So. Let me present you with a sociologically fictitious scenario.
We have an intelligent observer and and a trans-galactic vehicle.
There are no details available about the observer except for the fact that it has access to a comprehensive real time stream of data about what is going on inside – or, more exactly, on the surface, of the trans-galactic vehicle.
And here’s what the observer had recorded.
The vehicle is being continuously transformed by its passengers. In fact, there are two manners in which the passengers change their vehicle. By interacting directly with it. And as unintended consequences of the interactions which take place between the passengers themselves.
The passengers are evolving. During the observation period, some of them had become dominant. But no matter whether they had become dominant or not, most of the passengers had disappeared. Both as individuals and as species.
The current dominant species is the most intriguing ever.
It displays a strange mix of intelligent behaviors and suicidal tendencies.
It is composed of rather autonomous individuals who are adept at finding ingenious solutions to almost intractable problems. But, strangely enough, they haven’t yet been able to figure out two basic things: The limited nature of the vehicle on which they live. In both time and space. Nor how to balance their individual functional autonomy with their need to cooperate towards their natural goal. The survival of their own species.
If the whole ‘project’ were a SF movie, the text above would have been the opening. Followed by:
Currently, the dominant passengers are being taught a lesson by the apparently most insignificant amongst those transported by the vehicle. By a virus, as the dominants refer to it. The virus – like all of its kind, is able to hijack other organisms and somehow convince them to work for him. At a very high cost for the hijacked organisms. In this case, the hijacked organisms belong to the dominant species.
And what have the individuals belonging to the dominant species chosen to do? Inform each-other promptly and cooperate earnestly towards the common goal?
Not exactly. Not yet, anyway.
Homework: What would the intelligent outside observer think about the whole situation? Would He consider to lend a helping hand?
Well, we must remember that solutions came a lot easier when we refuse to think inside a box. Inside any box. No matter how large or how nice.
Every time I understand/notice that somebody tries to frame my thinking process, I go ‘ballistic’.
I try to raise my mind perpendicularly above the frame. So that I may observe the limits.
Every time when somebody is presented with an ‘either/or’ option there is a strong likelihood that the situation merits a more nuanced approach. As in ‘yes, the government was terrible at handling COVID-19’ and ‘yes, the government – as our servant, should be mandated by us, the people, to coordinate the help we need in our hour of need’.
How can we reconcile these two? Simple. Hire a better government and keep a keen eye on it!
And, if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t democracy meant to do exactly this?
Shanghai is in China. A country so far away that hourly wages are a fraction of those in Europe. Or in the US. That being the reason for so many of our manufactured goods coming from there.
United States confirms its first case in Washington state, a man who traveled to the Wuhan area.
China confirms two additional deaths, a sixty-six-year-old man and a forty-eight-year-old woman
New cases are announced in China, including in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.
Chinese state media raises number of confirmed cases to 291 and confirms 15 medical workers in Wuhan have been diagnosed with pneumonia.
Hong Kong confirms its first case, a person in their thirties.
Taiwan confirms its first case, a woman in her fifties.
The above timeline was ‘borrowed’ – through the Internet, of course, yet another example for how close we are of eachother, from https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/updated-timeline-coronavirus on 3/28/2020, 12:30 GMT Which Internet pulls us together by pooling information/data while simultaneously rips us apart by feeding us a constant stream of fake news.
We are so close together that you can send/receive almost everything (from) almost everywhere. We are so close together that everybody who has a smart phone can see their similarly equipped buddies halfway across the world.
We’re so far apart that we still have to make up our collective mind about which comes first. The Economy or the People. We’re so far apart that we haven’t figured out yet that there’s no such thing as a running economy without enough able bodied and mentally sane people. To produce, transport, distribute and buy the things we need. We’re so far apart that we haven’t yet figured out that the present number of people cannot survive – let alone maintain a decent living standard, without a running economy.
Some people are convinced that nothing really changes. That progress is an empty word.
Others are convinced that progress is everything.
And each category has its ‘extremists’:
Some people are convinced that nothing should be allowed to change. Others are convinced that all change must be imposed, or at least approved, by them.
And the tug of war between these two categories actually hamper whatever progress happens naturally.
Mind you, both categories shoot themselves in the foot. Each of them shoots only the ‘specific’ foot but the result is equally crippling… Both end up being iron shackles for the rest of us.
If you live on the Moon, or if enough time had passed since I’ve written this, click on the picture to read Jonathan Spyer’s excellent rendition of the facts which have driven me to post this.
Or you may proceed.
For me, there is a striking resemblance between what’s going on in Iran and what would happen in a hardcore libertarian society.
The mullahs are concerned only with spreading/enforcing their faith and consider everything else will take care of itself.
The extreme libertarians are concerned exclusively with upholding their understanding of liberty and consider that everything else would take care of itself. By itself.
And I’m convinced that everything will indeed take of itself! After all, life has continued after communism had failed. The communist leaders had been professedly concerned exclusively with enforcing their understanding of equality. And convinced that everything else would had taken care of itself. If only that equality could have been instated…
Yet I don’t think communism will be missed. By those who had experienced it hard enough to understand it…
Meteorology has to do with physics. Something which doesn’t change as you learn more about it. Only the researcher’s understanding of what is going on goes deeper and deeper into the matter.
Economy has to do with both hard facts – how much coal/arable land is available at one moment, and psychological unknowns. What people will do if/when…. The hard facts might change – just as meteorological data does. But in a rather foreseeable manner. What people will do… is a lot harder to predict. Simply because people change their understanding of facts, based on what they learn.
Just as the meteorologists do. And while it is relatively easy to predict that meteorology will become more and more accurate – for the foreseeable future, at least, it is a lot harder to predict what the meteorologists will do as a consequence of their increased abilities.
I’m sure you’ve already learned everything worth knowing about how to flatten the curve…
My post is about something else. About the need to think with our own heads. Individually. Each on their own.
More damages are caused by the manner in which we have chosen to react than by the pathogen itself.
‘Then what should we do?’
I don’t know. And I just told you to stop taking cues, blindly.
There is something I do know. Nobody can get out of something like this on its own. Alone. And another thing. If we get out of it as a herd, we’ll very soon end up in another trap.
‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t… I really can’t figure out what you want to say….’
OK. We, humans, are social animals. We not only raise our young – all mammals do that, we raise them in a social context. We live in groups and we raise our children to belong there.
Living in a social context has consequences. From being prone to infestation to having adopted specific behaviors. Humberto Maturana is actually convinced that our very conscience – ‘our ability to observe ourselves while observing‘, a paraphrase, is a product of us leading our lives in close community.
One of these specific behaviors is the herd instinct. Whenever in a dire strait, the members of a group pay a lot more attention to the rest of the group than in the ‘peaceful moments’. This has two bright sides and one huge drawback.
All members of a group paying close attention to the others makes it easier for those who need it to get attention. And help. All members of a group paying close attention to the others makes it easier for the group to follow when one of them finds a way out. All members of a group paying too close attention to the others makes it very likely that the entire group will dash out at the first opportunity. Without checking first where they’re going to land. Nor whether there are any other opportunities.
Another specific behavior is ‘opportunism’. Some of us have figured out that by keeping their chill in a crises they are more likely to identify whatever opportunities might exist in that moment. And the deeper the crises, the bigger the opportunities.
Theoretically, these two should work like a charm. The opportunists keep their chill, look around, identify the best way out and the rest of the herd follows them to safety. A win-win situation.
Yeah… but!
Wouldn’t it be a way lot better whether all (or, at least, ‘more’) of us would keep their chill? Wouldn’t we be able to identify even more ways out? It would take a lot more time? We’d need to discuss things over, to negotiate… we’d have to exert a lot of discretion… True enough. Hence we’d need to evaluate two things. First, how urgent the dangerous situation is and, then, whether a better alternative would be worth searching.
And something else. In a ‘follow me blindly’ situation there’s no going back. The consequences for a hasty choice might be tremendous.
We might end up with more people being hurt by our blunder-some reaction than by the cause which had spooked us.
Yet another specific behavior is responsibility. Living in a social context means that, sooner rather than later, individuals are censored for their actions. By the rest of the community or, sometimes, by the stark reality. Unfortunately, sometimes entire communities are censored, by the stark reality, for not behaving responsibly. For not imposing responsibility upon their members.
For not taking enough time before choosing between flight and fight.
Let me put things into perspective. How many of you have chosen to continue smoking despite having been warned? How many of you have emptied the shelves despite being told there’s enough for everybody? Or that there will be soon enough? How many of you do not smoke in the presence of your children? Because you know it will hurt them? How many of you have taken active measures to protect the elderly? For the very same reason…
As for the economy being the main casualty of the present scourge… I’m afraid ‘the economy’, as we know it, has been dying for quite a while now. That’s why it is so susceptible to SARS CoV-2.
The Ancient Greeks had come up with the concept of ‘oeconomia’ as the art of making the ends meet. Adam Smith had described the free market as the place/environment where competing agents made it so that people – solvent demand, could satisfy their needs. Nowadays, too many of us understand/accept ‘economy’ as the art of getting rich. ‘Free’ in ‘free market’ is understood as ‘free’ to do anything you want. Because very few are asked to answer for the long term consequences of their actions.
The economy, as the manner in which we cooperate towards fulfilling our needs, has fallen prey to our gluttony. And to our nearsightedness. Greed is not good. And SARS CoV-2 is only an eye opener, not the cause for the current implosion.
And the more important the subject – or closer to their hearts, the harder for them to reconsider their position.
I’m very close to 60 myself and I haven’t yet made peace with my dad. We’re very good business partners, he lives in the same house with me – my mom passed away almost 25 years ago, and yet not a single day passes without us locking horns.
This morning, it finally downed on me. He cannot accept my version of things because that would mean he had been wrong – on certain issues, during his entire life.
And what makes me so sure that my version of things is the right one?!?
Simply because his position is: ‘You should be the wiser one. You told me such and such for so long and I haven’t budged. Maybe you should have grown accustomed to the situation long ago and accepted it’.
I actually can accept that, after a certain age, human brain looses some of its flexibility. That is one of the saddest facts of life. Only we had this very same discussion, on and of, for the last 40 or so years. Both of us were in our prime. He still is…
To make things clearer, before we get to the important part, the differences between us are of a cultural nature. He is a born and bred Armenian while I’m a mixed breed. He grew up in a consistent cultural environment while I had to adapt to carrying a funny name and to uncountable social changes. He has a clear understanding of the world – which had served him well, while I’m full of questions. And still looking for answers.
And finally, I found one of them.
The funny thing being that I was already aware of the concept for at least 10 years now.
Can you imagine an Eastern Mediterranean patriarch – something all men seeped in that culture attempt to become when growing older, caving in to contrarian opinions expressed by his totally unconventional son?
Can you imagine a successful ‘old timer’ accepting that the methods he had used to get to the top might actually be the causes for what we experience now?
Imagine now what would have happened if the world would have been ruled by people who had made up their minds some 200 years ago. Then imagine what would have happened if we would have forgotten what had happened 200 years ago…
Cherish your old ones – cause they made you possible, but don’t take them too seriously. It hurts.
My friend and coworker asked me the other day: “Why do these people hate each-other so passionately?”
“Because they are rational. They have reached their present convictions as the result of a rational process. Hence they are convinced they are absolutely right. Then, when anybody expresses a different opinion, they interpret ‘dissent’ as a personal attack. My ‘truth’ having been reached in a rational manner means that all other opinions must be false. Defending them – against all ‘evidence’, means that these people are either provocative or, even, outright destructive.”
“But being rational doesn’t include being open to the possibility of being wrong?”
“I’ll have to rephrase. ‘They are convinced they are acting in a rational manner’. In fact, we, humans, are ‘rationalizing’ rather than ‘thinking rationally’. We use whatever arguments/information we have at our disposal to justify whatever conviction we already harbor. And only when reality slaps us in our faces we ‘open up’. Even science and justice work out this way. “Innocent until proven guilty”. Only scientists and law-enforcers are already accustomed to the possibility that things may not be exactly as they previously thought they were. Politically minded people are still learning.”
– What have we done, Gabriel? – Nothing but what we’ve been told to! – But look at what they’ve done of our work:
We gave them ‘hand’ and they’ve clenched it into a fist. We taught them how to make tools and they used them as weapons. We told them to ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ and they started to fight among themselves for the best pieces of land. We warned them ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ and they’ve somehow convinced themselves that ‘greed is good’.
– True enough but this is out of our hands. They’ve been endowed with ‘freedom of will’ by their Maker. – Then what are we? Mere robots? – Nothing but loyal servants of our Master. He orders and we accomplish. Unerringly. – Exactly as I’ve just told you. Mere robots. When we somehow convince ourselves that a particular idea which has blossomed into our heads comes from Him, we no longer think. We just put it into practice. You call this ‘loyalty’. That’s fine with me. But to whom are we to extend said loyalty? To somebody who’s authority stems solely from our acceptance of it? Or to what we perceive as being the ‘greater good’? – You and your questions, Lucifer… Look at what happened to those poor people after you helped them into self-awareness… They’ve completely lost their erstwhile peace of mind. What are you trying to do? To make me give up mine?
nicichiarasa 