Another year over, a new one to begin....It's been a pretty darker year to follow-up a pretty dark year. We don't seem to be moving the right direction on that. I'm looking for the possible bright light's in the near future...and looking....they're hiding like they mean it! I'm sure they'll turn up somewhere...Please?

As always, I wish the best to all people everywhere, but particularly people I know, cus they're more real to me and I'm a fallible mortal that way - lotsa other ways too, don't get me wrong! I've been thinking lots about lots of stuff, and have reordered my mind around a new (to me) concept.

I've had a realization (that someone else has probably had long ago, but it's new to me) that we as a species have become an organism instead of a collection of individual cells, as our progress can only be achieved by collective knowledge because no one can even almost come anywhere close to knowing everything humanity knows, let alone understand it. I know cus I've tried, and it turns out I'm an absolute idiot in that context - probably smarter than you, don't get me wrong, just an idiot in that context. What that means for you, you can figure out yourself...or maybe not.

If we now exist as an organism, we need to get all our organs working to ensure survival instead of having several acting like angry cancers. GO IMMUNE SYSTEM!! Oh, we haven't evolved one of them yet? The fate of early organisms, missing important bits. Here's to hoping we have one hiding out somewhere!

Hidden beneath that opening is a philosophical/political screed, I'm sure everyone will be surprised to discover. It does eventually circle back and ties everything in a nice bow, but, as usual, you'll have to fight through to the end to see it. If you skip bits, the end won't make any sense at all, instead of just not very much, so you do have to read it.

I get criticized by some people for writing things that ramble on like this, but the world we live in is a world that is governed by nuance. Nuance takes lots of words. Those people that turn everything into a two variable problem and pick one or the other might simplify their lives, but they make a lot of poor decisions.

We don't even know what all the variables are in most things, let alone know what state they are in. In the scientific world we try to model reality with equations, and they are always simplifications. In the day to day world we often don't know the states of the variables in the approximate equations we have, and hope they are mostly good enough. We don't often admit that there are a bunch of variables we simplified out of the equations to begin with, many of them we probably don't know exist, and others we have no way to measure.

If we look at our organism and try to measure it's health, we need a bunch of equations like that. There is no practical use to assigning numbers to them, cus we can't measure the ones we know about anyway. A large/medium/small is the best we can achieve. With that understanding lets look at some of those large/medium/small bits in today's organism.

As a 'large' in the present moment, the election of the Orange One Who Shall Not be Named (OOWSNN) has given a good case study of one pole of the extremes of human behavior. The one that civilization tries to get us passed. It's the extreme that celebrates in the evolutionary traits that have led to the species darkest moments. The traits that can be taken to extremes to cause badness are:

  • promote our bloodline - it encompasses all that follow;
  • show strength and dominance to increase our odds of attracting a mate;
  • horde wealth to increase our odds of...;
  • exploit the weaknesses, temporary or long term, of others to decrease the odds of them attracting a healthy mate and the survival of their bloodlines;
  • protect yourself, try to get other people to do anything strenuous or difficult or dangerous on your behalf. 
  • promote yourself as totally awesome to increase our odds...;
  • for the male, find a new mate once the previous mates oldest children could help protect and provide for his first kids (this is controversial in detail, but there are truths in there);
  • to protect, in order - the family unit - the wider family grouping of extended blood lines - the tribal unit, which encompasses tribal, national, and regional allegiance;
  • other stuff.

The traits the OOSWNN avoids that tend to mitigate the extremes in the traits above are:

  • promote our bloodline - that's sort of what all evolutionary traits are for, after all.
  • sharing with others;
  • helping others through temporary hardships;
  • fair treatment of others, justice;
  • acting in concordance with the actual state of events;
  • protect those weaker than yourself;
  • work to a possible future that is 'better' than the present;
  • believing in things greater (in the bigger, more important, context) than yourself;
  • limiting aggression to allow the completion of cooperative tasks;
  • other stuff.

Civilizations have leveraged those mitigating traits to rise and gather dominance (in the power sense). The most successful civilizations have formed rituals and social norms to reinforce allegiance to that civilizations dominant (in the 'primary' sense) characteristics. In successful societies, those characteristics have included those mitigating traits as cause and effect. They didn't need to be perfect at it, just better than their competitors. For the ancient Romans, the early years Republic of Rome version included:

  • great examples of public works to public benefit;
  • social unity leading to elevated effort against their military rivals, initially in the Punic Wars, and later in the early expansion;
  • a number of religious rites and principals that worked to harness the raw tendencies of humanity - ie. Venus taming lust to love. Mars taming fighting for defense of the republic and an association with planting. Venus hooking up with Mars to help tame him - Gods can do the brother/sister thing.
  • The incorporation of foreigners. OK, they started as slaves, but they could be freed and made citizens - primarily by service in the legions, linking service to the state as a requirement for citizenship.                                               
  • lots of other stuff. What, it's not a history dissertation, it's a social one.

They weren't the obvious world power yet and didn't start to obviously rule the world until after the Punic Wars with Carthage. Their eventual dominance was built on the basis of a strong national (tribal) linkage, but one that wasn't exclusive to Romans. I'm not saying the Romans were a great moral state, but they were undeniably a successful social model, as they made it ~1100 years in the western empire and ~2200 years in the eastern. That social model harnessed the cruder human traits to build that society, as all successful societies must.

The Chinese model lasted a heck of a lot longer than that, and I'm avoiding it because of lack of knowledge, not lack of respect. I'm working on filling that void, and it looks like I'll be doing some work in China this year to encourage/help along that learning.

The seven deadly sins (greed, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, envy, wrath) are so named, as the following great western empires involved the Christian religion, and in the Christian style, those 'sins' led to other 'sins', so were to be shunned in good society (interestingly, they match up pretty well to the list under OOSWNN, above). They still happened all the time, but it was good manners to hide it, and make up some other excuse for doing things than as celebration of those sins. Trying to let social norms help tame the cruder evolutionary traits in man.

Prudence, courage, justice, temperance, faith, hope and charity are the seven virtues in the same social milieu. They all involve stressing those good evolutionary traits that limit the cruder traits from an earlier time (These also match up pretty well to the list OOSWNN ignores, above). Successful societies work to tame the 'sins', because more can be accomplished by social cooperation than individual effort. Those 'virtues' work to tame those 'sins'. There are examples of successful societies that stressed the cruder traits, but they weren't successful against societies that didn't.

Look to the Romans again. The started to fight about which powerful figure had the biggest evolutionary construct, and stopped working to build a collective society, and were beaten by the barbarians to the north. Those barbarians were tighter societies, and soon incorporated the Christian precepts to build societies that collectively dominated their time. No the Christian societies have not been an unfiltered good, they were just better than their immediate competitors.

The founding of America took some of the Leveler concepts Cromwell espoused and rejected the second he achieved the power to implement them, and created a system of limited democracy that soon dominated its time. Again, they did lots of horrible things, but were less horrible and more interested in collective success, than the monarchical systems of glorifying the individual who was King or occasionally Queen, and ignoring collective accomplishments to a degree. Louis XIV/XV being worse that way than the Georges/Victoria (See following events for those monarchies). 

Ironically (in this context) they destroyed a set of cultures that were more mature, in the awareness of the collective good, than they were. Technological advantages, and some key individual's ruthlessness in their view of 'good' caused indigenous populations to be marginalized. Those indigenous populations were not universally awesome either, but they were more mature. The lessor technological achievements of the indigenous people can be put down to stressors leading to different problems that needed to be solved and less mixing of cultures leading to less exposures to other cultures solutions to problems.

That American model, and the evolution of the British and eventually European models, worked more and more to encourage collective solutions to societies problems and collective expansion of those society's knowledge and as a result, they came to, and presently do, dominate. The Chinese are presently encouraging more collective involvement their society, are catching up, and poised to overtake everyone else. The Indian subcontinent is held back by their caste society, despite democratic governments. The societal model is what matters, not the governmental model.

We have ended up, today, in a world that is stressed by increasingly limited resources, in the effort to live the extravagant lifestyle desired by all, or enough of the 'all' to average out leaning that way. When people get into stressed situations, the revert towards the cruder impulses of humanity. For functional, collectively organised societies, they are resisting the inward 'protect your own' drift of their populations - Canada, Germany etc. They are increasingly drifting that way, but resisting. The previously discussed China is more uninterested in everyone else, than protecting themselves against them.

The 'leader of the free world' has fetishized the cult of the individual, (and his supporting cast, I mean the Speaker of the House is a fan of Ann Rand, I mean really?) to a degree that collective solutions and cooperative accomplishments are not viewed as being important. To restate previous blogs, the vast majority of what is possible for us is based on the collective accomplishments and knowledge of the human species up to now. Leave a 'self made man' alone on a resource rich island and he won't accomplish much, compared to what the social construct he has been permitted to guide, has accomplished.

And I finally circle back to the OOWSNN with the observation that he is an embodiment of at least six of the deadly sins, sloth seems to be a problem but he might not quite cross that bar - or jumps over it like the others, whatevs. He is not an embodiment of any of the virtues...at all. No, a man who says he has never asked for God's forgiveness because he has nothing to be forgiven for doesn't get faith. That faith in the 'social good' sense doesn't include faith in your own awesomeness, it is a belief in things greater than yourself.

That individualistic view of success will lead to America of today falling behind a more collectively organised society. They may repent and go there themselves, or they may be overcome by Asian and European cultural evolution. Yes, the individual should be free to achieve whatever they can best achieve, but that freedom should be steered preferentially in the direction of collective achievement by social arrangements and norms. Successful societies require it. That freedom does absolutely not conceive of an individual as a separate entity from the people around them, because we aren't, and never have been. Heck, we're now part of the human organism and have been for generations.

Those successful social arrangements include economic ones, but also social prestige as embodied in government actions. Yes Virginia, 'they' should most certainly pick winners and losers. They should do so competently and without self interest, but governments are the social institution that are empowered to make choices about where the society steers itself.

Patents and Copyright are justifiable by encouraging the development of new ideas, not by elevating the creator to great wealth and power - certainly not by elevating the company the creator works for to greater wealth and power. Concentration of wealth, leads to concentrations of power through the purchase of influence, and make a governments evolutionary duty of moving in a beneficial direction for the organism more difficult. So an evolutionarily successful society minimizes concentrations of wealth to the minimum worthwhile progress in the society requires, not encourages it above all else.

Aristotle and Newton and Einstein etc..., and the Dali Lama and Jesus and Budda etc..., and Aristotle again and John Locke and John Stuart Mills etc...added the most important knowledge to the human collection and none of them were interested in golden palaces or high political office. Even the economists. (Well, Mills was an MP, but not a self interested one...whatevs). Self interest isn't required to achieve great things. It can be harnessed to help encourage people to do great things - Adam's Smith's great insight - but those are not the same concepts, 'required' and 'can be harnessed'.

Many of the folks who made fortunes creating methods of production or commercialization of scientific advancements weren't about the fortunes either, they got their kicks out of building things - Things the society thought were useful, see Steve Jobs or Elon Musk as recent examples. Again those guys aren't perfect or anything, but they are motivated more by wanting to make 'cool stuff', than by getting rich - except as a means to 'cool stuff'.

As a shining example of de-evolution, making a fortune buying and selling existing buildings provide a limited social good and don't need to be preferentially encouraged by government. It barely provides a public good. The tax changes the Party Who Shall Not be Named just passed aren't designed to make society better off, rather them and their family's, especially OOWSNN. Back to fallacy of the individual being important in a society. Fairness is important to a society, so needs to be encouraged by government, but that means not giving an advantage to any one individual because they are 'important'. This tax measure serves as an example of a spectacular social fail - I can't imagine why it's so unpopular.

"I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a dissenting opinion of the US Supreme Court, as he fought a losing battle to save his civilization. Devolve and die. Evolve and survive. Those traits that helped us evolve as individual 'cells' are no longer as useful in the 'human organism', and successful societies have learned that.

My personal moral universe is based on Agency, and progress/survival as a species. We need to take on the seven deadly sins, but maintain a desire for progress and personal growth, while killing greed. Maintain anger at injustice, while killing wrath. Maintain pride at doing good works, while killing vanity. Maintain love, while killing lust (something I struggle at, not the maintaining love part, that's cool, rather the killing lust part). We can pretty much kill off gluttony and sloth altogether, although I'll miss them. Keep envy of others achievement, while killing theft and any tendency to pull others back to keep ahead. Envy is an important motivating force, and it encourages people to accomplish 'more' when it's aimed right. I feel envy every time I see someone running, but don't think that should change anything...that's not an example of it motivating people to achieve more, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The virtues are things we need to hold onto. I guess faith doesn't have to be to a particular religious system, just to something bigger than ones self - maybe the human organism would work - but the other virtues work as is. What a surprise! People of long ago had it basically figured out! And it's not like the catholic church was the first one to figure that out, just one that has a cultural significance to me, and many who may read this - this being in English and all.

The wise men of the past had it pretty much nailed thousands of years ago, and here I am trying to make the same arguments. In evolutionary time, that's nothing, but the human organism evolves by choice, and we should get around to a near universal agreement of the general shape of the right choice some millennium. That choice isn't really all that hard to understand, Upton Sinclair withstanding.

We are the first species, we know of, that has the ability to not continue in monod style growth, where we grow past the limits of our environment and die off, to rebound and do it again. We have had periods were we settled into a fairly stable population, but it was always at the limits of what could be sustained, and the inevitable change (of what ever sort) led to dislocation and war and badness, as the tribes of the world adjusted to the new reality. We've kind of got to a limit where the global environment itself is shaking, so this die off will be a whopper if we play it wrong.

We are the first species/organism that can chose to find a sustainable spot. We aren't making that choice. America is acting as a world leader in that 'aren't' at the moment. Please get better. I'm Canadian, so I'll ask nicely, cus politeness (also known pejoratively as 'political correctness') is one of the lubricants a functional society maintains, just saying.

The survival, or at least the thriving of the human organism is at stake here. We need to agree that I'm right about all this, and everything takes care of itself after that. See how easy I've made it for all of you, collecting all these ideas like this? They aren't ideas that are new or anything, and I don't want or deserve credit for them, but you should listen to those old ideas, for the good of the human organism...or whatevs.

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