Posts Tagged ‘ Self-Destructive Society ’

Control at a Distance

I could also call this posting The Destruction of Distance – which amounts to the same thing.

This has been the effect of all our technologies involving communication – beginning with writing, which made a flowering of the arts and sciences possible, but subjected most of the people to the rule of the worst kind – the rulers of empires.

Writing made empires possible because it made control at a distance possible. Rulers could have their directives written down and taken anywhere – or even chiseled in stone. A few people could have influence (either good or bad) over many other people. Their words, in writing, acquired much more power.

And this situation lasted for almost a thousand years – with slaves providing the energy for all the work – which included making copies of their master’s writing.

The next breakthrough was the printing press – which made the modern world possible – which had advantages (which have been duly celebrated) and disadvantages (which have been mostly ignored). This lasted for about four hundred years. Note how time was shrinking – writing as the dominant communication technology lasted for 1000 years, printing for only 400 years – until the middle of the 19th Century, when all hell broke lose.

The influence of printing cannot now be appreciated. The amount of printing, in the form of newspapers and pamphlets, was phenomenal. People still wrote letters, also in volumes we cannot imagine – but they also read books and printing of kinds. Those were very literary people. Abraham Lincoln was an outstanding example – a self-taught man (but also a gloomy one).

But then came the deluge – a combination of two technologies: electricity and the photograph. Electricity produced the telegraph – which made instant, long distance communication possible. Both time and space had been destroyed – which was amazing, but even more amazing was the startling fact that no one noticed this. They just went crazy, and began to destroy their world.

This craziness was understandable. After all, their world had been destroyed. But they felt  just the opposite – they had been resurrected, and had gone to heaven!

The importance of Christianity cannot be overemphasized – this was our past, and provided explanations for our present – which, let me remind you, was the middle of the 19th Century.

I must return to the technical details of the Visual Revolution, as the historian Daniel Boorstin has called it. Marshal McLuhan has correctly pointed out that this shifted our dominant mode of perception from speech (auditory, or an ear world) into an eye world. Iain McGilchrist has taken this further in his book The Master and his Emissary – which has been ignored by the very people he was writing for – our so-called intelligentsia.

Photography quickly improved until photographs could be taken easily, day and night, by anyone who could press the shutter on a camera. And these photographs could be sent over the telegraph and incorporated into news stories – to be bought by the eager public – who wanted everything delivered to them instantly – whether accurate or not – as newspaper tycoons quickly discovered. Fortunes were built by inventing the News.

No one noticed that people were being destroyed in the process – simply by eliminating their ability to understand their world. They were not interested anymore in their real world – but in a pseudo-world that was much more interesting – but controlled by others, somewhere out of sight.

The process, however had not ended – but got much worse with the development of the Movies. Everyone went to the movies – religiously. And movie stars became our new heroes. Here again, let me remind you, control was being exercised – not only at a distance, but anonymously. By unknown forces that no one could understand – and did not want to. A very serious development – but here again, one that was not noticed.

But we were not finished yet, Mass Communications came on the scene – Radio, and then Television. We cannot now appreciate the effect of the Radio – but it changed us completely, and irrevocably – for the worse. We were dependent on others (somewhere out of sight) for our information (and even more importantly, for our entertainment).

Before this, we invented our own entertainment. When my mother was a young woman, they went skating on the river, and met the young men that way. And they really knew how to skate – much better than our generation. I remember an evening of music-making at my Grandmother’s house, before it had electricity. Grandmother played the piano, my Father sang, and my Grandfather played his harmonica – and we had a good time entertaining each other.

When we got electricity and radios – this ended abruptly. And here again, no one noticed.

And then something really big happened – Television. Which again, changed us completely – and no one noticed this either – except for a few, such as McLuhan and Postman (although we did call it the Boob Tube, but also admitted (somewhat sheepishly) we could not resist it).  Personally, I made the decision to not watch it – because I could see it had too much influence on me. One of the smartest moves I ever made.

This was the beginning of a long, slow process that resulted in my expulsion from that world – but only after something else happened – the Computer!

Here again, we were changed completely – but didn’t know it. I will be devoting a lot of postings to this change – but right now I will only note that it made control at a distance even more effective. The captains of industry could now exercise complete and interlocking control of their global enterprises.

Control they could not even dream of previously.

2012
11/18
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
History
Technology
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People Have Turned Against Themselves

I had an amazing conversation with an American visiting my little town in Costa Rica recently. He was not a typical American, and had his own slant on things. Over breakfast, I stated my favorite complaint: that Americans do not understand their world. He countered by saying they understood their world alright – but were too scared to think about it – or do anything about it. Then he abruptly ended the conversation. He did not want to talk about it.

The response of other people is simpler – they do not see anything bad going on – or at least nothing really bad. And they too don’t want to talk about it. I suspect my friend was right – they are scared, and too scared to talk.

I am left asking myself “What are they scared of?” And the answer forces itself on me “They are afraid of being killed,” the most fundamental fear of all.

I might as well get down to brass tacks – the normal world (a normal office, for example) now resembles a Nazi death camp, where the inmates are humiliated in every way possible – before being disposed of. People in such places are scared - and for good reason.

There are huge differences, of course. The inmates in this case are well-fed (too well-fed, in fact) and are surrounded by every luxury. As the Commandant of the camp’s family were. But these families had to force themselves to ignore what was going on around them. As all the Germans had to. They carefully ignored the basic facts – and paid a terrible price for their willful ignorance.

You will object that the analogy is too far-fetched – which, frankly, it is. But the basic situation is the same – people turning against other people. But in our case, these other people are ourselves.

Now this idea does take some getting used to. But it seems to me to be the basic fact of our time. And we should get used to it. Except for one thing – people have desensitized themselves so much (in order to survive) they can hardly sense anything. And attack anyone who tries to make them understand.

My a recent posting Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems, was a direct lift from the MIT Technology Review. It needs to back off and see the really big problem – the subject of this posting.

If we don’t, we come up with piecemeal solutions to partial problems. We gotta grab the bull by the horns (or perhaps a more sensitive part of his anatomy). Nothing else will catch his attention.

2012
11/13
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Psychology
Sociology
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Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems

MIT Technology Review

If anyone is critical of technology, I am. But here Technology Review makes much the same point. I quote from the final chapter:

It’s not true that we can’t solve big problems through technology; we can. We must. But all these elements must be present: political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem, our institutions must support its solution, it must really be a technological problem, and we must understand it.

This should be read carefully, and not skimmed over. He acknowledges in the article the work of Amartya Sen, who showed that poverty is a political problem, not a technical one.

I also quote from the section Irreducible Complexities:

There should be some kind of price on carbon, now a negative externality, whether it is a transparent tax or some more opaque market mechanism. There should be a regulatory framework that treats carbon dioxide emissions as pollution, setting upper limits on how much pollution companies and nations can release. Finally, and least concretely, energy experts agree that even if there were more investment in research, a price on carbon, and some kind of regulatory framework, we would still lack one vital thing: sufficient facilities to demonstrate and test new energy technologies. Such facilities are typically too expensive for private companies to build. But without a practical way to collectively test and optimize innovative energy technologies, and without some means to share the risks of development, alternative energy sources will continue to have little impact on energy use, given that any new technology will be more expensive at first than fossil fuels.

Less happily, there is no hope of any U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect this intellectual consensus, because one political party in the United States is reflexively opposed to industrial regulations and affects to doubt that human beings are causing climate change, and because the emerging markets of China and India will not reduce their emissions without offset benefits that the industrialized nations cannot provide. Without international treaties or U.S. policy, there will probably be no competitive alternative sources of energy in the near future, barring what is sometimes called an “energy miracle.“

Fair enough. But this overlooks entirely the psychological and social effects of technology in the last two hundred years. Which can be stated simply enough – people have been eliminated, or reduced to hollow shells.

After posting this, I found this article on Fast Company: Innovation Fails Because _____

2012
11/12
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Business
Economy
Psychology
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More Than Human and Less Than Human

The Human Race has changed more in the last fifty years or so that it had in all of its history before that. But it is only dimly aware of this change, if aware at all. And I am determined to explain this.

First of all, the technology responsible for this change is well-known – the Computer. But how it accomplished this change, we haven’t a clue. I am tempted at this point to describe, in some detail, what the computer is – but that would be a mistake. What has made this big change is not the computer itself, but what we think it is.

We think it is the most wonderful thing in the whole world, some kind of new all-powerful magic. And we have done our best to make it part of us – and to make us part of it.

In short, it has become our new religion.

We are very religious beings, and always have been. Our attachment to religion is fundamental and deep. And we ignore that at our peril.

The history of religion in America has been different than anywhere else. It is complicated – or more accurately complex, the result of many forces acting on each other. Much as was the case in early Christianity – which was the amalgam of many other religions and cultural influences.

America developed a secular religion, based on business and materialism. With a cover of religious fundamentalism. This much has been noticed by many – but not understood at all.

Because the real action was going on in our unconscious minds – both individual and collective. But the unconscious has been denied – and emphatically so. Which has made us helpless creatures ruled by unknown forces. Precisely what our new power structure wants.

I have been moving pretty fast here, covering a lot of ground in a hurry. But I flatter myself in thinking that my train of thought has not been too complicated. Although I am sure it is being rejected out-of-hand. The unconscious is not at all interested in reason. But let me move on – to today’s subject – becoming more and less at the same time.

Here again, there is nothing complicated about this. The Computer (the Computer as it appeared to us) offered us the chance to become more than human. An offer we could not resist, since this is one of our fundamental human drives – to be better than we are (using all the technologies we have invented). One of these technologies, let me remind you, was writing.

The Computer was a dream come true. It embodied all of our most fervent desires. Note the word embody, it is crucial. We promptly moved from our bodies into its body. And became, to our way of thinking, better than human. Not noticing the opposite was taking place also – we were still in our bodies (we couldn’t actually leave them), but these had become hollow shells – less than human.

You might still wonder how we could move into another body. And frankly, that puzzles me too. But I saw it happening right in front of my eyes when I was working in high-tech in California in the Eighties. Every nobody in the world claimed they were into computers. Although they had no idea what they were. They just knew they were the greatest – and they were part of them.

At the same time the collective intelligence of the companies that went into computers – nearly everyone – collapsed to near zero. They made the stupidest mistakes possible – and seemed determined to put their companies out of business – at which they were usually successful.

But this wasn’t all – they not only became less than human – they became anti-human. And people like me, who still had some humanness in them, were in big trouble.

To make a long story short – I had to run for my life. At first, the friends I had left behind in Silicon Valley were interested in what I was doing down here in Costa Rica. But as I developed a new life of my own – they lost interest. They were stuck, and had no interest in getting out – or so it seemed to me.

2012
11/08
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Business
History
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Staying Away From the Bad World

My family, and my family’s church, believed in this passionately. Worldliness was bad, as bad as could be. This had its advantages – smoking was bad, so we never smoked.

But it made it impossible for us to live in the world, like other people, and accept their world – which included the world of Business – which was fast becoming a religion of its own. Our religion, which had never been large, went into terminal decline and never recovered. Because it didn’t understand what was going on. A fault it had in common with many religions. Even religions have to have some smarts.

One thing they all have in common, however, is their belief in purity – an obsession peculiar to religion. Our new global religion, Business, shares this obsession.

Every religion believes in isolating itself from the rest of the world. Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, and gained some of his vital insights that way.

Globalism takes a slightly different approach – instead of withdrawing from the World, it makes the World withdraw from it – by destroying it, by getting rid of all that worldly stuff. Leaving it, the Pure Ones (assumed to be Christians and perhaps Jews) behind – and in complete control of the World. What there is left of it.

The result must be clearly understood. We live in a polarized world, divided into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. The Bad Guys are people who have not received the new Gospel – devoted to Power in every form, including, of course, that of money. And also – although they will not come right out say so – the destruction of the World.

Comprende?

2012
10/27
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Business
History
Religion
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The Eightfold Way as a Social Model

Finally, the book Complex Adaptive Systems by John H. Miller and Scott E. Page is getting down to pay dirt  - halfway into the book! It quotes Buddhist scripture:

Now what, monks, is the Noble Eightfold Path? It is as follows; right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

No doubt Buddhist scholars would object to his interpretation of Buddhist scripture, which is facile – but no matter, it is useful anyway. It maps them as follows:

View – Information and connections
Intention – Goals
Speech – Communication among the agents
Action – Interaction
Livelihood – Payoffs
Effect – Strategies and actions
Mindfulness – Cognition
Concentration – Model focus and heterogeneity

I personally have a problem with the interpretation of Mindfulness. It is clear that the authors have no idea of what that means in Buddhist practice. It is also true that the Buddha had no idea what models and agents would mean over a thousand years later.

Overlooking these minor matters, however, the authors (note the plural case) go on to explain what these mean in Complex Social Theory.

As I said in my other posting today The Worship of Wonderful, Complexity Science tries to be wonderful – but fails. No matter, it is useful, and that is all that matters. Here are three paragraphs (out of six) for Right View:

Right View encompasses the information that an agent receives from the world. Such information can influence agents in both direct and indirect ways. Directly, incoming information will often cause to immediately react to what was received by taking some action. Indirectly, information is often “memorized” via some change in the agents internal state, and such changes may set the stage fore actions that will only be realized into the future…

A further complication is that the networks that agents receive often come from other agents. As such, agents may be able to manipulate, at least partially, their outputs so as to influence the actions of others. As we will see, models where such manipulation is possible can lead to some very interesting behaviors…

Networks may also be important in terms of view. Many models assume that agents must be bunched together on the head of a pin, whereas the reality is that most agents exist within a topology of connections to other agents, and such connections may have an important influence on behavior.

Most people react to this complexity by turning off – and refusing to notice anything at all.

I have been enjoying the Tico Times ever since came to Costa Rica. But this week it decided to call it quits, because it couldn’t afford to continue. I think the situation is worse than that – few want to know about anything.

They seem to think if they ignore their problems they will go away.

2012
09/29
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Religion
Technology
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The Worship of Wonderful

It seems to me this is one of our biggest problems. It is certainly one of my biggest problems – and this give me the right to be an expert on the subject. One of its main problems is its shadow side – the impulse to destroy whatever is not wonderful. This explains the most important and fundamental impulse of our time – to destroy the world, and ourselves with it.

Wonderfulness is something we invented ourselves, and only exists in our minds – which are, and always will be a mess – and therefor far from perfect. We have to live with this – and carefully work around our built-in problems. Which are getting worse and worse, as we keep making our world more and unworkable.

I believe all our problems could be solved except for one thing – we don’t really want to solve them, because we demand everything (the perfect state of being) or nothing! And will be perfectly happy if we end up with the nothing – because that will prove how inadequate the world was. How it could not meet our infantile needs.

This ties in with an article in the NY Times yesterday The Psych Approach:

In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a study on adverse childhood experiences. They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured.

In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a study on adverse childhood experiences. They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured.

I have never taken this test – but I have been in plenty of therapy, which included, in one case, a series of lectures on the Dysfunctional Family. In group therapy we were all asking “Are there any functional families?” We were assured that they did exist, but in our population (the kind that made their living) they were rare.

I would expand the dysfunctional family to include our dysfunctional workplace – the elephant in the living room that no one wants to see – but is certainly there, and shitting all over the place.

It takes a strong person to cope with this workplace, and people like me are not strong. The result is a wide range of mental and physical problems.

I ended up in a hospital, unable to talk coherently, a victim of a temporary brain hemorrhage. Which, fortunately, I recovered from enough to allow me to get out of the country, and go somewhere were people weren’t treated so badly.

I see I have digressed; I started to talk about wonderfulness – and its built-in opposite: awfulness.

I think the worship of wonderful reached its peak in my parent’s generation – right after WWII. For them, it was embodied by Science – which kept making things more and more wonderful. And making them richer and more powerful. Another article in yesterday’s Times When Growth Outpaces Happiness, the Chinese are finding the same thing – being rich and powerful doesn’t make you happy. It doesn’t even come close.

But no matter, we are on our treadmill, running after the ultimate carrot – the Wonderful. Embodied now in all our smart things – even as we get dumber and dumber. And more and more destructive.

2012
09/29
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Fertility

Some situations are stimulating; some are depressing. And some are addictive. I am sure there are more, but these will have to do for now.

I am taking three MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) and I can clearly see the difference between them. Two of them are technical, which I expected to be interesting, but are not. One is about poetry, and it is very interesting. Poetry concentrates on telling it like it is – even if that means being like it is.

I was so disappointed by the other courses I have given some serious thought to why. I rushed off and bought a book written by one of the instructors Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. I found it frustrating because it concentrates on complicated things while ignoring the simple things that have always messed us up.

Modeling is great, and I still believe in it – but I want models that are creative – or fertile. I don’t want to be depressed.

I’m reminded of a theory I heard of back in the Sixties. It stated that there were two kinds of people – nourishing and toxic.

I now slice it differently – constructive and destructive. With the vast majority in the later camp. People immediately exclaim “How depressing!” They only want to hear nice things – things that will cheer them up.

I disagree entirely, I tried to ignore reality and live in a fantasy – but it bit my ass. I much prefer to see things the way they are. In the last analysis, it is also safer.

One last thing. Successful social trends may be bad, and just plain evil. If there is one thing we should have learned from history, it is this. Instead, we immediately join whatever trend is trending (to use contemporary jargon). And not only that, we make these choices unconsciously – and then defend these choices to the death. Which is why I maintain The End has already happened.

From the book mentioned above (page 141):

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be precise.

2012
09/28
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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Hatred and Stupidity

I am fully qualified to write about both of these. I not only lived in a world where they are dominant, but I am a product of that world, and often feel just as it feels – somewhat to my amazement.

You probably agree with me about the stupidity, but balk at recognizing the hatred part. I think this is a mistake. The 20th Century was a century of hate, where the Germans and the Japanese and the Soviets played leading parts, but it was common almost everywhere. Hatred was the fuel for the emerging global society that we live in now. And unless we recognize this, we will not be able to cope with the new world we have built for ourselves out of our self-destructiveness.

This is one of those statements you either agree with – or you will deny completely, no matter what anyone says. The key world here is deny. Most will deny it – because accepting it just too terrible. I believe we must face the facts, no matter how terrible they are.

Others will say “It is not this bad, the situation can be fixed!” Without stopping to consider what is wrong or how it can be fixed. As usual, the Devil is in the details – and there are a lot of them.

I am reminded of a young man I knew in Silicon Valley. His family were Jews living in Germany when Hitler came into power. They got out and spend the war living comfortably in South America. I don’t have to tell you what happened to the Jews who stayed behind.

I managed to get out myself – not because I recognized what was going on – but because I wanted to live comfortably on my Social Security income. To this day, my friends back in the States believe I came down here on some kind of a whim – not out of practical necessity. They cannot imagine living anywhere else. For them, their world is the only world, and they would not think of getting out.

I can see Costa Rica going down the same primrose path of self-destruction – and completely unaware of it. Over and over I see people I know self-destruct – chasing the rainbow of instant wealth – and ending up nowhere and being nothing.

I can still benefit from their public health system ($49 a month for my health insurance!) but this system is being destroyed by the for-profit systems – as are the public universities.

Ticos like each other – and this is why I moved here. But in the crowding in the cities, and in the rush for money, ordinary human kindness is heavily stressed.

2012
09/11
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History
Psychology
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What is Obama?

Harper’s Magazine – Compromising Positions, by Thomas Frank

I did not ask “Who is Obama?” because that would not be a fair question. People no longer exist anymore – a subject I will be returning to again. People are no longer people but something Latour calls human-nonhuman hybrids. It makes no sense to ask of someone “Who is he?” The appropriate question is “What is he?” What kind of people (and things) is he associated with?

For Obama, this is almost impossible to say. The September issue of Harper’s has two articles about Obama. The first one, by Thomas Frank, I have linked to here.

You really ought to read it. America still has its Freedom of the Press – something most of the world (including Costa Rica, where I live) does not.

America can allow this, because it knows Americans do not read – and more importantly, they cannot think, even if they did read. It is an authoritarian country where power is exercised unconsciously – a new development we have not appreciated.

All of the article is choice. For example, it starts off:

Barack Obama was lifted to the presidency four years ago on a great wave of progressive fantasy.

I was part of that wave. I helped my cousin, who lives in the DC Area, ring doorbells and ask people to vote for Obama. I was shocked by the people I talked to, and concluded if America was depending on people like them, it was in big, big trouble.

My cousin was not much better. He knew practically nothing about Obama, except the right kind of people were for him – and he got on that bandwagon. Later, when I emailed him that Obama was not living up to his promises, I got no replies. He had one hard-and-fast rule – do not think, and do not notice you (and everybody else) are not thinking!

This part is even better:

Conservative strategists learned long ago to attack an opponent at his or her point of greatest strength. The way to discredit a decorated veteran like Senator John Kerry was to depict him as a coward. Similarly, labor leaders must be referred to as “bosses,” intellectuals must be derided for their cluelessness, and figures with the sort of immense popularity Obama enjoyed in early 2008 must be mocked for being too distant, glacially disconnected from the sweating masses.

Personally, I would make it even simpler: the Republicans are destroying America – and Americans can see nothing wrong with that! This kind of situation is nothing new, it happened many times in the 20th Century – notably with the Nazis.

If you want more complicated explanations, I recommend another article in the same issue The Changeling. It is much longer, and does require some reading time. But it comes to much the same conclusion:

He’s the president we deserve, and who speaks to us in our own language, whose objective is to paper over the cracks rather than to tell us who we are.

2012
09/01
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Political comment
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