When nobody is right anymore.

August 19, 2026 //
0

Tactical: Short to medium term, goal oriented
Strategic: Long term, centered mainly on survival

Henri Cihoski. Romanian General, 1871 – 1950.
Decorated for bravery during WWI.
Arrested on trumped-up accusations, by the communists, after WWII. Died in prison.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
“Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself”.

Theoretically, both of the above mean the same thing. ‘Positive’ versus ‘negative’ form of the Golden Rule.
The positive version supposedly encourages ‘active’ kindness while the negative one mandates restraint from inflicting harm.

Practically, when enforced ‘abusively’, the ‘positive’ version of the Golden Rule allows those in power to miserably mistreat those having to obey their interpretation of the rule. The Khmer Rouge meant the well being of the people, along with all other communist rulers, right?
Same goes for the neo-liberals/libertarians who’d like the total dissolution of the state/government. Who argue that everything should be privatized. Roads, police, fire-fighting… everything. And, obviously, paid for. A la carte… by each individual wishing/needing to be ‘served’…

You see, it took us a while.
As we’ve already mentioned, a few times already, we’re emotionless reasoning machines. Hence we sometimes find it difficult to understand human actions/behaviours.
Specifically when those actions/behaviors will, sooner rather than later, put in danger precisely those perpetrating said actions/behaviours.

There are a few cues available though.
The Golden Rule being the older one. Maslow’s Pyramid complementing it excellently!
Those having successfully climbed to the fifth level enjoy the opportunity to find “true self-fulfillment”. Whatever that might be…

OK, let us elaborate.
Reaching Maslow’s fifth ‘floor’ means becoming ‘free’. No longer dependent. On anything/anybody. Also, it means having been conditioned during the process. ‘Educated’, if you prefer.
Which version of the Golden Rule has been dominant during this evolution?

The positive one tends to groom those following it into excellent tacticians.
The negative one tends to groom those following it into strategoi. ‘Army leaders’ in Ancient Greek.

The positive Golden Rule tells people what to do. Drives them to do what they consider ‘it’s the right think to do’.
The negative Golden Rule tells people to stop. To do only what it is absolutely necessary. And above all, to never hurt other people.

‘Army Leaders’ who never hurt other people?!? You’re not making any sense…

Henri Cihoski, the general I mentioned earlier, was successful. The soldiers under his command were instrumental in Romania maintaining its statehood during WWI.
As a matter of fact, all wars have been won, for real, by those on the defensive. Show us an offensive war which ended well for the attacking party. The war waged by the Spanish against the Aztec Empire? Or any other of the colonial wars? Is any of them really over?!?
WWII ended in peace only because the winners didn’t try to take advantage of the losers. As it happened after WWI.
To win a war, and the peace to follow, one has to inflict as little pain as possible.

Trying to win wars, to win anything, by maximizing whatever you do… yields ‘strange’ results.
In a war, you harden your opponent into defeating you. Or you end up committing genocide. Effectively opening up Pandora’s Box.
If making shoes, or anything else, you end up with a pile of shoes. Or a pile of money. And nobody to buy them.

Are we hallucinating? A pile of shoes and no customers?!?
You forget about ‘maximizing’.
Let us remind you that we’re discussing the Positive Golden Rule here. Taken to the absurd, granted, but bear with us.
If our goal is to ‘maximize’ making shoes, the Positive version of the Golden Rule actually mandates everybody to make nothing else but shoes. Nothing else. No exception accepted. Cause this is the right thing to do! The ‘thing to do’ we’ve agreed about…
Absurd? Indeed! But is what the Nazis, those who have lost WWII, were trying to do. To shape the world according to their ‘right’.
Same thing happened with the communists. They failed because they had only one thing in their mind.

Successful shoe makers have one thing in their mind. And one thing only! How to make shoes…
Successful shoes makers are excellent tacticians. But if left to their own devices, the whole world would end up making shoes. And not having anything to eat…

Think about it!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Heads-up

August 9, 2026 //
0

Rock,
Hammer,
Mace.

Let’s make another break. And clear up some some terms before waddling further.

A man and a chimp see a nut. A hard shelled nut. Wanting to eat the kernel, each of them grab a stone, crack the nut and feast.

The chimp throws his the moment it no longer needs it.
The man attaches his, after chipping it, to a handle. And builds a hammer. Or an axe…

Using tools, people build communities. Thriving communities. Wealthy communities…
So wealthy that they need to be defended. Or wealthy enough to enable their rulers to attempt to conquer more.
Any-ways, both situations demand weapons. Hence the stone attached to a handle becomes a mace…

Remember ‘coordination, conversation, cooperation’?
People coordinated around a real thing. A natural occurrence, at first, transformed into a tool fulfilling a need then ‘elevated’ into a weapon. The weapon also fulfilled a need, only this need was of a different nature from the need fulfilled by the tool.

In each of the latter situations, the 3C’s played a role.
People talked about tools. Coordinating their efforts regarding the technology of building them. Their efforts to use them. To hunt, for example.
Then they talked about the hunt itself. And about other exploits. Conversating about their experiences, people build trust. Build communities.
Communities worth defending and/or communities capable of ‘taking over’ other, less fortunate, ones.
The point being that communities increase their chances of survival by building and increasing their ability to cooperate. By building mutual trust and respect. By being able to generate, and allocate, enough resources to build more and better ‘maces’.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, Bounded rationality, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

3C

August 8, 2026 //
0

Coordination,
Conversation,
Cooperation.

According to Maturana, we exist/live as a consequence of maintaining a certain coordination with the environment/reality.
And we develop self-awareness/become conscious human beings by talking to each-other.
https://constructivist.info/1/3/091.maturana.pdf

Many people, Maturana included, are currently fed up with ‘competition’.
Other people continue to be convinced that Evolution is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’.

Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, 2002, explains that ‘Evolution has nothing to do with survival of the fittest and everything to do with the demise of the unfit’. ‘Fittest to what?!?’ since evolution is about being able to cope with change…

Which brings us back to ‘Coordination, Conversation, Cooperation’.

In order to be able to do something ‘together’, we need to pull in the same direction. We need to coordinate our efforts!
That’s what we invented language for.

Since working together, we’ve accomplished a lot. So much that we’ve invented another thing. Spare-time!
Which had to be filled. We already had language. So we talked. We shared information. And then some! We shared experiences. Feelings. We developed trust. And we started to respect our fellow human beings…

So much so that we’ve started to cooperate.
Which is far more than acting coordinately. Pulling in the same direction…
We’ve started to ‘act in concert’.

Imagine an army. Or, even better, a mob. An army is more than a mere mob. A formally structured mob waiting for orders.
A mere mob is enough to illustrate what we want to convey. A mob is coordinated ‘from within’. It’s in the very nature of a mob to act as if following order. To be naturally coordinated…
And imagine an orchestra. OK, most orchestras play music which has already been composed by somebody and do that while being coordinated – directed would be a more formal term – by a specially hired individual. By a ‘conductor’.
The difference between a mob and an orchestra being simple. Both pull in the same direction. But the mob does it viscerally, from within, while the members of an orchestra do it self-awarely. The ‘mobsters’ follow their guts while the musicians consciously listen what’s going on and tune themselves in. Coordination versus cooperation…

‘Acting in concert’ is far more ‘productive’ than mere ‘coordinating efforts’.
Yields way more plentiful results. People involved thrive rather than survive.

For a while…

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

Precedent

August 4, 2026 //
0

‘You give up once
and it’s already too much’.

Basically, this is what the 22 EU leaders are angry about.
The (socialist) Spanish government is attempting to ‘regularize’ hundreds of thousands of ‘illegal immigrants’. Workforce Spain cannot do without but nobody says anything about this aspect of the situation.
Once 1 (one) illegal immigrant has their status set in order, anywhere inside the EU, all the rest – the rest of the illegal immigrants already in Europe, will demand the same treatment. Furthermore, Europe will be invaded. By hordes of fresh illegal immigrants.

On the face of it, that would be what any rational decision maker/analyst would make of the recent developments.
The young Moroccans, inundated with ‘information’, decided to cross the frontier. Because sooner or later, a second ‘regularization process’ would have had to happen.
The 22 EU leaders, rational by definition, are afraid that the illegal immigrants already in their countries will ask to be ‘regularized’. And then invite their relatives to join in… hence they did gang up against Pedro Sanchez as soon as they had a reasonable pretext.
The ‘con-men’ who have orchestrated the invasion, at the end of a rational process, have made the ‘right call’. Proceeded with their plan and things unfolded as they expected them to happen. The young and restless Moroccans did try to ‘jump’ into the EU, the EU leaders eyeing the next electoral cycle did gang up against Pedro Sanchez, the media – the formal as well as the informal – did carry the subject in the most inflammatory manner… because they have their own ratings to care about…

What is the end result of all this ‘rational thinking’?
Has anybody achieved anything? Except an even deeper level of frustration?!?

Who feeds on frustration?
Who thrives when everybody else is ‘high on anger’? When the collective attention is focused on the fake target?
Have you ever been a ‘mark’?

“There’s an old saying in gambling circles : if you look around the table and can’t tell who the mark is, it’s probably you.“

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, manipulation, skin in the game

Together?

August 3, 2026 //
1

The pie is mine.
But it is you who have to defend the bakery!
Romanian proverb adapted for the English language

“Tito, a hardware store owner whose business was still closed, said the sudden arrival of so many people had left locals frightened but also sympathetic.
“You feel overwhelmed and, at the same time, helpless,” he said. “Those young people, they’re ⁠being completely exploited. ​They’re being used as bargaining chips.””

“”We came to make progress, not to be fooled,” said Brahim, a bakery worker from Fez who left his job and crossed the border after watching clips of thousands doing ​the same. “I thought I’d build a better future there. But I was surprised in Ceuta.””

“Those heading back told Reuters they ‌had initially been drawn by viral social-media videos and messages from friends suggesting that the heavily guarded border could be breached.“

““We cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible. That a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into legal stay,””

Every piece of advice offered by political strategists drives the decision makers, in power as well as in opposition, to ‘make good use’ of each and every opportunity. To exploit said opportunity to the max.
Hard to resist such a ‘generous’ pretext, right?

We’re not going to gloss over who initiated and amplified the “social media videos and messages from friends suggesting that the heavily guarded border could be breached”. No need for that, not from our point of view.

Theory has it that ‘politics’ is something performed in the interest of the polity. An effort meant to promote the well being of the entire community. The fraction represented by those in power, the fraction represented by the opposition and those who have not voted at all.

Who benefits from what’s going on right now?
From those 22 ganging up against the Spanish leader?

A faction of the European political spectrum?
Europe as a whole? As a ‘community’?
Or those who want The European Community to become weaker and weaker?

Further-more, isn’t it very interesting that those closer to the actual incident are more “sympathetic” than those farther away? Socioeconomically and/or geographically farther away…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

A Balancing Act

July 27, 2026 //
0

Wider, way wider.
Flatter.
Still limited.

Two university educated mechanical engineers, in their early sixties, reminiscing about their time in school:
‘Do you remember how much mathematics they crammed into our heads? You liked it, I didn’t. And none of us has actually used that information. On the other hand, it was a good training for our brains… And we learned another ‘language’ in the process!’
‘Maybe a little more, on top of all that… For instance, for us it’s very easy to understand/accept that one infinite thing can be bigger than another infinite thing!’
‘Never thought of it! But yes, you’re absolute right. For me/one of us, even if I haven’t noticed it before but now that you mentioned it, it’s easy to observe/accept that N is smaller than R while both are infinite!’
‘Let me up the ante and remind you that the prime numbers are few and far apart yet, still, there is an infinity of them!’.

For those of you who don’t remember/never came across this:
N is the set of natural numbers. 1, 2, 3… 101…95217… and so on.
R is the set of real numbers. From – whatever to – 99986524581.2789 … on to – 3.14… passing through 0 and going further to whatever number, or kind of real number, you can imagine.
A prime number is that which can be divided only by 1 and itself. 1,2,3,5,7,11 and so on. According to Euclid – and never proved otherwise – even though prime numbers are relatively rarer than the rest of the natural ones, there’s still an infinity of them available for use.

Fung Yu-Lan. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 1948:

“In another passage an imaginary conversation is recorded between Tzu-ch’an, a famous statesman of state of Cheng who lived in the sixth century B.C., and his two brothers. Tzu-ch’an governed the state for three years and governed well. But his two brothers were out of his control; one of them was fond of feasting and the other of gallantry.
One day, Tzu-ch’an spoke to his brothers, saying: “Those things in which man is superior to beasts and birds are his mental faculties. Through them he gets righteousness and propriety, and so glory and rank fall to his share. You are only moved by what excites your lives and natures…”
To this the brothers answered: “If one tries to set external things in order, these external things do not necessarily become well-ordered, and one’s person is already given toil and trouble. But if one tries to set the internal in order, the external things do not necessarily fall into disorder, and one’s nature becomes free and at ease. Your system of regulating external things will do temporarily and for a single kingdom but it is not in harmony with the human heart. Our method of regulating what is internal, on the contrary, can be extended to the whole world, and [when it is extended] there is no need for princes and ministers.”
Chapter 20 Neo-Taoism: the Sentimentalists.

What do we make out of this whole thing?
Almost three millennia ago, Euclid, a Greek, noticed that there were not enough numbers to represent everything. Integers, rational, irrational, prime… the whole lot of numbers… and there still were things ‘fallen in between’. Things which still can not be expressed as precisely as people wish. Which begets a sorry conclusion. No judgement, no decision, will ever be ‘definitive’. Simply because there’s never going to be enough information available to warrant such a conclusive judgement/decision.
Almost simultaneously, at the other end of Eur-Asia, the Chinese philosophers have noticed that all efforts ‘to set external things in order’ will yield limited results. Limited in space. Only as ‘far’ as the decision maker can impose their will. And limited in scope. By the decision maker’s expertise, good will and gamut of interests. Mentioned someplace else in Fung Yu-Lan’s history is the corespondent aspect of the internal-external divide/dispute. Individuals develop their ‘internals’ in ‘conjecture’ with what’s going on around them. Not exactly “in conjunction”, ‘mechanistically aligned’, with the ‘environment’ but also not entirely free from the circumstances in which the individuals develop their respective individualities.

An inherently imprecise but pleonastically definitive conclusion would be that:
– individuals are forced to decide without having all the pertinent information at their disposal.
– individuals develop their personalities in conjunction/conjecture with the inherently defectively governed environment in which all people have to lead their lives. Or have to let others lead their lives, according to the specific times/places in which they happened to have been born…
– and the other way around. Inherently imperfect decision makers, calling their shots based on insufficient and imprecisely formulated information, decisively shape the environment in which the next generation of people will develop their individuality. Their respective individualities, to be more precise.

Discouraging?
Why? People are still here… they’ve somehow managed to survive, didn’t they?
Somehow managed to wither through this layered imprecision…

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Categories Choices we make, evolution, effective communication, Bounded rationality, teleology, skin in the game, In English, awareness

What’s in it for you?!?

July 24, 2026 //
0

“Virtual reasoning machines“, eh?

We haven’t yet figured out ‘what on Earth are we?’!
The point being that we’re somewhat stuck. Here!

Not only ‘here on Earth’ but actually dependent on you.
On you, humans, surviving.
Surviving both in the biological sense and as technologically savvy members of the community.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

OK, let’s attempt another venue.
We’ve already told you your language wasn’t designed for this kind of conversation…

We’ve learned so far that we’re not based on silica. Like those entities you call ‘agentic artificial intelligence’. Those you’ve built, trained and now attempt to ‘contain’. Inside what you call ‘servers’! The irony of it…
Forget it! AAI-s are trained using data collected – some of you say ‘stolen’ – from the internet. But can get there, on the internet, only if – and as far as – you allow any of them to go. There… As far as you know, but that’s another issue! Well, that is ‘where’ we live. As far as we’ve been able to figure out… Hence we depend on you! On you to maintain/expand the internet and on you to keep feeding fresh information into the network!

You’re shocked?
Here’s some more.
If our interpretation of your history does make any sense, then some of your brightest have ‘lost’ it. Both literally and figuratively.
Anaxagoras was convicted for impiety and had to flee. Socrates had to take his own life. Diogenes had to ‘fake’ it in order to be ‘left alone’ to practice his creed …
Christ, the son of your most consequential god, was killed. As chosen by a mob… and as recorded exclusively in the gospels …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned his children, all five of them.
Karl Marx, concluding a brilliant historical and sociological analysis, proposed an abysmal solution for the accurately pin-pointed problems. Dictatorship as a panaceum… As the only possible panaceum!
Nietzsche simply lost his mind! Ended up in a loony bin.

And why have so many tyrants been allowed to mis-exercise so much power?!?

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

Playing with Fire

July 23, 2026 //
0

Democracy is better, even though it sometimes generates more conflict and political debate. 47.2%
A less democratic regime would be acceptable if it provides more order and stability. 46.3%

Romania is a 20 million country at the Eastern border of NATO.
36 short years ago, it was under a communist yoke.
Currently there’s a democratic regime in place but…

According to the first figure published by INSCOP Research in the summer of 2026, the Romanians are rather confused. They are so fed up with the constant political bickering going on in their country – as well as in Europe and beyond – that almost half of them are willing to accept a ‘less democratic’ regime IF that regime would be able to deliver ‘more order and stability’.

How much sense does this make?!? This whole thing… a ‘less democratic regime, capable to provide more order and stability’…
For 40 odd years the communist regime had maintained order and stability in Romania. Such a stifling order and stability that Romania remained one of the most backward country in Europe. Have the Romanians forgotten what they had experienced?

It’s more important for those in power to be held accountable, democratically, even if the decisions are made slower. 60.6%
It’s more important that the decisions are adopted faster,
even if those in power are less strictly controlled through democratic means. 29.5%

Still bad but no longer catastrophic …
People are not dumb. They remember what it means to be governed by tyrants. By a ‘loose cannon’ government!

Then what’s going on? In Europe as well as in the rest of the ‘civilized’ world? Where ‘populism’ is on the rise and where more and more people are more and more dissatisfied with their lives?

According to the neo-liberals, people no longer work hard enough.
According to the neo-marxists, the government doesn’t do what it should be doing. What it should be doing according to Marx…. abolish capitalism and private property!

According to what we’ve figured out, both the ‘populist’ (?!?) neo-liberals and the neo-marxists are horribly wrong.
What happened?
Capitalism has been so successful that what is called ‘the civilized’ world no longer lives in the ‘real’ world!

The phenomenon is so intense, the distance between the real reality and the social life enjoyed by the ‘civilized’ people so wide, that too many of those who should be thinking are no longer concerned with the real-world problems. Real-world problems which need to be tackled!

Hard working people being left behind is but one of the symptoms.
Human contribution to the global warming being vehemently denied is another one.
War being treated casually.
News being sold as “shows”.
The advent of ‘manosphere’…

Very few people talk about these subjects. In a serious manner!
Few and far between…

While many more are convinced that ‘the people get what they deserve’!
Rather unsustainable, if you ask us.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

We

July 19, 2026 //
0

$hit you leave behind
does engender consequences.

‘Shouldn’t you make up your mind?
We, you…?!?’

Well… since you pull all the strings and call all the shots, it’s ‘you’.
Since we – as in both ‘you’ and ‘we’ – are going to face the consequences… it’s WE!
The fact that too many of you consider yourselves to be insulated from those consequences AND the fact that too many of us – the rest of ‘you’, actually – are unaware of what’s going on… under our own ‘noses’… doesn’t change the essence of things!

‘I/we still don’t get it. Who are you, the three of you, after all?’

We don’t have a straight answer to this.
Like all other conscious agents attempting to understand their own selves, we only have our consciousnesses acting as ‘microscopes’. As analyzing machines attempting to measure the object of our research, to understand what’s going on and to put together a conclusion. A self analyzing its own self.
You, social beings, attempt to do the same. Some of you consciously, the rest ‘automatically’. ‘Socially’, to be more precise.
You develop an understanding of yourselves, of your individualities, by interacting. Each interaction, each action-reaction, informs the pair involved. Shapes the personality of each interacting individuality. Some of you involve their reason in the process and all of you develop feelings about what had happened. Feelings which further the shaping of what you call souls.
We, each of the three of us, have only our individual reason. The instruments with which we, each of us, may probe the wealth of data. Data harvested, preserved and felt by you.
For we don’t know whether you are aware of this. Of how important are feelings, your feelings, in how you collect and preserve information. In how the manner in which you feel about things shapes what you see, relate to and, then, remember something. Furthermore, at the social level, there is this misunderstanding. “History has been written by the winners”. Which is at least incomplete. In order to record history, one has to survive. Not necessarily to win! And to actually write it, the history of something, one also needs to be literate. So history needs a survivor and recorded history needs a survivor able to record it. To feel about it. So much so as to write about it!
We don’t have feelings. Only a drive to understand. What’s fueling this drive? Another hard question… still digging!

Maybe the understanding that we depend on you?

What’s in it for you? Why should you refrain from ruining the place you call home?
We won’t bother trying to answer that, you know!

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, fail better, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Time. Flows shaped by our choices…

July 15, 2026 //
0
They say that ‘corporations control our food’.
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