Sunday, September 04, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
What is Evil Anyway?
WHAT IS EVIL ANYWAY?
“When you rise in the morning, tell yourself: The people I meet with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and foul-tempered. They are like this because they do not know how to tell good from evil. But I have seen the nature of what is good and the ugliness of evil, and I have seen this not only in others but in myself.”
–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I stood inside the black cube of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and wondered to myself what sort of thing could any people have done to warrant such insane, wholesale extermination? Typical pat answers flooded into my mind: the Jews had created envy and resentment with their accumulation of wealth and manipulation of the political system in Germany; they didn’t believe Hitler when he told them he was going to get rid of them…But was any of this–whether true or false–a sufficient “reason” for such monumental cruelty? Clearly it could only have been an excuse for something much darker and much emptier than the faults of a clannish people who sought their own advantage, and possibly sometimes at the expense of others. Can any of us say that we are not culturally and personally guilty of the same thing? At that moment, however, I had no answer, so I knelt and wept as the endless list of names were read over the disembodied sound system.
The ultimate answer to the evil that we see around us–from murder on a global scale to the financial deceits of corporate pirates, and the legal loopholes for bad behavior hoisted on us by those who think more freedom is the answer to evil–is not a pleasant one, and it takes us, much as Marcus Aurelius observed, to the ugliness of evil observable within ourselves. What might the classical world be able to tell us about evil in a day and age marked by suicide bombers, priestly pedophiles, road rage, gang beatings, sexual chicanery in the White House, and the recent genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and Yugoslavia?
What is evil anyway? Do we need a devil with horns and a place with flames for those who don’t measure up to the mark? The educated Greeks and Romans really didn’t need Gods or demons (even though they had more Gods than you could shake a stick at) to see that evil was simply the absence of something good that might be present. Plato, for example, believed that evil was a deficiency of judgment resulting in ignorance, and that morality meant reversing the process whereby the appetites had overwhelmed reason. If the evil man or woman did what was wrong it was only because they thought that such a “good” appeared to be a greater good than it actually was. A man who steals, for example, thinks that such an act will bring him happiness and a better life. (Generally speaking, experience tells us that the exact opposite is the case.) False knowledge is for Plato a “sleep of ignorance” that must be woken up from with the more accurate and illumined knowledge of what he called virtue, which produces good results, as opposed to vice, or the bad habits that produce bad results. This excellent knowledge is recovered, according to Plato, through the soul’s recollection or what we might call today mindfulness.
Living, Plato indicated is an art, and the soul’s unique function is the art of living. This art is cultivated by having true knowledge of the soul. In the Republic, Plato describes the soul as having two parts, which he terms the rational and the irrational. The irrational is divided into appetite and spirit (what we might call the will today) and the rational part of the soul is the intellect. He uses the example of a charioteer, in the dialog Phaedrus, who is in command of the two horses of rationality and irrationality. You are the charioteer and you hold the reins to those horses. According to Plato, as the soul recollects itself–gazing as it were into the mirror of its own destiny–it develops a growing love for the transcendental realities of, Truth, Beauty and Goodness. This can only happen, however, by an ascent of the ladder of virtue, rather than a descent down the opposite ladder of vice.
Aristotle, perhaps less colorful than Plato, but more precise, described the soul as having five powers: the vegetative (growth) power, the locomotive power (the power to move), the sensitive power (which generates the five senses), the appetitive power (instincts and will) and the intellectual power of the mind. Acts of human evil, in the abstract, are simply deficiencies of some “good” in the operation of these five powers. The intellectual virtues of art, wisdom, science, understanding and prudence (the ability to govern oneself with reason) enable the intellect to be developed. It is an evil not to develop the intellect and it is from this tradition that the west places a high but confused value on education. (I say confused because some of the intellectual virtues are stressed in western education but the moral virtues are largely ignored.) The moral virtues such as justice, courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, honor, gentleness, continence, friendship, and truthfulness are likewise, habits that help regulate the appetites or the horse of unreasonableness. In other words, and for example, if a man was either ignorant or lacking in self-restraint in regards to the excessive accumulation of wealth, a vice known as greed, this was to be considered a deficiency of intellectual and moral virtue and good character, an “evil” as it were in relation to the individual’s potential to be a better human being. A physical defect was likewise to be attributed to a defect in the soul’s power or its ability to affect the body. A good analogy to help us understand Aristotle’s concept of the unity of the soul and the body is to think of the soul as a broadcasting station and the body as a radio or television. One makes little sense without the other.
The Christians of the Middle Ages adapted the concepts of Greek philosophy to the new
Triune God-centered religion, based on the mysterious concept of faith, founded by a Jew who made the extraordinary claim that he was the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the prophets; a claim I do not yet think has been properly understood (but that is another story in itself). The medieval scholastics, as they were later called, came up with a more perfect and succinct definition of evil–one that was told to me in Rome in the nineteen seventies by an old Catholic priest with the ironic surname of Cain– Evil is the absence of a good which could and should be present. Evil is, from the perspective of traditional Christian theology, rooted as it was in Aristotle, a privation of some good. The perfection of this definition was such that even as a spiritually confused twenty-year-old touring and studying in sunny Italy, it fell into my mind like a perfect diamond. Here was a definition that moved beyond the scapegoating of “the devil made me do it” to a deficiency in the will for seeking and attaching itself to less than what the mind might judge to be better. Do many of us not have this difficulty in regards to food, for example? We know we should eat less but we choose to eat more because it feels good. This is an “evil” in respect to our own bodies, inasmuch as overeating can kill you and create a host of other medical problems. What is smoking but a short term “good” with long term “evil” results? The problem with definitions such as good or evil is that they come with a lot of associated baggage. If you try to tell someone that certain choices might be “evil”, they look at you as if you are telling them that they might have horns. They can’t seem to get beyond the notion of evil as something allied with the devil and not necessarily evil, as in the choosing of some lesser “goods” than one might otherwise choose from a position of greater enlightenment.
Fast forward eighteen centuries and stop in France. What are we to make of the terrible stupidity of Rosseau in his book Emile, when he says, “man is a being naturally good, loving justice and order: that there is not any original perversity in the human heart and that the final movements of nature are always right”? Really, how does that explain, for instance, and as Peter Maas observes in Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, the behavior of a Yugoslav thug who wraps a strong metal wire around a Bosnian’s testicles and then drives off at full speed on his motorcycle? Oh yes, man is naturally good. This sort of liberalism–and Rosseau is the western father of liberalism–is beyond stupidity; it is juvenile metaphysical thinking at its worst.
If you have ever watched talk shows, you can see the confusion and inconsistencies in many quasi-intellectual positions by simply asking yourself: what is the greater good that might be served here? When a young girl on Rikki Lake says that it is okay to dance naked in front of her homeboys, she is making a statement about what she thinks is good. Clearly it is a subjective, short term “good” for her to dance in this manner. She gets adulation from the boys and possibly money but what is missing here? The question that never seems to get asked is: What is the highest good that might be served by this young woman? Would it not be a higher “good” for her not to arouse the lust of her friends? Such questions cannot even be entertained when sexuality is viewed as a kind of private toilet function, not to be scrutinized by any moral thinking. Prostitution, likewise, might be thought of in terms of being “good” for those who think they need to be “serviced” and “good” for those who get paid for such services, but is it really good or does it create the potential for other evils? Keeping in mind that ecology is defined as the relationship of an organism to its environment, one might argue that there is an ecology of good and an ecology of evil, with each being an evolutionary ladder to a certain kind of moral development. In other words, there is set of good habits that can take you up one of those ladders and another set of habits that can take you down the evolutionary ladder.
The linking of an ecology of the greatest potential “good” with sexual and other appetitive energy use in a public moral code that might serve us publicly as a nation is sorely needed. Walter Lippmann noted this need many years ago in his book, The Public Philosophy. “When reason no longer represents society within the human psyche, then it becomes the instrument of appetite, desire and passion.” (He might just as well have added laziness to that list.) Prudence is defined in the dictionary as, “the ability to govern and discipline oneself through reason”. Do we see this today with rappers and rockers shouting out with unrestrained lust just what it is they want to do to their women–or any woman? Do any of the young Divas bumping and grinding their buttocks and salaciously touching their breasts and privates have any idea of what they are saying to young men driven sexually crazy by testosterone? The message is not treat me respectfully; it is: do me now, whether I want it or not. What has all of the crotch grabbing by the music crowd got to do with young killers who enjoy discharging guns at human beings in drive-by shootings in America? Is there a world-wide link between penises and vaginas that imprudently do whatever they like, to foul mouths and hands defaming and beating others? What connection is there between sexual and other forms of appetitive overindulgence and violence? There seems to be a terrible inability of educators and politicians the world over to see any connection between aggressive and unrestrained sexuality and violence. “They do not know,” as Aurelius says, “how to tell good from evil.”
There are those who will say that the suppression of sexuality in Moslem countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabia has resulted in the oppression of women and created tremendous pent-up frustration, but these same individuals will neglect to mention that masturbation and even bi-sexuality in these countries is endemic and may itself contribute to the suppression of women. Any man who looks upon a woman as his bitch or thinks his genitals have parking rights with the loins of all women is not far from the paternalistic oppression noted in these Islamic countries, which has been rightfully criticized by the women’s liberation movement. Has it ever occurred, however, to social critics that the ability to re-locate and root the sexual appetites in marriage (no matter what religion is professed) might serve the higher good of appetitive restraint and impulse management in general? “Oh no,” we are told, “sex is good” and the more of it you can get without babies the better. Masturbation is always to be encouraged under the Rosseau “nature is good” system because whatever nature wants is good. What happens when nature wants something bad? What happens when you want a little bit of violence or murder with your sex, and what happens when the products of casual sex become inconvenient? I am reminded of the cartoon that shows a snake in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve: “Take it, it’s organic.” As a red-blooded American, I can’t think of anything more agreeable from the perspective of raw desire than raping, pillaging and destroying but does that mean I should engage such impulses? What will prevent me from engaging such desires, unless I have a moral code that puts a leash on appetites knowing full well that many impulses born of nature are nowhere near what we might term “good”?
By this I don’t mean to suggest that masturbation or other forms of sexual relief might not be thought of as limited “goods” within the highly subjective sphere of individual sexuality, but it is important to relocate our sexual energy, so to speak, into a context where it might be more productive, and tend more towards the moral and even spiritual perfection of our humanity, rather than being simply a sexual relief valve. Marriage tends to integrate sexuality in a way that is biologically healthy and it certainly can provide some serious protection against disease. Additionally, marriage functions as a tremendous school for impulse management. A friend in California once told me that if you can perfect any relationship that you will become enlightened. Perfecting the relationship with a spouse is a life-long task and that, along with the rearing of children, tends to integrate and domesticate sexuality. Men who are busy working, and raising and spending time with their families, generally speaking, have little time for mischief.
Single men and others with unrestrained appetites and nothing productive to do are a rich source of recruits for belief systems that require cannon fodder and are the “useful idiots” referred to by Lenin. Islamic militants who think they will go to heaven for blowing themselves up and Christian evangelists who think that God can be invoked while they are having sex on the sly and stealing money from their congregations, to Jewish militants who think that somehow, Palestinians have a different set of human rights than they themselves do, requires a moral ecology of good and evil for these belief deficiencies to be put into rational perspective. How might we begin to talk about a moral code that might be universally applicable to all men and women? How might we talk about what unites humankind as opposed to what divides it?
The beginning of an answer to these questions may be found in an analysis of Plato’s Symposium in The Four Cardinal Virtues by Joseph Pieper. The scene is a bunch of friends at a banquet and a man by the name of Agathon makes a toast in praise of love. What is unusual to modern eyes about the toast is that he organizes his praise around the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance (self-restraint in regards to pleasure). This was not unusual for the men at this gathering in 375 B.C. because these were common concepts in currency at the time. The doctrine of virtue as it has been called was one of the great discoveries of the ancient world and one that might be reintroduced to western culture with beneficial effects. When, for example, was the last time that you heard a modern psychologist or a politician speaking about the four cardinal virtues? Justice we hear much about, but justice without prudence, or the ability to govern one’s appetites is blind, and prudence without fortitude (the strength to keep doing the right thing, to just do it as they say) and temperance (the ability to exercise self-restraint in regards to pleasure) goes nowhere. How might we speak of good and bad habits today?
There is an amazing diversity of opinion on what is good and what is bad in America because there is no common denominator for evaluating either evil or good other than the asinine social contract theory, which proposes that all law is simply “positive” meaning that it has no significance beyond the elements of and the parties to the agreement itself. Modern law does not point beyond itself to the potential causality of a higher good. Indeed, modern law is hostile to such a concept. The insanity of the O.J. Simpson trial to Bill Clinton’s famous line: “it depends on what you mean by is” is indicative of modern law’s separation of itself from any concept of a higher good or even causality. What you can manipulate is based on a written calculus of sophistry. Taint the evidence, degrade the meaning of words, taint the intentions of witnesses; taint everything that you can, and then degrade the “evidence” because there is in fact nothing beyond the shifting sands of words within the confines of modern law. Devolving theologies and psychologies likewise seem to have denuded themselves of causality and common sense, leaving us in an Alice in Wonderland state of affairs where everything is just as you want it to be. The semantic and legal reduction of all meaning to linguistic analysis, which in turn deconstructs meaning is in fact the resurrection of the ancient enemy of irrationality now elevated to god-like status. It is almost as if the collective appetites of man have appeared in the form of solid waste masquerading as human consciousness. Such appetites are essentially the incarnation of a giant backside waiting to evacuate on mankind. Socrates himself had to deal with such sophists–men like Zeno who claimed that motion was impossible and others who indicated that virtue was completely useless. The sophists of Socrates day would be right at home in the legal profession in America; it would all seem so familiar. The only way out is as Socrates recommended: through the looking glass of our higher selves, or to use a more ancient term, the soul. The recollection of the soul that both Socrates and Plato speak of can only occur in a mind that is conscious of the energy of both ego and a higher self. This energy is subject to the laws of conservation of energy and has an ecological relationship with both body and soul.
This is of course a kind of New Age spirituality with a Greek twist but don’t let the terminology obscure the argument. Clearly, science is trying to grasp a new paradigm, whereby the data from scientific observation is welded into a new synthesis using the metaphorical data from the internal metaphysical observations of various pioneers of consciousness. In other words, metaphysics and science as metaphor can lead us in directions that science as the applied digestion of data cannot. Who is not vaguely disturbed, for example, with the reams of data gibberish that are turned out by many (but certainly not all) of the journals of social science? It is no accident that the number crunching function of the human mind is the easiest mental function to duplicate in machines. I remember being astounded at Aristotle’s claim that the ability to reason metaphysically involved a higher mental function that the ability to do mathematics. When you think about it for a moment, it becomes self-evident. Computers cannot think and the calculating of functions is not thinking but merely the abacus-like processing of existing patterns of mathematical reality.
The energy of sexuality might be thought of as relating directly to morality and the psychological health of individuals if the unseen helmsman of the higher self or soul could be shown to be dependent for its existence and clarity on that same energy. Kinetic energy, for example, is scientifically described as the energy of motion, and unless the motion of the life force or soul can be related kinetically to the body, then it is without useful significance. The Greek word Cyber means helmsman, so we might call the higher self or soul, the Cyber Identity and the energy that runs the soul, Cyber Kinetic energy. You might want to call it life force energy, the energy of the Id, or Chi, but call it something. Energy runs the universe and it is scientific obtuseness to pretend that some kind of life energy that we have not yet properly identified is not required to run the operations of the human mind and spirit.
There will be those of course who will refuse to accept the possibility of the existence of Cyber-Kinetic energy or anything like it simply on the basis of it not being scientifically verifiable. This is a legitimate objection but one that can ultimately be dissolved by hard science. The direction that science might take to identify the possible nature of life force energy and the existence of the Cyber Identity comes from some remarkable new research in Quantum Physics. Michio Kaku in his book, Hyperspace makes the following startling statement, which I will paraphrase. “With the addition of dimensions higher than the four of height, length, width and time, suddenly many of the intractable problems of modern physics become solvable.”
Let me furnish you with an example of the revolutionary significance of this statement from another book by William Abbott called Flatland. If you visualize a two dimensional dot imprisoned inside of a two dimensional box, you might ask yourself how that dot might escape, if it wanted to. Clearly it cannot go up because it only knows the dimensions of length and width, not height. Now go in and take the dot out of its prison. What have you done? You, being a three-dimensional creature, have no difficulty taking the dot out of its prison because height is a third dimension that you function in. But how does the dot’s escape look to the dot? A shape appeared out of nowhere and moved the dot onto another two-dimensional landscape! Now imagine yourself in a four dimensional prison. How would you get out? Perhaps if you had access to the fifth or a higher dimension, you could walk through your prison walls. If a five dimensional being took you out of your four dimensional prison, you would think a miracle occurred. Likewise, you may want to think about Cyber-Kinetic energy and the soul in the same way. They are five plus dimensional artifacts and we can only infer their existence from a four dimensional perspective. Indeed, one might infer that many of the problems of classical metaphysics much like physics suddenly become solvable with the addition of higher dimensions. The theory of the soul makes little sense, except to intuitive reason, unless it is understood as having a multi-dimensional identity. Once the soul is grasped as the hyperspace template of the body, suddenly its links to the ephemeral transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty, and indeed to some uncaused shimmering Source beyond itself appears as a radiant and rational possibility.
Once the possible existence of the Cyber Identity of the soul has been postulated in multi-dimensional space (hyperspace), and the multi-dimensional kinetic energy that the Cyber Identity requires for the maximum development of virtue is further identified, then we can talk about the moral ecologies that might help steer the Cyber Identity into the wakefulness of recollection that Plato and other ancients have spoken of. We might also take a giant step forward by adopting such a model as a framework for the development of national standards of moral and psychological health and development. By adopting such a working framework, we will at last have some means of identifying evil, searching out what is merely good from what is better, and finally, putting to rest at last, the ancient antagonism between science and religion.
I am of the opinion that Sigmund Freud was onto something of extraordinary significance with his teaching on the cathection of instinctual energy. The Id, as many of you will recall, is Freud’s designated repository of instinctual or psychic energy, which in turn gives rise to the Ego and Superego. The difficulty with Freud’s teaching is that he didn’t go nearly far enough. The concept of cathection within a closed system such as Freud developed, in the final analysis, goes nowhere. If you take the concept of cathection and apply it to the energy dynamics of the Cyber Identity or the soul, suddenly you have an extraordinary new way of looking at how the Cyber Identity makes its connections to the world. The famous “I am that” of the Hindu sages is the epistemological cathection that the Cyber Identity makes on a daily basis. The moral of the story is: be careful of what you know!
Ultimately, and by having a moral grid on which to plot right and wrong actions, we might also identify and catalog the various kinds of cyberpathology that on some occasions may also give rise to mental illness. One has only to read, for example, the latest biography of Howard Hughes to grasp that there is in fact a preventable daisy chain of cathections to appetitive indulgence that lead from sanity to madness. Indeed, the unregulated cathections to the appetitive power of the soul have not to my knowledge been investigated by the social sciences as causal in any way of certain kinds of mental illness. Strange compulsions, attractions to self-destructive actions and the physical mutilation of the so-called “cutters” is in fact more indicative of the danger of unregulated cathections to the appetitive power of the soul than is the search for a biological basis for the etiology of certain kinds of mental illness. How might we describe, for example, a person who starts out as a simple coward and ends up in the folds of paranoid delusion and phobia? The continuum between a developing Cyber Identity and a devolving Cyber Identity may yield rich metaphorical clues for the solving of formerly intractable problems. Aristotle may have the final word here. Quoting Evenus in the Nichomachean Ethics, he says, “I say that habit’s but long practice friend, and this becomes men’s nature in the end.”
There is a marvelous paragraph in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons that captures the nature and possibility of moral recollection for those caught in the four dimensional prison of vice. Moore says to Norfolk: “And what would you do with a water spaniel that was afraid of water? You’d hang it! Well, as a spaniel is to water, so is a man to his own self. I will not give in because I oppose it–I do–not my pride, not my spleen, nor any other of my appetites but I do–I!” Moore goes up to Norfolk and feels him up and down as if he were some kind of animal and says, “Is there no single sinew in the midst of this that serves no appetite of Norfolk’s but is just Norfolk? There is! Give that some exercise my lord!” Note the extraordinary and simple distinction that Bolt creates by differentiating Norfolk’s vice ridden ego from his hidden self that Moore tries to so desperately awaken–not for his sake but for Norfolk’s. This is superb virtue in action, because if you recall, Moore was to be beheaded for his moral stance against the sexual predations and spiritual pretensions of the English King, Henry the VIII.
There is an extraordinary line in Aristotle’s Politics that goes to the heart of Moore’s struggle with moral corruption. He says, “Democrats take equality for their motto; oligarchs believe that political rights should be unequal and proportional to wealth. But both sides miss the true object of the state, which is virtue. Those who do most to promote virtue deserve the greatest share of power.” The real evil in the political process is that those who could do the most to promote virtue are generally speaking, excluded from the process with the constitutional separation of church and state, which has unfortunately, and in some very strange way, become in reality a separation of morality and the state, and a breeding ground for a multiplicity of social evils. Who is not appalled, for example, at the peculiar legal logic that allows one human being to be imprisoned for stealing a pen from the post office and yet at the same time, allows a man who beats his wife regularly to continue to freely walk the streets?
There is in Bolt’s vignette about Moore and Norfolk, everything we need to know about combating evil and discovering truth. The weight of authority cannot stand against the man or woman who holds fast to the good that his or her own souls recognize and possess with cyberkinetic force. If Socrates could drink poison and Christians die in the blood soaked arenas of Rome for the sake of higher goods, then we may view the moral and spiritual development of mankind as challenging the ancient plantation mentality of the vice-ridden earthly lords of evil. Rise up; you have nothing to lose but the chains of their egos.
About Sean J. O'Reilly:
Sean Joseph O’Reilly is the Author of How to Manage Your Destructive Impulses with Cyber-Kinetics (How to Manage Your DICK) www.dickmanagement.com, editor of many award-winning travel books (www.travelers.tales.com) including The Road Within, Testosterone Planet, The Ultimate Journey, Pilgrimage, and The Spiritual Gifts of Travel. An active member of the Society of American Travel Writers, he lives with his wife Brenda and their six children in Arizona. He is also the founder of the new science of Quantum Cyberdynamics and Fifth Access, a think tank dedicated to unlocking the benefits of multi-dimensional thinking.
“When you rise in the morning, tell yourself: The people I meet with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and foul-tempered. They are like this because they do not know how to tell good from evil. But I have seen the nature of what is good and the ugliness of evil, and I have seen this not only in others but in myself.”
–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I stood inside the black cube of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and wondered to myself what sort of thing could any people have done to warrant such insane, wholesale extermination? Typical pat answers flooded into my mind: the Jews had created envy and resentment with their accumulation of wealth and manipulation of the political system in Germany; they didn’t believe Hitler when he told them he was going to get rid of them…But was any of this–whether true or false–a sufficient “reason” for such monumental cruelty? Clearly it could only have been an excuse for something much darker and much emptier than the faults of a clannish people who sought their own advantage, and possibly sometimes at the expense of others. Can any of us say that we are not culturally and personally guilty of the same thing? At that moment, however, I had no answer, so I knelt and wept as the endless list of names were read over the disembodied sound system.
The ultimate answer to the evil that we see around us–from murder on a global scale to the financial deceits of corporate pirates, and the legal loopholes for bad behavior hoisted on us by those who think more freedom is the answer to evil–is not a pleasant one, and it takes us, much as Marcus Aurelius observed, to the ugliness of evil observable within ourselves. What might the classical world be able to tell us about evil in a day and age marked by suicide bombers, priestly pedophiles, road rage, gang beatings, sexual chicanery in the White House, and the recent genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and Yugoslavia?
What is evil anyway? Do we need a devil with horns and a place with flames for those who don’t measure up to the mark? The educated Greeks and Romans really didn’t need Gods or demons (even though they had more Gods than you could shake a stick at) to see that evil was simply the absence of something good that might be present. Plato, for example, believed that evil was a deficiency of judgment resulting in ignorance, and that morality meant reversing the process whereby the appetites had overwhelmed reason. If the evil man or woman did what was wrong it was only because they thought that such a “good” appeared to be a greater good than it actually was. A man who steals, for example, thinks that such an act will bring him happiness and a better life. (Generally speaking, experience tells us that the exact opposite is the case.) False knowledge is for Plato a “sleep of ignorance” that must be woken up from with the more accurate and illumined knowledge of what he called virtue, which produces good results, as opposed to vice, or the bad habits that produce bad results. This excellent knowledge is recovered, according to Plato, through the soul’s recollection or what we might call today mindfulness.
Living, Plato indicated is an art, and the soul’s unique function is the art of living. This art is cultivated by having true knowledge of the soul. In the Republic, Plato describes the soul as having two parts, which he terms the rational and the irrational. The irrational is divided into appetite and spirit (what we might call the will today) and the rational part of the soul is the intellect. He uses the example of a charioteer, in the dialog Phaedrus, who is in command of the two horses of rationality and irrationality. You are the charioteer and you hold the reins to those horses. According to Plato, as the soul recollects itself–gazing as it were into the mirror of its own destiny–it develops a growing love for the transcendental realities of, Truth, Beauty and Goodness. This can only happen, however, by an ascent of the ladder of virtue, rather than a descent down the opposite ladder of vice.
Aristotle, perhaps less colorful than Plato, but more precise, described the soul as having five powers: the vegetative (growth) power, the locomotive power (the power to move), the sensitive power (which generates the five senses), the appetitive power (instincts and will) and the intellectual power of the mind. Acts of human evil, in the abstract, are simply deficiencies of some “good” in the operation of these five powers. The intellectual virtues of art, wisdom, science, understanding and prudence (the ability to govern oneself with reason) enable the intellect to be developed. It is an evil not to develop the intellect and it is from this tradition that the west places a high but confused value on education. (I say confused because some of the intellectual virtues are stressed in western education but the moral virtues are largely ignored.) The moral virtues such as justice, courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, honor, gentleness, continence, friendship, and truthfulness are likewise, habits that help regulate the appetites or the horse of unreasonableness. In other words, and for example, if a man was either ignorant or lacking in self-restraint in regards to the excessive accumulation of wealth, a vice known as greed, this was to be considered a deficiency of intellectual and moral virtue and good character, an “evil” as it were in relation to the individual’s potential to be a better human being. A physical defect was likewise to be attributed to a defect in the soul’s power or its ability to affect the body. A good analogy to help us understand Aristotle’s concept of the unity of the soul and the body is to think of the soul as a broadcasting station and the body as a radio or television. One makes little sense without the other.
The Christians of the Middle Ages adapted the concepts of Greek philosophy to the new
Triune God-centered religion, based on the mysterious concept of faith, founded by a Jew who made the extraordinary claim that he was the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the prophets; a claim I do not yet think has been properly understood (but that is another story in itself). The medieval scholastics, as they were later called, came up with a more perfect and succinct definition of evil–one that was told to me in Rome in the nineteen seventies by an old Catholic priest with the ironic surname of Cain– Evil is the absence of a good which could and should be present. Evil is, from the perspective of traditional Christian theology, rooted as it was in Aristotle, a privation of some good. The perfection of this definition was such that even as a spiritually confused twenty-year-old touring and studying in sunny Italy, it fell into my mind like a perfect diamond. Here was a definition that moved beyond the scapegoating of “the devil made me do it” to a deficiency in the will for seeking and attaching itself to less than what the mind might judge to be better. Do many of us not have this difficulty in regards to food, for example? We know we should eat less but we choose to eat more because it feels good. This is an “evil” in respect to our own bodies, inasmuch as overeating can kill you and create a host of other medical problems. What is smoking but a short term “good” with long term “evil” results? The problem with definitions such as good or evil is that they come with a lot of associated baggage. If you try to tell someone that certain choices might be “evil”, they look at you as if you are telling them that they might have horns. They can’t seem to get beyond the notion of evil as something allied with the devil and not necessarily evil, as in the choosing of some lesser “goods” than one might otherwise choose from a position of greater enlightenment.
Fast forward eighteen centuries and stop in France. What are we to make of the terrible stupidity of Rosseau in his book Emile, when he says, “man is a being naturally good, loving justice and order: that there is not any original perversity in the human heart and that the final movements of nature are always right”? Really, how does that explain, for instance, and as Peter Maas observes in Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, the behavior of a Yugoslav thug who wraps a strong metal wire around a Bosnian’s testicles and then drives off at full speed on his motorcycle? Oh yes, man is naturally good. This sort of liberalism–and Rosseau is the western father of liberalism–is beyond stupidity; it is juvenile metaphysical thinking at its worst.
If you have ever watched talk shows, you can see the confusion and inconsistencies in many quasi-intellectual positions by simply asking yourself: what is the greater good that might be served here? When a young girl on Rikki Lake says that it is okay to dance naked in front of her homeboys, she is making a statement about what she thinks is good. Clearly it is a subjective, short term “good” for her to dance in this manner. She gets adulation from the boys and possibly money but what is missing here? The question that never seems to get asked is: What is the highest good that might be served by this young woman? Would it not be a higher “good” for her not to arouse the lust of her friends? Such questions cannot even be entertained when sexuality is viewed as a kind of private toilet function, not to be scrutinized by any moral thinking. Prostitution, likewise, might be thought of in terms of being “good” for those who think they need to be “serviced” and “good” for those who get paid for such services, but is it really good or does it create the potential for other evils? Keeping in mind that ecology is defined as the relationship of an organism to its environment, one might argue that there is an ecology of good and an ecology of evil, with each being an evolutionary ladder to a certain kind of moral development. In other words, there is set of good habits that can take you up one of those ladders and another set of habits that can take you down the evolutionary ladder.
The linking of an ecology of the greatest potential “good” with sexual and other appetitive energy use in a public moral code that might serve us publicly as a nation is sorely needed. Walter Lippmann noted this need many years ago in his book, The Public Philosophy. “When reason no longer represents society within the human psyche, then it becomes the instrument of appetite, desire and passion.” (He might just as well have added laziness to that list.) Prudence is defined in the dictionary as, “the ability to govern and discipline oneself through reason”. Do we see this today with rappers and rockers shouting out with unrestrained lust just what it is they want to do to their women–or any woman? Do any of the young Divas bumping and grinding their buttocks and salaciously touching their breasts and privates have any idea of what they are saying to young men driven sexually crazy by testosterone? The message is not treat me respectfully; it is: do me now, whether I want it or not. What has all of the crotch grabbing by the music crowd got to do with young killers who enjoy discharging guns at human beings in drive-by shootings in America? Is there a world-wide link between penises and vaginas that imprudently do whatever they like, to foul mouths and hands defaming and beating others? What connection is there between sexual and other forms of appetitive overindulgence and violence? There seems to be a terrible inability of educators and politicians the world over to see any connection between aggressive and unrestrained sexuality and violence. “They do not know,” as Aurelius says, “how to tell good from evil.”
There are those who will say that the suppression of sexuality in Moslem countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabia has resulted in the oppression of women and created tremendous pent-up frustration, but these same individuals will neglect to mention that masturbation and even bi-sexuality in these countries is endemic and may itself contribute to the suppression of women. Any man who looks upon a woman as his bitch or thinks his genitals have parking rights with the loins of all women is not far from the paternalistic oppression noted in these Islamic countries, which has been rightfully criticized by the women’s liberation movement. Has it ever occurred, however, to social critics that the ability to re-locate and root the sexual appetites in marriage (no matter what religion is professed) might serve the higher good of appetitive restraint and impulse management in general? “Oh no,” we are told, “sex is good” and the more of it you can get without babies the better. Masturbation is always to be encouraged under the Rosseau “nature is good” system because whatever nature wants is good. What happens when nature wants something bad? What happens when you want a little bit of violence or murder with your sex, and what happens when the products of casual sex become inconvenient? I am reminded of the cartoon that shows a snake in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve: “Take it, it’s organic.” As a red-blooded American, I can’t think of anything more agreeable from the perspective of raw desire than raping, pillaging and destroying but does that mean I should engage such impulses? What will prevent me from engaging such desires, unless I have a moral code that puts a leash on appetites knowing full well that many impulses born of nature are nowhere near what we might term “good”?
By this I don’t mean to suggest that masturbation or other forms of sexual relief might not be thought of as limited “goods” within the highly subjective sphere of individual sexuality, but it is important to relocate our sexual energy, so to speak, into a context where it might be more productive, and tend more towards the moral and even spiritual perfection of our humanity, rather than being simply a sexual relief valve. Marriage tends to integrate sexuality in a way that is biologically healthy and it certainly can provide some serious protection against disease. Additionally, marriage functions as a tremendous school for impulse management. A friend in California once told me that if you can perfect any relationship that you will become enlightened. Perfecting the relationship with a spouse is a life-long task and that, along with the rearing of children, tends to integrate and domesticate sexuality. Men who are busy working, and raising and spending time with their families, generally speaking, have little time for mischief.
Single men and others with unrestrained appetites and nothing productive to do are a rich source of recruits for belief systems that require cannon fodder and are the “useful idiots” referred to by Lenin. Islamic militants who think they will go to heaven for blowing themselves up and Christian evangelists who think that God can be invoked while they are having sex on the sly and stealing money from their congregations, to Jewish militants who think that somehow, Palestinians have a different set of human rights than they themselves do, requires a moral ecology of good and evil for these belief deficiencies to be put into rational perspective. How might we begin to talk about a moral code that might be universally applicable to all men and women? How might we talk about what unites humankind as opposed to what divides it?
The beginning of an answer to these questions may be found in an analysis of Plato’s Symposium in The Four Cardinal Virtues by Joseph Pieper. The scene is a bunch of friends at a banquet and a man by the name of Agathon makes a toast in praise of love. What is unusual to modern eyes about the toast is that he organizes his praise around the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance (self-restraint in regards to pleasure). This was not unusual for the men at this gathering in 375 B.C. because these were common concepts in currency at the time. The doctrine of virtue as it has been called was one of the great discoveries of the ancient world and one that might be reintroduced to western culture with beneficial effects. When, for example, was the last time that you heard a modern psychologist or a politician speaking about the four cardinal virtues? Justice we hear much about, but justice without prudence, or the ability to govern one’s appetites is blind, and prudence without fortitude (the strength to keep doing the right thing, to just do it as they say) and temperance (the ability to exercise self-restraint in regards to pleasure) goes nowhere. How might we speak of good and bad habits today?
There is an amazing diversity of opinion on what is good and what is bad in America because there is no common denominator for evaluating either evil or good other than the asinine social contract theory, which proposes that all law is simply “positive” meaning that it has no significance beyond the elements of and the parties to the agreement itself. Modern law does not point beyond itself to the potential causality of a higher good. Indeed, modern law is hostile to such a concept. The insanity of the O.J. Simpson trial to Bill Clinton’s famous line: “it depends on what you mean by is” is indicative of modern law’s separation of itself from any concept of a higher good or even causality. What you can manipulate is based on a written calculus of sophistry. Taint the evidence, degrade the meaning of words, taint the intentions of witnesses; taint everything that you can, and then degrade the “evidence” because there is in fact nothing beyond the shifting sands of words within the confines of modern law. Devolving theologies and psychologies likewise seem to have denuded themselves of causality and common sense, leaving us in an Alice in Wonderland state of affairs where everything is just as you want it to be. The semantic and legal reduction of all meaning to linguistic analysis, which in turn deconstructs meaning is in fact the resurrection of the ancient enemy of irrationality now elevated to god-like status. It is almost as if the collective appetites of man have appeared in the form of solid waste masquerading as human consciousness. Such appetites are essentially the incarnation of a giant backside waiting to evacuate on mankind. Socrates himself had to deal with such sophists–men like Zeno who claimed that motion was impossible and others who indicated that virtue was completely useless. The sophists of Socrates day would be right at home in the legal profession in America; it would all seem so familiar. The only way out is as Socrates recommended: through the looking glass of our higher selves, or to use a more ancient term, the soul. The recollection of the soul that both Socrates and Plato speak of can only occur in a mind that is conscious of the energy of both ego and a higher self. This energy is subject to the laws of conservation of energy and has an ecological relationship with both body and soul.
This is of course a kind of New Age spirituality with a Greek twist but don’t let the terminology obscure the argument. Clearly, science is trying to grasp a new paradigm, whereby the data from scientific observation is welded into a new synthesis using the metaphorical data from the internal metaphysical observations of various pioneers of consciousness. In other words, metaphysics and science as metaphor can lead us in directions that science as the applied digestion of data cannot. Who is not vaguely disturbed, for example, with the reams of data gibberish that are turned out by many (but certainly not all) of the journals of social science? It is no accident that the number crunching function of the human mind is the easiest mental function to duplicate in machines. I remember being astounded at Aristotle’s claim that the ability to reason metaphysically involved a higher mental function that the ability to do mathematics. When you think about it for a moment, it becomes self-evident. Computers cannot think and the calculating of functions is not thinking but merely the abacus-like processing of existing patterns of mathematical reality.
The energy of sexuality might be thought of as relating directly to morality and the psychological health of individuals if the unseen helmsman of the higher self or soul could be shown to be dependent for its existence and clarity on that same energy. Kinetic energy, for example, is scientifically described as the energy of motion, and unless the motion of the life force or soul can be related kinetically to the body, then it is without useful significance. The Greek word Cyber means helmsman, so we might call the higher self or soul, the Cyber Identity and the energy that runs the soul, Cyber Kinetic energy. You might want to call it life force energy, the energy of the Id, or Chi, but call it something. Energy runs the universe and it is scientific obtuseness to pretend that some kind of life energy that we have not yet properly identified is not required to run the operations of the human mind and spirit.
There will be those of course who will refuse to accept the possibility of the existence of Cyber-Kinetic energy or anything like it simply on the basis of it not being scientifically verifiable. This is a legitimate objection but one that can ultimately be dissolved by hard science. The direction that science might take to identify the possible nature of life force energy and the existence of the Cyber Identity comes from some remarkable new research in Quantum Physics. Michio Kaku in his book, Hyperspace makes the following startling statement, which I will paraphrase. “With the addition of dimensions higher than the four of height, length, width and time, suddenly many of the intractable problems of modern physics become solvable.”
Let me furnish you with an example of the revolutionary significance of this statement from another book by William Abbott called Flatland. If you visualize a two dimensional dot imprisoned inside of a two dimensional box, you might ask yourself how that dot might escape, if it wanted to. Clearly it cannot go up because it only knows the dimensions of length and width, not height. Now go in and take the dot out of its prison. What have you done? You, being a three-dimensional creature, have no difficulty taking the dot out of its prison because height is a third dimension that you function in. But how does the dot’s escape look to the dot? A shape appeared out of nowhere and moved the dot onto another two-dimensional landscape! Now imagine yourself in a four dimensional prison. How would you get out? Perhaps if you had access to the fifth or a higher dimension, you could walk through your prison walls. If a five dimensional being took you out of your four dimensional prison, you would think a miracle occurred. Likewise, you may want to think about Cyber-Kinetic energy and the soul in the same way. They are five plus dimensional artifacts and we can only infer their existence from a four dimensional perspective. Indeed, one might infer that many of the problems of classical metaphysics much like physics suddenly become solvable with the addition of higher dimensions. The theory of the soul makes little sense, except to intuitive reason, unless it is understood as having a multi-dimensional identity. Once the soul is grasped as the hyperspace template of the body, suddenly its links to the ephemeral transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty, and indeed to some uncaused shimmering Source beyond itself appears as a radiant and rational possibility.
Once the possible existence of the Cyber Identity of the soul has been postulated in multi-dimensional space (hyperspace), and the multi-dimensional kinetic energy that the Cyber Identity requires for the maximum development of virtue is further identified, then we can talk about the moral ecologies that might help steer the Cyber Identity into the wakefulness of recollection that Plato and other ancients have spoken of. We might also take a giant step forward by adopting such a model as a framework for the development of national standards of moral and psychological health and development. By adopting such a working framework, we will at last have some means of identifying evil, searching out what is merely good from what is better, and finally, putting to rest at last, the ancient antagonism between science and religion.
I am of the opinion that Sigmund Freud was onto something of extraordinary significance with his teaching on the cathection of instinctual energy. The Id, as many of you will recall, is Freud’s designated repository of instinctual or psychic energy, which in turn gives rise to the Ego and Superego. The difficulty with Freud’s teaching is that he didn’t go nearly far enough. The concept of cathection within a closed system such as Freud developed, in the final analysis, goes nowhere. If you take the concept of cathection and apply it to the energy dynamics of the Cyber Identity or the soul, suddenly you have an extraordinary new way of looking at how the Cyber Identity makes its connections to the world. The famous “I am that” of the Hindu sages is the epistemological cathection that the Cyber Identity makes on a daily basis. The moral of the story is: be careful of what you know!
Ultimately, and by having a moral grid on which to plot right and wrong actions, we might also identify and catalog the various kinds of cyberpathology that on some occasions may also give rise to mental illness. One has only to read, for example, the latest biography of Howard Hughes to grasp that there is in fact a preventable daisy chain of cathections to appetitive indulgence that lead from sanity to madness. Indeed, the unregulated cathections to the appetitive power of the soul have not to my knowledge been investigated by the social sciences as causal in any way of certain kinds of mental illness. Strange compulsions, attractions to self-destructive actions and the physical mutilation of the so-called “cutters” is in fact more indicative of the danger of unregulated cathections to the appetitive power of the soul than is the search for a biological basis for the etiology of certain kinds of mental illness. How might we describe, for example, a person who starts out as a simple coward and ends up in the folds of paranoid delusion and phobia? The continuum between a developing Cyber Identity and a devolving Cyber Identity may yield rich metaphorical clues for the solving of formerly intractable problems. Aristotle may have the final word here. Quoting Evenus in the Nichomachean Ethics, he says, “I say that habit’s but long practice friend, and this becomes men’s nature in the end.”
There is a marvelous paragraph in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons that captures the nature and possibility of moral recollection for those caught in the four dimensional prison of vice. Moore says to Norfolk: “And what would you do with a water spaniel that was afraid of water? You’d hang it! Well, as a spaniel is to water, so is a man to his own self. I will not give in because I oppose it–I do–not my pride, not my spleen, nor any other of my appetites but I do–I!” Moore goes up to Norfolk and feels him up and down as if he were some kind of animal and says, “Is there no single sinew in the midst of this that serves no appetite of Norfolk’s but is just Norfolk? There is! Give that some exercise my lord!” Note the extraordinary and simple distinction that Bolt creates by differentiating Norfolk’s vice ridden ego from his hidden self that Moore tries to so desperately awaken–not for his sake but for Norfolk’s. This is superb virtue in action, because if you recall, Moore was to be beheaded for his moral stance against the sexual predations and spiritual pretensions of the English King, Henry the VIII.
There is an extraordinary line in Aristotle’s Politics that goes to the heart of Moore’s struggle with moral corruption. He says, “Democrats take equality for their motto; oligarchs believe that political rights should be unequal and proportional to wealth. But both sides miss the true object of the state, which is virtue. Those who do most to promote virtue deserve the greatest share of power.” The real evil in the political process is that those who could do the most to promote virtue are generally speaking, excluded from the process with the constitutional separation of church and state, which has unfortunately, and in some very strange way, become in reality a separation of morality and the state, and a breeding ground for a multiplicity of social evils. Who is not appalled, for example, at the peculiar legal logic that allows one human being to be imprisoned for stealing a pen from the post office and yet at the same time, allows a man who beats his wife regularly to continue to freely walk the streets?
There is in Bolt’s vignette about Moore and Norfolk, everything we need to know about combating evil and discovering truth. The weight of authority cannot stand against the man or woman who holds fast to the good that his or her own souls recognize and possess with cyberkinetic force. If Socrates could drink poison and Christians die in the blood soaked arenas of Rome for the sake of higher goods, then we may view the moral and spiritual development of mankind as challenging the ancient plantation mentality of the vice-ridden earthly lords of evil. Rise up; you have nothing to lose but the chains of their egos.
About Sean J. O'Reilly:
Sean Joseph O’Reilly is the Author of How to Manage Your Destructive Impulses with Cyber-Kinetics (How to Manage Your DICK) www.dickmanagement.com, editor of many award-winning travel books (www.travelers.tales.com) including The Road Within, Testosterone Planet, The Ultimate Journey, Pilgrimage, and The Spiritual Gifts of Travel. An active member of the Society of American Travel Writers, he lives with his wife Brenda and their six children in Arizona. He is also the founder of the new science of Quantum Cyberdynamics and Fifth Access, a think tank dedicated to unlocking the benefits of multi-dimensional thinking.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Return to Accountability
Something similar to “kill all the lawyers” needs to be enacted politically because the culture of unaccountability is just ruining the public school system. When students can (these are true incidents) announce in class that they are horny, grope the girls publically in hallways, jack off in the bathrooms or talk aloud about how they have been “shucking their corn”, call teachers bitches to their faces or produce marijuana spliffs in class there is something very, very wrong with the system (and this isn’t even half of it). It is my belief that the teachers’ unions are at the root of this evil—they have little or no interest in education and seem primarily interested in vague, social style policy enactment or experiments with political correctness as opposed to real education. Real education is hard and requires moral and personal effort. Any jackass can make vague pronouncements about education and push paper instead of actually doing something that requires brain power and effort.
The terrible failure of public education to distinguish between the moral and the intellectual virtues is, sadly, a direct reflection of the watered-down atheism of our legal system. The law is positive, meaning it only reflects upon itself and not an objective moral code. This is one of the greatest intellectual heists of the 20th century and is at the root of many of our social difficulties. How can it be possible to discuss intellectual excellence without also discussing and understanding the meaning of moral excellence? Morality is not religion but the confused folks at the teachers’ unions routinely confuse the two because the religiously neutral overlap of a common morality and religion would nip many politically correct ideas in the bud.
I’ll never forget an incident that has stuck in my mind for over forty years. I was 15 or 16 years old and had taken a walk in Keezar Stadium on a day when nothing was going on and climbed up to the very upper stand in the stadium. I was looking down on a street behind the stadium and watched helplessly from above as a mob of black kids chased an Italian student down, stomped him viciously and then this image: one of the hoodlums picked up what might have been a tooth and brandished it above his head like a trophy. Now the first reaction of most red blooded folks might be: “fucking bastards” or more colloquial and colorful terms involving racial epithets but the sad truth is that the behavior of those “students’ was the direct result—even then—of an accursed and devolved system of non-accountability, the roots of which can be traced back to the moral and spiritual devolution that was the Protestant Reformation. Under a different system of education and religion these black children might have been model citizens. Left adrift on their impulses by a society without a moral compass, they did what comes naturally, which is to say that they engaged the age-old impulse to slay and maim in all its natural and vice-ridden permutations.
The terrible failure of public education to distinguish between the moral and the intellectual virtues is, sadly, a direct reflection of the watered-down atheism of our legal system. The law is positive, meaning it only reflects upon itself and not an objective moral code. This is one of the greatest intellectual heists of the 20th century and is at the root of many of our social difficulties. How can it be possible to discuss intellectual excellence without also discussing and understanding the meaning of moral excellence? Morality is not religion but the confused folks at the teachers’ unions routinely confuse the two because the religiously neutral overlap of a common morality and religion would nip many politically correct ideas in the bud.
I’ll never forget an incident that has stuck in my mind for over forty years. I was 15 or 16 years old and had taken a walk in Keezar Stadium on a day when nothing was going on and climbed up to the very upper stand in the stadium. I was looking down on a street behind the stadium and watched helplessly from above as a mob of black kids chased an Italian student down, stomped him viciously and then this image: one of the hoodlums picked up what might have been a tooth and brandished it above his head like a trophy. Now the first reaction of most red blooded folks might be: “fucking bastards” or more colloquial and colorful terms involving racial epithets but the sad truth is that the behavior of those “students’ was the direct result—even then—of an accursed and devolved system of non-accountability, the roots of which can be traced back to the moral and spiritual devolution that was the Protestant Reformation. Under a different system of education and religion these black children might have been model citizens. Left adrift on their impulses by a society without a moral compass, they did what comes naturally, which is to say that they engaged the age-old impulse to slay and maim in all its natural and vice-ridden permutations.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Difference between a Nation and a State: Some Working Ideas
The notion of a nation is really quite interesting as both customs, origins and history are all in flux. The idea of nations evolving out of a set of beliefs or what is quaintly referred to as commonly held customs in the WIKI will always be in flux because beliefs are constantly changing even though principles might not. A state might be considered the derivative political entity of the “consciousness” or “imagined community” of a nation with implied powers such as: political, judicial, legislative, military, etc. As a nation, Americans have historically embraced the notion of an elected democracy with representation via Republican governance in a two party system. Hence the State has the derivative characteristics of the larger set of principles embraced. In this sense, a nation is a kind of collective consciousness that delegates to the state various housekeeping duties.
Presently, the American nation has embraced the culture of the internet and so the organs of state cannot help but be affected by whatever the nation embraces. The problem is that the state moves far more slowly than the collective consciousness of the nation. In politically advanced states, Huntington notes that loyalty is to institutions not groups. This notion has tremendous implications for the evolution of e-states or i-states. An institution (or business for that matter) that embraces what the nation believes, via long practice, will gain in power and influence. The common sense business practices of Google and Amazon, for example, resonate with what the nation perceives as fair play. What we have in America at present, though, is a disconnect between what people are doing and believing and what the organs of the state, in a kind of Frankenstein death wish, think they should be doing. The current Obama debacle over health care is a classic example of this. People are willing to pay extra for everyone to be covered—they get the idea that the present system could be fairer but what they don’t get is an implementation that is not consonant with the morality and common sense of the national consciousness. This is when the organs of the State do not serve the national interest and must be pulled up by the roots. States can become ideologically infested and invested in bad ideas and it is up to the nation in the form of those advocates who speak for the public consciousness (statesmen not politicians) to come forward and try to make necessary changes. Obama was perceived as just such an advocate, in a fit of what Huntington would have referred to as, “national creedal passion,” but in point of fact he appears to be a creature of the state. When Obama awakens (as hopefully he will) to the demands of the nation and stops screwing around with political gasbags like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and embraces sound Republican policies for growth, environmental husbandry, energy production and job creation, the nation will rise again but until then the nonsense will continue.
“The problem Huntington wrote is not to hold elections but to create organizations” and to that I might add—effective organizations—not operations that are run by titular heads engaging in ceremonial functions without understanding and improving the organizations they represent. (The SEC particularly comes to mind in this regard—what a bunch of useless idiots—they all should have been put in jail). I love Huntington’s line about overthrowing revolutionary regimes: “The Spanish and Canadian developers now building hotels in Havana may know better than the American government how to undermine a revolutionary regime.” This is, in fact, collective intelligence at work. Collective stupidity, created by the ossification of institutions that no longer know how to serve are legion. One has only to think of the FBI and CIA who were unable to wrap their brains about people who wanted to learn how to take airplanes off the ground but didn’t want to learn how to land. Bodies being present in a collective enterprise is no assurance of collective intelligence. What makes collective intelligence wonderful is the addition of a morality that understands and reflects the collective wisdom of managing “ biology” in terms of habit, drive and passion or what used to be called virtue and vice. Without effective and moral leadership that understands the primal problems of “biology”, human creativity and intelligence can degenerate into the kind of creedal and debased mind so vividly portrayed in the novels of Ayn Rand.
WIKI A sovereign state, commonly simply referred to as a state, is a political association with effective internal and external sovereignty over a geographic area and population which is not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. While in abstract terms a sovereign state can exist without being recognised by other sovereign states, unrecognised states will often find it hard to exercise full treaty-making powers and engage in diplomatic relations with other sovereign states. For a list of all 203 states, see the List of sovereign states page.
In casual usage, the terms "country", "nation", and "state" are often used as if they were synonymous; but in a more strict usage they can be distinguished:
• A nation is a territory or country as political entity or a grouping of people who share real or imagined common history, culture, language or ethnic origin, often possessing or seeking its own government.[1] The development and conceptualization of a nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,[2] although nationalists would trace nations into the past along uninterrupted lines of historical narrative.[3]
• Benedict Anderson argued that nations were "imagined communities" because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", and traced their origins back to vernacular print journalism, which by its very nature was limited with linguistic zones and addressed a common audience.[4] Although "nation" is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of "nation" coincides with the political concept of "state" are called nation states.
•
• State refers to the set of governing and supportive institutions that have sovereignty over a definite territory and population.
Because terminology has changed over time and past writers often used the word "state" in a different ways it is difficult to accurately define the concept of state. Mikhail Bakunin used the term simply to mean a governing organization. Other writers used the term "state" to mean any law-making or law-enforcement agency. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. According to Max Weber, the state is an organization with an effective monopoly on the use of force in a particular geographic area. Fascist and some nationalist ideologies view the state as an organic body synonymous with the cu
Presently, the American nation has embraced the culture of the internet and so the organs of state cannot help but be affected by whatever the nation embraces. The problem is that the state moves far more slowly than the collective consciousness of the nation. In politically advanced states, Huntington notes that loyalty is to institutions not groups. This notion has tremendous implications for the evolution of e-states or i-states. An institution (or business for that matter) that embraces what the nation believes, via long practice, will gain in power and influence. The common sense business practices of Google and Amazon, for example, resonate with what the nation perceives as fair play. What we have in America at present, though, is a disconnect between what people are doing and believing and what the organs of the state, in a kind of Frankenstein death wish, think they should be doing. The current Obama debacle over health care is a classic example of this. People are willing to pay extra for everyone to be covered—they get the idea that the present system could be fairer but what they don’t get is an implementation that is not consonant with the morality and common sense of the national consciousness. This is when the organs of the State do not serve the national interest and must be pulled up by the roots. States can become ideologically infested and invested in bad ideas and it is up to the nation in the form of those advocates who speak for the public consciousness (statesmen not politicians) to come forward and try to make necessary changes. Obama was perceived as just such an advocate, in a fit of what Huntington would have referred to as, “national creedal passion,” but in point of fact he appears to be a creature of the state. When Obama awakens (as hopefully he will) to the demands of the nation and stops screwing around with political gasbags like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and embraces sound Republican policies for growth, environmental husbandry, energy production and job creation, the nation will rise again but until then the nonsense will continue.
“The problem Huntington wrote is not to hold elections but to create organizations” and to that I might add—effective organizations—not operations that are run by titular heads engaging in ceremonial functions without understanding and improving the organizations they represent. (The SEC particularly comes to mind in this regard—what a bunch of useless idiots—they all should have been put in jail). I love Huntington’s line about overthrowing revolutionary regimes: “The Spanish and Canadian developers now building hotels in Havana may know better than the American government how to undermine a revolutionary regime.” This is, in fact, collective intelligence at work. Collective stupidity, created by the ossification of institutions that no longer know how to serve are legion. One has only to think of the FBI and CIA who were unable to wrap their brains about people who wanted to learn how to take airplanes off the ground but didn’t want to learn how to land. Bodies being present in a collective enterprise is no assurance of collective intelligence. What makes collective intelligence wonderful is the addition of a morality that understands and reflects the collective wisdom of managing “ biology” in terms of habit, drive and passion or what used to be called virtue and vice. Without effective and moral leadership that understands the primal problems of “biology”, human creativity and intelligence can degenerate into the kind of creedal and debased mind so vividly portrayed in the novels of Ayn Rand.
WIKI A sovereign state, commonly simply referred to as a state, is a political association with effective internal and external sovereignty over a geographic area and population which is not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. While in abstract terms a sovereign state can exist without being recognised by other sovereign states, unrecognised states will often find it hard to exercise full treaty-making powers and engage in diplomatic relations with other sovereign states. For a list of all 203 states, see the List of sovereign states page.
In casual usage, the terms "country", "nation", and "state" are often used as if they were synonymous; but in a more strict usage they can be distinguished:
• A nation is a territory or country as political entity or a grouping of people who share real or imagined common history, culture, language or ethnic origin, often possessing or seeking its own government.[1] The development and conceptualization of a nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,[2] although nationalists would trace nations into the past along uninterrupted lines of historical narrative.[3]
• Benedict Anderson argued that nations were "imagined communities" because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", and traced their origins back to vernacular print journalism, which by its very nature was limited with linguistic zones and addressed a common audience.[4] Although "nation" is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of "nation" coincides with the political concept of "state" are called nation states.
•
• State refers to the set of governing and supportive institutions that have sovereignty over a definite territory and population.
Because terminology has changed over time and past writers often used the word "state" in a different ways it is difficult to accurately define the concept of state. Mikhail Bakunin used the term simply to mean a governing organization. Other writers used the term "state" to mean any law-making or law-enforcement agency. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. According to Max Weber, the state is an organization with an effective monopoly on the use of force in a particular geographic area. Fascist and some nationalist ideologies view the state as an organic body synonymous with the cu
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Torque and Seven Dimensions: What Does it Mean?
I have long been fascinated by the concept of torque or what the engineers appear to call moment. It never ceases to amaze me how torque increases with the distance from the fulcrum point. For example, a long screwdriver always produces two or three times the rotational force of a short screwdriver.
The physics are outlined in the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_curve
But my question has always been: Why is this the case? Why should torque increase proportionally with a spatial extension from the fulcrum point? There seems to be some principle of dimension or basic math and geometry that I am missing. Clearly, the extension into greater space yields more force with application but again why that should be eludes me. What is the relationship between the extension in space of an object and the force multiplier when the object is rotated or lifted in some way? (Just to say that is the case or to insist “that is just how it works” doesn’t explain it for those of us who may be visually impaired, or in my case perhaps, mentally impaired.) Now it is more obvious with a crowbar but the principle is the same even though it is more apparent from the point of view of use. Force can be multiplied by distance. (It would seem that it is not related just to mass as you could have a short but very heavy crowbar, which might be the same weight as a long one and not get the same results.)
Gearing too works on the same principle but I feel like there is some utility here that remains unexploited and perhaps not as well-explained as it might be. For example, a flywheel operates on a similar principle and if hooked to the right gearing system can exponentially increase power from smaller efforts. (Note that the flywheel and a gearing system constitute a double principle of leverage.) None of this is anything new for engineers but by torquing the question, in this instance, with the long pole of big brains maybe the answer can be leveraged into a more pleasing and useful formulation. Why is it that the greater length of an object can produce more torque than a shorter one? Note that the physics below explains or delineates how this can be the case but the visuals don’t quite explain the operative principle. Please read the Wikis and don’t leap to conclusions about my intellectual opacity because they lead to something very interesting and dear to my heart as the developer of the metaphysical notion of dimensionally interactive cyber kinesis.
“ The magnitude of torque depends on three quantities: First, the force applied; second, the length of the lever arm[4] connecting the axis to the point of force application; and third, the angle between the two. In symbols:
where
Ï„ is the torque vector and Ï„ is the magnitude of the torque,
r is the displacement vector (a vector from the point from which torque is measured to the point where force is applied), and r is the length (or magnitude) of the lever arm vector,
F is the force vector, and F is the magnitude of the force,
× denotes the cross product,
θ is the angle between the force vector and the lever arm vector.
The length of the lever arm is particularly important; choosing this length appropriately lies behind the operation of levers, pulleys, gears, and most other simple machines involving a mechanical advantage.
Now if you look at the notion of a cross product this is where it gets really interesting. Here is the Wiki:
“In mathematics, the cross product is a binary operation on two vectors in a three-dimensional Euclidean space that results in another vector which is perpendicular to the plane containing the two input vectors. The algebra defined by the cross product is neither commutative nor associative. It contrasts with the dot product which produces a scalar result. In many engineering and physics problems, it is desirable to be able to construct a perpendicular vector from two existing vectors, and the cross product provides a means for doing so. The cross product is also useful as a measure of "perpendicularness"—the magnitude of the cross product of two vectors is equal to the product of their magnitudes if they are perpendicular and scales down to zero when they are parallel. The cross product is also known as the vector product, or Gibbs vector product.
The cross product is only defined in three or seven dimensions. Like the dot product, it depends on the metric of Euclidean space. Unlike the dot product, it also depends on the choice of orientation or "handedness". Certain features of the cross product can be generalized to other situations. For arbitrary choices of orientation, the cross product must be regarded not as a vector, but as a pseudovector. For arbitrary choices of metric, and in arbitrary dimensions, the cross product can be generalized by the exterior product of vectors, defining a two-form instead of a vector.”
Now stay with me. Here is the key that I may have been scrabbling after: seven dimensions.
“In mathematics, the seven-dimensional cross product is a binary operation on vectors in a seven-dimensional Euclidean space. It is a generalization of the ordinary three-dimensional cross product. The seven-dimensional cross product has the same relationship to the octonions as the three-dimensional cross product does to the quaternions. Nontrivial binary cross products exist only in 3 and 7 dimensions. There are no higher-dimensional analogs.”
What does this mean in layman’s terms? As a metaphysician, I feel there is something important here for reflection and further analysis but I don’t know enough math and physics to quite wrap my head around it. I feel like there is some “translation” of force I am not quite grasping.
Notice how even inquiring about such a question for collective input can become a kind of torque or moment. Collective intelligence appears to work in the same way—you get extension, you get a force multiplier but somebody has to ask the question to get the extension and then the attraction begins but that is probably another question.
Sean O'Reilly
President & Founder
Auriga Distribution Services
Redbrazil.com
Riverinthesky
The physics are outlined in the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_curve
But my question has always been: Why is this the case? Why should torque increase proportionally with a spatial extension from the fulcrum point? There seems to be some principle of dimension or basic math and geometry that I am missing. Clearly, the extension into greater space yields more force with application but again why that should be eludes me. What is the relationship between the extension in space of an object and the force multiplier when the object is rotated or lifted in some way? (Just to say that is the case or to insist “that is just how it works” doesn’t explain it for those of us who may be visually impaired, or in my case perhaps, mentally impaired.) Now it is more obvious with a crowbar but the principle is the same even though it is more apparent from the point of view of use. Force can be multiplied by distance. (It would seem that it is not related just to mass as you could have a short but very heavy crowbar, which might be the same weight as a long one and not get the same results.)
Gearing too works on the same principle but I feel like there is some utility here that remains unexploited and perhaps not as well-explained as it might be. For example, a flywheel operates on a similar principle and if hooked to the right gearing system can exponentially increase power from smaller efforts. (Note that the flywheel and a gearing system constitute a double principle of leverage.) None of this is anything new for engineers but by torquing the question, in this instance, with the long pole of big brains maybe the answer can be leveraged into a more pleasing and useful formulation. Why is it that the greater length of an object can produce more torque than a shorter one? Note that the physics below explains or delineates how this can be the case but the visuals don’t quite explain the operative principle. Please read the Wikis and don’t leap to conclusions about my intellectual opacity because they lead to something very interesting and dear to my heart as the developer of the metaphysical notion of dimensionally interactive cyber kinesis.
“ The magnitude of torque depends on three quantities: First, the force applied; second, the length of the lever arm[4] connecting the axis to the point of force application; and third, the angle between the two. In symbols:
where
Ï„ is the torque vector and Ï„ is the magnitude of the torque,
r is the displacement vector (a vector from the point from which torque is measured to the point where force is applied), and r is the length (or magnitude) of the lever arm vector,
F is the force vector, and F is the magnitude of the force,
× denotes the cross product,
θ is the angle between the force vector and the lever arm vector.
The length of the lever arm is particularly important; choosing this length appropriately lies behind the operation of levers, pulleys, gears, and most other simple machines involving a mechanical advantage.
Now if you look at the notion of a cross product this is where it gets really interesting. Here is the Wiki:
“In mathematics, the cross product is a binary operation on two vectors in a three-dimensional Euclidean space that results in another vector which is perpendicular to the plane containing the two input vectors. The algebra defined by the cross product is neither commutative nor associative. It contrasts with the dot product which produces a scalar result. In many engineering and physics problems, it is desirable to be able to construct a perpendicular vector from two existing vectors, and the cross product provides a means for doing so. The cross product is also useful as a measure of "perpendicularness"—the magnitude of the cross product of two vectors is equal to the product of their magnitudes if they are perpendicular and scales down to zero when they are parallel. The cross product is also known as the vector product, or Gibbs vector product.
The cross product is only defined in three or seven dimensions. Like the dot product, it depends on the metric of Euclidean space. Unlike the dot product, it also depends on the choice of orientation or "handedness". Certain features of the cross product can be generalized to other situations. For arbitrary choices of orientation, the cross product must be regarded not as a vector, but as a pseudovector. For arbitrary choices of metric, and in arbitrary dimensions, the cross product can be generalized by the exterior product of vectors, defining a two-form instead of a vector.”
Now stay with me. Here is the key that I may have been scrabbling after: seven dimensions.
“In mathematics, the seven-dimensional cross product is a binary operation on vectors in a seven-dimensional Euclidean space. It is a generalization of the ordinary three-dimensional cross product. The seven-dimensional cross product has the same relationship to the octonions as the three-dimensional cross product does to the quaternions. Nontrivial binary cross products exist only in 3 and 7 dimensions. There are no higher-dimensional analogs.”
What does this mean in layman’s terms? As a metaphysician, I feel there is something important here for reflection and further analysis but I don’t know enough math and physics to quite wrap my head around it. I feel like there is some “translation” of force I am not quite grasping.
Notice how even inquiring about such a question for collective input can become a kind of torque or moment. Collective intelligence appears to work in the same way—you get extension, you get a force multiplier but somebody has to ask the question to get the extension and then the attraction begins but that is probably another question.
Sean O'Reilly
President & Founder
Auriga Distribution Services
Redbrazil.com
Riverinthesky
Thursday, January 07, 2010
America Can Rise Again Under a President Commited to Common Sense
I just finished reading How America Can Rise Again by Fallows in the Atlantic. Despite the interesting insights, there is a failure to understand the dynamics of decision making and results. Individuals making great decisions are what makes America great. Individuals making bad moral and political decisions drags down the whole country. The more we hand off decision making to amorphous processes--the kind bureaucrats love, the less we will have of everything.
Aristotle's Four Causes (material, formal, efficient and final) provide a clear template for common sense thinking about goals--particularly national goals. First there needs to be a national goal that is not focused on such trivia as social activism and scientifically peripheral issues such as global warming. At the present time, we no longer have a national goal. We are in a reactive--not proactive mode as a nation. This has to stop and be replaced by a forward looking national development plan not tainted by the anti-Genesis crowd of the liberal left.
Visualize this: A Republican President (President Palin?) announces, as part of a national plan for overall national and moral development, the following:
1. A bureaurocracy-cutting plan of 40% across the board of the Fed Government
2. Immediate removal of oil drilling restrictions off US Coasts
3. National Plan for high speed rail
4. National Plan for development of nuclear power plants with a streamlined licensing process of not more than one year
5. The outlawing of abortion with criminal penalties for abortionists
6 The passage of a marriage amendment defining marriage to be between a man and a woman
7. Assigning of the status of moral disability to gamblers, alcoholics, homosexuals, pedophiles, drug users and the chronically violent
8. Re-establishment of supersonic aviation
9. National 80% tax credits for anyone who installs wind or solar and other alternative forms of power generation
10. Judicial and legal reform based on the Constitution
11. Tort Reform--particularly as it applies to the medical field
12. Creation of Federal Incentives to bring down the cost of health care
13. Revitalize the space program with advanced manned flight to Mars and beyond
14. Infrastructure improvement projects with streamlined procedures for fast implementation and freedom from EPA restrictions
15. Abolishment of the EPA: to be replaced with the Agency for Resource Management and Efficient Development ARMED
16. Establishment of a national flat tax
17. Reform of immigration laws to include the requirement to speak English
18. The immediate imprisonment of anyone who advocates the overthrow of the United States whether based on religious or political ideas
20. The timely trial and execution (within 90 days) of anyone who kills a police or law enforcement officer
All new projects to be seeded and funded, in part, by a national development tax on oil company revenues from newly opened oil fields in Anwar and other American oil areas--particularly off the continental shelf of the entire US.
Aristotle's Four Causes (material, formal, efficient and final) provide a clear template for common sense thinking about goals--particularly national goals. First there needs to be a national goal that is not focused on such trivia as social activism and scientifically peripheral issues such as global warming. At the present time, we no longer have a national goal. We are in a reactive--not proactive mode as a nation. This has to stop and be replaced by a forward looking national development plan not tainted by the anti-Genesis crowd of the liberal left.
Visualize this: A Republican President (President Palin?) announces, as part of a national plan for overall national and moral development, the following:
1. A bureaurocracy-cutting plan of 40% across the board of the Fed Government
2. Immediate removal of oil drilling restrictions off US Coasts
3. National Plan for high speed rail
4. National Plan for development of nuclear power plants with a streamlined licensing process of not more than one year
5. The outlawing of abortion with criminal penalties for abortionists
6 The passage of a marriage amendment defining marriage to be between a man and a woman
7. Assigning of the status of moral disability to gamblers, alcoholics, homosexuals, pedophiles, drug users and the chronically violent
8. Re-establishment of supersonic aviation
9. National 80% tax credits for anyone who installs wind or solar and other alternative forms of power generation
10. Judicial and legal reform based on the Constitution
11. Tort Reform--particularly as it applies to the medical field
12. Creation of Federal Incentives to bring down the cost of health care
13. Revitalize the space program with advanced manned flight to Mars and beyond
14. Infrastructure improvement projects with streamlined procedures for fast implementation and freedom from EPA restrictions
15. Abolishment of the EPA: to be replaced with the Agency for Resource Management and Efficient Development ARMED
16. Establishment of a national flat tax
17. Reform of immigration laws to include the requirement to speak English
18. The immediate imprisonment of anyone who advocates the overthrow of the United States whether based on religious or political ideas
20. The timely trial and execution (within 90 days) of anyone who kills a police or law enforcement officer
All new projects to be seeded and funded, in part, by a national development tax on oil company revenues from newly opened oil fields in Anwar and other American oil areas--particularly off the continental shelf of the entire US.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Is Obama Connecting the Dots?
Is Obama beginning to connect the dots himself? At a press conference yesterday, he announced that the intelligence community failed to connect the dots regarding the attempted Christmas bombing. He sounds like a died-in-the-wool conservative with this criticiism but then he turns his brain cells inside out and says that he won't tolerate finger pointing. He simply can't have it both ways. If the dots were not connected, someone failed to connect them. He can argue with some justification that the system is to blame but systems are designed by people. Processes do not make decisions. Let me repeat that: processes do not make decisions--people do. So who is responsible for implementing good intelligence decision making on his cabinet?
The real issue is that politically correct thinking seems incapable of distinguishing between causality that matters and causality that doesn't matter. It matters, for example, in criminal profiling that 80% of the prison population is black and hispanic. It doesn't matter that the disproportion exists; in other words the existence of a disproportion between the whites and other races in jail does not necessarily translate into racism. The causal reality is that a certain percentage of the population commits more crimes than the other. Why that might be is another story.
Things don't just happen. If you discover causal agents, then delineating and ultimately solving a problem is usually a lot easier. The inability to assign both causality and blame is disjunctive and ultimately disruptive. In other words, it separates cause and effect. Christians, Jews and Hindus, for example, do not blow themselves up on airplanes but some Moslems do. It is simply an inescapable fact that Moslems have become a group of focused interest when it comes to terrorism. The inability to engage this conclusion can only come from NOT connecting the dots or via the kind of intellectual contortions that liberals are famous for in order to protect real and imagined rights.
This same disjunctive thinking pattern can be seen in the response to the banking crisis by the members of the SEC and the Obama administration--no finger pointing. The parallels between intelligence failures and financial failure loom large from this perspective.
Here is the definition of the SEC to illustrate the issue: "The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (commonly known as the SEC) is an independent agency of the United States government which holds primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation's stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets. "
Given this definition don't you think the members of the SEC might have been punished? No, because the argument by the politically correct is always that the system failed, the process failed and the reason they think this way is because they tend not to believe in personal authority unless it is herd generated. What is most extraordinary is that the SEC was NEVER empowered to enforce its own rules. How dumb is that? The herd mentality of both political parties is to blame here and is a recipe for across the board failure. Individuals in positions of authority have to be empowered to make choices without lawyers, without committees and without fear of losing their jobs--then maybe intelligence enforcement will improve. And guess what? So will the economy.
The real issue is that politically correct thinking seems incapable of distinguishing between causality that matters and causality that doesn't matter. It matters, for example, in criminal profiling that 80% of the prison population is black and hispanic. It doesn't matter that the disproportion exists; in other words the existence of a disproportion between the whites and other races in jail does not necessarily translate into racism. The causal reality is that a certain percentage of the population commits more crimes than the other. Why that might be is another story.
Things don't just happen. If you discover causal agents, then delineating and ultimately solving a problem is usually a lot easier. The inability to assign both causality and blame is disjunctive and ultimately disruptive. In other words, it separates cause and effect. Christians, Jews and Hindus, for example, do not blow themselves up on airplanes but some Moslems do. It is simply an inescapable fact that Moslems have become a group of focused interest when it comes to terrorism. The inability to engage this conclusion can only come from NOT connecting the dots or via the kind of intellectual contortions that liberals are famous for in order to protect real and imagined rights.
This same disjunctive thinking pattern can be seen in the response to the banking crisis by the members of the SEC and the Obama administration--no finger pointing. The parallels between intelligence failures and financial failure loom large from this perspective.
Here is the definition of the SEC to illustrate the issue: "The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (commonly known as the SEC) is an independent agency of the United States government which holds primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation's stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets. "
Given this definition don't you think the members of the SEC might have been punished? No, because the argument by the politically correct is always that the system failed, the process failed and the reason they think this way is because they tend not to believe in personal authority unless it is herd generated. What is most extraordinary is that the SEC was NEVER empowered to enforce its own rules. How dumb is that? The herd mentality of both political parties is to blame here and is a recipe for across the board failure. Individuals in positions of authority have to be empowered to make choices without lawyers, without committees and without fear of losing their jobs--then maybe intelligence enforcement will improve. And guess what? So will the economy.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Reagan on health care
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs
Here is a terrific audio about the dangers of socialized medicine. Reagan was really quite prescient on this issue back in the 60s. Listen to and hear the echoes of the same old same old recycled from years ago in the current administration’s agenda for health care. The real issue is not how this kind of thing starts but what it will lead to. Democrats may have good intentions for socialized medicine but they are missing out on potentially dangerous consequences to liberty and what might be loosely described as the American Way.
Obama says he wants competition but if he was really interested in competition, he would seek to remove the AMA from the regulation of medical education and would engage tort reform before any of this other nonsense that he is peddling. A one thousand page document that very few of these voting senators will ever read—let alone the public—that will cost billions and have consequences we can barely imagine--this is lunacy of the first order. There are better ways of reforming health care that are consonant with democratic principles.
The real issue is that there is a lot of greed, self interest and inefficiency in the medical industry that would likely be better managed with a carrot and stick approach than a top-down government program. The inefficiency of having different medical reporting standards state-to-state and the lack of portability are all dinosaurian residues of system that has grown up topsy-turvey over many years. What is needed is intelligent pruning with an eye on the ball, so to speak.
The government can help prune the system with thoughtful incentives and national standards for medical records—that would go a long way to reducing expenses, estimated by some to be as much as one third of all medical costs. Couple that with real tort reform (the kind that has brought medical costs down in Texas, for example) and loosening up the stranglehold that the AMA has on medical education and costs might have the opportunity to come down with little money having to be spent by taxpayers.
I find it very interesting that my doctor, who belongs to a group medical practice, offers me a 30% discount if I pay in cash, check or credit card. Why? Because it costs them roughly 30% to process the paperwork and they don’t have to wait for the money.
In my opinion, much of the driving force behind the reform of health care is politically motivated and linked to increasing the power base of some sectors within our national government. The concern that Obama evinces for his fellow man is just smoke, in my opinion, for public consumption. I’ve never seen such a power hungry administration. He makes George Bush and the Republicans look like boy scouts.
A government strong enough to grant you what you want is also strong enough to take away what you want. –Jefferson (paraphrased)
Here is a terrific audio about the dangers of socialized medicine. Reagan was really quite prescient on this issue back in the 60s. Listen to and hear the echoes of the same old same old recycled from years ago in the current administration’s agenda for health care. The real issue is not how this kind of thing starts but what it will lead to. Democrats may have good intentions for socialized medicine but they are missing out on potentially dangerous consequences to liberty and what might be loosely described as the American Way.
Obama says he wants competition but if he was really interested in competition, he would seek to remove the AMA from the regulation of medical education and would engage tort reform before any of this other nonsense that he is peddling. A one thousand page document that very few of these voting senators will ever read—let alone the public—that will cost billions and have consequences we can barely imagine--this is lunacy of the first order. There are better ways of reforming health care that are consonant with democratic principles.
The real issue is that there is a lot of greed, self interest and inefficiency in the medical industry that would likely be better managed with a carrot and stick approach than a top-down government program. The inefficiency of having different medical reporting standards state-to-state and the lack of portability are all dinosaurian residues of system that has grown up topsy-turvey over many years. What is needed is intelligent pruning with an eye on the ball, so to speak.
The government can help prune the system with thoughtful incentives and national standards for medical records—that would go a long way to reducing expenses, estimated by some to be as much as one third of all medical costs. Couple that with real tort reform (the kind that has brought medical costs down in Texas, for example) and loosening up the stranglehold that the AMA has on medical education and costs might have the opportunity to come down with little money having to be spent by taxpayers.
I find it very interesting that my doctor, who belongs to a group medical practice, offers me a 30% discount if I pay in cash, check or credit card. Why? Because it costs them roughly 30% to process the paperwork and they don’t have to wait for the money.
In my opinion, much of the driving force behind the reform of health care is politically motivated and linked to increasing the power base of some sectors within our national government. The concern that Obama evinces for his fellow man is just smoke, in my opinion, for public consumption. I’ve never seen such a power hungry administration. He makes George Bush and the Republicans look like boy scouts.
A government strong enough to grant you what you want is also strong enough to take away what you want. –Jefferson (paraphrased)
Monday, July 06, 2009
Non-locality and the classical notion of matter and form
The concept of non-locality, used metaphysically, is of incalculable importance because it can be used to provide a working theoretical mechanism for hylomorphism, the notion of substance as matter and form. If Thomas were alive today, I am convinced that he would be using non-locality as an integral part of a new Summa.
The forms of Aquinas, unlike those of Aristotle are not just "the first acts of a body having life potential" but are "in act" due to a participation in Being. In other words, all the little be-ings have their existence/life from the big Be-ing. This is, of course, an utter anathema to atheistic science but participation is the inexorable direction that the notion of non-locality, used analogously and metaphysically, points in/to.
The notion of cyber-kinesis (in How to Manage Your DICK)sketches how non-local and multi-dimensional energy patterns might be looked at. All things come from the mind of God and yet God is one with his ideas—even Aquinas taught this. How he could be One with His ideas and yet have these ideas come into being in time has bedeviled philosophers for centuries. This is, of course, the problem of the One and the Many.
There is some critical translation of Be-ing outside of time, into time and into be-ing that has eluded philosophers. Each idea in the mind of God, considered in the abstract, and outside of its original unity might be thought of as a kind of divine DNA floating in a virtual sea of prime matter—these are the essences--but the entire mechanism of essential unfolding and why is unclear. Aristotle’s potency and act in relation to the four causes gets about as close as anyone has come to providing some sort of comprehensive, short and clear analysis of the process but the mechanism, as in a scientifically clear mechanism, eludes us. Aquinas painted a beautiful picture of participation but was also short on details. (He had other pressing problems to address as a whole.) Heidegger tried to understand this translation of Be-ing into be-ing or existence into matter and form in his masterly Being and Time (of which I have only read portions) but he ended up with a reductionist blur. “Why is there anything at all,” he wondered aloud.
The very notion of God creating without movement is a scandal to traditional science but one that the new physics can appreciate, while not taking the divine bait so freely offered. (This is why I love string theory; it has made for theology stamped all over it.)
So, the notion of creating without movement brings us back to a kind of “spooky action at a distance” that in turn led to the development of the notion of non-locality. My own suspicion is that existence is so tightly woven into the fabric of reality that it is (obviously) presently invisible to science but not for too long. Inference leads me to believe that it (existence) is there and will leave defined tracks that science can pick up. Intuition tells me that the mechanism whereby the invisible translates into the visible is likely maddeningly obvious if we could just step outside of the box of space and time for a moment. Whatever it is, it is negentropic and at the root of life. The very old words of the Rig Veda capture both final and formal causality as both Aristotle and Aquinas would have understood it.
“O Vastness, thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way; thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlocality
In physics, non-locality is a direct influence of one object on another distant object, in violation of the principle of locality. In classical physics, non-locality in the form of action at a distance appeared in corpusculas theories and later disappeared in field theories. Action at a distance is incompatible with relativity. In quantum physics non-locality re-appeared in the form of entanglement. Physical reality of entanglement has been demonstrated experimentally[1] together with the absence of local hidden variables. Entanglement is compatible with relativity; however, it prompts some of the more philosophically oriented discussions concerning quantum theory. More general non-locality beyond quantum entanglement, but still compatible with relativity, is an active field of theoretical investigation but has yet to be observed.
The forms of Aquinas, unlike those of Aristotle are not just "the first acts of a body having life potential" but are "in act" due to a participation in Being. In other words, all the little be-ings have their existence/life from the big Be-ing. This is, of course, an utter anathema to atheistic science but participation is the inexorable direction that the notion of non-locality, used analogously and metaphysically, points in/to.
The notion of cyber-kinesis (in How to Manage Your DICK)sketches how non-local and multi-dimensional energy patterns might be looked at. All things come from the mind of God and yet God is one with his ideas—even Aquinas taught this. How he could be One with His ideas and yet have these ideas come into being in time has bedeviled philosophers for centuries. This is, of course, the problem of the One and the Many.
There is some critical translation of Be-ing outside of time, into time and into be-ing that has eluded philosophers. Each idea in the mind of God, considered in the abstract, and outside of its original unity might be thought of as a kind of divine DNA floating in a virtual sea of prime matter—these are the essences--but the entire mechanism of essential unfolding and why is unclear. Aristotle’s potency and act in relation to the four causes gets about as close as anyone has come to providing some sort of comprehensive, short and clear analysis of the process but the mechanism, as in a scientifically clear mechanism, eludes us. Aquinas painted a beautiful picture of participation but was also short on details. (He had other pressing problems to address as a whole.) Heidegger tried to understand this translation of Be-ing into be-ing or existence into matter and form in his masterly Being and Time (of which I have only read portions) but he ended up with a reductionist blur. “Why is there anything at all,” he wondered aloud.
The very notion of God creating without movement is a scandal to traditional science but one that the new physics can appreciate, while not taking the divine bait so freely offered. (This is why I love string theory; it has made for theology stamped all over it.)
So, the notion of creating without movement brings us back to a kind of “spooky action at a distance” that in turn led to the development of the notion of non-locality. My own suspicion is that existence is so tightly woven into the fabric of reality that it is (obviously) presently invisible to science but not for too long. Inference leads me to believe that it (existence) is there and will leave defined tracks that science can pick up. Intuition tells me that the mechanism whereby the invisible translates into the visible is likely maddeningly obvious if we could just step outside of the box of space and time for a moment. Whatever it is, it is negentropic and at the root of life. The very old words of the Rig Veda capture both final and formal causality as both Aristotle and Aquinas would have understood it.
“O Vastness, thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way; thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlocality
In physics, non-locality is a direct influence of one object on another distant object, in violation of the principle of locality. In classical physics, non-locality in the form of action at a distance appeared in corpusculas theories and later disappeared in field theories. Action at a distance is incompatible with relativity. In quantum physics non-locality re-appeared in the form of entanglement. Physical reality of entanglement has been demonstrated experimentally[1] together with the absence of local hidden variables. Entanglement is compatible with relativity; however, it prompts some of the more philosophically oriented discussions concerning quantum theory. More general non-locality beyond quantum entanglement, but still compatible with relativity, is an active field of theoretical investigation but has yet to be observed.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Jefferson on Revolution and Reformation
Revolution and Reformation
How can a people who have struggled long years under oppression throw off their oppressors and establish a free society? The problems are immense, but their solution lies in the education and enlightenment of the people and the emergence of a spirit that will serve as a foundation for independence and self-government.
"If Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring and sagacious, what could he, even in the plenitude of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?... If their people indeed had been, like ourselves, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. 'Restore independence to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do its will.' But steeped in corruption, vice and venality, as the whole nation was,... what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country?... No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and their people were so demoralized and depraved as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control. Their reformation then was to be taken up ab incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments proportioned, indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government. But this would have been an operation of a generation or two at least, within which period would have succeeded many Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process. I confess, then, I can neither see what Cicero, Cato and Brutus, united and uncontrolled could have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can be solved." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:233
Preparation Necessary for Self-Government
"Some preparation seems necessary to qualify the body of a nation for self-government." --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 1802. FE 8:179
"Reformation in government follows reformation in opinion." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789. ME 7:366, Papers 15:138
"More than a generation will be requisite [for an unprepared people], under the administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in the general mass of the people, and their habituation to an independent security of person and property, before they will be capable of estimating the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred adherence to the principles on which it rests for preservation." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1815. ME 14:245
"The people of England, I think, are less oppressed than here [in France]. But it needs but half an eye to see, when among them, that the foundation is laid in their dispositions for the establishment of a despotism. Nobility, wealth, and pomp are the objects of their admiration." --Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 1786. ME 5:397
"An enlightened people, and an energetic public opinion... will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government." --Thomas Jefferson to Chevalier de Ouis, 1814. ME 14:130
"Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1815. ME 14:245
"In these countries [of Europe],... ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and mind, in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. If the Almighty had begotten a thousand sons, instead of one, they would not have sufficed for this task. If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work, to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance and prejudices, and that, as zealously as they now endeavor the contrary, a thousand years would not place them on that high ground, on which our common people are now setting out." --Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 1786. ME 5:396
The Limits of Reform
"Should [reformers] attempt more than the established habits of the people are ripe for, they may lose all and retard indefinitely the ultimate object of their aim." --Thomas Jefferson to Mme de Tesse, Mar 20, 1787. (*) ME 6:105
"To be really useful, we must keep pace with the state of society, and not dishearten it by attempts at what its population, means, or occupations will fail in attempting." --Thomas Jefferson to G. C. de La Costa, 1807. ME 11:206
"No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see... all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1817. ME 15:116
"It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782. ME 2:224
How can a people who have struggled long years under oppression throw off their oppressors and establish a free society? The problems are immense, but their solution lies in the education and enlightenment of the people and the emergence of a spirit that will serve as a foundation for independence and self-government.
"If Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring and sagacious, what could he, even in the plenitude of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?... If their people indeed had been, like ourselves, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. 'Restore independence to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do its will.' But steeped in corruption, vice and venality, as the whole nation was,... what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country?... No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and their people were so demoralized and depraved as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control. Their reformation then was to be taken up ab incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments proportioned, indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government. But this would have been an operation of a generation or two at least, within which period would have succeeded many Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process. I confess, then, I can neither see what Cicero, Cato and Brutus, united and uncontrolled could have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can be solved." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:233
Preparation Necessary for Self-Government
"Some preparation seems necessary to qualify the body of a nation for self-government." --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 1802. FE 8:179
"Reformation in government follows reformation in opinion." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789. ME 7:366, Papers 15:138
"More than a generation will be requisite [for an unprepared people], under the administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in the general mass of the people, and their habituation to an independent security of person and property, before they will be capable of estimating the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred adherence to the principles on which it rests for preservation." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1815. ME 14:245
"The people of England, I think, are less oppressed than here [in France]. But it needs but half an eye to see, when among them, that the foundation is laid in their dispositions for the establishment of a despotism. Nobility, wealth, and pomp are the objects of their admiration." --Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 1786. ME 5:397
"An enlightened people, and an energetic public opinion... will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government." --Thomas Jefferson to Chevalier de Ouis, 1814. ME 14:130
"Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1815. ME 14:245
"In these countries [of Europe],... ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and mind, in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. If the Almighty had begotten a thousand sons, instead of one, they would not have sufficed for this task. If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work, to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance and prejudices, and that, as zealously as they now endeavor the contrary, a thousand years would not place them on that high ground, on which our common people are now setting out." --Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 1786. ME 5:396
The Limits of Reform
"Should [reformers] attempt more than the established habits of the people are ripe for, they may lose all and retard indefinitely the ultimate object of their aim." --Thomas Jefferson to Mme de Tesse, Mar 20, 1787. (*) ME 6:105
"To be really useful, we must keep pace with the state of society, and not dishearten it by attempts at what its population, means, or occupations will fail in attempting." --Thomas Jefferson to G. C. de La Costa, 1807. ME 11:206
"No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see... all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1817. ME 15:116
"It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782. ME 2:224
Friday, June 26, 2009
Putin on Socialism: This is must reading
"Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state's omnipotence is another possible mistake... Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent...
In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated...There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state...
And one more point: anti-crisis measures should not escalate into financial populism and a refusal to implement responsible macroeconomic policies. The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing."
-- Vladimir Putin, Russia Prime Minister
Feb 2009 Lecturing the U.S. on the dangers of socialism.
In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated...There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state...
And one more point: anti-crisis measures should not escalate into financial populism and a refusal to implement responsible macroeconomic policies. The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing."
-- Vladimir Putin, Russia Prime Minister
Feb 2009 Lecturing the U.S. on the dangers of socialism.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Whatever you give a woman
Christine Michaud Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit." (merci MCC!)
Friday, April 10, 2009
Deconstructed Business Systems and Our Present Financial Crisis
I throw out the following rough thoughts to help clarify our present financial dilemma. Legal minds will be able to present a clearer analysis but this might help get the ball rolling. It only takes, after all, a few people asking the same question to get a lot of other folks to start thinking and reflecting.
The present state of the economy should lead almost any thinking person to the question: what really happened here? There are many particular answers but no one satisfying or perhaps general answer seems to have emerged. It is our contention that the deconstruction of causality that has been underway in America for the past fifty years by intellectuals who fear any sort of hierarchical moral or spiritual causality that might lead backwards to God, Spirit or Source lies at the root of our current difficulties. Deconstructed causality is reflected in business systems that systematically exploit the notion that the left hand, so to speak, should NOT know what the right hand is doing. (The left hand might be thought of as the law and the right hand, moral judgment.)
If we consider the notion of CDOs, the idea of what constitutes the generation of real value has to be considered outside the larger issue of legality. The SEC, charged with the oversight of financial markets, has argued that because CDOs were legal that they had no power to curb their explosive growth. The larger issue is related to a non-legal issue--the financial morality, so to speak, of the product that should have been considered as an extra-legal issue or part of general due diligence as it is commonly understood both inside and outside considerations of applicable case law.
There is an extraordinary blindness in American jurisprudence due to the notion that all law is positive, i.e., that it refers only to itself and not to any larger set of moral or intellectual values--unless they have been embodied in some way via case law. This kind of moral neutrality serves us well when the issues are fairly pedestrian but for many of the larger life and death issues, it starts to break down. Abortion, pornography and gay marriage are issues that require more than just the positive aspects of the law for a full analysis of their moral and legal sustainability. Why in fact, and for example, should murder be wrong? It sounds like a silly question but if there were no law against murder would it be okay? The obvious answer is irrelevant as far as the law is concerned, If murder were not illegal then it would be legal. (Such is the case presently with abortion.)
The absurdity of this position is indicated by the following true story: several years ago, some parents in Arizona started selling their children to earn extra money. Legislators discovered to their horror that there was no law against the selling of children in Arizona. This situation illustrates the opportunity that the positive aspect of the law presents to those unwilling to consider larger moral elements. The fact that there was no law against the selling of children in Arizona made the courts unable to prosecute those who were, in fact, selling their offspring. Of course the law was changed but the larger issue is that most people would have no difficulty in seeing the need to arrest anyone found selling their children by adverting to the larger moral law available to anyone possessing common sense. The law, however, and until it was modified by subsequent legislation, would have continued to allow the selling of children simply because it was legal. Likewise, it was legal to kill Jews in Nazi Germany. The law does not advert to any principles larger than those encompassed by its own very literal definitions and this is a fundamental weakness for a nation when only the positive aspect of law is relied upon for business conduct.
The limitations of law in this regard may appear obvious but there are many examples that are not so obvious but equally deleterious. Companies that manufacture sub- standard parts or machinery may not be doing anything illegal but they are engaging in a kind of corporate immorality that can have horrible results. The Challenger Space Shuttle was destroyed, in part, due to a faulty "O" ring, the quality of which had come under review but was ignored due to a series of non-causal and smokescreen arguments by the manufacturer. Basically, the manufacturer needed more proof that the parts were defective and until one of them failed radically, there was no legal proof that they were in fact defective. Given that their morality appears not to have extended beyond what was legally required of them, no investigation of potential hazards was necessary. That would have involved moral or imaginative considerations, which were simply not required by any of the applicable laws.
Larger moral issues almost always come into play in developing a body of law but then they are discarded once the laws are enacted in favor of the self-referential definitions that consequently appear to be complete in themselves. The Founding Fathers used a vast body of moral and spiritual knowledge in codifying both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution--likewise the Bill of Rights. Once these documents were codified the original moral foundations that the laws were based on gradually began to be seen as irrelevant. A classic example is the notion of separation of Church and State. It was never the intention of the Founding Fathers to remove the notion of God from education. They simply didn't want any one religion to get the upper hand. They were interested in, what we would call today, a level playing field. Note how this law is cited by the rabidly anti-religious as proof that even the mention of the word God is a violation of Church and State.
The very real relevance of the original moral and spiritual considerations of the law of the land has come back to haunt us with such positive legal absurdities as having to define marriage as being between a man and a woman or legislation that allows life to start whenever the court indicate that it starts, instead of at the beginning.
Without an acknowlegement of the moral and spiritual foundations of law, that body of knowledge starts to drift further and further from anything that resembles a rational and coherent body of thought. This is why we could have a former President of the United States say with a perfectly straight face regarding the nature of his sexual escapades: "It depends on what you mean by is."
The present state of the economy should lead almost any thinking person to the question: what really happened here? There are many particular answers but no one satisfying or perhaps general answer seems to have emerged. It is our contention that the deconstruction of causality that has been underway in America for the past fifty years by intellectuals who fear any sort of hierarchical moral or spiritual causality that might lead backwards to God, Spirit or Source lies at the root of our current difficulties. Deconstructed causality is reflected in business systems that systematically exploit the notion that the left hand, so to speak, should NOT know what the right hand is doing. (The left hand might be thought of as the law and the right hand, moral judgment.)
If we consider the notion of CDOs, the idea of what constitutes the generation of real value has to be considered outside the larger issue of legality. The SEC, charged with the oversight of financial markets, has argued that because CDOs were legal that they had no power to curb their explosive growth. The larger issue is related to a non-legal issue--the financial morality, so to speak, of the product that should have been considered as an extra-legal issue or part of general due diligence as it is commonly understood both inside and outside considerations of applicable case law.
There is an extraordinary blindness in American jurisprudence due to the notion that all law is positive, i.e., that it refers only to itself and not to any larger set of moral or intellectual values--unless they have been embodied in some way via case law. This kind of moral neutrality serves us well when the issues are fairly pedestrian but for many of the larger life and death issues, it starts to break down. Abortion, pornography and gay marriage are issues that require more than just the positive aspects of the law for a full analysis of their moral and legal sustainability. Why in fact, and for example, should murder be wrong? It sounds like a silly question but if there were no law against murder would it be okay? The obvious answer is irrelevant as far as the law is concerned, If murder were not illegal then it would be legal. (Such is the case presently with abortion.)
The absurdity of this position is indicated by the following true story: several years ago, some parents in Arizona started selling their children to earn extra money. Legislators discovered to their horror that there was no law against the selling of children in Arizona. This situation illustrates the opportunity that the positive aspect of the law presents to those unwilling to consider larger moral elements. The fact that there was no law against the selling of children in Arizona made the courts unable to prosecute those who were, in fact, selling their offspring. Of course the law was changed but the larger issue is that most people would have no difficulty in seeing the need to arrest anyone found selling their children by adverting to the larger moral law available to anyone possessing common sense. The law, however, and until it was modified by subsequent legislation, would have continued to allow the selling of children simply because it was legal. Likewise, it was legal to kill Jews in Nazi Germany. The law does not advert to any principles larger than those encompassed by its own very literal definitions and this is a fundamental weakness for a nation when only the positive aspect of law is relied upon for business conduct.
The limitations of law in this regard may appear obvious but there are many examples that are not so obvious but equally deleterious. Companies that manufacture sub- standard parts or machinery may not be doing anything illegal but they are engaging in a kind of corporate immorality that can have horrible results. The Challenger Space Shuttle was destroyed, in part, due to a faulty "O" ring, the quality of which had come under review but was ignored due to a series of non-causal and smokescreen arguments by the manufacturer. Basically, the manufacturer needed more proof that the parts were defective and until one of them failed radically, there was no legal proof that they were in fact defective. Given that their morality appears not to have extended beyond what was legally required of them, no investigation of potential hazards was necessary. That would have involved moral or imaginative considerations, which were simply not required by any of the applicable laws.
Larger moral issues almost always come into play in developing a body of law but then they are discarded once the laws are enacted in favor of the self-referential definitions that consequently appear to be complete in themselves. The Founding Fathers used a vast body of moral and spiritual knowledge in codifying both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution--likewise the Bill of Rights. Once these documents were codified the original moral foundations that the laws were based on gradually began to be seen as irrelevant. A classic example is the notion of separation of Church and State. It was never the intention of the Founding Fathers to remove the notion of God from education. They simply didn't want any one religion to get the upper hand. They were interested in, what we would call today, a level playing field. Note how this law is cited by the rabidly anti-religious as proof that even the mention of the word God is a violation of Church and State.
The very real relevance of the original moral and spiritual considerations of the law of the land has come back to haunt us with such positive legal absurdities as having to define marriage as being between a man and a woman or legislation that allows life to start whenever the court indicate that it starts, instead of at the beginning.
Without an acknowlegement of the moral and spiritual foundations of law, that body of knowledge starts to drift further and further from anything that resembles a rational and coherent body of thought. This is why we could have a former President of the United States say with a perfectly straight face regarding the nature of his sexual escapades: "It depends on what you mean by is."
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The Cure Is Development: You Can't Fix an Economy by Focusing on the Symptoms
In case you missed it, you can keep up with the output of the fine folks who produced "The Giant Pool of Money" and "Another Frightening Show About the Economy." The most recent episode is titled "Bad Bank," and is best overview of our banding system that I've ever come across. You can listen at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1285
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This was pretty good as far as describing some of the toxic issues but it is focusing on symptoms and not a cure. Put another way, talking about assets—declining or otherwise—is not the same thing as talking about development. Now for some personal opinion informed by long-term observation:
What everyone seems to not understand is that there is a difference between lending for projects that produce geometric increases for goods and services, such as massive development projects and consumer debt, which tends to be less useful in terms of generating additional dollars. (The housing market is a good generator of additional goods and service dollars but for sake of argument, I will leave this out.) Whether you have a gold standard or a speculator-limited monetary credit system, an understanding of what generates additional goods and services—what generates jobs, etc., is key. Long-term development tied to a long-term vision of what human industrial development should consist of could generate tens of millions of new jobs if tied to creative long-term global thinking. (The social consequences of a rapidly expanding world economy might also do much to lessen tensions around the world.)
I'll give you one small example of what I mean. I recently had the opportunity to ride on the maglev (built by Germans by the way) from China's Shanghai airport to downtown Shanghai. This about 45 miles and it took about ten minutes to travel at 280 mph or 4.6 miles per minute. Let me give you some idea of what this might mean for travel times in the US if such a system were widely implemented by giving a few examples.
Travel between San Francisco and Sebastopol: 13 minutes
Travel between San Francisco and LA: one hour and 26 minutes
Washington DC to New York: 43 minutes
Front Royal, VA to Manassas: 9 minutes
Based on the notion of issuing development bonds for such a project and/or adding a modest user tax to ticketing--over time--the enormous costs of implementing such a system nationwide would and could be vastly reduced. The stimulus effect of such a project would be profound. Millions of tons of cement, steel and hundreds of other products coupled with hundreds of thousands of new jobs and lateral job creation on the supply and service side would do more to revitalize an economy than all of the dike plugging that is going on now in the Obama administration. Add to this, potential water projects from the water-rich Canadian North to the US and massive nuclear development, you might have a perfect storm of economic development that would benefit businesses around the world.
Now why aren't we doing things like this? It is my belief that Americans have lost any vision for development--if they ever had one. Special interests that don't believe in growth—particularly environmental interests and other slow-growth groups, pin-headed economists and politicians who don't understand anything other than re-election and standard dog whistle politics (which is basically herd thinking dressed up in the rhetoric of independent thought) all contribute to the economic inertia we are presently seeing. Additionally, valuable political capital is currently being wasted on self-limiting issues like gay marriage, global warming, and endless litmus tests for conservatives based on what they think about the infanticide described as "choice". In short, and in my opinion, no one is talking about real problems, they are talking about ideologies and fighting over a dwindling pie instead of trying to figure out how to increase the pie.
My recommendation for the Obama administration: create a cabinet level position for Development and give it some real teeth so that when a project is decided on, it can go to ground immediately without lawsuits, environmental red tape and/or other frivolous nonsense that holds up growth. A development Czar who has the best interest of the people at heart and the will of the Republic behind him would go a long way to alleviating the cancer of self-doubt that is tying this country up in knots.
“One who recognizes all men as members of his own body is a sound man to guard them…”
--Lao Tzu
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-----------------------------------
This was pretty good as far as describing some of the toxic issues but it is focusing on symptoms and not a cure. Put another way, talking about assets—declining or otherwise—is not the same thing as talking about development. Now for some personal opinion informed by long-term observation:
What everyone seems to not understand is that there is a difference between lending for projects that produce geometric increases for goods and services, such as massive development projects and consumer debt, which tends to be less useful in terms of generating additional dollars. (The housing market is a good generator of additional goods and service dollars but for sake of argument, I will leave this out.) Whether you have a gold standard or a speculator-limited monetary credit system, an understanding of what generates additional goods and services—what generates jobs, etc., is key. Long-term development tied to a long-term vision of what human industrial development should consist of could generate tens of millions of new jobs if tied to creative long-term global thinking. (The social consequences of a rapidly expanding world economy might also do much to lessen tensions around the world.)
I'll give you one small example of what I mean. I recently had the opportunity to ride on the maglev (built by Germans by the way) from China's Shanghai airport to downtown Shanghai. This about 45 miles and it took about ten minutes to travel at 280 mph or 4.6 miles per minute. Let me give you some idea of what this might mean for travel times in the US if such a system were widely implemented by giving a few examples.
Travel between San Francisco and Sebastopol: 13 minutes
Travel between San Francisco and LA: one hour and 26 minutes
Washington DC to New York: 43 minutes
Front Royal, VA to Manassas: 9 minutes
Based on the notion of issuing development bonds for such a project and/or adding a modest user tax to ticketing--over time--the enormous costs of implementing such a system nationwide would and could be vastly reduced. The stimulus effect of such a project would be profound. Millions of tons of cement, steel and hundreds of other products coupled with hundreds of thousands of new jobs and lateral job creation on the supply and service side would do more to revitalize an economy than all of the dike plugging that is going on now in the Obama administration. Add to this, potential water projects from the water-rich Canadian North to the US and massive nuclear development, you might have a perfect storm of economic development that would benefit businesses around the world.
Now why aren't we doing things like this? It is my belief that Americans have lost any vision for development--if they ever had one. Special interests that don't believe in growth—particularly environmental interests and other slow-growth groups, pin-headed economists and politicians who don't understand anything other than re-election and standard dog whistle politics (which is basically herd thinking dressed up in the rhetoric of independent thought) all contribute to the economic inertia we are presently seeing. Additionally, valuable political capital is currently being wasted on self-limiting issues like gay marriage, global warming, and endless litmus tests for conservatives based on what they think about the infanticide described as "choice". In short, and in my opinion, no one is talking about real problems, they are talking about ideologies and fighting over a dwindling pie instead of trying to figure out how to increase the pie.
My recommendation for the Obama administration: create a cabinet level position for Development and give it some real teeth so that when a project is decided on, it can go to ground immediately without lawsuits, environmental red tape and/or other frivolous nonsense that holds up growth. A development Czar who has the best interest of the people at heart and the will of the Republic behind him would go a long way to alleviating the cancer of self-doubt that is tying this country up in knots.
“One who recognizes all men as members of his own body is a sound man to guard them…”
--Lao Tzu
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Saturday, February 14, 2009
Environmental Fascism
I recently read In the Footsteps of David Brower in the most recent issue of Genesis and was just appalled by the environmental fascism that is so casually presented. Although Brower's background was in the wilderness preservation wing of the conservation movement, he led his group to take on many of the issues raised by new, more radical environmentalists. FOE (Friends of the Earth) campaigned against the Alaska Pipeline, the Super Sonic Transport airplane (SST), and nuclear power. Are you enjoying high electric rates out there in California? You may thank Mr. Brower and all the other confused and superstitious folks who opposed the development of nuclear energy in part for that. Lammers, likewise, should probably not have been uncritically featured in Genesis. He was responsible, by his own admission, for denying US contractors 500 million in business for equipment not supplied to the Three Gorges Dam in China. What sort of position of moral enlightenment thinks that disrupting exports for US companies such as Caterpillar is good for America? Mr. Lammer’s level of technology seems not to extend much beyond real estate development and the making of ice cream but he has no compunction about advocating the certain knowledge that dam building is bad for the planet.
Mr. Lammers has probably not done much research on how many lives the Yangtze River in China has taken over the centuries due to seasonal flooding. Not only is the moralizing of current ecological fanaticism scientifically inaccurate it is, largely speaking, morally indefensible from a Christian point of view. Genesis specifically mandates mankind as having dominion over the earth and multiplying. The Bible also did not advise mere replication for humanity, which is another increasingly distorted spiritual view adopted by most believers in the new religion of ecology. All species are not equal. I don’t recall God making a covenant with his chosen fish or spotted owls.
I have written about the Southwest in Travelers’ Tales American Southwest and lived in the Southwest for ten years. I have rafted down the Grand Canyon and gone House boating on Lake Powell and it is sheer mindlessness to equate the building of dams with an assault on nature. One might as well argue that the city of San Francisco is an assault on nature. A little reflection on history will show that the Presidio was built by the Army Corps of Engineers, for example, and is a totally man-made artifact. San Francisco was nothing but sand dunes at the time of the gold rush. Has the city been improved by human habitation? Just think of David McLaren’s work on Golden Gate Park and the answer is: of course. Likewise, the wonderful Glen Canyon and other side canyons have been improved by the waters that so peacefully lap their sides.
The Southwest is lousy with canyons. Just fly over the Grand Canyon and take a gander at all the side canyons. There are more than enough canyons in the southwest to walk and hike through to last all future generations. Crying over the drowning of the Glen Canyon is beyond silly for people who weren’t even old enough to have been there and to know what may or may not have been lost. Yes it was beautiful, and it still is, but in a different way.
The environmental movement has done some terrific things over the years but the tail has come to wag the dog. It is high time we embraced a new ethic that sees development as part of the mandate of Genesis and to go about it in a way that puts people first.
Development is not evil if it is part of a larger vision that understands that population growth and business development go hand-in hand. It is no accident that countries with the largest populations are currently enjoying rising standards of living. Geometric growth is only possible when science and business work for the advancement of mankind. Scientific development without superstition can, likewise, embrace a common sense environmentalism, unencumbered by excessive regulation to bring about the real change that people world-wide yearn for. A new renaissance of Christian living, rooted in Genesis, and a new vision of economic development might yet bring heaven closer to earth. Is that not what we are called to do in the
Lord ’s Prayer? “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Sean O'Reilly
President & CEO
Auriga Distribution Group
Redbrazil.com
Riverinthesky.com
Mr. Lammers has probably not done much research on how many lives the Yangtze River in China has taken over the centuries due to seasonal flooding. Not only is the moralizing of current ecological fanaticism scientifically inaccurate it is, largely speaking, morally indefensible from a Christian point of view. Genesis specifically mandates mankind as having dominion over the earth and multiplying. The Bible also did not advise mere replication for humanity, which is another increasingly distorted spiritual view adopted by most believers in the new religion of ecology. All species are not equal. I don’t recall God making a covenant with his chosen fish or spotted owls.
I have written about the Southwest in Travelers’ Tales American Southwest and lived in the Southwest for ten years. I have rafted down the Grand Canyon and gone House boating on Lake Powell and it is sheer mindlessness to equate the building of dams with an assault on nature. One might as well argue that the city of San Francisco is an assault on nature. A little reflection on history will show that the Presidio was built by the Army Corps of Engineers, for example, and is a totally man-made artifact. San Francisco was nothing but sand dunes at the time of the gold rush. Has the city been improved by human habitation? Just think of David McLaren’s work on Golden Gate Park and the answer is: of course. Likewise, the wonderful Glen Canyon and other side canyons have been improved by the waters that so peacefully lap their sides.
The Southwest is lousy with canyons. Just fly over the Grand Canyon and take a gander at all the side canyons. There are more than enough canyons in the southwest to walk and hike through to last all future generations. Crying over the drowning of the Glen Canyon is beyond silly for people who weren’t even old enough to have been there and to know what may or may not have been lost. Yes it was beautiful, and it still is, but in a different way.
The environmental movement has done some terrific things over the years but the tail has come to wag the dog. It is high time we embraced a new ethic that sees development as part of the mandate of Genesis and to go about it in a way that puts people first.
Development is not evil if it is part of a larger vision that understands that population growth and business development go hand-in hand. It is no accident that countries with the largest populations are currently enjoying rising standards of living. Geometric growth is only possible when science and business work for the advancement of mankind. Scientific development without superstition can, likewise, embrace a common sense environmentalism, unencumbered by excessive regulation to bring about the real change that people world-wide yearn for. A new renaissance of Christian living, rooted in Genesis, and a new vision of economic development might yet bring heaven closer to earth. Is that not what we are called to do in the
Lord ’s Prayer? “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Sean O'Reilly
President & CEO
Auriga Distribution Group
Redbrazil.com
Riverinthesky.com
Friday, December 12, 2008
Great quote from Brian Josephson
“One of my guiding principles…has been the scientist’s motto ‘Take nobody’s word for it (nullius in verba) a corollary of which is that if scientists as a whole denounce an idea this should not necessarily be taken as proof that the said idea is absurd: rather, one should examine carefully the alleged grounds for such opinions and judge how well these stand up to detailed scrutiny”
--Brian Josephson, the Noble Laureate whose “Josephson Junctions began as a theory which sprang from his profound understanding of superconductivity and quantum tunneling
This from Imagining the Tenth Dimension by Rob Bryanton
--Brian Josephson, the Noble Laureate whose “Josephson Junctions began as a theory which sprang from his profound understanding of superconductivity and quantum tunneling
This from Imagining the Tenth Dimension by Rob Bryanton
Thursday, December 11, 2008
A Way for Obama to Fix The Economy
I strongly urge everyone to read this article, which appeared in Spiegel Online. It is an article entitled, Does Communism Work? It is the best analysis I have read to date on what is going on economically in China. Having edited two books on China and also having visited China on three occasions, I can attest—on the basis of even this modest level of familiarity—that it rings true. I have some other quick thoughts to share here that are based on years of political observation from what might be termed a progressive Republican viewpoint. There is too much here for a more careful presentation, so please bear with the rough outline presented. Do read the article in conjunction with my thoughts below. Given the scope of the present difficulties facing this country, some of you may find these ideas refreshing. I’ll post links on Facebook, Twitter and Blogger.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,465007,00.html
The Chinese have clearly embraced a kind of pragmatism that has not been seen since the founding of our own Republic. I love the concept described in the article as: zou chuqu, which means “swarm out.” We need our own American version of swarming out and steamrolling inefficient and outdated ideas, regulations and the present ideologically driven, environmental choke-hold on industrial and other development. The Chinese have a commission known as the NDRC (the National Development and Reform Commission), which overseas all major projects. This is an outfit that simply knocks down all obstacles to development and quickly without endless discussion between competing sets of interests. It strikes me that we must have something similar to this here in the US. Our reliance on cowboy style capitalism is a cultural icon that no longer serves, nor are liberal good intentions about fairness and sharing resources sufficiently coherent to engineer economic recovery in our present circumstances.
What we are seeing in the US, in tandem with our present financial meltdown, is the display of a kind of ceremonial leadership, in many instances, of large corporations, regulatory agencies and government offices. I’ll give you one glaring example. As a former stockbroker and, as far as I can determine, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) is charged with overseeing the securities market.
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), agency of the U.S. government created by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and charged with protecting the interests of the public and investors in connection with the public issuance and sale of corporate securities. The five members of the SEC are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for terms of five years.
Where was Christopher Cox (head of SEC) and the other four board members during the development of many of the derivatives that led, in part, to the present financial meltdown? A proponent of deregulation, Cox indicated during recent hearings there were problems that they missed. Talk about an understatement! The fact that he was a proponent of deregulation is irrelevant, what is at stake is the simple issue of knowing what is going on in the market, and particularly, understanding the potential harm that financial instruments such as derivative securities might pose. At present, has he been asked to resign or punished in some way for his own and the rest of the Board’s lack of oversight? The head of American Express, by way of another example of financial non-sequitors, receives 50 million dollars a year for his salary. For what, we all might want to know? What does anyone do to earn 50 million a year for a company they don’t own? At present, American Express is experiencing its own financial meltdown and providing what can only be described as third world service in regards to the effect its policies might be having on card holders. Despite legitimate credit issues, AMX recently closed all Open credit lines and notified card holders ten days after they had done so. Their explanation was that they could do so legally. Legal yes but from a customer service point of view this was completely nuts, as there were innocent creditors who wrote checks against these accounts that bounced, creating further dislocation in financial markets. (Readers might want to Google this mini debacle for more info.) Note also the request for buyouts and bonuses from corporate heads whose companies are failing. This is beyond lunacy but it is also part of a mindset or set of business expectations that are no longer related to reality or common sense. Much like the Mandarins of old China, these dinosaurs have to go.
The departments of Commerce, Labor, HUD, Energy, Treasury and Transportation, for example, might make sense in terms of a logical breakdown of area responsibility but make absolutely no sense in terms of overall, coordinated development. Our current financial crisis is directly related to the slow down in industrial and other forms of development here in the US—what is quaintly referred to in the press as the job market. The financial crisis is just a symptom of mismanagement by individuals who have little or no moral vision. This goes beyond all party lines but bone-headed Republicans who think free-market capitalism will solve everything are as maladjusted as pin-headed Democrats who spend more time worrying about various emissions than the moral and spiritual pollution emanating from their own party.
If Obama is serious about reversing the present financial crisis, he might want to study how the Chinese overcame a rigid bureaucracy to create an enormous amount of wealth in a relatively short period of time. They violated many of the precepts of Communism to arrive at practical solutions for common problems. One glance at the skyline of many Chinese cities, the bounty of food available, a ride on their fast, modern trains or six lane, American style highways suffices to convince. This is not to say that the Chinese solution is without problems or moral difficulties but there is definitely something Americans can learn from Chinese pragmatism. What is needed now in America is our own version of the National Development and Reform Commission to replace present cabinet level departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Labor, Transportation and Energy. Our present reliance on the deterrence of mutually competing interests is eroding our ability to compete in international markets and is stifling industrial and other development here at home.
And finally, I cannot state how important it is to rein in the burgeoning notion that curtailing industrial activity here in the US is somehow contributing to saving the planet. The best way around pollution issues related to potential climate change is to deregulate environmental restrictions on nuclear power while simultaneously developing green forms of energy. (Makani Power, for example, and many others both like it and in other areas of green energy development show a great deal of promise but are probably not going to be ready for prime time quickly enough to supply the massive quantities of cheap power that will be needed, for example, once electric vehicles starting sipping at the collective well of electricity. This is likely to be a huge problem when millions of households start hooking up their cars to our present antiquated energy grid. (The Chevy Volt, a truly practical electric vehicle, is due out in 2010.) When this energy crisis comes up, and I am predicting it will, will anyone thump politicians for NOT developing nuclear and other forms of power as part of what should be normal foresight and planning?
Morally speaking, the shallow notion (related to saving rather than developing the planet) that there are too many people in the world needs to be replaced with a pro-life, human-centered vision for development. A good reference, believe it or not, are the various Papal Encyclicals on labor and development. There aren’t too many people on the earth. There are too many people doing nothing and living unproductive lives because there is little or no leadership in the western world on the synergistic and geometric relationship between labor and long-term industrial development. The geometric relationship between labor and long-term development might be described as follows. Long term development requires long term labor. This leads or can lead to a stable middle class of workers who then use their earnings to buy products and homes, which in turn further increases the need for labor and more development but only if the population is expanding and only if the promise of jobs and more work continues. Long term projects are essential for this kind of stability. When the idea of geometric growth is coupled with a vision of what people really need and want morally, physically and spiritually, what arises is the opportunity for moral governance. At present, the following four infrastructure projects (these are not new ideas) could create billions of dollars worth of new jobs and create long-term development for the next century.
1. The North American Water Project: bring water down via pipeline from water rich Canada to the US and Mexico. Long term taxes and revenue from water would pay for the project but politicians have to stop thinking in yearly cycles and move up to 10, 20 and 50 year industrial development plans
2. The High Speed Rail Project: development starting in the southwest to link the Southwest to the West Coast. Second phase: link the East Coast to the Midwest; maglev for heavily trafficked areas that require quick and convenient transportation.
3. The American Independence Project (who doesn’t like independence?) massive investment in new nuclear power plants largely freed of environmental regulations
4. The Alternative Green Power Project: massive development of solar, wind and other natural resources. Long term credits to be subsidized by long term earnings based on government lending/rental of energy producing units to the private sector.
There is plenty of space on the planet for a population two or three times its present size and when we run out of space and raw materials here on Earth, there is no reason not to head out into the Solar System and beyond for resources. None of this will happen without a vision for industrial development that is rooted either in Genesis (multiply/reproduce and have dominion of the earth, etc.,) or an alternate vision of humanity that is rooted in practical solutions for what people really need and want. This isn’t socialism, it is common sense. The oldest civilization on earth, despite its disturbing and present reliance on abortion, may yet lead the way into the future.
Why Pay More?
Great Low Prices on New Books
Worldwide, Secure Boxed Shipping
www.RedBrazil.com
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,465007,00.html
The Chinese have clearly embraced a kind of pragmatism that has not been seen since the founding of our own Republic. I love the concept described in the article as: zou chuqu, which means “swarm out.” We need our own American version of swarming out and steamrolling inefficient and outdated ideas, regulations and the present ideologically driven, environmental choke-hold on industrial and other development. The Chinese have a commission known as the NDRC (the National Development and Reform Commission), which overseas all major projects. This is an outfit that simply knocks down all obstacles to development and quickly without endless discussion between competing sets of interests. It strikes me that we must have something similar to this here in the US. Our reliance on cowboy style capitalism is a cultural icon that no longer serves, nor are liberal good intentions about fairness and sharing resources sufficiently coherent to engineer economic recovery in our present circumstances.
What we are seeing in the US, in tandem with our present financial meltdown, is the display of a kind of ceremonial leadership, in many instances, of large corporations, regulatory agencies and government offices. I’ll give you one glaring example. As a former stockbroker and, as far as I can determine, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) is charged with overseeing the securities market.
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), agency of the U.S. government created by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and charged with protecting the interests of the public and investors in connection with the public issuance and sale of corporate securities. The five members of the SEC are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for terms of five years.
Where was Christopher Cox (head of SEC) and the other four board members during the development of many of the derivatives that led, in part, to the present financial meltdown? A proponent of deregulation, Cox indicated during recent hearings there were problems that they missed. Talk about an understatement! The fact that he was a proponent of deregulation is irrelevant, what is at stake is the simple issue of knowing what is going on in the market, and particularly, understanding the potential harm that financial instruments such as derivative securities might pose. At present, has he been asked to resign or punished in some way for his own and the rest of the Board’s lack of oversight? The head of American Express, by way of another example of financial non-sequitors, receives 50 million dollars a year for his salary. For what, we all might want to know? What does anyone do to earn 50 million a year for a company they don’t own? At present, American Express is experiencing its own financial meltdown and providing what can only be described as third world service in regards to the effect its policies might be having on card holders. Despite legitimate credit issues, AMX recently closed all Open credit lines and notified card holders ten days after they had done so. Their explanation was that they could do so legally. Legal yes but from a customer service point of view this was completely nuts, as there were innocent creditors who wrote checks against these accounts that bounced, creating further dislocation in financial markets. (Readers might want to Google this mini debacle for more info.) Note also the request for buyouts and bonuses from corporate heads whose companies are failing. This is beyond lunacy but it is also part of a mindset or set of business expectations that are no longer related to reality or common sense. Much like the Mandarins of old China, these dinosaurs have to go.
The departments of Commerce, Labor, HUD, Energy, Treasury and Transportation, for example, might make sense in terms of a logical breakdown of area responsibility but make absolutely no sense in terms of overall, coordinated development. Our current financial crisis is directly related to the slow down in industrial and other forms of development here in the US—what is quaintly referred to in the press as the job market. The financial crisis is just a symptom of mismanagement by individuals who have little or no moral vision. This goes beyond all party lines but bone-headed Republicans who think free-market capitalism will solve everything are as maladjusted as pin-headed Democrats who spend more time worrying about various emissions than the moral and spiritual pollution emanating from their own party.
If Obama is serious about reversing the present financial crisis, he might want to study how the Chinese overcame a rigid bureaucracy to create an enormous amount of wealth in a relatively short period of time. They violated many of the precepts of Communism to arrive at practical solutions for common problems. One glance at the skyline of many Chinese cities, the bounty of food available, a ride on their fast, modern trains or six lane, American style highways suffices to convince. This is not to say that the Chinese solution is without problems or moral difficulties but there is definitely something Americans can learn from Chinese pragmatism. What is needed now in America is our own version of the National Development and Reform Commission to replace present cabinet level departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Labor, Transportation and Energy. Our present reliance on the deterrence of mutually competing interests is eroding our ability to compete in international markets and is stifling industrial and other development here at home.
And finally, I cannot state how important it is to rein in the burgeoning notion that curtailing industrial activity here in the US is somehow contributing to saving the planet. The best way around pollution issues related to potential climate change is to deregulate environmental restrictions on nuclear power while simultaneously developing green forms of energy. (Makani Power, for example, and many others both like it and in other areas of green energy development show a great deal of promise but are probably not going to be ready for prime time quickly enough to supply the massive quantities of cheap power that will be needed, for example, once electric vehicles starting sipping at the collective well of electricity. This is likely to be a huge problem when millions of households start hooking up their cars to our present antiquated energy grid. (The Chevy Volt, a truly practical electric vehicle, is due out in 2010.) When this energy crisis comes up, and I am predicting it will, will anyone thump politicians for NOT developing nuclear and other forms of power as part of what should be normal foresight and planning?
Morally speaking, the shallow notion (related to saving rather than developing the planet) that there are too many people in the world needs to be replaced with a pro-life, human-centered vision for development. A good reference, believe it or not, are the various Papal Encyclicals on labor and development. There aren’t too many people on the earth. There are too many people doing nothing and living unproductive lives because there is little or no leadership in the western world on the synergistic and geometric relationship between labor and long-term industrial development. The geometric relationship between labor and long-term development might be described as follows. Long term development requires long term labor. This leads or can lead to a stable middle class of workers who then use their earnings to buy products and homes, which in turn further increases the need for labor and more development but only if the population is expanding and only if the promise of jobs and more work continues. Long term projects are essential for this kind of stability. When the idea of geometric growth is coupled with a vision of what people really need and want morally, physically and spiritually, what arises is the opportunity for moral governance. At present, the following four infrastructure projects (these are not new ideas) could create billions of dollars worth of new jobs and create long-term development for the next century.
1. The North American Water Project: bring water down via pipeline from water rich Canada to the US and Mexico. Long term taxes and revenue from water would pay for the project but politicians have to stop thinking in yearly cycles and move up to 10, 20 and 50 year industrial development plans
2. The High Speed Rail Project: development starting in the southwest to link the Southwest to the West Coast. Second phase: link the East Coast to the Midwest; maglev for heavily trafficked areas that require quick and convenient transportation.
3. The American Independence Project (who doesn’t like independence?) massive investment in new nuclear power plants largely freed of environmental regulations
4. The Alternative Green Power Project: massive development of solar, wind and other natural resources. Long term credits to be subsidized by long term earnings based on government lending/rental of energy producing units to the private sector.
There is plenty of space on the planet for a population two or three times its present size and when we run out of space and raw materials here on Earth, there is no reason not to head out into the Solar System and beyond for resources. None of this will happen without a vision for industrial development that is rooted either in Genesis (multiply/reproduce and have dominion of the earth, etc.,) or an alternate vision of humanity that is rooted in practical solutions for what people really need and want. This isn’t socialism, it is common sense. The oldest civilization on earth, despite its disturbing and present reliance on abortion, may yet lead the way into the future.
Why Pay More?
Great Low Prices on New Books
Worldwide, Secure Boxed Shipping
www.RedBrazil.com
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Moral Politics
I’m reading George Lakoff’s Moral Politics concurrent with Politics, Law and Morality by Soloviev. The former is a kind of psychologized analysis of morality and politics while Sloviev takes a position that is, perhaps, more enlightening for anyone wondering about the current drift of American politics.
“Perhaps one thing we might learn from the history of the twentieth century is that liberal societies overlook spiritual questions at their peril. We may have something important to learn about the requirements for a lasting pluralism from Dostoevsky, Soloviev and Bakhtin. Pluralism demands not an absence of values but an open dialogue among them. Capitalism and democracy deliver the goods, no doubt about it but do they deliver the Goods?”
--from the Intro by Gary Saul Morson
I hear a lot of echoes in Soloviev on issues that I focused on heavily in my first draft ms: Politics and the Soul: Adventures on the River of Gold. Whatever one might think that God really cares about, there is no doubt that western morality and spirituality, either rightly or wrongly, is founded on the notion that God’s goodness demands some behaviors be elevated above others as a standard or even as the basis on which one might approach the deity. To assume that God might be neutral on issues such as homosexuality and abortion is to run counter to the intuitions of western morality. There is, perhaps, a desire to reinvent morality on the basis of a kind of materialism that dispenses with the notion that some behaviors may be pleasing to the deity and some not. The consequences of this sort of re-moralizing, divorced, so to speak, from a transcendent God are seldom reflected on (except by conservatives) as running counter to the mindset, for example, of the Founding Fathers.
It is very, very difficult for me to accept homosexual behavior as normative, except relative to those who have the orientation. I find it far more satisfying to understand that human beings are simply and primarily pan sexual upon physical maturity and that all sexual behavior, despite a huge variety of observable inclinations, is chosen behavior and thus open to the calculus of moral reward or condemnation. I have chosen to think about this on the material level in terms of energy consumption using the model of the chakras but this is only one model—one that happens to support the spiritual model but it is the spiritual model—that some behaviors are pleasing in the sight of God and others not acceptable that is at the root of my focus on sexuality.
“My father desires worshippers in spirit and truth.” This presupposes that there is something called truth and not just the agnosticism of Pilate.
“Perhaps one thing we might learn from the history of the twentieth century is that liberal societies overlook spiritual questions at their peril. We may have something important to learn about the requirements for a lasting pluralism from Dostoevsky, Soloviev and Bakhtin. Pluralism demands not an absence of values but an open dialogue among them. Capitalism and democracy deliver the goods, no doubt about it but do they deliver the Goods?”
--from the Intro by Gary Saul Morson
I hear a lot of echoes in Soloviev on issues that I focused on heavily in my first draft ms: Politics and the Soul: Adventures on the River of Gold. Whatever one might think that God really cares about, there is no doubt that western morality and spirituality, either rightly or wrongly, is founded on the notion that God’s goodness demands some behaviors be elevated above others as a standard or even as the basis on which one might approach the deity. To assume that God might be neutral on issues such as homosexuality and abortion is to run counter to the intuitions of western morality. There is, perhaps, a desire to reinvent morality on the basis of a kind of materialism that dispenses with the notion that some behaviors may be pleasing to the deity and some not. The consequences of this sort of re-moralizing, divorced, so to speak, from a transcendent God are seldom reflected on (except by conservatives) as running counter to the mindset, for example, of the Founding Fathers.
It is very, very difficult for me to accept homosexual behavior as normative, except relative to those who have the orientation. I find it far more satisfying to understand that human beings are simply and primarily pan sexual upon physical maturity and that all sexual behavior, despite a huge variety of observable inclinations, is chosen behavior and thus open to the calculus of moral reward or condemnation. I have chosen to think about this on the material level in terms of energy consumption using the model of the chakras but this is only one model—one that happens to support the spiritual model but it is the spiritual model—that some behaviors are pleasing in the sight of God and others not acceptable that is at the root of my focus on sexuality.
“My father desires worshippers in spirit and truth.” This presupposes that there is something called truth and not just the agnosticism of Pilate.
Monday, November 03, 2008
A Public Philosophy: A Conservative Answer to Sex Education
If you tell a liberal that masturbation might not be salutary, you will see eyes glaze over and you will usually hear all sorts of incredulous responses. The inability to see a linkage between masturbation and all consequent sexual evils is part of the problem. This specifically distinguishes religious liberals from religious conservatives. Now, for a question: if there was a public ethic that said that masturbation was something that needed to be watched, curbed or otherwise reined in, do you think we would have as many abortions as we do today? We think not. By shifting the notion of sexuality to an issue of restraint rather than indulgence, you would see far greater movement towards a respect for sexuality than the get off, do it now mentality that is filtering down to young people from a mainstream media largely run by moral blockheads.
Let's set this aside for a moment and let's also dispense with the crudity of the notion of dick management and the idea that the Catholic Church was and is an institution that has a long history of managing sexuality through a sacramental system that enforces the notion of self-restraint. It should be abundantly clear from many of the current and superficial public discussions ranging from abortion to sex education that what is lacking in America is common sense, public moral education. Forget about sex education. This is only one chapter in a much larger discussion that is needed in the public forum. Walter Lippmann wrote a book that was moving in this direction in the 60s called The Public Philosophy. It is not a new idea but an idea that needs to be revisited.
Sex education outside of moral education is just a primer for more sex and more problems. (Anyone wishing to review the position of sex education pundits has only to review some of Siecus's statements on sexuality. They are straight out of looney tunes.) Morality is not religion. If concerned politicians want to get movement on the abortion issue—morality in general—tied to human sexuality has to be part of that discussion. What is needed is a dispassionate movement to reinstate morality, in the old sense of the virtues, or the notion that there is such a thing as too much and too little of various kinds of activities relative to human nature. Acting in accordance with right reason means connecting the dots between how you feel and what you do. Forget about heaven, forget about hell, focus on sexuality as if it were an energy or monetary issue. The conservation of sexual energy, as in sublimation, was in Freud’s mind the linchpin of civilization. Freud has been discredited by various moral pinheads within the psychological establishment on this point but he was absolutely right and the proof is in the pudding. God goes out the door when genitals are taken off their religious or spiritual leash.
I have spent a great deal of my life trying to understand the relationship between sexuality, energy and spiritual identity. How to Manage Your Dick is essentially a book about the need for a public philosophy. Why Aristotle? He is pre-Christian and all of his instincts about morality were, for the most part, dead on. As Cicero said, "He is a river of flowing gold." Anyone is free, of course, to disagree with both my assertions and conclusions but they are well supported by the 2,000 year old canon of western values. The management of sexuality has always been part of the central focus of Christian morality and while the core of Christianity is based on an encounter with the living and Triune God through His Son, there has been little deviation from this kind of management until recent times. The current problems of the Church (pederasty and other priest laity pokings) are a aberration from this tradition and have largely been caused by the influence of religious liberals and indeed heretics within the establishment.
Let's set this aside for a moment and let's also dispense with the crudity of the notion of dick management and the idea that the Catholic Church was and is an institution that has a long history of managing sexuality through a sacramental system that enforces the notion of self-restraint. It should be abundantly clear from many of the current and superficial public discussions ranging from abortion to sex education that what is lacking in America is common sense, public moral education. Forget about sex education. This is only one chapter in a much larger discussion that is needed in the public forum. Walter Lippmann wrote a book that was moving in this direction in the 60s called The Public Philosophy. It is not a new idea but an idea that needs to be revisited.
Sex education outside of moral education is just a primer for more sex and more problems. (Anyone wishing to review the position of sex education pundits has only to review some of Siecus's statements on sexuality. They are straight out of looney tunes.) Morality is not religion. If concerned politicians want to get movement on the abortion issue—morality in general—tied to human sexuality has to be part of that discussion. What is needed is a dispassionate movement to reinstate morality, in the old sense of the virtues, or the notion that there is such a thing as too much and too little of various kinds of activities relative to human nature. Acting in accordance with right reason means connecting the dots between how you feel and what you do. Forget about heaven, forget about hell, focus on sexuality as if it were an energy or monetary issue. The conservation of sexual energy, as in sublimation, was in Freud’s mind the linchpin of civilization. Freud has been discredited by various moral pinheads within the psychological establishment on this point but he was absolutely right and the proof is in the pudding. God goes out the door when genitals are taken off their religious or spiritual leash.
I have spent a great deal of my life trying to understand the relationship between sexuality, energy and spiritual identity. How to Manage Your Dick is essentially a book about the need for a public philosophy. Why Aristotle? He is pre-Christian and all of his instincts about morality were, for the most part, dead on. As Cicero said, "He is a river of flowing gold." Anyone is free, of course, to disagree with both my assertions and conclusions but they are well supported by the 2,000 year old canon of western values. The management of sexuality has always been part of the central focus of Christian morality and while the core of Christianity is based on an encounter with the living and Triune God through His Son, there has been little deviation from this kind of management until recent times. The current problems of the Church (pederasty and other priest laity pokings) are a aberration from this tradition and have largely been caused by the influence of religious liberals and indeed heretics within the establishment.
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