Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Babeling

(Image is copyright Wizards of the Coast, used for fair use purposes, no infringement intended.)

Imagine for a moment that you saw a rickety scaffold, just five feet wide at the base, which goes up five feet and then has a platform ten feet wide, from which more scaffolding goes up another five feet to support a fifteen-foot-wide platform, and so forth and so on. (The picture above should give you a vague visual cue to this concept.) Obviously, this is not a very stable structure, particularly not if there are a bunch of people standing on the platforms. Let's say that you saw a large number of people under the scaffolding, all working together to hold it up, while more and more new people climbed up to the current top layer and worked to build another layer, which was only half-complete yet already people were climbing up onto it and building on top of it as well.

It should be clear enough that this is a recipie for disaster...but say that the people inside the scaffold absolutely insisted that you *had* to join them in trying to prop this insanely unstable structure up, or else they would blame you when it fell. Let's say, in fact, that everyone in your town, if not your country, was all involved in this ridiculous scaffold-building enterprise, and they'd brought all the food in the area and hid it inside the scaffold with themselves, and were saying that if you didn't join them in trying to hold up the scaffold, they would let you starve. Plus, because anyone who isn't helping them is obviously their enemy, they would throw rocks and knives and such at you, until you joined them in the scaffold. And once you were in the scaffold, you'd have to hold up the layer above you, while other people climb up on top of it and add more and more weight, until eventually, inevitably, the whole thing finally collapses and crushes everyone inside it.

This is the way I feel about our society. It's an insane house of cards where everyone just agrees to go along with obvious idiocy, and because I try to tell people that they're going to ****ing die and they should get out now before the collapse happens, I'm looked upon as an antisocial malcontent, instead of as someone who's trying to help. It drives me mad to see the way people just blithely insist on continuing to pretend nothing is wrong, rather than listen to someone who tells them truths they'd rather pretend not to be able to see for themselves.

The four pillars that I think are holding up our scaffold are Money, Law, Faith and Violence; some combination of these factors seems to be critical to pretty much everything that carries weight in our society. And I seethe with intense dislike for all four; Money is a flawed premise, Law a complete fallacy, Faith is lunacy incarnate, and Violence is as intolerable as it is efficient. A myriad of permutations emerge from these pillars: Money and Law create Bribery, Law and Faith together form Obligation, Law and Violence produce Intimidation, Money and Faith are crucial to Fraud, Faith and Violence combine into Xenophobia, and Money and Violence are both synonymous with Darwinism, and these six further combine with each other and their ancestors to give rise to an ever-widening web of extortion, mercenarism, brainwashing, contractual enslavement, financial intenture, crime, black markets, institutional corruption, mutual backscratching, pederasty, indoctrination, cycles of abuse, propaganda, oligarchy, ethnic cleansing, hypocrisy, bastardization of truth, confidence games, pyramid schemes, generational rifts, communication breakdowns...the list goes on and on. But ultimately, I think all of them boil down to one root concept, a name for the entire scaffold: Dehumanization.

Money teaches us that life has a price, which is factual but untruthful; while it may cost something to keep body and soul together, every life is nonetheless priceless, because it is unique and cannot be replaced. Law tells us that we are bound to obey our previous agreements, but this ignores the entire fact that life is nothing but the process of change; the creature who signed a contract in your name yesterday wasn't you, but something that evolved into you, and you in turn will evolve into something else, so you can't make promises today and expect your future self to honor them. Faith is nothing less than the antithesis of reason; sure there are questions we don't know how to answer, perhaps never will, but is that any reason for us to believe something that someone tells us is true, when they offer nothing resembling convincing proof? And violence, well, it gets results; kill everyone who disagrees with you, and you can damn sure get people to cooperate (either with you, or with each other against you). But it is nonetheless true that, ethically speaking, we have no right or entitlement to kill each other; again, our lives are of incalculable value, and every death is an intolerable waste, of an endlessly replenishable yet nonetheless crucially limited resource.

So we've built ourselves a very impressive scaffold society using these four bits of rebar I've described, and I can't say that I exactly want to see it come tumbling down - but I'm absolutely certain it will, and I am strongly unhappy with people's attempts to convince me to come join in the doomed effort to hold it up, when the only possible result is that I'll be crushed along with it. In fact, the more rocks the people inside throw at me, and the hungrier I get because they're hoarding all the food, the more I find myself tempted to locate a weak point in the structure and give it a good push. For now, I continue to resist that urge, and it's probable I'll die before the opportunity arises for me to act upon it. Certainly, all of you people in the scaffold are justified in hoping so. You've every right to ignore my ravings telling you to start climbing down and spreading out, every right to keep piling ever higher in your mad scramble to be one of the ones on top, who hope they'll survive when it all crashes down, as long as it doesn't fall too fast or tip too far to the side before flattening. If that's what you want to do, I can't stop you.

But I think you deserve better than that...and I'm certain that I do.

Meditations on Life's Dynamics - Insects, Conspiracies, and the Six Coercion Methods

The world of today is a wonderful and terrible place; if you want to see that fact writ large, go on a Wiki Walk, a journey through the absurd fucktons of information that the Internet has enabled us to collect, organize, and interrelate in ways previously unimaginable. Where once the sort of research, fact-checking and comparisons that are central to the plots of mystery and Lovecraftian horror novels was the work of many hours or days, carrying books from place to place and sifting through pages of mostly-irrelevant data in search of items of information that were worth considering in relation to other such details, now we have Google and Wikimedia and similar companies doing most of the work for us in a trillionth of a second. And I've developed a bit of an addiction to immersing myself in this flow of knowledge, which is one of many reasons I haven't been back to update this blog in something like two years wow, it was actually only like eight months, but still.

Today, just previously, I've been getting my fix of instant gratification for my mental hungers, watching a sequence of YouTube videos which has touched off a cascade of interesting thoughts. This sort of thing happens to me a lot when I'm at my job (minus the YouTube part; I must make do with more work-safe forms of gratification when I'm in the office, with minimal privacy and no functioning speakers); I've often wanted to post as a result, but not found the time to organize and topicalize (?) my thoughts to be worthy of blogging. Now, the stars have aligned thus that I have the opportunity to share my thoughts fresh from the tap, and I've come up with quite a concept to delve into by comparing two videos on very different topics which came up in rapid sequence.

First, there is this collection of interesting-looking insects from all over the world. There are well more than five million kinds of insects (according to Wikipedia the number might be as much as double that), and they range from the beautiful to the hideous, and from the absurdly rare to the inescapably numerous. For the most part, these groups seem to align; the most attractive insects (for example the Jewel Beetle or the Blue Morpho butterfly) usually come from remote places and are largely unfamiliar to the rest of the world, probably not terribly common even there. Meanwhile, insects that are plain-looking or hideous, colored brown or black to blend into their surroundings (or painted in nauseatingly gaudy hues so that a hungry bird might mistake them for its own droppings), covered in spikes and oozing stenches to ward predators away and often capable of nerve-rattling vocalizations or skittering speeds that set human nerves acrawl, and frequently delivering a poisonous bite, agonizing sting, or just scratching open the skin they scuttle across to leave behind an irritating rash...all of these insects are often highly successful. The cockroach shits where it eats and swarms worldwide; the Argentine Ants form a single ruthless colonizing army whose soldiers around the globe will form ironclad alliances on sight. Termites, firebrats, boxelder bugs, cicadas...at best these creatures are unsettling to look at, and often they cause substantial property damage. And why? Because they're the product of three hundred million years of evolution, since the first insects appeared in the fossil record; they'll do anything it takes to survive, and they're damn good at it, while the prettier and more harmless specimens are quite possibly a Darwinian dead end, whose small range ensures it would take only a single, localized disaster to decimate them, and speed them toward extinction with irresistable inertia.

The lesson:  In our world, being quirky and unique and well-meaning gets punished with death, while the greediest predators and most fecund infestations are feared, respected, and allowed to flourish by Mother Nature and all her other creations.

The other half of this little brainstorm of mine comes from a fiery political video, which I won't bother linking to because I half-suspect the members of a shadowy conspiracy are going to get it pulled down as soon as they get back into their government offices on Monday er, wow I was paranoid back then, it's right here. In this video, former Minnesota governer Jesse Ventura pokes quite a few holes in the official story of America's current military situation, and points out that wars are often spurred by religious hatred, perpetuated by government incompetence, and provide fertile soil for the flourishing of corporate greed which quickly overtakes any less tangible motivation behind them. I've often observed such facts as these as seeming to describe the world in general, and bemoaned the seeming inevitability of this foolishness, and in doing so today, I touched off an interesting series of meditations on the various forms of coercion, the ways that the malevolent masters of our society today have discovered to enforce their will - highly efficient trump cards, against which idealism like mine is largely powerless.

Since I like making lists, I'm going to go ahead and spell out what I've come up with:

First, there is the threat of immediate violence. If you put a gun to someone's head and say "Do X or die", it's extremely likely that the victim will do X, regardless of their usual objections. And if they refuse to help, you can just kill them, and at least they aren't working against you. Thusly, groups who have the ability to use violence are very good at getting their way.

Second, there is intimidation. This is the threat of non-immediate violence, the application of fear to compel obedience without necessarily forcing you to execute (or at least brutalize) the victim the moment they refuse. This also means it is effective even while you're unarmed, or while under the effect of laws that attach awkward consequences to an act of immediate murder; you can simply tell the person they'll be on your "hit list" if they don't cooperate, and imply that even though you can't kill them then and there, you're perfectly capable of getting away with doing it later, if they don't act now to avoid it.

Third, there's a different kind of fear, which involves invoking paranoia. When it's known that some people use violence to get their way, other people will use the first people to get their way. Instead of saying "Do what I say or I'll kill you", they say "Do what I say or that guy might kill you; I can stop him but only if you give me a reason to bother." This can be applied more subtly, and is a favored technique of agencies in our society, who often claim to know that dire consequences are on their way and can only be averted by their own actions. Such claims are often spurious on the face of them, but we've got another technique coming up in the list which works very well in conjunction with this one.

Fourth, we switch over from negative reinforcement (which is generally more powerful in the short term, but often denies the existence of the long term) to more positive ways of motivating people, collectively termed "bribery". By appealing to someone's desires, you can lure them into cooperating with you; this can be portrayed as a simple exchange of one favor for another, or it may be more involved, with concepts such as customer appreciation or romantic entanglement enabling the interaction to take on various dynamics over the course of time. Money, sex, fame, professional accolades, or even simple friendship are just a few of the many things you can be in the position to grant or withhold to another person, and attempt to use these various currencies to purchase their aid, either now or in the immediately-projected future

Fifth, there's a more rarefied and abstract version of the previous methods, which I'll call "allegiance" (a more impolite term might be "racketeering") - rather than immediately providing a bribe or a threat, you incorporate yourself into a structure which possesses enough power to be taken seriously, and then you use the mere existence of that structure as a reason why people should obey you. Any national government is one of these monoliths, and the general concepts of money and law are more generalized examples, whose power extends across national boundaries with various degrees of effectiveness. A politician, lawyer, businessman or the like doesn't actually need to promise his company's aid or threaten its enmity; he can simply use his affiliation with such an organization as a reason why he must be obeyed, in the hopes that his victims will assume the possibility of future bribes and threats depending on whether he renders aid or not.

And sixth, finally for the moment, we come to the most intangible and worrisome of these malignant strictures: belief. If you don't currently have any power to reward or punish others, you can still obtain their cooperation by convincing them to accept a blank check, persuading them to trust in your future ability to make good on your promises, through any number of methods of earning someone's confidence. These can range from the very noble (such as a long history of seemingly thankless charity work which eventually might pay off in offers of assistance in return, but is performed without actually guaranteeing such repayment) to the utterly monstrous (such as brainwashing children to believe whatever they're told and then teaching them to regard critical thinking as a tool of malign forces, so they will resist any attempt at deprogramming themselves)

So, for the moment, I've identified these six methods of controlling other people, all of which I believe our society's authority figures do not hesitate to use in order to keep their position. (Granted, as the webcomic XKCD often points out, our society's authority figures are generally inept enough that their ability to succeed through these Machiavellian techniques is distinctly limited; it may not be quite as true or quite as obvious as in the Saturday morning cartoons, but the real world's black-hats are far from immune to being incompetent enough to serve as their own worst enemies.) I mention these in the same breath as the video about the insects, because I see there as being a parallel; in nature and in society alike, the ruthlessly efficient tend to flourish, and the harmless and unique and special are at best marginalized, more often crushed altogether. The bumbling overlords of our society, fallible and wracked with human frailty, and the implacable forces of nature, nonsentient and devoid of motivation though they can safely be assumed to be, are both in essence working out of the same playbook. Kill the fragile butterflies with a harsh winter or a drought or something; the ants that swarm beneath the dirt will devour their corpses and multiply in droves, and Nature will be happy. Throw the hippies in jail for having had the gall to sing in public about peace and love and freedom, then give a medal to the jack-booted racist thugs who happily volunteered to kill foreigners on your say-so; Civilization will approve.

What would I do differently, if I had the chance? That question is the upshot of this article. If I had power exceeding that of both Nature and Civilization, I would want to see the pleasant, harmless, and magical preserved, rather than allowing the highly efficient to succeed by becoming monstrous. I think that rarity is a virtue and that artistry is a signal of cosmic merit; to my way of thinking, Life is not a net positive, but rather requires enjoyable input to be worthy of continuing to bother with. So I would like to see anything that makes life more fun and interesting preserved and supported, while things which automatically preserve and support themselves a little too well, in fact flourishing in the face of adversity, ought to be ruthlessly culled down to manageable numbers and told not to be so boring or evil all the time. Rather than seeing the world be a rat race where the losers are killed and the winners given their stuff, I want it to be an egalitarian procession, in which every runner is told to remain within sight of those behind him, so that all may marvel at the spectacle each other are presenting, and the whole group can gradually make as much process as they feel is absolutely necessary without ever having to go too far.

There would be no need for coercion techniques in such a world.