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.
Excellent observation, however, like my posts, your musing is beyond the intellectual reach of most public schooled people. They can't grasp it, they just can't. If its not something shiny, or flashing dangling in their faces they can't factor it. Now if its something that requires actual critical mental processing, something that requires pragmatic deduction, then they are lost. They shut down. Nothing currently plaguing society would be possible if not for the dummies of academia, and its disciples of public school, who parrot the academic mantras. Even on this platform. There is a small cadre of intellectuals, but most are satisfied to repeat the popular topics of the day, never grinding down into the reality of it all, or the root causes of their torment.
"With slavery, we shipped the labor here, but with colonialism, we can just ship the work there." Most people don't grasp the fact that "slavery" was not imported Africans, but rather American Negro Indians who were already here. The first "slaves" in colonies were Pre-Colonial Whites and American Negro Indians. The colonies supported themselves by enslaving the local populations of Indians captured in Wars (King Phillips War). It was rinse and repeat, all over New England. Only a total of 92000 "Africans" were brought here in 400 years. In fact, there was so many Negro Indians that they were captured and shipped out. They were shipped to the Islands, Europe and they even sent them to Africa (Liberia), any place to lower the populations. The ones who remained were re-classified, over generations, via census records, from Indians, to Indians not taxed, free people of color, mulatto, octroon, quadroon, creole, negro, black and now "african." (They tried that with my family, but we had the documents) From Ben Franklin onward the plan has always been to get rid of us, steal our estates, steal our land and change us from aboriginal Indians into foreign Africans. Slavery as espoused by academia is a lie. The "out of africa" theory was created by a Eastern European, Melville Herkovitz, who taught the lies to academia. "Roots" was a fraud, a book stolen by Alex Haley from a White author. He was sued and he settled, the judge calling it a "hoax." History is a lie, agreed upon. Regards.
I'LL MAKE TWO POSTS. ONE GENERAL, AND ONE FOCUSED ON OUR CONVERSATION.
Purpose
Some say that there is no purpose to life, Others swear by supporting their religion as their main purpose. I am sure there are rewards from both ways of looking at it. But I think that we can impute a purpose for everyone.
1. I want to start with some very broad generalizations, to see where they lead. So please don't bother looking for exceptions.
Mankind's "doing" is purposed to support his needs. Therefore man's thinking and talking are also purposed to fulfill his needs. My needs might already be fulfilled. Then my thinking and talking, (and doing) are to ensure that nobody moves to erode this fulfillment.
The big problem comes when my needs have been fulfilled at the expense of somebody else. Then my thinking and talking are to deny this with all of my possible might. This group has many topics which are considered "no-go-zones", which is a major part of their denial. So we have two major groups, (see Marx), those that are underprivileged, who's thinking and talking are all about justice and righting these wrongs. And those who are already well-off (or medium well-off), who think the status quo is good for everyone, (if you just apply yourself). They want to talk about endless diversions. They have thousands of interests that they will try to engage with you, and yes, they are interesting.
2. Many people might not understand what I am inferring, so I'll make a few definitions. Ancient man first raided, (stole surpluses), then they traded. I am sure Asian people traded, but I don't know about them, so I will talk about the West. Europeans were early traders (and raiders), after the Crusades. Surpluses of wealth came out of this trade, and out of that developed the "reasoning behind capital". Basically it is simple; "Don't spend it, but make it grow". This is the origin of today's capitalism. Europe is a land of light skinned peoples, so we can call this commercialism the "white man's heritage".
A good portion of these Europeans, "white men", built their capital by any means deemed legal at the time, and on through the ages. This included trading, stealing, colonialism, enslavement of non-whites, and any kind of oppression or genocide that they could conceive of for outsiders. Their prime means were the high investments in the technology of weapons, so they could easily dominate the world.
If you live in the west, or work with western corporations, you live under white-man's privilege, no matter what the color of your skin. (Probably everyone reading this blog.) You might say that was yesterday, and today it is different. I'll just give one example:
The west believes in free trade. For those countries that have import duties, the US will force their markets open. That means the west will sell all of its surplus product, and the importer will be denied the opportunity to make those products for themselves, (or grow that food). The net effect is that the west exports primarily its unemployment, and in the second priority, some products. The importer suffers the same unemployment that the west has avoided, and maybe more.
No matter what sector your work in the west, your business benefits by the vibrant economy of (a more) full employment.
3. So now we have two groups and two ranges of topics. Both these groups use humor. The Have-Not's use humor as irony, and relief from what is not working in their lives. They say that there can be a comical nature of something, or word pictures can provide amusement, appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous, or a sudden unpredictable, or unreasoning inclination, an incongruous quality causing amusement.
I would have to write another post to analyze what is humor, but basically if our government leaders do something that even a high-schooler knows will not work, we can laugh at them for being so stupid.
BUT REALLY THEY ARE NOT STUPID, WE ARE THE STUPID ONES. Because we expect that they should be doing something for our benefit (for society), when they work only for the oligarchs that pay them and put them into office.
The other group, the "Have's", uses humor both to denigrate the Have-Not's, when talking among themselves, and to divert the have-not's attention from the inequality that is growing like a tidal-wave.
4. So if we are to engage together here in a dialog, which ranges of topics should we consider? Should we talk about that part of the world that doesn't favor peoples needs and lifestyles, and why? Should we talk about all the myriad of diversions and interests, and justify that they are beautiful scientific discussion (which they no doubt are)? Or should we just stick with humor and see if we can spend the rest of our days laughing among ourselves, and at everyone else who are too dumb to laugh like we do?
I suggest that whatever we talk about, we need to make judgments about the parameters that we come up with. Those judgements (or choice points), need to have a benchmark of comparison. We may not agree on our topics, nor on our conclusions, but it would be a head start if we could agree on some benchmarks of judgement.
Most people use the benchmark of "the truth". But of course we won't agree on that, so let's find something else. Again, my suggestion; but let's say that the human lives in a society, so whatever is good for me, but not damaging for society, (nor nature), could be our choice points.
In other words we examine the pretty-clear trajectory that a certain belief will put us on, and imagine what ends will result from behaving in that way. Please notice that I did not say we should "fix the world", but I only said we shouldn't damage society (or nature), nor be sucking someone else's blood.
CAN WE AGREE ON THIS STANDARD? That will make a big difference in our conclusions.
5. Notice in 4., I have moved away from asserting what is the "truth", (for me). All the truths down through the ages are now the basis of jokes. I think that our truths will suffer the same hilarious fate.
So I suggest the same process we discovered in #4. That in lieu of the truth, we always use our probable future trajectory, (whether personal or collective), for adopting beliefs or making decisions. We do have stated objectives, or we do know where we want to go, so is that trajectory (based on our truth) counterproductive to these objectives? If so, DON'T ADOPT IT.
6. I have said that false-cause always undermines the situation to be worse, or that there are ample unintended side-effects. False cause comes from our imperfect understanding of the circumstances, and from our distorted points of view. Humans have a limited window of observation, even with instrumentation, because we have evolved the tools for our survival in simpler times.
One of our distortions is our erroneous view of time and time-lines. Probably most people will admit that there is no place called yesterday, nor no place where the future is now residing and is on its way to join our present time. Both these concepts are based on our memory capacity, the past directly on memory, (and written histories), and the future as a projection of the past trajectories, again from our memory. But yet we are fully immersed in talking through the shorthand of past and future, like they are the essence of progression and change.
Past - Present - and Future seems linear. Hence we search each sequence for a linear cause and effect, which may be the furthest thing from reality. One alternative might be that related things arise together. Then there is no cause and there is no effect. People want a "beginning" to everything imaginable. What does that search (or invention) give to you? I say, only false cause, and all the resulting problems that we are now living through.
ALLOW MYSTERY into you life.
7. So with our hyper-resolve to find cause and effect, with all the possible misconceptions, of course everything seems very, very complicated.
In fact, with very little research into the conventional wisdom about problems, you can list reams of factors that have to be considered. It is the mal-working of mathematical models. At first they don't fully describe the situation. So they need a patch. A patch is another side formula that takes care of that perceived extra movement. That side formula requires more variables (unknowns to solve for), which are considered as additional "degrees of freedom".
Wow, it gets complicated fast. But with "super-computers" you can solve for dozens of variables in some reasonable time. Most typically you get dozens of solutions too, but then you can choose the ones that make the most sense, (or those that make the most money for your benefactors).
If many related things were seen as arising together, in a greater matrix of relationships, perhaps many things could be simplified. That is only one way that I propose, but I don't know the greater workings of the universe. We could seek to:
SIMPLIFY EVERYTHING THAT WE TALK ABOUT. At least to the best of our ability, and leave mystery where it seems going toward the intractable.
8. That brings us to our two groups, Haves, and Have-Not's. I propose that the Have's, in order to avoid any concrete action that will denigrate their privilege, will always try to complicate everything. If really forced into action, they may choose one of the inconsequential factors to work on, and then say, "see, we spent all that money trying to do some good, but it just doesn't work. What we have now is the best that we can do."
AT LEAST THOSE ARE MOTIVES TO WATCH FOR IN OUR ARGUMENTATION.
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