None Of Us Can Select As Well As All Of Us ... IF ... All Of Us Adequately Participate In Selecting Where We're Going

Paul Meli raised a key concern yesterday.

Why Has Our US Media Come To Function As A State Sponsored Institution?

There's a particularly interesting implication in the video at the above link.

"you can have journalism, or you can have empire"

I've long wondered how an entire press corp became so complicit.  Patrick Smith indicates that it's the same creeping momentum that drives citizen complicity in the excesses of empire. It's an unregulated bug baked into our narrow approach to "capitalism."

That reminds me of a saying attributed to some Roman statesman, 2000 yrs ago:

"No law withstands the will of the people."

One nuanced translation: 

"No reality withstands the temptations of an electorate." 

So periodically, we can easily be our own Control Frauds? Defrauding ourselves of some part of our own options?

Whole aggregates, not just individuals, can succumb to rash temptations, if they feel that not enough people are either watching or willing to condemn their actions. In other words, if there are no significant consequences.

Once you know that you can act with impunity, your behavior WILL gradually start to change, and your moment of adaptation will move towards those processes shaping your own, local self-regulation, and away from distributed, aggregate adaptation (e.g., looking out for your grandchildren). Feedback? Pattern recognition? Both effect your ability to perceive the spectrum of immediate-to-sequential outcomes.

Somewhat analogously, once our nation feels that it can act with complete impunity, OUR national behavior also begins to change, also inevitably, and our moment of aggregate adaptation moves to or away from our methods for maintaining distributed national vs international feedback, which alters how we set aggregate Desired Outcomes - which in turn drive all our efforts and methods for aggregate self-regulation.

There's a deep implication in these observations. When whole nations - not just individuals - begin to condone actions they themselves wouldn't willingly submit to, it always involves the conscious conclusion that the people being acted upon DO NOT MATTER AS MUCH AS WE DO.

Overwhelming evidence, historical and current, indicates that this is a highly conserved behavior in humans, not just in other species. So it's a feature of reality that we must acknowledge and deal with, not try to ignore.

Whenever a feature is highly conserved throughout an evolutionary sequence, it has some strong adaptive value, even if it's not immediately obvious.

In this case, when aggregate experiments fail, and revert to meanness, not just any mean, it may usually have helped human cultures dissolve and shift wholesale direction, faster than they would have otherwise. Think of NeoCons and NeoLiberals as our safety valve, in case everything goes wrong. In that case, returning to stone-age thinking sooner rather than later may actually help. We may be homo sapiens, but it pays to keep a remnant of our ape ancestors around.

Note that that doesn't mean that we should put our lowest common denominator in charge BEFORE we find ourselves in grand dead ends! We still have insanely interesting options to explore. Many of those options are not possible anytime soon, if we restrict ourselves to use of our NeoLiberal monkey brains alone.

"In order to make a more perfect union" is an ideal long endorsed - in one form or another - by the majority of humans.

When and how to make selective inclusions is one corollary of that ideal, as are two other corollaries.

Whom to exclude from our union - and when?

And also, who, when and HOW to exile from our union? And, for what reasons, and to satisfy which emerging Desired Outcomes for the remainder of our union?

There are well known methods for exploring and estimating answers to these questions. We merely need to be fearless and honest enough to face them quickly, rather than just letting those feared ills occur anyway, through our inaction. For example, given sexual and cultural recombination, physical culling is rarely necessary. We just have to stop making more of or reinforcing a mal-adaptive human, habit or method, and let its representation in our aggregate repertoire rapidly dwindle. 

As always, we as a people face overwhelming pressure to make rapid decisions based on insufficient data - but not too rapidly. That's the business of nations and cultures, not just the business of individuals. Our job - individually as well as collectively - is to choose well.

There's no evolution for the detached. Success follows the depth and quality of participation, not just blind complicity. Since our aggregate selections drive all national adaptations and national outcomes, we must admit that none of us can select as well as all of us - IF we maintain enough distributed participation to add adaptive value.

Aggregate intelligence means aggregate uncertainty. Only fools, and foolish nations, are cocksure and recklessly bent on being number one, which is historically a mistake in a marathon. Staying in an unending race means positioning ourselves in THIS TRANSIENT CONTEXT to be ready for subsequent, entirely unpredictable, contexts.

What is YOUR definition of success?

Finding a better way, NOW? That's efficiency (which is meaningless without present context).

Finding ways to keep finding adequate ways to get by? That's resiliency.

As soon as we as the people can juggle two method-sets simultaneously, we can move on to juggling yet another. And another after that, someday. Even though we can't imagine what that might someday be.

The biggest question is always "HOW" to achieve more participation, from more people, more of the time.

There's no human population in history that could compete with the one we have today. Would they have stopped fighting if they knew about us and our capabilities today? Would we, if WE knew about future achievements?

Continuously Re-Distribute Ounces Of Cheap Cultural Preparation ... Or Pound Ourselves With Expensive Cultural Rehab?

If you've ever wondered how natural selection can proceed, if we don't always produce enough diversity beforehand to select from after the fact ... then read on. In the end, this should also remind any thinking person of the need to provision culture with distributed spending first ... and clawing back (capitalism) later. In fact, both those examples illustrate one, singular logic. Sow widely, to reap adequately.

Now let's diverge, so we can find some new circuits leading back to the same path.

Do you like puzzles? How about this one?

What links '60s rock music, parallel Roger Ericksons, Korzybski & Wittgenstein, LSD, network logic and capitalism?

Why, with a few extra links, this does! You'll laugh when you see how.

This is actually fascinating, not just comical.

A QUEST FOR PURE SANITY - THE PSYCHEDELIC POETRY OF TOMMY HALL (13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS)

"Science And Sanity", by the Polish-born mathematician Alfred Korzybski

5th edition (Institute Of General Semantics, New Jersey)

All this rehashed in a 1967 acid-rock album - written by a chem-engineer student! :)

"Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically", the famous liner notes differ markedly from the juvenile poetry/hype that made up the average 1966 rock LP back covers. Written, though uncredited, by Tommy Hall, the liner notes go on to observe that our language has been used primarily to identify - and consequently distinguish between - objects, rather than to focus on the relationship between them. Such a way of thinking, Hall states, is keeping man from enjoying the perfect sanity which comes from being able to deal with life in its entirety. 

The terminology is Korzybskian, but the implementation is brand new. It definitely wasn't something they would teach you at alcohol drug rehab.

Hilarious! Who knew what acid-rock was really all about!

"The goal is to resystematize our knowledge so that it would all be related horizontally."

Ironically, they may have missed the point, and been wrong all along, by assuming the solution was to go too far in either direction.

Why? This story makes you wonder if the supposed appearance of dialectic mainly in Indo-European cultures was an accident of the discovery - or wide-spread use - of certain psychedelic drugs.

After all, many other tribal languages never embodied the distinction of simplified summary mappings and classifications vs coordinating ALL objects, and hence didn't NEED dialectic. :) 

The two strategies impose different amounts of complicated overhead, at different scales. 

How and why? Consider this. The process of sensory system evolution is always to reduce sensory-receptor bandwidth to that minimal range allowing adequate navigation. Humans, for example, didn't need ultraviolet or infrared vision, or ultra-sonic hearing or echo location to survive. We forsook those individual skills and instead invested in a more complex neocortex allowing more post-processing of limited-frequency sensory input.

If we apply that analogy to human language and human culture, not just human physiology, then a similar conclusion is apparent. The key to navigating increasingly complex cultural contexts with lean linguistics may be to limit group-discourse bandwidth & focus cultural-cognition on that skeletal backbone of context which is adequately vs totally relevant. 

To scale up any system, some micro-level features have to be sacrificed, as useless burdens on macro agility. No system scales unchanged.

The evolutionary advantage of aggressively "classifying" languages & cultures may be their ability to focus on what does vs doesn't scale, and hence allow accelerated evolution.

For those unfamiliar with these analogies, try using another, more similar one. There are advantages of delegating some aspects of micro vs macro context management to dedicated specialists, such as human genders - where "males" cannot possibly master the details of pregnancy & neonatal care, while "females" cannot as deeply grasp the details of large territory management - not to mention the many segments in the spectrum between those and other arbitrary behavior sets.

If nothing else, visualizing those system anomalies as necessary features, and not unwanted bugs, points out that arguing for either paternalistic or maternalistic cultures misses the bigger context. Rather, all human cultures feature interleaved as well as interdependent maternal & paternal subcultures, as well as all the intermediate variants demanded for retaining resiliency, via biological diversity.

Meanwhile, back to our Texas pyscho-rockers.

"In an intellectual quantum leap he suggested a modern and tangible way to effectuate the non-Aristotelian lifestyle that remains painfully abstract in Korzybski - psychedelic drugs."

Too bad that didn't work out for them. Being narrowly educated, they weren't aware of the different mental health dangers of disrupting basic neural-reward systems vs the more diffuse psychedelic (peripheral neural-ordering?) drugs.*

Intellectual quantum leap? Or tragic, juvenile generalization?

Their mistake - mixing heroin & LSD- was as fundamental as not appreciating the differing repercussions from tampering with foundation/plumbing/electrical building codes vs experimenting with interior design. Sad, but true.

Pity we can't get back to simply providing all students with:

1) awareness of infinitely changing & fleeting contexts;

2) familiarity & comfort with navigating change, as Context Nomads, and

3) joy in surfing accelerating change with boundless curiosity & fascination, PLUS

4) enough early feedback to appreciate the difference between foundations, and frontiers of exploration.
Why is it proving so difficult to have our growing culture and keep it too?

That observation holds for group brains as well as groups of neurons, i.e., an individual brain. Does that vaguely remind you of our two political parties? Even if in different ways at different times.

Perhaps the core purpose of cultural politics is to keep a population in the survival zone within the closed circle spanning passive-aggressive belief and anarchic-repressive cynicism?



* However, being at an early stage of cultural-dialectic, it might well be useful to imagine what the cultural equivalent of cultural-psychedelic drugs are. Diversity in student travel during their critical periods of cognitive development, their formative years?

Just Do The Little Things That Make It Harder For All Citizens, Everywhere, To Work At Cross-Purposes?

Periodically, we can't help seeing all the way through.

When that happens, it's always a bit deflating to see even revered elites revealed as logically challenged at times. Yet even that shouldn't scare us. We need our audacity as much as our security.

What are we seeing through this time? Several items, through the eyes of one man, as well as his known history. It's a compelling, revealing snap-shot, with multiple elements of partial truths compromised by a history of countermanding errors - by many people.

See the photo and URL. This approach sees part of the problem, but misses the point.

There is a better way.

"Just do the little things that make it harder for citizens to work at cross-purposes." Col. Casey Haskins (US Army, Retired)

That's what evolution, aka Natural SELECTION, aka OBT&E is all about.

It is NOT about kicking anybody out.

(A portion of all people everywhere, at all times - even a portion of ourselves & our own kids - are always misbehaving, and misguided. Do we kick them all out, and swap 'em for those that other countries kick out? No matter WHAT we do, we'll just recreate a similar range of challenges and options, in one generation. That's the penalty for enjoying the benefit of massively parallel recombination, cultural or sexual.)

Instead, it's about listening to our own logic, instead of to pea-brains, and practicing forbearance while exploring - and selecting - better options. How? We always need even newer methods to do just that, & can discover them ONLY by initiating enough distributed trial & error. It's not about having insights, or being partially right. It's about seeing all the way through, to even better options, plus better methods for achieving those Desired Outcomes.

"One day after I am long gone, you will remember me and say, we should have stopped the nuclear program of Israel, abolished the Federal Reserve and kicked all secret societies, occultists, usurpers and Zionists out of our wonderful country, to keep it that way, but it is never too late, just remember that." 

[I don't know who that's from, but it's not from JFK, as some have claimed. It doesn't matter, since it misses the deeper point altogether.]

Trading Royalty for Banksters for Racists for Trusts for Nazis for Zionists for Banksters for Neo-Liberals? Is that the national process history of the USA, and what our electorate argues itself to a standstill over?

Isn't there a better way than just enduring a cyclical trap of orienting to create, then combat, then re-create successive Innocent Frauds & overt Control Frauds? We're afraid of our own shadows, and panicking, instead of just managing our constant combination of fears and options.

Which approach do we choose?

Passive NonCompliance - after ceding tempo?

     Or

Active Outcomes-Based Practice - while seizing & maintaining initiative?

Why are a tiny # of sociopathic pea-brains usually able to keep 90% of humanity confused, divided & conquered?

Only because we're not aggressively PRACTICING listening to all of ourselves, all of the time - so that an adaptive hierarchy of options worth exploring is always and automatically sorted and distributed, soon enough to matter?

Mal-adaptive ideas are never our core problem. 

In fact, the combination of having them and then trying to eradicate them instead of just ignoring them is our greater failing, and a self-inflicted wound! 

Mal-adaptive ideas are a constant, from an infinite source. 

Success lies in constantly & QUICKLY surrounding mal-adaptive ideas & outcomes with enough adaptive ideas to make the distinction obvious, early and often enough to steer ongoing outcomes.

After all, our goal is to SELECT more adaptive ideas than mal-adaptive ones.

Just make it easier to bias our selection in one vs the other direction.

Doing the little things that make it harder for citizens to work at cross-purposes ... is the same as doing the little things that make it easier for citizens to coordinate, at any scale.

Those two, desired practices support both goals, and reduce to the same practice set.

We need a Bias To Adaptive Outcomes, from coupling a Bias To Action PLUS a Bias To Full-Feedback Selection.

Key Topic - If We Care About "Our People" - Any Comments?

Anthropology and evolution studies the historical process of "making hunters & gatherers, into thinkers and builders." That has obvious implications for the challenges currently facing our Middle Class.

That's been happening since the dawn of time, in pauses & spurts. From hunter-gatherer humans to tribal/cultural humans was only the latest step.

Our biggest, perennial question is, how to keep growing the spurt/digest cycle across bigger aggregates?

We ALWAYS face demand for more thinking, and bigger cultural building ... on a greater scale?

So how we do that? Where do we go from here?

That's a huge topic, yet it just occurred to me that the physiology of sleep is a useful lesson. The physiology of sleep involves multi-tasking, but one function seems to be the review of reality-navigation options.

Basically, an analog network of cells takes in a LOT of information everyday. To navigate unpredictably changing contexts, it has to take time out to re-iterate, digest, review, recognize and SELECT replicable, ADAPTIVE, useful patterns from that data.

Our bodies & brains simply can't keep up with adaptation in real time. Adaptation requires analysis, testing & SELECTION.

[Mathematically, that implies that we're only chasing context, at maybe 1/3 it's rate of change. We can chase by plodding, but never keep up, let alone catch up? There may be some exceptions and advancements, via delegation of interleaved tasks, but that's a topic for subsequent discussion.]

Most histories of humans suggest that we've achieved ~the following in the physiology of humans and the culture of human-aggregates.

1) 5-8 hours/day of USEFUL data gathering (maybe only 2-5, really);

2) 5-8 hours/day of USEFUL inter/intra-person waking review (discourse & thinking);

3) 5-8 hours/day of neural cycling/reviewing/distilling (sleep).

Anything less than that, and individuals & groups stray too far behind the data onslaught, & are labeled as "insane," or aristocrats, Control Frauds, politicians, rogue states, or ... "empires." :)

What's that imply about nations & cultures?
We're just a larger ensemble. Trying to stay sane, on a national, not just a small-group level.

Our net numbers take in full bandwidth data.
Our own actions & interactions throw off all the additional data we need.

So the data regarding adaptive policy-options is always there. Sensing it, and reporting/analyzing/testing/assessing enough of it, fast enough, among one another? That's what is rate limiting for the adaptive agility of any and all groups.

What about our nation as an adaptive group?

All indications suggest that we're spending far too much time haphazardly doing, and not enough time reviewing? At least as a functioning nation-group.

Reviewing comes in - at least - two forms (and likely in a near-infinite, tailing curve of interaction "levels," going all the way back down to molecular & even quantum statistical evolution).

1) reviewing local data in local ensembles (personal thinking, small group discussion)

2) reviewing subsets of national data, in national ensembles (national thinking, national group discussion; of necessarily limited topics)

Multiple questions immediately arise.

For 320 million people, how many levels of review is required, to distill topics and data down to agile segments? (e.g. tactics, strategy, policy, milestone goals, Desired National Outcome)

Perhaps we need to delegate far more decision-making to county and town levels, not just state legislatures, let alone agency bureaucracies?

How do we achieve - and maintain - enough crosstalk between all processes at all levels, to achieve national agility?

I could go on and on, but it's already clear that our whole nation is missing what's perhaps the most pressing question of all. How to train students in K-12 education to even be aware of the most pressing question of all? We need to change K-12 education as fast as economic challenges change. We are obviously NOT doing that right now.

"How to achieve - and maintain, and GROW - net Agility of a growing aggregate?"

If we don't teach context awareness, or Situational Awareness, to a large enough proportion of our students - before they reach voting age - then we obviously can't maintain an informed electorate capable of navigating through unpredictable obstacle courses with adequate group agility.

Suggestion to citizens. Start volunteering at your local elementary schools. NOT, I repeat NOT to do mundane busywork, but to tell students real life stories, and update their situational awareness of where their country is, and where it is going. If upcoming citizens are not far better prepared to be far more involved in updating context awareness, at far higher rates than at present ... then we cannot attain and maintain a functioning democracy. It's that simple.

There is no alternative?

"We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. But we can ... determine .. what [group, adaptive rate we can express], whenever .. the hour strikes ... ."
Paraphrasing Joshua Chamberlain

A Thinking Electorate Capable of SELECTING A Thinking Policy Staff? Why A Liver Cell Doesn't "Retire" On It's Own.

We are now deluged with discussion of "retirement" as a personal, not a national concept.

Let's put things in perspective. The best security for an aging, human atom is to establish and help maintain coordination among the 10x Trillion atoms inside a typical human cell.

The best security for an aging liver cell is to help establish and help maintain coordination among the 10xTrillion cells and ~60 organs making up the typical human physiology.

The same holds for any single person among the ~320 million residents inside the USA.

How do WE organize on a bigger scale? What are the unimaginable returns we could reap if we'd just all work together? We have a long way to go to match previous organizational achievements. We're not even getting started, folks. Could we stop this evolving train, even if we wanted to?

Thinking ONLY as isolated individuals is obviously not the solution.

This is NOT a difficult concept to comprehend. Life-cycle utilization of aging components in an organized, GROWING AND EVOLVING system is a trivial task - IF all components just work together. Teamwork makes progress and growth incredibly easy for team members. That's why "social" atoms, molecules, cells and species evolved, and why teams work. Call it the return-on-coordination.

The opposite - team members ONLY parasitizing one another - only leads to dissolution of teams and nations, and loss of the original return on coordination - which is the highest return, BY FAR. This is 2nd nature to all kids converging on a playground, or huddling around a game. What are we doing to remove it by the time they're adults? Our real goal is to drive adaptive SELECTION at all levels, from local to national ... and then to mold mold them into NET, not random, adaptive selection. That requires a lot of connections and interactions. More than none, and less than too many. But how many in any given context? There's no pat answer, other than "just enough," but working teams can easily figure that out on a daily basis, if they try. Even large electorates can do this easily, but only if they at least try.

What happened to our founders original goal of a thinking electorate capable of selecting a thinking policy staff?

Instead, we're faced with with a flood of randomly distracting messages, like the following.

Every $5 worth of food stamps generates $9 back into the economy.

Seems to me that the whole article falls into the trap of being confused, divided & conquered, by unnamed opponents who are getting us to promote our own demise. Those opponents might even be ourselves, purely by accident! For Pete's sake! Instead of being distracted, divided and conquered by the mass of disorienting details in this story, please briefly ignore those details, and instead ask a simple question about context.

What Desired Outcome is this discussion implicitly embracing?

A strategy for an undefined SOME of us, to live off a "stabilized" serf class?

The whole discussion drifts towards an abstract view the US Middle Class as a commodity, somewhat like cattle on their way from Kansas stockyards. However, the new slaughterhouses are on Wall St., not in Chicago.

Why is this even happening? Where does this view come from? Partly because of the highly publicized - and highly abstract - economist's myth of "equilibrium" in an evolving system?

Doesn't that make you wonder who finds it convenient to SELECT economists who spout such nonsense? When all you have is a parasitic ... er, aristocratic outlook, every policy question looks like a question of ruling? By idiosyncratic Central Planning? Regardless of whether the commodity SOME have targeted for domestication involves sheep, cattle, serfs or even our former Middle Class?

For us "commodities," it doesn't matter whether we were targeted innocently or purposefully by those who think they are destined to rule. Either way, we need to refuse to go on the journey to the financial slaughterhouse others have selected for us. Stop cooperating with those targeting you, and start playing team ball with YOUR teammates in the former Middle Class.

That's how we can ALL retire while seamlessly rebuilding, not looting, our nation, and enjoy every step of that journey too.

The whole failure of Central Planning is that the perspective from yesterday's context is never sufficient to avoid mistakes in tomorrow's, bigger context. Only with constantly increasing perspective can further adjustments continue, sooner, rather than later. Adaptive adjustments are those based on expanding perspective. All other team adjustments - individual or group - tend, by definition, to be random actions, mostly maladaptive.

So why are we still drifting back to Central Planning, this time under the guise of capitalism? We can't see the context for all the fees we're charging one another?

There is a better way. We have the tools of democracy. Let's just use them. Once perspectives are broadened and stimulated to at least LOOK at our constantly changing and EXPANDING context, an element of doubt is possible. Those doubts about how we're navigating through a CHANGING situation are the only thing that keep any evolving system alive.

Without an adequate fraction of nagging doubt about all actions AND their growing connectivity, we don't re-examine our increasingly complex systems.

And if we don't re-examine emerging outcomes, and actually assess what we're seeing? Well, then don't be surprised if outcomes don't steer towards what YOU recognize as survival - for you, your kids, your neighborhood or your entire nation.

That's how we end up even dwelling - so much - on the occurrence of mal-adaptive things that clearly have no public purpose.

Take the following series, as another complement to Bill Black's scathing review of banksters, their lobbyists, and the "policy staff" which "we" SELECT to let them buy.

How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part I in a Series

How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part II in a Series

How To Steal A Lot Of Money (Part III In A Series)

How many ignored messages DOES it actually take, to make the US electorate actually wake up and re-examine what they really want?

Not mention their actual process for SELECTING their own, national policies that steer us to those outcomes?

Nor our methods for SELECTING the policy staff they task with delivering those Desired Outcomes.

The ball is distributed all over our court. We have 320 million players on our team. Can we organize this team to achieve what we want to achieve? How soon can we mobilize to do that? Before it's too late?