When You Don’t Think Ahead

We need more strategic thinkers
And fewer reactionaries.
We need more planners
And fewer trigger happy soldiers.
We need more chess players
And fewer first person shooters.
We need more patience with intellect
And less impulse with emotion,
Because life really sucks when you don’t plan ahead. 24.11.07

Traffic congestion is a classic example of systemic failure created through the actions of multiple self-interested individuals. Interestingly enough the solution to traffic jams involves altruism and especially forward planning that takes into consideration the actions of others. This is a very important concept to consider that has much wider applicability than simply dealing with traffic on a highway, think of micro-economics for example. 05.05.06

The farther into the future you plan the better off you will be once you arrive.

MSNBC news article: Think ahead to head off traffic jams - Unselfish steering makes scientific sense for commuters

[A] few ways you can help speed things up for everyone:

• Look past the car in front of you to anticipate what's coming up ahead.

• Act altruistically. When people are trying to merge from an on-ramp, slow down and let them merge in front of you.

• Don't procrastinate. If highway construction shuts down lanes, merge early on before the lane closure.

Iraq & the Zero-Sum Players

Pick any metric you want but no matter how you measure it America’s invasion of Iraq has been a complete fiasco. The only element of success so far has been the removal from power and capture of the despotic (but well suited for his environment) Saddam Hussein. While kicking out Saddam is great as far as most Iraqis are concerned it has not as a consequence had significant benefits to Iraq or the world. Indeed after nearly two years and amidst a flaring insurgency that grows in scale by the day, Iraq is not safer now, the United States isn’t safer and the world isn’t safer - so what was the point!?  It seems the clique that foisted this foolish war on the American public are either exceptionally incompetent or profoundly malicious having wasted several hundred billion dollars and still rapidly counting, killed thousands of civilians, soldiers and everyone in between, and even pushed the military reserve forces to the breaking point. None other than Iraq’s own intelligence chief, Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, has recently admitted that, “I think the resistance is bigger than the U.S. military in Iraq.” Well that’s certainly encouraging news for America isn’t it? Slam-dunk success! Get the ticker tape ready! Yeah right. With the insurgency in Iraq possibly as large as 200,000 it’s increasingly clear that the most powerful military force in the world is losing a war to car bombs and kids with rocket launchers!

Losing a war is much worse than never fighting one at all because your weakness' are exposed for future attackers to exploit.

In any situation war or peace, the bulk of any given population is always ambivalent and the Iraqi people are no exception being only concerned with their daily lives and basic needs – food, employment and security. The bulk population will support whichever side provides them with their basic requirements and since the coalition forces in Iraq cannot provide the basic utilities, jobs and definitely not security for Iraqis, in this case because of a relentless assault by rebel forces, then by President Bush’s own logic since the Iraqi people are not “for us” then they are automatically “against us”. Thus the United States has already lost the war in Iraq because they have lost the tacit support of the majority of the Iraqi people.

The artificial state known as Iraq is nothing more than Gertrude Bell's  line on the British Empire's map. Anymore the descent of this motley, multi-ethnic conglomeration into civil war is a foregone conclusion. What is more important strategically is to better understand the mindset and motivation of the people that intentionally start these conflicts in the first place. Now true, politics has its windows of opportunity and the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks provided a massive blank check for the Executive Branch and indeed despots and democrats alike around the world, but the American invasion of Iraq and the war on terrorism which is supposed to be a part of goes beyond that because it was sold as a war of good versus evil. Saddam and bin Laden are evil therefore we must eliminate them. This view of things is so simple that it has a convincing appeal even though, and perhaps especially, because it fails to take alternative options into account or to recognize consequences before they occur and defeat our efforts.

The Clash once had a song for the Cold War era called 'Charlie Don't Surf',
It's a one a way street in a one horse town
One way people starting to brag around
You can laugh, put them down
These one way people gonna blow us down
... better watch out, the one way people are still around.

This black or white, left or right, right or wrong mentality is perfectly emblematic of the conservative, Manichean mindset that not only avoids the natural ambiguity inherent within real life but it actively seeks to ignore it! Now ‘conservative’ is a vastly over-used term but in this case it refers to people that hold an unambiguous and absolute interpretation of reality and events that does not allow for multiple interpretations. This conservative mentality is built on the assumption that everything is divided into good and evil and further that life events are fundamentally zero-sum games where if one side wins the other side loses and there is nothing in between. The conservative view is usually spiritual and religious in nature and easily leads to fundamentalism and dogmatism as well. President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are stereotypical ‘zero-sum players’ – totally convinced of their own righteousness and the base evil of everyone else as well as the simplistic competition they operate in.

By now it should be painfully obvious that following the ‘leadership’ of zero-sum players is like following a suicide bomber to their target.

The zero-sum conservative view is fundamentally based on non-reality; they thrive on myths, unverifiable beliefs and fantasies where they see what they want as opposed to what actually is. These people often lack self-confidence and fear to make decisions because that means taking a risk of being wrong so they invent excuses and hide behind the façade of a manufactured black and white world where they can’t fail because decision-making is a tautology, after all - just do the right thing! However in practice this self-delusion doesn’t make life easier it actually sets up impossible standards that only trap and torment the individual foolish enough to cling to them. Any methodology not based on a careful and objective analysis of reality is doomed to eventual subversion by truth and easily predicted events.

And again President Bush is a classic example of the weaknesses of belief-based decision-making. He continues to maintain that the invasion of Iraq is on course, successful and ‘the right thing to do’ even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. He cannot adapt to fit the new situation and information because to do so would necessitate rejecting his asserted position of correctness. This mindset has extreme difficult adapting to new information and dynamic situations because they rely upon a fixed and abstract reference for making their value-based decisions; rude reality inevitably intrudes. It’s not whether you are right or wrong in any given decision but whether you learn from the situation and incorporate that knowledge into your next decision. People that are afraid of being wrong, afraid of not always conforming to the culturally defined standards of excellence, are people that are self-handicapped because they can’t learn, change and improve. 08 & 22.01.05

Selfish Altruism

It’s a struggle to justify many of the value based choices we make such as why we don’t like Wal-Mart or why we should protect an endangered species. In many ways it boils down to aesthetics. We don’t want every store to be a giant parking lot with butt-ugly warehouse like monstrosity on it and we don’t want the world’s wildlife to consist of rats and roaches. Nevertheless, aesthetics are mostly subjective which tends to undercut the universal applicability of the argument. What are we left with?

In many ways money is an efficient method of distributing resources; the cost of beauty is generally factored into higher prices. People shop at Wal-Mart as awful as it is because the lack of beauty equates to lower product prices. But basing everything on purely economic costs has its limits, after all why don’t we build all our nuclear power plants the cheap way like Chernobyl - without a containment dome over the reactor? Why not just dump all the waste heat into the river without a containment pond – who cares if all the fish die?

It’s important to understand that money is an abstract concept; it is an artificial overlay like a grid pattern that creates an order that does not naturally exist. The distortions that emerge from the use of these abstract constructs are a result of the values that built the structure in the first place. Witness the post-modern failure of empiricism. In order for things to make sense and become more universally desirable and sustainable we’ve got to stop basing our decisions on simple quantities and start basing them on relationships.

Recently when asked if American had progressed any in the past 20 years George Carlin responded: “Everybody's got more jet skis and Dustbusters now and sneakers with lights in them. They've got more cheese on their thing that they buy. They get double helpings. See, Americans measure all their progress in the wrong way. They measure by quantity and by gizmos and toys. And not by quality and by things that are important.”

In order to accurately gauge true effect and measure costs we have to look at not just one part to find the result we want but to also include even the parts we don’t want to measure, in other words the system as a whole. Practice what you preach; only work to build a world that is one you yourself want to live in.  I call this concept ‘selfish altruism’. Selfish altruism shouldn’t be confused with Christian compassion. This is not about taking pity on others, it’s about self-respect and an awareness that local effects have global consequences.

Much of this depends on the intelligence and wisdom of the individual and sadly many people are incapable of making wise decisions or planning their actions. But the rules are made for these fools and their ineptitude inevitably delivers their comeuppance, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is the ones making the decisions, the leaders and the administrators that do know better because it is their responsibility to be better. So for example, if a leader commissions a nuclear power plant without a containment dome, make him live next to it. If a business leader makes a dangerous product but claim it’s safe, make him use it – and if he won’t then don’t buy the product and boycott the company. You get the idea.

The beauty of living according to selfish altruism is that it doesn’t require making any values that don’t already exist; it minimizes differences and maximizes commonality. Selfish altruism comes very close to circumventing the struggle of making value-based decisions entirely as highlighted in the opening paragraph. However it does depend on society being as transparent as practically possible, the mitigation of superstition and the promotion of rational thought and behavior – elements that should be encouraged regardless. It’s not perfection but at least it’s a start. 31.01.04

Setting the Standard

A problem: how do we set it so that people strive to follow the wisest and most competent elements and not emulate the most narrow-minded and venal? What's not always understood is that people have a built-in need to obey, they have an inherent desire to be socially accepted. They want to do what is right. Yet people still disobey, why? Because either:

• They have no choice

• They perceive it to serve their own interests

Maria Montessori wisely surmised that mindless rebellion is just an effort to salve an ego assaulted by egregious authorities. Defining 'right' is random when set against an arbitrary standard but is objective and sustainable when measured against personal liberty and responsibility - the capacity to take care of oneself for the benefit of oneself. Perversion and anti-social behavior is predominantly the result of wayward authority warping the individual. As a child, character can be adjusted but as adults it's much more difficult.

So the answer to the problem is to set the best as leaders and the worst as examples to the rest. Make the best teachers. True, not everyone is equally able to perceive time or to recognize consequences and a system must be in place to efficiently and fairly eject the failures and promote the competent.

Freedom

Members of the state can’t be more free than that needed to police the worst elements. The amount of freedom a state can offer is limited to the level required to police it's worst elements.

Anarchy is a transitional state because the vast majority of a mature populace prefers order over disorder and are willing to sacrifice freedom for security. Many investors do the same thing, they prefer a small return that is stable and predictable over a greater reward at higher risk. A promise of a dollar tomorrow is worth less than a dollar today. Age is a critical factor, Africa for instance has a huge population under 25 and look at the rampant instability. The young have less invested financially just as they do socially in the pre-existing system and thus are more likely to see radical change as potentially conferring a viable reward.

True freedom is not only impossible because all social existence involves sacrifices to others, but is also not overly desirable for most since freedom requires responsibility. Total freedom requires total responsibility. 31.01.04

Towards Ego Driven Social Transparency

So many people live for others, wait for others, base their lives solely on others; yet this is a self-defeating way of life that inevitably leads to resentment and confusion. It is a way of life promoted by erroneous morality systems, East to West, for hundreds or thousands of years and also by more modern misguided philosophies and ideologues, specifically the two of concern here are:

• Ayn Rand - build to magnify the self, work to inflate self-worth.

• Max Stirner - cheat and screw over others just as long as the self-ego is maintained and magnified.

In both cases and indeed for all of recorded history the underlying goal was the search for personal happiness. Even today that goal seems just as elusive as ever even as scientific and mystical efforts have increased exponentially. Drugs and psychology are the hottest arenas for this false hope of happiness through prescription. However I posit that there is no universal happiness but there are certain fundamentals that apply in that regard which can aid in the realization of happiness.

The root of all happiness is purpose, although purpose can be masked by many things to such an extent that a state of near-happiness can be achieved. Religion and work are two examples. Workaholics area a classic depiction of using activities to ignore internal discontent because if you are doing something you are not thinking about other things - you have numbed the quandaries brought on by introspection.

Work addiction segues nicely into 'achievement based happiness' which can be detected in Ayn Rand libertarian egoistic philosophy, that being the unfettered pursuit of self-interest benefits society. The ego is something to be constructed upon the universal tabula rasa, or blank slate that every person starts out as, according to Ayn Rand. Incidentally her use of a tabula rasa justification is typical Ayn Rand - taking things that are an unproven, tentative hypothesis at best then portraying them as unassailable fact. In this view, the ego is built using the forces of materialism such as money and expressed through buildings, monuments charitable tax-write-offs with your name in big letters on the signs. Hence Ayn Rand using an architect as a protagonist and modern Ayn Rand protégé Alan Greenspan expressing himself through the manipulation of money as Federal Reserve Chairman. The flip side is that if one has no talent in this regard then you have no worth, to state it bluntly; which is why this philosophy is clearly not for everyone. Happiness here stems from a zero-sum game, screw the other guy over and I win. Although Ayn Rand would disagree with that glib assessment.

Max Stirner had the idea of a pursuit of self-interest without regard for the effects on others or anything outside of the self; a very existential, synthetic, unreal way of acting. Ultimately it's self-defeating because no man is an island as they say, all actions have consequences. Ayn Rand said if we just all work to express our own ego everything will (magically) work out through the 'invisible hand'. But Stirner is saying that if we worship our ego nothing else will matter.

Both of these assessments are flawed but I think Ayn Rand was closer to a practical solution than Stirner. It's not egoism over altruism, it's egoism as altruism - self respect. If you care about yourself and your surroundings you will by extension of that reasoning also care about others because their lives will invariably intersect with yours. Not necessarily in mutual dependency or interdependence but just as the fact that in an increasingly interconnected world there is no safe place, we cannot trash one part and flee to a haven. If I make garbage my neighbor will suffer and if he makes garbage I will suffer. I care about myself, and I don't want to live in pollution therefore I don't pollute my neighbor's or my own either.

Common elements leading to better understanding and conduct which are also incapable of being abrogated:

--> Everyone is Selfish, it cannot be wrong to be what you naturally are, therefore being selfish is not wrong.

--> We all see things from a subjective, selfish, me-centered view. There is no other way around it, it must be this way. We cannot feel exactly what the other person feels, we cannot see what they see we can only imagine and try to understand.

Therefore -> live for yourself, not for others. But we say, 'that's selfish, I can't be selfish!'

The moral imperative of avoiding selfishness is beaten into the minds of most everyone from day one but in reality it's just a perversion of fact. Think of the Bible 'Thou shalt not covet they neighbors possessions' etc. It's totally counterintuitive and completely against human nature because we all want what we don't have even beyond the bounds of reason. And here we see that outdated moral codes are a barrier to that inveterate human goal of happiness if not sanity as well. Since all people want happiness but since society and moral rules tell us not to get it - this causes problems and creates perversions. The point is that most everyone is immersed within a society and a culture in one form or another where cognitive dissonance, lying and personal dishonesty are made necessary for interfacing with the outside world. This is because the underlying morality and ethical codes are inherently flawed - they are not based on fact but upon desire. Even intelligent and knowledgeable scientists are unable to extricate themselves from this trap. Example:

"A principal theme of Dr. Pinker's argument is that the blank slaters — the critics of sociobiology and their many adherents in the social sciences — have sought to base the political ideals of equal rights and equal opportunity on a false biological premise: that all human minds are equal because they are equally blank, equally free of innate, genetically shaped, abilities and behaviors.

The politics and the science must be disentangled, Dr. Pinker argues. Equal rights and equal opportunities are moral principles, he says, not empirical hypotheses about human nature, and they do not require a biological justification, especially not a false one." So close and yet so far - Dr. Pinker's statement starts out with fact but concludes with an opinion! In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature, By Nicholos Wade, New York Times.

None of us start out with nothing. Despite the chronic cacophony of media and marketing to the contrary, you and I already have what we need. What we need can't come from the outside except as an illusion or the temporary escape of a drug like entertainment or religion. You have to find what you do best, what you like to do, and follow it. Suggestions from the outside, knowledge and ideas are all helpful but in the end only you can act and only you can reward. Everyone finds their own expression but it is ultimately limited by that of your neighbors. Everyone would like to rule the world and tell others what to do, but so would everyone else! I refuse to grant that power to anyone else, therefore I refuse to grant it to myself.

However, it's rare to find a person that only enjoys serving themselves. And while such a person would generally be deemed antisocial they could function within a larger society but they certainly could not create a civilization working only amongst similar types! They'd never cooperate or agree on anything. Solipsistic purpose is a myth. Interfacing with others to construct something larger than any single person is the practical solution. Charity work and volunteer programs find plenty of help after all and since the volunteers aren't being paid they are obviously getting something out of it or they wouldn't do it. Makes sense? Do it for yourself but what you do is beneficial to others. This is defeating raw capitalism, negating the myth of the 'invisible hand' and creating a situation where everyone wins. So just as we've found that checks and balances on government lead to a safer world, so does a check on the power of the ego lead to a safer world as well.

The question is not who controls the capital - the people or the elite, communism or capitalism - the question is how do we make both sides of the equation balance? We already have a system where effort is rewarded, or at least on an inconsistent and inequitable basis. So like always the effort is self-interested and the benefits go to the elite while the costs are transferred to the public. The solution is to balance the equation, make gain connected to cost, make the winners pay for the costs of their gains, internalize the externalities, capital has to be connected to geography.

Checks and balances form a start but not the ultimate solution. The answer is to create a system where instead of the personal consequence being broadened into the social pool, they are personalized - direct culpability must be established. That means the creation and maintenance of a transparent society, where we say what we mean and do what we say, where confusion is the enemy and obfuscation is intentionally minimized. This is an imperative necessity because the diseases of corruption, dishonesty and antagonism breed exponentially when the social and legal rules are unclear or easily distorted. Responsibility should be commonly perceived not as a choice but a near-term inevitability.

This highly deleterious state of an opaque society can come about through many ways. Arbitrary synthetic rules, unclear rules, rules that can be easily abrogated with money or lawyers for instance and even too many rules. As you think about all this, ask yourself are contemporary institutions, judicial, corporate, political, religious, are their rules clear? Are the lines between people and authorities direct? Or is responsibility masked by layers of administration, institutions and special codes? 18.10.02

Thus a young student may become a great doctor if he is spurred to his study by an interest which makes medicine his real vocation. But if he works in the hope of an inheritance, or of making a desirable marriage, or if indeed he is inspired by any material advantage, he will never become a true master or a great doctor, and the world will never make one step forward because of his work. He to whom such stimuli are necessary, had far better never become a physician. Everyone has a special tendency, a special vocation, modest, perhaps, but certainly useful. The system of prizes may turn an individual aside from this vocation, may make him choose a false road, for him a vain one, and forced to follow it, the natural activity of a human being may be warped, lessened, even annihilated.

We repeat always that the world progresses and that we must urge men forward to obtain progress. But progress comes from the new things that are born, and these, not being foreseen, are not rewarded with prizes: rather, they often carry the leader to martyrdom. God forbid that poems should ever be born of the desire to be crowned in the Capitol! Such a vision need only come into the heart of the poet and the muse will vanish. The poem must spring from the soul of the poet, when he thinks neither of himself nor of the prize. And if he does win the laurel, he will feel the vanity of such a prize. The true reward lies in the revelation through the poem of his own triumphant inner force.

There does exist, however, an external prize for man; when, for example, the orator sees the faces of his listeners change with the emotions he has awakened, he experiences something so great that it can only be likened to the intense joy with which one discovers that he is loved. Our joy is to touch, and conquer souls, and this is the one prize which can bring us a true compensation.

Sometimes there is given to us a moment when we fancy ourselves to be among the great ones of the world. These are moments of happiness given to man that he may continue his existence in peace. It may be through love attained or because of the gift of a son, through a glorious discovery or the publication of a book; in some such moment we feel that there exists no man who is above us.

As for punishments, the soul of the normal man grows perfect through expanding, and punishment as commonly understood is always a form of repercussion. It may bring results with those inferior natures who grow in evil, but these are very few, and social progress is not affected by them. The penal code threatens us with punishment if we are dishonest within the limits indicated by the laws. But we are not honest through fear of the laws. - Maria Montessori in The Montessori Method, 1912.
 

Life is a game and we're all players...

"Before you can make sensible decisions in a game, both the goals of the players and the formal structures of the game must be taken into account." - Morton D. Davis.

I admire game theory because it puts qualitative values within a quantitative framework; it's sort of the merger of sociology and mathematics. For example: is capitalist wealth merit based, socially pre-ordained, or just random? "Generally, a person's wealth affects his or her attitude toward risk. A multimillion-dollar corporation will take a $50,000 gamble when a person with exactly that much capital will not. And this is so even when both perceive the situation in exactly the same way. Eli Schwartz and James Greenleaf (1978) suggest that this is one reason that the rich grow richer while the poor grow poorer. They constructed a model of a society in which everyone is equally wealthy initially and in which there was a sequence of bets that each could make. Some bets were riskier than others but their average return was higher as well. As chance made some members wealthier and others poorer, this difference was accentuated in a systematic way since the more affluent could afford the more speculative, higher-return bets. Schwartz and Greenleaf found in some computer runs. that after five, twenty, and fifty trials the top tenth controlled 18 percent, 25 percent, and 50 percent of the total wealth, respectively." Game Theory by Morton D. Davis 1983, Dover Publications, page 59.

It's mostly about rewarding risk, or rather those willing to take larger risks receive proportionally larger rewards. But after wealth differentiation occurs, not everyone involved is equally able to assume equally hazardous risks and therefore is unable to achieve the rewards of significant wealth. In other words within a capitalist system outcome is determined by origin, if you are rich you will stay rich or get richer while if you are poor then you're stuck there.

Another thing that game theory demonstrates in actual testing is that human nature is fundamentally adversarial. When two can cooperate and both win, usually one will try to beat the opponent in order to take home slightly more than they'd get agreeing. Some personalities would rather defeat an opponent than gain anything, it's as if winning is its own reward. This effect is most pronounced in two person games; group dynamics are different because the variegated levels of power come into play but the basic adversarial nature is still there. It may be a risky suggestion but it would seem that the most pronounced flaw within socialism is this natural human preference for competition over cooperation.

Decisions are very often made based upon the constantly shifting basis of momentary context. [reference p.71] Ultimately all morality is subjective as well. Game theory is also a lesson in morality because every players action elicits a reaction from the other player(s). Emmanuel Kant thought a moral act should be based on examining the effect of everyone acting similarly. If you help me I help you and if you hurt me I hurt you back. At least within a non-zero sum game which is the typical situation in most of life. This is known as a 'Tit-for-Tat' strategy and it has the highest long term rate of success, but only if you'll meet the other players again; otherwise it's better to rip them off. And the payback punishment reaction may not even come from the same party, it could be an outside force like say the police, or a fictional force like the judgment of God, but the restriction upon original action is the same. Future prospects must outweigh present reward to negate rational, immediate, self-interest. So you can see that crime and cheating are much more prevalent as the society gets larger, why criminals are short-sighted, and why so much contemporary emphasis is placed upon the concept of 'community'. If you know your neighbors and they know you, then you won't steal from them. Or if you are stupid enough to anyway, you'll be punished.

Everyday human "reality" is not based upon objective fact but rather upon subjective perceptions. This is why human behaviour is so seemingly unpredictable and irrational much of the time. Lotteries for instance, the average person can much more easily visualize a huge amount of cash than they can the infinitesimal odds of ever getting it. "When people are faced with a loss, they seem to seek out risks-they want to gamble to remain whole. The loser in a poker game who wants to play double or nothing and the holder of a losing stock waiting to break even are two examples of this kind of behavior. People who are winners often want to avoid risk-witness the winning poker player who wants to go home." [P.73] By this reasoning I would expect lottery revenue to increase during tough economic times and insurance sales to go up during good economic times. Furthermore it's not the odds that determine whether one gambles or not so much as the esteemed quality of the prize. 15.07.02

Psychic Ignorance

From numerology to tarot cards and every miracle solution in between they have one thing in common, they produce false results mixed with faith in the mind to form a self-consistent but inaccurate methodology for understanding and predictability. Many rumors are bouncing around concerning the terror attacks on the Pentagon and New York city. Numbers seem to be the most common such as connecting twin towers to 11, and dates such as 11 and 22 or 9-11, 911. The last one, the 9-11 date/emergency number coincidence I know ABC news' Peter Jennings himself parroted. So we see authority figures have a keen interest in spreading disinformation and promoting the ignorance too since it's often to their advantage. As long as the public is busy vilifying numbers and Microsoft's Wingding font they aren't worried about finding facts or questioning the media accuracy. By taking flight numbers, dates or anything else and screwing them around you're not generating anything except the numerical solution you wanted to find in the first place! You're just desperately attempting to ascribe order and meaning to a (seemingly) random and completely unpredictable event and highlighting your own ignorance and gullibility in the process.

The concept behind all mystical connections is the nugatory attempt to control, to understand, to make sense of randomness by imposing a pattern onto ignorance, chaos, and unpredictable events. That manic human tendency to connect dots to form preconceived lines of conclusion. It's sad that so many need to resort to fantasy to explain fact only to make clarified understanding that much more difficult. These catastrophes are more than predictable, they were overdue but Americans are so poorly aware of world events, have no command of history and reason through rumor, well such reactions are expected. Let's not put the numbers on trial here, When in doubt just apply a little Occam's razor. 25.09.01

Behaviorist Policies Within Political Debate

Jorg Haider’s success in Austria is unlikely to have any long-term effect on the political topology of Austria especially given the typical hypocritical posturing of everyone involved. But what will be more valuable is the broadening of the political spectrum that has been under constant pressure like a headwind forcing everyone to the left. Example the fact that the media keeps calling Haiders Freedom Party "FAR RIGHT" which is about as accurate as calling Stalin a sensitive populist or Pat Buchanan a Fascist! (Does anyone even know what Fascism really is????). Haider is nothing more than a big-mouthed political conservative (with a small ‘c’), the Austrian equivalent of a Republican Ted Turner.

But by warping the accepted standards of the political spectrum the goal is fairly clear to any half-wit. Call everything ‘bad’ extremist and everything good ‘popular’ and ‘democratic’, box debate within ‘acceptable boundaries and banish all else to the realms of dangerous heterodoxy; do it enough times and with a loud enough voice and soon the people start to believe it and the politicians start to change their tunes in unison.

By now at least in Austria the voters are realizing that by electing ‘extremists’ and ‘right-wing nuts’ the universe doesn’t implode in a horrific fireball. Likewise sanctions and ostracism from the present 'life sustaining' extra-national institutions is not nearly as detrimental as the media tells us all. This is the real danger from Haider entering the political process – they win and thereby violate the established codes, once the barriers are broken it’s much more difficult to maintain the margins on debate and the politically acceptable. 13.02.00

A new view of criminology

Human behavior fuses what we want to be with what actually is. The process gets confused with the purpose and the action is equated with the intention. Nietzsche does a superb job of highlighting this concept in Human All too Human .

The fault doesn’t lie in the criminal because they aren’t able to do anything different. A wolf can’t be expected to eat vegetables with the sheep. It’s the lie of the infinite malleability of human behavior. It’s true that actions can be manipulate i.e. Behaviorism. however on a large scale it simply won’t work because society would be bribing the criminals at the cost of the law abiding. Actually one could write essays on how this actually does occur today throughout our society (crime really does pay). But once again people get fooled into thinking that a change of action means a change of intent! Behaviorism doesn’t change anything. It just creates an alternate pathway of superior profitability for the individual to choose. This means that a rational person is more likely to follow the behaviorists path with a bigger piece of cheese than the ‘criminal’ path with a relatively smaller piece of cheese! Of course behaviorism doesn’t work if the individual isn’t rational; that’s why group behaviorism really doesn’t work - it’s called propaganda and plays by a completely different set of rules.

If a society doesn’t want criminals they have two choices. One would be to change or delete the laws thereby removing criminal behavior. The second option is to remove the criminals from the population. This can be achieved by dumping them on an island (Australia concept), locking them up forever or killing them. The second option never works because of the limitations of prisons and the inevitably fruitless effort at ‘rehabilitation’ . Either way it’s a self-imposed evolution because society must remove the individuals that refuse to help perpetuate the umbrella of security known as civilization. The proper purpose is not to punish the offender but to protect society.

Western governments have refused to conduct such positive evolution. Mired in the murky depths of Christianity and the goodness of all souls the west continues to rehabilitate and temporarily incarcerate.

The result to civilization is completely predictable yet totally avoidable.

Still most social deviancy and perversions are the result of the unnatural circumstances that modern humans are forced to live in. The urban jungle, rootless cosmopolitanism, overcrowding and the stresses of a money culture create a bewildering array of unhealthy stimuli. Perversion and deviancy are just human responses to these uncontrollable, omnipresent forces. The exact same reactions can be observed with mice when they get overcrowded or otherwise stressed out in confined dwellings.

It’s amazing the lack of concern for the individual’s mental health that is displayed in all modern urban development. It’s partly ignorance but mostly incompetence and greed. Nearly every architecture is nothing more than a monument to cheapness and disposability.

I could go on for pages about this topic but for now I’ll be succinct. The point is that our civilization seems to vigorously create it’s own problems yet remain completely ineffectual at solving them. It could be interpreted as entropy but it doesn’t have to be inevitable. 18.06.98

Consumer Brainwashing

I’ve always been mystified by the powers of mass-marketing and consumer sentiment. How much influence does advertising actually have on people? I rarely if ever buy the products that are shouted at me on a daily basis but then other extremes exist in greater numbers like Andy Warhol who would intentionally buy everything he saw on TV.

But mass-market brainwashing is so prevalent in our society that we take it for granted, we fail to grasp the tenacity with which it manipulates our thoughts. However I think its important to divide the people into two simple classes - the individuals and the group. Of course the individuals try to think independently and avoid herd mentalities, while the mob wants to appear obedient and servile so they follow every trend to various degrees of infatuation. So advertising is very effective for a large group and very ineffective for a select few. Maybe this is why they created pinpoint marketing, yeah exactly because that type of marketing is almost always for high-end items like fancy watches, gourmet food, stuff like that. They go after the intelligent ones that ignore most of the everyday propaganda. We know that both marketing methods are relatively effective or else they would stop throwing money down those holes; still it’s very difficult to actually judge the effectiveness of these campaigns, many companies are actually wasting their money but marketing enjoys such a cult status that its very difficult to get outside that box.. The other day I went to another movie wasting $7.25 but walking away entertained for a very brief 2 hours or so. It really dawned on me the fantastically indelible nature of the capitalist stain on America. it makes me sick, every time I see these blatantly gratuitous advertising's, and always in the most offensive places - it makes me sick-angry! It’s everywhere, we breathe it, we eat it, we can’t escape from it! It grows and kills and eats and evolves; capitalism is a monster but it won’t die its the new religion and like all religion it can’t be annihilated just replaced. Ironically we must create a new monster that is even more powerful and potentially evil and unstoppable in order to destroy capitalism!

Wow that’s a task! How can anyone top the motivation of personal greed! One way would be to make money worthless. I remember when I was maybe 9 or 10 I said that there should be no money, and my grandma quickly replied (possibly to nip my Communist tendencies in the bud) - ‘that’s silly what would we trade with!’. That’s a natural born consumer right there folks. I always enjoyed entertaining the fantasy of giving everyone the same amount of money whether they worked or did nothing; as long as they spent it, Keynesian economics would still work fine.

But you know money really isn’t the problem, it’s just a tool like a gun in a crime. You could send the gun to prison but what good would that do?

The part that really irks me is the constant behaviour manipulation, the brainwashing. I guess it really scares me because I have no faith in my fellow humans - they all seem like robot zombies anyway they could be made to do anything! Well hell they’ve always been like that! It’s not the megaphone that's evil its the person shouting into that megaphone!

OK now were getting somewhere. The structure isn’t the problem its the people behind it the greed obsessed crooks that will destroy anything or anyone if it will increase their profits. That’s dangerous because it will never take me down the path that I want to go on. But don’t mistake them for nihilists, they may be cynical but they have a very clearly defined motive and it’s unhealthy for everyone, profit and greed is a pursuit for instant gratification, unadulterated hedonism; its obesity and sloth, stupidity and anti-intellectualism.

So the real problem is partly the corrupt people that perpetuate the capitalist system and partly the morality of shortsighted greed.

History has proven that anytime a peoples perception of time diminishes to the point that they become completely unaware of temporal consequences outside the ‘now’ frame, they witness self-annihilation within a very short period. You see civilization maintenance requires very far-sighted planning; the ability to determine the consequences of actions on future generations. We are making the mistakes now and it seems so harmless but that's only because the consequences are on a time scale greater than our own! In 30,40,50 years we’ll see exactly what the end result of foolish hedonism is. 11.08.98

Revolution as a behavioristic response

The white American bourgeois as we all know wants nothing more than an infinite continuation of the current economic bliss. The importance of this class is greatly over emphasized; revolution will come from the teeming underclass of racial minorities regardless of the bourgeoisie. Please excuse me if I sound like Malcolm X but the blacks and Hispanics have too many legitimate problems to simply integrate into the white commercial class. An American black male adolescent is fed an unending stream of blame and hatred from the media, how would any sane person react to such a milieu? You can't blame them for what they do; they have a circumstance and a reason, what else do they need for revolution but the willpower?

The white commercial class can do nothing better to promote civil war than to continue their spree of apathy and support of the status quo. And that they will do with all the vehemence of a religious zealot. Why else is Clinton still so popular, surely not because of his personal perversions!

Too many Americans confuse economic health with the well being of the national social meta-structure.

Calvin Coolidge was popular too because everything was just so wonderful how could it possibly end? Herbert Hoover was hated; Al Gore may want to find a new job, eh? 03.04.98

With equal truth we can face the fact that human life is dependent on many influences of its world and in the game of life that we will never completely comprehend, man is but a bridged period of power, just like any other living being. We have to acknowledge a certain inner force that enables man to consciously live and die for an idea, which proves the existence of a force of some sort. That contravenes the other principles of existence and thus leaves us to assume a force that is not beyond the ideas of space, time and causality Certainly there is no perfect freedom, even if we want to acknowledge free will as such. Freedom is contingent on external possibilities and internal "Gestalt", but in my eyes this very fact is the only possible presentation of freedom. In the life of a nation, therefore. freedom does not mean the opportunity to achieve everything and, individual freedom cannot mean that one can create, invent or form everything. On the contrary, freedom has to be thought of as a Gestalt. This means that freedom, in the sense of creative power, opposes the tyranny of performed patterns, and it also opposes the arbitrariness of chaos and the absence of "Gestalt". From Alfred Rosenberg's Internal and External German Freedom, 1943.