Posts Tagged ‘ Self-Destructive Society ’

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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Living in a World That is Against It

This is not easy, because the world is in complete denial. It denies, and denies completely – that this is the way it is. It proclaims that, to the contrary, it is the most wonderful place possible! And that anyone who says otherwise should be severely punished.

And its people hear and obey.

But they also hear something else “You must not be!” “No problem,” they say – and don’t exist. And not only that – they attack anyone who does exist. Who is foolish enough to not obey orders.

Now I have to ask myself why this is such a problem now – since non-conformists and free-thinkers have existed for a very long time.

I think (and this is only a guess) that this is because mass communications have made mass behavior part of the atmosphere we live in. Part of the air we breath – and cannot get away from.

Free-thinkers – and America used to have a lot of them in the middle of the 19th Century – used to have a much easier job. Their target was easily defined. And they could easily ridicule it.

Not anymore. How do you say that everything is wrong? You will simply be sent to the looney bin.

People conclude (unconsciously) that they can’t deal with it. And give up. And join the crowd. And become ignorant, stupid – and helpless.

There are plenty of people who say “We have a solution to this!” When they should be admitting, candidly – that there is no overall solution.

There are only solutions for individual problems – and for individual people. A society that is determined to not exist cannot be fixed at all.

Allow me to switch to my favorite example – software development. There have been a number of fine movements there – Open Source, Agile – all aimed at making better software. What they do not realize are the forces opposed to them in the marketplace – which are subtle, ubiquitous – and all-powerful.

All these forces – reform or reactionary – are centered around one thing – being. The reformers are determined to to be – but society is determined that they not be. And no one is aware that this conflict exists.

The whole idea, for them, of being to is too vague and too fuzzy. When it is as simple as it can be.

Any living being has being. But no machine has being – even if seems to be alive to its admirers – and those who serve it.

2013
03/31
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Philosophy
Sociology
Technology
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Self and Society

I am obsessed with the idea of Being, and am convinced a lot more work needs to be done on it. This posting is an attempt to do just that.

I used to subscribe to New Scientist, and still would be, except it costs $234 a year! They keep pestering me to subscribe again – and sent me a notice about their latest issue, which is about the Self. Since I am registered with their site, I can browse each issue – and I promptly took at look at this one.

This issue takes great delight in proving to its readers that the Self is an illusion! To be fair, one of their contributors also says this may be so – but it is still a useful illusion we should not discard. I ordered his book Reality, a Very Short Introduction.

It’s about time someone took the Self in hand and made sense of it. And another closely-related idea – Society.

The being of inanimate objects, a rock for example, is simple – it is simply what it is in itself.  It exists in a larger world, where it is affected by other objects – a person may pick it up the throw at at another. But this does not effect the rock itself. If it is ground up and made part of a road – each little rock is still a rock.

But as soon as life appears, things change drastically. Each individual has its own life-history – and as result, can vary. The mouse in my house quickly learned where the food was – and was a different mouse after that. Over time, mice evolved to be more successful in our company.

But with social animals, things were more complicated. The social behavior of whole species could evolve – and did. Edward O. Wilson describes this for our species in my other posting today The Riddle of the Human Species.

What I want to point out is that for us Self and Society are constructed on-the-fly – and are absolutely essential. In favorable situations they are enhanced – and in unfavorable situations (such as the one we are on now) they are degraded.

In favorable times, a society rises. In unfavorable times it falls. It doesn’t take a genius to see where we are now. What is more difficult to see is our self-destructive society. I have a very hard time seeing this myself. But Reality keeps hitting me over the head – with the behavior of people, such as my family, who seem to rejoice in showing me how nasty they can be.

I might as well come out and say it. We live in Evil Times. And if we are going to survive, we have to recognize this. And strengthen our selves and our society.

2013
02/26
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
The Self
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Our Goal is to Destroy the World

And we can see nothing wrong with that; it seems like a perfectly honorable intention; and it shows how much we have improved over our previous innocent condition – where we thought our job was to make the world (or at least our part of the world) better. It didn’t take us too long (only a couple of centuries) to see how foolish that was – and to mend our ways.

I am taking an online course on the fundamentals of philosophy, and this week was about morality. I found I agree most strongly with the relativistic approach – that moral standards vary from culture to culture.

Nothing, it seems to me, could be more obvious. To take an extreme example – the Nazi extermination of the Jews was entirely moral – from their viewpoint. The rest of the world made a big mistake in not taking their attitude seriously.

Likewise, we are making a big mistake in overlooking our present self-destructive impulses. We feel we are not responsible for them – because we do not recognize them.

2013
02/20
CATEGORY
History
Morality
Negative being
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Why Globalization Cannot Work

Like many other people, I often wonder about human nature. Do we change (as individuals and collectively) – and if we do change, how do we change?

This is not just an abstract question, It is the most practical question there is. And the way we answer it reflects how we answer every other question. It shows how we think – or (more likely) how we avoid thinking.

We have a powerful new tool at our disposal to do this – Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious. Which says simply, that most of our mental processing goes on without our knowing about it. And worse than that – as life becomes more difficult – more and more of our mental processing happens that way. It lets us behave in ways we do not want to acknowledge consciously.

Madison Avenue finds this a god-send. All it has to do is discover what is going on behind the curtain – and manipulate that. Conscious motivations can safely be ignored.

To put this another way, people have often been stupid, but now they are even stupider – because they cannot think. They just react automatically to their unconscious processing.

“Fine,” some people will say, “This only makes our job easier. All we have to do is find out who these people are (the ones who are controlling everyone else) and get rid of the bastards.”

This is indeed a useful strategy, there are plenty of bad guys that should be eliminated. And they are not too hard to find. But the really clever ones have made this very hard to do – they have many friends in high places – and these friends have friends.

But that is not the main problem. We are all locked in a network of interlocking dependencies – where everyone is being manipulated by everyone else at the same time as they are manipulating everyone else. And all this is happening in our collective unconscious.

“So what is new?” You may ask. “Hasn’t this been the human situation forever?” Yes, it has been, but something new has been added – mass communications.

Which has produced globalization – where every society has been mixed up with every other society into a total mess. Once any society become too complicated (or, more accurately, complex) it breaks down. The classical example was the Roman Empire. And this is what is happening now to global society.

It doesn’t work – and cannot work. We are simple people living in a world we cannot understand or control.

2013
02/14
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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The Impulse to Destroy Everything

I keep coming back to this subject. Even though I know it makes me sound like a monomaniac. I does seem to me – that we operate in two fundamental ways – constructively or destructively. We like being creative, building our world and everything in it – but we like being just the opposite also. Destroying our world and everything in it. Beginning with ourselves.

Humans have the amazing ability, that no other species has – of being able to understand what is going on in the world they find themselves in. And understanding it at the most fundamental level. They can intuit whether or not their particular corner of the universe is working or not – and decide whether to help it or hinder it.

This is an incredible skill, but one we have not taken seriously enough. We should, and we should take note of what basic decisions we are making – individually and collectively. Whether we are acting constructively or destructively.

At the present, we are acting destructively – and profoundly so. But we are not aware of this at all – for the simplest of reasons. Our first destructive act was to destroy ourselves – and our ability to do anything or understand anything.

How can I make such an outrageous statement? I’m really not sure, but my guts keep screaming that it is so. And my mind keeps noticing how destructive other people (and myself) keep acting. It seems to me that we have overlooked the most powerful impulse in our behavior. The constructive/destructive urge.

We have paid a lot of attention to our constructive side – but not our destructive side. With the result that it has taken over.

People wonder why I so interested in Nazism. Why be interested in something so awful? Wouldn’t it be better to think of something better? But I am interested in it for a very good reason – the Nazis showed us – as powerfully as they knew how – what the self-destructive instinct was like in operation.

They paid with their lives – demonstrating to us what was really going on. But even then, we did not notice.

I say “Enough craziness! Let’s get a handle on our problems before they finish us off!” But no one is listening.

But I refuse to shut up. And I will use my family, which I know something about, as an example. My family was religious – and very much so. Their RLDS church began in the middle of the 19th Century. And my grandparents (my grandmothers in particular) on both sides of the family, were obsessed with their religion. This obsession carried over into my parent’s generation, and  began to die out in my generation. But I am the only one to notice this. The rest, true to form, notice nothing – and are determined to continue noticing nothing.

Our church ended, I am certain, because in the Fifties America changed profoundly. And the church became immaterial, useless.

But it had a huge influence on me, as a boy. The church believed it had solved all the world’s problems. And in like manner, I reasoned, the rest of the world was solving them too. This was the Enlightenment viewpoint – and we brought it up to date with modern technology – namely Electronics. I became an Electronic Engineer.

And quickly learned that the business world was not interested in solving the world’s problems – only in destroying it. I went into shock – and in many ways have not come out of it.

With the result that I can see what I am writing about today – the impulse to destroy everything – in action all around me. And I can also see no one is interested in knowing about it. They are completely under its control – and cannot see what is pulling their strings.

2013
02/11
CATEGORY
Business
Philosophy
Technology
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A Society That is Determined Not to Work

Perhaps you have not noticed this – but it is one of the defining features of our times – our Dysfunctional Times. It just doesn’t work – and we are determined to keep it that way. And even more strangely, we are determined to not notice that we are this way.

This is shameful behavior, and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. But we are not – we are pleased with ourselves instead. As if we had some great accomplishment to brag about.

I am tempted to philosophize here, and speak of our discovery of negative being or perhaps negative reality. We have discovered that we could move in an entirely new direction – one that will result in our total destruction. But instead of horrifying us – this attracts us.

We should rewrite our history to show how this fundamental transformation took place. This hasn’t been done before because this possibility never occurred to us – it was too shocking to even be considered. But now it has happened, we need to backtrack and take it seriously.

We can easily answer the question which bedevils us “Why aren’t things working?” The answer is “Because we don’t want them to work!”

We have gone into a self-destruct mode without realizing it – because the first thing we destroyed was our selves – our self-awareness.

You may object – as I did myself – that we have been able to make some things work. New software comes out all time time – Windows 8, for example. But this only happens in an environment that is determined to not make things work overall.

I speak from experience here. I worked in the software industry for ten years – and I watched these software companies self-destruct over and over. And noticed how no one was noticing this. They were not only destroying themselves, they were destroying all the people associated with them – their employees, investors, and customers.

There I was, the solitary observer at the end of an era, noticing what everyone else was incapable of noticing. And wondering why. I am reminded of the Stoic Philosophers at the end of the Roman Empire. And it seems to me our situation is similar.

And this is not a bad analogy. It is one we could use to our advantage. The Roman Empire was over-developed – as our own is. We only need to ask ourselves “What is the over-development in our own time?”

Two thousand years ago, this would have been obvious from looking at a map of the Empire. It was physically over-extended – it covered far more territory than it could defend. But accurate maps would not appear until much later – after the Empire was long gone.

What kind of map can we provide for our own time? I think we need to start from where we are – with an honest evaluation of where we are – completely messed up. And go from there.

We have made some assumptions – just as the Romans did – that didn’t work. One of them was that perpetual exponential economic growth had to happen – or more correctly, had to continue to happen. It doesn’t take much thought to realize this is not possible.

But Americans do not think; they just insist it has to happen anyway. Their business plan cannot possibly work – but they are determined to make it work anyway.

2013
02/09
CATEGORY
Negative being
Philosophy
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Not Understanding – and Determined to Remain That Way

This morning I am obsessed with Understanding – with a capital U – and the lack thereof. This seems to me to be the prevalent situation – and the worst possible situation for homo sapiens to be in. The birds and the bees can get along fine without thinking – but we cannot. Once we lose that, we are doomed. As, I believe we are.

Are you still with me? Fine, I will continue.

One of my last postings was Our Finest Achievement: Not Being, and this posting builds on that. But first a quote from my online philosophy class:

It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do. There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts… Both these aspects of philosophy are necessary to it.

Iris Murdock

To this I would add my own:

The belief in human progress is one of the worst we have ever had. It leads us to believe that we have become perfect - when we have only fallen into another, deeper trap. One of our own making.

As humans, we have fantastic potential – but also fantastic problems. If we don’t understand this (if we become arrogant), we end up being the strangest of all creatures – able to function physically (to reproduce, for example) but incapable of understanding anything.

Most of all – ourselves.

2013
02/03
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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People Are no Longer Necessary

And for this reason can be eliminated – and should be eliminated, because they only get in the way.

As you can see, this is a pessimistic view of things. But I think it is the way things are – and we have to pull this out of the air we live in and put it into words. Although language is an imperfect tool, it is the best one we have – and we should use it constructively – not destructively.

What I see happening – or, more accurately, feel happening – is the belief that the world is ruled by impersonal forces – such as those at work in any machine. What these forces are, we have no idea. We only know they are there – and are in control. And they don’t want people interfering with their operation.

Wiser minds than mind can deduce what these forces (or laws) are, and how they operate. And indeed, this has always been the function of the arts and sciences. To make us understand ourselves better. But people are no longer interested in this.

They are not interested in the way things are – but in something much better than that. Something that seems to be a new religion. One that believes in the impersonal forces I have mentioned. Religion has always believed in these, in one form or another. Devout Marxists, for example, have their own religion.

Our religion now seems to involve the workings of The Market - which must be in control - and not us. The Global Market was made possible by the latest technology. The computer and its software – and the Internet and Wireless networks.

It doesn’t take much poking at The Market to see what is really going on there. It is a return to the rule of the rich and powerful – but in a new form – the interlocking organizations that now control everything. People have no idea what these are – but they know they are there – and they have the all-important jobs.

And we now must consider the nature of jobs. These are a relatively new invention – invented, in fact, by the Industrial Revolution. People have always had roles in the societies they belonged to – and this is what made them important. Society could not work without them.

But now, in the post-industrial world, jobs (manufacturing jobs, for example) are being eliminated – and people along with them. This simple statement has far-reaching implications.

I was born in a railroad town, Ft. Madison, Iowa – where everyone worked for the Santa Fe Railroad – either directly, or more commonly, indirectly. The last time I was there, my brother and I noticed a sign that indicated we were looking at the Historical Santa Fe Town. There was nothing there. It is now part of the Rust Belt that covers the American Midwest.

I cannot say it was a great loss. Industrial America was no great beauty. In fact, it was ugly – but it was alive. We now have to deal with the fact that it is not.

And we have nothing to take its place.

2013
02/01
CATEGORY
Economy
History
Sociology
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Constructive/Destructive Social Behavior

This morning I decided I wouldn’t write – for a change. But here I am pounding away on my keyboard - determined to tell the world about the world, whether it wants know about it or not. This is one advantage of The Cloud – it accepts anything and everything without limit.

People may not spend much time there but computers – such as the super-computers owned by NSA – are trawling through it constantly – figuring out what is going on in our collective unconscious – so it can be properly channeled.

If I were starting my working life over, I might be writing the algorithms that do some of this trawling – perhaps concentrating on the poetry that continues to pour out. Or perhaps the lyrics of popular music – which would not be too hard to analyze.

But more fundamental than this is the overall direction our global culture is moving. This has to be in either of two directions – constructive or destructive. When I was working, I could not help but be struck by how destructive it was. And by how no one was noticing this.

Everyone seems determined to not notice what is going on. How on earth we got this way, I can only guess. But the end result is obvious – we have become destructive – especially of ourselves.

This observation is nothing new. Historians have always written about the Rise and Fall of different peoples. And before there were historians, tribal groups no doubt rose and vanished without number. We should not be surprised to find the same thing happening in our time. And it should not be hard to see where on the rise/fall curve we are.

Once we took note of that, we would be in much better shape to do something about it. Self-awareness is always the first step to recovery.

But we are not aware of this. And this is the most important fact of our time. I suspect this is typical of any culture in decline – a lack of awareness. Occasionally, a people (or a person) will wake up and recover. But this is not usual.

The prototype for this process in the West was the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. This was followed (after a thousand years) with the Rise of the Modern World – a very complicated series of events (the Renascence, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution) we have not even tried to understand.

We have no label for where we are now – a serious handicap in itself. It is clear to me (and, indeed, to many others) that we we are in decline. But most (about 80 percent of the population) will not even admit that.

They are out of touch with Reality – living in a world of their own – and determined to stay that way.

2013
01/08
CATEGORY
Economy
History
Philosophy
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