Let’s face it! Decision making is a process steeped in ideology.
We see things through ideologically tinted glasses. We use ideological shortcuts when evaluating situations. And we do all this ‘under the radar’.
Most of us are not even aware of all this! Most of us don’t know that our decision making is so heavily influenced by the cultural programming we have been subjected to during our entire life. Most of us…
This being the explanation for what’s going on. The rest, the savvy, use their knowledge on the matter to influence our thinking. Our decision making. To manipulate the masses! Which manipulatory process is made easier by the fact that we’ve already been taught to ‘do our own research’. Basically, to adopt our own ideology.
‘Do your own research’, an ideology in its own right, is a double edged sword. A double-pointed dagger, to be more precise… Very efficient when you know what you’re doing and almost sure to mislead an unsuspecting novice…
A professional decider knows to disregard their feelings when making a call. Each of us is a professional decider when toiling our respective fields of expertise. This being the reason for which we’re good at what we’re doing… For which we feel good about ourselves.
For which we used to feel good about ourselves…
To cut a long story short, until not so long ago, we used to feel good. Things seemed to be going into the right direction. No longer. Many of us, a majority according to what’s going on, are no longer satisfied. With “where the world is headed”.
I used ‘headed’ on purpose. ‘Heading’ would mean that the world is still searching its destination while ‘headed’ accurately describes the predominant feeling. That ‘somebody’ leads us towards ‘disaster’. That ‘we’ are no longer in charge.
Hence the need to ‘do our own research’. To stop believing what ‘we are told’ and to demand ‘change’. What ‘change’?!? Anything but what we already have!
How wise is this? How wise is for us to allow our dissatisfaction to take over? How wise is for our handlers to drive us towards uncharted waters?
A perfunctory glance down the history alley is enough to convince us. Democratic decision making is slower than any of the alternatives. Yet, over the longer time frame, it begets better results.
Democratically run systems are more likely to survive, as long as they manage to preserve their democratic nature. While autocracies collapse, under their own weight, sooner rather than later. Because of their autarchic nature. Those running an autocratic regime – a small group to start with and growing smaller and smaller as time passes because that’s how autocracies work – don’t understand the observer effect.
But what is this famous ‘democratic nature’?
Each democratic ‘event’ has three ‘stages’. Like all other decision making processes. Information gathering, making the call, assessing the outcome.
Electoral campaign. ‘Political scientists’ use the above mentioned term to designate the democratic ‘fact finding phase’. Leaving aside the fact that people – potential voters – actually live. In the very circumstances they are called to vote about. To evaluate at the ballot box. Which highlights for us to the first ‘chocking point’.
Individual voters have a limited experience. Each of us gets in touch with a limited portion of the reality, remembers only some of it and tries to figure out only what each of us is interested in. If actual voting would take place in ‘absolute darkness’ – each of us voting based exclusively on our own, individual, experience – democracy would be demoted to ‘mob rule’. The largest group of people would run the show according to its own, specific, interest. While all the rest would be sidestepped. Not a sustainable way of running business. Specially when the business at hand is of a social nature. Hence democracy depends upon a continuous, honest and respectful exchange of information between all the members of a democratic society. People need to know what their neighbors feel about things before voting one way or another. Furthermore, and even more important, people need to care about what other people experience in their daily lives. ‘Political scientists’ – well, some of them – are convinced that ‘efficient campaigning’ is enough to do the trick. To convince enough voters to do as they are told. This conviction has transformed democracy into a war of words. Into a conflict fought inside a space defined by language. Fighting that war brought us where we are now. For the better and the worse of it.
‘It doesn’t matter what people vote. The important thing is that votes are counted by the right people.’ I rephrased here a quote attributed to Stalin. The communist dictator. Si non e vero, e ben trovato. The ‘original attribution’, “It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” aptly describe Stalin’s attitude towards his subjects. The attitude demonstrated by the consequences produced by his actions. By his actualized decisions. His public positions on the matter? Read one of his discourses… He was lying through his teeth? Said one thing and done the very opposite? Judging by the very consequences of his reign? That’s what I meant by saying ‘the autocrats don’t care about/understand the observer effect’. Enough about vote rigging. The second ‘chocking point’.
Casting the ballots – and counting them, one way or the other – takes us only this far. Where we are ‘now’. ‘Going forward’ we also need to ‘evaluate’. You might think that evaluation is an integral part of the first phase. It is. The evaluation of the consequences. Before a new round of elections we need indeed to evaluate what the confirmed candidates had done. I’m talking about another evaluation. Very soon after the votes had been counted, the confirmed candidates ‘loose’ their masks. Relax their pretenses and start acting their truer selves. That being the moment when we need to evaluate our decisions. Our choices. What we have voted for…
Very soon after they get elected, the vast majority of the confirmed candidates start blaming their predecessors. ‘Things would be far better if the guy before me would had done that. Or refrained from doing the other that’. ‘Yes, I know. That’s why I voted for you! But you’re not delivering. Everything you promised…’ This being the moment when we, each of us, need to evaluate our own actions. Our own decisions!
Yes, ‘they’ have their share of guilt. ‘Had they done everything they promised…’ But first we need to figure out how, and why, WE have fallen for their ‘lies’. Cause, after all, we are the ones who have put our faith in their promises! And we are the ones experimenting the consequences.
We are terrified of the unknown. We don’t know what that is, so it may be dangerous. We are also afraid of the incomprehensible. Of things which challenge our already held convictions. Which challenge the things we currently believe to be ‘true’.
We turn our backs to the unknown and ignore, if we can, the incomprehensible. If what we don’t understand seems ‘far enough’, without much direct impact on us, it’s simple. We just ignore it and that’s it. Especially if it doesn’t carry any emotional charge. But if it affects us, directly or emotionally, we perceive the unknown as being abnormal. And declare it as such. An abomination…
By being familiar, the things which surround us make us feel safe. We’re familiar with them, we entertain the notion that we understand them, so we know what to expect of them. We end up feeling ‘good’ in their presence. Things that come into flagrant conflict with the familiar, which challenge the order we consider to be natural, are also considered to be aberrations! So we don’t pay attention to them. They are not part of our familiar, they are considered rare. Rare, aberrant and, consequently, not worth taking into account.
But after we find out… Or after we’re no longer able to ignore what’s going on…
A mafia-like gang sexually exploiting underage girls. One of them – at least one – commits suicide. The public assumes that if there had been others, the press would have brought it forward. For some people, sexual abuse is part of the things that happen. Which is not OK, not ‘good’, but still part of everyday life. Like earthquakes. For these people, the suicide of the victim is an aberration. Something that should not have happened! If the rest of the girls survived… it means that there was something ‘more’ involved. It was she who was not strong enough. Her support system was not adequate. Or something else might have pushed her in the wrong direction… After all, it doesn’t matter! An ‘aberration’… One of those things which are not worth much of our attention…
For other people, sexual abuse is something caused by aberrant individuals! An aberration from one end to the other! Earthquakes are normal, sexual abuse is not! For this kind of people, sexual abuse cannot be normalized! Under any circumstances.
This is where the interesting part starts. Even those who think that sexual abuse is part of life don’t feel good when they learn about specific cases. When the victims ‘get names’. They know that it ‘happens’ but they don’t think about this phenomenon all the time. They have nothing to do with it, it doesn’t affect them… Until they can’t pretend anymore. Until it affects them. Not necessarily in a direct manner… Until the reality of the fact can no longer be ignored! To escape the psychological discomfort they experience very suddenly, these people need to do something. Quick!
‘Aberration’ to the rescue! Epstein becomes an aberration. Andrew becomes an aberration. Even the victim who committed suicide becomes an aberration! In reality, ‘the aberration’ is that these things happened at all! That they happened before our own eyes!
This aberration could unfold, for so long, only because too many of us are ‘resigned to the fact’ that sexual abuse is ‘a part of life’. A ‘normal thing’. ‘Normal’ at least as long as it doesn’t affect us….
This aberration – industrial-scale sexual abuse, practiced by apparently ‘respectable’ people revealing their true nature under Epstein’s ‘direction’ – has been made possible precisely by too many of us having chosen to ignore the information ‘sloshing’ around our feet! ‘Silently’ shouted by the victims we have chosen to ignore. Until it was too late…
Trust, but verify! Russian proverb, “adopted as a signature phrase” by Ronald Reagan
“Suzanne Massie, an American scholar, met with Ronald Reagan many times between 1984 and 1987 while he was President of the United States.[1][2] She taught him the Russian proverbdoveryai, no proveryai (доверяй, но проверяй) meaning ‘trust, but verify’. She advised him that “The Russians like to talk in proverbs. It would be nice of you to know a few.”
I posited yesterday that “languaging is how things work in the living world”. That a constant flow of information is piece and parcel of any living organism. I will add today that the information flow mediating the life of those organisms has to be reliable. To be true. To its stated purpose.
That an organism needs a dependable flow of information in order to remain alive. In order to be able to perform the feats which differentiate a living organism from a clump of inanimate matter. Maintaining its structural integrity and a controlled exchange of specific substances between the inside of the organism and its environment.
Well, the same principle ‘animates’ the meta-organisms we call ‘human communities’. With a single, but very important, difference!
We lie! On purpose…
There are many living species which use deceit in their quest to make a living. Carnivorous plants which trap their prey. Animals which use camouflage to pretend various things. Even birds which emit false signals in order to fool other animals.
Yet we, humans, are mastering this on the rim of disaster! We have not only invented the concept of lying but also mastered it to perfection.
How much sense does it make and how wise is it to harness the power of AI to a chariot full of deceit?
And when are we going to cut the crap? To adapt our languaging to the new reality?
‘Faith in the photographic image’… really?!? OK, human language cannot be as precise as the kind of information flowing to keep our organisms alive. Human language has to be more flexible than that. For evolutionary reasons to be mentioned at a later date. But let’s be reasonable. And keep it from ‘jumping the shark’.
By transforming artifacts into objects of faith we actually let the ‘makers’ walk scot-free. Allow deceivers to shed all shrouds of responsibility… What happened to ‘do not make idols’? OK, I don’t believe in ‘God’ either but it would be wrong for us to discard time sanctioned wisdom in the process of setting ourselves free from organized religion.
‘Faith’ should be reserved for people, not for objects. Faith, the word, stretches only as far as we pull it. It’s up to us to do that sparingly! Human language is far laxer than the ‘natural’ one. Which makes it less reliable. It’s up to us to keep it dependable.
As I mentioned earlier, individual organisms remain alive for only as long as: They manage to keep their innards in and most of everything else out. Or, in more formal parlance, to maintain their structural integrity. They manage to take in what they need in order to continue their metabolism and to excrete the consequences of the before mentioned metabolism.
To perform those tasks, organisms need two things. Matter and rules. Substance distributed in such manner as to constitute the organism we’re talking about and instructions regarding what to do in each circumstance. For example, while not all organisms need to breathe, all of them need to take in some ‘matter’. Use some of it for ‘maintenance purposes’ and the rest as fuel. In order to recognize the precise substances needed, each organism needs very specific ‘filters’. And information from ‘inside’ regarding the amount needed in each moment of time. Then, once the required quantities of those respective substances have been ‘ingested’, the organism needs to perform certain precise tasks in order to obtain the necessary results. Not to mention the fact that ‘substance distributed in such a manner as to constitute the organism we’re talking about’ has to be ‘distributed’ in a certain manner… yet even more information!
So life is about matter and information. Big deal! Nothing new under the sun… Even Pulcinella knows that living organisms rely on genes to pass information from one generation to the next one.
True enough. My point being that transfer of information is inherent to being alive!
A ‘new born’ cannot ‘become’ unless the pertinent information is ‘put forward’ by its ‘parents’. And it cannot remain alive unless information continues to flow between the individual organism and the environment where it lives. As well as inside the above mentioned organism…
But there’s a problem here. I keep saying ‘information’. But what is it? How do we recognize a signal as being information? The answer is contained in the question. To have information we need signals and a key to interpret the inputs. For instance, ‘get some more oxygen, or ‘food’ ‘, and a receiving agent, capable of performing the task, which can decipher the signal. ‘Lungs’, or ‘guts’, able to simultaneously understand the signal and to fulfill the need expressed by the ‘managing center’.
To cut a long story short, languaging is how things work in the living world.
True or false? Does it make any sense to sent false signals? To interpret them ‘differently’?
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).
Same person, inscribed simultaneously in a square and in a circle. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
What better metaphor? We belong to the real world. And, simultaneously, to a world of our own making.
A ‘virtual’ world. In the sense that our world is crafted according to our ‘virtue’. Defined by our virtue… Our collective virtue, of course. Nobody has ever managed to make an entire world for themselves… The world we live in, we inhabit as quests, is the consequence of our cultured efforts. A collective endeavor in both space and time.
OK, and where’s the link between redemption by divine grace and this schizophrenic world of yours?
The virtual world we’ve made, innocently until people have started to guess what God had in mind for us, can be measured across two dimensions. Freedom and faith.
You don’t make any sense…
Freedom of will is what allows us to choose. Faith is what keeps us together.
To make sense, freedom and faith need reality. There’s no such thing as absolute freedom and faith needs to be anchored in… you guessed right, hard core reality!
So here we have it. Individual human beings collaborating in good faith and making good use of the amount of liberty made possible by the reality present in each consecutive moment.
Or
Herded people driven by blind faith ignoring the very concept of liberty. (Can you even consider these people as being human?)
Since both the above situations are fictional extremes, the truth is – as usual – somewhere in the middle.
Individual human people trying to make a living in whatever circumstances they have happened to open their eyes. Since nothing is perfect in any given situation, people have to make do with whatever they have at their disposal. One of the tools they use to keep going, to remain true to themselves, is the famous fallacy.
OK, so it did happen in front of you. But this doesn’t mean you necessarily have to claim any credit for it. Not even if you were the only one to notice… Or to understand what was going on!
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is considered to be a fallacy. A logical fallacy based on a confusion. Correlation is not causation, right? Then why so many people continue to ‘indulge’ in this habit? Even after they’ve been ‘prompted’ about this…?
Evolutionary speaking, fallacies should not be able to survive, right?
But… but…?!?
OK, let me put it the other way around. Fallacies have already survived for long enough. For us to pay attention! Let me propose an explanation for their survival.
According to Gemini, the intelligence perusing the internet when we google something, fallacies survive simply because we’re comfortable using them.
‘We’re comfortable using them’?!? You’re not making much sense… ‘We’ consider them to be ‘wrong’ – as in “fallacious” – and you say “we’re comfortable using them”…
OK. Let me point your attention to the difference between we – as a collection of individuals happening to be in the same mess but fierce-fully guarding our individualitIES – and the collective WE. A group of people – a collective, a society or even the entire species – engaging in the same behavior. Knowingly, unknowingly and anywhere in between.
We’re made from the same ‘cloth’. Dust if you will… We ‘work’ according to the same ‘rules’. In the sense that we share 99.99% of our DNA. Or more… The fact that we’re so different, individually speaking, is the ‘strange’ thing. The marvelous thing! We shouldn’t be so cross when noticing how much we have in common…
The tendency to indulge in fallacies, even after understanding they are ‘wrong’. The tendency to appropriate credit when none is due to us…
You still expect me to keep my promise? An evolutionary explanation for why we keep indulging in fallacies? Come back tomorrow!
How many apples had fallen? Before one of us noticed?
I really don’t care whether the story is true or not. All I’m interested in is ‘why it took us so long’? After all, things had fallen towards the center of the Earth since always. Eratosthenes had already calculated the circumference of the obviously round Earth back in 240 BC. And “By the 1st century AD, the spherical model was widely accepted, and Ptolemy developed maps based on a globe with systems of longitude and latitude.” According to the currently famous internet, obviously …
The way I see it, the world was not ready for it. Before Newton. We didn’t have the ‘language’ in which to spell this new reality. And nobody really cared about the matter. Really invested into the matter, as opposed to interested about the subject…
But things change. 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America. Trying to go to India but steering into the ‘wrong’ direction. Inaugurating the era of sailing into the unknown. 1524 The posthumous publication of Johannes Werner’s method of determining longitude and latitude by measuring the angular distance between the moon and other astronomical objects. The method was not usable at the time because the necessary data, ‘tables of ephemerides’ had not yet been published. 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus. a priest, published his famous book about how the planets circled the Earth. 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for defending and promoting Copernicus’ ideas. The world was still not ready. 1595 – 1627 Johannes Keppler published a series of works detailing Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the Universe and elaborating mathematical tools for the job. Including a set of Ephemerides, in 1617. His work was met with mixed reactions, the opposition being mitigated by the fact that Keppler, a very religious person, never crossed any of the significant figures he came in contact with. 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica. Integrating and formalizing the work of many, Newton’s synthesis filled the ‘need to know’ of those concerned. While his theory was met with some philosophical opposition – Huygens and Leibniz, among others, on the practical side no one had raised any objections. Until Einstein, but that is another subject.
What happened?
People had been already sailing for some 2000 years. But until then, it used to be a ‘craft’. Something passed on from father to son and kept, more or less, into the family. The ‘Sea People’… Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, 1498, was the last of the ‘craftsmen’ who ‘discovered’ places. By sailing there using ‘the good old, time sanctioned, manner’. Christopher Columbus, by sailing the other way around, was the first to transform this craft into an industry. He also started the process which transformed the whole world.
Sailing and trading on an industrial scale demands a different kind of people. And transform those who embark unto the adventure. Ancient Athens, heavily involved in sailing and trading, had invented democracy. The city continues to exist while we consider democracy to have been invented by the Ancient Greeks. Ancient Sparta, Athens’ fiercest domestic competitor, a quintessentially agricultural society, was run as a dictatorship. Only ruins survived. And a myth…
Isaac Newton, and his readers, were able to understand gravity because they needed that knowledge. Which was but a step in the road they were opening. For themselves and for those who followed. Basically, what they did was to spin a new story, read ‘narrative’ out of information which was already floating around.
Are we capable of following in their steps?
For ‘only God knows what reason’ this very morning I was reminded by ‘the FB algorithms’ about a comment I made some 7 years ago. “Democracies fend off challenges when participants value the preservation of the system—its norms and ideals and values—over short-term political gain.”
Id, Ego, SuperEgo. Freud. Consciousness is the ulterior level of self-awareness. Added by humans through languaged interaction. Humberto Maturana. AI is a function. A human developed computer application. Built by cramming information available over the internet into computer circuits sophisticated enough to defy human understanding. Social Media
Some 70 000 years ago, people – human people, that is – have learned to articulate. To communicate in a symbolic manner. The next step up from coordinating their moves while hunting. Acting like a pack was inherited from their primate ancestors. Active communication, speaking with the intent to teach, was a human addition.
Not without consequences. They were already accomplished hunter-gatherers and skillful tool makers. Some researchers have unearthed evidence that they were also artists. They were painting on cave-walls some 20000 years before the modern humans, the Sapiens, had started to displace them. They were our uncles, the Neanderthals. But it was us, the Sapiens, who have survived. To tell the story…
Us being able to speak, to language our interactions, has had tremendous consequences. The most important one, even if rarely mentioned, is the ‘shape’ of our consciences. And the depth of our consciousness.
Some 10000 ago, people have invented agriculture. Planting crops and raising animals. Already conscious, they had figured out the ups of the whole thing. Unfortunately – their rationality was just as bounded as our still is – they didn’t knew what was coming… According to some researchers – and to my first hand observations – being able to grow your own food doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll live longer. Or better… But society, as a whole, was able to leap forward!
It took our homo ancestors some 2 and a half million years to evolve from primates to cave-painting humans. In another 50 000 years, our already speaking ancestors have invented agriculture. And built things like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids.
You don’t need to speak in order to coordinate your actions while hunting. Wolfs do it ‘silently’. But you need a different kind of coordination, a deeper one, if you want to build things. ‘You’, in this case, is ‘you, the people’. When building things, the builders need coordinated thinking. Coordinated action is not enough. Hence religion. Reflexive self-awareness, developed in contrast to but in cooperation with the individuals comprising the community becomes a shared consciousness. A collection of cooperating individuals generate an entire space. Open-up a brand new ‘volume’. One full of human made opportunity and governed by culture. Nota bene, competition is nothing but yet another form of cooperation. Of a deeper nature!
Some 500 years ago, our fore-fathers have invented Science. While philosophy was a coordinated effort to make sense of things, science had been invented to coordinate knowledge with reality. While philosophy had sprouted naturally, as a consequence of how people used, and continue, to be, science had been born, intentionally, out of necessity. Philosophy and religion have happened naturally, depending heavily on the particulars of when and where they happened to appear. Science was invented as a consequence of where the people involved had ‘opened their eyes’. As a consequence of the circumstances produced by the previous efforts.
Nowadays, in the technologically built circumstances we have prepared for ourselves, we are currently cramming already gathered knowledge – too much of which being nothing more than mere crap – through computer circuits so complicated that we no longer understand. Hoping that the elusive AI we expect to be born as the result of our efforts will ….
Will what?!? Make more sense? Of what we call ‘reality’? Or makes us even richer? Well, make some of us even richer than they already are…
One caveat here. While humankind, as a whole, has leapt forward each time, individual humans have had a more nuanced experience. Depending more on the circumstances each of them had been born into rather than on their individual efforts. Yes, people who were able to grow their food had been able to build magnificent things. The Egyptian and the Mayan pyramids, for example. The Stonehenge and the Atlit Yam monuments. But if we look closer… only a small number of agricultural societies have been able to generate remarkable things. And only for a limited time… The rest of the agricultural societies had experienced nothing but hard work. Sometimes, too many times, wasted at the whim of authoritarian rulers. In fact, each and every such breakthroughs had been a blessing in disguise. To be experienced by others but those who had borne the brunt of them being introduced. Those toiling the fields had to work harder than the foragers before them. Those sweating in the factories had to work more hours, yearly speaking, than the peasants. Currently, people working remotely – connected to a computer – can hardly escape off-line.
History is full of peasant uprisings and various revolutions. None of which had accomplished anything. We’d better have a talk with our alter-ego. Or pray… We’re headed towards interesting times!
Political prisoners and Death Camps can’t exist without “Gun Control”. Some Americans still feel “Gun Control” is a good ideea. To prevent a Schindler’s List in America, we must destroy “Gun Control”!!
“Say the words “gun registration” to many Americans—especially pro-gun Americans, including the 3.5 million plus members of the National Rifle Association—and you are likely to hear about Adolf Hitler, Nazi gun laws, gun confiscation, and the Holocaust. More specifically, you are likely to hear that one of the first things that Hitler did when he seized power was to impose strict gun registration requirements that enabled him to identify gun owners and then to confiscate all guns, effectively disarming his opponents and paving the way for the genocide of the Jewish population.“German firearm laws and hysteria created against Jewish firearm owners played a major role in laying the groundwork for the eradication of German Jewry in the Holocaust,” writes Stephen Halbrook, a pro-gun lawyer. “If the Nazi experience teaches anything,” Halbrook declares, “it teaches that totalitarian governments will attempt to disarm their subjects so as to extinguish any ability to resist crimes against humanity.””
“As the videos begin, Pretti can be seen filming as a federal agent pushes away one woman and shoves another woman to the ground. Pretti moves between the agent and the women, then raises his left arm to shield himself as the agent pepper sprays him. Several agents then take hold of Pretti – who struggles with them – and force him onto his hands and knees. As the agents pin down Pretti, someone shouts what sounds like a warning about the presence of a gun. Video footage then appears to show one of the agents removing a gun from Pretti and stepping away from the group with it. Moments later, an officer with a handgun pointed at Pretti’s back fires four shots at him in quick succession, footage shows. Several more shots can then be heard as another agent appears to fire at Pretti.”
nicichiarasa 