There's an old saying used by flirtatious females.
"When I'm a good girl I'm a very very good girl
But when I'm a bad girl --- I'm better"
& the Ice caps R melting oh ho ho ho !!!
Tiny Tim wuz rite - the sky *is* falling
And I'm smirking and giggling all the way to eternity
sorry bout the formatting - for some reason word doesn't translate to googlerama
I I am too lazy ettc and don't have a cow because someday you may need the milk
Lubberly weather here and I can't control meeself and hope you do too---
The last section of today’s essay is the easiest to understand and I daresay the one that needs the least external verification. It strikes me that something that is often said of ancient anthropology, that based on the collection of artifacts is that we know how people lived but we still haven’t that good an idea as to what they thought about things.
Today we have the far more modern science of psychological anthropology where we not only seek to discover the way people perceive and understand the world around them but as well we have begun to be sensitized to the notion that an understanding of these processes has become more and more critical, lest we discover that, having relinquished the capability of being able to think for ourselves we have ceded that capability to others and those others may not have our best interests at heart.
It really does help to understand as well circularity and feedback processes. This holds true even in such seemingly determined instances as market economics. Soros has labled his method of dealing with the variation of prices “Reflexivity”. It calls to mind the old song title, “My heart has a mind of it’s own.”
The more convinced we are of the correctness of our idea at the outset then the less willing are we to consider alternatives. In ordinary understandings of feedback we assume the sender, like the German foreign service in 1938, will only be attuned to hearing the answer that it expects to hear. There is a good deal of power in this notion. The ninja philosophy, for instance is based, to some degree on humans being contortionists and thereby assuming shapes not thought of as human and hence unrecognized.
An even better analogy, to my mind, is the feedback caused when microphones are placed too close to amplifiers. Not all information distortion requires some evil genius spinning lies. A far greater percentage of information feedback is when the system takes control and not only places an inconsequential message “at the head of the loop” to drown out all other messages, but distorts the message itself.
In recent decades a controversy has arisen between advocates of the unfettered free market and regulations. The regulators can say, in effect “What good is ideological purity if it hurts people and prevents actual growth?” Be that as it may it is not always a strong argument on paper. The enticements of logic can be devastating.
What has be labeled “the selfish gene” sees little benefit in anything approaching morality, lest it be the morality of those shams created to debilitate and castrate one’s competition. In the battle for survival it is difficult to make an argument for the survival of the weak. Unless one understands at the core of their being a sense of all having worth it is impossible to convey the truth of the matter.
You can take a step away from such despair by using a game theory. Split the world into predators and prey and you’ll realize that a world of predators alone is unsustainable. And, as an aside one can without great difficulty group entire societies into one category or another. When a city state pays three wagons of silver to pay off a band of marauders it is not difficult to choose the predator or prey.
To judge accurately one must stand outside the duality and gain a sense of context. I digress in the previous few paragraphs because for many years which I labeled “the wasteland era” the control of thoughts and actions was so complete that one felt like a fool to carry on. A plague had settled on the land and I now know it was the same plague that faced the American Indian – to wit – both sides understand that one side is lying but there is nothing the weaker side can do. The law had failed as it had so many other times in the course of human history.
But as Edmund Burke, a Irishman who lived while his country bore the yoke of English tyranny would say, “Despair if you must but work on through despair.”
What then is this golden calf; that measures a man by the worth of his possessions? It must be done I suppose but let’s not disgrace ourselves and call it humane.
No comments:
Post a Comment