the only war that matters is the war

against the imagination

the only war that matters is the war

against the imagination

the only war that matters is the war

against the imagination

all other wars are subsumed in it

There is no way out of the spiritual battle

There is no way to avoid taking sides

Rant, Diane di Prima

===

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people

themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control

with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to

inform their discretion by education.“

Thomas Jefferson

===

“The world may be going to hell but there’s lots of really neat stuff you can buy.”

Wired magazine 1993

===

• Preface:

1. this is a draft so it may be a bit bumpy in places and repetitive throughout,
2. as I note every time I criticize capitalism, I am only seeking a better version of capitalism, which I believe exists, not get rid of capitalism.

================

Today I am suggesting capitalism stifles the type of imagination necessary to envision a better version of capitalism. I will also suggest a reinvigorated imagination is the needed weapon to attack the present-day capitalistic system and its issues.

That said. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest capitalism is at the root of business’s lack of employee’ engagement’ issue as well as a number of other societal social engagement issues. While wealth has been created, I believe it is useful to step back and consider the dehumanizing effects of the economic system. Beyond the system’s tendency to default to a ‘treat humans like machines’ mentality, the set’s objectives increases apathy, sapping jobs of meaning and mattering, imbue overall ethical decay, all of which lead to an inability to take the right action, in the right situation, at the right time by a person. I imagine the question becomes can we use our imagination to see how we can work as free and responsible human beings and still be enmeshed within a global economic system, i.e., encouraging system objectives that humanize rather than dehumanize. Let’s be clear. The institutions and businesses within the capitalistic system, spanning local communities (financially and attitudinally) to global arenas, dominate to such an all-encompassing complex and embedded level that it may feel like resistance through this imagination I am suggesting seems futile. To many people it feels like our fate is sealed, there is a sense of powerlessness, therefore, since there seems to be no hope for a better way of doing things people become apathetic, escapist or just materialistic – all of which the capitalistic system actually encourages. Today I will suggest that rather than resign ourselves to the apathy, helplessness, and despair, it seems to me that if we were to reengage our imagination, we could easily envision the hope of a better version of a capitalistic system – and make it a reality.

Which leads me to imagination versus innovation.

I would argue, and will, the biggest casualty in a capitalistic zero-sum world, and of a populace accepting of a zero-sum belief, is imagination. We have lots of stuff and we are constantly encouraged to have stuff (and make stuff), but that orientation creates an unhealthy objective blindness in which imagination becomes subservient to the system of infinite growth. To be clear, I am suggesting imagination is different than innovation. Innovation, in capitalism, is mostly an incremental affair. The existing economic system is one in which innovations occur to further the strategies, objectives, and profits of a business; not the to the profit of society. In many cases the innovation – and the R&D investment dollars – a firm wants done is aligned against its own product and process systems, its strategy for getting and staying ahead, and its self-identified needs. this is an extremely pragmatic, competitive, orientation albeit a business will most likely cloak it in ‘possibilities’ terminology. Imagination, on the other hand, creates the great leaps. The ideas and thinking that can reshape systems and the ways things are done. I would suggest that innovations simply increase the velocity of infinite growth (the capitalism ideology) which only increases the speed in which we crash into the finite resource wall. Imagination is what we need to redesign the systems in order to optimize the finite world, not the growth objective. That doesn’t mean there will be no growth, just that the growth is in prosperity and quality of life and not wealth and, well, just growth. Even Schumpeter (Creative Destruction Schumpeter) recognized most innovation was wasteful and that this type of capitalistic competition is inherently wasteful. So why do we agree to waste the imagination which could possibly envision a new better way to generate the prosperity that everybody wants while optimizing the finite resources available to us from the world? I propose the pathway to the better way is a reimagined imagination which will not eliminate capitalism, ** but rather create a better version.

• ** note: capitalism is not an ideology like socialism, therefore, socialism is not an alternative economic system. In addition, a capitalistic society will have social programs, i.e., features of socialism.

Look. I am not attempting to create radicals, but often I attempt to prompt some radical thinking. Why?

I don’t know exactly when it started creeping into the society mindset, but at some point we inched away from a simple social contract and began to think the world was too complex and decided that the social aspects should become financial, capitalistic, and transactions based all measured by money and ‘growth’ measures just like business. It gives us a sense that we had some control in a world where everything seems out of control. The problem with that was we began to believe everything is uncontrollable and it feels like the only people and businesses that DO have any control are the ones focusing on “more” – growth, wealth, profits, etc. As a consequence, the “how” was subservient to ‘more’ and the ‘more people’ felt like they were not only winning, but controlled their own fate in this uncertain world. There was a general sense if we focused on ‘growth is good’, ‘more is better’ and ‘their more means less more for me (so it’s a war over a finite more)’, society would prosper and, in particular, our society would prosper more than ‘theirs.’ That’s, uhm, rationalizing a fairly unhealthy system and mindset, i.e., rationalizing a fairly dystopian view.

Which leads me to the struggle in-between imagination and rational.

As society careens between dystopia and optimism it seems like many people believe our only hope of being saved is found in capitalism. Although today’s capitalists and their relentless pursuit of power and profit seem to set society’s standard for rationality, I would argue most everyday people are driven by dreams, hopes and a desire for some type of, uhm, redemption. What I mean by redemption is that living in a capitalistic society forces many people to compromise a shitload of moral and ethical things. At some point I imagine many people would like the system to offer some redemption, or salvation, for those slippery slope decisions. To that end, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that capitalism and religion have evolved together and that business is permeated with aspects of religious concepts (and vice versa). We routinely expect far more from capitalistic output than convenience and comfort. We demand deliverance. Deliverance for something better as well as deliverance from the problems that we have. That deliverance is grounded in myths forged by the system itself. In fact, this is just one aspect of how the capitalistic system manipulates/controls society. People have always constructed collective myths in order to give a sense of meaning, and rationale, to their shared experience. These capitalistic myths guide us and inspire us and enable us to live in an increasing uncertain, uncontrollable, world. But if myths help us, over time they can harm us by blinding us to real and urgent (if you take into consideration environmental finite challenges) needs. On occasion we should step back in the hope that we might learn to correct ourselves of some of the myths at the core of the capitalistic worldview in order to begin to redirect our imagination toward more world and human ends without sacrificing some of the prosperity we have gained or even desire.

As a consequence, maybe we would stop having to seek redemption for the lives we live.

Maybe a better direction is found within continuous and cumulative progress; not growth.

Maybe we should reflect a bit about how the system has reduced our innate nature as humans. Humans are not natural exploiters of the environments they live within, they are nurterers, yet, industrial capitalism reversed the relation between humans and nature by making humans extractors and exploiters through machines and technology.

Maybe we should reflect a bit on our obsession with reductionism and our increased valuing of the concrete over the abstract.

My guess is that all my ‘maybes’ are driven by my desire to inject imagination in a system increasingly bereft of anything but a “more” objective blindness. My guess is that capitalism actually encourages us to feel powerless to do anything other than what the system propagates.

Yeah. I would argue our sense of powerlessness is actually created by our lack of imagination. To be clear our lack of imagination is encouraged by the institutions themselves. The system is designed for the results it’s getting and the system attempts to design our minds to encourage us to believe that these are the results we should be getting. I say that because if we want to create different results, we will not only have to redesign the system, but we will have to redesign our imaginations. I won’t deny that the task ahead may appear daunting, but if you look ahead, gather your imagination, it doesn’t become difficult to be able to envision a better way of doing things. That doesn’t mean the better way is a radical difference for the sake of radicalness (i.e., disruption), but the only way to redesign the system is to actually break it before it collapses in on itself. Just stating it that way suggests it’s not radical thinking. It’s certainly not radical to head off what is impending; that’s reasonable and logical. Once again, I circle back to imagination. Imagination which is the ultimate power. More than money, more than authority, more than even the existing system, the most powerful thing in the world is imagination. I say that just to remind everybody (1) this is concrete, not abstract, and (2) why the institutions fear it. The struggle isn’t against the rulers. I would even argue it’s not even against authority in the system. I would suggest that the struggle is against ourselves – our despair or lack of hope and our lack of imagination. Those are the things that we are struggling against. Once we win that struggle, we’ve crossed the bridge where we can create the system that is best for us and the planet – a version of capitalism which recognizes it’s not a zero-sum world and progress is not always dependent upon growth. I believe empowered imagination will usurp the original purpose for which the original capitalistic system was created and I would argue even those of us who benefit from the existing system we will cease contributing to the problems of the existing system and simply through envisioning what could be better we’ll begin addressing the underlying flaws of the existing system little by little. If that’s radical, so be it.

Which leads me to control.

Control comes in a variety of forms, but the most pervasive type of control is the capitalism narrative – and myths. Those of us who have become dependent upon the modern capitalistic society, which is offers us goods and services and conveniences, can’t imagine living without them. We can’t imagine a world where all of these amenities, which we no longer see as amenities but as givens, uhm, given to us by capitalism are not only available, but actually have. Of course, there is a partial truth to this, but simply because capitalism was the economic game we played to get here, doesn’t mean it is the only game in town or that another game could have gotten us to this same place – without all the waste and destruction. To that point. The ideology that supports capitalism requires the belief that limitless economic growth is both possible and desirable and will lead to a higher standard of living for everyone (rich and poor). It certainly can, and has a history of doing so (sort of), yet, that claim includes a number of serious flaws. While the tide has certainly risen higher for almost everyone in some form or fashion the wealth and prosperity has not been shared equitably. Indeed, any claim that economic growth brings benefits to everyone can be challenged simply by looking at the actual effects and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Yes, a lot of wealth has been created, however, the inequities are extreme. Anyway. I believe we all know that we live on a finite planet with limited resources, what I believe that we struggle to imagine is that the economy can’t grow indefinitely. As Kenneth Lux said:

“We live in a finite planet. Human beings are defined as being made up of infinite wants, and the task of an economic system is to fulfill that infinity, then such a system will go on endlessly churning out goods in an attempt to reach what is from the beginning an impossible goal. When the infinite production of goods meets up with the finite planet there is bound to be a collision.”

This is the illusion of unlimited economic growth. The goal of most national economies is to achieve unlimited growth of GDP through the continuing accumulation of material goods. Since human needs are finite, but human consumption is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through the artificial creation of needs through capitalism, i.e., materialism. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded and thus are essentially waste. The continuing illusion of unlimited growth on a finite planet is the fundamental dilemma we need to resolve. Yet. Businesses fed by globalization continue to grow bigger and bigger, and faster and faster, using up resources while pushing governments to gear everything towards economic growth and decrease regulations. The businesses make ever greater profits under the guise of keeping the global economic system growing and growing and going on and on. Our lack of imagination keeps us from seeing where we are headed. Economic globalization is often presented as benign as simply a matter of trade development, complex global interactions (and cooperation) and financial flows. While functionally true, in reality power and control permeates the global system at every level. That isn’t to say that the appeal of this capitalism that promotes consumption as desirable isn’t beneficial because it is beneficial enough to keep the system of corporate globalization going and, people, generally speaking, satisfied. But could it be a better system? It is that question that is at the core of imaginative needs. In the end I imagine the worst thing about all of this is our lack of imagination keeps us from seeing any logical place to make it all stop.

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.”

Thomas Friedman

Which leads me to say capitalism exploits all communications techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason and imagination of any other system (or way of living).

Yeah. In some sense I am suggesting a sly bit of mind control. To be clear, mind control, or ‘brainwashing’ at its worst, has much subtler techniques than the Chinese water torture. In fact, technology has become an increasingly effective tool for mind control and affecting what people think. This is best articulated by Jaron Lanier (Who Owns the Future) and how technology constantly nudges the mind in small degrees every day until it achieves the larger effect. Anyway. My point here is capitalism has a narrative and it uses all tools available to further that narrative. One could argue capitalism’s greatest communication victory has been its ability to define the conditions, and related narratives, of the social realm. Economic activity has increasingly provided the north star desires for people’s fantasies. Capitalism and consumerism have provided the attitudes which frame the questions and answers of grander discussions of human need and desires and paradoxically, as a consequence, also frame a restriction of possibilities. This, I would argue, is the meta narrative of industrial capitalism – a version of social control. I will admit that I am suggesting a coercive power. And it’s not just narratives. Economic power is a control mechanism that encourages everyone to believe pursuing profits at the cost of people’s mental lives and ecological destruction is okay if we are benefiting from the system (note: most people do not recognize the mental harm cause). The ultimate consequence of this narrative is it encourages society, people, to leave the system as is. To be clear, the capitalism narrative is a means of control in and of itself by making clear that those who cannot or will not play by the system’s game, and its rules, are expendable. What do I mean? Part of the insidious aspect of the capitalism narrative is that in order for capitalism to work wealth must be accumulated in economies must grow and if you are not accumulating or growing you are part of the problem. Oh. And it always encourages you to feel like the game is ALWAYS being played so if you are not playing, someone else is. This is a subtle encouragement of a zero-sum baseline mindset, and is the basis for the hamster wheel metaphor and it is also the basis for general apathy and despair – it is an infinite game in which we only have finite resources as humans.

One could argue this unsustainable cognitive warfare (mind control war) creates a general breakdown in society and the social contracts within which people interact. Paradoxically, there’s an underlying encouragement to not put constraints on this capitalistic system because it has convinced us to believe it is the only path to “more” than what we have today.

Which leads me to dissonance.

Beyond the apathy and the despair, I would suggest we actually feel dissonance. What I mean by that is dissonance occurs when everything you have been told crashes into what is reality. The easiest example I can offer is what we are told abut a foreign country, maybe Russia and somewhere in the middle east or even Latin America (if you are American), but then when you actually meet someone from there or maybe visit you see they are actually people just like you, the cities are a lot like the cities in your own country and, well, they really aren’t anymore a shithole than some of the places in your own country.

The story within the story, creates an identity crisis WITH capitalism. Capitalism tells narratives that conflict day in and day out with reality. And while capitalism argues at a meta level, the arc of history, people live in the mesa level and see how capitalism actually works. This dissonance is a version of mental anguish and the story we should be paying attention to is the capitalism attacks on our mental state. I would argue using our imagination will throw off the mental shackles of the existing capitalistic narratives and myths.

Which leads me to the game <a derivative of gamification>.

“A game is a machine that can get into action only if the players consent to become puppets for a time.”

Marshall McLuhan

We need to stop thinking of economics and the system we make money as a game because it is the first step to stop being played by the capitalistic game. Games are contrived and controlled extensions of group awareness. The more seeming /perceived autonomy a player has (context) the less they notice how contrived/controlled the game actually is. This game, materialism (or accumulation of wealth), contains no limiting principles, yet, the resources necessary to maintain, and fulfill, materialism is limited. But the capitalism game invades the private lives of people, communities, and business. It meddles in the politics of life and certainly is wielded as power by those in power to control mindsets, attitudes and behaviors. But the control is clever. The memories of what we are told ‘is best’ are fuzzy at best, yet, the objectives of best are clear. The capitalism control shapes ideas into familiar and meaningful contexts clearly outlining the punishment, threats, and rewards for the e minimum necessities of life which, in a capitalistic society, are the stepping stones to maximum comfort of life. There is no imagination necessary because capitalism has drawn the color by numbers world to success and wealth. But that is the capitalism game. And when we are in the game, we become mentally apathetic and more prone to simplistic capitalism narratives (solutions) in order to navigate the game. What that means is we use capitalism in order to relate to meta problems. This is exactly the wrong direction to go.  The combination of certain social forces grounded in capitalistic thinking ranged against the mind will inevitably lead to the destruction of the democratic way of life and the planet itself.

Our largest most powerful weapon against this is imagination.

Full of hope, we need to use our imagination to attack the system-wide narratives which have corrupted the better angels of business and how we think. We need imagination to bring about the most fundamental and far-reaching changes, in terms of restoring basic honesty and integrity, and dignity to each other and to the world’s resources. As Vaclav Havel said. “We still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions if they are to be moral is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.” What he is saying is that it is not enough for a nation to liberate itself from a flawed ideology or a theory, but rather if you can liberate yourself from a bad idea, it is necessary to find another good idea. we need imagination to identify that idea.

To be clear. Industrial capitalism is flawed. Innovations have certainly made the existing system more efficient in production, but less so with resources. capitalism is associated with considerable waste. That said. The system is designed for the results it is getting and it is paying off for those for whom it is designed. In order to be able to redesign the system resistance needs to be organized by the people and for the people. And by resistance, I mean something William Stringfellow said:

“Persons live most humanly. To death means yes to life.”

If that is radicalism so be it.

All I can really say is “bring on the imagination.” The system will shout their argument that capitalism “can’t be beat,” but the persons who seek to live most humanly should be imagining ‘what are the alternatives?’ We can all see the wastefulness of capitalism, but currently appear to lack the imaginative strength to envision a better way. Surely there is a better way to enable a healthy system where there is real competition among people with different ideas, where there is widespread access to knowledge in order to develop the smartest possibilities, where there are incentives to meet market needs not just wants, and where we cut losses when it is clear we should.

We should acknowledge the existing system doesn’t actually determine winners and losers in any meaningful or efficient way.

We should acknowledge this engine of progress has generated remarkable results, but also acknowledge those results, and the pursuit of those results, changed the nature of the capitalism engine itself and, therefore, the results objectives may need to be changed.

I imagine we should also acknowledge that in response to the changing nature of the capitalistic system, some in business have attempted to change – with new kinds of organizations, new ways of doing things, new ways of connecting and new ways of thinking about work itself AND we should be paying a bit more attention to this.

We should acknowledge this is more a social process, not just a business capitalistic process, and, inevitably, a cultural evolutionary process.

We should acknowledge that businesses watch other businesses, workers watch other workers, communities watch other communities and, yes, even nations watch other nations – and learn.

We should also acknowledge that the capitalistic system itself will be watching it all and will hold on to its power with ragged claws encouraging everyone to believe that the zero-sum narrative is more important to everyone’s survival, and thriving, than anything they could learn in this new imaginative space.

And with that we should acknowledge the reality is there are few absolute zero-sum economic situations (even though people see them everywhere and it negatively effects economics) and if capitalism is done well, economic growth – not through extracting and exploiting – makes everyone better off.

If that is radicalism, so be it. Bring on the radical imagination.

Ponder.

“In society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation

of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the

reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest

communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor

===

===

“However, even if we accept that citizens are not primarily causally responsible for our poor information environments, it could be argued that they nonetheless have a remedial responsibility to mend them.”

Solmu Anttila

===

This is about technology, maybe partially about generative AI, but more about technologies impact on culture and how we think. Let me begin with technology’s improbable intelligence. Yeah. I believe we should feel comfortable suggesting AI is intelligent. I say that recognizing I think the really smart people get caught up in the wrong discussions. As I’ve noted in the past the whole argument about whether artificial intelligence is actual intelligent or not is dancing on the head of a pin when the everyday schmuck like me, or anyone who uses a computer on a daily basis just for everyday work, the computer is pretty intelligent, artificial intelligence is anything but artificial, and we’re pretty glad that it’s a little bit more intelligent than we are because it elevates us. That said. I’ve always liked a thought that Norbert Wiener offered us in 1960. He briefly mentioned we should reject a certain attitude of people toward technology. What is that attitude? It is the assumption that machines cannot possess any degree of originality. And, yes, I associate intelligence and originality. Regardless. The assumption is shaped around the understanding that nothing can come out of a machine which has not been put into it. beyond originality, the output, this also suggests technology must always be open to human intervention WITHIN a process (not just post hoc). But going back to originality, the reason Weiner emphasized his thoughts on originality is because, at that time, many people diminished the concept of machines, or technology, outrunning human control, therefore, diminishing the idea that machines could gain control. Yeah. improbable intelligence has two interesting aspects: originality and control.

Let me discuss control first. Going back to Weiner he believed that machines can, and do, transcend some of the limitations of their designers and that in doing so they may be simultaneously effective and dangerous. He made this statement with a couple of thoughts in mind:

• a concern that technology would take on elements of whose behavior we cannot comprehend sooner or later.
• a recognition the technology often acts far more rapidly than humans are capable of and are far more precise in performing the details of their operations.

And while this may not be true intelligence what it does do is transcend humans in the performance of tasks – both doing tasks and thinking tasks. Which makes me circle back to the thought technology could theoretically take control over mankind. I don’t believe that is meant in a whole cloth way, but rather because technology moves so fast, so precisely, and in such an overwhelming way in terms of information flow, that people’s attempts to augment technology as they recognize issues, those attempts will be irrelevant, and ineffective, because technology never stops moving and the old issue has been replaced by a newer, more dangerous, issue. In other words, technology will always be ahead in this race. I imagine the grander point to be made is the only way to avoid complete disaster is if understanding of the technology equals the performance of the technology. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out this is true of intelligence: human intelligence must be equal to technology intelligence (improbable as that may sound). Yeah. Improbable, no? Human speed makes effective control of technology a pipe dream. By the time we can react to our cognitive conclusions we may have already run off the cliff. Yeah. It is highly likely that given the fast pace technology assimilates and generates output it would either (a) be impossible to foresee the undesirable consequences or (b) be incapable of assessing the onslaught of output effectively against any strategic objective or (c) our ‘control’ decisions are obsolete by the time implemented. this ends my point on control, or, better said, our lack of control of our improbably intelligent technological partners.

Which leads me to originality.

Generally speaking, we mangle the concept of originality and totally misuse the concept with regard to technology’s output. How do we mangle the concept? Everyone should just assume that nothing is original that almost everything is a derivative of something that already exists and what really matters is what you do with what exists and can it be used in an original way. But, with regard to technology, Norbert Wiener points to a misconception that technology’s output will never be original because it is dependent upon the information that has been input. But if we apply the true definition of originality, the one I just pointed out about using what exists in imaginative ways, technology can certainly meet that originality definition. In addition, it can reconfigure data at a faster pace than humans. I stated that to suggest that technology can offer originality faster. Ponder that. Maybe the time has arrived to acknowledge a bit more liveliness and creativity, if not originality, in our technologies. And maybe if we do so we, people, can become a bit less mechanical (think in machine terms). I say that because maybe, just maybe, if we concede a bit of originality to technology and maybe if we stop thinking of ourselves in machine like terms, we may begin to view people as having the ability to evolve in tandem with technology.

Ponder that because there are absolutely some good consequences as well as some bad consequences.

Which leads me to the improbable.

It seems like we have entered an era where we have become significantly more accepting of the improbable. That doesn’t mean that in the past, and I mean centuries in the past, people’s beliefs didn’t dance around the edges of some improbable things. But typically, traditional thinking, let’s call it reason based thinking, was grounded in some basic societal agreements within which the improbable things stood out distinctly enough that the majority of people, well, recognized they were improbable. Technology has changed that. With all the information bludgeoning us the reality is the improbable has, perceptionwise, gained a degree of possible. It’s not that everybody agrees that it’s probable, they just don’t completely dismiss it. and technology appears to be the megaphone of the improbable (intelligent and unintelligent). In the cacophony of information available to everyone there will always be a voice shouting that some fact makes all other facts irrelevant and that you should be paying attention to this ‘fact’ and if the source of it has some semblance of credibility, it starts edging its way into the possibility zone. I believe it was HL Menken who said there is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it. That has a grain of truth in today’s world. seemingly experts mingle with ordinary people  in terms of accepting some fairly improbable things despite having access to more good information than ever before. Technology elevates the improbable voice while also making some significant truths and thoughts invisible and therefore they become less relevant.

Which leads me to improbable intelligence becoming an authority.

Since the dawn of time people have believed in some authority. The only thing that has changed has been what that authority is and in today’s world it has become a revolving wheel of which we will pick and choose the authority that we want to believe. And while much of early authority intelligence was of dubious intelligence – royalty and religion – science pricked that improbable intelligence with probable intelligence. And that is where technology has assumed some authority; by dismantling the entire authority system to such an extent that we can’t discern who to believe in, therefore, what to believe. The world we live in is fairly incomprehensible to most of us and discerning the improbable from the probable, with some certainty, is beyond most cognitive abilities. Technology’s improbable intelligence plays a significant role in that almost no fact, actual or imagined, surprises us for long because what is an unacceptable contradiction to reality has become blurred. Technology has encouraged us that there is no reason not to believe – in anything. Technology’s improbable intelligence has taken on the role of probable intelligence. I cannot remember who shared this metaphor, but let me share it.

Prior to the technological world that we live in today which certainly had technology in the industrial sense life for most of us was like an unopened deck of cards. You could open the deck of cards and after flipping them over one by one you could be relatively comfortable of what the next card was going to be. But what today’s technology world has done has shuffled the deck so while every single one of us is familiar with the deck and we’re familiar with the cards that are within the deck, just because we see a card we can’t be confident of what the next card will be when it’s flipped over.

Anyway.

I imagine my point today is to say arguing whether AI/technology is intelligent or not, whether it is original or not, seems like wasted energy. While we argue, it assumes the role of the expert in original thought and reason and, well, intelligent dialogue. It has already outpaced even the best minds in society. So maybe we should accept the fact it is quite probably intelligent and quite probably going to run over many of the societal good things we embrace and start being a bit intelligent ourselves in solving what is quickly becoming an existential societal issue. Ponder.

“You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.”
Scott Westerfeld

===

“the way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with new truths that run down from the top of the head
and out of the heart”

Charles Bukowski

===

One of capitalism’s superpowers is the ability to destroy itself over and over again. This means that stagnancy is its kryptonite. It is a form or method of economic change and never can be stationary. The truth is capitalism is an evolutionary change agent should it be permitted to be so (I will return to this point). I say this because so many people talk about capitalism as a ‘state’ yet that ‘state’ is ever changing in a blink of an eye. To describe a capitalistic society is simply to describe it in a point of time (and in the past). This evolutionary characteristic is not just due to economic/business but also changing social/societal environments which as it changes alters the arc of economic action. In fact, I could argue that the social condition is more important to capitalism than any industrial/business change. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. This implies a large amount of qualitative change in order to beget the quantitative economic/industrial change. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that globalization is an inherently social activity from which economic activity emerges.  In other words, capitalism revolutionizes the economic structure from within destroying what exists to create something, and things, new. Schumpeter called this (in different words) Creative Destruction.

Which leads me back to “permitted.”

Every industry, every business and its strategy, is dependent upon both destruction and construction. Those who exist already maniacally create constructs in which their survival is guaranteed, i.e., they cannot be destroyed. Those who want to create are constantly seeking out opportunities to destroy what exists. I begin there to say “what is permitted”, for both aspects, dictates the success and thrivability of capitalism. The entire modus operandi of competition is actually dictated by what is permitted. Free market advocates suggest that some ‘invisible hand’ will dictate fair price competition and fair economic competition. The problem is that the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization, the competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which doesn’t just attack the profit margins and outputs of the existing firms, but at their foundations and survival, is negated when existing ‘rules’ permit existing businesses to monopolize or have some unfair ‘scale’ advantage which doesn’t permit ‘new’ competition to gain a competitive foothold. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out this is why government subsidies to innovative industries and businesses are so crucial (but that’s a post for another day). But my point here is that if we permit monopolies or oligopolies than there is no destroy and the create is incremental at best. By the way, ‘permit’ has a social function as well as a governmental/administrative function. Rules, regulations and laws by the administrative state can certainly outline what is permitted and what is not, but the public – the social contract with the economy – also has a role in what is permitted. What I mean by that is (a) people need to become just a bit smarter about the negative aspects of monopolies and oligopolies and (b) people need to better understand short term ‘pain’ with the destroying part of capitalism for the longer term gain.**

• ** note: my prime example of this was the break up of the Bell telephone company. The first 5ish years after Bell was “destroyed” were miserable as a consumer, but it led to smartphones and cellular coverage and, well, a significantly better telecommunications world.

Anyway. I imagine my larger point here is that what we are permitting in the business world today is not capitalism nor certainly how we envision the best of capitalism to work. I, personally, believe we have to actively destroy some of the things we are permitting so that capitalism can create some of the innovations and inventions and, well, better things I envision capitalism is quite capable of creating. Ponder.

===

“You had been a paper boy to me all these years – two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.”
John Green

===

Preface: for some pieces I feel the need to state I am a capitalist and believe the capitalist system, properly done as an idea, is a force for increased overall prosperity, progress, and innovation. I imagine I feel I have to say this whenever I am critical of capitalism.

===

I would say we are in a world increasingly attempting to flatten people. As Marshall McLuhan would say we live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes. I will argue today that it is the system’s objective is to have ‘flat people.’ Anyway. The flattening of people is basically the downward leveling of progress towards generality. It ignores the combinatorial complexity ‘of the people’ which powers the rapid expansion of ideas and progress found in the number of combinations as the moving parts of a situation increase and change. I’m not suggesting any guaranteed result if we didn’t flatten people, however, probabilities decrease significantly (downward leveling) if we flatten people because it is people who can creatively and imaginatively expand situations and connectional opportunities. This is, basically, to suggest culture is an open system not a closed system. What I mean by that is people are consistently ambiguous and vague and is extremely difficult to understand what people are thinking when they make up their minds to do something therefore are open to things beyond the basic linear and predictive. I say that to suggest that if humans are in a constant mental flux, complex and irrational as they are, culture itself ends up being a bit malleable. Which leads me to how the system encourages a ‘closed culture’ and something that Marshall Durbin said in 1973. “Cultures are best seen as an asset of control mechanisms, plans, recipes, rules, instructions, which are the principal basis for the specificity of behavior and our essential conditions for governing it.” I’d buy that there are some organizing principles underlying cultural behavior and I buy that those principles offer some boundaries or constraints that make up the social contract of normal accepted behavior, but I chafe on controlled mechanisms despite the fact he may be correct. Control mechanisms, when implemented by the system, flatten humanity, flatten people, flatten progress, and inevitably create a flattened world. That said. The flattening is occurring. Generally speaking, those control mechanisms are designed by the system and implemented by institutions with the intent to attain power through authority. They attempt to define what is best for people, and society writ large, so that those who ‘do the worst’ can be identified as ‘not of the system.’ I would also suggest in a capitalist system, control is embedded in the products, services and prices (especially those things identified as ‘the good things’). Regardless, many of the control mechanisms are positioned as what is best for the people, what is best for progress, and what is best for society. It’s a clever move by the system because if you squint hard enough you will see they are rarely ‘the best’ but rather just constraints and controls on who and what people can be, i.e., they are conserving conditions. I will also note all of this is accompanied by words and language. The system propagates specific language on what is good and what is bad, what is logical and what is not logical. This language typically is bereft of any nuance. Look.  I fully buy that logic demands some language with some semi-precise meanings so that there is less ambiguity in order to navigate a relatively uncertain world where guarantees are few and far between, but logic should not flatten people and their progress and their ideas and their possibilities and their potential. What I mean by that is the truth is 90% of almost all environments and contexts are not fully observable so the system language and the system control mechanisms are constructed to suggest that the unobservable is manageable and in the worst cases suggests concrete certainty attached to the unobservable.

Which leads me to one of the greatest unobservable but seemingly observable creators- the capitalistic society.

A capitalistic society is a framework within which people decide, or do not decide, how to implement an economy – of ideas, things, and behaviors. It is those decisions which create the narratives; narrative like materialism or ‘consume-ism.’  Consumption, and what we decide to consume (‘consume-ism’), craft a societal narrative. The products and services developed by the capitalistic system create a mindset of wants and needs. These products and services serve as a story, or a myth, for how lives should be lived, and viewed. But in the end all of those stories and myths propagate beliefs with regard to what a good life is supposed to be. Basically, these narratives deprive people the opportunity to craft their own stories. That said. I purposefully use propagate to suggest that the system is creating a social consciousness which becomes resilient to any ideas that challenge it. Yeah. It is a self-fulfilling narrative. The system suggests “this is the way,” offers products and services which, generally speaking, are beneficial (even if you don’t really need) that are embedded into people’s way of life therefore proving out the system which created it all in the first place. And if life doesn’t suck, and maybe even pretty good, the system becomes even more self-affirming and change becomes even more difficult.

All of this flattens the idea of society, the economy and how life should be lived. The patterns get embedded further and further and everything gets reduced to the terms of the system itself.

Almost everything is discussed and defined by the self-fulfilling rationality of the given system and of its quantitative measured definitions. For Individuals, families and communities being successful gets whittled down by this reality. The system inevitably claims society as a whole. In other words, the capitalistic system becomes the capitalistic society and the system begets itself. Being successful within the system identifies the individual with this society and through it with the society as a whole. Yeah. Read what I just wrote out loud. It sounds incredibly rationally irrational. And therefore, we once again get confronted with one of the most maddening aspects of a capitalistic civilization: the rational characteristics of our irrationality. And by irrational I don’t just means humans, but the system itself. This capitalistic society is actually all kind of nuts if you think about it. The productivity, the efficiency, the increased comfort beyond needs, turning waste into need, the way resources are destroyed to construct material goods, and where the objective world is just an extension of the capitalistic system and all its trappings. It’s kind of an upside down way of thinking about things where bad is necessary for good and useless is the path to usefulness. This may sound extreme but, in the end, people become commodities within a system where finding meaning and identity is found through their cars, homes, recreational equipment, hobbies, and the clothes they wear. The mechanisms of the society tie the individual to the system by which social control is anchored in the new needs generated by the system and the things which the system and the people have produced. Once again, that’s kinda nuts and completely irrational. The reason why this is so irrational is all this productivity is actually not just destructive to the world within which the people live, but it’s also destructive to potential. What I mean by that is the potential found in the development of human minds, real human needs and human thinking where the growth actually exists. Why? The system itself represses the real possibilities in the system as the humans that make up the system focus on the struggle for existence within the system as existence defined BY the system. Yeah. The system actually deprives people of the agency to its potential. Its nuts.

It can seem even nuttier if you take a moment to this about something Herbert Marcuse said:

“while the capabilities as an intellectual and material of today’s society is immeasurably greater than ever before, which means that possibilities are greater than ever before, the scope of society’s domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than even that.”

The point here is a capitalistic system actually gives people an immeasurable amount of power to do good things, think things, and create things. And, yet, the system, by investing itself into society, has gained immeasurable power in shaping HOW we think about markets, business, and work. In addition, it has encouraged people to ritualize behaviors, and beliefs, so much the people ‘implement life’ without much reflection on how the ‘system’ is minimizing thinking and creation potential. Everything has become subservient to the capitalistic system and to the benefit of the system itself. Oddly, the abstract capitalistic society becomes concrete ‘productivity hacks’ to minimize time and effort in service TO the system. Once again, this is rational irrationality and its, well, nuts. As I pointed out in the wayback machine in my “will of the institution” people get untethered from real civilized society and become ‘units of production’ within a capitalistic society where our meaning is whatever our utility is to this society. We are a people OF the market and the system mobilizes us to capture value anywhere it can be found regardless of cost to the collective good let alone the planet.

Which leads me to the ultimate consequence of flattening: stagnancy.

Regardless to say, stagnancy is bad. The whole piece points out how the capitalistic system flattens everything out in a capitalistic society and how that flattening only encourages status quo, i.e., stagnancy. But there is an additional social connectivity consequence which almost stratifies that stagnancy. In this flattened system, society gets split between those who only understand flattened simplified versions of ideas, perspectives, and behaviors of a complex world and those who grasp observational complex thinking, Ultimately, they find it relatively impossible to not only communicate, but agree on anything. Neither side believe the other because they don’t understand them (literally and figuratively). In the intellectual circles this is called ‘a lack of common sensemaking.’ But it gets a bit worse. The flattened thinking side has a strong sense of sequential occurrences while the non-completely flattened tends to have a strong sense of a degree of tenuous connectivity of things. This only broadens the gap. Anyway. My point here is that this all happens because the system actually encourages flattening people and flattening how they think about things. Ponder. This seems important.

==

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
H.L. Mencken

===

 “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

1968, media advisor Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon

===

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H.L. Mencken

===

This is about social intellect and, I imagine, the question of whether the majority of the general public is, well, stupid. This is written with United States in mind, but I imagine many countries have a version of this issue. The issue is one of an ideological split; that isn’t really an ideological split. What I mean by that is that it is ideological in name only: democrats/republicans, liberal/conservative. And I say in name only because the labels confuse the issue which is actually about social intellect or differently said ‘the mental ability to engage in civic issues intelligently.’ That said. Beyond the labels, one ideology embraces policies, thoughts, and some ideas while the other simply embraces the belief that they are against everything I just said simply because the other ‘side’ is evil, the enemy, or all those things will destroy some mythical vague outline of what the country is (or isn’t). Consequently, the first group sees the second group as incapable, of, well, thinking. Consequently, in thinking they are incapable of thinking through the seemingly obvious foibles in their mythical vague narratives, they call them stupid. So. We end up with a country where a large segment of the population sees one side as having evil ideas and the other side as incapable of thinking, or stupid. To put it mildly, that simplistic concept is not very helpful.

Which leads me to the idea of social intellect inequality.

To be clear, social intellect is not about intelligence. Social intellect is the ability to assess the dimensions and nuance of civic responsibilities, and concepts, in order to contribute in an intelligent way with societal discussions if not actually participating in the decision-making. Just to begin making people feel uncomfortable today, I could argue that the primary contributors to societal system failures are the people who did not have the desire to develop their social intellect. This made them less-than-capable of effectively navigating through most complex issues throughout life. Once again, to be clear, this same person could be incredibly skilled in a profession and be grounded socially in a community, but, is less-than-capable of grasping the intricacies of how an entire society, country and system works. I remind everyone of that because then the real issue within a society is ‘what the intellectual level of the society is compared to the complexity of the economic and political environment in which it needs to survive’ and ‘is it effectively matched up.’ To be clear, today’s situation is a bit different than if we asked these questions in the past. Typically, a societal intellectual level will rise as the education systems get better and wealth is distributed among a larger group of people. In the past, wealth and education have tended to align with increased social intellect. I would argue the wealth and education aspects have diverged, i.e., in today’s world you can become pretty wealthy even while being ‘less-than-educated.’ From a social narrative aspect this becomes really really important because, as John Kenneth Galbraith said, ‘the relationship between wealth and intelligence is specious at best.’ Said differently, you can be stupid and still have money. Yet. Society has a nasty tendency to connect intelligence to wealth. Regardless. Setting aside wealth and education, if the complexity in the economic and political environment is rising faster than the increase in the intellectual level of society then the social intellect of the society is actually falling in relative terms. This is where inequality comes in. Because while education has improved and wealth is a bit more ubiquitous** (certainly to the extent that the majority of the American middle class is fairly comfortable in their homes and their lives):

• one portion of the population has intellectually risen to the complexity of the economic and political world or at least as close enough to be able to discern some of the proper actions that are needed
• one portion of the population, while possibly intellectually rising, has not risen to the same level.

** note: the reality is that in the United States most middle-class households have a comfortable lifestyle, albeit they may not feel like they have enough as they look at the higher income hhlds, and hhld wealth appears to have ‘de-linked’ from social intellect. Many, many, comfortable households simply skate on the superficial surface of social intellect most typically under the (a) common sense banner or (b) the patriotism banner or (c) a combination thereof.

That latter group is certainly not stupid and in fact it’s silly to suggest that anyone in the population can fully understand all the complexities of society in the world today. All I’m suggesting is that a segment of the population has fallen to an intellectual level where they are overwhelmed by the complexities in the world. For this group, in particular, if the speed and the strength of both technological advancements and global integration remains far above the speed of their intellectual development then both the total size of the incoming overlapping mental stimuli and the time required to assimilate and assess will increase. Uhm. And, yet, people seem to be actually embracing ‘speedy thinking’ more and more as they also embrace a ‘time starved’ narrative. To be clear, both are nuts. And bad. This social intellect challenge not only creates a continuously unstable societal, economic and political environment, but increases the risk of destroying the whole system as the asymmetry between the intellectually capable and the intellectually less-than-capable get farther and farther apart. As a defense mechanism to this cognitive onslaught, this intellectually-less-than-capable group may believe they can insulate their life paths/fates/communities from other areas of society, other communities, and even other countries. Unfortunately, for them, an interconnected world it is not only about the intellect of a country or a population within a country, but within a global scope.

Regardless. Democracy implies some version of intellect equality. Democracy suggests because everyone can be involved, they are all equal intellectually.  I would argue this is why democracy feels shaky as the intellect inequality tugs at the foundation of the democratic system. Look. Having the right to decide one’s own future in a democracy is a great feeling, however, if done without having the necessary social intellect it ends up in selecting the wrong future or, let’s say, selecting the paths which offer lower probabilities of a better future.

Which leads me to highlight the simple solution trap.

The objective should be to increase the overall intellectual level of not just the entire society, but of specific groups and populations who may be slightly less intellectually capable. A society, or half of society, cannot simply discard a significant portion of society as ‘stupid.’ In fact, I would suggest the intellectually less-than-capable provide a larger risk to society in totality and cannot be ignored. Why? Well. When overwhelmed by the complexity this group can most effectively be reached through someone promoting irrational patriotism as the simplest ‘objective’ and consequently intentionally imagining patriotism as sacrificing one’s own interests to a country for the potential welfare of society in total. Intellectually, the argument comes down to some simplistic “what is best for the country is best for everyone.’” It’s kind of a warped hollowed out intellectual rationale. I say ‘hollowed out’ because there are many things that are best for the country AND best for everyone; just not as a blanket carte blanche on all things to be done. That said. This asymmetrical relationship between intellect levels, which is not a difference between smart and stupid, is actually more about socially aware versus socially unaware. This becomes a dangerous issue to navigate because every society and their social system needs to balance the personal interests of the individuals versus the interests of the society and the short-term interests of both versus the long-term interests of both. A successful society navigates the contradictory objectives. I say that because the truth is that a society typically resides somewhere in the shade of gray versus the extremes. But with intellect inequality the less-than-intellectually-capable inevitably reside in some simplistic extreme while the intellectually-capable typically reside in the more nuanced complex space. Ponder what I just said because this is a nuanced view of ideologies. One that may seem foreign in today’s world where simplistic labels are misused to identify ideological leanings.

=====

“The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.”

Robert Heinlein

Which leads me to ideologies.

The less-thoughtful, the ones who for good reasons or bad reasons, do not pursue some observational critical thinking, end up crafting a simplistic ideology which is crafted in a way that it is more an attitude with loose behaviors attached to it rather than ideas with actions. The easiest one to point to is patriotism or some version of elevating country over anything else. Regardless. It becomes a loose ideology which, intellectually, a lot of shit can be placed within. Once again, this is not stupidity, it is more just intellect laziness. While it may seem like ideology is the intellectual basis of societies, ideological expressions tend to represent distorted perceptions of realities which, in turn can produce some real distorting efforts. In today’s world the distorted realities have taken on some concreteness through measurement and productivity and actual production. Through these somewhat dubious concrete ‘numbered’ things, social reality and identity definitions get molded into, well, a ‘reality’ shaped in the form of the ideological attitude. Yeah. Once ideology, the abstract, becomes concrete it is legitimized as an effective illusion for a society even though that illusion is of some alternative society to real reality. At that point ideology takes on sort of a flat preciseness in that they no longer represent choices but instead declarations of undeniable facts.

“One, they cherry-pick evidence. Two, they take the information out of context and misrepresent what happened. They disregard the truth that’s in front of them. They downplay and dismiss it. And finally, they flat out lie.”

Herbert Marcuse suggested it all creates ‘the one dimensional man.’ As I’ve written about before increased complexity encourages many people to increase simplicity. So as the world becomes more multidimensional, if not even to a quantum level, interconnected complexity there will always be a group of people, sometimes a significant amount of people, who become more and more one dimensional in many of their thoughts and ideas. To be clear this complexity is perception and reality. What I mean by that is while the world is getting a bit more complex, if you listen to enough ordinary people describing life, it quickly moves from chess to The Matrix and you are being asked to take a red pill or blue pill or some shit like that. Let’s just say that we should be wary of ordinary people because oftentimes the ordinary people aren’t as wise as we would like. And by ‘not as wise’ I mean that they reject many of the thoughts that would actually be helpful to improving their mindsets and their mental models. Suffice it to say rejection is bad. Denial and contempt are typically for little people with nasty minds who typically think they have made themselves all on their own and they owe nothing to anyone about what came before. Well, from there this version of a faux ideology takes on some real psychological trappings.

Which leads me to becoming bigger people.

As Jerome Scott and R. P. Lynton put it: “Every man requires emotional and intellectual satisfactions which alone secure for him his belonging to a community.” The path from little people to bigger people seems to be narrowing day by day. Maybe it’s because once an abstract ideology becomes concrete it becomes a club, not a community. I say that because if belonging is important, belong to ‘the club’ is exponentially important in terms of social identity. And THAT is important because when this need is suppressed, anything from psychological maladjustment to mental derangement can occur. Yeah. I just said that. Some experts suggest the most obsessive psychosis arise from a failure of social adaptation and from the suppression of community relations. When that happens, a person tends to seek substitutions – through social media and ‘clubs.’ And, yeah, this is where technology – social media – can begin to play a massive role. Technology is an alternative reality in and of itself as it portrays a wide variety of illusory realities. These faux realities outline criteria for a version of life that some people will find social identity within and be able to clearly point to who Is ‘without.’ This sociological structure is forged by technological forces and economic perceptions beyond what lies immediately outside the front door. The illusion exists as an attractive alternative to anything seen on the street outside. They are not the result of thought, doctrine, discourse, well, they partially are, but all within, ‘the club.’ Uhm.  A club of (sometimes nasty) little people. Anyway. From that point on the illusions become a condition of fact. From there all social beliefs, all social reforms (or reductionism), all social changes, are located wholly within this condition of fact. From this condition of dubious facthood the shaping of society and social boundaries will vindicate it as well as exploit it. It is a little world where “us” reside and “them” do not. The problem is the “us” gets littler and littler as they become more unchanged, paranoid, and actually inefficient in the larger world, i.e., reality. This little world insidiously mutates the larger, bigger, thinking world as it pushes and shoves and punches and stabs that which wants to expand. But let’s get back to becoming bigger people. Head, heart and wallet. The pathway is always found in calming fears, keeping scepticism and cynicism in check, reshape the brain and offering the vision of a more prosperous future (either for the individual or future generations). It is as Claude Munson suggested: “It is a question of strengthening the environment in such a way that, in practice, all subjects come more or less quickly under its influence.” People need to be placed in a positive social environment where they can thrive, emotional and intellectual satisfaction, or be encouraged to adapt in positive ways.

Which leads me to end with cultural despair.

While both ends of the social intellect despair for greater society they do so in different ways. There is intellectual passivity and intellectual activity. And in our upside down world today often the passive believe they are the active and believe that the intellectual active are the well passive sheep. They see passivity in following science, data, logic, reason, real knowledge-based experience, and associate their own intellectual activity to be found in the nebulous common sense. What this means is in an upside down world of logic and realities where ultimately cultural despair is created through every corner of society.

Rejecting the discipline of the mind as well as the overall corruption of the entire concept of education, a concept which had actually elevated the ‘ordinary person’ to some intellectual rigor of thought, a passive intellectual group then goes forth and corrupts the social mind and social fabric. It all creates an almost willful disregard for common knowledge replacing it with the oft mis-placed and oft-misused common sense. If we are truly honest, a significant swath of society lacks the observational critical intellect needed to pierce some of the complex issues we face. So those in despair then run after every person in power offering a simple solution hoping for well something other than despair. Everything is questioned – what is success, what is equality, faith in scientific method, what is progress. All the ideas and concepts which grounded us as we grew up get questioned. There is a grand clash of idealism, realism, and some form of materialism, from which cultural despair arises.

Maybe this version of cultural despair is best captured by Philip Tetlock.

Regardless of what side of the social intellect scale you reside on what you think isn’t really based on the level of Education or even actual experience instead it comes down to the way someone thinks. The ones who typically do amazingly badly with regard to how they think about things were those who believed that there was a big idea which explained everything world was simple and could be understood simply and that they could just stamp their big idea unto every situation. The ones who do well thinking through things were those who had no such big idea, who regarded the world as complex took their information from many different sources and were willing to be self-critical and learn from mistakes. The key inevitably comes down to checking whether you were right or wrong. And even that is tricky because the majority of people seek out proof for what they predicted or thought rather than broad based information to check against it.

I believe it was Jonathan Haidt who said when we are presented with evidence for or against a hypothesis, we ask ourselves one of two questions.

• When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves can I believe it? Then we search for supporting evidence and if we find even a single piece of pseudo evidence we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe.
• When we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves must I believe it? Then we search for contrary evidence and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it.

I believe this is called motivated credulity and motivated skepticism. And maybe that’s where I will end this piece with credulity and skepticism. Social intellect balances itself on what is credible enough to overcome the skepticism. A good healthy skepticism should force better observational critical thinking until we can arrive at a point where there is a credible conclusion. We seem to have lost that balance. Somehow some way we must arrive back here as a society in order to engage in civic issues intelligently. I would argue continuing to engage in civic issues unintelligently is the path to ruin. Well. About this? Not solving this means we will fail to secure the emotional and intellectual satisfaction required to maintain a healthy community and society. Ponder.

===

“To satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house dog.”

TS Eliot

===

I imagine this metaphor summarizes much of our current public narrative. As we all argue over what we deem the practical questions of the day, it is like we are the house dog munching peacefully on the meat while the entire house is looted. Much of this discussion centers around the role that the computer and technology play in our lives. That is the wrong discussion. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, the reality of how we think, our values and, ultimately, how we shape our views of reality. The truth is technology alters the structure of all – our interests as well as the things that we think about. But maybe most importantly is that they alter the structure of how we actually think and what we value.

While I clearly believe that humans control their own destiny in terms of shaping how we think and how to cognitively manage ourselves, the truth is that everything must give way in some degree to the technological onslaught. And this onslaught not only changes the shapes of our thoughts, but it also brings a scalpel to culture. Oh. I am not suggesting that technology affects culture with precision, but rather as technological tools are embedded into culture, they will methodically begin slicing and dicing culture’s substructures. These tools have no ideology, no real bias for truth, and no solid objective except that which the tools are designed for – engagement, activity, usage. That is their mindless bid to become the culture so that they can thrive. I say that to suggest everything that we think will be forced to either fight or defend itself if we do not want these tools to ‘work upon us.’  And when is say ‘everything we think’ I include traditions, politics, norms, values, religious beliefs, social ethics, myths .. everything. If you don’t actively evaluate what is important to you, I can guarantee you will not be able to fend off technology. Maybe it would behoove all of us to think about physicist James Prescott Joule who suggested nature is very parsimonious with energy and that energy is neither created nor destroyed but merely converted from one form into another. I say that because technology is an energy user in search of, well, energy to convert TO ITSELF. I imagine my point here is that if we continue to feed it our energy and it keeps on sucking up more and more of human energy, well, what’s left of us after it has done all its work upon us?

In the end. The problem is that we, people, end up serving technology rather than technology serving us and our needs. And I imagine that goes for all the technology tools, not just algorithms. Little by little they work upon us, we munching on the meat the burglar gave is while our minds are being looted. Ponder

===

“when I pronounce the word Future; the first syllable already belongs to the past.”

Wislawa Szymborska

===

Frames of minds change by jumps or leaps, not by degrees. Yeah. Big jumps from seemingly little things and little steps and little changes is the norm. I begin there to say that saving yourself requires saving the world. To be clear. I don’t think most people need ‘saving’ as in being rescued from something. What I mean today is maximizing your potential means saving the world around you so that you can manifest your own destiny. I imagine this is a version of context matters but, in this case, I am suggesting that, mentally, you have to purposefully save the environment (large, medium and small versions of) in order for you to thrive.

Which leads me to things are getting better; invest in it.

The world is strewn with good things. In fact, I would argue there are more good things than bad things (albeit the bad things are often really bad). This is where I remind everyone of a famous Peter Drucker thought. “It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.” The good stuff in the world is the first rate stuff. Invest in making that, and those things, excellent. I would suggest this is, mentally, like long term planning versus long term responsibility. The difference is between trying to control the future and trying to give the future the tools to help itself. I imagine this can be a bit difficult because the past is both a comfort and a warning. The world and all its trappings stands on the past and it can be pretty easy to decide to focus on destroying some of the things OF the past because its easier than deciding what to build for the future. Here is the good news. Lots of good shit is already being built or is being offered up to be built; invest in those things rather than the destruction of the past. I would argue that ‘better’ is simply found in shattering the continuity of the past, not erase it, from which new patterns emerge. Within that thought resides the concept that continuity and perpetual renewal coexist, and thrive, together, but that is another thought for another day.

Which leads me to saving the world.

====

“Society, community , family are all conserving institutions.

They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least slow down change. But organizations are organized with the intent to destabilize. Because its function is to put knowledge to work – on tools, processes and products; on work; on knowledge itself – it must be organized for constant change.”

Peter Drucker

====

‘Saving the world’ is about conserving our future (so that we can thrive) and, yet, the world is strewn with conserving institutions seeking to self-perpetuate themselves, i.e., conserve themselves, and not the world.

Therein lies the core issue to my suggestion.

I imagine most of us find ourselves waking up many days thinking ‘wow … I would love to improve (save) the world somehow today’ <either consciously or subconsciously> and yet we end the day seemingly not even having nudged Life in a positive <improving> direction. Frankly, this struggle increases a feeling of negativity which can easily consume your life if you are not careful. Between society encouraging things that don’t feel right for you, a ‘conserving’ environment, unhappy friends, media generating anxiety rating point by rating point by convincing us the world is going to end, or angry trolls on social media, it can seem overwhelmingly negative as you view all of this versus what you felt when you first woke up in the morning. Yeah. But. Remember. Saving yourself may mean saving the world. All the negative shit is just words (mostly), not actions and behaviors and ideas and thoughts. The majority of the world is good and doing and thinking good stuff. Maybe we just need to remember that everyday in order to save the world and, consequently, save ourselves. All that said. Maybe that is why I love this Brian Andreas quote “we wake up in the morning knowing ‘who I am’ without anyone trying to tell us otherwise.” So, yeah, maybe in the long run saving yourself means saving the world. Ponder.

“Money decides how it wants to live.”

Ryan Gravel, City Designer

===

In a productivity, growth-obsessed system, while many people are enjoying outcomes, fewer are enjoying wealth. And those who are wealthy invest a lot of energy saving the ‘winners money’ from everyone else <they safeguard the system that created them>, in other words, money protects money <or money decides how it wants to live>.

So, what should we seek? Commercial symmetry. I want to be careful here. No neat graphs, no distribution curves, no models, this is simple symmetry through de-clustering. Rather than accept the lousy extremes, and lousy money clusters, with a wretched in-between of zero-sum precarious mindsets, money should seek some symmetry.

I will begin in an unexpected place; not redistribution of wealth, but rather the transaction world. Commercial symmetry demands a sustainable model of transactions – products and connections (“value given – value received” equaling a fair monetary transaction). Yeah. I am actually suggesting the market, itself, can deliver a more symmetrical distribution of money and wealth. Currently many transactions are, well, simply transactions of less-than-fair asymmetrical value exchanges. For example, an Uber transfer of money is simply a transaction of lesser value than what is fair, in other words, the transaction labor is essential, but ‘under value’ in the transaction. I purposefully used Uber as an example because it is reflective of the entire “Gig economy” and its negative economic asymmetry. Regardless. I would argue the social contract is broken in this situation even though a financial contract is completed. And maybe that is the trick to commercial symmetry. When a social contract works you recognize what is good for them, what is good for you, and what’s good for others, is generally speaking what is ultimately good for you. Which makes me circle back to the ‘transaction world’ idea I opened with. Economically, this social contract is made up of millions of mini-money transactions which, currently, is an asymmetrical cash transaction world. The more symmetrical version of the system conceptually creates a higher understanding of value, and exchange of value, creating structural economic lift transaction by transaction. It imbues, and embeds, a sense of social morality which, I would argue, permits a society to value itself, and its citizens, just a bit more transaction-by-transaction.

That last point is a bit important to ponder because, currently, the social contract appears subservient to the financial contract and that contract is absurdly attached to the idea of an ‘efficient functioning’ of the system thru the free-market laissez-faire attitude, i.e., the market will dictate what is a fair value exchange. That’s nuts. The idea of morality has been so distorted that is used as a euphemism for the efficient functioning of systems. The result is that we are unable to use our common sense to actually see the poverty and lack of acceptable value exchanges .. created by default. I am suggesting to attain commercial symmetry the financial contract should either be subservient to the social contract or, at least, equal to. But I am certainly suggesting the economy must be grounded in a social contract, or as a product of a social contract, not a value-less transactional one.

===

“We continuously make promises and create agreements with ourselves and others. Some of these agreements are mutually beneficial. However, when you realize that things you agreed to in the past are no longer helpful, possible, or relevant, renegotiate. Be invested enough in your situations or relationships for renegotiation to take place.”
Susan C. Young

===

To be clear, this social contract can, and does, exist without an economic exchange and it exists outside of business. That said. Today’s piece is about the economic social contract with society. But in a weird unhealthy twist, the economic world (business) sees social actions as useful actions, not meaningful actions. In other words, the social contract is grounded in some results-based, productivity, mindset. That’s fucked up. And it is so fucked up it only exacerbates an already asymmetrical economic world.

Which leads to say commercial symmetry is going to be difficult.

Many people are bearing the fruits of the asymmetry and will be reluctant in letting that power go. But, more importantly, we need to address the system itself. The underlying purpose of the existing consumerism-based capitalism is not to provide public good, but rather, to control and sell resources and provide a profit for those who control of the resources. In addition, money is actually being used to buy one’s place in society by, well, buying the ticket in – churches, donations, philanthropy, etc. It’s like a Faustian bargain with society funded by money. I could argue our sense of community, over time, has even been corrupted by money. In the past capitalism and community spirit accepted a grudging partnership, but in today’s world capitalism is just another money maker, or funder, for community. In other words, similar to my point on economic transactions, the community has become subservient to the financial contract. Yeah. Community spirit has eroded and now it is just another monetary transaction. What this actually does is isolate people from community and, simultaneously, divides the community into ‘those who fund (have money)’ and ‘those who use’ (the money). In addition, it has freed business from any civic obligation <unless they see it as an ROI investment of their money>. Circling back to the beginning, again, the economic transactions are bereft of true social value and the inevitable arc is economic asymmetry. This gets a bit worse. This simplistic monetary transaction attitude has trickled into education, home ownership, renting, childcare, well, everywhere. All transactions tainted by that ‘monopoly money’ lack of accountability in which the social contract gets dumbed down to the transaction itself. That isn’t to say people don’t recognize ‘money given’ as real, my point is that even things of substance <education, investment in meaningful materialistic things, childcare, etc.> have been stripped of the substance and are simply transactions. That said. Achieving commercial symmetry is going to be difficult.

And I end with that thought despite the reality that, basically, people pay more, receive less, and are told that is the way the world is supposed to work. In other words, we are actually told that money chooses how it lives. Ponder.

===

“An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark – that is critical genius.”

===

“The turning point really is just knowing you’re an imbecile.”

===

I almost called this the ugly underbelly of simplicity, but heuristic imbeciles was more fun. To be clear. I am not smart enough to come up with ‘heuristic imbecile.’ Someone must have said it or written it somewhere because it was scribbled in one of my notebooks. So, what is a heuristic imbecile? I would bet we all have one or more people in our sphere. They forward some meme or a snapshot of some simplistic shit (sometimes a quote) that either (a) ignores context or history or (b) maddeningly actually makes the opposite pint they believe it does (but in an upside-down alternative universe down looks up). What they are doing is adopting complex beliefs based on incorrect, or less-than-correct, simplistic bites of information. Let’s call it the allure of the ‘satisfactory partial.’ Pieces and parts become the quick and dirty heuristics to navigating the less-than-rational path. Yeah. Heuristic imbeciles cannot be agents of rational thoughts. The imbecile use of heuristics basically means always being caught in-between rational and irrational even though someone may think of themselves as ‘the rational one’. The satisfactory partial process seems to make sense and, yet, it arrives at outcomes that don’t really make sense. That’s because the ‘process’ understanding isn’t really understanding but rather, well, satisfactory partials. And from there, well, we are screwed.

Anyway. Remember that a thinker must collect and remember enough available information to be rational or implement ‘reason.’ Ignorance is no excuse because there is more than enough information available, so the test is what I knew or should have known. This is stressful. This creates cognitive dissonance. This makes us dependent on some heuristic thinking. The problem, that imbecile thing, occurs with the question of what we conveniently adopt, which creates in some sense an unsound inference, in order to make a choice/decision or even form an opinion. We demand a reasonable requirement of collection of available information and yet many do not have the ability to gather all of it. the reality is we must implement some reasonable care in the gathering as well as the assessment.  This is sometimes called a ‘finite predicament.’ In this predicament our finite minds mean we are unlikely to have entirely correct and complete theories therefore our cognitive biases may cause us to accept some falsehoods and reject some truths. To be clear, generally speaking, we should be cool with this. The reality is complete theories are likely to be too complex for many of us to understand. We are always in a finite predicament of having fixed finite limits on our cognitive resources. In fact we should accept the possibility that any human being let alone any computational entity to be able to perform some relatively simple reasoning tasks in ways that are guaranteed to be correct. This doesn’t mean that we should abandon reason in the pursuit of rational thinking, but rather understand the limitations of what we call reason and rational. It is the understanding that almost every single action that we choose will fall somewhere between randomness and perfection and an understanding that our best logical ability simply must satisfy the minimal inference condition. Uhm. The heuristic imbeciles do none of this.

Part of their issue is they use simplistic heuristics as ‘obvious inferences’ which are supposed to represent understanding of logical truths involved in those inferences. To be clear. The question of adopting convenient, but in some sense unsound inference rules, is how a human’s deduction system works. And while not completely rational it is not a complete rejection of ideal rational conditions because if it did it would encourage us to adopt and anything goes thinking. We just grab onto satisfactory partials, but, the truth is almost always found in the drama of the details. Heuristic imbeciles hate details.

Which leads me to the imbeciles God – technology.

I will not even begin with ChatGPT, suffice it to say the reality is that humans and technology are intertwined and in fact technology becomes a mechanism of some version of a technological moral change. What I mean by that is technology affects moral beliefs and practices through decisions, how we make morally embedded decisions related to others and their decisions, how we relate to others, and perceptually how we perceive situations. And when technology is embedded in those ways they’re constantly nudging against our morality by adding options, by changing decision making utility and costs, by enabling new relationships, by altering the burdens and expectations within those relationships, altering existing balance of power in relationships, and ultimately changing the perceptions through information altering mental models and, of course, heuristics.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out an additional consequence of imbecile heuristics is it permits a sense of distance. What I mean by that is the heuristic provides a sense of anonymous expertise which creates a physical, mental, and moral distance which reduces any consequences to actually being wrong. Ultimately, though, this imbecile runs on reductive, exclusionary ideals of the world which, over time, begins to tear the fabric of the societal contracts. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of heuristic thinking rejecting the misguided ideals, but the imbeciles can be overwhelming and exhausting.

What we would like is for technology and our heuristics to provide us with mental models and analogies for understanding the world. Heuristics do this in a simple and direct way by giving us new images which we use to interpret and understand the world usually by helping us develop theories about the world. Often it happens in a very abstract way (I believe this is called the tools-to-theories heuristic). Once again, generally speaking, all of us do this. All I’m suggesting is that the heuristic imbeciles do this in such a simplistic and affirming way it is unhealthy for society and, practically speaking, useless for the individual. And it can even become slightly dangerous in that new mental models and heuristics inevitably change our moral perceptions.

Which leads me back to heuristics themselves.

Heuristics are constantly evolving and adapting as we are provided new data, imagery, and information. And as the heuristics change the mental models adapt. And while most of human reasoning about the world is done through simplified mental models of how the world works, reasoning is dependent on crafting models by comparing them with other models. But heuristic imbecile mental models are typically, uhm, heuristics, not models. So, uhm, yeah, their heuristics are being shaped by other heuristics. It gets worse. The heuristic imbeciles simplify this even more so not by degrees, but by multiple degrees. So, while models typically generate insightful thinking and practical guidance, heuristic imbeciles don’t truly compare mental models (and new data, imagery, information) for insightful thinking and practical guidance, they simply generate nonsense and useless guidance. Look. We all compartmentalize information to manage cognitive resources. But extreme compartmentalization, which is basically what heuristic imbecile do, tends to exclude a belief system from the things it needs to optimize reasoning and rationality. What I mean by that is if a belief system is organized into too many sharply defined small compartments, cognitively it all disintegrates into unrelated fragments of too many of the beliefs. The consequence of this is it decreases the likelihood to activate any coherence between them because the mental model only sees too many inconsistencies so useful inferences cannot be recognized.  Here is where things go really awry. Without the linkage the simplistic sense making becomes grounded in flawed logic which, while possibly being okay in the present, will inevitably guarantee the future will at some point no longer make sense. It is generally recognized in the philosophy of psychology that although consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds consistency is a condition for having any mind at all and if the heuristic imbecile cannot even make sense of the present; the future is fucked.

Which leads me to not all finites are created equal.

The reality is a very fundamental feature of human beings is the finite predicament of having fixed limits on their cognitive capacities and the time available to them. This actually demands minimal heuristic requirements as a default mechanism to get us mentally from here to there. The finite predicament we find ourselves in is within our fixed finite limits on our cognitive resources. We may be unable to grasp complete theories because some of the most interesting important theories are likely to be too complex for us to understand and this, inevitably, leads everyone to , in some form or fashion, to agree on some ‘satisfactory partials’. Unfortunately, this contributes to the innate cognitive biases necessary to navigate life and decision making and sensemaking, yet, may also cause us to accept some falsehoods and reject some truths. But just as not all finites are created equal, not all heuristic use is created equal. While much of what I have said today we all do, the heuristic imbeciles are just bad at all of this. they could be lazy, they could be purposefully ignorant, they could be happy with their mental bias, but in the end they are imbeciles who use heuristics to simplify the world in dangerously misguided ways.

Anyway.

Rejection of an ideal rationality condition will never translate into rationalism (a minimal normative condition as a descriptive condition is a dangerous path to wander). And being a heuristic imbecile will never translate into rationalism (although it may feel rational to the heuristic imbecile). Look. In the daily onslaught of new data, a sane human will settle on some vanity metric to point to. Vanity metrics are simplistic heuristics for complex situations. The problem in being sane is in this world we become heuristic imbeciles defining success and failure and picking winners and losers off these simplistic heuristics, memes and information. So, well, maybe I am suggesting in order to avoid being a heuristic imbecile you have to approach the world in a slightly less sane way. Well. That’s a point to ponder.

===

“Education is a requirement for success. College is not.”

Me

===

“Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.”
JFK

===

This is just a short thought on education mostly because I keep hearing about ‘free’ (note: nothing is free) college for everyone. Personally, I think this is nuts. Maybe some technical college or community college, but if you choose to go to a 4-year college, please, go get a good loan. But it’s your choice. And you should pay for your choice.

That said. Free is energizing, but we should be taking a look at structurally whether the education system accommodates the true development of the potential of people.

And maybe this is where I veer a bit from other people.

I break education down into two basic aspects: structural foundational education and ongoing education.

Structural education is the basics you need to assume adult responsibilities and citizen responsibilities. Lets call it readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic + civic education. But I offer it with a twist. Its not time driven (you go at your own pace to the floor or the ceiling) and let me highlight the ceiling aspect. There should be “gifted student programs” because we want the smartest to go as fast, and far, as they can and feel comfortable doing so. Please note that I believe this despite the fact research suggests gifted programs don’t really optimize either IQ or scores and break out gifted students typically benefits disadvantaged gifted students moreso than anyone (even advanced gifted students). But I even have a twist on this. it has been shown time and time again that even one gifted student in a class can lift the entire class. So there has to be some cross-pollination which leads me to the additional ‘gifted student’ program: The generalist path. So what happens if you are gifted in combinatorial thinking? Well. Now you have a gifted program. This structural thinking demands a bit of changed perspectives on education, but in my pealike brain the existing system could be transformed to this thinking (rather than build something from scratch).**

** note: building a new education system from scratch, of which I am a proponent of, is a topic for another day.

Ongoing education certainly has a beginning, but I am unclear there is an end. The reality is awarding more college degrees does not increase the number of jobs that most graduates desire. We are running up against a fundamental limit both in terms of people being herded into college programs and the number of matched-skilled jobs available for them when they graduate. Numbers vary, but about 1 in 5 college graduates in the US are considered overeducated for their current occupation. Circling back, please note “when they graduate.” We are in a weird spot where we feel like there should be a “done this, deserve that” linear like flow. And while. Hypothetically (because of the investment), this should be right, its not. education is complimentary to experience and the combinatorial aspects sometimes mean that there is a time continuum aspect to value created. Well. that’s the whole “ongoing” thing. Anyway. While most people don’t know these numbers, they sense the numbers and as a consequence “higher” education has become easier to access, yet, fewer people take advantage of it. I would argue the majority of people, absent the overwhelming expense, are focused not on education per se, but rather ‘development’, i.e., develop constant learning to be of value and create value in the community (some of which could be monetized). And, yes, this could be primarily in their profession of choice. But. Good management of resources, all resources, should enable opportunities for all people to thrive today and tomorrow, to educate and improve themselves. We should conserve a system of ongoing learning, i.e., education.

Look. The conservation of education is part of, but not the same as, the larger question of national efficiency and effectiveness which I am fairly sure we, society, do not really know how to answer. That’s bad. Its really bad that our perspectives are mostly what’s holding us back. Any significant redesign of education involves changes in how we see as well as how we act, and I would suggest the world – in all its imperfect glory – has repeatedly attempted to transform our perspectives. I am not suggesting education has to run in opposition to rampant industrialization and capitalism, but it should certainly not be run by it.

In the end. It is easy to run into problems when decisions about education are made by a population that is, itself, under educated and steeped in a belief that education is to train for some specific profession.

In the end, 13 years ago I wrote college isn’t for everyone. It isn’t. And we should stop suggesting people who don’t go to college are lesser than, in any way, than someone who elects to go. That said. I think the entire education system needs to be redesigned, but college education in particular needs to shift from a profit-making machine into institutions dedicated to being places of learning. I say that because we are in a weird place where less and less people value a college education and more and more people are suggesting it should be for free, i.e., it is of no value and costs nothing. We should want to have every child have the ability to access college should they desire it. And insure the ones who will excel with a college experience get there with the highest probability of success. And let non-college goers still have opportunities to learn while pursuing their professional choices. Ponder.