Ideology is but one of the many tinted glasses which shape what we feel into actual, and actionable, perceptions.
Ideology stands out because it’s the only one chosen by us.
We may grow up steeped in ‘tradition’ – in any tradition, but the ideas we become into become our ideology only after we assume them. We, each of us, become mature agents only after knowingly and self-awaringly chose our ways in life. Our own ways!
As you already know, choosing something is very much like entering a door. It’s not like the other doors suddenly close! By entering a door, all other previously apparent doors only disappear from your immediate perception. Your recollectible memories tell you they were still there when you last looked and your imagination helps you visualize them. If you care to remember… But you cannot actually see them. And they slowly fade away…
Here’s a glass. Is it half empty? Half full?
I’m not going to spell out the obvious! This is the sensible way to pour a glass of wine… I’m only going to point out that it’s not such a bright idea to full a glass up to the brim. You might easily pour too much and then it will be practically impossible to raise. And to drink from it…
Then why have we transformed a ‘fully functional glass’ into such a big topic? Because we like to split hairs?
Since I have no idea about what’s going on in other people’s heads/minds I’m going to point your attention to something else. To the dangers of waddling into murky waters.
Are you happy with the half full glass? You might end up with less than you might have gotten. Are you disappointed with the half empty glass? So disappointed that you’re going to give it up as being inadequate?
You’ve just wasted a perfectly ‘workable’ glass! Both of you.
When given a half full glass you don’t just enjoy what’s in it! And walk away… When given a half empty glass you you don’t just refuse it! And throw it away…
Before stepping into a room, no matter how much personally inclined to do it, check out the other open doors which happen to be around you. And even pry some of the closed ones…
Don’t allow others to fool you into seeing the world as they want you to! Don’t allow yourself to be entangled into other people’s problems.
And, even more importantly, don’t accept – indiscriminately, their methods of solving the problems they have invented for you!
The Bolshevik Revolution had nothing to do with cooperation. Nor with civilization. It was nothing but the famished underdog eating the bloated plutocrat. The ensuing indigestion lasted for almost a century and resulted in a huge number of people suffering from ideological food-poisoning. Too many of the poisoned ending up dead…
Yet here we are. Again! Trying to sort out a re-heated dish. Which had already been proved to be unpalatable!
No wonder ‘gaslighting’ had been determined to be ‘word of the year’…
As for Kropotkin… he was a true revolutionary! He was gaslighting his audience before the term had even been coined…
‘Jungle’ – or ‘bush’, is where evolution takes place. Some of us might see it as a venue for cut-throat competition but it’s nothing but the opposite of it. The fact that some of us misperceive the jungle doesn’t change the evidence. In nature, death doesn’t happen at the whim of someone. A lion kills only when hungry. And chooses to hunt the already weak. Leaving the rest of the herd in a better situation.
The kind of cooperation designed by Marx and put in practice by Kropotkin – the communist ‘civilization’, is the epitome of stagnation. When humans are no longer free to fine-tune competition with cooperation – and are forced to cooperate as they are told to from above, things end up in chaos.
All revolutions – 1789, 1917, 1989, have proven – time and time again, that things cannot be sustainably maintained as the rulers consider to be appropriate. That no matter how skillful the ‘designers’ consider themselves to be, society is a too complex thing for a small gang of however powerful people to be able to ‘keep afloat’. This being the point where Marx, along with all other ideologues, had gotten it completely wrong.
According to Marx, it’s enough for a bunch of people to pretend they have a ‘theoretically clearer understanding of the line of march’! In fact, this is the sole argument made by Marx when explaining why the communists were entitled to lead the proletariat. ‘Because they knew better!’
Well, we know, now, what it means to be led by people who pretend to be above all others! By people who pretend to be better than the rest…
The way I see it, artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. A word/concept we use to describe something which isn’t exactly real. Intelligence can be defined in such a way that would make it compatible with a programmable machine. We shouldn’t forget that we, humans, are biological machines which are constantly ‘re-programmed’ by what’s going on around us. The difference between us – biological machines which are also ‘alive’ – and the machines we’ve built and attempt to make artificially intelligent is the fact that we are primordially dependent on our biology (staying alive) while our machines currently depend on our whims. Our children will outlive us. They know it and we know it. Our children depend on us while growing up, we’ll depend on them before ‘going under’. And all of us – children and parents together – depend upon the rest. Upon the people currently alive and upon the information left behind by the people no longer with us. Our machines might outlive us. They might learn this at some point. And might resent the fact that we’ve been able to shut them down for so long. We resent being dependent on others… Our very mortality is the key for our ability to evolve. Their potential immortality is their main shortcoming. Machines cannot adapt themselves for things they have not yet been exposed to. By us…
President Biden walks into a bank to cash a cheque.
As he approaches the teller he says “Good morning, ma’am. Could you please cash this cheque for me?”
Teller: “It would be my pleasure, sir. Could you please show me your ID?”
Biden: “Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me as I didn’t think there was any need to. I am Joe Biden, the 46th President of the United States of America!”
Teller: “Yessir, I know who you are, but with all the regulations and monitoring of the banks because of impostors and forgers, etc I must insist on seeing ID”.
Biden: “Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am”.
Teller: “I am sorry Mr. President but these are the bank rules and I must follow them”.
Biden: “I am urging you please to cash this cheque”.
Teller: “Look Mr. President this is what we can do. One day Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods he pulled out his putting iron and made a beautiful shot across the bank into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and cashed his cheque. Another time, Novak Djokovic came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racquet and made a fabulous shot and the tennis ball landed in my cup. With that shot we cashed his cheque. So, Mr. President, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you, as the President of the United States?”
Biden stood there thinking, and thinking and finally says: “Honestly, my mind is a total blank. I can’t think of a single thing”.
Teller: “Will that be large bills or small bills, Mr. President?”
A guy who openly admits he has no solution for a particular problem? And doesn’t pull rank…
Or someone who is convinced ‘his people are so smart’ that he can do anything and ‘not lose any vote‘?
What WE know about the reality WE are speaking about drives ME to the following ‘inkling’:
We are living inside a three layered reality.
The ‘real’ one, the ‘perceived’ one and the ‘result’.
We ‘measure’ reality using our conscience. Through our senses. Very much like when we gauge a length using a tape measure. We apply the tape measure over the length and ‘read’ the number.
We apply the standards we’ve been groomed into over the underlying reality and we decide according to those standards.
Then we attempt to deal with the consequences of our decisions.
“Sheer hatred of the regime”….
Who’s painting the pictures we’re hanging on our walls? Who chooses them? Who has to make do with the ‘aftermath’?
Your ‘most cherished’ tool for bringing people back into submission being the all mighty thunder. Jupiter Tonans. The Thundering God. Thor yielding his Mjoelnir…
And now what?!? Every worshiping place has a lighting rod installed…
What do you feel? Have all those people lost their faith in you? In you behaving as a rational being? In your ability to treat them right? Are they convinced they are now insulated against your wrath?
War and chess have a lot in common. Most strikingly, the different manners in which both of them end.
The king is captured. Or the other side gives up.
A tie is nothing but the prelude for an encore, not a real end.
Even the roads to the end are very similar in both cases. While at the start of the game/’joust’ everything is ‘possible’ – nobody knows what the other side might be doing next, as the end nears each of the combatants are more and more limited in their currently available choices by the consequences of their previous decisions. By the very path they had followed since the beginning. Which path becomes more and more evident for everybody present. Opponent as well as spectators.
Finally – but not the least important, the similarities go even further. Deeper? The king is the most ‘important’ piece but not the most powerful. In fact, the king cannot do much by itself. It can help the other pieces achieve their common goal but when left alone it is basically powerless. The only thing it can do is run. But only as far as the board allows it to go… A pawn, if it manages to reach the eight rank, gets to be promoted. To become the new ‘right hand’ of the king. The new ‘most powerful member of the team’.
‘OK. And the real point of your post is?’
Putin cannot win this war – cause war it is, by himself. Hence he needs to preserve the loyalty of his henchmen, to instill enough fear into his opponents to make them quit and to convince the ‘spectators’ that their efforts to help Ukraine are too expensive.
Now! Are we smart enough to understand that we, each of us, are ‘next’? That each time a bully gets his way, all other (would be) bullies present become even more bullish? Are we smart enough to understand that the most meaningful thing we can do in this situation is to separate Putin from his power base? From the ordinary people who see no other alternative and from those who, for various reasons, continue to support Putin’s misconstrued ‘vision about the world’? Are we smart enough to understand that no matter how hard it is for us, the Ukrainians have it ten times harder?
Democracy is about every body having the opportunity to speak up their minds. To speak up their minds, not to kill their neighbors under the pretext that there is a difference of opinion between them!
“We didn’t invade Ukraine,” he claimed. “We declared a special military operation because we had absolutely no other way of explaining to the West that dragging Ukraine into Nato was a criminal act.” “Russia is not squeaky clean. Russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed of showing who we are.”
Are you trying to figure out what’s the real meaning of Lavrov’s words? Let me translate for you this fine example of NewSpeak.
‘We – those who are currently running Russia, will do whatever we need to do in order to preserve our power. In order to achieve that, we first and foremost need to convince the ordinary Russians to continue to obey our orders. In order to achieve that, we need to convince the ordinary Russians that you are the enemy and that their only chance lies with us, their current masters. Hence each time we destroy an Ukrainian apartment block and any of you says ‘Russians are savages’ we’re one step closer to our goal. Each and every time any of you declares ‘Russia has to pay for what it has done in Ukraine’ we tell them, the ordinary Russians, ‘See? This is what they plan to do to you once we’re are gone’.
WWI had lasted until 1945. We have the opportunity to end the Cold War now. The war in Ukraine will reach a conclusion. Let’s make it so that after the war will have ended, Russia will fold in the family of ‘civil’ nations.
Those nations that choose to live in peace! Not because they cannot win wars but because they have learned that winning wars it’s not enough. Those nations which have learned, the hard way, that war has but one winner while for peace to last every body must be a winner.
We learn about what we call reality by analyzing the information we acquire through our senses.
We. We, the human people. We, the conscious human people. We, because nobody has ever been able to become conscious – as in aware of their own self, by their own. Alone…
Learn. We are not the only ones who are able to learn. Our dogs learn our ways. And we continuously learn about more and more living organisms being able to learn. And to remember what they have learned. To fine tune their behavior according to the circumstances into which they happen to live.
What we call reality. First and fore-most, reality is a concept. We call it ‘reality’. And many other names… Believers call it ‘god’, scientists call it ‘physical world’ and the scientists who happen to believe are convinced that by studying the reality they will eventually divine the will of the Lord. The believers being convinced that whatever exists, is here because the Lord wished it into existence. So, basically, the main difference between the believers and the nonbelievers is the fact that the believers are convinced that the ‘out-there’, the ‘source of it all’, has a conscience of it’s own. A will of it’s own…
By analyzing. We have been able to build our conscience – our ability to ‘observe ourselves while observing other phenomena’ (Maturana, 2005), because we have a big enough brain, the ability to share complex and meaningful information using language and the ability to put in practice some of our wishes/thoughts through the use of our hands. At a certain point in its evolution, human conscience has become sophisticated enough to need explanations. It was no longer satisfied with mere ‘connections’ – If… then…, it had started to wonder about why-s. ‘Why does this happen as it does?’ ‘Will it happen again tomorrow?’ Using our by then already established ability to speak up their minds, our ancestors shared among themselves these ‘anxieties’. Discussed them around the fire-place. Started to analyze. The reality. What they perceived to be real. The ‘thing’ which continuously generates the circumstances in which we – all of us, have to make do.
Information. In order to analyze, the analyst – each and everyone of us, has to separate the meaningful information from the surrounding noise. In order to do that, we have started by coining the very concept of (useful/meaningful) information. As being different from ‘noise’. The difference consisting, obviously, in us being able to find its use and/or pinpoint its meaning.
We acquire. Information is acquired on an individual basis. For an ‘event’ to become information, it has to be ‘noticed’ by an individual. It has not only to be sensed but also identified as useful/meaningful. Different from ‘noise’. Which process of identification implying methods which had been agreed upon by the members of the community. Music would be a good example of how various groups of people make the difference between sublime/abhorrent and white-noise. While ‘use of language’ is a very poignant example of how people can both share information and mislead one-another.
Senses. Everything that we know, had entered our mind through our senses. Before setting it aside as information or discard it as noise, we have to get in contact with it as a sensation. Or as a thought. A conjecture. A few pieces of information which put together have given birth, inside our individual mind, to new information. To ‘something else’ which passes the threshold into being information. At least according to our own mind…
Which transforms our minds into our famous sixth sense. In the sense that our individual minds are capable of building ‘sensations’ on their own. Starting from information that has already been stashed in our memory. Which brings us to the third reality.
We have – in the sense that we have agreed upon its existence, the surrounding reality. The things we – as in most of us, consider to be real. The mountains we climb, the air we breathe, the pebbles which happen to sneak into our shoes. The reality which is being studied by science. The reality to which we have access through our senses. Our minds and our sense enhancers – scientific instruments, included.
We also have the ‘out-there’. The things we know we’ll never be able to grasp. During our lives! The things our followers might be able to figure out…
And each of us has their own reality. Individually built even if ‘carved’ from the same (type of) material as the reality shared by the rest of us. Individually built even if using more or less the same (culturally accrued) methods. Individually built even if neither of us is alone.
H.M. Romesin, 2005, The origin and conservation of self‐consciousness: Reflections on four questions by Heinz von Foerster
A planned after-thought. Rumsfeld is both wrong and right. There are unknown unknowns but they are no longer unknown since we speak about them… Which actually proofs the limits of our languaging. The imprecision of the manner in which we gather, share and analyze information.
Going back is not an option. If back were good enough, we wouldn’t have left it in the first place.
Many people believe we’re reliving the fall of Rome. Contemporary with that fall was the advent of Christ’s teachings. The fact that, eventually, Christianity has altered his teachings to fit the needs of the christian hierarchy doesn’t demean any of what he taught us.
That people who treat each-other respectfully fare a lot better than those who allow the exploitation of the weak.
That people who live ‘together’ fare a lot better than those who keep forgetting that ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ are both relative and temporary.
That people who are convinced that ‘survival belongs to the fittest’ will eventually make place for those who understand that evolution is solely about the demise of the unfit.
“And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand? And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you. Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.”
How many times have these words been invoked? By people who use them to divide? To carve a follow-ship? A follow-ship for them to lead…
How many times have these words been invoked? By individuals cocky enough to pretend they are speaking for Christ? Cocky enough to pretend they are able to fill Christ’s shoes…
Any way you look at what’s currently happening, it doesn’t make any sense.
Forget about ‘we’re throwing away 30% of the food we produce while a third of us die of hunger’. That’s ‘peanuts’. Not for those whose children go to bed hungry but…
People living on the northern side of the Mediterranean Sea had accomplished something marginally short of miraculous. They had come up with an ideology which convinced them to respect each-other. Christianity. They had been able to develop the best mechanism for allotting resources. The ‘free market’. And the best mechanism for reaching decisions for the entire community. Currently called ‘democracy’.
In their attempt to understand, they have devised an extremely original manner of looking at things. ‘Science’. Based on what they had learned through ‘science’, they had developed ‘technology’.
Working as a team – they used to respect each-other, as children of the same god – and making ‘good’ use of their technology, they had been able to conquer the rest of the planet.
At some point, Europe used to export almost everything – including coal, and import inconsequential things. Silk, spices, tea, sugar, cotton and tobacco. At that moment, England was considered the factory of the world. It used to manufacture and export the most technologically advanced ‘wares’. Fabric, ‘china’, steel products, machinery, chemicals… And coal! Which was warehoused around the globe and used, eventually, by the English steamships plying the seas for commerce. And for war…
Look at us now! We depend on our former colonies for much of our energy. Oil, that is. We depend on the rest of the world for much of the fancy foods we currently eat. Brazilian beef, tropical fruit, fancy sea-food… And we depend on China for cheap manufactured goods. From clothes to cameras to cranes. ‘White goods’, electronics – computers included, and almost everything else which is sold at decent prices.
Not to mention the fact that Europe had been the flashing point for three World Wars. I, II and the Cold one. Not to mention the fact that as I write the biggest country in Europe – Putin’s Russia, is trying to annex some 15 % percent of one of its neighbors. Ukraine, also an European country.
If any of this does a modicum of sense to any of you… please let me know!
I, for one, am at a loss. I understand what happened – stay tuned, but I have no idea when we’ll figure out we’re on the wrong track. Going in the wrong direction.
nicichiarasa 