Jon Stewart: America's Most Trusted Reporter?

The Opposite of Pascal's Opinion:

Jon Stewart's comedy represents a sane, critical perspective on the ideological machinery of modern "news entertainment," -- and a voice against Right-Wing hysteria.

Study my actual opinion at:
...but NOT the Jaguar!

An Open Letter on Visual Culture

Here's is what I do NOT believe:

Human culture is becoming less verbal and more visual.

To read my actual opinion...

An Open Letter on The Politics of Serfdom

The Opposite of Pascal's Opinion:

The term "redneck" is inappropriate to describe Right Wing political interests -- since these are simply the rational assertion of the self-interest of free citizens. This is a sincere modern political stance which reflects an authentic religious disposition and a deep concern for the prosperity and security of the Nation. As in the example of the American Republican party these individuals stand up for the rights of "the little guy" against the manipulations of the Powerful.

There are no such things as "green-necks" since, by definition, those people who put the interests of planetary ecology, organic farming and local community values are progressive Liberal thinkers.

For my actual opinion visit Culturopathy's Echo

The Sound of One Hand Clapping (tm)

1.What is most critical to the overall progressive momentum of the human species -- sealing the catastrophic ruptures afflicting the most challenged areas of the world, OR causing the leading edge of humanity to go even farther forward?

Obviously it’s not an exclusively either/or type of situation, but, perversely, perhaps the best course of action would be to let the ‘failing states’ burn themselves out, and rebuild from the ashes. Intellectually this seems acceptable, but emotionally, morally, and aesthetically it is almost too horrible to contemplate. It takes far more energy and commitment to build something up than to destroy it, so in the long run, over the next 20 years, it will be critical to establish fully functioning, robust networks that can absorb the impact of destabilizing forces in the world. A visionary model, as lived through extrordinary individuals will be vitally important to the continuation of civilization. What is the nature of these individuals? They are information synthesizers and meta-distributers- in the parlance of P2P networks, they are the global ‘seeders’, cross-disciplinary loci of awareness, processing, communication, and action.

2.What sort of world will exist in 50 years if both the most liberating and regressive trends of today are carried forward together?

This is difficult to acertain, since so many unforseen factors can tip the balance in favour of one side or the other. I think an analogy to the early universe would be apt: we will see cooling and condensing ‘clumps’ of coherent intelligence emerge from the hot chaotic global state. Small groups of highly technologically sophisticated people will essentially ‘recolonize’ the wastelands left by the die-off of the regressives. This to my mind is the most likely scenario, and follows the same kind of development patterns seen after any historical mass extinction event. We just have to make sure that we are decentralized and portable enough to withstand the accelerating social breakdown.

3.What type of inner practice for individuals is most likely to steer their being in the direction of effective socio-political and ecological action?

If we are speaking of so-called ‘regualr’ folks, the best course of action i could suggest would be to undego a crash-course of self education via the internet. There is an astounding quantity of high quality freely accessible information out there, such that a moderately intelligent and open individual could have a solid foundation with about a years worth of intesive study. Once the knowledge base is in place, the next step is application of that knowledge through technological liberation, ie. the creation of genuinely sustainble systems of living, such as permaculture food production, micro-scale renewable energy harvesting, and ecological manufacturing via design-on-demand, digital fabrication, and good ol’ fashioned recycling and reappropriation. Then its a simple matter of spreading this knowledge/application through networking with other individuals, building up larger and larger sustainable structures.

4. Which 3 technologies, about to emerge, have the greatest potential to disrupt even our best anticipations and estimates of the overall situation?

I think those i covered in the last question are the biggest ones, but rapidly emerging fields like nanotechnology and open-source biology are going to be big. I think the dark horse in the race will be some form of strong AI in the next two decades, which will radically accelerate our design capabilities as well as information management. Human-machine interfacing is a logical outgrowth of nanotech coupled with strong AI, but it remains to be seen if this will be truly viable. A good book on the subject is Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. Also, this shows some more intriguing fields of developemt.

5. Which saints, heroes, visionaries or events are among the most applicable symbols for the needs of any current transformative movement?

There are almost too many to count! And i think this is fundamentally the strength of this movement, that it doesn’t have any real leaders, but is a confederacy of equals, all working, all contributing. It is a systems approach that sees everything as inexorably linked together into a non-linear web of causality. For me the greatest sign is that this movement has already become so decentralized that no one person or organization can claim to speak on behalf of its goals and concerns. Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest details this phenomena, and i would direct anyone who is interested in these sorts of things to check it out for a fuller exploration of this process.

5 MORE FINGERS BUT NO FIST

1.What is most critical to the overall progressive momentum of the human species -- sealing the catastrophic ruptures afflicting the most challenged areas of the world, OR causing the leading edge of humanity to go even farther forward?

2.What sort of world will exist in 50 years if both the most liberating and regressive trends of today are carried forward together?

3.What type of inner practice for individuals is most likely to steer their being in the direction of effective socio-political and ecological action?

4. Which 3 technologies, about to emerge, have the greatest potential to disrupt even our best anticipations and estimates of the overall situation?

5. Which saints, heroes, visionaries or events are among the most applicable symbols for the needs of any current transformative movement?

An Open Letter in reponse to "CLARIFICATIONS"

Thank you for the "Clarifications" proposal -- I had a hunch that incrementally increasing the amount of disagreement in my posts might stimulate greater interactivity & self-definition within the blog.

#1) Do you believe we are headed for an ecological collapse?

I believe that we must act as if we are headed for a ecological collapse. Our science contains many ideological blindspots and still-primitive failures but this should not dampen our spirits. The true extent, nature & human leverage over the current biospheric situation is either catastrophic or irrelevant. We cannot say either with certainty but this voice, this Other voice speaks in our hearts, demanding that we move with urgency. And so we must.

#2) What is the correct form for human social structures?

This is too broad a question... and "correct" waits upon thorough testing. However, here is what my heart speaks -- trans-democracy, trans-capitalism, culture-religion, decentralized globalism, ecological ethics, permeable organic castes.

Politics must absorb, improve and willingly pass beyond current quasi-democratic regimes. Economics must produce a maximally safe and vigorous socialist-capitalism which must produce two rivals -- a flourishing, ethical market economy & a vast "free economy" of equivalent strength. Culture must reawaken to its function as religion. Planetary governance is balanced by technologically enabled decentralization of decision making -- at least into custodial cultural-ecology zones as suggested by the Dalai Lama for the Greater Tibetan Region. The biosphere, and the abstract mathematics of "naturalness" must become the ethical demand placed upon social action & flexible, developmentally-ranked organic castes/classes perform specialized functions incl. governance, technological development, military-policing, priesthood-coaching, ecological enforcement, etc.

#3) Can you describe the role of politics/government in the next 10-20 years?

Governments must begin to become both more activist & less controlling. National governments have to begin by shifting tone, up-taking the best available data, and pushing through as many regulatory modifications as possible. Nations must be streamlined, improved in health & intelligence and re-produced as capable of making the necessary changes. International good-will and crisis-response need to prompt potent international regulatory bodies that are empowered to act against violations. Financial regulation, ecological retooling & large-scale international military intervention are their obvious world-historical tasks. They must "starve and steer" the most self-destructive regimes while training their populations to become capable of addressing planetary-scale situations. This will necessarily involve an increase of seriousness and good cheer, transparency & pragmatism, flexible openness & an increasing planetary-imperial aesthetic.

#4) What is the best method of attaining reliable information?

Our knowledge of this subject must improve greatly in the years to come. For now, at the individual level, we must look to, and combine, the opinions of the experienced & the broadly minded -- placing special importance upon the conclusions of minds who integrate vast numbers of positions into coherence and also minds which produce unexpected positions. Logical thought and popular data must be combined with intuitive and physiological knowledge.

Interpersonally we can best rely upon the conclusions that are averaged results of voting-estimates, produced as a gradient marker in response to a specific query, by a maximally formally diverse and permeable set of participants who prove minimum acceptable coherence of communication and knowledge of the subject matter and who are able to process information and articulate their position anonymously and free from consensus or organized persuasion. And, increasingly, the services of mass-coordinating intelligence software operating at ultra-high speed to detect linear and non-linear patterns among humanly incomprehensible algorithms and data sets.

#5) What specific changes are needed, and how many will make them?

The list is vast. Here are just a few: implementation of simple, general, re-takeable entrance exams for democratic elections; mandatory application of multiple-intelligence testing in schools, government and businesses -- intellect, emotional intelligence, ethics, aesthetics, etc. -- and this information freely available online; mandatory meditative or contemplative practice in schools; removal of the security council veto from the United Nations; active inter-penetration of global military forces; decriminalization of drug use and partial decriminalization of drug sales. Drastic increase in investment for alternative and very alternative energy sources & water purification systems. Large scale public works programs laying down new electrical and transportation infrastructures in all nations. Widespread promotion of free video streaming for all materials. Municipal de-automobilization wherever possible. Proliferation of new and more tenacious recycling plants. Medical pathologization of problematic emotional conditions. Creation of an international eco-navy, or else the support of existing models such as "rainbow warrior." De-urbanization by all those who can manage it.

Who will undertake these and other tasks? As many as are emotionally impressed by the weight of planetary duty, or else who trust in the instincts of such people. This is a highly flexible percentage of the population, dependent upon the credibility, creative energy, urgency AND optimism of seers.

I will shortly post five alternate questions in order to elicit your articulate responses.

CLARIFICATIONS

I have the feeling that we may be getting into rather unproductive territory here, so i'd like to make the following proposal: we each ask and give short answers to a series of five questions designed to act as a kind of 'summing up' of our particular viewpoint.
I'll go first.

#1) Do you believe we are headed for an ecological collapse?

#2) What is the correct form for human social structures?

#3) Can you describe the role of politics/government in the next 10-20 years?

#4) What is the best method of attaining reliable information?

#5) What specific changes are needed, and how many will make them?

If you want, i can answer the same questions, or if you have alternates i'd be happy to tackle those.

A RESPONSE TO PASCAL

Optimism, like trust, has to be earned. It is not given, either philosophically or socially, that this is the position we should automatically take. The strains of this kind of ‘New Romanticism’ you are postulating will crash headlong into the hard realities before too long, in which case the ephemera of ideas will blow away like a mist, leaving only the observable certainties to be dealt with.
All this equivocation is, frankly, dangerous, in that it gives a false sense of our own capabilities. We are not nearly as clever as we think we are, and to pretend otherwise only confuses the situation.
Optimism is not simply the opposite of cynicism, it is a negation of reality. Hope is intangible, and generally useless- an empty void onto which we project our aspirations and desires.
A genuine knowing, one capable of producing change, attaches no conditions to itself, does not deign to define or label itself in any particular way. This is why IT reamins always untouchable, out of sight, incapable of being coerced into defending some particular position relative to our considerations.
In other words, neither up nor down.

You write, “Growth does not behave like a "cancer." A cancer is a regressive local establishment of patterning control which sequesters the body's resources in order to replicate itself in a manner that does not proceed toward the general Good.”
But this is exactly what our current models of economic growth demonstrate, which is why the problems that confront us exist in the first place. Of course growth is not an absolute, i never suggested as much, but to deny the obvious empirical patterns betrays a gross lack of familiarity with the situation at hand. Economic growth, as is practiced in all western countries, is based on maximizing profits through the externalization of the true social and environmental costs. It is therefore a model that is inherently anti-growth in the sense you propose.

“Conversely, social growth is the measure of our capacity to reorganize ourselves fluidly in the direction of spontaneously patterned coherence.”
This spontaneously patterned coherence is in every situation aborted by the machinery of our current structures. This is precisely what i have been arguing all along! We are actively being prevented from reaching our potential.
Organic growth and all of the positive attributes comensurate with it are being threatened by this industrial cancer.

"All life is a continuous reorganization of elements through consumption and redistribution controlled by the interplay of the communal structures. More life and better life consists of an increase of the potency of this capacity -- primarily at the social level. Improvements of quality depend upon improvements in the ability to handle quantity.”
And yet this is the very process which is in danger of falling apart. Coherence can only be maintained up to a certain threshold before instabilities set in which overwhelm the balance of positive forces. In a system where nothing any longer functions on a basic level, nascent social development structures are effectively destroyed. The process you speak of can only flourish in a stable evironment- the very thing which is now in question.
The earth is not a linear system. There are feedback loops in effect whose thresholds cannot be accurately determined, yet the overall trends, that is to say their directionality, are no longer open to debate. This has nothing to do with mere climate models or theoretical speculation, this is based on the observable data, and their conclusions are clear: our entire planetary system is entering a period of catastrophich decline, generated by human indistrial activity.

“The Right Wing correctly points out that we cannot be sure, that the mere fact of MASS CONSENSUS is not proof. Yet the Right Wing does not yet realize that the proposed changes are necessary anyway. To hell with climate change!”
Except that we ARE sure, for the reasons given above. Those who are aware must follow the imperatives of that awareness, and plan for a different kind of future. But let us not delude ourselves, or be mistaken as to what will almost certainly happen, which is the mass die-off of at least half the global population, if not more. At our present course, socially, politically, economically, industrially, this is the guaranteed outcome. A simple case of effect following cause.

Overall we are not at odds, you and i apporach the same ‘thing’ from two different positions- yours from an already realized future, mine from the all-too uncertain present. You see what MUST happen, and embody it, i see what IS happening and prepare for it.
Ultimately it is not a matter of who is right or wrong, but instead a matter of achieving the force necessary to join these two potentialities together.

THE MYTH OF DARK AGES

Planetary crisis is the only message we can hear. Our dumb animal nature responds to the popular warning cry -- taking up the call and passing it on. Stressing to our neighbors how "urgent" this matter really is...

Is it urgent? Yes -- but not for the popular reasons. It is critical for the formation of tomorrow's world that we human beings assume our appointed place as mass-scale ecological custodians. This is part of the eco-ethical, neo-Imperial planetary ethos which is everywhere being manufactured. This is the demand placed upon our hearts and mind AS IF the Biosphere herself were infiltrating culture & calling us to our world-historical Task.

But is this global warming? And are we the cause? And what can we do to reverse its effects? Or should we call it "climate change" since it could reverse itself unexpectedly and bring on the ice? Are our computer climate models correct? We simply don't know. Are we inputting the right variables? Again -- we have only our current guesses. While it is true that the "folk" do not take seriously many important factors, it is also true that the scientific "folk" equally ignore all those elements which they have not trained themselves to take seriously. The pulsating crystalline heart of the Earth? The interface between the magnetosphere and solar plasma fields? The relationship between bio-electricities and atmospheric chemicals? Who knows! Yet the "people" of science do not feel obligated to study the problem with all their options on the table. Aren't these the same pinheads who swallowed the Big Bang ideology without complaint?

It is important what they are saying? Or is it far more significant that they have achieved their greatest creative consensus ever? This is without a doubt the most potent scientific "WE" that planet Earth has ever seen?

The Right Wing correctly points out that we cannot sure, that the mere fact of MASS CONSENSUS is not proof. Yet the Right Wing does not yet realize that the proposed changes are necessary anyway. To hell with climate change!

I don't want to breath car exhaust in my cities.
I don't want smoggy sunsets, or to eat mutant toxic fruit or have children born with missing limbs.
I DO WANT the biosphere to function at full power with optimal regenerative coherence.

Why do I want this? She, herself, in me, wants this.

As we have webbed ourselves together electronically this imploring cry has become louder, clearer -- stronger. This is an historical fact of greater certainty than our climate models.

Those who are not yet adult enough to deal with the real situation, fraught with uncertainties, are not exempted from their world-historical duty. If they will not follow the carrot then they must race against the stick -- and so the lethargic multitudes come slowly to this idea that there is a SURVIVAL EMERGENCY. After all, they lack the energy to be motivated by anything else.

And: fine.

The closed heart, sealed in its enclosure of "human individuality," MUST be cracked open, must learn that "care for Earth" is the centerpiece of the New Faith, MUST be converted to the aesthetic-ethic of the Biosphere. Such is the demand of eco-ethical neo-Imperial Planetary Humanity which now comes upon at the hands of all parties on all sides of every social debate.

The Right Wing nuts are correct -- but their evaluations are backwards. It is a vast international conspiracy using dubious science -- but we MUST take new and dramatic action with the global biospheric situation as our reference point.

AGAINST: GROWTH DOES NOT EQUAL PROGRESS

Here's why growth is equivalent to progress --

The meaning of socio-economic growth is not an increase in mass since, quite obviously, the mass of available material on Earth is relatively fixed. Development can only mean reorganization of existing elements. Progress implies an improvement in our capacity to reorganize the available components. What can such an improvement mean? An increase in the speed, diversity, fluidity, mutuality, reliability & intelligence of our control systems. This is precisely what the general indicator of "economic growth" symbolizes.

Growth does not behave like a "cancer." A cancer is a regressive local establishment of patterning control which sequesters the body's resources in order to replicate itself in a manner that does not proceed toward the general Good. Conversely, social growth is the measure of our capacity to reorganize ourselves fluidly in the direction of spontaneously patterned coherence.

Nations with greater "growth" have historically been those in which slavery was abolished, women gained legal inclusion, famine & overt tyranny were abolished, diseases are combated, ecology becomes a significant concern and the cultural development of citizens arises as a potent demand. Alternatively, archaic regimes which are concerned with the "sustainability" of their way of life are generally tyrannical, repressive, regressive & lethargic.

The philosopher Karl Marx was well aware that his futuristic Socialist regime was not the contemporary adversary of growth markets but the inevitable outcome of their fulfillment. Of course this fulfillment is identical to the revelation and transcendence of the internal contradictions inherent in the system but it is still also an extension of the system. Only where "unchecked growth" reins have we see a proliferation of citizens who grow sensitive to the failure of unregulated markets, the toxic effects of greed, the need to expand our flow of socio-symbolic power beyond even the boundaries marked by our previous successes.

All life is a continuous reorganization of elements through consumption and redistribution controlled by the interplay of the communal structures. More life and better life consists of an increase of the potency of this capacity -- primarily at the social level. Improvements of quality depend upon improvements in the ability to handle quantity.

The very concept of an abundance economy signifies an increase of symbolic "mass" in which the old inequalities are abolished. Tomorrow even the slaves must live as kings -- and the kings must extend their desires to the point at which an even greater abundance emerges past the threshold of instability.

Sustainability is a foreign concept in all non-growth societies. It does not represent an alternative to growth but rather an outcome -- an operation of growth to the point that abundance becomes widely distributed. If this sounds like "top-down" trickle economics that is only because people fail to acknowledge that all effects, even the most "grassroots" take effect under the guise of top-down modifications.

THE TRUE IDEOLOGY IS MUCH MORE INSIDIOUS

The true mental zeitgeist of our age is an epidemic of cynicism. Today the average citizen is joined with the ideological theorist and the regressive elements in government, joined in a single great supposition: "Governance fails. Business-as-usual is toxic. Leadership is suspect. High hopes are thwarted by the need for approval from the irrational masses. Grand vision is mere propaganda."

It reminds me of the old joke about American Republicans: They believe that Government doesn't work and when they get into office... they prove it.

The worst regimes behave precisely as if they believed what the cynics and radicals proclaim -- the system does not and cannot function. It should not function! This viewpoint is a demand. This pervasive Operating System is complicit in the Great Crime. It normalizes the attitude which itself imprisons the change potential within our social mechanisms.

A leader stands before a great crisis, shrugs his shoulders, saying "What can I do? The people will not let me do anything! They system will not let me do anything!" This is the complaint of the progressive and of the cynic. This is the claim with which the fascist seizes control, the excuse offered by the monolithic state. It is the obscene chuckle shared by the regressive members of parliament. They all believe it.

It is the 'bad self esteem' of society. Though it thinks itself pragmatic, diagnostic, progressive, it accepts and reinforces the idea that the entire body of social functions cannot succeed. Is this not equivalent to a doctor examining a patient and saying, "Your brain "leader" says you want to be healed but I just don't see it happening. It's business as usual throughout the rest of your body -- so the only thing I can recommend is a radical dis-engagement with the structure of your body, setting your cells free to reform into cooperative networks... if they can."

And then the body oozes onto the floor...

GROWTH DOES NOT EQUAL PROGRESS

There was a news story today which perfectly captures the mental zeitgeist that i spoke about earlier, about the all-pervasive political/economic inertia that has infected the modern world.
The story dealt with the (unsurprising) refusal of countries at the G8 meeting to make ANY concrete commitments to drastically reduce carbon emissions.
‘"I know that in the past, the United States has sometimes fallen short of meeting our responsibilities. So let me be clear: Those days are over." Said Obama.
But by the end of the day... leaders of the most developed nations again declined to commit themselves to any specific actions now or in the immediate future to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming -- actions that would require increasing energy prices, raising taxes or imposing other unpopular economic measures on their people.’
Instead they made vague pronouncements about voluntary targets of 50% less carbon dioxide by 2050, far too little and far too late, even with sufficient political will, which was sorely lacking.
This is the epitome of short-sighted political self-interest; ‘leaders’ proving themselves unwilling to undertake any actions which might make them unpopular in the eyes of their ignorant constituents. How profoundly sad it is that we let these individuals of such narrow vision dominate the decision making process.
We have become psychologically locked in a perception that the most important economic measure is growth, and yet the kind of growth pursued by industrialized countries is fundamentally no different than the runaway cellular growth of a malignancy which eventually destroys its host. This is what human beings have become on this planet- a cancer, spreading unchecked.Real progress needs to be measured by a different set of values, ones less concerned with overall GDP and more with basic issues of sustainability and maturity. Of course, this would severely impact the business-as-usual mantra of free-market fanatics and globalization zealots, so nothing gets done, and every single living thing on this earth will have to bear the price of this incredible stupidity.

The Authoritarians

The research work of University of Manitoba's Bob Altemeyer on the nature and structure of Right-Wing Authoritarian personalities is available in an a non-technical, breezily written online PDF book, and is essential viewing/reading for anyone interested in the kinds of extreme personalities that are the dominant voices and actors in the impediment of social progress globally, and what we can do about them.
After all, we cannot fight against an enemy we know nothing about, and as G.I. Joe said, "Knowing is half the battle!".
This work confirms much of what one half consciously suspects when, god forbid, one tries to have a rational discussion with a political or religious 'true believer', but it is all based on rigorous research and so is immune from charges of mere opinionationism.
There is an objectively measurable difference between progressives and retarders, and we must ourselves be clear on this distinction and use it to affect positive change.

THE END OF CIVILIZATION AND THE NEW DARK AGES

Change is slow, particularly the kind of change that is needed if we are to avert global catastrophe. Everywhere inertia reigns- ‘debate’ rages on in the media while the foundations of our prosperous, safe, and healthy way of life begin to crumble away.
We are addicted to our own ignorance and the promise of a quick fix technology that will swoop in to save the day.
By the best estimates from a variety of reality-based sources we have between ten and fifteen years to turn things around. This means a cessation of our entire industrialized economy and infrastructure in favour of low-impact sustainable alternatives. It is not enough to switch to compact flourescent bulbs and recylcle bottles and newsprint- the deadly fiction of unrestrained growth must be purged from our minds and our actions.
The problem is, people are stupid. I don’t say this to imply that they lack intelligence, although a great many of them do, but merely to point out the fact that almost no one is capable of seeing and understanding the incredibly complex sets of interrelationships between actions, organisms, and environment on this planet. This is what i mean by stupidity; we lack the very cognitive capacitites to grasp the whole picture. We constantly see ourselves and our actions in a vacuum, our self-reflective consciousness forming an insultated bubble separating us from the rest of nature.
But human beings are, biologically speaking, no different than rabbits or bacteria. We all operate according to the same fundamental, inviolable rules, despite the political and economic fairytales we tell each other.
And any species which multiplies unrestrained, consumes all its available resources, and pollutes its environment goes extinct. There is no other outcome.
Of course, our technology provides us with a window of opportunity, where we can seemingly pursue our dreams of growth while mitigating the negative consequences. However, this is an illusion, at least in a strict sense. The terrifying reality is that there is no concievable way six billion human beings can live on this planet at anywhere near the level of quality we take for granted.
And so the urgent call for change, real change, goes out. But it is not answered, at least not on anywhere near the level needed to fend off mass collapse. Politicians and pundits argue on endlessly, or throw out legislative sops- foolish and useless compromises meant to give the appearance of proactive action while in reality serving as a cover for the continuation of suicidal business intrests.
We are constantly pacified, told that if we make a few painless lifestyle changes we can do our part for the earth and avoid destruction, but it is all a lie.
There is nothing any one individual can do to prevent catastrophic climate change, indeed, there are many who feel we may already have crossed the threshold of irreversible damage.
All we can do now is to collect together as many likeminded individuals and implement rational strategies for the creation of new societies in those areas of the globe which will be the least physically affected.
Human beings do not respond well to crises. Cut off from support and denied basic resources we turn savage, reverting to a state that expresses the worst aspects of our tribal instincts. This thin veneer of civilization we have built up for ourselves, founded as it is upon ‘cheap and abundant’ energy and a stable environment, peels away as quickly and easily as a sticker on a piece of fruit. To see the most likely future of the american continent one need only look to the most pathological and desperate failed states of africa, and glimpse what is in store for us unless the strictest measures are taken immediately.
Only one thing is certain beyond any doubt: radical change will come. Whether this becomes an opportunity for a new world of justice, abundance, and intelligence, or spells the end of civilization and the start of a new dark ages remains to be seen.
Personally, my feeling is that the weight of rabid nationalism, pannicky apocalyptical fervor, and selfishly ignorant reactionism will overwhelm the capacities of more balanced individuals to deal with these global threats.We must put into motion plans to preserve both the literal and metaphorical seeds of civilization- preparing for the unthinkable, but doing everything we can to stop it.

NEW & COMPLICATED PROSPERITY

>Anyone who has ever toiled in a garden has sooner or later learned that if a weed is not uprooted it will simply grow back again.

Who will decide the weeds from the flowers? Can we ourselves be trusted? The first requirement is for testable tools of evaluation -- better gardeners & better gardening schemes are needed.

>Why does this happen? Is it a lack of intelligence? No, not really.

By "society" we mean a power that is either (1) variably responsible, or (2) utterly irresponsible. To improve or to replace our inherited schemes of social organizations requires that we exceed them in the accuracy of our knowledge of the world's habits and the potency of our ability to compile this information. "Intelligence" is the precondition for "capacity."

>Conversely, a truly free society has little interest in trying to maintain the disequalities that are foundational to the breakdown of order and are the main generators of violence. A free society organizes itself to maximize prosperity for everyone, not just a few at the ‘top’.

Kurt Vonnegut writes in CAT'S CRADLE that the great mistake of America's Founding Fathers was their failure to provide a legal limit upon incomes. The general power of wealth fails as long as its pressure is always drained into deep, narrow wells.

Most likely a flexible "target" level of wealth is desirable, incentivized by our regulatory frameworks. If animal bodies get too hot, or too cold, in any of their parts, they quickly sicken and perish. This wisdom is the heart cybernetic self-regulation but it is everywhere opposed by the oligarchs and their simple-hearted popular supporters.

>The solution then, as i have been advocating throughout these posts, is the restructuring of society along deliberate, radically free, values-based lines.

First we must have agreements upon the categories for the new values. We need to decide the groups, their inter-relations, and then -- how to test them.

>... no sane populace should feel under any obligation to continue to support or validate such an utterly corrupt system.

If we could find an utterly corrupt system this would be the correct course of action. However we find only relatively corrupt systems -- which we must simultaneously oppose in their inefficiency and support in their struggles against less efficient systems. The Perfect and the Not-as-bad will live together or die apart.

FREE! FREE! FREE!

Here is a fantastic book available in audio format that i would encourage everyone to listen to! It goes in depth into a lot of the peripherally expressed issues on this blog regarding the nature of information and its impact in shaping the future, based on the premise that as information as a resource becomes more abundant its becomes freer and freer, both in terms of cost and capabilities.
Well worth checking out.

PROSPERITY FOR ALL EQUALS FREEDOM FOR ALL

Anyone who has ever toiled in a garden has sooner or later learned that if a weed is not uprooted it will simply grow back again to cause further trouble. We live in such a half-blind society that takes an approach to its problems like an ignorant gardener- pruning away unwanted leaves while the roots of the ills that beseige us grow ever stronger and more entrenched.
Why does this happen? Is it a lack of intelligence? No, not really. The clearest answer to this dilemma can be found when we ourselves take pains to examine the actual causes of our social concerns, such as crime, poverty, familial breakdown, etc.
When we do so, we see that the very structure of our society, with its vested intrests and powerfull controlling minority, is the ultimate causal factor.
Why do we have crime in our society? It is because of the way our society is built.
Why is there poverty in our society? Because our society is based on exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.
So clearly, any society that is the cause of its own problems is ill-equipped to provide their solutions.
Conversely, a truly free society has little interest in trying to maintain the disequalities that are foundational to the breakdown of order and are the main generators of violence. A free society organizes itself to maximize prosperity for everyone, not just a few at the ‘top’. Freedom is autophilic- self-loving, and seizes every opportunity to grow and expand its reach. The only way to counter it is through direct opposition, that is, through the establishment of social structures that work constantly to impede it. Thusly we have an educational system that actively resists free inquiry, a legal system that favours wealth and discourages the search for truth, a political system of narrow, static options that claims to represent the wishes of tens of millions of individuals, and an economic system that pursues profit at the expense of life itself.
The solution then, as i have been advocating throughout these posts, is the restructuring of society along deliberate, radically free, vlaues-based lines.
The rational person, seeing that something no longer functions, discards it, rather than expending inordinate amounts of energy and resources propping up the failure. A prime example of this short-sighted self-destructive method is to be found in the response to the economic meltdown (itself the result of a pathological financial system). Instead of taking the opportunity to educate the public and work together to find equitable solutions to help the true victims (complitic though they may have been), ie. consumers, the government instead dumped nearly a trillion dollars into the very institutions whose practices led to the crisis in the first place. This is not intelligence at work- it is fraud, on a massive scale, and no sane populace should feel under any obligation to continue to support or validate such an utterly corrupt system.

A MEDITATION UPON FREE SOCIETY

The natural impulse toward Nationhood is always steering toward a learned definition of "the nation." Today's task is to impress upon hearts the only one viable nation -- the whole human life-world. Supplementary to this task is an encouragement for those temporary fantasies of post-nationalism which describe the hinterland between yesterday's regional-ethinic nations and the Grand Planetary Politics of tomorrow.

Dangerous to nations, as to bodies, is the rogue growth of contracted power-knots whose historical regime is called "oligarchical rule." Often the institution of the divine monarch has been the liberating counter-balance to these knots, weilding the symbolic force of The People against the irresponsible acquistiveness of the private dominators. The liberating use of the Emperor is too often occluded by that undeveloped sentimentality of the masses which ignorantly accords an special status to whomever occupies an elevated platform.

Yet monarchy is a primitive mechanism whose ability to constrain social collapse fails in the case of personal corruption or a traumatized populace. So Constitutional Monarchy, and then the Democracy, were developed to inhibit the regression of the social field. These are eminently praiseworthy but our Democracy suffers still the idiocy of "parliamentary team-sports," "one man, one vote," and several other self-crippling mechanisms which inhibit its efficacy. Our duty today is to drive this movement foward, taking advantage of health, education & relative safety as a stage from which to launch new social networking patterns that MUST operate with greater intelligence, vigor and effectiveness than the systems we have inherited.

Truly, people are not ready to govern themselves -- lacking the will, knowledge and capacity to pursue their own satisfaction -- but this goal must hover above all those who advance new teams & new hierarchies which will feed upon the disunity which once appeared as the enemy of governance, and whose authentic social navigators will discern maps in what was anciently deemed to be a loose chaos of competing cultural activities. We must produce that One Nation that is the best factory for growing Free & Potent Persons, and creating networks that do not renounce governance but... exceed it.

The Consequences of Freedom

What are the consequences of a society oriented towards radical freedom? What becomes of the artificially forged ‘unions’ known as nations?
If we recognize that the nation’s push for unity is a natural outgrowth of what can be termed the homogenization of control, then when this restraint is removed a new form of organization emerges- one given readily to a multitude of loosely interrelating groups. That these groups will be in creative conflict with each other is a given, but it is this very conflict which is necessary for the growth and development of society as a totality.
Unity, in the artificial sense, is a breeding ground for stagnation, and as mentioned above, merely the pretext for a supra-controlling structure to be put in place. This structure has generally been known as the government, and the etymology of the words that it uses to describe itself give us clues as to its nature. The term government originates from the latin gubernare, meaning to steer a ship. Those who govern then, see the people, whether explicitly or implicitly, as needing to be directed and guided by an authority, lest they drift blindly into the rocks and are sunk. Similarily, on examining words such as leader, and politics, we see patterns of meaning which reinforce a very real disequality between those in charge and their ‘charges’. Afterall, to lead is to show the way, which presupposes special knowledge not available to those being led. How they come into posession of this knowledge is never directly revealed, but we can see it as a watered down version of the legitimacy that monarchs claimed for themselves: divine decree. The leader is imbued with this quality of otherworldlyness, claiming an inherent authority which is nonetheless dressed in secular vestements. Politics pertains to the citizenry, who are understood to owe an alegiance to the state in exchange for its protections, and so on and so forth.
It is a language of heirarchy, nothing more. A free society, when considered in the light of what genuine freedom entails, proceeds from a point of disunity, and yet this disunity is not equivalent to disorder, or chaos.
A radically free society has no need of unity because it does not involve itself in the business of controlling peoples’ lives. How then is it to function, or go about the task of defending itself against assault?
If we construct for ourselves a system of democracy, in its original formulation as direct citizen decision-making, then we must also accept the consequences of its premise of equality. That being, if all are equal, and none should ever come to hold dominion over others, then we must all bear the responsibility for fulfilling and maintaining this delicate balance of power. We must each of us become the enforcers of our collective security, each of us must become the peace officers commited to holding order and creating the socio-political space where freedom can flourish. We must all become the living embodiment of the law and its application in our dealings with one another.When there are no ‘authorities’ then there remains only the authority of life as lived by those who are aware of themselves.

THE GERM OF VIOLENCE

Social Engineering.

Exhibit A:

Fresh from fighting TB and AIDS in Africa, Gary Slutkin returned to his hometown of Chicago to discover epidemic levels of violence. Why not combat this social ill with the tools and tactics usually deployed against viral evils?

With strong confirming studies from several universities and now the U.S. Dept. of Justice the CEASEFIRE (video) program is poised to move from a few Chicago suburbs to a much grander scale. Or at least we hope so -- both for its immediately benevolent effects and its illustrative power as an example of progressive social engineering enabled by hybridized genres of research.

The formal presentation of destructive social behavior provides numerous strong correlations to the problems of disease control -- similar graphs of transmission, similiar public response and the same kind of philosophical resistance which plagued our attempts to deal with... well, the plague.

In Defense of Social Engineering

In a previous post i stressed the need for us to uncover and apply the ‘rules’ for a functional society- rules based not upon tradition or emotion, but grounded in high-quality and correct information.
As an example i mentioned the field of engineering, based as it is upon mathematically rigorous physical laws, as a good model to follow.
Now obviously there is no direct equivalent between the unambiguousness of a discipline like classical physics, which leaves little room for personal opinion, and the much ‘messier’ realm of the social sciences- however, recent research in fields such as biopsychology and cognitive physiology are providing us with new understandings of the complex behaviours and actions of human beings. It is not unresonable to suppose that within the next few years we will achieve a broad consensus regarding what people need to best function in any given environment.
Perhaps it is time we reappropriated a term which has fallen into deserved repute: social engineering.
Traditionally social engineering conjures up images of the state trying to control or influence what people think and how they act, which historically leads to very undesirable outcomes, but we must also remember that the legitimate purpose of a government should be to implement broadly accepted standards for the benefit of the whole society.
How those standards are arrived at is the very ne plus ultra of areas like law, education, and economics.
For instance, the purpose of the standardized western education is to prepare students for their future roles as productive members of society. It is a model built on 19th century notions of conformity and segregated learning. Every subject is concieved of as separate from the others, built on an accepted foundational corpus that must be mastered through rote memorization and problem exercises. It is a very fragmented, rigid approach to knowledge, which while fine for an heavily industrialized society is wholly inadequate for the realities of contemporary existence.
We now know that all things are interrelated, and that the boundaries between one discipline and the next are largely fictional. We also know now that not everyone learns in the same way, and that various styles of knowledge acquicision are needed. Similarily, the greatest contributions to any field are the direct result of pragmatic problem solving- experimentation, exploration, trial and error- rather than the strict application of static facts and theories.
In short, we need a dynamic revolution in basic education if we are to confront the issues facing our future. The point is that there is a correct way of educating the members of a society, one based on proper research and non-ideologically driven information.
This then is the true and proper meaning of social engineering: discerning the most effective and efficient strategies for achieving our goals, and then implementing them. Of course, we must forst have a clear understanding of what those goals are, so we must engage each other in a dialogue about what we value, and find our agreements therein. In our education example then, it might be argued that the ultimate goal we should be pursuing is not the creation simply of a class of 'workers', but the creation of fully functional adults who are emotionally mature, capable of thinking clearly, and able to search for, collect, and efficiently process new information streams.
It may well be that social engineering will turn into one of the most important tasks of the next twenty years.

On somewhat of a tangent, here is an interesting video from MIT on the subject of engineering for the ecological age. Enjoy!