Archive for the ‘ Sociology ’ Category

We Cannot Be Good to Ourselves

I had an unusual night last night. All kinds of things were mixing it up in my mind and body. First there was Adrianne Ross’s Dharma talk, which I wrote about on Dharma Seed. I had also finished listening to A Visit From the Goon Squad. Neither one knows what is really going on – and doesn’t want to know.

In a dream I had last night, I was in a large construction tunnel with two huge movable projects underway – both starting from opposite ends of the tunnel and meeting head-on in the middle. I was part of a small group of humans watching them meet. I was even given a video camera to record what was going on. If the dream had lasted longer, I would have seen these two projects destroying each other – with no one at ground level aware that anything was going on at all.

The Goon Squad says a lot – but says it subtly – and from all kinds of directions. In the last analysis, it comes to the same conclusion – but sugar-coats it. We think we are wonderful – do we ever! – but we are not.

I was terrifically impressed with Ms. Ross. This gal has been everywhere and done everything. But she hasn’t seen the big picture at all. I remember Spirit Rock (the finest meditation center in the world) once had a retreat that was supposed to solve this. They put all the top meditators in the world together in an a intensive situation that would guarantee great results – they thought. They even did some advance publicity about this.

When no such thing happened, they said nothing. They were telling the truth (they had no grand answer to the world’s problems) – but not the whole truth (that the world (the human world) was destroying itself). When it came to this, they were as ignorant as everyone else.

Our intellectuals cannot see this either. I am reading Foucault, for example, and was tempted to write about his ideas on normalization - one of the techniques of control that our society uses – without being aware of it. In our schools it is called grading on the curve. Everyone’s progress is compared to all the other students in the class. The teacher (who knows perfectly well what needs to be learned, and whether or not the student has learned it) is pushed out of the picture.

Applied to society as a whole – it means society has no way of detecting its overall trends – since everything is referenced to itself.

One of these trends is what I am writing about – society has become hostile to people. Something that could be easily detected if it referenced its gut feelings. Exactly what meditation is supposed to do. But meditators have the same unconscious instructions as everyone else – and do not do this. And society suffers from all kinds of problems as a result – including self-destruction on every scale.

Amazing!

2013
04/30
CATEGORY
Meditation
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Normal Human Development Does Not Produce a Standard Product

In fact this is true of any living organism. Every plant is different – while at the same time typical of its species.

Our emphasis on products makes us look at them as what the can be reduced to – for example, a tree can be reduced to lumber. This is completely foreign to the way uncivilized people looked at the world – or artists of any kind looked at it.

This attitude is now considered treasonous because everyone must be the same and see the same. We have developed a standard development that produces standard people. And we consider this a huge improvement – when it is just the opposite.

This problem is not the problem of the individual versus his society – but the problem of both as effected by the drive towards standardization.

I can see the huge advantages of this. Having a standardized automobile allows anyone to drive any car easily. Having a standardized computer user interface allows any computer-literate person to operate any computer.

But I can also see we have taken this too far. We have concentrated on our interfaces so much we have forgotten what is behind them – us.

And we have not only forgotten us – we have destroyed us.

2013
04/29
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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A Grim Life

I marvel when I look back on my working life – how grim it was. It was focused on two things – making money and spending money! That was a grim existence.

But we were absolutely convinced that was the only proper life. Destroying the world by making money off of it. Any other kind of life was unthinkable.

Not that we did much thinking. We lived by our instincts alone – and they were all about money, in one form or another. Living for any other reason was treasonous – and was punished by a fate worse then death – being unemployed and unemployable. Which meant not being able to live at all.

Having been in that condition – and recovering from it – has been the story of my life. I am very much a person of the 21st Century – marveling at my life I led (if I could call it that) in the 20th Century. It was as weird as any life could possibly be – but to us it seemed perfectly normal.

Here I have to make my usual disclaimer – and remark on the huge difference between conscious and unconscious behavior. This, it seems to me, is the one thing we need to get clearer on. We went through a big change when we went from Modern life to Post-modern life – a change that happened sometime between the mid-19th Century and the mid-20th Century – marked by WWI and WWII.

We become a different kind of people – a kind we did not like – so we moved these people into our unconscious – individual and collective. Where they could operate autonomously – allowing our conscious selves to claim themselves innocent of their horrible behavior.

Any recovery (if there is any) will have to acknowledge this very basic fact. The fact that we have become liars on a vast scale – and have become unable to notice this.

We even have a technology that allows us to embody this – we have become our computers – a complex of hardware, software – and the Internet and the Wireless networks. And the industry that serves them – which I was in for 20 years. We have insisted that they take over our lives. Just as we had insisted that our cars take over our lives.

We have insisted on being helpless. A grim life indeed.

2013
04/26
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Morality
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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People Who Are Not Interested in People

We marvel endlessly about all the marvelous new things in our world – they get all kinds of attention. But we do not marvel at something much more amazing –  the people in our world who are not interested in people at all.

But who deny this most emphatically. To their minds, they are very interested in people – but in a different kind people – the kind of people they feel they have evolved into  - Nietzsche’s übermensch brought up-to-date technologically. The way they see it, they are part of a super-race endowed with supernatural abilities. And they hate people with ordinary abilities.

In fact, they have no such super-abilities – only the illusion that they have them. But in their world that is all they need – other people who agree with them completely. And who are all involved in the grand project of their times – making a world that does not work.

In practical terms, this means they are terrible parents – not interested in their children at all. Especially when they become adolescents – and try to become their own persons. In their world one must remain helpless forever.

This brings up a subject I keep harping on – the identity of opposites in the human mind. These people who are completely helpless feel they are all-powerful. Since they are pure nobodies they feel they are godlike.

Those of us not like that, can only marvel at them – and carefully stay out of their way.

2013
04/21
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Mass Communications

First there was writing – which made possible control at a distance – and thereby empires of all sizes. Then there was the printing press that made the same thing possible – but on a much grander scale. Communication (of nearly everything) was greatly enhanced. But time and space were not altered. Print still had to travel physically.

Electricity changed all that. The telegraph and telephone could carry information anywhere instantly. And radio did not even need any physical carriers – but could broadcast through space itself! This was the breakthrough that caused a breakdown of the Modern world in the 19th Century.

Movies, radio, and television in the 20th Century made mass communications possible – where a small group of people could control the behavior of much larger groups – which made totalitarianism possible.

Then came the computer that made this communication two-way. People could influence their mass communications as much as it influenced them. This was a big improvement – but, at the same time, it created a new problem. Information of all kinds could circulate rapidly – and become powerful (and thereby creditable) rapidly. People had no way of filtering all this information – and soon gave up trying.

The Information Economy (as it was soon called) became inherently unstable – the curse of all overdeveloped societies.

2013
04/18
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Confusing Hate With Love

This is a continuation of my key insight that the human mind considers opposites to be the same thing – the problem of the identity of opposites.

In my family we confused hate with love – and only recently have I discovered that this confusion still exists in my mind – and in my behavior. You cannot imagine how destructive this is for me – and everyone else in my life.

As more and more of our functioning becomes unconscious – this confusion becomes more and more of a problem – because this kind of reasoning occurs in our unconscious mind – without our knowing about it – because this is what the unconscious is for.

It takes a fully-awake mind to make solid moral judgments – and to see the world clearly. But more and more we prefer illusions to reality – because they provide instant gratification.

Developing a trained mind takes time – and strong social support . Something the classical world had – at least for some of its upper classes at one time – but then lost. This was one of the goals of the Enlightenment – but we have lost that too.

The conflict between our emotional mind and our thinking mind is perhaps the most serious one we have. It requires a careful balancing act – a skill we have lost – and don’t want back.

Our society has a perverted moral code – because we confuse opposites with each other. And one other thing – we confuse our things with ourselves. In other words – because we are completely confused. We confuse intelligence with stupidity – for example.

But more importantly – we confuse being confused with mental clarity. And feel we are as smart as we can be.

Let me run that by you again. In our highly developed condition (highly developed technologically) we have flipped into a being socially and mentally undeveloped. The exact opposite.

This is hardly a new observation – it is as old as the hills. Except for the technological part of the complex (where everything affects everything else) which, as far as I know, has been overlooked.

2013
04/15
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work?

TED

This was a presentation made at TED Rio de la Plata - on the border between Argentina and Uruguay – both Spanish-speaking countries.

The audience were young professionals who were fluent in English – and who had probably worked in the States at various times – as the presenter had.

This was interesting to me because I live in Central America, in Costa Rica – which is not part of the Informational Economy – which consists of, most importantly, knowledgeable people.

I just talked to a young acquaintance, who is completely bilingual, and who is going to college, and studying programming – among other things. I was shocked to discover that he knew next to nothing about what was going on in the Computer world!

I get much of what I get on the Internet – from Aerocasillas – who flies what I get delivered in Miami – to the nearest large town, where I pick it up every week. Their web site is excellent – so they must have some good software engineers working on it. Probably somewhere in the States.

But only a small minority of Gringos and Ticos use it. The rest think it is too different.

And while I am at it – I might as well mention that only a small minority of people in the States are computer-knowledgeable.

Here we are in the Computer World – and most can only look at their smart phones – and marvel at them – having no idea how they work – and no desire to know how – or much of anything else.

2013
04/13
CATEGORY
Life in Central America
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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If the World is Not Interested in Them, They are Not Interested in It

This is the basic dynamic that shaped what we call the Post-modern world – it seems to me – although I seem to be the only one who sees this.

I did not come to this conclusion from a study of history – I am hardly qualified to do that. I simply noted what the people in my world (late 20th Century America) were like – and drew my own conclusions. America was the most highly developed country in history – but this development was not interested in people – quite to the contrary. It was interested in the production of products instead.

In the town was born into in 1936, Ft. Madison, Iowa – the west end of town was devoted to the Santa Fe Railroad, which had a large repair depot there for its steam locomotives – and the east end of town, where the Sheaffer Pen Company was. Today there is nothing left of either one. Ft. Madison is now part of the Great American Rust Belt – where most of the world’s goods were once manufactured.

Americans have carefully overlooked this part of their history – and pretend that it was not important. They have forgotten their past – and, as a result, have no present – and don’t want one.

Let me summarize this development again. We became more and more interested in our things (our manufactured products) and less and less interested in ourselves – and our children. As one of those children – I fiercely resented this – and I am sure many other children did too. But this resentment was simply shoved – along with much else – into our unconscious. Where it determined how we behaved.

These people – latter dubbed The Great Generation – did very well in WWII – after failing completely in the Great Depression. They emerged the most powerful country in history. And this promptly went to their heads. Instead of building the Great Society - they set about destroying it! Because – as I keep saying over and over – this society did not want them – as people. But only wanted them as building blocks for their industrial economy.

I am not saying anything new here. What I am saying has been said so many times it has become tiresome. All I am doing is putting it in context – its own social context.

There is nothing complicated about this analysis. It depends entirely on the functioning of the unconscious. Which people usually recognize – in a formal way, but deny in practice. Because that would involve acknowledging some very unpleasant parts of themselves – that they would rather ignore.

The overall result is that people (especially the young) have ceased to function. But due to an inversion of values – they interpret this as being perfect!

2013
04/13
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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The Loss of Human Potential

This is hard a hard problem to write about – for the simple reason that we have decided it doesn’t exist. We have lost interest in ourselves – and in our all-important thinking and feeling abilities.

We have decided we are only good for doing other things – and not for being our precious selves. A recent issue of Scientific American, for example, concentrated on proving that the self was an illusion – implying that it was not important.

Self-development, it seems to me – is all-important. And we should be making it our first priority. But the very idea makes us nervous – because, we think something else (the economy, perhaps) is more important.

What we do not say (but do believe) is that human beings have become unsatisfactory – compared to other things. Things we cannot specify, but we feel strongly to be better than us.

This is a disastrous state of affairs – the worst possible – but a situation we have carefully overlooked.

This has resulted in a cumulative negative feedback situation. People have made a society less and less interested in people – and society has made people less and less interested in themselves.

And we consider this a vast improvement – when it is a total disaster.

2013
04/08
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Agile Software Development Methods Can be Applied more Widely

I have been saying – and saying over and over – that expertise in technology cannot be expanded to expertise elsewhere – to life in general. But the Agile approach may be an exception to this. Wikipedia (which can also be seen as  using an Agile process) has a good article on this. 

But the best place to get a feel for this is to poke around the many AWS (Amazon Web Services) related sites - such as the ones here. 

Right away I can hear the whining “But that is too much work!” Which, in my opinion, is nothing but people saying “The only right way to be is to know nothing at all!” Or to keep tightly-focused, and not look at the Big Picture at all.

To me, you got to be like a hound-dog – following a scent wherever it goes. No matter how much work it takes. Since when has anything worthwhile been easy?

One obvious way Agile has to be expanded is to turn the customer (in the business world) into everyone. To use it for social engineering.

Perhaps I can use my nose for sniffing out real progress (as opposed to all the fake stuff). I have certainly been down enough dead-ends  - maybe this scent-trail will go somewhere.

We did have the idea, at one time, that the world could be improved – and we should be doing that.

And it’s time we started doing that again.

2013
04/05
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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