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Ten Years of Holology 2000-2010
A Brief (and Developmental) Summary of Analysis

10.10.10 Here you will find a few practical conclusions, and proposals for social solutions, drawn from Holology. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, rather it's a work in progress that will be expanded and detailed as part of an ongoing effort.

Introduction

The 21^st century has reached a remarkably widespread conclusion, we don’t like it now and we want to tear it down, but fear holds us back from attack because we lack a positive vision for the future! As ideologies and beliefs crumble and collapse like rusting statues of former heroes, the stench of failure is unavoidable, yet no authority will illuminate a path to a better future.

“We hate this system that we’re trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how. We don’t even know what our cage looks like because we have never seen it from the outside.” - Gore Vidal, 2004

The demand for permanence (and perfection) is a common demand that we must strive to overcome. Nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent, all that has functional utility is built upon hypothesis leading to experiment leading to implemented verifiable conclusions.

Life is a work in progress

Even when a model works, it still probably won’t work forever. Things change and we have to develop a new model, that’s why revolutions, in one form or another, are so critical to human development. The transition phase is the most confusing because everything is breaking down and no one has the upper hand anymore, or the authority to point the direction out of the turmoil. Our world is desperate for new visions and visionary alternatives. In the absence of any collective direction for change we're left to adapt on our own as best we can to our situation – and that requires developing an immunity to unhealthy mental environments, like learning to tune out extraneous distractions and learning to discern fact from fiction. We all must improve the way we think and our perceptions of people, forces and events.

Authority

I don’t want anyone to be in charge, except of themselves, I want a system structured in such a way that it operates perfectly fine without centralized command. Anywhere there’s a pyramid of power it should be crushed as flat as possible. We have to push the pyramid down so far that everyone has to cooperate or be held responsible by their neighbors.

Military

War is obsolete, a standing military is not a defense it’s a threat and everyone involved is forced to respond to the threat; the forced defensive response defeats the stated purpose of military defense! A well-trained citizen militia is a reasonable element of group protection, but in the big picture the most effective and enduring defense remains soft-power, i.e. diplomacy. Communication and negotiation aren't perceived as threats, they tend to de-escalate conflict, and they remain immensely cheaper to employ than the machinery and bureaucracy of military warfare. But then again, diverting national treasure to private corporate interests is the primary (unstated) purpose that modern warfare serves anyway.

Police

In a functional community crime is self-policed because when someone steps way out of line everyone else counteracts that persons aberrant behavior. In large social organizations that become impersonal, police assume a mostly unavoidable status as custodians of public behavior. Even today in most places anyone can arrest anyone else and immediately haul them down to the police station if they witness  an illegal act being perpetrated, that's the concept of citizens arrest. The best way to defeat the negative aspects of police authority, such as abuse of power and supporting a wealthy and corrupt status quo, is to integrate local police into the community and to rotate staff while maintaining a higher level oversight; forces needed to counteract tendencies towards favoritism and corruption.  

Society

Living in a society necessitates compromises on personal freedom – you simply can’t do whatever you feel like at any given moment; self-discipline is necessary. But this is hardly a negative situation, because by living in a society we gain benefits we can get no other way – just try doing surgery on yourself, or growing all your own food and making your own clothing. In a society we don’t have to work to fulfill each of our needs through our own labor – meaning we don’t have to grow our own food, make our own cloth to sew our own clothing, and so on. We can specialize in tasks, and that's a synergy that makes everyone involved far better off than we would be alone with total freedom.

Evolution provides an analogy. As life has evolved on Earth, organisms have progressed from the simple to the more complex in a continuous process of cooperation and mutual development. For instance, some of the very first animals to develop on Earth were the sponges, consisting of cells living together inside a simple scaffolding of collagen protein. Life became more complex as the organisms grew larger, developed specialized cells and organs. From the cell to the human body, each of us as physical beings are living proof of this wonderful process.

Rules, Rights and Justice

Any set of rules employed for people must be predicated upon basic human needs. So what does everyone need to live? Clean water, healthy food, clean air, functional shelter, clothing, employment, and an opportunity for healthy social interactions. What good is freedom if you're starving? What use is democracy within a demeaning hierarchy of economic exploitation? We must have a system designed to provide fair and proportional treatment for all, otherwise we're only left with a brutal elitism that's as wasteful and dysfunctional as it is unstable.

Rights have to be more robust than mere words or letters on paper. Are they really rights if authorities can so easily take them away at a moments notice? America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution speak of ‘inalienable rights’, meaning the deprivation of which makes us less than human. The UN Charter speaks of extensive human rights as well. Words are nice, even comforting, but what help are words when the righteous aspirations they proclaim are so easily denied every day to billions of people throughout the world?

Personal success relies on your own ability to determine what to do and how to do it. And it’s fairly clear from observation that, as it is now, only a few will succeed while many will fail. Yet because of the interwoven nature of existence with many unavoidable relationships and connections, life is not a zero-sum game where one wins at the expense of a loser; meaning that we’re all better off with more winners rather than less. A healthy society can't base its rules solely upon punishment and exclusion.

• No law should ever be enacted that compels hypocritical action; think of the 'War on Drugs', for example.

• We all must have freedom of association, and freedom of thought and expression.

Democracy

21st century America, and indeed much of the modernized western world, is not functioning as a democracy, and it’s misleading to criticize democracy where it doesn’t really exist. The United States, as the dominant political emblem of the era, is essentially a kleptocracy. The United States has become something like Nigeria or Indonesia, a country ruled by thieves but who still sense enough public opposition to their crimes and corruption that they must cover their deeds under a thin veil of saccharine rhetoric and media-backed deflection.

From pirates to counter-insurgency, the beauty of a wholly corrupt and undemocratic empire is that you can always rely on the rulers to do the wrong thing every time, and then lie about it every step of the way! When the decision-making process is enmeshed within an insane establishment, you can’t expect any sane actions or results to emerge from the system!

Many don't want to hear it, but government works best when it serves as an equalizer, for example by taxing and distributing wealth from the rich to poor; and government is at its worst when it becomes corrupted to serve a few and steals from the poor to make the public well-being more precarious. Think of public highways, or financial regulation, standardization of trade and communication, all these things serve to create a level playing-field for everyone, regardless of their class or background – the things that make a country livable and desirable.

Public Goods

Education

The group is only as capable as the basic education that the least of society receives. Education can’t only be for the elite because then enormous potential is lost and gross instability will quickly emerge in such a pathetic society. Education is yet another public good that has to be supported to the fullest extent reasonably possible. Exactly what the education contains and how it’s delivered are another matter. Suffice to state that, as with any effort, we have to ask what the ultimate aim of it is and structure the process to best meet that goal. At minimum, education has to enhance individual and collective functionality; it has to provide a critical foundation in mind and body so that everyone can maximize their personal potential in life.

The majority of human behavior patterns are defined in childhood, especially early childhood. This is why it’s incredibly important to get not just an early academic education, but far more importantly, a social education built upon personal development. Maria Montessori had this nailed – the key to mentally healthy and socially balanced adults is a childhood where the child learns about power (personal efficacy), learns how to properly interact with the world around them in order to take care of themselves in cooperation with others. No child can really learn by simply having an authority figure dictate to them how to do it – they have to be able to actually do it for themselves. Similarly, they can’t simply be told such and such is right and such and such is wrong – they have to be given consistent and rational reasons in order to form a useable, consistent and objective framework of ideas and values – one that isn’t based on deceit, subterfuge, ‘spin’ and situational morality.

Healthcare

Sick people with communicable illness will make others sick, intentionally or not, therefore it's logical that sickness must be kept to a minimum. This requirement necessitates at least a basic level of health care for everyone, not a select few. A service so critical to society as healthcare can't be treated as a commodity or a selective service to be rationed based on personal wealth or special access.  

Mind

In the past our collective human struggle was primarily one of overcoming physical obstacles, but today our struggle is one of the mind and the intellect.

Purpose

Within a natural ecosystem everything, chemical, plant and animal, has a purpose and a niche, and everything has a reason for existence. Much of the confusion surrounding the definition of 'purpose' is the flawed effort to treat it as an isolated factor or entity. Purpose is not an separate entity, it's a factor that emerges through interactions. Purpose is naturally derived from personal interactions and the establishment of a community of collaborating individuals.

Free Will

The existence of free-will is a recurring philosophical issue, frequently questioned and never fully explained one way or the other. Like most philosophical conundrums, the argumentation is as useless as it is irrelevant. It's not so much that we lack free-will as that our environment is so fundamentally proscribed in the range of options for action that are available to us at any given moment. For instance, a being with free-will dropped into a big empty box can't really do much regardless, or less than a being with limited self-determination placed within a very large and open world. But our world is remarkable repetitive, like a recycled film set, or a repetitive scrolling backdrop in an old cartoon. Certain actions and locations repeat over and over regardless of our own personal behavior because we're constrained, either culturally, practically, or absolutely, in what we can do at any given moment.

Intelligence

Intelligence is absolutely not the same as education, nor is intelligence the same as wisdom; reference Holology for more on this critical topic. Intelligence is important, but for most situations we have to work within the range already established through natural biology and childhood development. Education is helpful, it builds upon the individual's existing intellectual capacity. Indeed, education is one of the most important efforts any society can attempt, and it's all the more tragic that the inept methods of education so frequently employed today are so frequently ineffective and flawed. Education fails whenever it operates attempting to impart isolated facts without context; it has to operate teaching a practical and effective methodology for learning on an unlimited personal basis.

Personal Beliefs

Until the human brain can be reconfigured we’re stuck with what evolution has given us over millions of years. The human brain is a remarkably wonderful organic computer, but it has noticeable flaws, susceptibility to foolish beliefs and assumptions being one. This can be overcome with adequate scientific education but we have to recognize our own mental limitations first, we have to recognize how we think and perceive and the differences between personal sensations and objective forces. This endeavor is largely a quest to conquer the ego, or at least place inflated personal value within a more robust context!

The Ego Threat

The greatest threats of the mind come from moral-superiority (egotism and projected egotism) and false distinctions.  Moral superiority gives people license to conduct the worst atrocities and oppression in the name of righteousness. As soon as any group believes it's inherently superior to others – the stage is set for a screaming horror show that will swallow you whole. It’s all right to have confidence in yourself and your group, to have preferential association, but it’s fine line, and that’s where the false distinctions are so critical to avoid. Ideologies and theologies are built by cherry-picking facts, beliefs, and perceptions to create an incomplete view of events. Every distinction has to be thoroughly backed up by credible evidence and substantive, inclusive research. The proper mentality is key. Everyone has unique abilities and talents but the key to success is not trying to defeat opponents; success is using what you have in cooperation with those that have different capabilities.

Defining Reality, Quantum Forces

One of the most fundamental and profound questions anyone can ask is this: why are we here, and enmeshed within something instead of nothing? It's purely logical to conclude that given infinite time anything is possible. As vast as our visible universe is, it’s even more stunning to consider the preponderance of evidence that suggests other universes exist as well! The reason anything exists seems to be a quantum fluctuation from nothing to something and then back to nothing again. This process can be observed occurring constantly in the 'vacuum' of space. Indeed, nothing is as ephemeral as something! Our perception of reality is a probabilistic composite of events and forces. Although we have limitations in what we can perceive at any given moment, we can compensate with intelligence, communication and historical awareness.

Economic System, Distribution of Resources & Money

Taxes

The most foolish thing rulers can do is to tax productive labor, like the VAT tax does. If the public authority system needs tax revenue put taxes on speculation and negative externalities. If we simply had a tax on loans it would probably pay for every public good right there without any need for other taxation. The tax on loans wouldn’t even need to be high, just .10% or .01% of the face amount – so little that most people wouldn’t even notice it, but the banks and billionaires would finally be forced, as part of business, to actually pay something back to the public for their investments (or swindles as the case may be).

Work & Labor

Shorter work hours are better for everyone, and I recommend a maximum of eight work hours a  day, and five hours a proper level to aim for. This may seem counterintuitive to some (certainly to bosses and billionaires), but working less actually increases overall social productivity, primarily because it allows people to contribute to society in other ways that we currently have to pay for out of our working income. Fewer work hours also allows more people to have a job, it spreads the labor more equally, generating less less unemployment and associated disenfranchisement; it gives more free time to everyone working yet still gives them an income to do things outside of work. Shorter work hours also allow people to participate in ways that they can’t do working all day yet that improve society and science.

Much modern research relies on a multitude of informal observers, for example studying bird behavior, or the stars, or any number of research efforts. These kinds of participatory programs can greatly improve scientific knowledge. But they work best when people have the time and energy to do them. Care-giving of the very young, the elderly, the disabled, all of these services cost the taxpayer when treated as commodities, but not when family and friends have free time to do this while still earning a living! The point is that society as a whole is greatly served by increasing the free time of citizens while still providing them with a livable wage.

Demand a 30 hour workweek with 6 hour days

One of the main reasons participatory democracy doesn’t work is because the citizens are too busy working 40, 50, 60 or more hour weeks and don’t have time to participate, or even keep up with the issues. This alone is reason enough to lower full-time work week hours.

Minimum wage

Possibly the most important thing international institutions can implement is a global minimum wage, one adjusted for inflation and fully representing the minimum income necessary for one person to survive wherever they live. This minimum wage must be enough to pay for all the essentials, housing, medical care, education, clothing, shelter, and so on. Maybe it’s too much to call this a living wage, but at least it’s a start and it establishes a floor that everyone else can build and better their lives knowing it’s the established base level. Corporations and employers have nothing to fear from this, and everything to gain from healthy workers, because as long as it’s universally implemented there’s no competitive disadvantage! This is exactly the kind of thing the WTO, setting international trade and finance standards, should be doing but, unfortunately, as long as they solely  serve billionaires this is not going to happen. It’s clear by now that billionaires and corporations will try to get away with anything, unless some force holds them accountable they will cheat, over-work, and steal left and right. Forced to play by their brutal rules, it's going to be you or them – and the secret is, we have far more on our side than they do!

What Is Holology?

What if understanding the universe was not an exercise akin to a jigsaw puzzle but rather a Rubik's cube? In other words we're not gaining a completely accurate understanding by fitting tiny pieces together to gain an entire image but should also search for meaning as a whole? It's an increasingly pernicious element of our information age to be constantly bombarded by a barrage of pictures, sounds, opinions, ideas and notions to the point of desensitization and eventually the inability of the individual to process anything meaningful. The 'information age' is an information calamity. Much of this useless information can be ranked as of little concern but the difficulty is doing the ranking quickly and efficiently without losing substance. Holology is partly an education system, or rather the effort to build a useful and effective method of learning in general, and also dealing with information overload, it's about extracting signal from noise and chucking the chaff to collect the matter of concern. But wait, there's more!

Holology encompasses the two primary forces of destruction and construction and their corollary methodologies of nihilism and social engineering (sometimes referred to under the general terms of reductionism and holism respectively). Fundamentally Holology is about the promotion and extenuation of intelligence. Holology also strives to better understand the time, place, and means of conducting both. Holology is a different world-view, a new way of looking at people, forces, and events.

Is Holology necessary? Every corporate marketer and media mogul thinks in a linear pattern, that debasement has no bottom in potential or market appeal. Yet not everyone wants to believe in popular delusions or revel in stupidity. Many people actually want to think creatively and expand their intelligence, and although this may merely be a profound rediscovery of the obvious it has monumental significance.

So Holology is not just an ideology or just a religion, it's a little of everything and a little of nothing, a weltanschauung. It encompasses not just one aspect of a life, but all. Holology is not antagonistic it's cooperative. Holology is non-government, non-politics and non-religious although it nonetheless discuses and analyzes political and religious issues to better understand them. Furthermore, Holology is not necessarily non-spiritual because the concept of spiritual is intangible, it's a positive accumulation of factors leading to health and well-being of both the individual and the group. And everyone can make their own determination on that one.

Holology is is for those who care or dare to comprehend something greater than themselves. The rare few who can realize a problem and address it, solve it and move on no matter how deep its implications may be or the friction it generates against mores.

There is a time for everything, "a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build," Ecclesiastes 3:3

What is Social Engineering?

This site is about many things but the common theme is the structures that form and sustain culture and society. All these components come together in a symbiotic relationship to form the system we call civilization, but then you already knew that, right? Just like the variables in an equation each aspect can be changed individually or collectively to create different results.

The term 'social engineering' originated in 1925 and is defined as "management of human beings in accordance with their place and function in society: applied social science." You may also have heard of social engineering used in relation to computer systems. The pop-lexicon has an unofficial definition to mean gaining passwords through false pretenses for unlawful purposes or to test system security. But this site is not about that, although if that's how you got here you'll still find something of interest to read, so stick around.

Human behaviour is so profoundly self-centered that most fail to comprehend the fact that our civilization is not the historical apex of perfection. Both better and worse have existed before and will exist after our own is long forgotten. What we have today can be improved upon, but the costs in doing so are nearly always higher than the collective population is willing to pay. This is why dictatorships evoke such horror, curiosity and academic study - they defy the entropy of  status-quo and create change. But is despotism and human nature evil?  Can behavior be modified and controlled and does free will exist? What happens when 'bad' becomes 'good'?

If we can place people and events in a more accurate and functional context we can gain an improved comprehension of our own era, and work towards a better future.

"The end of birth is death; the end of death is birth: this is ordained!" - The Bhagavadgita

Organization

For convenience and accessibility Holology has eight departments, Authority, Communications, Consciousness, Destruction, Information, Methodology, Outcome, and, Structures. Here's a description and a link to each department:

• Authority - The Department of Authority deals with the implementation and actualization of concepts and ideas.

• Communications - Manages the distribution and acquisition of information as well as public relations.

• Consciousness - The DoC manages individual and group issues both tangible and spiritual.

• Destruction - The DoD manages and implements forces of destruction, entropy, and disorder.

• Methodology - The Department of Methodology develops and analyzes practices, procedures and processes to achieve successful outcome.

• Outcome - The Department of Outcome measures results of processes and methodologies and catalogues events.

• Research - Concerns health, safety, and various other topics.

• Structures  - The Department of Structures manages the systems that regulate society and culture.

Developmental Goals

Holology is engineered to be made up of people and ideas. This necessarily entails both full time employees, volunteers, and part time contributors. Eventually Holology is intended to develop into something like a company or a church with finances, promotion, recruiting, and so on. Along the way Holology operates on a few simple principles.

Every individual citizen must be allowed:

• The freedom of expression to disprove any idea, theory or law in any form in a public forum and in your own private domain(s).

• Freedom to pursue personal gain but not at the cost of collective well-being.

• Define their own identity free from coercion subtle or brutal - legislative mandate, cultural imperative or mass media. [A sense of purpose and identify is so critical to survival that it must be guarded more jealously than individual life itself .]

• The freedom from coercion in action or thought originating from any rule, law or principle by any name which is known to be false. [Any rule, law or principle by any name known to be false cannot be used to coerce public action or thought.]

The Spiritual Principles of Holology:

• Expanding accurate and functional intelligence benefits everyone

• Our visions of subjective complexity are nothing more than a profound misunderstanding of simplicity.

• Truth is verifiable consistency. God is truth, truth is power, to know truth is to have the power of God.

The Big Book of Holology

Holology in Internet form is called The Social Engineering Notebook; but in printed or digital form it's nothing like the typical partisan or theological mental stamp-press where the vociferous preachers force their one-size-fits-all pseudo-solutions onto everyone else, while conveniently excepting themselves in the forceful process. Rather the Holology book, and web site, serve as a resource for the individual to better understand social structures and world events while interacting with others on a higher plane to create and define their own life-meaning and weltanschauung.

The book of Holology, now in development, is for when readers ask 'where does this stuff come from?' And 'how does Freydis come up with this [hopefully no expletive here] stuff?' It's giving everyone who cares or dares to read the ammunition they need to defend against the fools and loudmouths plaguing everyday life while simultaneously laying down a a targeted volley of return fire - winning new allies and vanquishing old enemies. The book of Holology is a follow-on to the successful book Nihilism by Freydis.

The book of Holology will work for the reader on multiple levels, for many it will be both a source of informative analysis and modern scientific analysis on a wide range ideas and critical issues from physics to biology and mental to physical health. For some it will even be a way of life and a source of community in goals and identity. It will also be a valuable asset to Nihilists as well because they can easily access the roots and source material both scientific and philosophical that so inexorably accumulates into the formation of their caustic world-view.

Holology will continue to primarily be an online resource because that provides the greatest freedom and flexibility for remaining current and topical.

Who Is Freydis? (About The Author)

Some readers of Holology are interested in the background of the primary author and designer for the Holology website you're reading. If you think some of it is unconventional or even provocative you'd be right but please don't neglect the constructive intent. Change is a reaction to discomfort and the discomfort of new ideas and challenges to pre-existing notions in mind, environment, or body is the source of change. Social-scale change is the art of finding ways to make as many people constructively uncomfortable as possible while motivating the reconsideration of popular assumptions. And yet to generate discomfort is classified by the dictatorship of public opinion as evil, therefore change is "evil"; blaming this "evil" only condemns solutions.

Such statements likely lead an audience to curiosity concerning the author and protagonist of heterodoxy. But myself is the least gratifying topic I can discuss I feel because objectivity and impartiality are essentially impossible and my ideas are more important than being, or so it seems. To most I seem an enigma especially in person but that's a product of cultural bias. In America where I live they wear their opinions and especially their ambitions on their facades, shallow shells that hide nothing and find comfort in obliviousness. Most everyone stumbles over themselves to disabuse the world of false notions concerning their failures and faults often with little success. I remain undaunted by public opinion of my abilities or lack of them because I don't draw my strength and personal value from the weak and unsubstantiated perceptions of people that don't know me and can't understand me. My highest aesthetic value is best summarized by the 18th century Dutch writer Hemsterhuis who so succinctly stated that beauty is that which provokes the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time.

Holology: The Social Engineering Notebook began many years ago as loose-leaf notes in a three-ring binder. I then copied most of them onto a website and called it the Social Engineering Notebook .Since then it has grown to include various topics the I'm interested in monitoring and learning more about, such as School Shootings, Neo-Cons, NATO, and the global economy, to name just a few. Over the years I've added various ideas and opinions in an effort to remember and to create a foundation to build upon, and also to create something that other people can read, consider, and add to. So, in the same way that computers have external hard drives, Holology is my external brain.

The Writing Style

One circumstance in particular used to torment me - namely the circumstance that no one else was like me, and that I was like no one else. I am a person to myself, whereas they are everybody. From: Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky.

Philosophical discussions, especially on an interpersonal plane, seem to be a very troublesome issue to the average person. They instinctively believe that what you say is your opinion (what you believe). They take offense at perceived difference and submit accolades to the perceived similarities to their own beliefs. Indeed in my experience talking to people concerning these subjects is an exercise akin to futility. Which is why I write so much, in many ways why this site even exists. I think our society is too quick to relegate writing to the dustbin of history, replacing it with the audio-visual, speech and images. For me anyway those methods have a seemingly inherent inability to convey philosophical and politically-charged ideas. Within a charged and polarized atmosphere speech and video are very difficult mediums for conveying nuance and clarity. Thus I write, and in a form that's like Hegel's dialectic, using contrasting viewpoints and antithesis to achieve a knowledge synthesis. Or more accurately it's a synthesis of nearly similar elements and their neighborly mutations; but I shouldn't get any more confusing or Hegelian than I already have here. So when you read this don't immediately assume that what I'm stating is my opinion, but rather it's often disparate but hopefully enlightening observations.

Remember: the validity of the idea is not dependent upon the character of the proponent or the appealing qualities of the delivery but rather upon how well it matches with what we can test, think and feel, and its function within everyday life and events.

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How To Help & Who To Contact

The primary author does not belong to any political party or religion and is registered as an independent voter. Holology is not affiliated with any political entity, theological interpretation, or indeed any organization except the CounterOrder Cadre. If you would like to discuss the issues within Holology or collaborate with others to expand the content and research here, then join The Symposium Forum.

It's the firm desire of Holology and Freydis to remain unencumbered by external corporate interference or editorial oversight, as well as commercial advertising. Operating primarily as an individual effort Holology: The Social Engineering Notebook is much more expensive in time than money, but it isn't free in either category. If you have any ideas, suggestions, or if you wish to contribute materially or financially to support the continued presence, quality and spread of Holology please e-mail Freydis:

Thank you for visiting Holology: The Social Engineering Notebook.
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