Open a window on the past and cry

Jerusalem Artichoke

   Saturday. September 19. The Year 2026. A Forecast high of 94 F. The filthy rich will take their money and hide. There'll always be someone they can buy. And yes an empire dies when a secretary of defense relies on testosterone shots and judges his soldiers by the rigidity of their erections rather than their spines.

  Edward Gibbon never for one minute believed the Roman Republic would survive. His reason for thinking this was that once the Roman Republic had expanded into a massive empire, its collapse and transformation into an autocracy was the natural, inevitable result of what he called "immoderate greatness." In modern parlance "Kiss business man arse and bend over for billionaires and you loose your republic."  John Walking Stewart could have told you that when he had to run from Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore.

  Worth wondering how Gibbon might describe the world as it is today. His great history addressed the Roman Empire rather than the Roman Republic. His account began in the year 98  with the establishment of Emperors rather than elected consuls and he ended the history in 1590, a hundred and fifty years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans which happened in 1453.

  Gibbon chose the year 1590, the year the ruthlessly efficient, architectural genius Pope Sixtus V died,  because he wanted to explore how the 15th and 16th Century Popes in their efforts to rebuild the ruined City of Rome had reappraised the Roman Empire and by so doing they had allowed themselves to enter a Renaissance, they'd given themselves hopeful look into the future. Edward Gibbon went on to suggest that by 1590 Rome was no longer a shadow of the glorious past cast on Europe, indeed by 1590 Europe was marching to a new drummer that became the Age of Reason.

  The other view describes an interstitial, a between spaces, where hope exists but can't be reached until something desperate happens.   

  

Sea People

Lion Tail

   If you use Rome or the British Empire or the right footwear as your cuddle bunny, if you're tempted by Napoleon, as Hegel and many an idealist were tempted, then in your understanding of Central Authority, or Monotheism, the mistake you're about to make is what I will call the Late Bronze Age Error.

 "We got bronze belt buckles, we got bronze adzes, we got it all, look at us, nothing can stop us now!"

  In this era of today, how long have we known that Western Modernity depends upon diesel fuel. How long have we been searching the interstitial for new spaces. How often have those new spaces looked like hard work and too much change as we wait for the Sea People to reveal our tomorrow.

  We, as is our tradition, because we cannot conceive of a space without diesel, will cling to a policy of colonial extraction. These days, unless our capital city is Washington DC or London we prefer not to use soldiers to quell the resistance, it's too destructive, veteran laden and expensive. 

  The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age, which began around 1200 BC, not that long ago. Iron is stronger, lighter and cheaper than bronze, so yippee! In the Near East the Iron Age itself slowed into a greater complexity of thought, monotheistic impulses, massive building programs and other monopolistic touchy-feely-ness around 600 BC. 

  This cradle of the Near East, holds the memory of that part of humanity that describes itself as civilized, and to this day it retains a pre-nation understanding which sees itself as belonging to family. Oh sure they have the Wompom of Djacooti with his twenty three wives, fourteen yachts and a City Block in New York, while you still draw your water from the well, but if you can see your blood line running through the Wompom's veins then so what, it's like being related to Charlton Heston or Mary Pickford . 

  Be brave, read history and learn, which you can't do unless you avoid Hollywood, Madison Avenue, television  and all that which the mathematics of a beaky hat holds dear. Yes indeed! In Arabia, when petroleum was discovered in 1938, the Banu Hanifa and their Wahhabi Priests would still be floor cleaners if it wasn't for a British Colonial Officer and Cambridge man named Harry St John Bridger Philby.

Henceforth I will be referring to the "R" word as the "H" word.

Drainfield

  Of the expressions available to the English Language, "Dumb as a Haddock," just like the word "Retard," is a fine example of how meanings drift over time. Here the better lesson is to accept that semantic drift, meaning changing over time, cannot and should not be prevented.

  "Dumb" as in deaf, dumb and blind, at one time reflected the idea of "Mute," unable to speak. This way the expression "dumb as a fish" meant as mute as a fish.

 A Haddock is a North Atlantic ocean fish in the Cod family. In parts of the British Islands, Dublin and South Wales for example, the word "cod," as in "he's a cod" or "it's a cod," means an unreliable, dastardly sort of person or deed, not to be trusted. A Haddock on the other hand can sometimes mean a purse, as in "I'll bet you a monkey to a Haddock!" A monkey being around five hundred guineas and a purse being not much more than a couple of shillings. 

  So here we are rushing to protect the skulduggery and underhanded maneuvering of those in the Sensitive Professions who moved to replace the splendidly expressive symbols of Moron, Idiot and Imbecile with a variation of the Latin retardare so as to poshify an employment opportunity when all along emanating from the State of Maine here in the United States is the wonderful muddle of the H word, as in "I heard the current Secretary of Defense is Dumb as a Haddock."

  Henceforth I will be joyously referring to the "R" word as the "H" word.

Raising the Children.

Ides of September Foxglove

  Strictly speaking the Ides of September would be the 13th of September. Mind you back when Ides of a month were a thing, instead of a poshnik making a Nancy-boy reference to Shakespeare's 19th Play, September would have been the seventh month of the Roman Year.

 nik of course is a Slavic suffix. And while there are some who might not believe me when I offer poshnik to a dictionary, you will find that the more formal definition of the word poshnik has so far been recorded thusly : "In internet culture, a poshnik refers to someone who is obsessed with luxury, high fashion, or acting overly upper-class."

  On the other hand a Gopnik, apparently, is a well-known slang term for lower-class, tie wearing street hoodlums found wandering around in one of the USA's major political parties. And we all know what a lipnik is.

 Oh yes, the internet of sixth formers, or sixth graders, as they broach the realities of meaning, like everyone else spend long useless years beating their heads against brick walls and whining like puppies, their hopeful little faces desperate for an expression that will impress the court.

Parasitic Arachnids.

Autumn Crocus (Winter Daffodil)

  The Tuesday of this week already looks bleak, as in hot. Without meaning to further gore the ox, I'll suggest it's a time of year when a simple mind as it patiently waits for the happy chance of a final curtain sees an opportunity to reflect favorably upon the bleak of a killing frost that might briefly retard the exuberance of arthropod populations, particularly the parasitic arachnids generally referred to as Ticks.

  In the simplicity of those olden days of right wing stone tablets, the book of Exodus set rules for when an ox injures or kills a person. It was a complicated and detailed list from the lips of a vengeful God. 

  The Innocent Ox scenario went this way : If your ox subjected an Israelite to a goring that resulted in the death of an Israelite, the ox was stoned to death and you were not allowed to eat the meat.

  The Dangerous Ox scenario went this way : If you knew your ox was prone to bad tempers and poor behavior and it gored someone to death, both you and your Ox were stoned to death. 

  My own view is this : If by chance you find death by stoning a particularly brutal and unnecessary sentence for any of God's creatures then, unlike The Lord, you've not been subjected to a season of tick bites.

 Don't be silly of course God approved of stoning as long as it was done outside the city or the camp and as long as one of the two witnesses to the offence threw the first stone. He once told Moses to stone a man to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, that's how serious narcissistic megalomaniacs can get when no one listens.

Wisdom hath builded her house with a Kalashnikov wearing Flip Flops.

White Snakeroot

  Where I live, Central Authority looks like a bunch of old white men with collars, ties and gray or grey suits - the weirder of them wear brown shoes - they all have a hard on for the culture of, if not the technology of the 18th Century and they are terrified of disobedient women, non-christians and socialism. 

  If you want to know why disobedient women, non-christians and socialism frighten them, you'll find the answer in loss of control, reduced power within the structures of a society that currently enable the wealthy property owner to keep a seat on the committee of the ruling class. Go ahead tremble!

  Stranger still, fifty years ago Central Authority looked and sounded the same, so please don't ask me to even think about assimilating. Back then of course it was also true that you can't buy courage or competence with money. 

  The title of TE Laurence's book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom comes from Proverbs : Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars. An observation Laurence made from his studies and passions for history of the Arabian Peninsular was an understanding of the kind of disciplines and developed wisdom required of a nomadic tribe surviving in the least forgiving parts of Arabia.

 It's a discipline and a wisdom, Laurence argued, that regularly takes Damascus and Baghdad but never keeps them.  The Fremen of Herbert's Dune ended when it rained. Arabia died when they drowned in oil. 

    

 

Creed

White Snakeroot and Eastern Cedar

   In my view monotheism in all its iterations is in the process of chiming it's own death knell. 

  Why do you say this?

  Because the new war lords in western society are called Billionaires and without a functioning creed there will be no Magna Carta.

  What is a creed?

  US Meanings from Miriam Webster : Creed - a formal statement, summary, or system of core beliefs and guiding principles.

  What do you mean by monotheism?

  A belief in a central authority.

Arendt's understanding of Freedom

Blue Mistflower (Wild Ageratum)

  Yes indeed, being "uprooted from meaning" results in populations becoming subject to meaning makers. Arendt's argument for the public square was to promote a meaning making that promoted pluralism in a society rather than versions of atomized Individualism, which Arendt saw as a breeding ground for tyranny, insisting instead that genuine freedom requires a shared, public world sustained by active citizenship.

 To go further into a sense of belonging, the purpose of belonging is security, feeling safe, being supported, and other multiples of wokeness, a symbol within the meanings of awake that entered the language of whitey from a population on the receiving end of attitudes that still see black people as runaway and dangerous slaves. Stay awake! 

  Invariably when life has a price in dollars and cents, the dream is found in the security of property, an exterior castle with iron gates and a moat, a picket fence, an ice machine and a swimming pool the neighbors can envy. An understanding of freedom that chains a mind to the security of the sort of bread and circus power structures that bury alive a couple of Vestal Virgins every time Hannibal crosses the Alps. 

Saint Teresa's Discalced Guides

Acapulco Wedelia sounds good

  Yeah though I walk through the shadow of doubt I will reach the divine presence within.

  Saint Teresa of Avila wrote guide books for her brothers and sisters. In her book, Interior Castle, a soul took a journey through seven mansions, it followed along miles of corridor visited hundreds of rooms on its way to heaven and the book earned Teresa a Doctorate from the Pope of Rome. 

  Prayer, Teresa had always claimed was both a vocal and mental training encapsulated by the Lord's Prayer. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum, adveniat regnum tuum........ etc.

  And here we are, all these years later still trying to retrain the mind to better accept the interior castle and the big wide world, this time  with words like cognition, neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, gilia, systemic collapse, DNA methyltransferases, methyl globs, gene start buttons...... etc.

  In these days, the idle, of whom there are many, squander the rewards of convenience by forgetting the frequency with which our bodies replace our cells. Every cell in your body is regularly replaced except your inner ear hair cells, your eye lens cells and the neurons in your Cerebral Cortex. The same inner ear hair cells, the same eye lens cells and the same neurons in your cerebral cortex last a lifetime.

 A cerebral cortex is the Top End, it manages those areas of the mind which are considered "higher functions."  A cerebral cortex has four lobes, the highest of the high lobes being the Frontal Lobe, which apparently is the master of thinking, problem-solving, planning, personality, and voluntary movement. 

 The process of teaching, or training the brain, is essentially a chemical process that revels in the plasticity of the brains capacity to strengthen and polish up new chemical connections. It's a continuous adaption, new connections benefit from being polished, and like the eight times table unless they are polished they may be quickly lost. 

  And hark the Herald Angels sing, if it's that simple, we can reproduce it, make it obedient, plug it into the electric, put it to work and make money out of it. 

  When Saint Teresa lay dying her final word were thusly: "O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another." Not to be a Debbie Downer but there is a chance that meeting her spouse didn't happen for our most favorite Barefooted Carmelite.

Inner and outer

Goatsbeard will yellow

  Should we think of prediction as top down, see it as the past making assumptions about the present. Or should we think Saint Teresa of Avila's Inner Castle and explore prediction as the outside dominating the inside.

 There's a good chance none of this makes sense to anyone.

 Prediction is what happens next. You wake up in the morning and the top part of you, the most recent, the youngest bits of your brain, sigh before accessing your more mechanical, more ancient capacities like hearing, sight and smell. 

  Your Top, a relative juvenile, 3 to 4 hundred thousand years old,  knows how to get from it's bed, to the kettle in the kitchen, and on the way there, as an upright and decent male you'd pop outside to point Percy at the Banana Tree - boy pea is very good for the general wellbeing of Banana Plants.

 Your older self - which goes back to those happy years we all spent as air-breathing fish experimenting with furriness, a less imaginative time perhaps dominated by matter of fact mechanical senses, such as hearing, sight and smell - has information for you. It's quite obvious to them that not only has the Banana Tree disappeared, no sign of it ever having existed, but in the kitchen the kettle along with a packet of strong breakfast tea are nowhere to be found.

 Go ahead call this First Monday in September an example of systemic dissonance, the first step into a dystopia of confusion, sadness and possibly some sort of retardation. Or venture into the Inner Castle, re-write the narrative as a message from God. 

  

  

Dewey, the Inference Machine and an objectified populace

Fun With Gravel

  Ages ago, we're talking decades, back when Baxter was a bead in the wicked eye of a lonely aorta, we looked at how neuroscience interpreted aspects of the human way of being, a way of being that specializes in experiencing existence second by second. An existence in play that rebels against the disciplined understandings of working toward a sensible goal, as the painfully correct John Dewey and most all institutions of education would have us believe. 

 We swam around in the rather neat ways of thinking that suggest we people are constantly updating our view of the world, giving it a hard look and then comparing it with what our memory suggests is a view of the world as it was yesterday, or two seconds ago. Within this process we grasped that a mind has a capacity to predict what today - or now - should look like. This prediction emerges from a set of prior understandings, built slowly and often painfully over time and many hours spent in detention or on the dole line. 

 It's that isolated and distant castle that rules all and we had fun with Saint Teresa of Avila's insights into how we navigate our own Interior Castle if we'd ever been foolish enough to plan on a retirement in paradise. 

 Prediction, we tried to assure ourselves, is top down. There's a central control post, a big vein, perhaps a really bossy neuron, it could be a soul wanting to go home, it's a something, and do you know why science argues for a top down prediction of what today should look like. I'll tell you! Top Down is efficient, it saves energy, there's none of this committee libtarding around the Brie cheese and leaving the lights on because Chalky forgot his false teeth!

 Then when the senses, those undeserving underlings start going all Bayes Theory - posh math talk for Bottom Up - the command post, that well dressed sunshine of our lives, can be persuaded to weigh its prior understandings against today's sensory inputs. Staying awake gets expensive while inputs moan and complain, and yes indeed the be and end of all things will need two ham sandwiches followed by a caramel flavored ice cream, dancing girls and a couple of chewable antacids. Either that or a sharpie with which to change the forecast. 

  There are occasions when Bottoms Up - or sensory inputs - achieve what you and I might prefer to call a Sodom Interpretation of what you and I rather pompously call the real world. And when a Sodom interpretation from the cellar presses too mightily on The Top, it can sometimes breach the barrier of priors and when it does, it can be honestly read as social collapse.

 Here there's always a chance the messengers from the bottom will be locked in the strangling cupboard and forgotten, there's a call to the cavalry, and a committee of the ruling class makes laws that allows for the public execution of Luddites. And well worth remembering that far too often, priors with responsibility for the efficiency of accurately predicting today can become totally decoupled from reality. Loopholes help.

  Lucky for us in the underclasses, at the moment we're still allowed to call this sort of irreversible retardation, Systemic Dissonance as we quietly drink ourselves into a stupor and wonder what happened to guilt in a new world of education that's divided work and plays.

  To follow Kant and bring Hume back into the room we can be easily persuaded to believe that we people are inference machines, we never see "the thing in itself," and because we never see "the thing in itself," "the thing in itself" remains a creation of our mind. 

  I was almost four months old when the great educator John Dewey died. He cultivated one of those choir boy pervert middle partings for his hair. He developed his belief in Rational Empiricism while teaching at the University of Chicago which had been founded four years before he joined the faculty. And maybe it's just me but the Chicago School has, I'd argue, despite the passion of their claims to the contrary, always supported a Capitalist Elite and the widgetization - posh talk for objectification - of us people. 

Objects for Property Developers

Mooncarrot Maybe?

  If we're bold enough to question Dewey's assumptions about how we think, an agile yet less aggressively ambitious mind will enter the meanings contained within the word Teleological. Here we encounter the nightmare of teleological ethics and that brotherhood of ass-holes defined by utilitarianism. This so called common sense of backwardness, which when confronted quickly reverts to wishing on the star of deontological ethics......

  "What!"

  The Ancient Greeks, comrade! Happiness is Duty over Outcomes which bled into the Kantian supposition of pretty little rules that turn angels into pedants because, you know, categorical imperative just felt right. And then of course we have to look at the incessant dribble from the crotches of the evolutionary biologists, those owners of a second home in Colorado about whom not much good can be said........

 "Stop! What's wrong with you?"

 First of all Dewey had a depressing enthusiasm for the world Europeans were building north of Mexico and South of Canada. It was the sort of enthusiastic rah-rah that makes the mistake of assuming The Impossible It is on our side. Prelude to New Jerusalem. Golden City on a Hill. Breakfast with Bozo, or whichever one was the monkey. In short we people became objects for Property Developers, there was only one way to be, either a winner or a loser, nothing else mattered because nothing else needed to matter...... 

 "What's the second of all?"

  Call it the Black Prince, The Edward of Woodstock, either a chivalrous knight and brilliant leader of men or a brutal fanatic, depending on whether you share a narrative with Spain, France or England. Edward died in 1376 of what could have been battle fatigue but which was diagnosed as An Inflammation of the Bowels, a dysentery that afflicted him while he was battling The Spaniards and followed him to his deathbed.

The errors in Dewey's end purpose.

There

  More likely, I could well be wrong, yet I'll continue to suggested that in one way or another, John Dewey's approach to the distinctions between work and play figure large in current theories of education. In his How We Think he does rather lay down the law when he touches on the idea that work and play have a connection. The difference is play has no definite order, the thinking wanders, it chases squirrels. Work directs thinking toward particular goals, a teleology is explained by its end purpose.

  Kafka was bored reckless by his work, his nights were spent in a rented room with his pens and paper, looking for moments of ultimate release. He wrote to a friend about the joy he felt when the words became sentences that made him feel. Dylan Thomas was the same. His Black Cat Night spoke, it connected. 

  The trouble with work, is the draw between the difference between what Arendt call work and labor. Like Dewey, work "was thinking toward a goal." As for labor, Arendt saw it as the means to insure the necessities, a task generations of slaves had provided for generations of property owners.

 When a person pins their destiny to a futures market funded by venture capitalists time to reappraise Dewey's  assumptions about "how we think?"

The R Word

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923)

  The few may disagree with my contented roll into the phrase "impossible It" as a substitute for the little diddums idea of a ruling singularity where everything makes sense under the watchful eye of a creator. This adoption of an  all knowing unknown is an aspect of mental surrender to supply and demand curves as substitutes for peer review is so heinous in my view it genuinely deserves an "R" word. 

 Here, I think it worth exploring a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as a 'euphemism treadmill.'  To do that I'll paraphrase the Special Education Guide: 

  The word - Retard - originates with the Latin retardare, meaning to slow down or hinder, as in "Retardare that Train!" In the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, bushy tailed psychologists introduced the concept of mental retardation as a neutral, clinical diagnostic term. It was actually created to replace older and perfectly respectable terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile. These words had originally been serious medical classifications but thanks to our beloved euphemism treadmill the word "retard" quickly warped into a childish, both puerile and cretinous, taunt. Over the decades, the word "retard" suffered the exact same fate reserved for idiot, moron and imbecile as cheerfully the unwashed adopted this refreshing medical term "retard" as a newly rehearsed, well designed and legitimized explanation of stupid or foolish or useless jackass.

 The Good Soldier Švejk, a character from Jaroslav Hašek's collection of satirical stories, had been categorized by the Austro-Hungarian  Empire's conscription service as a Congenital Idiot. Švejk, especially when he ran foul of a non-commissioned office or an officer took every opportunity to introduce himself as a Congenital Idiot. Coming as it did from high authority, Švejk, surrounded as he was by the incomprehensible world of a private soldier in Hašek's First World War, had no issue with the category Congenital Idiot. It was a title that suited him, he was proud of it, it was one of the few things that made sense to him.

 

 

  

Domestication, taint tanning and the so called "farmers."

Tick Trefoil

  Once upon a time, and this might be hard to believe, The  Impossible It, became math, adding, subtracting, the square on the hippopotamus cankle and on into a set of symbolic interactions which were the polar opposite to the symbolic interactions of language.

 The two faiths have clashed, number has retreated to the home of the white coats, and language has been dressed up, given a dead rat authenticity by Grammarians as theater went to die in what are loosely referred to as musicals, usually with dancing before dance became a glorified version of death by violence with plenty of blood as a simplistic visual alternative to the spilling of passion.

 Give me a surrey with a fringe on top just so long as the sheepdog dies in slow motion so we can all have a good cry  As for Civilization it all went wrong in the very late Stone Ages, early Bronze Ages when the materialists of agriculture successfully turned people, animals and plants into soulless objects.

  Go ahead, blame the boys, I will, thick as frogs on the new girl, it was their time to shine, as the ultimate chick magnet became twenty acres, a winter's worth of wheat, barley, maybe a goat to milk and a something dashing in metal that cut meat and killed other boys who tried to take your sourdough starter.

  For those interested this current homoerotic fashion for communal taint tanning found in the less attractive corners of what in the USA is still referred to as the GOP, may harken back to the Neolithic collapse of diversity in the human Y chromosome roughly six thousand years ago. 

  So what might the moral be?

  Don't blame the several million years of Paleolithic Nomadic Excellence for the decline of our species, blame the damage done to the sense of place granted us by the endless creaking of farmers.

  

Titans aren't that bright

Gravel Truck Stuck

  Martin Luther died in the February of 1546. He was 62 years old. In 16th Century Europe while the average age was something between 30 and 35 years old, if you made it through your childhood and teenage years you had a very good chance of reaching your 50's or 60's or even your 70's. Michelangelo was 88 when he died in the February of 1564. Back then, teens, tweens and kiddywinks dropped like flies.

  Probabilities comrade! The security of the average if you prefer. The impossibility of trusting a Black Swan to grace your kitchen floor, and yet we all wish, hope and indulge those sort of symbolic expressions that make money for casinos. 

  The understanding of miracles as real includes a faith in the idea that hope and wishing make things real. Thoughts and prayers, if you prefer. It runs the gauntlet that permits evil to be real, an existing something or other that allows for good to be real. 

  A dilemma for AI in a world that sacrifices so much and regularly to the improbable is for AI an existence solely within probabilities. Only an impossible it that knows all, can ever be correct.  

"Such is the pathway to the stars."

Newish Bovver Boots

  The written symbol 'career' means something like this : "A long term, rosy cheeked, professional journey through a succession of employment opportunities within a particular industry or field."

  Good luck with that Nancy because the symbol 'career' sounds like : "Make me safe, give me purpose, light my life and I'll role over play dead and do anything for you." As a result, over the generations, we people have tried to create a symbol for 'Help' which as a written form looks something like this : "Chapter One - Morality."

  These vague utterances are not blessed by the precision Russell yearned for in language, but close enough to the game theory our Patron Saint Wittgenstein proffered as his rule of thumb when examining how meaning is exchanged between hominid minds. I've always felt sorry for the innocent, open heartedness of Wittgenstein's lesson planning following his decision, after the second world war, to return to teaching the Cambridge elite. Not only was Wittgenstein a Jew in England with a thick Austrian accent, he'd long ago surrendered his wealth to his search for truth and he'd once tried to explain to his super brilliant, fantastically intelligent, upper crusty next generation of leaders and oligarchs that if the lion could speak English they'd understand no better what the lion was saying.

 Our issue of course has far less to do with a purity of thought that dreams beautiful in its reach for a per ardua ad astra - sic itur ad astra, if you're Canadian - and much more to do with the ten to twenty five years of training a splendidly flexible hominid mind endures as it fits itself into this or that power structure that lies within a set of cultural beliefs that will always work best when totally unsupported by facts.

  Yes indeed - "Give me a red Corvette!"

  The "in the beginning" of faith has the charm of myth, only recently has it included the old testament certainties of "in the beginning was the Chicago School of Economics," what Paul Krugman has referred to as a product of the Dark Ages.

  So why not "Give me a Data Center" and let's open a new chapter in Hell.

The pigmentless Hummingbird doesn't see through blue eyes

Albino Hummingbird is on the left

  We've enjoyed David Hume's more happy-go-lucky attitude, his skeptic at the billiard table, rational grasp of what Individualism might be. The Calvinist, the individual answering to the gates of heaven, definition was in his view a religious nuttery which over the years has caused a damage to our intellect by attempting to create an unwarranted concreteness which Hume, who died in August of 1776, disparaged as humorless, or perhaps humourless, form of sloppiness of confidence which in Hume's view was remedied by a solid breakfast along with a good Tawny Port and lots of it.

  When you look across the savannah - and I don't mean the tourist trap in the North American US State of Georgia where the State Bird is a Brown Thrasher, I mean the notion of freedom as a wilderness floating endless toward the horizons, the occasional thorny tree, a giraffe, lions chasing hartebeast while cheetah laugh as they wonder what you or I might taste like and so on - what you'll see of us people is a head with a big brain on stilts that takes ten to twenty five years to grow into a tool making clever clever with a certificate of achievement that entitles it to a career, it has a union if it's lucky or professional body to preserve its set of living standards, a stability, a zoo for giraffe, lions, hartebeast and cheetah that's sometimes mistaken for an entitlement.

  Entitlement, whether earned or unearned, is, to use the Scottish word as a tribute to Hume, the ball peen beating thinner and thinner with hammer of personal possibilities in the increasingly odious ranges, hills and vales of "I am Blessed" by the deceits that keep me from even trying to be honest. 

  

  

Garden Paths and Battle Plans

Garden Path

  So long as the drowning of government remains fashionable in the higher echelons of western society, individualism's current self defeating personality disorder will never be an officially recognized social ailment. And as a result the standard model of society as a whole remains increasingly welded to the daytime television game show theory of social development. 

   I wanted to mention a World War One battle that began in and around the 4th July of 1918 between Central Power German forces and the Australian Army with help from recently arrived United States Infantry, the Royal Air Force - to the stars and beyond - and Royal Tank Corps. The allied commander was an Australian called John Monash.

  If there is a point about this relatively small battle, it was  the allied commanding officer's use of what's called combined arms, a battle tactic that after almost four years of Trench Warfare was finally adopted by the commanders at the Third Battle of Picardy. And here the thing about Combined Arms, for it to work effectively, commanders have to trust individual soldiers to make decisions, which means soldiers have to be trusted with battle plans.

 As I sit here waiting for the first frosts to relieve me of the burdens of garden chores, I wonder what the battle plans are.

What happened to the slave of reason

Turkey

   If we think about Hume as a happy go lucky person who loved port and cheese, we can pull two strands of his thinking that nicely reflect his world view. The first strand, was his understanding that commerce was a humanizing force. His point was that the desire to improve one's material condition gives a person something useful to do, stops them being "indolent" and it drives the interactions that result in "industry, art and knowledge."

  Hume's second strand was his understanding of 'habit' which he read as a scaffolding of both 'custom and habit' which allowed for the individual who gets useful things done. Hume's list of good things for such an individual, included stable laws and property rights, not because they were divine rights, but because they provided a predictable framework in which human beings could cooperate, and flourish without butchering each other.

  "What happened?"

  The likes of Descartes and that man from Somerset John Locke were of the opinion that we people had a rigid soul. Our core essence was rational and fixed, they argued, we were isolated, autonomous moral actors, we were "absolute" which means our self, the thing that is you or I, doesn't change.

  Hume, on the other hand, with his ever changing bundle of emotions and passions, his constantly fleeting thoughts did not believe that reason alone could even begin to prove the existence of an unchanging self, the existence of God or morality or half the things reason was credited with.

  It was like this : reason and passion are not enemies. But as Hume put it himself : "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions."

  For Hume, commercial activity was something individuals could do that was only valuable because it refined human sociability and made life pleasant without us butchering each other. The moment commercial individualism starts laying down endless no's, destroys social harmony, conversation, and sympathy, Hume would have agreed, commercial individualism begins to defeat its own purpose. 

The Hyper-Individualists

 

Ironweed

  Baxter and I have an issue with what's loosely referred to as Individualism. What's happened over the past 250 years is that Market Logic has replaced Social Ethics, then the political class determined that stupidity did indeed trickle down and more recently Neo-Christians rearranged the Beatitudes to allow jumbo jets, corporations, the billionaire and aircraft carriers to pass through the eye of the needle because of King Cyrus the Great of Persia, formerly Iran.

 A basic genesis of modern Individualism would start with the Protestant Reformation. An assertion by the Godly that no longer were we people joined by a collective church, that whole collective stuff which allowed the greedy to thrive and pay priests to grant them amnesty, that soup of vice and avarice had warped the understanding of why Jesus died on a cross. The truth was, when you died you stood alone before God, who'd bring out the big book, you'd be asked to explain your actions and your attitudes, and sometimes, depending on your legal team, especially if you were a suspicious looking character, God himself, apparently, would ask to see your papers rather than just assuming you'd been baptized.

 You can wonder, if you like, why people got excited by the prospect of this face to face with the ultimate headmaster. There are a number of theories the simplest is that a worthy percentage, it's usually 20%, relish the prospect of purification by large numbers of the poorly adjusted going to an eternity in hell without prospect of forgiveness, this was certainly Dante's position.

 More recently the poorly adjusted are seen as an opportunity for gathering redemption points within a community, they have been lumped in with the heathen, the Jews and the Catholics and are regularly subjected to degrees of evangelical fervor from our 20%. 

 When the Enlightenment gathered steam, one of the areas it chose to apply reason to was this rather icky personal relationship with God, his enthusiastic Son and a somewhat sinister, poorly understood Ghost. Not everyone was convinced that Calvin and Luther had logically solved the problem. One of the founders of Individualism as a modern practical philosophy David Hume, and you can blame the English for a lot but Hume was a Scotsman. His Book was Treatise of Human Nature, it was published in 1740. Hume, along with a bunch of others, argued that people were a bundle of sensations subject to the give and take of cause and effect, we had free will, he didn't think miracles were real and we probably hadn't been perfectly designed.

 Some might say "What about what's his name, the chap from Somerset England, who died in 1704, he pretty much wrote the bill of rights."

 The thing about John Locke, he was all very Enlightenment, and gung-ho on property rights, personal rights, slave ownership, supply and demand, money as a means of exchange and it's a very long list of often sensible, old fashioned capitalistic claims about stoic behaviors being profitable and so on, but he was a Puritan who was 10 years old during the English Civil War. This made Locke a Calvinist, Lutheran true blue Protestant with an aggressively healthy attitude toward Judgement Day, he wasn't a liberal in the same "for god's sake don't take yourself so bloody seriously" sense that Hume was a liberal. Nor was Hume anything much more that an agnostic, and by the 1740's you could begin to use the 'A' word without being automatically branded a dangerous blasphemer who should be shipped off somewhere.  

  So how did a tool meant to establish moral agency turn into a "dying fish on the beach"?

 In the late 20th century, championed by figures like Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women."  Ayn Rand's individualism was stripped of its relational context. Reagan became a Right Wing Saint. And on it went into deeper and deeper pits of tripe.

  Hyper-individualists now continue to guiltlessly reduce human freedom to frictionless consumer choice and white faced autonomy from obligation. Public health measures are "tyranny." Taxes are  "theft." Collective sacrifice is viewed as "sucker behavior." Just visit the White House if you want to listen to the new sermons

 The issue for Baxter and I is this : Homo sapiens is an obligate social species, which means we cannot survive, grow or reproduce alone. We survived the two million plus years of the Pleistocene precisely because our ancestors did not act as hyper-individualists. Our neurobiology, our oxytocin pathways, and our default somatic states are hardwired for cooperation, shared responsibility, and belonging.

 This current iteration of hyper-individualism, dominated by an unlettered, small class of psychotically un-woke, newly hyper-wealthy, demand that because an increasingly tinier few want to fly around in rocket ships and government is an evil, the rest of us human organisms must learn to live in direct contradiction to our evolutionary biology and to do that we've got between eighteen months and three years to learn to share our existence with cake. 

 

We Fear Death Because we Fear Freedom

Old Fashioned Buddleia

   I think we can go for the meanings in freedom that share the sense that something is free if it can change without constraint so long as we include the sense of aloneness in free found in the meanings chemists have given to Free Radicals.

  A free radical is an unpaired electron which is short lived, highly reactive and unstable as it bobs around looking for stability by stealing or sharing an electron from other molecules. When two Free Radicals meet they clash into each other and combine to form a stable pair. When the union happens a Free Radical is no longer a free radical.

  Of course, in chemistry, free radical is not quite that straightforward, there's a further complexity that requires a basic grasp of the word valence. Electrons prefer pairs, they bond as positive and negatives, An unattached electron is within the orbit of an atom, an ion or a molecule. Within this context of a disgruntled, lonely unbonded electron that's already a part of something, a free radical presents the entire atom, ion or molecule with the destabilizing insecurity which when free radicals find each other results in new chemical bonds between atoms and molecules.

  I don't know about ions, possibly they just doff the hat as they pass in the night but for the atoms and molecules in something like a barrel of crude oil the insecurities of free radicals when correctly encourage by devious chemists can be persuaded to become a billion plastic shopping bags.

 The uncertainties of the Free Radical hint at an idea amongst psychiatrists, sociologists and sometimes philosophers that we people, without our chains, would probably define freedom in terms of disappearing into nowhere as a blinding light. Instead we fear death because we fear freedom and have a penchant for inventing a rule based paradise. 

Woke, Freedom, Habitus and Simone de Beauvoir

Mason Bee

  An acceptance of Pierre Bourdieu's structural scaffolding, the Habitus in which we confront the unwritten of our absorbed existence is rightfully useful. There within Bourdieu's scaffolding you'll find the 'situation' through which de Beauvoir's 'nothingness' becomes. In these shadows, you can if you're desperate enough, mandate or inspire new structural rules, but you can't force a human organism to thrive, and note the symbol thrive, under a scaffolding a human organism no longer regards as legitimate.

 De Beauvoir herself, despite her antipathy toward elements of the Habitus - she had some very cruel and self centered things to say about La Belle France into which she was born - was able to thrive because the scaffolding of her Habitus and her capacity to navigate her situation allowed her to thrive.

 Sartre's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am free regardless of the world I am born into. My consciousness is always radically unbound.

 De Beauvoir's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am born into a structured situation, a 'habitus.' To will myself free in the situation I have found myself born into is to will others free because my freedom needs a world of free others "to act upon and disclose" which is a way of saying I need something like a permission structure in a Habitus that allows me to decide what I want to become. Hence "You aren't born a woman, you become one."

 In her Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir put it this way: "Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men." She went on to write: "To will oneself free is also to will others free...."

 And of course it had occurred to her that since the Bronze Age, female humans had been turned into objects by male humans.

 "Where are we? I'm lost!"

 De Beauvoir: Freedom needs an open future of choices, just having free will inside your head, like Sartre, is useless if your 'situation' offers no real possibilities. If a person is trapped in poverty, tyranny, or rigid social roles, their future is closed off. We need free others to give our actions meaning.

 "Really?"

 If everyone around you is reduced to a passive, subjugated instrument, your own freedom operates in a vacuum and it becomes meaningless.

 "Really."

  Oppression, de Beauvoir argued, is a mutual mutilation. To turn a free, conscious "subject" into an "object," the oppressor destroys the very thing that makes human society dynamic. By closing off the future of others, you shrink the richness of the world you yourself inhabit.

 "You sound very woke! Or are you ant-woke?"

 If the scaffolding isn't legitimated by the free choices of the people living inside it, it becomes an enforced cage - one that degrades the freedom of those running the cage, too.

Gendlin's Going Forward

Woodland Liriope 

   "The Body Holds the Meaning First." Instead of blinking we'll think of the body holding the meaning first as a pre-verbal moment, it's an implicit understanding of a complexity, which might last seconds, hours, or years. If this implicit understanding is associated with a physical discomfort, a knot in the chest or belly, however it manifests, the physical discomfort isn't random physiology. It is what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, your sense of place, your memories, the panoply that defines the scaffolding or your being experiencing a pre-verbal situational friction that's combined into a single, uncomfortable complex somatic state that's not happy.

 Usually, what I am wary of calling the intellectual mind, doesn't know what precise meaning this sometimes delicate, complex somatic state is attempting to express. Is it hungry, does it need water, does it need a beer and a carton of cigarettes. Is it just tired?

  Believe it or not, and you might have to climb into your "woke" pajama suit, but the Phenomenological observations of our man Eugene Gendlin, inspired by Husserl perhaps, suggest that by a process called "focusing" you might be able to discover what ails an agitated somatic state by shaving away at the possible causes of discomfort your somatic state is experiencing by asking it questions. 

  Gendlin made the observation that with us people there was a going forward, which in my view can be understood as a consciousness moving through time. For Gendlin a living organism isn't a static object, life is an on-going process which is subject to a Trinity of Stoppage, Social Conformity and Carrying Forward.

  Go ahead, cuddle a Teddy Bear, life is a journey that sometimes stops. Conformity tells you to suppress the stoppage, take no notice of the pre-verbal meanings in the discomfort expressed by a complex somatic state, suck it in, join a gym, see a plastic surgeon, bandage it up, pay someone to listen, call the manager, get lost in first world luxury, don't even think about going anywhere new.

 Worth remembering agriculture changed us physically, we people developed genes that enable us to digest lactose into adulthood.  Hell! blame agriculture for real ice cream.

Where of one cannot speak, Gendlin's Felt Sense and Others

Almost an Inch

   The Oracle has spoken, Eugene Gendlin, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, was not a preacher. He was a Phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and particularly John Dewey, who like Gendlin was a New World Enthusiast devoted to the uncomfortableness and dangers of democracy, an advocate of reflective thinking and the value of an education system that taught the youth how to think for themselves.

  Here we have to remember that one of the reasons Socrates was tried for suborning the youth is that Athens was in the process of recovering from losing the war with Sparta. Athenians had been subject to a  brutal eight months rule by a pro-Sparta Oligarchy governing body history refers to as The Thirty Tyrants. The last thing Athenian property owners needed, as they pulled their lifestyle back out of the ashes, was a disruptive old man who kept asking negative non-trirelative, irony laden, petty questions when sensible Athenian patriots were busy straightening the line.

  Men like Plato, and to a certain degree Socrates, were searching for the Metaphysical Truth of the world, which once known would have solved so many problems of the "What Next." Men like Dewey, who called themselves pragmatic new-worlders and saw themselves as being in the world where they were engaged in solving the everyday practical problem of "What To Do Next" and "What Works" rather than "What's Real."

  There is a sense in which "What Works" is "What's Real." And there is a sense, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, in which "whether something makes money or not" is a demonstration of "What Works and What's Real."

  But here, August 12, we're talking the somatic of sense feeling, we're not talking right or wrong, we're not talking economic theory, we're talking Gendlin's Implicit Philosophy which places a burden on the unspoken, the "whereof one cannot speak," a burden he called 'felt sense.' This 'felt sense' is the somatic discomfort of the moments of "whereof one cannot speak" described as an unspoken 'felt sense' which when subjected to the niceties of Neuroscientists is a visibly neurological response to the moments before Wittgenstein's command when the "thereof one must be silent" is ignored and some form of speech emerges from the subject producing neurological and body, heart, pulse, breathing etc signals that suggest relief.

 A hot-dog dude moment of realness perhaps, but let's give that somatic moment of 'felt sense' a wider social context by raising the specter of Dewey's 'habits' around 'forks in the road' and giving it a moment to clash with Bourdieu’s, infinitely stricter and harder to change, 'habitus.'

  Both thinkers had this sense of a mental scaffolding erected by social circumstances, think of de Beauvoir being born as an ego-less being  into a situation, and realize that this framework or socializing process has parameters which do offer the stability of a cohesive group or place to belong.  Call it class, socio-economic status, Republican, Democrat, socialist, fascist, dickweeds  or whatever you want, that mental scaffolding has great influence on how individual minds react to "whereof one cannot speak."

 Dewey, the New-Worlder, produced his understanding of 'habit' in a functioning democracy where Reflective Thinking was encouraged and taught in schools by enlightened and passionate teachers. For Dewey the tool for active living could be reshaped. For Bourdieu, the Old-Worlder unaccustomed to the notion of a working meritocracy, understood a mind/body interdependence as he produced the hard lines of his 'habitus' which explored a deeply ingrained social fate that feels natural precisely because society builds it into your body. 'Habitus,' for Bourdieu, operated below the level of conscious intent, it wasn't something easily changed, you couldn't will it away, pretend it wasn't there. Once a twit, always a twit. 

 Closer to Plato, Bourdieu, who died in  2002, had more questions along the lines of "what works" and "what's real," than the pragmatic, and dare I say it 'transactional,' Dewey.  

 Of course you can just bypass all this earthy mind and body "what next" nonsense by giving up and declaring "Bite me! I am a Soul!"

Pierce's Semiotics, the triad and putting curves into Straight Lines

Blooms, watering can and a hose hopper

  "So what are you actually trying to say about Straight Lines and Trinities?"

 If you think of breeze and the sails of sailing ships you might be able to think of breeze as influence. If you then address Charles Pierce's Semiotics - signs, symbols and communication - where he insisted  that "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this trirelative - three related subjects - are an influence that cannot be resolved into actions between pairs." You might now conclude that minds are propelled by a breeze called triads or trinities that use words as symbols as they are blown into the corridors of meanings. And here, you as the interpretant are a third participating influence, or breeze along with the sign which is the word CAT and its object, an actual breathing cat that needs to be fed or whatever. 

 Unlike de Saussure, who concentrated his poststructural thinking on language around the signifier - the spoken word C-A-T - and the signified - the abstract image and understanding of cat that dwells in your mind - Pierce was of the opinion the whole combination that connects the cat form to the cat idea - the you - should not be underestimated and therefore in the study of semiotics there was a tri-relative - three related subjects - influence that could not be resolved by the actions of bi-relative - two related subjects.

 Pierce died in 1914, de Saussure died in 1913.

 "And your point?"

 Since those days, not so long ago, scientists of the mind and their terrifying machines, have determined that when the brain is engaged in routine task-solving, or cognitive custom and practice, it relies on predictable, boring apparently linear pathways that draw straight lines from Problem A to Solution B through a tri-relative process. (1) the Problem, (2) The solution, and (3) the subject, you or I, who more often has already mentally examined, carefully shelved and sanctified the solution to the problem long enough for it be classified as a habit of thinking that has achieved the status of "True."

 So when stuck in a loop of depression, or stuck in the loop of a failing belief system of predetermined solutions, those "There is no alternative" doctrines of the locust relieve common sense of its purpose by maintaining a triad that keeps the line straight, endless, unchanging until blessed release produces no actual somewhere else to go.

 But when the brain stops to actually think, it enters a genuinely creative state which neuroimaging suggests is a radically non-linear series of events. The brain turns to the wishy-washy parts  responsible for daydreaming, sometimes called memory-blending, and explores the glory of unconstrained association. 

 To do this, a mind intentionally breaks the triadic logic of "Given A and B, C must follow." The straight lines are gone, replaced by friction, anxiety, ambiguity, and a wandering that allows thoughts to drift out into the wilderness where unexpected connections hide behind or under rocks waiting to be presented as a possibility, sometimes called "hope" or "dreaming" or "the solution."

A "Just Is" that Curves Straight Lines

On The Move : Turkey Nursery

 "Trinity Thinkers. What are they? Please explain! I know we have looked at this before but at the moment if it was a question on a long bus trip I'd be a D-minus." 

 Let's make Kant proud and call them, as an example, Triadic Structures of Faith. We might begin to think of them in terms of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, how he thought thinking progressed from a slight disagreement between friends into a "dynamic process inherent in History and Reality." Here, for the billionth time we have a chance to raise the ancient specter of the dialectic, a three part process that starts with a statement or an argument, is then met by a contradicting statement or argument, and this potential for a third world war is resolved by combining the valid parts of both arguments into a new argument, or into the New Thesis.

 For Hegel and for Marx, their triad of the dialectic was a foundational axiom that produced a comforting  straight line of Historical Determinism that sort of lost touch with anything remotely resembling the curves of hope, the circles of dreams or any of those flagrantly subjective chains to heaven that have to be regularly polished, in case they rust away leaving a soul stranded.

 First of all, let's put something to bed. Creativity is a Just Is that  Curves Straight Lines in us people. "Artists," as defined by 21st Century US English Usage, are people who make a point of defining themselves and sell themselves as "creative." In the rest of the world, if we're lucky, "Artists" are still painters or drunks or confidence tricksters. Creativity is not a commodity, nor is it a skill that a data driven Agentic Intelligence can master. 

 The difference, my friend, is between "generating and output" and "living the creative act." If we return to Walter Benjamin's thesis on the mass production of Art, think ourselves into that time when to see the Mona Lisa you'd have to make a pilgrimage to Florence, or a castle in Amboise or since 1797 The Louvre. Look around for it now, and you can see the Mona Lisa hanging on many a wall, second hand shops, and post cards

 The market myth tells us that friction is bad—that the goal of life is to get from thought to finished product instantly, without effort.The machine can trace the straight lines of our past, but only a living human being can throw a curve into the future.

 Meanwhile structures in the mind of the self defined, and please forgive me for using the odious word, "creatives," have sourced their dawning sense of alienation in the myth of a fundamentally market driven trinity. And lo, our Over-lords having prepared the ground, have automated the soul first, because patterns in text and images were easier for algorithms to harvest than building a robot that can mop a floor or fix a pipe or say "have a good day" with a meaningful smile as it serves you a bacon and egg sandwich.

 Like the dismal loop of Beck's Cognitive Triad of Depression or anxiety. In comes the professional to bandage you up by taking the curves out of your line and straightening you up by suggesting a new trinity.  

Stoicism, the Libertarian Elect and Market Forces.

Turkey Tail Fungi

 Kant was sweet with his categorical imperative and his structures in general. You got to do something, can't just do nothing - was his version of Parmenides' own wisdom which offered "whatever it is, it must be, it cannot not be."

 Kant was a trinity thinker, he'd followed the classic vandalism standards of the later Bronze Ages, he'd straightened his curve with a three in one to keep us people from ever experiencing bliss, which in my view was unenlightened of him but you know, better than releasing the Kraken by not telling other people to think like Calvin and allowing Stoics to morph into limp wristed Libertarians as the Western Beatnik alternative to being a born again Christian.

To make sense of this rabble of words, you have to start with the Renaissance, which went on a bit through the 1300's into the 1600's and the early 1700's. The Renaissance was a peculiar reawakening, in my view led by Thomas Aquinas' attempts to broaden the horizons of the Catholic Belief System by reintroducing the church to an idea that science, while often the practice of heretical covens is also God's precious gift.

 If we go back to the ancient Stoics, and here I reference the Greek Epictetus, who was born a slave, and the Roman Seneca, who advised Nero the fiddle player, but not Marcus Aurelius, a Roman born in Austria who became a Roman Emperor, who might have done better with a personal witch doctor, a god or a psychiatrist rather than attempting to commodify a set of beautiful understandings with his imperial seal.

 These originals of Stoicism, arose during times of massive imperial decay and autocratic rule. A central maxim was to divide the world into what is in our control - such as our opinions, desires, and character - and into what is outside our control - such as the market, the Emperor, sickness, supply and demand, death and for Sartre and Schopenhauer other people.

 But, and I think this an important grasp for the dignity of cocktail hour Stoics, the ancient Stoics while they had an ethic of internal sovereignty, they were not "atomized individualists." They believed in a universal human brotherhood which they expressed through civic duty and an understanding of a cosmopolis, a world city that included all men, both free and enslaved, but probably not girls. The Ancient Stoics, the true blue pre-Roman Emperor from Austria Stoics, were not remotely Libertarian in their thinking!

 Libertarians, or atomized individualists or crude modern day sociopaths, are a mutation of the early Stoics - mutations of the Aurelius castle building cul-de-sac, rather than Epictetus or the practical ethics of the Stoic Seneca the Younger, a poet, playwright and a philosopher.

 Libertarianism took the Stoic emphasis on "internal control" and converted it into property rights and hyper-individualism. "I control my inner soul, I own my body and my capital, and no collective has the right to touch either." And it goes on into an economic coldness, the shameful frigidity of, "If you are poor or struggling, that is your individual responsibility to overcome through discipline; do not ask society for a safety net. Die silently please."

 Yes indeed, by straightening human life into a pure line of Contract and Market Exchange, Libertarianism creates a new aristocracy, much like Calvinism did. The "elect" aren't those predestined by God, but the "self-made" individual who successfully navigates the market without "complaining."

We are constantly told by Libertarians, market dogmatists assure us that "supply and demand" is a law of nature, like gravity or photosynthesis.

 It is not.

 "Supply and demand" under modern capitalism is a human-constructed set of rules that measures purchasing power, not human need and has no clue what a free market is. Those Axioms that emerge from the thinking patterns of Adam Smith and Ricardo are now jaded, old, unenlightened and illiberal.

 If a community has 1,000 hungry children and zero money, the market registers "zero demand" for food in that town. If a billionaire wants a third yacht, the market registers "high demand" for luxury shipyards. (Remember the Bush Doctrine)

 The great moral scandal of our gluttonous era is that we live in a world of manufactured scarcity inside a reality of potential abundance. When we let "market forces" dictate resource distribution, we aren't submitting to a natural law of the universe; we are surrendering human agency, morality, and reason to an unthinking accounting mechanism which defines the future as ever expanding.

The value of honesty.

A Senna Plant in Bloom

 We talked yesterday about interconnections of such magnitude they are sometimes referred to as "Global." The word "Global" was supposed to hint at a meaning so vastly interconnected and complicated, that it ultimately defies attempts to accurately define it with structures. 

 On this topic of interconnections, another way of defying Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak" is to go full "Global Web," blind everyone with Tech Bros Speak and raise the banner "Epistemic Holism" as though it was an untouched round of cheese.

 "It all sounds a little like foreplay?"

 Of interest, in this wide world of meanings, "Epistemic Holism" has a twin opposite called "Epistemic Atomism." Epistemic atomism is the understanding that knowledge, justification, law, pretty much anything that looks whole, is actually made up of what can be referred to as: individual, foundational units.

"What about true scientific value prior to empirical testing?"

Therein lies the rub, my friend. Sometimes when you test the individual, foundational units to find out why the whole isn't working there's nothing wrong with the parts........

"I know the feeling.  It's when the whole is too ennui-laden to get out of bed."

 The Duhem-Quine thesis does rather shrink the value of reductionism as it supports a more coherentist grasp of our universe of things. Pierre Duhem's own Underdetermination Theory of empirical evidence and of course Willard Quine put Akron Ohio on the map with his acid distinction between "no unmarried man is married" and "no bachelor is married" argument which suggested that the analytic stance is fundamentally circular in nature and therefore prone to repeatable  errors.

 "Atomists are such Dweebs."

 Logical Positivists aren't so much Dweebs, Comrade, as reluctant to risk the perils of intuition and that chasm of subjective hopefulness that results in the extreme vacuum of belief states that result in a solidarity around such absurdities as Raelism and Vicarious Redemption.

"They don't actually believe that! It just makes them feel special and different."

 For God's sake! We were not made in laboratory by an extra terrestrial species who has lost contact with us, anyone who thinks that's where we came from struggles with retardation.

 "When you're trying to boff a UFO princess who has a BMW, Raelism makes a lot of sense."

 I'll give you that, but there is no way an infinite, invisible deity came into the world disguised as a man, was executed, and this specific execution is a cosmic legal substitute for the moral failings of all humanity.

 "Stop being a whataboutist!"

 Don't make me go Epistemic Fallibilist combined with Pragmatism all over your kitchen floor comrade! We don't build our ships in the dry dock, we build them from drift wood and bits of floating plastic along with loose bits of kelp while we're at sea.