyone together and focusing them in a joint effort, with clear moral overtones and a simple narrative, but it operated across the entire economic and social spectrum. Both wealthy and working classes were invested and all the various racial and cultural groups had to come together. It made the United States what it is today.

The overwhelming consequence and problem was the degree to which this gave the military precedence over all other aspects of both national and international relations. We don’t need no stinking diplomacy, when we can just beat anyone over the head.

Given that we took over the colonial history of a beaten Europe, the subsequent military misadventures since then have been various versions of gunboat diplomacy and expeditionary campaigns against smaller countries. With slavery, we shipped the labor here, but with colonialism, we can just ship the work there.

Though having hollowed out our own industry and shipped the work abroad has been one of those situations where the short term gains for the rich are now running up against the long term issues, of exporting the technology and reducing our own labor force to waiters and welfare recipients.

Now those other countries are sensing weakness in the alpha dog and are looking to teach it some of its own lessons.

While it will definitely upset the applecart, it does create truly monumental opportunities to learn from the experience and how humanity can better understand its situation.

Though that will likely have to wait for the post mortem.