The Compulsive Explainer

Extravagant Expectations

I recently got The Image by Daniel L. Boorsin from my mailing service. It was so busy during the holiday season it only had time to move packages from its terminal in Miami to its office in Cartago. The rest of my mail will have to wait until later. I took the book home and put in on the table with many other books. This morning, I picked it up to glance at the first page. It was this:
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In this book I describe the world of our making; how we have used our wealth, our literacy, and our progress, to create a thicket of unreality which stands before us and the facts of life. I recount historical forces which have given us the unprecedented opportunity do deceive ourselves and befog our experience.

Of course, American has provided the landscape and has given us the opportunity for this feat of national self-hypnosis. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience. 

We want and believe these illusions because we suffer from extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word - "going beyond the limits of reason or moderation". They are excessive. 
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The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America, some of its most honest and most necessary and most respectable business. I am thinking not only of advertising and public relations and political rhetoric, but of all the activities which purport to inform and comfort and improve and educate and elevate us: the work of our best journalists, our most enterprising book publishers, our most energetic manufacturers and merchandisers, our most successful entertainers, our best guides for foreign travel, and our most influential leaders in foreign relations. Our every effort to satisfy our extravagant expectations simply makes them more extravagant and makes our more attractive. The story of the making of our illusions - "the news behind the news" - has become the most appealing news of the world.

We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give us or than what we can make of the world. We demand that everyone that talks to us, or writes for us, or takes pictures for us, or makes merchandise for us, should live in our world of extravagant expectations. We expect this even of the people of foreign countries. We have become so used to our illusions we mistake them for reality. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making: the world of the image.

Murderous Idealism

One of mankind's worst faults is the tendency to idealize. The key philosopher here is Plato, whose idealism became incorporated into Christianity, along with the Jewish notion of an ideal, all-powerful God. As Islam has correctly noted, adding Jesus to this pure mix was a perversion. But Christians don't see it this way, and are perfectly happy to slaughter anyone who disagrees with them. Idealism is murderous and needs enemies to destroy. But its main enemy always turns out to be itself, and it self-destructs. 

This approach has now morphed from a theology into an ideology, with business being our new religion. But the attitude is the same: the market economy (previously referred to as capitalism) will solve all our problems - if we only allow it to take over completely. The same approach used by the Taliban.

We still haven't learned that the more perfect the answer, the more horrible its consequences. 

Corporatism

This is the favorite whipping boy of John Ralston Saul, in his book The Unconscious Civilization. Since it is one of mine too, I enjoy reading him. I took a slightly different approach: finding where power resides - but came to the same conclusion: in the large corporations in our economy. In their book The Power Structure of American Business sociologists Beth Minz and Michael Schwartz describe this power structure in considerable detail with lots of tables, graphs, and diagrams. In summary: they are all in bed with each other - to an amazing degree. 

This should surprise nobody, but it should - because they are running our economy and our government. In other words: the are running us - and no one finds this the least bit worrisome. This is probably because their logic is simple: capitalism produces democracy - and everybody swallows this absurd foolishness without thinking about it. The two are direct opposites, not bed-fellows! Émile Durkham expressed its rhetoric this way:

The corporations are to become the elementary division of the state, the fundamental political unit. They will efface the distinction between public and private, and dissect the democratic citizenry into discrete functional groupings which are no longer capable of joint political action. 

Corporatism, as developed in the 1920s, had three aims:

1. Shift power directly to economic and social interest groups.
2. Push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies.
3. Obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest - that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.

These were incorporated into Fascism, and later, in the US, into neoconservatism - but more importantly, into the Democratic Party, which is eager to serve them. 

In case you see nothing wrong with this, let me remind you of what it means: political power has been removed from our hands.

Counting Calories

My nutricionista had set me up on a diet that emphasized the different food groups, with the proper size servings for each. My weight loss was satisfactory for the first month, but slowed down during the second month. I was also uncomfortable because I didn't understand her system, which involved five meals a day.

I researched diets on the Web, and the experts there said there was no advantage to eating more meals. It is true that you can find support for almost any kind of crazy diet you can name on the Web, but I picked the ones who seemed to be the most scientific, who had done studies testing their theories. One thing they agreed on: calories were important, and you had to keep track of them. This made sense to my engineering mind, that likes to calculate things.

I found a neat site on the Web by the US Department of Agriculture, the USDA National Nutrient Database, that gives the nutritional value for anything you can imagine. For example, a small banana, 6-7 inches long, is 90 calories, and a extra-small has 72 calories. This is handy because bananas don't come with labels on them. Almost everything else does.

I started making a small index card for each meal, listing everything I ate, and the calories it had. I then entered this info on a large grid, using one line for each meal. This also allowed me to insure that I was getting a balanced diet, with something from each food group.

After floundering around for awhile, I determined my basal metabolism was about 1500 calories a day. I had to stay below this to lose weight. 

And what do you know? It works!

I Try Twitter

I keep hearing about how fantastic this service is. So I got an account, and every once in awhile I get an email saying "So-and-so is now following you on Twitter." These persons always have women's names, so I suspect their objectives are commercial.

Since I am always sending out emails about my latest postings, it I occurred to me that Twitter might be a better way to do this. So I tried copying my last email into Twitter. It said it had 254 too many characters - 140 characters is the limit. Huh?

You can't say much in 140 characters; real communications is impossible. But that is probably the main idea: to end literacy forever.

Objective Reality

We are losing our awareness of objective reality - because subjective reality is so much more attractive: we can make it be whatever we want it to be.

Mankind has always believed that the real world was not our everyday world. Something else was running the show. Originally these were the spirits: the animating forces that resided in everything: animate and inanimate. Our first specialists were those who could communicate with them: the shamans. Much later, these evolved into Gods and Goddesses who ruled over us in a capricious manner - and religions to serve them. The Hebrews consolidated the many gods into one God: a male. But the situation was still the same: outside forces ruled the world.

Then something strange happened: we began to think that we, by the use of reason, could understand how the world worked - without the intervention of religious authority. This was called the Reformation, and it started the long, painful, violent process that formed the modern world. Part of this process was the Scientific Revolution: where people discovered Objective Reality: a reality where Scientific Laws ruled the world - not the supernatural beings we had believed in before. Humanism, another movement in this era, emphasized the importance of human achievements, and therefore of humans themselves. Our belief in human rights comes from this era: the belief that all people have rights that cannot be denied them. 

The discovery of the objective world coincided with the discovery of ourselves: territory which did not exist in the pre-modern world. We also discovered objective morality, and began to insist on honesty as something absolute, and not relative - as it had been before.

All of this had an unintended side-effect: affluence: something new in the world. And this affluence, which was largely due to the exploitation of fossil fuels, made us forget the discovery of the very thing made us so affluent: objective reality: which by definition is a reality that we must conform to, not one we make ourselves: that is, subjective reality.

We can no longer tell the difference - and most amazingly: we have also lost our sense of ourselves as individuals. We see ourselves as part of a group (a tribe), just as we did in pre-modern times.

This plays out in the larger world as our refusal to accept climate change, because it is inconvenient for our subjective belief in everlasting growth.

Google and Microsoft

Microsoft aims to get all the money in the world; Google aims to get all the data in the world. 

Microsoft made money selling proprietary software, mainly Windows and Office. Google realizes that making money is secondary, once you get the world's data -any kind of data - money will follow. People are their data, and people are their money - equally. To put it another way: Google is in the business of selling advertising, and to sell advertising you have to know what people want, and especially what they want to buy. The implications for social control are also clear: once you know what people want in all kinds of ways, you know how to manipulate them in all kinds of ways. 

Much of the world's information is now locked up in books. So Google is busy digitizing all the world's books: 10 million so far. I should be up-to-date on just what this means, but I let this get away from me - and I doubt if I am alone. 

This may be the end of libraries as we know them.

Google Bookmarks, Latest News

As is often the case with Google this situation is a little confusing. Google is changing so fast, it's hard to keep up with it. 

Originally GMarks was implemented as a Firefox Plugin, and was displayed as a sidebar (a separate column on the left side). Then Google disabled this, as I related in Firefox is no Longer Compatible with Google. All my bookmarks seemed lost.

Then I found Google still had them in the cloud, in http://www.google.com/bookmarks, and I made a bookmark for that in Chrome. I also noted a link on that page that you could drag to the links area of your browser. So I dragged that to Firefox. Voilà! My bookmarks were back in Firefox too. 

As a matter of fact, they display even better than they are in Chrome. Google is so busy updating Chrome, they haven't gotten around to this yet. After playing around with Chrome for awhile, I will go back and use Firefox. Maybe in a few months Chrome will be as good as Firefox. 

As a matter of fact, if all goes as Google plans, we will all be using the Chrome operating system, which will eliminate all other browsers - and Microsoft too. If Google can pull this off, Nelly bar the gate!

Why no Social Democracy in America?

Because Americans are strongly adverse to anything that smacks of Socialism - the only country in the world that feels this way. The reasons they feel this way are complex, and he goes into them, if you are interested. But I will start here:

Tony Judt in the New York Review: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

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My concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Our shortcoming—forgive the academic jargon—is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things. To understand why this should be the case, some history is in order: as Keynes once observed, "A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind." For the purposes of mental emancipation this evening, I propose that we take a minute to study the history of a prejudice: the universal contemporary resort to "economism," the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.

For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste.
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This tragedy has been brought about by the failure of the left: first to achieve its objectives and then to defend itself and its liberal heritage. Each, albeit in contrasting keys, drew the same conclusion: the best way to defend liberalism, the best defense of an open society and its attendant freedoms, was to keep government far away from economic life. If the state was held at a safe distance, if politicians—however well-intentioned—were barred from planning, manipulating, or directing the affairs of their fellow citizens, then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay
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The most revealing instance of the kind of problem we face comes in a form that may strike many of you as a mere technicality: the process of privatization. In the last thirty years, a cult of privatization has mesmerized Western (and many non-Western) governments. Why? The shortest response is that, in an age of budgetary constraints, privatization appears to save money. If the state owns an inefficient public program or an expensive public service—a waterworks, a car factory, a railway—it seeks to offload it onto private buyers.

The sale duly earns money for the state. Meanwhile, by entering the private sector, the service or operation in question becomes more efficient thanks to the working of the profit motive. Everyone benefits: the service improves, the state rids itself of an inappropriate and poorly managed responsibility, investors profit, and the public sector makes a one-time gain from the sale.

So much for the theory. The practice is very different. What we have been watching these past decades is the steady shifting of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage.

There arises the question of moral hazard. The only reason that private investors are willing to purchase apparently inefficient public goods is because the state eliminates or reduces their exposure to risk. The "hazard" in question is that the private sector, under such privileged conditions, will prove at least as inefficient as its public counterpart—while creaming off such profits as are to be made and charging losses to the state.

Unstable Human Societies

For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in stable societies. But with the advent of Civilization, this changed abruptly. Civilizations came and went in endless succession. There have been no shortage of reasons for this, but none has even come close to being satisfactory. 

The reason for this is probably because human societies are extremely complex and difficult to understand - or in computer terms: difficult to model. Large numbers of feedback loops, both positive and negative, with different timings, and with different interactions, are in action at the same time.

Consider something much smaller: The Military's Plan For The Afghan War Surge, In One Giant Chart. Click on the image to get a full-size version. Five minutes looking at this, or even five seconds, will make you doubt Obama's war plan - if he even has one. You have to give the Pentagon credit though, for even trying to understand the problem. If it really tried to put it into operation, with some way to monitor what was going on in all these loops, I would be even more impressed. 

My next course from the Learning Company, my Christmas present to myself, will be Understanding Complexity. I did take the class on Chaos Theory, which is also useful. It says chaotic systems which had been considered unpredictable, actually actually are predictable, but in some strange ways: they tend to flip back and forth between different stable states. 

In human societies, these would be periods of increasing power, followed by disintegration and loss of power - and often even existence. The Babylonian Empire is been long forgotten, along with many others.