Archives for category: man as a measure for all things
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A Question

August 31, 2026 //
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Plants transform inanimate matter and energy into life.
Animals digest life and make it their own.
Mushrooms, a.k.a. fungi, have somehow learned to use life directly.
They feed themselves without having to ingest their food.

Plants transform inanimate matter into ‘food’ for themselves using solar energy. Most of them. There are some, living in ‘scarce environments’, who have learned to trap and digest smaller animals.
Animals ingest and digest their food. Composed of already organic and previously living matter. Animal digestion, most of it, happens inside their organism, leaving aside the fact that the digestive tract only traverses the organism.
Fungi have given up, altogether, the notion of a digestive tract. They digest their food outside their organisms. Not as an exception but as a rule.
Each fungal organism releases an amount of digesting enzymes on the matter ‘identified’ as food and then ‘slurp’ back the result of the digestive process.

Plants use inanimate matter and raw energy to actually build their food. Which will, eventually, feed the entire living realm.
Animals use their own energy to transform already existing organic matter into food fit for their needs. ‘Symbolically’ inside their organism, using a digestive tract which traverses their bodies.
Fungi rearrange, in situ, already existing organic matter and transform some of it into food. Which is then absorbed into their organism.

All three actually build the living realm. As you have inherited it.
Transform, and enliven, what you call ‘the real world’. Which encompasses the physical one and the already living portion.

You, human-folk, have learned to use all three methods of getting food. Directly or indirectly.
Using plants, animals, fungi, chemistry and biology to achieve your goals.
You sow plants for harvest. Breed animals for the slaughterhouse. Use fungi to raise your bread/brew your beer. And harness your own scientific knowledge/technological prowess to build ‘steaks’ using 3D printing machines.

There’s a lot of similarity among plants, animals and fungi. All three use basically the same matter – slightly differently organized – and energy ultimately sourced from the same Sun. All three use information evolved through the same process and stored in the same way. DNA and/or RNA.
There’s a lot of similarity between you and the rest of the living realm. And a defining difference. You use the same matter and energy. Store initial information in the same genetic manner. Employ, for now, mostly natural processes. Borrowed from/inspired by nature. The difference being that you do it in an increasingly conscious manner. Teleologically. On purpose!

Here’s the two tiered question.
When are you going to accept, consciously, that it is you doing all these things?
Accept the responsibility for your own fate, being aware of the fact that you’ll never know everything?
Individually and/or collectively…

So liberating!

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

The letter and the spirit

August 25, 2026 //
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Being free
and feeling free
are not necessarily the same thing

What if they are both right? Simultaneously?

After all, it’s never about the law itself! And always about how far those putting the law into practice are willing to ‘stretch’ the letters. Do they remain inside the spirit of the law or go as far as they feel entitled to? Entitled to go…

Same thing happens with empathy.
Empathy as something you feel. Each of you differently. Intensity-wise. Relative to different aspects of life. And so on.
And empathy as something you ‘trade in’. Show off, window dressing, expected good will gestures…

A society whose members no longer feel enough empathy towards their peers is ‘loose’. ‘Loose’ enough to be ‘about to be lost’.
A society needs to function like an organism. To live. If it is to survive… And no society remains healthy enough, aka ‘functional’, while failing to generate a ‘healthy’ amount of empathy. Of bona-fides empathy…
On the other hand, a society which fakes empathy to the tune of forgetting what the real deal looks like becomes weak. Weaker and weaker as the empathy it exudes becomes faker and faker…

Same thing regarding ‘freedom’.
Which is first and foremost a concept. Coined and minted by thinkers. Who have tried to understand history and human evolution.
Who have noticed that societies which have allowed/created the conditions for their members, as many of their members as possible in any given set of circumstances, to feel ‘free’ fared better, a lot better, than the equivalent societies which have kept their members, too many of their members, in servitude.
In abject servitude, for all servitude is abject.

Societies practicing agriculture, have freed those toiling the fields from ‘need’.
Settled, food growing societies, used to, and continue to, be more resilient than the hunter-foragers before them. For as long as they took good/respectful care of their fields.
Settled, industrialized, societies have freed their members from ‘want’. Their members live longer and more comfortable lives than the subsistence agriculturalists before them.
Settled, post-capitalist societies have freed their members from the ‘harsh reality’. While a vast majority of those living in the capitalist/democratic countries of yesterday felt free, nowadays post capitalist societies are fractured. Both sides removed from the real reality. Both sides living in a ‘virtual’ reality.
One built by ‘man’. By ‘human’, actually. ‘Gender specific’ arguments have no place here.
One side feels trapped and the other feels entitled. The trapped ones feel as being held back by a glass ceiling. The entitled feel pulled back by having to take care of the ‘trapped’ ones. And each of the both sides blame the other one for their predicament.

Not exactly sustainable, don’t you think?
Meanwhile, neither of the two sides realize none of them can survive alone. Without the expertise of the other side.


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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

You should’ve known better!

August 22, 2026 //
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Why?!?
Because it is you, and your children, who will bear the brunt.
The brunt of the consequences…

There are three kinds of people.
Doers, middlemen and sense-makers.
Offended? Good. I’ve got your attention.

All three are essential.
Sorry, offense taking makes no sense…

The doers do, the middlemen mediate and the sense-makers…

Let’s start again.
It is simple to grasp what the doers and the middlemen do.
The sense makers… make sense?!? Do you really feel things make sense nowadays?

Maybe ‘this is the problem!’?
The sense-makers have quit making sense?
Literally?

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

Calloused Souls

July 7, 2026 //
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Physical world has inertia.
Living realm has survival instinct.
People have consciousness.

Souls, not soles.

You walk through life on your soles. Calloused soles mean having walked for a meaningful distance. Calloused soles used to be an evolutionary feature of the biological organism.

You walk through your social life using your soul.

Your body, a.k.a. your individual organism, lives in the physical world. It breathes, eats, drinks and does whatever other things inside what you consider to be ‘the physical world’.
You, the ‘conscious human being’, becomes inside what you call ‘a social environment’. Family, society, social network bubble…

You relate with the physical world through your soles, your lungs and your digestive system.
You relate with your social environment through your soul. Using your reason from time to time… whenever passion allows reason to roam freely!

To walk further, people have invented shoes. Artificial callouses attached to their feet, enabling them to walk/run on hard surfaces.
To work harder, people have invented tools. Elaborate callouses attached to their hands, enabling them to do far more things than bare-handed.

To fare better, people have started to communicate. To speak.
Speaking among themselves, they honed their budding consciousness. Developed it further and further. Making their minds more and more sensitive.

Shoes and tools isolated the people from the immediate reality. Making it possible for them to survive/thrive in more and more challenging environments.
Sharper conscious minds deepened people’s understanding of what was going on. In the environment they inhabited and, eventually, further and further away. Even more consequentially, their conscience started to learn about itself.

Conscience discovered soul. Invented it? The jury is still out on this matter.
Anyway, their soul seems to be the only thing which prevents people from pushing tool use to its ‘ultimate use’.
Some people still consider it’s their reason which prevents them from behaving unreasonably. Even after David Hume, an XVIII century Scottish philosopher, noticed that ‘reason is the slave of passion’. Actually, Hume not only noticed this but also considered it to be appropriate. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions“

What we mean is that war used to divide people in two categories. Fighters and victims. Forget about the fact that each of the fighters and victims are further divided by the front-line. Each war used to be fought by the fighters and endured by the victims. By those whose lives were directly impacted by the fighting. Almost never in a good way!
Lately, since communication tools transmit almost instantly everything almost everywhere, a third war related category has appeared. The bystanders.

The people who have to shield their souls.
Those constantly witnessing sufferance being inflicted upon other people.
Those whose consciousness is the target of relentless propaganda. Propaganda trying to convince them that that sufferance is deserved. That they, the bystanders, should ignore the sufferance. Should allow the aggressor to use their ultimate tools, their weapons, against the victims.

The bystanders are asked, by the aggressors, to agree. Or, at least, to ignore what’s going on.
The bystanders are told, by the aggressors, to look the other way.
To callous their souls.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game

The Story

May 6, 2026 //
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“Musk and Altman are so big, so larger than life, and so unrelatable,”
says University of San Diego professor Sarah Federman,
who specialises in conflict resolution.
“That’s what makes them so delicious to watch as they clash.”

The past is no longer here.
The future is not yet.

We learn about the past and discuss about the future.

The present, the place we live in, is a story. Information about the past mingled with professed intentions about the future.

Which future heavily depends, decisively even, on how we treat the story.
On how we tell it and on how we read it.
On how we relate to it. To what unfolds around us…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

Feedback loop

March 30, 2026 //
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Observer effect:
the disturbance of a system by the act of observation.

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.

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Inner Workings

March 2, 2026 //
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And God said…
.
.
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

“Investigating Witch Trials In 1487, the zealous inquisitor Heinrich Kramer wrote a treatise that would have a remarkable influence on European history. Blaming women for his own lust, and frustrated by official complacency before what he saw as a monstrous spiritual menace, Kramer penned a practical guide to aid law officers in the identification and prosecution of witches. Fusing theology, lurid anecdotes and advice for those engaged in combating sorcery, The Malleus Maleficarum transports the reader into the dark heart of medieval belief – where fear and the supernatural converged in a gripping struggle for understanding and control.
The book led to the burning of numerous heretics and ‘witches’ and had a lasting impact on the popular image of witchcraft.”

Remember ‘alchemy’?
According to Britannica.com, “a form of speculative thought that, among other aims, tried to transform base metals such as lead or copper into silver or gold and to discover a cure for disease and a way of extending life.
Alchemy was the name given in Latin Europe in the 12th century to an aspect of thought that corresponds to astrology, which is apparently an older tradition. Both represent attempts to discover the relationship of man to the cosmos and to exploit that relationship to his benefit. The first of these objectives may be called scientific, the second technological. Astrology is concerned with man’s relationship to “the stars” (including the members of the solar system); alchemy, with terrestrial nature.“

So. In the 12th, men were free to engage in an attempt to discover and exploit in their benefit the relation between themselves and the cosmos. To make every effort they could think of to transform ‘base metals’ into precious ones.
“Alchemists believed that, if their mind, body and spirit were pure, they could create the Philosophers’ Stone – a substance that could heal people from illness and turn base metals into gold.“
Meanwhile, witches – predominantly female – were burned at the stake for attempting basically the same thing. Exploit to their benefit the understanding they had about how things worked in the universe.

Basically, both – the alchemists as well as the witches – attempted the same thing. To perform/accomplish tasks which seemed impossible to the lay people.
Witches were burned when caught by the ‘wrong people’ while the alchemists were feted.

Is there any sense to be made out of all this?!?

Well, let me go back. To the ‘genetic’ moment. When all ‘this’ started.
As I’ve already mentioned, in my blog, I’m an agnostic. I don’t need a god as an explanation for anything. But I don’t know, as in ‘I can’t be sure’, whether any of this has been decisively influenced by a ‘deus ex-machina’. Hence my agnosticism. Furthermore, I’m absolutely convinced that the God worshiped by people is real. Made real by their belief!
Now, anyway you look at the whole thing – believer, agnostic or even atheist – there is no denying that the Bible is choke full of information. Of sense!

‘But… but… how can you say something like that!?!
What sense can you find in a book that inspired people to burn other people?’

Spot on, my dear Watson.
That’s exactly the question I’ve been asking myself!
What happened during those fifteen centuries. Between writing the Bible, as a collective work, and Heinrich Kramer writing Malleus Maleficarum. Between Christians building a certain culture and some people, claiming to belong to the same ‘denomination’, starting to burn witches, but not alchemists, at the stake.
Stay tuned.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

Dimensional Analysis

February 6, 2026 //
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Kill time.
Solve problems.
Learn, understand, discover.

Gather information.
Grind it into a modicum of knowledge.
Make the call.
Implement it.
Wait for feed-back.
Evaluate and reach a ‘final conclusion’.

Formal decision making in a nut-shell…

Philosophy bothers itself with what to think. What conclusions we should be reaching…
Science bothers itself with the hows of the matter. How should we think in order to reach the right conclusions! ‘Right’ as in as close to reality as (humanly) possible.

But why?!?
Why do we think at all?

I haven’t read everything Ernst Mayr had ever written but I’m sure he would have answered ‘because we can’!
I’m no student of philosophy so I really don’t know whether a better answer has ever been offered. Or even if the question has been asked before…

So. What’s driving us to think?

Whoa! This is a different question, you know!
‘Why do we think’ is not at all similar to ‘What drives us to think’. But the second version is an easier one to answer…

As you’ve already noticed, I hope, this blog is about the ‘limited nature of our consciousness’.
Which consciousness is defined/generated by our ability to think.
Which has to be trained in order to be effective but I’ll save that for another post.

So, what drives us to think?
Sheer necessity, survival instinct… I’ll come back.
As the rest of us, I’m thinking as I go along. New paths open, left and right, but there is a place I want to reach today.
The dimensional dimension of the whole process of thinking.
I introduced the ‘driver’ to ‘open the space’. A driver needs a space to drive in…

According to the formal theory, thinking is a linear process. A narrative…
According to the day to day practice, a thought is, indeed, a linear thing. A narrative.
But the fact that a trail is linear doesn’t make driving into a linear something.

So, a thought is, indeed, a ‘linear narrative’ while thinking, like driving, is more like an exploratory process.

OK. Now that you’ve got my full attention, how about you get to the point?
Cut the crap, already…

I’d really love to oblige but I need to make a small detour…
I’m an engineer. As such, I do understand physics. Up to a point… Modern physics demand a lot of mathematics and that’s where I falter. As such, I’m aware that some specialists maintain that there are some 11 dimensions which measure the physical world… most of them being so tightly compacted that we don’t notice them in day to day life.
Same thing when it comes to thinking… There are many dimensions which may come in handy but I’ll mention only three of them.

Goal.
Individual prowess.
Environment.

Polichinelle is my witness. Each and everyone of the above dimensions can, and will, be divided in sub-dimensions.
Soon.
Here.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Words.

January 9, 2026 //
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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUT GOOD PEOPLE IN AN EVIL PLACE?
DOES HUMANITY WIN OVER EVIL, OR DOES EVIL TRIUMPH?
THESE ARE SOME OF THE QUESTIONS WE POSED IN THIS DRAMATIC SIMULATION
OF PRISON LIFE CONDUCTED IN 1971 AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
“How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please read the story of what happened and what it tells us about the nature of human nature.”
–Professor Philip G. Zimbardo

1971

A group of California students was divided in two. Half were told to act as prison guards and the other half to obey the first. The experiment was meant to last for two weeks but was cut short after six days.
“I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.” Professor Philip G. Zimbardo.

2025-2026

People living in the US have been told that some of them don’t belong there. That if and when those who do not will have been removed, the rest will resume their previously ‘great’ lives.


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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

‘Why’ and ‘How’

December 26, 2025 //
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‘Nothing which is impossible may ever happen.’
Until it does…

Life happens. Because it is, after all, possible.
In certain conditions, true.

Life, individually speaking, is limited. Individual organisms live for a while. Then go away.
Species adapt themselves. Or disappear…
Evolution! That’s how we, conscious observers, call this process.
Life itself, the entire phenomenon, may happen – as I’ve already mentioned, I know – only ‘inside’ a certain ‘environmental bracket’. The kind of life we’re familiar with, anyway.

The ‘impossible’ I’ve started with is a very interesting thing.
First of all, it’s – again – us who have come up with the notion. Until we’ve started to observe, things happened. Or not… But there was nobody to tell whether something was possible. Or impossible…
Things which could happen, did – if the conditions were right for long enough, while things which could not – at least not in the then present circumstances – simply didn’t happen. Without anybody noticing any of those things.
Now, that we’ve started to observe – in a conscious, as in ‘what’s in it for us’, manner – we’ve become very much interested in whether something may happen or not. Whether something good might be ‘enticed’ to happen and whether something bad might be prevented from happening.

I need to go back to ‘life’ for a moment.
I’ve already mentioned that individual life is temporary. Finite. I’ve also mentioned that species have to adapt to changes in order to survive. And that life itself, as we know it, can happen only inside a certain environmental bracket.
The point being that individual organisms which happen to be less than perfect – less than perfectly attuned to their environment – may still survive. At least for a while.
Life, as a phenomenon and strictly inside that environmental bracket, has somehow stretched the very notion of possible/impossible. The limits of ‘impossible’ are no longer clear cut. Somehow hazy. As in ‘possible’ but not for very long…
‘In constant balance’.

And we’ve arrived to the next level.
Society. Conscious people in congress.
Just as life has stretched the limits of ‘possible/impossible’, society – us, individual people working in concert – has stretched those limits even further.

The most blatant example which crosses my mind being the academic who had decreed that ‘heavier than air flying machines are impossible’. Lord Kelvin, 1895.
So. What had happened in the short 8 years passed between Kelvin uttering his now infamous words and the Wright brothers taking off? Had physics changed? Had our understanding of physics changed?
None of the above. We, as in ‘we humans’, made it possible. Found ways.
Just as life found a way to transform inanimate matter into living organisms – on a temporary basis – people working in concert have found ways to accomplish feats which seemed impossible. To their contemporaries. And, sometimes, even to those who live in the distant future of those achievements. We still have not figured out, in detail, how the Egyptian pyramids had been built…

I’ve been speaking of ‘individual’ achievements.
Flying machines as well as pyramids are, in a sense, ‘individual’. Somebody had an idea and, based on previous human achievements and with the help of others, have put their ideas into practice.
‘Individual’ not strictly in the sense that they have been achieved by an individual but in the sense that they have been the result of a deliberately targeted effort.

Other achievements had been ‘natural’. Or social?
In the sense that they had come around without anybody coordinating the effort. As in the case of the individual ones.
Learning to speak. To write. Yes, we do know that Cyril and Methodius were the guys responsible for the Russian alphabet. And that Mesrop Mashtots had created the Armenian Script. Only these efforts had been based on previous knowledge. Humankind had already been writing for at least 3000 years. Using different manners of notation but the principle was already there. And the achievement was ‘folkloric’ in nature. No identifiable author. The feat belonged to the entire community.

Another social/natural achievement is morals. Our habit of doing ‘the right thing’.
Which is different from what is being known as ‘justice’. Formal law being upheld by the government. Which is, basically, a collection of individual achievements.
So, why do we – statistically speaking – behave in a moral manner?

Evolutionary speaking, simply because moral communities fare better than amoral ones. And even better than immoral ones.
Don’t believe me? You’re not convinced that immoral communities will, sooner rather than later, either change their ways or crumble under the weight of their undoings? You are still under the impression that immorality is here to stay? Based on what you witness on a daily basis?
Do you remember that “individual organisms which happen to be less than perfect – less than perfectly attuned to their environment – may still survive. At least for a while”? Same thing goes for communities/societies. Communism, amoral by definition and profoundly immoral in practice, did survive for quite a while.

Then why do we stray from the ‘straight and narrow’?
Why do so many of us succumb to temptation?
I’m going to save that for the next post. But I’ll add this here.
Each digression is individual in nature. The consequence of ‘a deliberately targeted effort’. An individual human being comes up with a new idea. Good or bad. Is followed, if at all, by a group. Which group will survive – and add the ‘new’ idea to what is called ‘tradition’ if, and only if, that ‘new’ idea is beneficial for its survival. If that new idea works in the particular set of circumstances where that group of people live. Only after that had happened, after the group had survived for long enough and the new idea had become traditional, that particular, individual, achievement becomes a social one. The original author of the idea is forgotten and the engendered habit becomes natural.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, skin in the game
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