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Weaponizing the public discourse.

June 26, 2020 //
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Weapons are nothing but repurposed tools. Sometimes ‘enhanced’ to fit the new goal.

Clubs had started as fruit harvesting utensils, then used for hunting purposes and eventually for bashing in the heads of those who had slept with the missus when the wielders weren’t looking. And so on…

As a tool, an implement is used to ‘put things together’. As a weapon, the same (kind of) implement is used to ‘set things apart’. An axe can be used to split wood in order to build a fire or to ‘split’ furniture during a fit of rage.
Generally speaking, a tool is used towards the ultimate goal of adding to/fine tuning a structure while a weapon is used to destroy/disable something which is meant to remain so.

Our ability to communicate was ‘the’ tool which actually transformed us into what we are today. Humans.
At least according to Humberto Maturana. His theory maintains that we’ve become self-aware social individuals through what he calls languaging.
In a nut-shell, he says that we’ve become humans – self conscious apes, by continuously expressing our thoughts towards the other members of the community. Hence simultaneously building an ‘agora’ and ‘walling in’ individual private spaces.

Yet the same ability to communicate can be used also as a weapon.
Instead of being used by individuals to mutually groom themselves, and ultimately adding to the overall resilience of the community, ‘weaponized’ communication is used to ‘downgrade’ susceptible individuals. Hence lowering their ability to coalesce into functional communities.

History suggests that, in the longer run, democracy – as a manner of decision making, increases the survivability of the communities which use it. Simply by pooling the decision making resources of the entire community instead of relying on the mental prowess – and good will, of a single authoritarian leader.
Only for democracy to be fully functional, the individual members of the community have to be able to share, in earnest, their thoughts.
This is why Freedom of Speech has been enshrined in the First Amendment.
That’s why whenever the public discourse becomes increasingly dominated by ‘fake-news’ things start to go south.

That is why whenever people allow themselves to be split into warring parties – with no real communication between the sides except for the misinformation hurled across the divide, both sides eventually end up wondering at the destruction they had allowed the ‘communication warriors’ to inflict upon them.

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Categories altruism, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, democracy, effective communication, evolution, freedom, In English, Intent, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Roe vs Facemask

June 24, 2020 //
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So, in the name of liberty and in order to protect the lives of the innocents, the government should not mandate wearing a mask in public – for the duration of the current pandemic, but should close the public funded ‘planned parenthood’ clinics forever…

Individuals – both men and women, are to be trusted to take, on their own, the appropriate measures to protect themselves – and the others, but women are not to be trusted to decide, on their own, about what happens inside their own bodies.

Meanwhile, “The US and Brazil each recorded more than 100,000 cases over the seven days from June 15 to June 21, the WHO said, the only two countries with such high infection numbers.“
Do I need to refresh your memory about the fact that neither of their presidents, Trump and Bolsonaro, have never been seen wearing a mask in public?

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Categories altruism, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, feminism, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Maslow, a reminder.

June 20, 2020 //
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This Covid thing is an excellent opportunity.
For us to reconsider.

Everything.
Our past. Our meaning/role in this world… our future…
We have the time, some of us also have the means.

The means to socially distance ourselves from the fray.
Hence increasing our likelihood to survive. Increasing our confidence that tomorrow will actually happen.
Increasing the need to ‘actualize’ ourselves. To be able to cope with what tomorrow might bring.

This whole thing reminds me of the fact that Maslow’s Pyramid is nothing but a succession of steps which might be climbed. Might be climbed….
There’s no one there forcing us to step up once we’ve ‘fulfilled’ the one we’re standing on. And no one to tell us what to do once we’ve ‘upgraded’ ourselves.

And another thing.
Covid also taught us, the hard way, that our planet is limited.
That it’s hard to live apart and that everything which happens anywhere eventually influences all of us.

Thank you for reading this.

Later Edit
Some use ‘physical distancing’ instead of ‘social distancing’.
The rationale being that the distance is only physical and not social.
The way I see it, ‘social distancing’ makes a lot more sense.

‘I keep my distance because I care about you, not because I fear I might catch something from you. We are together in this!’

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices that we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, identitate colectiva, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

It takes (at least) two to tango.

June 16, 2020 //
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The world is full of problems. Complicated problems. Multi-layered and multi-dimensional.

The world is also full of simple, black and white, solutions. Pun intended, of course. ‘Choke’-full, actually.

A mural depicting African-American George Floyd killed in police custody in Minneapolis, U.S. (REUTERS/Christian Mang)

Some people are convinced that George Floyd’s death was a direct consequence of racism while others are convinced racism cannot explain much and that each man is responsible for his fate. Or should I have said ‘each person is responsible for their fate’?

Those who are convinced that racism is a thing of the past blame the current mess on “toxic masculine values emanating from gangs and peer groups, in the absence of marriage and male parenting.” and on schools being “forbidden to punish more black than white/Hispanic/Asian kids.“
In other words, “black” people are responsible for their own fate and those ‘soft-hearted’ ‘affirmative action’ pussies are to share the blame. The only foreseeable solution being “the growth of black community schools that are prepared to take the little buggers by the scruff of the neck, discipline them, and make men out of them.”

Meanwhile, those who see racism as the single cause of the seemingly endless string of tragedies deface and decapitate statues…

A marble statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded in Boston. (Photo by Tim Bradbury / Getty Images)

And things are further complicated by the fact that many of those who are convinced that racism is the root of all evil are white.

““White people are seeing racial injustice, they’re seeing Breonna [Taylor] and George [Floyd], and they’re seeing the cause of death was not Breonna or George; it’s racist policing,” … “Now they are seeking to transform the policy, and that’s a good thing.”“

First things first.
White people demanding that racist policing must be changed is a step further. Only it won’t take us far enough. We don’t need to change a scapegoat – racism, with another.

What? Racism is a scapegoat!?!

Yep!
Racism was the scapegoat used by slave-owners to rationalize away the fact that they were using people – fellow human beings, as burden beasts.
Racism is the scapegoat used by our contemporaries to rationalize away the fact that African Americans are more likely than their white neighbors to drop out of school and to get into prison. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether you consider that African Americans make bad decisions individually, as a consequence of their race/culture or as a result of having been oppressed for so long.
For as long as we don’t acknowledge the fact that African Americans behave exactly like all the other Americans when exposed to the same socio-economic conditions we remain racists.
All of us.

“I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”

What happened since Dr. King’s prophetic words?
The American Dream has grown more and more inaccessible, even for the whites? More and more white people feel that nobody hears them?

And too many of those who should have already heard continue to remain deaf?
Or, even worse, instrumentalize that rage, already multi-racial, towards their petty political goals?

“Bad things happen to politics when Americans feel like the future will be worse than the past. Reactionary and socialist ideologies ascend. The stories we tell ourselves about the problems we face have profound implications for the policy directions we take in the future. But there’s much more to the story than what politicians and pundits are telling us right now.“

Nota Bene.
Racism worked as a scapegoat exactly because Afro-Americans were so easy to pin-point. To identify as being different. And from ‘different’ to alien is but a small step…
This being the reason for people of color being pulled over by the police more often than their white counter-parts. An ‘alien’ driving a Tesla ?!?

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, teleology, Trust

Bias

June 13, 2020 //
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We need to remain ‘consistent’.
Each of our individual consciences needs to remain in ‘one piece’.
To preserve its self-esteem.

Hence our tendency to rationalize away our mistakes.
Our past decisions which had been proven to be less than optimal.

Hence our tendency to uphold our already ‘adopted’ beliefs.
To discard any new information which contradicts our past conclusions.

The process of ‘selection and discarding’ followed by a robust ‘defensive’ rationalization is almost instinctive. In no way completely conscious.

No one in their right mind can pretend that someone defending their smoking habit is fully aware of what’s going on inside their heads.
That rationalizing away the higher probability of a smoker to develop a cancer is behaving in a fully reasonable manner.

Unfortunately, rationalizing away bad habits is the smallest manifestation of bias.
A more important, and malignant one, is the tendency to impose upon others our own conclusions.
To force others to give up smoking because we’ve reached the conclusion that smoking is bad for us.
To interpret other people smoking – wherever nobody else is affected by the smoke, as a slap in our faces. As an insult to our intelligence.
How does that guy dare to act contrary to what I believe to be proper behavior?

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Trust

Too much of a good thing

June 12, 2020 //
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Charles Darwin gave us “On the origin of Species”.

We’ve summed it up ‘the survival of the fittest’.
And behaved accordingly. Including some of those who should have known better. “The world of the selfish gene revolves around savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit, and yet, Dawkins argues, acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature.“

I reckon all of you know – or at least have heard of, Richard Dawkins.
Compare his celebrity with the relative absence from the public scene ‘enjoyed’ by Ernst Mayr.

And what’s so special about this Mayr guy?
‘Evolution is not as much about the ‘survival of the fittest’ as it is about the ‘demise of the unfit’ ‘

Get it?
In fact, there is no such thing as ‘the fittest’ when we speak about evolution. ‘Fit’ is relative while evolution is a process. Fit is about ‘this moment and this place’ while evolution is about the ability to adapt. To change when needed.

And what has any of these to do with “exploring the consequences of our limited conscience”?

Well, it was us who had interpreted Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ as ‘the survival of the fittest’ individual. It was us who had lionized Dawkins’ ‘Selfish Gene’ and left Mayr’s ‘True’ Evolution in relative darkness…

To sum it up, it is us who are are obsessed with something we call ‘success’.

It is us who keep forgetting that the mighty dinosaurs – maybe the most ‘successful’ animals ever, had been the first to disappear when ‘shit’ had struck. And that is was a meek mammal which had inherited the Earth.

“Mammals had lived in the large shadow of the dinosaurs, never getting bigger than a small dog until the mass extinction. The mammals that survived the asteroid were mainly small omnivores – the largest being the size of a rat and weighing about a pound (0.5 kg).
Within 100,000 years of the extinction event, mammals reached about 13 pounds (6 kg). By 300,000 years after the extinction, they got to 55 pounds (25 kg), with the first purely herbivorous mammalian species. By 700,000 years after the asteroid, some mammals weighed more than 110 pounds (50 kg).“

It is our success craving conscience which is highly biased. And I’m not at all sure this is a good thing. In the long run, I mean.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, coruptie, Culture, democracy, effective communication, evolution, fail better, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children

How things work

June 12, 2020 //
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Albert Einstein, a physicist, had noticed that observations are relative to the “frame of reference” where the observer happens to make his observations.

Humberto Maturana, a biologist, has reached the conclusion that consciousness – or ‘self awareness’, as he prefers to call it, is a personal trait which is developed by individuals living in concert.

Blending Einstein’s and Maturana’s ideas, it is easy to ‘see’ that observations made by human individuals depend, simultaneously, on two referential systems. Or frames of reference, in Einstein’s terms.

On the actual, ‘geographic’, ‘place’ where the individual makes their observations.
And on the ‘cultural place’ where the conscience – inner referential system, of the observing individual had been ‘shaped’.

Otherwise put, nobody can see things which are not there. Nor ‘see’ – a.k.a. understand, things which are too ‘distant’ from what that person already ‘knows’. Accepts as being ‘normal’. Feels like being ‘right’.

To make things just a tad ‘clearer’ – ‘nature versus nurture’, we must consider the vagaries of individual ‘biology’. Some people see/hear/smell/feel differently than others. And even ‘think’ differently.

And my point is?

Maturana made it before me. The ‘other’ – the more different, the better, is a source of richness. IF we treat each-other the right way. If we help each-other by ‘concerting’ our observations about what we have in common.
The ‘place’ we observe. Einstein’s referential frame. Where we ‘happen to stand’. Together.

And there’s something else I’d like you to read.

“J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues”
https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues

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Categories altruism, awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, Chance, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Culture, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, teleology, Trust

Take a breath.

June 11, 2020 //
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We’ve arrived at a very interesting point in our evolution as a cultural species.

Having more or less solved our existential problems – food, shelter, companionship, we’re hard at work towards building ‘self esteem’.

Putting it in Abraham Maslow’s terms, a good portion of the humankind – most of those active on the internet, the netizens, have reached the ‘self-actualization’ stage.

The problem being that we’re so preoccupied with ‘expressing our true selves’ that almost nobody listens anymore. Truly listens…

The kind of listening needed when we try to learn something. To understand what’s going on.

As opposed to the listening used when educating somebody.

When attempting to learn, we listen opening our minds. We let information in and structure it afterwards.
When educating people, our listening is focused. We take information in with the sole goal of detecting dissent – in order to stifle it, and openings to exploit in our quest to implant our opinion about the world in the minds of our ‘targets’.

Take a breath.
And exhale carefully not to inflate another bubble.
There are already a lot of them waiting to burst.

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Culture, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, Intent, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

Bowing to an image

June 6, 2020 //
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“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Science teaches us many things.

In fact no, science teaches us nothing!
Science cannot teach, at all. Simply because science is not a teacher.

At individual level, science is an attitude. A mind open enough to accept its own fallibility. To accept the fact that, sooner rather than later, it will fail.
To accept the fact that the image it constantly generates during its interaction with the surrounding world is, at best, incomplete.
To accept the fact that the understanding it has reached during its existence is, and will remain forever, a work in progress.

At the social level, science is a way of conducting business.
Based on ‘trust but verify’. A scientifically minded community trusts its individual members to be honest in their efforts but verify their work because – as mentioned above, each of us will, sooner rather than later, fail.
Hence, by aggregating their efforts, a scientifically minded community will eventually paint a still imperfect image but one closer to the reality than any of those belonging to its individual members.

In order for the community to be able to continuously improve their ‘work in progress’ each, or at least, enough of its members need to preserve their scientific mental attitude. Their intellectual humility.
As soon as too many of the individuals reach the conclusion that their image of the world is the only correct one – and they start not only to bow towards it but also to convince others to join them, things start going south.

“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Who among us is perfect? Perfect enough to be sure?

And why had been chosen an adulterous woman as the main character for this lesson?
Because adultery is a sin which cannot be committed in solitude? Only in cooperation with ‘the other’? As a relationship? Where each member contributes to the shared doom?

Do you see how similar science and sin are?

Both start ‘individually’ and are put in practice ‘together’.
Both are initiated as individual pulsions and put in practice as choices.

I’ve started this post by mentioning science.
The scientists among us have reached the conclusion that there was no need for a God to start the process of which we are the alleged pinnacle. That evolution was enough to drive the whole thing. I tend to agree.
On the other hand, history – yet another branch of science, has produced enough evidence to prove that God had a tremendous contribution to the present state of civilization.

Not God himself but the image of God we have created for ourselves. The Image we’ve been bowing to for some time now.

Go figure….

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Categories altruism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children

Who’s the problem now?

June 4, 2020 //
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I’ve always been fascinated by quotes which are ambiguous enough to be simultaneously wrong and right.

In this situation, the ambiguity comes from ‘government’ covering three ‘patches of ground’.

‘Method of running a place/country’. (Self)Organized versus chaotic.
‘System in place’ which is used in running a country.
A particular group of people who man, at any given moment, the above mentioned ‘system in place’.

Now, which of the three meanings was at the top of Reagan’s mind when he was uttering those ‘famous’ words?

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptable(sic). Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

Frank Herbert

The way I see it, government ‘as a manner of running things’ is a very powerful method. Which had served us rather well, on aggregate. Only it is not fail-proof. Or, more exactly, fool-proof.
Government as a ‘system in place’ is a work in progress. We’ve been improving it since we’ve invented government as an alternative to chaos. Only we need to be very careful. As a man made system it will always be far from perfect. It has not been perfect in the past and, no matter how much effort we’ll put into it, it will always remain perfectible.
Finally, government as ‘the team temporarily in charge’ ‘suffers’ mainly from being composed of humans. Hence both corruptible and attracted to power. Hence liable to do everything to maintain their positions.

‘Liable to do everything to remain in power’.
Which means that it’s our job to keep them on the straight and narrow.
We, The People, are the first to experience the consequences of their decisions. Hence we, all of us, are those who need to keep Government – ‘the team in charge’, on a short leash.
If they want to remain in power, they need to keep us ‘alive’.
They need to keep the system in shape. Working good enough for the vast majority, not for just a few of us. For a few of them, to be more precise.

Otherwise ‘government as a manner of keeping chaos at bay’ would have failed.


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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., altruism, arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, democracy, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Psychology, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust
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