I've been a bit off my feed here the last day or two, kind of flat, kind of blah. Things are shifting at deep levels, emo-intellectual energy is kind of at a premium. I was rambling around in the attic, ok, the hard drive, and came across a document holding a long correspondence with an online friend. The conversation went deep at times, there's things in there worth sharing. So, since I'm kind of flat at the moment figured what the whale, it won't hurt to recycle some words. A cut and paste post from personal history that sort of washed up on the shores of today...
January 29, 2007
We’re not the first to see it coming… far from it. Consider if you will the prophet John on Patmos, penning the book of Revelation. A simple man he was, wise but simple. How could he possibly have words to describe modern warfare? He did his best. Two points have always struck me. The one about the seven headed monster that comes from the sea and consumes cities? Isn’t it funny, that when the engineers, both Soviet and American, had finished their work they’d both concluded seven was the ideal number of warheads to ride a submarine launched ballistic missile? To my mind that validates the man’s vision. But the biggie from that vision, the one that has led mankind around by the nose, is the number of man as beast. I think the man got the mantissa, but had no way to write down the exponent. I think he was trying to communicate the critical population density on Planet Earth. Every animal population ever studied has shown a critical density… even with every resource imaginable in plentiful supply if the population exceeds a certain density the social structures break down into destructive pathologies. I think that number for us is 6.6^9… or roughly six and a half billion souls on planet, a number we are approaching at a terrifying rate. And every social system on the planet is showing acute stress. AIDS and every other pathogen in Mom Nature’s arsenal may be her attempt to stall off that critical value… we are not helping her one bit.
Next I would speak to what really drives our world. It is not money or power or military might, no, those are tactical things, means to an end. What really drives our world are the paired psych structures of motive and expectation. Consider those words in depth, how they relate to each other. Humongous numbers of things open up and make sense… when you analyze them from that perspective. If the thing you’re looking at makes no sense at all, change the assumption on one of those two and look again… sooner or later you’ll hit the combination that does make sense compared to the observed facts. This is one place where the self, our own motives and expectations in life must be most carefully filtered out… we are not they, and it is exceeding rare they are like us.
Another thing that heavily shapes our world are the apposing forces of compression and expansion, when these word-thoughts are applied to the two before. Compress an expectation, and you get anger, just as if you compress a gas you get temperature… the energy is no greater, but it is contained in a smaller area, the temp goes up. Compress a motive, and you eventually get a blind obsession. Compress either to far and the population behaves like the fuel and air in a diesel engine: it explodes to break the compression. In an open and young society there is expansion, and the forces expand to fill the available volume as it were, generation after generation, until external reality puts on the brakes.
A lot of what we are seeing in the United States is a result of compression… at the end of world war II this country owned the world… the only victorious nation not physically hammered by the war. Britain, Russia, France, all suffered heavy destruction, and everywhere the psych scars of that war, the scars that shaped the lives and motives and expectations of those who parented the generation in power now. We see in America a growing movement of those whose expectations, learned blind from parents and never exposed to the rest of the world, we are seeing them twist and buckle into blind hatred… they were brought up to believe they were American, the best, some natural apogee of the human race… reality is denying them, and just like the Germans of 1930 they are massively vulnerable to anything that will give them a place to put the heat of that compression.
Consider how religion deals with this situation. It puts an unlimited, and undefined, expectation not on this life, but on the next. Anything can be tolerated in this life, to the limits of physical strength and beyond sometimes, the motives and expectations that power those lives are based in the hope of a life after this one where everything they don’t know enough to want will be theirs. Is it any wonder then that religion has always flourished best among those enslaved, be it literal bondage or the slavery of expectations that can neither be changed nor brought into reality? Look again at the American neo-fascist Christian right… these people are already enslaved, their actions are totally consistent with the old standard motive of misery loves company. The answer to defeating them is easy: don’t give them a fish, teach them to fish. Nothing else will work, you can execute genocide on them at best rate and they will outbreed your best effort at killing them off, an effort which will as an inevitable side effect destroy your culture in the process.
The best efforts of technology only speed up the processes defined above, they really don’t touch on the root causes. One reason I like this manner of looking at the world is it is the only one I’ve found that seems to work equally well on the individual as the society, that truly links the fields of psychology and sociology.
Of course, none of this does a whole lot for the tactical problems of personal survival, but as any commander of an outnumbered force knows when you are outgunned you damn well better hit the right target the first time out, you won’t get a second chance, and that is where these thoughts play in the game… just what in the hell is the right target?
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