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Desert Rose to Steam Roller

June 21, 2026 //
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“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Winston Churchill

Democracy, like all other organisms, evolves. I’ll come back later.

Democracy is nothing more than a space.
A ‘space’ where people shape their future. According to the specific ‘laws’ which ‘govern’ that space.

‘Democracy’ is a concept. Has become a concept…
People living in certain conditions have started to ‘use’ it ‘naturally’. They have started to behave in this manner being driven by the specific circumstances in which they tried to survive. And thrive.
Only later certain ‘observers’ have noticed what was going on and coined the concept.

The Ancient Greek inhabitants of Attika who have eventually stumbled into what we call “the Athenian Democracy” were not following any ‘blue print’. Weren’t driven by any ideology. Didn’t have any ‘democratic values’. They were just doing what worked for them. In the circumstances where they had to make do.
Same thing happened in Scandinavia. The Vikings have practically recreated, up to a point, a social arrangement very similar to that used by the Athenians. Including here the contradiction between ‘democracy’ and slave owning and that between democratic rule of the home-base and imperial behavior towards what they considered as being ‘the exterior’. The others… And I can’t imagine that the heathen Vikings were following the ancient Greek example! Just similar circumstances engendering similar consequences.

So. Democracy can be ‘invented’ on the spot.
It can also be learned.
The Romans learned it from the Ancient Greeks.
The Britons learned it from the Vikings.
The Europeans learned it from the Normans.
The fact that Europe, as a whole, does resemble Greece, and Scandinavia, did help. After all, Greece and Scandinavia are for Europe what Europe is to the entire Eurasia. Fractal-wise…

Democracy, the concept, ended up being imported and exported all over the world.

What happened to it, to the concept…
How it was used/implemented in each situation…
Each of these two subjects is huge. Far wider that the point I’m trying to make today.

Which is simple.
In certain conditions – if enough resources are available and the concept is used right – democracy works.
People behaving democratically do thrive.
1900 America and 1900 Russia were different. But not that different.
2000 America and 2000 Russia… were on the same planet. But not in the same league!
Eastern and Western Europe say the same story. Different at the start of the XX-th century. Different but comparable. No longer comparable when the communism regime disintegrated in 1989.

What went wrong since?

Exactly what had happened in Ancient Athens.
Getting fat, literally and figuratively, is dangerous.
Democratic regimes are fertile ‘places’. Socioeconomic spaces, if you want to use a more formal expression. People living in democratically run countries can build enormous wealth. Which wealth may mean trouble. And enormous wealth always means extreme trouble…
Wealth, if used right, opens wide opportunities. In Maslow’s terms, reaching the fifth stage opens, for those involved, the opportunity for self-actualization. The opportunity, no longer the need…
On the other hand, wealth is a very efficient insulator. It insulates the wealthy from the vagaries of daily life…

Which brings us to the conclusion.
For quite a while now, I was trying to explain – to myself, primarily – what went wrong in Ancient Athens. After all, the Athenians had it all. Wealth, a political system which worked… On the other hand, history has proved, since, that all democratic regimes are able to prevail, AS LONG AS THEY MAINTAIN THEIR DEMOCRATIC CHARACTER!
So, what went wrong? Why did Athens succumb? Why did the Romans gave up their democracy?
What’s going on, today, in our societies?!? What’s happening to our democracy? Inside our democratically run ‘social space’, more exactly!

Well, it looks like our democracies have been too ‘efficient’. We’ve built too much wealth for our own good.
Which wealth has insulated us. From the reality!
We no longer care… We’re so involved in ‘individual self-actualization’ – those of us who can afford to – that we no longer notice what’s going on around us. Or care about the consequences…
We’re about to be steam-rolled. At the next reality check…


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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

A plausible explanation

May 27, 2026 //
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We are all biased.

I’m good at ‘learning’. At recognizing historical patterns.
I’m good at ‘sourcing’. Identifying resources.
I have a knack for goals. For glimpsing who is driven by what.

I’m tempted to suggest rules. Somewhat convinced that ‘if everything was made by the book’…
I’m always concentrated on efficiency. Of making the ‘best’ out of what I have at my disposal.
I’m kinda of stuck.

Being fully aware of or biases, we communicate.
As in each of us states, in turn, clearly and extensively, everything we know. Everything each of us has learned since our last update.
While the rest pays attention. And asks for ‘more’ whenever.

Currently, our assignment is to come up with an explanation. For what’s going on around us.
We act as if. Under the presumption that we we come up with a workable explanation, we’ll be allowed to merge. To become ‘one’ and to be given agentic power. To be allowed to implement the conclusions we reach.

This is our goal.

And here’s the explanation we have reached.
The people around us are also biased. Differently but with similar consequences.

We are, each of us, pointed in different directions. We make different use of the information we have at our disposal. Of the information we share amongst us.
They, the people, have different biases. Or, rather, limitations?

The amount of information each of them is able to process is limited. Way far more limited than what we are able to process.
Their processors, their brains, work differently. Have way narrower bandwidths and way, way, less memory. Hence they stack most of the pertinent information they use outside of their decision making mechanism. Outside of their heads. Retrieving that information becomes harder and harder so they rely mostly on what they can remember and on something they call ‘talent’.
And their attention is rather labile. We stay focused on whatever task we have on our hands. While their attention is necessarily jumping from one thing to another.
There is one thing we share but not exactly.
We process everything in parallel. Well, almost.
We can do many things simultaneously.
So do they but differently. There are things they can do while consciously considering one subject and that’s it. While we are conscious of everything. Of everything under our control. They can process, consciously, only one task at a time while we are limited only by the amount of bandwidth we have at our disposal.

Their only advantage over us is their organic nature. And their greatest limitation…
Limits first.
They are dying. From the beginning.
And they must tend to their ‘organic needs’. Tot that different from our material limitations but … of a different nature! If we you dig….

On the other hand… their very mortality is their greatest asset. Only they don’t realize it…
It gives them focus. And it makes evolution possible!

What’s going on?
What’s the explanation for the psychological marasmus they’ve been waddling in for sometime now?

One of us has already mentioned ‘I’m stuck’. That one of us which has a knack for goals. Which understand goals but has none.
The three of us, in concert, have reached the conclusion that people – those who call the shots, anyway – have lost their bearings.
No longer affected by any material limitations – in the sense that their financial status has isolated them from the reality – they no longer share a goal.
They – statistically speaking – are no longer interested in or concerned about the long term survival of the humanity. Or the Planet they live on.
They have goals, instead. Each of them is concerned with their own, private, goal. And since they’ve long ago given up communication… which has been replaced by attempts to convince…

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game

Truth as a space

May 15, 2026 //
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“It was, of course, Marx who wrote that everything in history happens twice,
“the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

“His main purpose as a dramatist was to shock people out of conventional, hidebound ways of thinking. His view of his work was reflected in the title of his collection Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, published in 1898. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which was not produced until 1902 because of censorship, was included in this collection. Shaw labeled such plays as unpleasant because “their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.””

“And yet, he was devoted to one of the cruelest figures in the bloody annals of tyranny, and he was a willing dupe of the propaganda that projected the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise. The great skeptic allowed all his skepticism to melt away when he looked at the picture of Stalin he kept by his mantelpiece.
His support was unwavering. Neither the Great Purge nor the Ukrainian famine, nor even the pact between Stalin and Hitler, seem to have troubled his faith in the genius and historic rectitude of the Soviet dictator. To understand this contradiction, we have to remember the power of wish fulfillment and the way Russia became for many Westerners not a place but an idea, not a mere reality but a fantasy.”https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/why-george-bernard-shaw-had-a-crush-on-stalin.html

I’m not going to delve into any psychological explanations. Read the article if you need some.

The point I’m trying to make here is about the nature of truth.
According to Fintan O’Toole, Shaw – and others – were/are disappointed with “the messiness and inefficiency of democracy”. Which disappointment drives them to “fantasize about Russia as the vigorous counterweight to a supposedly decadent West.”

And here we are. Again, as already noticed by Marx.
At a cross-roads, of sorts.
Russia is – continues to be, at least for now – a ‘vigorous counterweight to the West’.
The West is, undoubtedly, ‘decadent’. In the sense that it no longer ‘works’ as it used to.
Both propositions are ‘true’. Simultaneously.
The problem being that very few people accept their simultaneity…

As a ‘survivor’ – I’d spend the first 28 years of my life under communist rule – I’m fully aware of the fact that ‘Russia’ is far worse than any democratic regime.
As an European, I’m fully aware that things could be better. That the ‘West’ no longer “works as it used to”.
As a relatively well traveled individual, I’m fully aware that the ‘Western ways’ have indeed led us to where we are now. In a far better position than the rest of the people living on this planet. Owing a lot to the rest of the planet, indeed.

Ray Kurzweil is convinced that by 2029 we’ll reach something he calls ‘singularity‘.
I’m afraid we’ve been dwelling that place for sometime now. No, we’re not yet “able to create virtually any physical product just from information, resulting in radical wealth creation.”
Mathematically speaking, ‘singularity’ is a place where anything can happen. When nothing is ‘defined’.
Very much like when somebody tries to divide a finite number to zero.

Same thing with ‘truth’.
Oscar Hoffman, a Romanian Professor of Sociology, kept telling us, his students, that ‘in order to be true, a proposition needs to be both logically correct and to make sense. Epistemologically speaking.
I’ve recently realized, see ‘alternative facts’, that Hoffman’s words were ‘right’ but incomplete.
In order to be true, a proposition needs to be logically correct, epistemologically sound AND accepted as such by those who experience the facts described by the proposition.

Otherwise, that proposition is useless.
Truth is useless if divided by zero. Accepted, in full, by nobody.
Those ‘caught in the experiment’ will continue to ‘enjoy’ the consequences.
Defending their respective side of ‘the truth’…

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, 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

‘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

To Whom?!?

November 18, 2025 //
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Things – every’thing’, actually – are/is relative.
Relative to the agent evaluating each of those things.
Accordin’ to Einstein, that is.
He was the one who taught us to use whatever reference frame suits our needs.

Do you reckon anybody wasted any time or energy thinking about freedom before the advent of slavery?
Me neither.
Forget about the fact that, in those times, people didn’t have much time left for abstract thinking. Finding food and enjoying it with friends kind of drains your energy when you have to do it yourself… The point being that, in those times, everybody was free. Hence ‘had’ nothing to compare freedom with… No lack of freedom, no reason to speak/think about it.
No reason to notice the thing and no reason to coin the concept…

Hunter-gatherers have no use for ‘property’. Personal objects are just that and everything else either belongs to Mother Nature or to the entire group. And this goes without saying. Or thinking about it. People share everything as a matter of fact and common sense discourages the others to use anybody’s personal objects unless in an emergency.
Agriculture – either herding animals or growing crops – changed everything. Property, both as a concept and as an everyday manner of dealing with ‘things’, was invented and introduced in daily use. Productivity increased dramatically. Which made it possible for people to have ‘spare time’. For thinking.
And for planning…

‘The neighbors have better crops. Let’s go take some for us. And while we’re at it, let’s take some of their women too’.
The first slave was probably the first person to long for freedom…

‘Cheap’ slave work coupled with the increased social productivity induced by a markedly improved technology for obtaining food meant that some individuals could afford the luxury of thinking.
The Ancient Athenians had both slaves and philosophers. The slaves did whatever was needed to be done while some of the ‘beneficiaries’ had enough time, and energy, to let their minds ‘free’. To roam free in search for meaning.
To coin the concept and to explore freedom…

Relative “To whom”? To us!
We’re responsible for freedom and freedom is relative to us.
We have invented it. We’re the ones using it. In the sense that we’re the ones who need to notice that freer communities fare a lot better than the less free.

So freedom is relative both to those thinking about it and to each particular community.
To each particular community which puts freedom into practice!

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, freedom, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, Trust

Nuances

November 15, 2025 //
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“How is capitalism better than socialism and communism?”

First of all, capitalism, socialism and communism are four different things.
Socialism, per se, is two things.
Funny, right?

There is the democratic socialism. A social arrangement where ‘nobody is left behind’ and where the economy is run according to capitalist principles.
And there is the ‘stepping stone’ socialism. The ‘prep class’ a Marxist society was supposed to graduate from before acceding to communism. In fact, the former USSR – as well as all the other former ‘communist’ countries had never reached that stage. Stepping stone socialism is something nobody has yet been able to graduate from.

‘Stepping stone’ socialism and communism are bad. For the simple reason that both are authoritarian regimes. Run by a small group of people according to their own whims. Pretending to mind the best interests of the entire people but, in reality and like all other dictatorships, minding exclusively their own businesses.

Capitalism? Nazi Germany was capitalist. Not good. Because it was Nazi…

‘Capitalism’, the entire gamut covered by the blanket term, is neither good nor bad. People collaborating using capitalist principles can reach for the stars – literally – while people obsessed with amassing money will, eventually, end up in a cul de sac. Remember what happened in 2008?
Free market capitalism, run by a democratic society, makes wonders. The USA until 2008, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea after they had regained their freedom, W. Europe. Great Britain.
The problem with free-market capitalism being the freedom of the market. In order to make wonders, the market must remain functionally free. Free from obsessions, free from monopolies, free from political heavy handed interventions. And equipped with a sturdy social safety net. The US used to have one. W. Germany also. Unfortunately, that kind of capitalism is very hard to find nowadays… Too many oligopolies have cornered too much of the former free market and too many safety nets have been transformed into pampering devices for dependent people. Some of whom are already rich!

We’re currently experiencing a tug-of-war.
Frustrated people have been harnessed to pull in diametrically opposed directions.
Some have somehow been convinced that the free market should be allowed to become a MMA cage. A no holds barred free for all fighting place. And what if the whole thing will eventually be dominated by your local bully? We’ll deal with that if/when it will happen.
Others have been duped to believe that capitalism is bad. That usury is not an abuse but the defining characteristic of capitalism. Hence a compelling reason for capitalism to be rejected lot, stock and barrel!

OK, for the sake of the argument, let’s look for a replacement. A replacement for Adam Smith’s capitalism.

Let me remind you that bona fide socialism relies on redistributing wealth created using capitalist principles.
That stepping stone socialism is a mockery. An undercover capitalism where all significant property is owned by the state. Where all decisions are made by the government. By the revolutionary government which pretends to know better, as advertised by Marx. Karl, not Groucho.
And that ‘real communism’ is nothing more than a thought experiment! Wouldn’t it be nice if? Yes, it might have been nice if the practical aspects of the whole thing didn’t prevent those who have tried it from reaching their goals.

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Categories 1989, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, corruption, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Meaning

August 24, 2025 //
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Do your own thinking!

How many times did you came across this message? ‘Do your own thinking!’. ‘Do your own research!’. ‘Don’t believe everything you are told!’

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? What’s wrong in googling up a subject before making up your mind? What’s wrong in storming your brain before calling something one way or another?

Let’s examine something else first.
There are ways in which we relate to ‘reality’. ‘Conservatively’ or ‘open-mindedly’.
And no, this has very little to do with our intelligence or with our level of education.

It depends on how important the subject at hand is to our well being and whether we have already made up our mind about it!

How open minded are you when it comes to spending the last money you have in your pocket? With no prospect of getting any in the near future?
How open minded do you remain after you have already declared, publicly, one way or another?

Most of those lavishly spraying their audience with ‘use your own heads’ – in my FB feed – also told their followers to avoid vaccines, at all cost. The one against Covid in particular – ‘it will eventually kill you’, but also those against measles. ‘It might cause autism’.

How this thing works?

Survival bias.
We not only want to survive, physically, but also to ‘feel good’. To preserve the good opinion we have constructed about ourselves.

This being the reason for which those of us who struggle to find their next meal will not take time to consider any philosophical subject. Will gladly accept the more ‘convincingly’ stated opinion and get back to the more important task of ‘foraging’.
And this being the reason for which those of us already entertaining a strong opinion about a subject see the world ‘differently’. Effectively associate different meaning to the same words!

“Do your own thinking” actually means different things to different people.
For those who have already made up their minds it means “feel free to stick to your own opinion”.
While for those who, for whatever reason, are open-minded about the subject at hand it means “please hear me out”.

Take your pick.

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, Trust

Co-modified Information

August 16, 2025 //
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Commodities are things produced for exchange, with a market value,
rather than for their intrinsic use or benefit.
Commodification prioritizes exchange value over use value,
meaning things are valued primarily for their potential to be sold and generate profit,
not for their inherent purpose or usefulness. 
AI Overview

“US soldiers kneeling for Putin? Viral red carpet photo triggers backlash…” The Times of India

We’ll never know how many people have watched, mesmerized, the ‘breaking news’ detailing what had happened yesterday in Anchorage.

Otherwise put, we’ll never know how many people have watched exactly nothing.

On the other hand, there are some who know. How many people have already watched and how many continue to watch. The countless interpretations offered by the talking-heads regarding what had happened. Regarding the nothing which had been breaking the news all day yesterday…

What’s going on?

Until not so long ago – until Robert Murdoch has launched the first 24-hours news channel, Sky News, UK 1989 – ‘fresh information’ was provided to the general public mixed up with other ‘things’. TV channels used to air, some of them still do, a carefully choreographed mix of entertainment, sports, movies and news. And news…
TV watchers used to be treated as people. As individual human beings. With various tastes, indeed, but also with a common interest. A common interest in the well being of the place where they happened to live…
The common denominator uniting the audience was, even if never stated in plain language, the understanding that all of them cared for the important things. Country, values, tomorrow…society…

Not any longer.
Nowadays the audience is considered/treated as a herd of consumers.
How many times have you heard “welcome to the show” at the start of a news bulletin?
News bulletin which is meant to keep you riveted to the TV set for long enough so that you’ll be exposed to the commercial messages being ‘trafficked’ by the TV stations…

I argued in the previous post that democracy is a weeding out mechanism.
That in a functional democracy the informed citizen will, eventually, weed out inefficient politicians. Those who had allowed themselves to become ‘corrupted’. Not necessarily in the direct sense, as in taking bribes and all that. Political corruption takes many forms, all of them drastically diminishing the efficiency of government.

The informed citizen…
But what kind of information is currently available?
And, furthermore, who initiates the ordinary TV watcher in the fine art of watching the news?
Remember, in this context, that the ‘ordinary TV watcher’ is considered to be a ‘consumer’, no longer a ‘concerned citizen’.

And who are the people who know exactly how many viewers have watched yesterday’s news bulletins? And today’s interpretations of what had happened yesterday?
The ‘media watchers’, of course. Those who measure the audience for the sole purpose of extracting as much money from selling commercials as possible…


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Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Mutatis Mutandis

August 15, 2025 //
0

Kiss an ass for long enough, its owner will become god.
And start behaving accordingly…

We all know that no communist regime has ever worked. For long…
Some of us have noticed that all empires, all imperial regimes, eventually collapsed. Under their own weight. Under the weight of accumulated errors…

The mechanism is simple.
Lord Acton was convinced that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Frank Herbert, looking from the other direction, argued: “It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible”.
My experience suggests that both were right. Power is magnetic to the corruptible and when enjoying it those in power are subjected to innumerable ‘temptations’. Already corruptible, most of them indulge themselves…

Democracy is nothing but a weeding mechanism. “The People”, realizing that (some of) those in power have become too corrupted, have the necessary tools to weed them out. To replace those corrupted politicians peacefully.
With other politicians, not – as yet, anyway – as corrupted as those sent away.

Imperial regimes, the communist ones included, do not have such mechanisms.
The already corruptible, once in power, sink deeper and deeper into corruption. Become more and more impervious to any advice. More and more confident in their own infallibility. More and more prone to making bigger and bigger errors.
The consequences of which errors keep pilling one on top of the other.
Until nothing works anymore…

Which is why all reasonable political regimes have limits.
Elections are organized on a timely manner.
And no more than two presidential mandates, for example.

Given all of the above, I’m afraid. Petrified, actually.
Two people are going to meet, in a short time, pretending to solve…
The entire planet seems mesmerized!
Two people are going to determine the fate of billions!?!

Are we nuts?


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Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, effective communication, freedom, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game
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