Why Culture is Not Reality

When it's hundreds of millions and billions of people, it's not so much culture and politics, as it's biology and physics.

The world is breaking down across the spectrum in ways that will combine to defeat our usual tactic of patching problems as they arise, rather than the much more fundamental strategy of digging down and dealing with the causes.

This habit of patching has created a disjointed worldview that will be unable to sustain much further civilizational progress, as all the various institutional and ideological groups fight over finite resources. Since their positions only harden over time, it limits possible solutions to more patchwork.

An alternative would be to step back and examine the various beliefs and assumptions driving human behavior. This would not be a popular effort, considering the degree to which we are embedded in the various cultures, but it is one that could develop over time and gradually heal some of our more self destructive behaviors.

Given the need to step outside culture and convention in order to frame it, as well as incorporate a range of issues into a bigger picture, this essay is not constructed as linearly and sequentially as our thought process prefers, but more as cycles of conceptual expansion and consolidation. Which is how structure does develop. So it might seem like I’m pinging off a lot of different topics, but it’s about connecting the dots, in a broader tapestry.

Consider the people leading armies are called generals, while specialist is about one rank above private. The kids that would make good generalists are the ones interested in everything, as eventually they come to sense how all the various aspects fit together. Yet they are the ones diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated until their minds fit back in the boxes. Leaving this global Tower of Babel, where all the specialists are talking past each other.

The reason our beliefs would reflect a distorted understanding are both physiological and psychological.

They are physiological because our knowledge is anthropocentric. Like a geocentric cosmology, the basis of human knowledge is the human situation, as these individual, mobile organisms in this thermodynamic environment.

They are psychological, because our habits and intuitions are built around our survival and what is beneficial to us.

A good example of the former is our view of time.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present moving past to future. It is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative. The sciences codify it as measures of duration. “What a clock measures.”

The reality is that activity and the resulting change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.

Epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our view of the cosmos, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation. Beware using the models as proof.

There is no literal, physical dimension of time, no time traveling through wormholes in the fabric of spacetime, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

It’s like a tapestry being woven out of strands being pulled from what was woven.

The reason different clocks can run at different rates is simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. Emotions like boredom and excitement are a function of how our body’s clock relates to external rates of activity.

That culture is about synchronizing our behaviors as one larger social organism, using the same languages, rules and measures, it might seem like there should be one universal, Newtonian flow of time, but that would be like only one frequency. The reason nature is so diverse and yet integrated is because everything doesn’t march to the beat of the same drummer. It’s rabbit time and turtle time and the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

The overall effect is the ecosystem, in which organisms co-exist. Harmonization by the radiating energy balances all the synchronizing nodes in the network, like galaxies across space.

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

The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness expresses as an energy. Though the digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

This might help to explain a lot of our social dynamics, as that underlaying conscious compulsion is constantly pushing the resulting structures and strictures, building up our physical and conceptual frameworks, then tearing them down, as they become too rigid, brittle, corrupt, unbalanced, confining, etc.

Therefore this love/hate relationship we have with order. The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.

Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.

As these mobile beings on the surface of this little orb, we are about in the middle, where the feedback loops between energy and form are most complex.

It’s reflected in our political polarization, as conservative is most definitely on the side of order and structure, while liberalism tends toward that youthful energy pushing and pulling, but given the resulting structural ambiguities of conflicting energies and desires, does tend to spiral into various social, emotion based feedback loops, where the more established structures and strictures of culture and civilization would ground it, but get rejected as obsolete. Not entirely without merit, but with limited experience to back up the presumption of knowing better. Passions of youth, versus lessons of age.

No, puberty is not a fascist plot. The biological body and its cycle of life is a far more complex and evolved structure and dynamic, than our social, cultural and civil conventions can imagine. The sexes are a dichotomy, a biological yin and yang, that predates the split between flora and fauna. While people are a spectrum.

The genesis of the identity politics of the last few decades was the Democratic Party abandoning labor as its core constituency, in order to court corporate donors. Thus having to emphasize the other aspects of its coalition, beyond just the progressives leading the way. Given the various minority factions have deep cultural roots and therefore moderately to seriously conservative cores, the effect was to push the sexually ambiguous to the forefront. Since the defining characteristic is a reproductive handicap, it limits this faction to remaining among the fringes of established cultures, so not a long term solution, but it is politically expedient and in synch with progressive cultural ambiguity and homogenization.

Of course, labor is part of culture as well, but of the foundations, not the fringes.

The sad fact is that labor’s political power faded because much of the manufacturing moved to corners of the world where labor has few rights, leaving it much less leverage here. Also various of the unions had reputations for corruption and all were painted as socialist sympathizers, against the shining white knight of capitalism.

Yet many people from those countries would still like to come here, because it’s the “land of opportunity.” As well as the fact our establishment still prefers incarceration over death squads to enforce its writ.

Not that Republicans are innocent of all the economic and social chicanery, as the Democrats are just playing catch-up. A pox on both their houses.

I wrote in Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning in the last election and it seems likely will do the same in the next.

He looked the Beast in the eye and didn’t blink.

Then there are the psychological factors.

To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, God and the Devil.

To nature, it’s the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

This is due to that synchronizing factor of culture, of organizing the body politic as one social organism. That has to constantly sort through the various impulses and factions and prioritize them. Much as we, as individuals, have to constantly decide which of our needs and desires have precedence. So this distinction between good and bad has to be clearcut. No waffling in the middle, as we can’t take both directions at the fork in the road. Though situations do exist along a spectrum, not only of the grays between black and white, but all the colors of the spectrum, between light and dark. Nuance is ignored at our peril. The devil is in the details.

The feedback loops switch from positive to negative at the crest of the wave, where we are most intoxicated, so we usually find out the hard way what works and what doesn’t. A little pain is educational. More is not always better. Trial and error.

Signals in the noise are the information that coalesces into and resonates with our mental frame, consequently knowledge condenses, from memes and metaphors, to abstractions and abbreviations.

Maths are where the abstractions and abbreviations are most refined and consolidated, so these fields are seen as the highest forms of order.

So that store of knowledge supporting our particular frames, beliefs, maps, models becomes ever more stable and established. As excess information reverts to noise and shed, it is a dynamically centripetal process of sorting. Then as nodes in that larger network, we find ourselves drawn to and condensed into the groups where we find ourselves on the same wavelength, swirling around and defined by the core ideals.

The broad social herding can be either beneficial or detrimental, given the burn rate, depending on the larger context and one’s relationship with the group. There is safety and development in numbers, while the factors that will appeal to and focus groups of people have to be either fairly basic, or specialized.

Decisions are like turns in the road. Best taken as the situation requires. Too soon and it’s impulsive, too late and it’s indecisive. Though in groups, making decisions is a sign of power, so we tend be led by the impulsive.

So culture is like stories for children, hoping the next generations learn the right lessons. While nature is like a super computer, that doesn’t always come up with the answers we want to hear.

There are various organs in society, much as there are organs in the body. Government and politics, education, banking, healthcare, manufacturing, public infrastructure, et cetera, function as interconnected parts of the whole, with individuals as the cells of these structures.

Government, as civil executive and regulatory function, serves as a form of central nervous system, organizing and focusing the community as a unit. Like the mind, it is often just referee of the desires, than deciding factor. Politics is the process of the factions competing.

The bureaucracy of government is a significant faction though, but because its role is presumably only to implement, it will steer others to its benefit, rather than being up front.

Money and banking serve as a form of blood and circulation system. As such, while the role of government is the centripetal, synchronizing dynamic, to focus and direct the nation, finance serves as a form of distribution and equalizing mechanism, to harmonize resources and energy throughout the body politic.

Like the bureaucracy of government, banking will also tend to focus on its own desires and steer resources toward the self interest of its management.

One of the larger problems the world faces today, is that while our public perception has evolved enough to realize that government should function as a public utility, even though it is far more messy and chaotic than one autocratic monarch, we have yet to understand the same basic principles apply to banking. When the medium enabling markets is privately managed, we are all tenant farmers to the banks.

Capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy, as the financial sector tends to be focused on monetizing all value, than serving the larger society, if not properly regulated by society.

So with public government and private banking, the banks have the upper hand. They don’t have to work around cumbersome election cycles, don’t have as much public oversight and can control the finances of anyone trying to run for office.

Consequently the one job those in public office seem to be really good at, is running up the public debt the banks need to grow much beyond systems of allocation and accounting. “The real money is in bonds.” The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.

Though government is the decision making function, so hollowing it out and deferring to the appetites of finance creates a social dynamic with the strategic aptitude of bacteria, as any options interfering with the monetization of everything will be overridden. Profit trumps quality.

A possible fix would be to make the line item veto work by breaking the spending bills into their various lines, having every legislator assign a percentage value to each item, reassemble the bill in order of preference, then have the president draw the line. “The buck stops here.” That would make budgeting more a function of the legislative process and not so much about buying political influence, while leaving the overall level of spending up to the executive, therefore explicitly responsible for the level of debt.

As these linear, goal seeking organisms in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 assumes it to be both medium of exchange and store of value.

Yet a medium and a store serve different functions. For example, in the body, blood is the medium, while fat is a store. Roads are a medium for cars, while parking lots are stores. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. Would doctors, highway engineers, or the average five year old totally confuse the two?

While we may think of money as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, the fact is that it functions as a social contract, between the individual and the community. Its real value is in everyone participating in it, making it a networking mechanism. As a medium, it is the accounting system enabling the individual and corporate organisms to function in the larger social and economic ecosystem. Community tokens would be a useful description.

It might be fiat, but so is the US Constitution, to anyone born a citizen of the US.

When it is held as asset by the members of the public issuing the debt backing it, in theory it balances out, unless it’s been turned into a global currency, or the borrowed money is wasted, requiring serious imbalances and eventual hangovers.

In order to store money, there has to be a debt to back the asset side of the ledger. Consequently society has evolved to generate piles of debt, in order to maintain the illusion of wealth. Presumably those piles of cash in our bank accounts we all hoard.

The problem is this feeds the influence of the financial system, driving a feedback loop of wealth and power leveraging ever more wealth and power. We are like pods in The Matrix, with our bank accounts as the umbilical cord.

When we design electrical systems, we have to include circuit breakers, so the feedback loops don’t build up too much energy, melt the wiring and burn up the furniture.

By three thousand years ago, the Ancients had devised debt jubilees as just such circuit breakers, as they found out that free land owners made more effective soldiers, than half starved debt serfs, when the neighboring tribes and nations sensed weakness.

Yet here we are, in our modern, advanced world, stuck in the same doom loop. It’s like the heart telling the hands and feet, as well as the brain, to go suck dirt, because it’s keeping the oxygenated blood for itself.

The fact is that as a medium, money is a public utility, not private property. It doesn’t have your picture on it, you don’t hold the copyrights and are not responsible for its value, like a personal check. You own it like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. Would it work to store those, as opposed to carefully regulating their use?

Though if you control all the roads, air and water, you effectively own everything moving about in them. Which is why the banks seem to think they own everything, as royalty once saw it. The banks are having their own, “Let them eat cake.” moment.

If the serious excess was taxed out and not borrowed out, people would quickly devise other methods of storing value. Possibly in community networks and environments.

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 World War 2 came along, as the largest public endeavor in American history, pulling all the classes, creeds and colors together and the die was cast, of the MIC as the one accepted public works project. It was the heat being turned up under the melting pot.

Considering how seamlessly adversaries switched from communism, to Arab terrorism, to Russians, it’s evident all successive wars have been driven by the need to sustain this martial identity and the industry supporting it, while the stated reasons have been more a matter of convenience. Though capitalism is ideologically opposed to communism and socialism. Thesis and antithesis, with no synthesis.

Paul Volcker is given credit for bringing inflation under control, in the late 70’s, early 80’s. Yet the method of higher interest rates starved capital to those willing to borrow in order to grow the economy, from buying houses to starting businesses. Meanwhile it gave more as interest to those with more than they needed and were lending out. How would that cure an excess of money in the system? Logically it would have the opposite effect.

Inflation started to come under control by ‘82. The year the Federal deficit topped 200 billion for the first time, under Reaganomics.

The difference between the Fed selling debt it bought to create the money and retiring the money collected and the Treasury issuing new debt, is this money is spent back into the economy. Even if much of it went to the military, it still served to grow the economy, therefore increased the need for money. Which lowered the unemployment rate for money, aka, inflation.

For all its fearsome power and influence, the military industrial complex is really the trophy wife of the banks. It looks impressive, gets everything it wants and doesn’t ask questions.

It should be noted that Russia and China have essentially gone back to private forms of government, with Putin and Xi as respective CEO’s, specifically to control their own oligarchs. Which is why our oligarchs, their political patsies, managerial underlings and media hacks hate them so passionately.

That Charles 3 is English head of state should be proof enough that government in the West is a hollow shell.

Why does the culture bow down to money? Why has the medium become the message? The tool become the god?

A big part of it is our physiology. Our minds operate by sorting signals from the noise and money is about the most basic signal across society. Then we assume that if a little is good, more is always better.

Yet there are practical limits on how much a healthy, functioning society actually needs, much like how much blood does the body need, or roads do people need?

So when we make it the focus of society, not only do we need to create the debt to back the stores of it, but all other factors of society eventually dissolve in its face. When profitability trumps quality and nothing can stand up to monetizing all value in everything, it amounts to a social and economic Ebola virus.

Back in the day, you raised your kids and were taken care of in old age. Now we have retirement accounts and the kids have mountains of debt.

Companies have to constantly spend money to buy up their own stock, to keep the prices high, so the hedge funds and vulture capitalists don’t suck them dry of any value above possible stock prices. So there isn’t as much to spend on development, or higher wages.

Residential real estate has become another large asset grab, driving many people out of the housing market.

Though these gluttons are cooking their own golden goose, as the dynamic goes unsustainably parabolic. Even parasites need a healthy host.

You can cheat on the foundations to store more gold in the penthouse for only so long, before it does more than just trickle down.

There used to be a time that being fat was considered a status symbol, as it meant you had more than enough to eat and didn’t have to work too hard for it. One day the notion of extreme monetary wealth, rather than social connectivity and responsibility, will seem as quaint. Not that there won’t be extremely powerful people, but this particular cycle has reached its peak.

Likely the vulture capitalists will buy up the bonds for pennies on the dollar and insist they be traded for federal assets and land, when the US can’t keep paying the interest, disaster capitalism style, but in the world being created, it will likely be the warlords with the growing power. Fall of Rome style.

Those armored Mercedes won’t do much good, when the gangs have rocket propelled grenades, nor will the estates and security guards be much defense against the armed drones. The nature of conflict resolution, currently evolving in Ukraine, will have spillover effects.

Money is a contract. Financial control requires a functioning state to back it. When the goal of the state devolves to supporting the interests of a self absorbed elite, over sustaining a healthy society and nation, it has become little more than organized crime and will further corrode the legitimacy of the state.

Right now it looks like a cage match between the markets and the dollar and the markets have more lobbyists, while the dollar just has the Federal Reserve. Which is like having the other guy’s drug dealer as your lawyer.

When they do implode the dollar, communities, states and regions will likely have to start issuing alternate forms of money, consequently foreign policy will be between Texas and California, etc. When the big tree falls, saplings grow in its place.

Imagine Donald Trump’s mug on a Florida dollar.

The billionaires are the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the age and that 32 trillion in Federal debt is the meteor. Debt doesn’t matter. Until it does.

The basic fact is that there isn’t the investment potential for everyone to save individually and turning the financial system into a casino and blowing enormous asset bubbles isn’t going to change that, but we do save for many of the same reasons. So the logical solution, horror of horrors, would be various forms of public commons and public works. Yet that would require appreciating the basis of a healthy society is public responsibility, with rights as reward, not rights as ordained and responsibility as optional. Like cells in the body, either we function as a whole, or the process becomes necrotic.

The problem is that when our nation was being conceived, there wasn’t much in the way of social safety nets, beyond family and church, so the irresponsible were out of luck. Which is why the debates and focus were over rights and how to exercise power.

With the military as the one public works that all of society has grown to accept, giving the industrialists lots of contracts that rarely face real world testing and generations of people careers and a sense of purpose, the main tool in the government tool box is this sledge hammer, so every issue becomes a rock to break. Which tends to emphasize and encourage the more sociopathic tendencies among the political stage actors. Delinquent children given matches and gasoline will become arsonists.

When Donald Trump, the Kim Kardashian of the 1980’s, has the entire political establishment running in circles, like rats or kids after the Pied Piper, any vestige of gravitas has long left the building.

Looking at all the idiot charges being brought against him, it’s like he wrote the script. Donald Trump; All-American Martyr. Coming to a video screen near you.

That Calamity Joe uses his no account son as his bagman, rather than a non-profit foundation, as all the proper grifters do, it’s clear that even appearances no longer matter. It’s past being a swamp, it’s a sewer and no vertebrates are welcome.

When the smart people won’t do what you tell them, fire them and hire stupid ones that will. The banks cut the paychecks.

It’s like the establishment has become an enormous scab over a festering wound.

Can we begin to establish the more nuanced social assumptions, cultural conventions and civil forms to really tie this country together, beyond just worship of the dollar and the flag? How to reconcile the deep social integration that can exist organically at the local level, where it’s possible to know, or with a few degrees of separation from those one is working with, with the mass scale, interconnectivity and sorting of the larger society?

We have to understand the many layers in-between and how society has evolved.

Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family and the cycle of life as godhead. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism was the forty years isolated in the desert, giving the Ten Commandments to the Old Testament.

Greek religion originated in fertility rites, where the young god was born in the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother. Yet by the time of the Olympians, tradition had prevailed over renewal and Zeus didn’t give way to Dionysus.

Which is why the story of Jesus, born of royal blood, lost to the establishment, crucified and risen in the spring, had such fertile ground to take root.

(Jesus was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers. That’s when they crucified him.)

By the time Rome adopted Christianity as the state religion, several hundred years later, it too had started to calcify and harden into the establishment. Tradition prevailing over renewal again.

For the Romans, the monotheism was necessary to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules. Divine right of kings. “Forgive them their debts.” became, “Forgive them their sins.” People are sinners, rulers are wise.

As the Catholic Church became the Eternal Institution, the meaning and origins of the Trinity were obscured. Tradition over renewal. Though Martin Luther did try pushing the reset button, if only over the corruption, not the tradition.

When the West went back to more populist forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics. Which is about as schizophrenic as Descartes’ distinction of the mind and body.

Islam first recognized the power of a common creed, then political systems evolved in its wake, making this split between culture and civics even more difficult than when it was the state adopting the religion as an ideological function.

Logically a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgment, from which we fell. More the light shining through and illuminating the film, going past to future, than the images and narratives playing out on it, going future to past.

So while monotheism served a useful political purpose, the effect was to found Western culture on the premise of ideals as absolute.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The village totem or alter is an ideal. The center point of the centripetal dynamic. The focal point giving the group or ideology a common locus. The grain of sand at the center of the pearl. The eye of the storm, the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

As such, it is a very powerful assumption, yet given other groups and ideologies will have their own creeds around which their cultures are centered, to assume one’s own brand is universal and unquestionable, while all others must consequently be false and misleading, can only create a situation of endless tension and conflict.

An absolute can have no distinctions, divisions, qualifiers, features, thus no form. Ideal or otherwise. The only current reference to absolute, besides a brand of vodka, is the temperature of absolute zero. The state of total stillness, with no possible features. The most basic state of equilibrium. Zero. Nothingness.

Given absolute is a more definite concept than truth, consider reversing the term, “absolute truth” and using truth as the qualifier: True absolute. It’s redundant, as there is no such state as partial absolute, like there is partial truth. Which is what our knowledge is, as patchwork.

If morality were an absolute, there simply would be no way to transgress against it. Instead it is an ideal. The basic behaviors supporting a healthy and stable community. Immorality is social pathology, breaking down the communal organism.

The West over invested in God as the moral policeman and when the fear of God died, Nietzsche’s Will to Power filled the void. Unfortunately those most adept at this game are not the knights in shining armor, but the amoral assholes who lie, cheat and steal from their grandmothers as a matter of principle. Having the moral character of bacteria, they have the strategic aptitude of bacteria as well, since it breaks down the communal super organism that is the strength of civilization.

Like modern economics, bacteria operate on the infinite growth model. The problem is when they hit the edge of the petri dish. The advantage of multicellular organisms is they sense and navigate their situations. Feedback, not just crashing.

We are nodes in the network. Organisms in the ecosystem, that builds us up and breaks us down. No matter how self absorbed we might be.

To confuse ideals with absolutes is a category error so profound and obvious that philosophers should have been all it over centuries ago. Yet because society is more about patching the problems, than getting at the realities, we have plenty of priests and politicians coming up with answers to our problems, while the philosophers are intellectually neutered and confined to the back alleys of academia, to beat the same old tired mules over and over.

Stoicism, anyone? Deconstructionism?

Reality is the tension and feedback between the absolute and the infinite, with ideals as the points of light in the middle.

While math models space as three dimensions, that is a mapping device, the xyz coordinate system. Like longitude, latitude and altitude.

If you remove all physical definitions, metrics and quantities from space, the remaining qualities are infinity and equilibrium. Which is implicit in the frame with the longest ruler and fastest clock being closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum, the unmoving void of absolute zero.

Like numbers, from zero to infinity.

What fills this space is the energy, radiating toward infinity, as well as the forms being manifest, coalescing toward equilibrium. That centripetal effect of synchronization. One big wave is more efficient than lots of small ones.

Both entropic.

Therefore galaxies, as the primary dynamic in the universe. What energy is not radiated out, is increasingly carried in, eventually to fall into those vortices at the center, then shot out the poles as quasars. Which are like giant lasers, essentially synchronized light waves.

Which suggests the qualities and distinctions of mass, that our tactile, object oriented sensibilities regard as foundational material, is an intermediate effect of that centripetal dynamic, aka gravity, rather than gravity a property of mass and so no need for dark matter to explain the excess gravity. Essentially gravity as deep resonance across the spectrum of waves.

The music is more real than the matter.

We worship knowledge and intelligence, originally as the one, ideal, absolute, all-knowing god. Now libraries and universities, scientists and academics are our current places of worship and high priests. Yet just what is intelligence, other than the processing of information? Signals from the noise. We can build machines to do it, as well as store the knowledge.

The problem with making it a god is that it is inherently subjective. An objective point of view is an oxymoron. Yes, there are common patterns and formulas. I’m emphasizing one here, between energy and information, but those are the basics. As things get ever more complex, the patterns and dynamics get ever more specific, subjective, relational and distinct, as the amount of input and feedback multiplies. So the premise of this omniscient omniscience is a contradiction. The universal is the elemental, not some overarching ideal.

The sciences look to the elements, while the arts look to the ideals.

Which goes to the nature of structure and form and our relationships with what is and is not. We are biological forms and we develop social, cultural and civil forms, in order to function as communities within our planetary situation. These forms are conditional, emergent, relational and subjective. Which means knowledge, that collection of information we organize to make sense of reality, is inherently biased. We are all our own point of view.

Like waves and cycles, they and we are constantly building up and breaking down. Sometimes as harmonizing background, sometimes as our entire world building up and crashing down. Depending on the situation of our point of view.

Do we fight it and go a bit further, possibly toward a bigger crash, or just accept fate and fade, leaving space for the next? Some combination of the two? There are limits to hitting one’s head against the wall, but sometimes that wall does break down and there is more space to run. No pain, no gain.

The fact is, each of us has to make those decisions constantly, even if it’s to keep doing what we are doing. The future is not determined, because the act of determination can only occur as the present. Potential>actual>residual.

Occasionally events can seem too coincidentally fated to be random, but consider the energies, pushing and pulling, attracting and repulsing, on levels far beyond our imagination. Evidently conscious energies included.

Life is like a sentence. The end is punctuation. What matters is how well we tie the rest of the story together.

The price we pay to feel, is that a lot of it is pain.

Without the ups and downs, it’s a flatline.

Each of us lives in our own little bubble of awareness, trying to make sense of all the input and sort it out. When we begin to wrap our minds around nature and biology as constantly bubbling sentience, with the effect of material reality as residue of the process, like gunk in an eye, the fear and greed fades in importance.

We carry these little wireless devices around, that are quite recently developed. Is it possible that our own senses, which have been evolving for billions of years, have subtle wireless connectivity, that is obscured by our current cultural structures and assumptions? That those mirror neurons do more than just reflect the energies of those around us, but truly make us one with them. Life is the vibes, not the boxes.

One is the node. Oneness is the network. Entanglement is resonance.

Within the last couple of generations the amount of manufactured and processed information, relative to the more organic sensory experiences, has gotten vastly out of proportion to our abilities to effectively and healthily absorb and understand it. That usual feedback between nature and nurture is being overwhelmed in ways that are not sustainable. We are heading for a cultural breakdown even more profound than the economic and political ones that seem to be looming. We are blinded by the gunk.

There is a void developing at the center of Western civilization, as the bottom line dissolves all above it. All the politically enforced wokery is just a shimmering bubble over the rising gases, like some camp horror satire. Zombie Clowns in Drag.

When it’s all foam and bubbles, the wave has crested.

What will prove to be scab and what will remain as healing wound?

The people who will best adapt will be those most able to accept and adapt to the situations they find themselves in, while maintaining their own balance, not those conditioned to think it should be something different. Often those differences they are being conditioned to desire are some political or marketing ploy to make them pawns in someone else’s game. Ask the Ukrainians what it’s like to buy into a song and dance routine that preys on your prior grievances and desires.

Or adolescents told they can chose their sex. They will end up as part of the attrition rate. The bottom line of biology is that some is seed, the rest is fertilizer.

When you are running with the herd, you can’t even stop to scratch your ear, but as a little creature in the forest, every sound can have significance. Safety in situational awareness, not just numbers.

Life is a dance, not a race.

The possibility of building a functional society will have to be a bottom up process, where the one size fits all models remain as basic tools, not as the particular organisms rising from them. Much like the human species is our basic model, evolved to the surface of this planet, but the various individuals and social contracts evolve according to conditions. Some more stable, healthy and long lasting than others, but all trial and error. Fluctuations and feedback resonating between synchronization and harmonization. Foundations and fringes. Nature and nurture.

Which is not to say there is no need for top down structure and authority, much as the mind focuses the body, as it focuses the abilities of the group on some larger goal, overriding the networking effects that will detract from it. The issue then is that larger goal and is it necessary and valid for the health and survival of the social organism and its environmental basis, or is it a parasitic function, or addictive feedback loop, channeling the energies in ways that are detrimental to overall health. Which gets back into appreciating the power of feedback at work. The groove becomes a rut, when the bureaucracy becomes its own center of gravity. Or the military has to keep creating enemies. Or the banks become some enormous “vampire squid.”

Having lots of people working on a situation doesn’t necessarily create an objective mindset, even in the sciences. Invariably the initial assumptions are more established than the goals being sought, or there would be no problems to solve in the first place. Consequently they tend to become the reference point for the groupthink, which naturally selects for conformity and cooperation over broad questioning. Then, “Shut up and calculate” devolves into, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

So it is necessary to have multiples of such organizations and groups, as social organs and organisms, to balance each other out in the larger network and ecosystem. “Multipolarity” works within larger structures, as well as between them.

While this is more than most people will be willing to wrap their minds around, the one point to emphasize, discuss and develop, is that our current economic system can’t recognize the difference between a medium and a store. Which goes to the source of most of our social pathologies. Consider the rest as supporting argument.

It might take a few years, or even decades for this to sink in, but the reality is already here and the longer we put off understanding why, the bigger the mess will be.

The future tends to be a continuation of the past, until it becomes a reaction to it.

Basically it’s all part of the larger learning curve.

We are at the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.

Not that it will be easy. “Go forth and multiply” has reached the edge of the global petri dish and those couple billion years worth of stored sunlight, aka, fossil fuels, have been seriously tapped. That horse has been ridden into the ground and it isn’t getting up again. The next one will be much tougher to break.

It will be more of a backpack world, than a pickup truck world, but that gym membership won’t be necessary. It will be more durability and flexibility, than complexity and specialization. The simple can be more sublime than the complex.

The current powers that be seem determined to hang onto the bitter end, but the feedback is increasingly negative. Shooting, bombing, sanctioning and cancelling anyone who won’t acquiesce to their temper tantrums is not a viable long term strategy, as the situation in Ukraine increasingly shows.

The mother of all reality checks is in the mail.