INTO THE HEART OF LIGHTNESS - PART 1 of 5 - Work in Progress

PREFACE

References Not Required

A lie travels round the world while truth is putting on her boots 

- generally attributed to Winston Churchill but actually written by minister Charles Haddon Spurgeon (d. 1892)

The references for this project are incomplete, generally because it makes life easier, much like anything that can be dealt with in an atmosphere of trust.  The theory in use here is that official documentation does not make anything more or less true. Serious students of history and politics know there is often an inverse relationship between authority and authenticity.

As post-industrial society declines further, propaganda increasingly overshadows learning. It’s in keeping with Rollo May's maxim that it is an old and ironic habit of  human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

Regardless, keyword searches bring information from a variety of perspectives, rather than the conformist, screened body of work usually found in reference lists.

A chapter in the following work covers various deception tactics and how best to spot them. As always, do your own research. 

INTRODUCTION

Reconnecting

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with other people; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects.

- Herman Melville

A primary reason for the standard explosive model of change is the traditional cause and effect mindset.  This approach examines relatively few factors in a linear fashion to determine what went wrong and how to fix it.  Inevitably, myopic decision makers are blindsided by side effects building from phenomena that were not considered to be part of the problem.  Unintended consequences is one term used to describe what happens when an entire system is not adequately considered when designing a course of action.

Another method of problem solving is known as systems thinking or cybernetics, which can be defined as the art and science of communication and control.  In this outlook, many different interrelationships are assessed before the possible root causes of problems are addressed.  Linear dynamics are combined with feedback loops to see how areas progress or regress.  However, even known cybernetics can only deal with a small part of the stunning complexity that is life. Basic morality remains the missing key to complexity management for the future.

What follows is an attempt to shoehorn the helical complexity of cybernetics into a linear book format, to see how moral actions might better become possible in an often viciously competitive world.  The emphasis on many interdependent variables has led to a rambling approach, with numerous quotes, repetitive elements and subject matter that's all over the map.  Core concepts are interwoven through different chapters to show different contexts and a lack of proper academic footnoting has littered the text with a jumble of titles and authors.

As always, the imaginative elite thinking needed during times of change is caught up in its own ceaseless striving for power and war of all against all.  The dictatorial solution has a disturbing tendency to emerge from such dynamics.  If this should happen, it would not only refute all of modern history, but miss the point of what the knowledge age is really about.  There is just no way the speed and amounts of information that flow today can be intelligently controlled by any traditional methods. A decentralized information structure seems to be an obvious requirement, with morality being the foundational unifying element. 

In an Imperfect World

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

- William Jennings Bryan

The views in this book may sound utopian to some, but they are really a question of why this generation is playing Russian roulette with the prospects of future generations.  Perfection at the level of human existence is a form of death.  Scientific evidence suggests that for a larger system to be in evolutionary balance, the constituent parts must be out of balance. 

However, there is an important distinction between the parts being out of balance and the whole being out of control.  In the past, a lack of control led to many troubles, but there was always a safety margin for recovery provided by the balancing actions of nature. Today, technology has extended the clumsiness to threaten the human planetary life support systems, while creating information vehicles that leave most people unaware of what is really going on. The result is that the individual, family, community, nation and planet are all under serious attack by a system that is quickly reaching its physical limits. It has finally become an absolute necessity to distinguish between the type of competition that stimulates striving and advancement, and that which destroys what most people consider precious, including basic morality.

Listening to those who advocate waiting for an outside intervening force to save the day would seem to reject the fact that God or nature gave humans reasoning ability and free will for a reason. Anything intelligent enough to rescue humanity would also know that it would be creating the mother of all welfare cycles. It's a given that helpful information reaches people in ways unknown, but it's a wise design that offers help without taking responsibility.  It is the free will to act independently that enables healthy interdependent relationships and further progress.  Of course, self-determination is also a double edged sword, which can sow the seeds of a civil society, or reap a destructive, apocalyptic future. 

PART 1

CURRENT REALITY

The Fork in the Road

Dyma ni awr ar daith ein gobaith (here we are now on our journey of faith)

 - Morgan John Rhys

Say goodbye to work drudgery, heavy taxation, and environmental degradation. It sounds like a late-night infomercial. Yet, we have the technology to do this and more. So why the disconnect between what is doable and what is possible? Powerful actors and institutions are often blamed, but these reflect society in general. Suspect leaders and institutions fade away through the ages, yet the gaping separation between human potential and political reality remains.

The misdeeds by overt and covert rulers are part of a deeper, systemic problem. At root, humanity’s evolutionary path is the culprit. Like all life on earth, it led through a jungle environment, where force and deception are cardinal virtues. The brutish instincts required for survival in this milieu are still within us. Automatic reflexes, hormones and selfish genes are among the impulses that drive bestial behavior. A meme that spoke to this reframed the famous military quote “we have met the enemy, and he is ours” to say “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

 

The good news is that people change all the time and societies along with them. The development of civilizing structures nurtures our better nature. The law of the jungle is slowly giving way to the laws of civilization. As a result, there is far less violence today than in the past. The most dangerous neighborhood would be considered a relatively safe space by our not-so-distant ancestors. The exception to this is during times of war. As one general put it: “the clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.” 

 

As nations grow closer together through technology, trade and treaties, warfare is again decreasing. It has been generations since conscription in many nations. War between the democracies is almost unthinkable today. There is still constant warfare on the world stage because nascent international laws often have no teeth and are applied selectively. However warfare today is on a much diminished scale compared to the past. The final step to ending war is to create more effective security arrangements for individuals and communities, particularly those that wish to break away from countries they no longer desire to be a part of. The question of our times is whether this is tried through the imposition of a secretive global oligarchy with dictatorial ambitions or with the participation of a more educated, informed public. The view here is that only the latter approach is sustainable in the long term.

The Emperor’s Old Clothes

The higher I go, the crookeder it becomes.

 - Michael Corleone, Godfather Part III

Understandably, many are strongly opposed to the idea of international law. The more distant the government, the more difficult it is to keep it accountable. A higher concentration of power also tends towards more corruption. Stories that leak out of existing international bodies do not dispel concerns. Nationalistic conditioning, complete with flags and anthems, feeds yet more resistance to the idea of more individual and regional sovereignty. 

 

Beyond this, our daily experiences with national and lower levels of government are rife with abuses of power and other forms of corruption. Politicians often finish dead last in surveys on the trust accorded to a profession. Who in their right mind would want more of this, at a higher almost untouchable level? Yet, logic would demand that regional, community and especially individual sovereignty be protected by an international bill of rights. National leaders often turn on their own people rather than give up power when the community at large has lost faith in them.

 

The first question to ask is how those elected to high office are ranked so low? To be fair, politicians are in the spotlight, along with their shortcomings. Constituents can condemn the human failings of a politician while ignoring their own similar transgressions. That said, the lack of trust is ultimately justified. Politicians are integral participants in what has been accurately termed a lying structure. This method of ruling has predominated for millennia.

 

The lying structure political model was codified some 500 years ago in a book entitled The Prince by high court diplomat Nicolo Machiavelli. The term Machiavellian is often used as a pejorative, meaning underhanded and unethical. However, Machiavelli was simply being forthright about what it took to advance in the ruling structure of his day. He concluded that we could not do good without power, but we cannot gain power, nor keep it, without doing evil. The reason he gave for this was the people themselves. Many would abandon their leader if they thought another power seeker could offer them more. His view was that wise leaders don’t trust the people any more than the people trust their leaders. 

 

Machiavelli observed that: “princes who have little regard for their word have achieved great things, being the experts at beguiling man’s minds. In the end, these princes overcame those who relied solely on loyalty.” He ignored the good side of humanity to say “one can make this generalization about people: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well, they are yours. They would shed their blood for you, risk their property, their lives, their children, so long as I said above, the danger is remote, but when you are in danger, they turn against you.” 

 

Nice guys finish last was Machiavelli’s observation. Because rival claimants to power can be unscrupulous, the current leaders needed to act likewise to defend themselves. Consequently, he advised, “it is necessary that the prince should know how to color his nature well, and how to be a great hypocrite and dissembler.” He went so far as to argue that it was irresponsible to apply to political action the moral standards that are appropriate to private life. He reasoned that disorder would result, and the people would suffer more.

 

Machiavelli viewed public morality as only another tool for manipulation. He wrote: “a leader doesn’t have to possess all the virtuous qualities, but it’s absolutely imperative that he seems to possess them.” The crowd is won over “by appearances,” and as “the world is all crowd” appearances matter. He expressed admiration for “a certain prince of present times, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything but peace and faith, and is very hostile to both.” 

 

Over a century after Machiavelli’s defining work, Englishman Thomas Hobbes followed up with an equally pessimistic look at humanity. In his most famous work, Leviathan, he posited: “in the first place, I put forth a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceases only in death.” Hobbes argued that individuals living in a state of nature were constantly at war, did not know right from wrong, and lived lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He advocated rule by an absolute dictator.  Otherwise, “during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.” History proved Hobbes wrong. Totalitarian dictatorships lost out, as constitutional democracies proved far safer and more stable. 

 

Machiavelli’s theories had a longer shelf life, although the Hobbsian viewpoint is forever trying to make a comeback by those too addicted to power to remember history’s lessons. The Machiavellian or lying structure still predominates today. It underlies the false reality projected by our mainstream media, educational facilities, and other institutions. People tend to vote for whoever promises the most, regardless of broken promises in the past. Leaders who are immoral and cater to the selfish side of humanity usually end up on top. For most people, it is easier to fool them than convince them they have been fooled. 

 

As difficult as it is to accept, as an aggregate, the people do get the government they deserve. It’s no one’s fault of course. Previous human evolution got us here. The selfish gene lurking deep within us needs to be better directed to get us out of here. The question is how best to break out of the cycle of mutual distrust to create a participative, empowering future for all. The communications technology is now here to make a post-Machiavellian society possible. The veil is being pulled back on the secrecy necessary to run a society based on super elite lying. 

 

Machiavelli’s most well-known statement is that “it’s much safer to be feared than loved.” The reasoning is that fear is a more powerful emotion than loyalty or friendship for most. However, fear also breeds hatred. Machiavelli must have sensed the downside to his advice as he also wrote: “the best fortress is to be found in the love of the people, for although you may have fortresses, they will not save you if the people hate you.” It is instructive that the ruler who Machiavelli dedicated his book to rose above many of the Machiavellian precepts. Lorenzo de’ Medici did gain the love of many of his subjects through the tumultuous times of his day. Machiavelli did not gain the position at the prince’s court he was angling for with his book of advice. 

 

It seems bad luck for Machiavelli that he was drawn to one of the better rulers of his day. The immoral methods he promoted as necessary did hold sway over most rulers of the time. More importantly, the Machiavellian method has continued to prevail over the ages. In recent history, Machiavellianism has led to totalitarian governments enslaving and sometimes murdering millions of their citizens. 

 

It’s instructive that nations did not provide a refuge for individuals. Their rights were not protected. The current covid coup attempt is just the latest example where national borders failed to protect their constituents from totalitarian policies. Something more than nations is needed to guarantee individual rights. It’s time to build out new effective governing structures from the grassroots up, with a solid Universal Declaration of Human Rights providing security for the sovereignty of each individual and regional government from national, globalist or other would-be tyrants. 

Proofs of a Conspiracy

If indeed sometimes I do happen to tell the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.

 - Niccolo Machiavelli

Some super-elites have owned up to their Machiavellian bent in published books that anyone can access through the public library system. Insider economist John Keynes came clean in his 1931 book Essays in Persuasion. He wrote, “for at least another hundred years, we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” In other words, Keynes followed Machiavelli’s advice that it is necessary to do evil in order to do good. More about this later, but the monetary system Keynes and other mainstream economists preside over is essentially based on fraud and has enormous unintended consequences.

 

Jesuit and Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley, described by past U.S. President Bill Clinton as a mentor, wrote a book entitled Tragedy and Hope, a History of the World in Our Time (1966). In this massive tome, he laid bare the reality behind the Keynesian economics that dominated western society for decades during the industrial and digital ages. He wrote: “The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” Quigley also related that he was an insider with this group, had studied its inner workings for years, and approved of their overall aims.

 

Arnold J. Toynbee served as a director of the highly influential Royal Institute of International Affairs. He admitted his adherence to Machiavellian principles when he wrote: “we are at present working, discreetly with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands. It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly. To impugn the sovereignty of the local nation-states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or publicist can perhaps not quite be burned at the stake, but certainly be ostracized or discredited.”

 

In his 2002 book Memoirs, United Nations stalwart and financier David Rockefeller did not mince words when he penned: “for more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure ­— one world if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” 

 

The preceding is but a tiny sampling of the evidence of the super-elite push to weaken national sovereignty in favor of global, elitist governance and to do so by Machiavellian means. A key point here is that the conspiracy to create a world government is not a monolithic block as is sometimes presented. Like every other significant human endeavor, there are competing factions, outliers, and shifting alliances. As Keynes, Quigley, Toynbee, Rockefeller, and others make clear, even the injunction to secrecy is not something all feel bound to. A caveat is that when these insiders made their honest statements, they felt confident their grip on the mass media and educational systems would ensure our political reality would not become widespread knowledge. Rightly, it was assumed that few people would read the original works in low circulation journals or plow through Quigley’s book of more than 1300 pages. 

 

The Internet is a game-changer here. The relevant quotes were pulled from their obscurity and given wide circulation in a concise format, along with references to the original works. Belated, futile attempts to stifle information on the Internet is not so much to forestall fake news as to try to put this information genie back in the bottle. However, that genie can give us our best wishes, including accountable, transparent governance at all levels. Sounds impossible? Stay tuned. There has been decades of work done on promoting individual sovereignty by lawyers, economists, civil rights leaders and more. The time has come to put these into action, or bow down to would-be tyrants.

Rocketing Through Ages

All great things have small beginnings. 

– Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, the Art and Science of Systems Thinking. 

‘Change is the only constant’ is a well known maxim that generally holds true. However, there is an important distinction to be made between continuous change and discontinuous change. Continuous change is ongoing and gradual, a part of everyday life, like growing older or progressing through school. Discontinuous change is disruptive and divergent, creating upheaval, as in a job loss or the death of a partner. One’s way of life can be abruptly altered. 

 

An entire society can undergo discontinuous change. For example, revolutions and wars can set a nation on a new path. 

 

The most dramatic discontinuity in human affairs is referred to as an age change. In an age change, inventions and innovations lead to fundamentally new ways of doing things across many nations and peoples. World history enters a new phase. Now is such a time. Leading societies are entering the knowledge age; with the usual pushback from an out of touch elite. Previous human ages were the hunter-gatherer age, the agricultural age, the industrial age and the digital age. 

 

Humanity has evolved from primitive tribes with crude stone tools to attain a society in which information can flash around the world at 70% of the speed of light on fiber optic cables (almost 100% in laboratories}. The journey from stone tools to space travel occurred in a remarkably short time, throwing doubt on the standard evolutionary concepts of blind variation and selective retention. A trip back in time provides some context and illuminates humanity’s miraculous progress.

 

The hunter-gatherer age began about three million years ago when early human species became meat eaters. Carrion and disabled animals provided rich food energy in substantial amounts. The survival advantage was increased by the development of rudimentary hunting tools and strategies to bring down healthy animals. Hunting tactics and tools also proved critical for success in clashes with other tribes. Hunter-gatherers evolved into modern humans. Other early human species, like the Australopiths, remained plant eaters and became extinct.

 

The agricultural age began to supplant the hunter-gatherer age about 10,000 years ago. Cultivating crops and domesticating animals increased the food supply yet again. Nomadic life faded as settlements grew up around the new sources of food energy. Warfare increased as growing populations led to more territorial clashes. Hunter-gathering tribes slow to adapt were destroyed or absorbed by the larger populations and superior resources of agricultural age peoples. 

 

Cities and civilizations arose out of the conquests and alliances. Money was invented but ledgers, barter, and self-produced consumption dominated the economy. Industrial production made up less than five percent of the economy and included such things as metalwork for weaponry and luxury clothing. In 1701, Jethro Tull developed a much improved seed drill. It was an early agricultural mechanical device that planted seeds efficiently at the correct depth and spacing. He also developed a better plow and a horse drawn hoe to churn the earth between rows of plants. Tull’s added efficiencies laid the basis for modern agriculture and freed up farm labor for the dawning industrial age.

 

The industrial age started with more complex mechanical inventions. In 1698, Thomas Savery patented the first commercially used steam device, building on millenia of experiments with steam power. This manually operated invention pumped water out of mines and helped increase the production of coal and metals. It also pumped water into buildings and population centers. The boost to coal energy, metals and the water supply of cities fit well with the requirements of the industrial age. A previous employee of Savery, blacksmith Thomas Newcomen, worked under Savery’s patent to create a steam engine in 1712 that did not require manual labor to operate. It was a significant step up but not much used for purposes beyond that of the original design. James Watt sporadically improved on Newcomen’s design from 1763 to 1775. The result was that the steam engine became a world changer. It boosted production in farming and manufacturing. It also helped create the railroads to revolutionize travel and freighting. Ships with steam engines were freed from the vagaries of the winds. 

 

Steam engines heralded the end of the cottage industries and the birth of mass production. The 1784 invention of the power loom, driven by a steam engine, increased the output of a weaver by a factor of 40. Clothing became plentiful and inexpensive. The arrival of the steam tractor in 1812 gave farmers horsepower that didn’t get tired or need to be fed and sheltered. At a world’s fair in 1855, a steam thresher was demonstrated that could replace 123 farm workers. Even without the steam engine, industrial age materials led to improvements. Cyrus McCormick’s 1831 horse drawn reaper allowed one person to cut 40 acres in a day, whereas previously it took five people. Food production increased dramatically even as people migrated to towns and cities. Many of those uprooted by the mechanization of agriculture found work in the new manufactories of the burgeoning urban centers. 

 

As the agricultural age came to a close, less than three percent of the population was required to produce food surpluses in the developed nations. Tribes and countries slow to leave the agricultural age were easy prey for conquest and colonization by the superior weaponry and technology of the industrializing countries.

 

The harnessing of electricity occurred in tandem with the mechanical inventions and steam power to take industrial age life to another level. In 1600, the year Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, William Gilbert coined the term electricity within a six volume work that included the discovery of the earth’s magnetic pole. However, it wasn’t until a century and a half later that Benjamin Franklin discovered that electricity had positive and negative elements and that electricity flowed between these elements. In 1752, Franklin conducted his famous kite experiment. Michael Faraday invented the first electric motor in 1822 and laid the groundwork for future electrical innovations. In the late 1800s, Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison lit up cities. Tesla’s alternating current electricity distribution system eventually won out over Edison’s direct current design to bring electricity into households everywhere.

 

Electricity also revolutionized personal communications, enabling the invention of the telegraph and then telephone. For mass communications, radios and televisions supplemented the newspaper; which had previously supplanted the town crier and traveling minstrels of the agricultural age. Transportation took a leap forward when electricity sparked the inventions of the gasoline and diesel engines. Gas engines then overtook steam engines in the development of the automobile and made early powered flight possible.

 

By 1956, about 70 percent of the workforce was directly engaged in manufacturing activities in the leading countries. Then, increasing automation led to a gradual reduction in blue-collar employment and a rise in non-essential white-collar activities, such as advertising and finance. The digital age was on the horizon.  

 

Early efforts at computer development, started with the Babbage analytical machine in the 1830’s. Alan Turing jump-started successively more complex calculators leading to the first fully functional digital computer in 1946. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) occupied about 1,800 square feet, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed almost 50 tons. Over the subsequent years, advances in mainframe computers made them a necessity for successful large organizations. In 1964, the first desktop computer was unveiled to the public at the New York World’s Fair. About 44,000 were sold to businesses. The first personal computer (PC), the Kenbak-1, was introduced in 1971. Unassembled PCs were promoted to the early geek culture by magazines such as Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics.

 

The general public was welcomed to the digital age in 1977, when three pre-assembled mass-produced PCs hit the marketplace. The Apple II, the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Commodore PET or Personal Electronic Transactor required nothing more than an electrical outlet to set up. The first workable prototype of the Internet was invented in the late 1960s by the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANET. This blossomed into the World Wide Web in 1991, and connected the PCs of the people to a growing treasure trove of information. Search engines made information retrieval instantaneous and easy. The growing decentralized and democratized communication structures weakened the elite control of the mass media and planted the seeds of the knowledge age. 

 

The time between age changes decreased by magnitudes as knowledge built on knowledge to grow in an almost exponential, or Fibonacci, pattern. Larger populations that could communicate easily could do things that smaller populations could not undertake, something termed the increment of association. An individual can build a boat, but it takes a city to build a ship. Three million years ago, the hunter-gatherer age started, 10,000 years ago the agricultural age came on the scene, 400 years ago the industrial age began and about 40 years ago the digital age came to life. The amazing changes wrought over this time suggest a higher power at work. 

 

Over the next few years, as the knowledge age comes into being, humanity could enter a new phase of civilization. The widespread transparency made possible by the communications technology of the digital age has the capability to complete an overarching discontinuity that spans all previous human ages. With the birth of the knowledge age, the secrecy necessary to the Machiavellian lying structure is fading. The predominance of force and deception in human affairs since time immemorial could shift to the rule of ethics and morality; Machiavelli’s retirement party as it were. 

 

The overarching discontinuity would require a new word, as it would be a new phenomena in human history. In geological terms, we have the epoch, period, era and eon. So far, in human terms we have the age. There is a potential limitless horizon of wonders ahead for the human race.

 

Alternatively, current misguided efforts to return to the authoritarianism and totalitarianism of the past could reverse progress. The great reset promoted by the super-elites is aptly named. It implies a regression rather than an evolution. Society could again devolve to lord and serf dynamics. In this event, technology would provide a temporary cushion. The immediate effect could very well be a general rise in the material standard of living for many. The reason for this is that the sabotage of our current technological capabilities by obsolete institutions would be lifted. The sabotage was put in place in order to dominate people and would no longer be necessary under a police state in a worldwide totalitarian system. Then, much like the Soviet Union, there will be a violent, apocalyptic collapse, only this time the venue will be global and the violence will be epic. A new dark age, perhaps the final one, will be the result. Excessive concentration of power always leads to the same result in human affairs. It’s not just the historical record that proves this out. Lord Acton’s dictum that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is ultimately based on logic and neurochemical research. This will be covered in future chapters.

What’s in a Name

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. “The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

- C.S. Lewis - Alice in Wonderland

Futurist Alvin Toffler used the analogy of the third wave to describe the digital age. In 1982, insider Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote of an emerging technotronic era in Between Two Ages. The ill-fitting information age became the mainstream term for some time. The digital age was then relabelled by the elites as the ‘third industrial age’, reminiscent of Toffler’s third wave description. For the super-elite stalking horse, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the steam-powered industrial age became the first industrial age, while the electrified industrial age was considered the second industrial age. By splitting up the industrial age, the elites missed important factors, such as steam and electricity both replaced muscle power with machine power. Telegraph wires were laid down with steam engine tracks. The predominance of employment was in manufacturing throughout this largely meaningless division. 

 

The WEF third industrial age label is even more bizarre in that the digital age holds little of what most people think of as industrialization. As employment in manufacturing decreased and the service, information and research economic sectors grew, post-industrial economics and post-industrial society became common terms. The emerging knowledge age has been given the title of the fourth industrial age to add more confusion to the mix. 

 

The hunter gathering age, agricultural age, industrial age, digital age and knowledge age continue to be better descriptors. They reflect the dominant characteristics of each development and so are easier to understand and communicate. This might make the terms unfashionable among those who prefer wordplay that is obtuse; the better to limit the involvement of the general public it seems. A lack of ability on the part of the average person is the unspoken reason given for the exclusivity. However, even where this is true, it is due to a deficient education system designed by the very same elite who, in the main, consider themselves innately superior. The truth is the elites were either born with privileges that shielded them from the deficiencies of the educational systems, or had a God given immunity to such indoctrination, much like their opposites, the revolutionaries of each age. 

 

It’s worth pointing out another possible reason behind the elite age descriptions is that the first, second, third and fourth industrial ages suggest a certain continuity; one that doesn’t involve the elite changeout that generally accompanies an age change. The very concept of elitism might lose its current meaning in this age change and become extemporaneous, where situational leadership holds sway in a system with real education.

Discontinuity and the Deep State

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society. 

- Michel Foucault

Alvin Toffler wrote a groundbreaking trilogy on the birth of the digital age. The bestsellers were entitled Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift. The books were published 10 years apart. Future Shock (1970), promoted a theme of people and societies being overwhelmed by the age change, with many going into a form of shock, having difficulty making sense of their fast-changing world. In The Third Wave (1980), new ways of creating wealth and governance were among the topics. The book predicted transnational powers and separatist movements would increasingly weaken the nation state from above and below. The traditional idea of a world government accomplished by a unification of nation states would fade. Periodic polling at elections in the democracies were forecasted to move toward more direct interactions between the government and its constituents. Powershift (1990) explored new concepts of knowledge, wealth and force driven by the new digital age technologies. The empowerment of the average citizen was the focus, rather than the headline grabbing leadership changes at high levels. Toffler postulated that power is not merely transferred in an age change, it is transformed.

 

Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2006 and co-authored with wife Heidi Toffler, expanded on the concepts covered in the trilogy. Most notably, the book took into account the emergence of the World Wide Web, which started a year after Powershift was published. Topics in Revolutionary Wealth included the ramifications of a general populace having easy access to points of view outside the mainstream media. Cyberspace was considered important in how it affected the synchronization of work and play over larger geographical areas for both elites and the grassroots. 

 

In The Third Wave, there was a grim recounting of the transition from the agricultural age to the industrial age. An age already rife with violence became even moreso. In Alvin Toffler’s words, the age change involved: “one long blood-drenched drama of wars, revolts, famines, forced migrations, coups d’état, and calamities’’. In assessing the start of the digital age, he concluded, “today [1980] the stakes are much higher, the time shorter, the acceleration faster, and the dangers even greater”. Alvin Toffler went on to warn: “Much depends on the flexibility and intelligence of the elites, sub-elites, and super-elites. If these groups prove to be as shortsighted, unimaginative and frightened as most ruling groups in the past, they will rigidly resist the third wave [digital age] and thereby escalate the risks of violence and their own destruction.” 

 

Alvin Toffler knew that age changes threaten existing power structures. Elites invested and experienced in the old ways of doing things are usually slow to take advantage of the efficiencies of new inventions and innovations. For example, as the industrial age got underway, the aristocracy gave way to elected legislatures. Some were more successful than others in avoiding ”violence and their own destruction”. English and Dutch royalty segued into comfortable ceremonial roles while French and Russian royalty met tragic ends. Either way, the hereditary rulers of the agricultural age gave way to the elected legislatures of the industrial age. 

Arrested Development

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

 - Frederick Douglass

A decade or so after the publication of The Third Wave, the establishment mantra was that the information age had arrived. In terms of technological capability this was true. In terms of society in general, the disinformation age would be a better fit. The elites overall did “rigidly resist” institutional change for the age change. However, they were not overthrown or superseded as Toffler thought likely and as had happened in previous age changes. Instead, these elites co-opted the rise of the tech giants and other upstarts of the digital age through their control of finance and the mass media. New players that didn’t get on board with the old guard were starved of funds while facing well-funded opposition. Revolutionary players that managed to end-run the funding structure of the controlled banks faced a hostile mass media, which at that time was more effective at creating a hostile populace. As a last resort, violence was used. Together, this one-two-three punch confined nascent digital age institutions to the backwaters.

 

The mass media, central banks, state schools, legislative bodies, corporate structures and so on that emerged with the industrial age remained largely unchanged in the digital age. These institutions were devised before there were telephones, televisions, radios, computers, instantaneous trillion-dollar global transfers, or the capability to destroy the environment. Economic progress is still measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which bizarrely measures a murder and a marriage to be of equal value, if the same amount of money changes hands. The saying ‘war is good for business’ is part of this madness. 

 

Legislatures are increasingly in thrall to the new underground aristocracy and their money machine. Campaign financing, lucrative board appointments, jobs after defeat or retirement, and offshore accounts while in office, all serve to subvert constitutional democracies and republics. As such, legislatures are losing relevance to knowledge age governance structures that truly empower the individual. Citizens are increasingly calling for such improvements such as the right of recall, referendums, free votes, direct democracy and adherence to bills of rights. National legislatures remain largely unchanged but they are generally held in contempt and vilified in most countries as people look for new, relevant governance models. Growing evidence of voting irregularities to prop up pliable establishment puppet candidates is coming to light, further eroding trust.

 

Amazing technological advances covered many of the cracks caused by the obsolete institutions. Super production and new distractions sated enough of the general population so the industrial age elites could continue despite their shortcomings. However, like most temporary fixes, the necessary foundational work is only delayed, not forgone. 

 

Institutional changes are at the heart of successful age changes. As the agricultural age gave way to the industrial age, political institutions changed from feudalistic aristocracies to somewhat representative democracies. Economic institutions went from primarily barter and self-produced consumption to widespread capitalism and communism. Social institutional changes included extended families giving way to nuclear families and massive migration to urban centers. With fits and starts, the dramatic institutional changes worked in tandem with the emerging technologies of the time to lift civilizations both materially and morally.

 

Because institutional changes were largely stillborn in the digital age, many facets of society degraded, even as new technology made more possible. Just a few decades ago, it was common to leave houses and other possessions unlocked in most areas of the developed nations. Now everything is locked up tight, often alarmed and with bars on the windows of buildings in many areas. Security cameras are common. The income of many of the essential workers has been falling in real terms for decades. Growing homeless encampments have surpassed those of the dirty thirties in some areas. 

 

The social decline in the digital age is in stark contrast to the significant improvements wrought during humanity’s advances through the agricultural and industrial ages. Rather than the temporary dislocation caused by a new age, a general malaise has set in and deepened with time, as the needed institutional changes were put off. For many, the digital age became a dark age of the soul, with economic, intellectual and cultural decline. American professor Brene Brown points out the world’s leading country is riddled with “the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history.” 

 

To be fair, there has been significant progress in such things as ecological awareness and bigotry of all kinds. Warfare has also diminished dramatically. However, the progress against bigotry is unraveling, as elites ramp up the age-old divide and conquer strategy, as they become increasingly desperate to continue their dominance. Ecological issues are misused to promote centralized elite power, thereby discrediting them as well with many. The idea of globalism has been likewise besmirched. Progress against warfare could similarly regress, as an awakening populace, driven by the eternal human urge for freedom will only take so much.

 

THE ROAD FROM SERFDOM

 Change of Change

 “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

Humanity stands at a fork in the road that is as significant as any in history. True to form, the ruling class approach to the coming knowledge age is, in the words of futurist Alvin Toffler, ‘short-sighted and unimaginative’. Necessary reforms are being ‘rigidly resisted’ by the procrastinating elites who fear and dread real change as much as the average worker facing layoffs. Instead of fundamental institutional evolution, there is an attempt to misuse new technology to put a facelift on neo-feudalism. A classic case of putting lipstick on a pig as it were.

Enhanced freedom for the populace is rejected in favor of bizarre proposals coming out of the banker stalking horse at the WEF. One article on the WEF website mentions the desirability of implanting new technologies into people. The lead-up is a condemnation of medical coercion, framed in the context of potential legislation against some implants. Then there is a stipulation the person being implanted should not have agency, or a choice, in the matter. This is of course the ultimate in medical coercion. It gets worse but suffice it to say the logical inconsistencies are mind boggling.

While disappointing, the escalation of elite inanities is not surprising. In his trilogy on age changes, futurist Toffler did not adequately address the Catch-22 inherent in an awakened populace under Machiavellian leadership. How do the current rulers get off this tiger without being eaten? As mentioned in part one of this series, some royal houses, as in England and Holland, segued into ceremonial roles during the transition from the agricultural age to the industrial age. Other royalty, as in Russia and France, met tragic ends. Despite calls for revenge, the view here is that the peaceful change model needs to be expanded as much as possible for the transition to the knowledge age. As covered in Part 1 of this series, Machiavellians are often caught in a damned if you, damned if you don’t situation. This is largely due to a previously beguiled population rewarding those who lie and make false promises.

To take the path out of the jungle, to what Toffler and others have referred to as the first true human civilization in history, the transition itself should reflect the desired society as much as possible. Developments that call for a relatively peaceful age change this time around include the advent of nuclear weapons and serious ecological challenges. Humanity’s capacity for repeating a history of widespread violence during an age change has reached its limits. It has been said that people and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted. It is the view here that this point has been reached: change of change is necessary. Peace and reconciliation should be the dominant theme for the knowledge age transition when the time comes.

A Gathering Storm

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

― H.L. Mencken

In 2019, an Ipsos-Mori survey of more than 16,000 adults in 23 countries revealed the majority think their society is broken, the economy is rigged, and traditional politics doesn’t work for them. Gideon Skinner, Head of Political Research at the polling firm, commented “[t]hese findings reveal a worrying lack of confidence in the traditional political establishment around the world and not much more confidence in other key institutions such as the media, courts, or big business”. An honest journalist summarized the results of the poll with “outrage with mainstream institutions has become a mass sentiment.” Polls can lie, but the evidence bears this one out.

The powerful populist movement in the U.S. is one sign of the growing unrest. It culminated in an attack on their legislature in response to a highly questionable presidential election and is now biding its time, growing in power. Another was the yellow vests protests that rocked France. The French government backed down from the planned fuel tax hike that sparked the protests. Regardless, the movement continued, segueing into demands for political reforms and spreading to other countries. Covid restrictions finally shut it down in early 2020.

The cessation was temporary. As so often happens, government repression fed fuel to the fire. Once it became clear to many that covid restrictions were more about political control than health, widespread protests became a mainstay worldwide. Trust in establishment institutions fell further.

 More politicians are coming onside, some sincere, some hurrying to get in front of the public parade that is forming up. The covid pretext for a police state could be weakening, although there is talk around bringing back ineffective restrictions. Regardless, there will be another excuse for totalitarianism already teed up, It could be a false flag cyber-attack, a ‘climate change’ emergency, a war or some combination of ‘an endless series of hobgoblins’. The only certainty is that society is reaching a tipping point, as more and more people wake up to the elite’s strategy of using fear to manipulate populations. 

The battle lines for the coming age change are firming up. On the one side is the great reset, a devolution back to full-on feudal times, with the destruction of the middle class and jettisoning of human rights. The World Economic Forum, with its dehumanizing fourth industrial revolution, is on point. On the other side is a great awakening; an evolution, with broad-based, servant leadership. It holds the promise of enhanced individual freedom in a secure, sustainable society, made possible by our fantastic technology and automated wealth production. What remains to be seen, before the eventual breakthrough to the aptly named knowledge age, is the degree of violence involved.

Force and Deception

“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

Some good news is that deadly force on behalf of the establishment is less tenable today. The widespread massacres of rebellious populations used in the past look to be off the table; not least because most police and soldiers would refuse orders and switch sides. This happened during the collapse of the former USSR a few decades ago. Troops sent by communist hardliners held their fire as a Russian rebel leader climbed on top of a tank. He gave a speech decrying totalitarianism from this makeshift stage. Attempts to use troops from other nations to attack populations won’t hold either, as the awakening is worldwide and they will be needed at home to keep order.  A supplementary safeguard against rogue governments in the West is a population that is armed in some countries. The U.S. is particularly relevant here.

Chinese communist soldiers did fire on their rebellious population in the Tiananmen Square massacre. However, that country lacked the democratic traditions that infuses much of the world and Chinese citizens had been disarmed. Even so, it was a one-off massacre, and the Chinese leadership was forced to extend many freedoms to quell the unrest  The reforms included limited free markets and the attendent private property ownership. Unfortunately, political totalitarianism, with its widespread human rights abuses, continued despite the loosening of economic restrictions.

As such, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) serves as an inspiration and model for many elites in the West. Their censored Internet and big brother surveillance system, under the misnomer of social credit, have power addicts worldwide salivating at the possibility of extending such slavery. A Canadian Prime Minister went so far as to express open admiration for the inhumane Chinese dictatorship. Public opinion, and likely behind-the-scenes pushback by the military in the West, has recently forced much of the elite admiration for CCP repression to go underground.

Deception as a method of elite control is also fading. Edelman’s 2021 annual trust barometer revealed that fewer than half of Americans trust their legacy media. The results are an all-time low since the prestigious poll’s inception. Fifty-six percent of U.S. citizens agreed with the statement: “journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.” Polling in other countries reflects similar sentiments.

The widespread availability of competing narratives on the Internet is of course is at the heart of the growing mistrust in legacy media. The new decentralized media is well on the way to replacing centrally-controlled mass media and will be at the forefront of driving more significant institutional change in the future. 

The Information Wars

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and will never be.

— Thomas Jefferson

As legacy print and TV media fade, the establishment has picked up the pace in attempts to control Internet information. However, social media censorship by establishment stalwarts such as Facebook and Youtube, is defeated by the growth of more democratic competitors like Gab, MeWe, Truth Social, along with Rumble, Bitchute and Odysee. Salted search engine results to bolster the official narrative has led to people rejecting Google, Yahoo and Bing in favor of more honest alternatives for searches on political matters. Some dissident information sources are taken over and subverted, but new ones spring up to take their place. Truth wants to be free. Meanwhile the Tech giants are forced to temper their censorship or risk losing more and more of their audience to the upstarts.

The end result is that elite disinformation tactics end up seeing the light of day. The blowback is further damage to establishment credibility. It is not unusual for condemnations and ridicule to be the dominant themes in the comment section of an official news story that at one time would have been widely believed. The so-called ‘fact checkers’, sometimes unfairly, meet a similar fate when they are sent in to try to turn the situation around. Disinformation on one side tends to induce it on the other and some dissidents adopt the tactics of the Machiavellians to spread countervailing fake news. However, they are also being found out and lose credibility. With the widespread use of the Internet, transparency and truth are at last on a level playing field with lies and deception.

The Communist Chinese Party has led the way in attempts to throttle Internet access, but VPNs and other work-arounds are common in that country. There is a push to expand the CCP model to other nations, such as Canada, but constitutions around the world are blunting the effort. Any heavy-handed efforts to physically shut down the Internet would have massive repercussions and tip many fence-sitters into the revolutionary camp. Localized efforts would also have a cobbled together Internet back up and running, in communities, that would now be committed to revolutionary change.

The Internet was a result of a U.S. military project, ARPANET. The protocols were designed to prevent decapitation of communications capabilities by a nuclear strike. Redundancy in the form of mesh configurations and flexible routing instructions would send messages around destroyed cables and obliterated communications hubs. The enemy at that time was totalitarianism in the form of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Fortuitously, the decentralization design is now proving effective against the resurgence of totalitarianism today.

Relatively inexpensive desktop publishing is also playing a role in the great awakening. A key facet of the collapse of the totalitarian USSR and its satellite states was dissident print publishing collectively known as samizdat. Print is now secondary to online, but still effective. Department and grocery stores that invested extensively in online shopping and advertising still spend millions printing and distributing flyers, and it’s not because they want to reduce their profits. What is more, totalitarians continue making extensive use of their legacy print media empires to spread propaganda. Truthful newspapers and magazines ensure this channel of elite disinformation does not go unchallenged on its home ground. The revolutionaries are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to financing and other resources, but people are hungry for more honest journalism. In a classic case of David and Goliath, the dissident newspaper DRUTHERs established a firm foothold, even as legacy newspapers continue to retreat. In Canada, governments have gone so far as to use taxpayer dollars to prop up and bribe legacy print media. The move has backfired as the primary result of the policy has been yet a further loss of credibility for these compromised sources.

The attempted covid coup is a test case in the information wars. The official narrative, thoroughly dominant at the beginning of the pandemic, was beaten back and looks to be on its way to defeat in many areas. Publicizing the establishment sabotage of early, effective covid treatment opened the eyes of many. Hypocritical, inconsistent and often bizarre social restrictions around the disease were widely communicated and added to the pushback. Lies have come to light regarding the risk/benefit and effectiveness of the leaky jab, adding to the outrage. The downplaying of natural immunity and the lack of targeted protection for the most vulnerable also became widely known. Alternative media gave a public platform to brave medical personnel, outlier politicians, and above all, everyday informed, honest people to step into the breach. A veritable tsunami of lies, intimidation, coercion, and finally state physical violence promoting the covid coup was blunted and then reversed. The end result was a further loss of trust in establishment institutions for many and the setting of the stage for the next step forward.

The Money Trick

In reality, the ‘miracles’ performed by credit are fundamentally comparable to the ‘miracles’ an association of counterfeiters could perform for its benefit by lending its forged banknotes in return for interest. In both cases, the stimulus to the economy would be the same, and the only difference is who benefits.

 - Maurice Félix Charles Allais, French physicist and economist, 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Insider Carrol Quigley chose his words carefully when he wrote the financial system “was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world” in his book, Tragedy and Hope. This is accomplished through the ability of banks to create money from thin air. For the uninitiated, banks do not lend the money of their depositors. Each time they make a loan, brand new money is created. The new money is lent out at compounding interest to the general public and captive governments. The money to pay the interest to retire the debt does not exist, until it is created from nothing, as more debt, at more compounding interest. This inexorably leads to debt servitude. It is the reason the world is awash in debt today.

The method of money creation is not a conspiracy theory, but an established fact; one that is now coming into the general consciousness. The Bank of England includes it on their website as of this date. As far back as 1922, the Chicago Federal Reserve outlined the money creation process in a booklet entitled Modern Money Mechanics. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS), located in Basel Switzerland, coordinates the fraud on an international basis.

Even if an individual has no personal debt, they are still collared through odious government debts. In Canada, it is estimated one-third of tax dollars goes towards paying interest on money created from nothing and ostensibly lent to governments by private banks. Refusal to pay one’s portion of taxes to service odious government debt results in property confiscation, fines and sometimes prison. In more honest times, the so-called debt payments would have been called tribute, paid by a weaker state to avoid attack by a stronger, predatory state. In mafia terminology, it is called a protection racket. Governments that attempt to set up a more honest money system are subjected to sanctions or worse.

Interest on money created from nothing adds significantly to the cost of almost everything. Businesses are usually paying interest on loans. This cost must be built into the price of goods and services. For a mortgage, it is not unusual to pay two or three times the cost of a house before the principal and interest are finally paid off. One reason the system continues is that it is so unjust most people have difficulty even imagining it, let alone accepting it. Incontrovertible evidence of the money trick is now easily accessible online, but cognitive dissonance prevents understanding for many.

Often there is a contrived shortage of money that results in not enough money being in circulation for everyone to pay their debts and interest. Interest rate hikes or the withholding of new loans can cause this. For example, as economist Milton Friedman pointed out, the money supply was cut by 30% for the Great Depression. As soon as WWII started, the money supply was rapidly expanded. Previously it was held to be impossible to hire one unemployed in a family to build needed housing and so on, but now both spouses could be paid to build things to blow up.

Monetary contractions result in a game of musical chairs, with the difference that those caught out of position lose their homes and businesses. One trauma this causes has been called a scarcity mentality, which feeds greed and promotes the worship of money. It is akin to hoarding because of a fear of the future. Beyond Greed and Scarcity is an excellent book on the subject by ex-banker and financial expert Bernard Lietaer. Lietaer also has some excellent essays on the Internet on the current reality of money creation.

The monetary fraud has been hidden in plain sight for some time, in low circulation journals and the unpublicized work of many monetary reformers, including accredited financial professionals. Arrayed against this was the usual tsunami of disinformation from the legacy media. There was no countervailing Internet for most of this history. The silver lining to the attempted covid coup and the lying that was exposed around this issue is that it has opened the eyes of many to the extent of establishment dishonesty. Cognitive dissonance as to the true character of our Machiavellian elite has lessened considerably. This blessing in disguise is a step towards the knowledge age.

Mammon’s Early Childhood

“Money is a great servant but a bad master.”

― Francis Bacon

The monetary fraud, or what Nobel Laureate economist Maurice Allais likened to counterfeiting, originated in medieval times. Goldsmiths fortified their places of business to forestall robberies of the precious metal they fashioned into jewelry and ornaments. Other people could store their gold in the strong-houses for a small fee and were given a receipt for the amount. The depositor could go get their gold when they wanted to make a trade, keeping it secure in the meantime. This was the beginning of the banks.  

It was soon found more convenient to sign over the gold receipt where it was trusted by the other party in a transaction. The gold could stay in safekeeping and not weigh down traveling traders. This was the reiteration of paper money and its widespread introduction into the European economy. (Paper money had previously been a facet of the Chinese economy for centuries before it collapsed, eventually re-emerging in 1890 as the yuan).

The next step in the evolution of money came when the goldsmiths observed that relatively few of the receipts were cashed in at any one time. There was always a significant amount of the customer’s gold just sitting there, gathering dust. Goldsmiths began lending out some of this surplus gold at interest, as though it were their own. The fraud naturally resulted in less gold in the stronghouse than was indicated on the total receipts in circulation. This was the start of fractional reserve.

In 1694, the fractional reserve fraud was formalized when a Royal Charter was granted for the founding of the Bank of England. Moneymen agreed to finance the war debts of William III in exchange for the right to issue banknotes and loans that were only partially backed by funds invested in the bank. England changed from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy at this time. It meant a royal decree could not override the decisions of elected representatives, many of whom relied on the banks for finance. Bankers no longer had to be looking over their shoulder at a royal power that could arbitrarily steal their gold as had happened in the past.

With the birth of the industrial age, extensive demands for capital elevated the power of the banks once again. They completed displacing the medieval Church as the dominant power behind thrones and then legislatures. In the accelerated economy, more and more paper money and other financial instruments were issued, while the percentage of gold backing them went down and down. In 1971, the world’s largest economy, the United States, dropped the gold standard entirely. Banking networks and their ability to create money became more powerful than the elected representatives. Money ruled supreme as legislatures, parliaments and senates were compromised by both campaign finance requirements and the need to stay onside with the bought out and subverted legacy media. This concentrated power corrupted, as concentrated power always eventually does, and  has brought the world to its present situation.

The Antidote

In college, I was always disappointed by lectures that covered social problems but failed to identify what I could do to change them. Part of the problem was that many professors simply didn’t believe they had a role in converting awareness to action.

- Ben Rattray, founder change.org

Property ownership is at the core of individual freedom and was affirmed as such as the royal houses gave way to elected legislatures, during the transition from the agricultural age to the industrial age. The American Revolution was a pivotal event in this process. The wisdom of its leaders is still relevant today. At the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 Benjamin Watkins Leigh observed, “power and property can be separated for a time by force or fraud — but divorced, never. For as soon as the pang of separation is felt...property will purchase power or power will take over property.” Early American secretary of state Daniel Webster observed “power naturally and necessarily follows property.” Noah Webster, who has been described as the father of American scholarship and education, wrote “[l]et the people have property and they will have power — a power that will forever be exerted to prevent the restriction of the press, the abolition of trial by jury, or the abridgment of any other privilege.”

To resume the progress of civilization, the way forward is opposite the WEF ‘own nothing’ push, which is of course the main plank of communism’s abolition of private property. The antidote is the creation of what has been termed an ownership society, wherein each and every individual owns a part of the amazing technology that is making labor less and less a factor in wealth production. A discipline known as binary economics (BE) is the pre-eminent starting point here. There has been decades of work on this concept by lawyers, economists, and other professionals.

The employee stock ownership legislation in the U.S. was a preliminary step to widespread ownership. It was created by binary economists who gained the support of influential politicians in 1956. Unlike communism, the track record of the BE solution for the future is one of success.

It is not a stretch to argue that civilized means must be used to transition to a truly civilized age and binary economics meets this requirement. For starters, the design involves bringing everyone up, without bringing anyone down. Unlike past age changes, the establishment is not deprived of any property during the changeover. Instead, the continual increases in wealth derived from new technologies are widely distributed by free-market principles, while respecting the property rights of existing owners. Elites would not be deprived of material goods, but would forgo their ability to enslave others. The effect on them will likely be beneficial for most.

Every year many trillions of dollars of new capital come into existence through what is essentially a shell game involving large financial houses, central banks and captive governments. In a binary economy, this injection of new money would not go in a concentrated stream to the super-rich and their supporters through the monetary fraud. Instead, it would disperse to enter the economy in the form of interest-free loans to each and every individual. The loans could only be used for the purchase of carefully vetted, non-transferable, productive property. Insurance products with premiums paid by the borrowers would provide collateral. The loans are repaid through the profits on the productive investments, with insurance looking after any defaults. This design enables people without significant collateral to gradually become substantial owners of productive property. It gets around the old catch-22 of ‘you need money to make money’.

It also updates old employment paradigms to align with the new automated technology. You don’t have to worry about a robot taking your job when you own the robot.

Binary economics has been likened to capital homesteading, in recognition of previous legislation in North America that made landowners out of many of the propertyless classes in the agricultural age. In this policy, enacted both in the U.S. and Canada, land was sold for a nominal amount on the condition that it was improved and made productive. The explosion in new property owners occasioned by this legislation formed a foundation for the middle class and democracy that led to North America becoming a beacon and desired emigration destination for the world. Capital homesteading follows a similar design, except relatively limitless capital takes the place of limited land.

UBO vs UBI

“The power of community to create health is far greater than any physician, clinic or hospital.”

– Mark Hyman

After the BE loan is paid off, the productive property ownership provides a dividend income stream to every individual, much as it works for the wealthier today. The tax-sheltered, full payout dividends would grow with the economy. Those concerned about limits to growth have a stunted view of what growth is. Increases in quality rather than quantity is a form of growth that enhances sustainability. Economic growth could comprise growth in more green space, given value by a populace with increasing leisure time, or in low or no impact digital educational and entertainment products, or in the not too distant future, growth in extraterrestrial ventures. Doing more with less in a hallmark of progress. Environmentally friendly growth possibilities are virtually limitless.

The citizen dividends could be termed a Universal Basic Ownership income (UBO). UBO is fundamentally different from the Universal Basic Income (UBI) being pushed by those who want a disempowered population. From trust fund recipients to welfare cases, many people suffer from a ‘crisis of meaning’ with the passivity and detachment inherent in not being actively involved in the economic activity of a community. A UBI would make this social debilitation endemic. With UBO, citizens are active, involved participants in the larger economy, creating a sense of belonging and interest in governance.

A UBO also puts more power in the hands of the individual. Rather than faceless bureaucrats of a UBI determining a citizen’s income level, the individual has significant input into choosing their investments. As shareholders, they can also vote for company direction or even serve on boards to have input into their income level; along with the beneficial impacts their investment brings to their community and society in general. In the employee stock ownership legislation invented by binary economists, the connection between worker inputs and rewards are of course obvious.

The binary economics aspect of the UBO means the labor work you do is not deducted or otherwise affected by your investment income. Binary means two, as in two separate streams of income, should you choose to engage in paid work after your dividends income can supply you with your needs and wants. Prying bureaucrats will have no say in the matter.

With UBI, power is centralized in a small governing body, and so invites corruption. A political party can promise a big raise to get elected, regardless if the real economy is producing the necessary goods and services. This leads to inflation. They can also cut off someone’s UBI income for not bowing down to those doling it out. This means the UBI is essentially a recipe for tyranny. In a UBO, power is decentralized and a truly free market handles funds distribution; in tandem with the production of marketable goods and services.

And finally, in the unlikely event, all carefully vetted investments fail for a citizen, the UBI concept can still come into play; but as a last resort, for a small minority. The government-administered guaranteed income would also be temporary, as each year new interest-free loans to invest become available for each person. The negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman is the way to go for this small part of the economy. The process respects privacy and is harder to cut off due to its tie-in with income tax. You just send in your tax form like always, and your tax refund can be disbursed in monthly installments sufficient to provide the basics of food, shelter, and clothing.  This also makes this method very efficient. No new bureaucracy is required. Existing government tax agencies could administer it through their normal procedures. The tax burden for such a system would be a fraction of the myriad social programs set up today. Because binary economics was stalled for a few decades by the power addicts, some UBO might have to be reverse engineered from existing government support programs. Regardless, abject poverty, in the midst of plenty, would become a thing of the past.

Own or be Owned

Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights - A. 17.

As economist and lawyer Norm Kurland put it “On the one hand there is capitalism, an economic system governed by market forces but where economic power is concentrated in the hands of a few who own or control productive capital. On the other hand, socialism, in its many forms, is an economic system governed centrally by a political elite, with even more highly concentrated ownership and economic power. Logically, a “just third way” would be a free-market system that economically empowers all individuals and families through direct and effective ownership of the means of production — the best check against the potential for corruption and abuse.”

Various investment instruments have been proposed for binary economics. The existing Employee Stock Ownership Program is a good start, but it limits involvement to those employed in the relevant private companies. More is needed to both expand widespread ownership stakes and also to make each and every individual an owner. Proposed vehicles include Community Investment Corporations, Consumer Stock Ownership Programs and Community Land Development Cooperatives. Under these financial instruments, utility companies, new industrial and residential developments, small businesses and larger companies, and so on, can all come into being with direct ownership by individuals. Along with other investment ownership designs, these would form the foundation of what has been called economic democracy. It is true stakeholder capitalism, not the WEF version, in which the term is misused to camouflage a push for a further concentration of power for the few. Capital Homesteading funding can also be used to buy existing productive property from the estates of the dying lords of the last age, to transform them into widely owned entities.

In binary economics, all will have equal opportunity, but individual productive investments, along with one’s own labor, will lead to significantly different individual material wealth results. Some might prefer more free time, or to work on things that interest them most, regardless of pay. As 1920’s monetary reformer and real social credit founder C.H. Douglas put it, “what we really demand of existence is not that we shall be put into somebody else’s Utopia, but we shall be put in a position to construct a Utopia of our own.” Instead of a few elites playing God, each person can become master of the technology needed to realize his or her fullest human potential and dignity; which is very likely divinely inspired.

The Community Land Development Cooperative (CLDC) might be especially useful for designing prototypes. Communities of the future can be modeled where each individual has direct ownership of not just their residences, but shares in the utility support systems as well as investments in all other manner of wealth creation. Re-worked condominium legislation or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) might aid here, keeping in mind condominiums can include separate housing units and varying degrees of flexibility. Parallel structures being developed by dissidents can naturally align with this justice-based outlook. Already, superior educational, medical and other initiatives outside existing government control are springing up. Bringing these together in a prototypical community could be a next step.

The unit of accounting, money, can more closely reflect real wealth production and sustainable resource use, rather than speculation and sometimes the destruction of real wealth, as happens in war and disease. In essence, it could be a resource based accounting system. This is in line with the work of visionary economists like Kenneth Boulding, who was an early adopter of the term knowledge age. Energy would be a primary component of a scientific money system that symbolizes wealth.

The ecological danger that has been termed the tragedy of the commons can be solved in a sustainable political manner under such a prototypical design. You can’t have environmental sustainability without political stability, and the injustice inherent in the fourth industrial age design, under the aegis of WEF, guarantees any political stability will be relatively short-lived there. The urge for freedom in human affairs is eternal.

More information on binary economics in a mainly U.S. context can be found at the Center for Economic and Social Justice website at cesj.org. The website at globajusticemovement.org works on marrying the core concepts of binary economics with other reform efforts in a world context.

SOMETHINGS OLD, SOMETHING NEW

Witch Doctors and Warlords

“At their best, people are the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice they are the worst.”

-        Aristotle

In the hunter-gatherer age, individuals directly participated in the tribal discussions and decision-making that helped shape their lives. Leadership was fluid and flexible, determined by skills and experience related to a situation at hand. Expert hunters, shamans, elders, toolmakers and other tribal members rotated through positions of authority dependent on the issue, thereby optimizing the group’s aggregate knowledge.

The situational leadership, along with stringent survival conditions, required trust and transparency for a tribe’s wellbeing and very survival. Consequently lying and deception were seen as serious offenses that could lead to social ostracism, exile or worse. Anyone attempting to gain influence through dishonesty was likely to be exposed and held accountable In the small, close knit community, 

An exception was the shaman. As in all professions, then and now, some prioritized their knowledge to serve their constituency while others focused on personal aggrandizement. The latter conflated their special knowledge of healing herbs and other natural elements to bolster specious claims that would further enhance their status. The alleged special powers included the ability to control the weather and to communicate with the spirits of animals and ancestors.

The weather could be observed by all so that a shaman might be replaced for too many inaccurate predictions. However, such missteps could also be blamed on the trickery and capriciousness of spirits and gods. The trickster god justification for broken promises was often accepted because of a shaman’s successes with healing herbs and accurate predictions of less complex phenomena. In short, some shaman parlayed learned skills little understood by the majority to claim a special relationship with a magical world; one that was not observable to the community at large and so largely shielded from tribal approbation.

Trickster gods were featured throughout hunter-gatherer societies in the ancient world, a common thread of humanity through time and space. Loki conned the Norse, Greeks were duped by Hermes, Amerindians were tricked by Coyote and Kokopelli, various African tribes were fooled by Anansi, Eshu and Elegba, Kitsune hoodwinked the Japanese, Maui beguiled Polynesians, Puck deceived Northwestern Europeans and so on. Trickster gods could be considered personifications of the bewildering complexity of nature and the divine. However, their main political purpose was to serve as handy excuses for the broken promises of dishonest or delusional shamans. 

This is not to discount the very real phenomena of special personalities being gifted in tapping into prescient information.The wondrous world of entangled quantum mechanics gives scientific credence to the real world phenomena of pragmatic police sometimes using people with psychic abilities to help solve crimes. Unfortunately, the status and economic potential attached to such abilities attracts a plethora of poseurs, then and now. Ironically, by indulging in immoral behavior, it is the view here that manipulators move away from rather than towards enhanced sensory capabilities.

Religions headed by shamans were originally animistic, meaning spiritual or supernatural qualities were attributed to natural phenomena such as animals, plants, weather, tree and stone. The divine was considered to be imbued in all things and is another ancient belief that has merit today in the world of cosmology and quantum physics. Spiritual practices helped to explain the origin of the world, the meaning of life, and the relationship between humans and the divine. Hallucinogens sometimes played an important role in the religious ceremonies, giving all adult tribal members a taste of a mystical experience. 

Through an exaggeration of their spiritual and healing abilities, some shamans could grow to take on a permanent leadership role within a tribe, wielding outsized influence even in areas where another tribal member had superior knowledge. Social manipulation could replace merit. Fluid and flexible leadership was on the way out. As power shifted from the community to leaders, religious beliefs evolved from animism to include deities, myths, and elaborate rituals that were more inspired by humans seeking higher social status and control over others than anything divinely inspired. 

As populations grew, warfare between tribes increased. A highly skilled hunter had the attributes of a highly skilled warrior. Such people also attained a permanent leadership position where the tribe was under sustained threat from other groups of humans. Truth and transparency faded during wartime. Deception was not only allowed against hostile tribes, it was celebrated. Erstwhile hunters became trained in trickery and duplicity against the most discerning prey, other humans. The shaman continued to play an important role during conflicts, beseeching the gods for victory, looking for auguries of warning or success and promising troops spiritual rewards. Religion provided the warrior leadership with a source of legitimacy and support and became a tool to help maintain social order and stability. Together, the war leader and the religious leader made a formidable team in hunter-gatherer societies and beyond. An exceptional person might take on the role of warrior priest. The dawning agricultural age and following industrial age were to be ages of widespread warfare, with high priests and warchiefs being central players.

Kings and Serfs

“In every republic there are two parties, that of the nobles and that of the people. The former have a great desire to dominate, whilst the latter have only the wish to not be dominated “

- Niccolo Machiavelli

As populations grew rapidly during the agricultural age, the fireside political structure became unwieldy and then impossible. Direct involvement with decision making became a thing of the past for most. Some agricultural age leaders misused their relative social remoteness to control information and mislead trusting populations. In true Machiavellian style, power-seekers who were “experts at beguiling people’s minds” and made false claims and promises usually won out over those who “relied solely on loyalty”. With the unscrupulous winning most contests, secrecy and conspiracy became integral parts of most political processes.

The rough egalitarianism of the hunter-gatherer age gave way to hierarchies that often became extreme. Excessively concentrated power corrupted to the point of madness. It was not unusual for early agricultural age rulers to claim, and in many cases believe, they had god-like or demigod status. Other royalty, hIgh priests and generals rounded out the top tier of society. A relatively small middle class was composed of various military, religious and civilian professionals. Peasantry was the fate of the masses while slaves were at the bottom. One small step above the slaves were the serfs.

Serfs were legally bound to the land of their masters and could not leave without permission. Getting married often required the approval of their lord. They were referred to by various names throughout history: Egyptian heqanakht, Greek helots and Roman coloni all served similar roles. After the fall of the Roman Empire, serfs gained their current nomenclature and labored under aristocratic knights allied to a hereditary or military ruler. A relatively few serfs gained freedom through valor in combat, manumission by generous owners, or fleeing to newly settled land where few questions were asked. 

The Roman Catholic Church held it all together in western Europe. Popes mediated disputes between competing powers of the day such as England, France and the German or Spanish led Holy Roman Empire. The Church was also constantly negotiating its own power and influence in an uneasy alliance with the various kingdoms and principalities. 

The Vatican itself owned vast amounts of land and was often involved in the feudal system as a landlord or lord. Some Christian spiritual leaders stayed true to their religion, which advocated for the poor and the oppressed. They argued that serfs had a right to fair treatment and protection from their lords and that the Church had a duty to ensure this. Other clergy joined in the oppression and social climbing, their professed beliefs and their actions diverging.

In return for their support of the Pope, secular rulers received the carte blanche of ‘The Divine Right of Kings’. This declaration was a political and religious doctrine that asserted a monarch's authority came directly from God, and so was absolute. Social reformers were not just going against the established order in agitating for change, they were ostensibly going against the wishes of the creator of the universe. With religious belief in decline today, science rather than spirituality, is misrepresented by power seekers in their quest for dominance. 

In eastern Europe, the Greek Orthodox Church held sway in the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine had emerged from the eastern half of the Roman Empire in the 4th century. The Emperor there was considered to be the head of the Church as well as the head of state. The Byzantine Empire fell to the Muslim Ottoman Turks in 1453, but the population remained predominantly Christian under a tolerant Muslim religious policy. The erstwhile lands of the still Christian Byzantine Empire were rejoined to Europe when the Ottoman Empire in turn met its end in WWI.

In both east and west Europe, the Roman tradition of widespread slavery had continued. For example, about 10% of England's population entered in the Domesday Book  in 1086 were slaves, despite an injunction against slavery there in 1066. Pope Innocent III issued a decree in the 13th century that prohibited the enslavement of those of the Christian faith in western Europe but it was not universally upheld. Estimates for slavery in Byzantine were higher, topping out at 30% of the population in some areas. A caveat is that historical records are incomplete and, tellingly, the line between slave and serf was often blurred. However, most European slaves, east and west, eventually made the transition into serfdom, where they still weren’t free, but were responsible for their own upkeep and hence easier to exploit. 

False Spring

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Medieval serfdom started to fade with the bubonic plague, which decimated the populations of Europe. The resultant shortage of labor gave the surviving serfs some leverage. Political agitation accelerated the process. The invention of the longbow, musket and other weapons gave a trained peasant the military capacity to overcome an armored knight. The result was knights were no longer considered the tanks of their day on the medieval battlefield. Their fiefdoms and their supporting serfs were gradually replaced by more centralized kingdoms with well-equipped standing armies.

As the industrial age started, events such as the French and American Revolutions ushered in the age of reason and elected legislatures. Official proclamations emancipated serfs throughout Europe. France eliminated the last vestiges of serfdom in 1789 while Russia waited until 1861 to give serfs the right to own property and marry without the permission of their lord. Russian Tsar Alexander reasoned it was “better to free the 23 million serfs from above, than have them do it themselves.from below”. As it turned out, it was too little, too late for the Russian rulers. 

The British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act on August 28, 1833, which banned slavery throughout the British Empire, including its colonies in the Caribbean, South Africa, and Canada. Two years after the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln read out the Emancipation Proclamation in an America embroiled in a civil war. Two years after that, all American slaves were freed with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. 

Finally, substantive freedom seemed within reach for the masses in Christendom. However, all was not as it seemed. Behind the scenes, a new banking aristocracy was on the rise, and like any aristocracy it needed serfs to feed its ambitions. Supporting secretive societies sprang up and became transnational to further banker aims in an increasingly globalized world. Widespread freedom was stillborn as a gentler, veiled, form of serfdom was created in western society. In European dominated Africa and Asia the unspoken serfdom was significantly more brutal and pronounced. 

Neo-Feudalism

“This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”

- Carrol Quigley in Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time

By initially issuing fake gold receipts and later institutionalizing the fraud through legislation, the new banking lords could outbid competitors for control of the press and finance election campaigns. Their pull on legislatures eventually led to influence over the curriculum of the state school systems emerging in the industrial age. Generations of students learned important skills such as literacy and basic math. However, on the political front, they were immersed in a new sea of falsehoods. Economics classes studiously avoided the subject of how money was created from thin air for the benefit of a few. Social studies labored over the symptoms, but never the root causes, of poverty in the midst of plenty. Above all, it was drilled into everyone that they lived in a free society. The now chronically losing Vatican and its Christian offshoots were reduced to a rearguard action on the school indoctrination front in the west. 

The claim that western society is free is a significant exaggeration. Modern people are indeed much freer than most of the population of the agricultural and industrial ages. However, the borrower is the servant of the lender. Most people have to take on personal debt for large purchases and sometimes smaller purchases. A house purchased with a mortgage will be paid for 2 to 3 times over, with the financial system getting the difference for essentially acting as a bookkeeper. The bank did not lend the money of depositors but created the money from thin air and lent it out at compounding interest. For running the numbers on the credit risk, and pushing a computer key to create the money, the bank, amazingly, assumed ownership of the house as collateral; and could take physical possession in the case of default. In essence, interest payments on money created out of thin air are the same as the payment of tribute paid to a conqueror by the conquered.

Even if one avoids personal debt, tribute is still extracted to pay for odious government debts. Although governments have the ability to create their own money, and to do so in non-inflationary ways, captured western governments instead borrow money from private lenders at compounding interest. Politicians through the ages have tried to create honest money systems for government purposes. However, any electoral candidate that gave precedence to the needs of their constituents over the interests of the new banking aristocracy found themselves smeared in the mass media and starved of campaign funds. Direct action was sometimes taken where nonviolent means did not suffice. 

Social mobility is now relatively unrestricted, so individuals are almost always free to join in the oppression. Unfortunately, the requirements for such upward mobility are that one either be ignorant of the fraud, or to not care about justice: hardly criteria for building a good leadership structure for the knowledge age.

In the new feudalism or neo-feudalism, wage slavery is all too often an accurate description of how most people spend the bulk of their waking hours. As automation advanced, much of the work became busywork and did not add to wealth by anyone’s estimation, even as it burdened the environment and usurped human lives. In many non-essential jobs, resources are churned and burned in non-productive activities simply so that people can obtain enough money to live and pay personal and/or government debts. 

It would not be remiss to guess that upwards of 80% of office workers are engaged in make-work activities that are net destroyers of real wealth, even as more money is created. For the uninitiated, money is not wealth itself, which quickly becomes obvious during periods of hyper-inflation or in cases where no goods or services are available. The truth of the matter is that those most loudly proclaiming their need for totalitarian control over populations to avoid ecological disaster are at the same time the ones who created and preside over an exponential, compounding interest money system driving massive, needless amounts of environmental destruction. The bizarre spectacle of elites using their private jets to travel to a conference on emissions reduction is symbolic of the deeper problem.  

At the dawn of the digital age, publications were filled with predictions of leisure and self-directed work that would be made possible by the new amazing technological advances. Despite these claims, households began working significantly more hours, with both spouses often employed. Part of this is due to a seemingly insatiable demand for consumer goods on the part of the population, driven in no small part by an advertising industry that has studied mind control techniques. Some is due to the fact that wages have been falling in real terms for decades. Cancerous inflation and oscillating interest rates have finished off the rosy predictions for the future for many. 

The digital age could not function properly under outdated industrial age institutions. This era of arrested social development was driven in no small part by the fact some elites would not enjoy their power as much if the freedom prediction had been borne out. As Machiavelli pointed out, aristocracies “have a great desire to dominate”. This would be difficult, if not impossible, in a society with widespread leisure and economic security. A dependent, and often desperate population is the preference for personalities in thrall to an addiction to power over others. Monetary reformer and true Social Credit founder C.H. Douglas guessed that another reason why people were kept busy was so they would have little time to dwell on their political reality and so agitate for change.  

Modern lord and serf dynamics are sometimes referred to as class warfare by socialists. However, in communist countries neo-feudalism is even more pronounced, despite rhetoric to the contrary. The predictable corruption happened with the concentration of power. Elites lived in opulence and abundance even as their ‘comrades’ lined up for scarce products. It was not unusual for citizens of communist countries to have even less rights than the serfs of old. 

Communications technology in the dawning knowledge age is at last unveiling the lying political structure to the general public and so holds the promise of a return to more transparency and honesty in the political process. The fireside is now global in scope, and exceedingly complex, but anyone with an Internet connection is once more allowed a seat to observe leadership claims and the unvarnished results. Not surprisingly, overt censorship is rearing its ugly head in the West, further exposing the real nature of the ruling establishment. However, aggregate knowledge within humanity will come on tap to adequately deal with the torrent of information available through modern communications technology. Whether this occurs in a relatively peaceful manner, or through a violent upheaval is the question of our times.

The Road to Hell and Good Intentions

“The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.” 

- Thomas Sowell

In fairness, in addition to causing great suffering, especially in poorer countries, the fraudulent financial system was also used to apply leverage that lessened warfare. There are those who claim the opposite and that the banking system is the cause of all wars. This begs the question as to why warfare was ongoing and endemic long before the monetary fraud came into play. The money power does work hard at maneuvering nations to destroy those that work against its interests. Banks also profit enormously by financing wars, often on both sides of a conflict. However, in terms of the percentages of populations involved, it is a fact that war is much reduced today. In this case, the Machiavellians did evil to do good. 

However, the rot that usually accompanies centralized power took hold. Instead of setting up the conditions to free people and segue into a great new civilization, finance is now working at creating a servile totalitarian state, ostensibly for our own good. The faction that advocates depopulation is also gaining in strength. Elites justify this policy as a requirement to forestall ecological disaster. They are currently using the stalking horse of anthropogenic, or human caused, climate change. In true big lie fashion, anthropogenic climate change is conflated with natural climate change, with the same term used to describe two entirely separate phenomena. This is opposite science in which definition of terms is a necessary foundation.

Essentially super-elites see the centralization of power as necessary to prevent what has been termed ‘the tragedy of the commons’. In this real world phenomenon, most individuals will focus on their own needs and wants to the extent they will destroy the supporting environment that makes wealth creation possible. Decimation of fish stocks by competing nations is one of many examples of this dynamic in action: the fable of the goose and the golden eggs writ large. An overarching control mechanism is needed to coordinate individual demands on the support system. Among the problems with the proposed totalitarian solution is that it is not sustainable.

The concept of individual empowerment in an environmentally sustainable structure is given short shrift by the elites, largely because it is missing the key ingredient of feeding their power addiction. However, a transition to a widespread empowerment model is the only sustainable, peaceful way forward in an age of exploding information. With new communications technologies, and widespread ownership of productive property, the advantages of a freer society can be taken up another level. Most importantly, at root, the urge for individual freedom springs eternal, likely supported by a higher power for its own communication purposes. 

The United Nations Agenda 2030 (UNA2030) pays lip service to individual empowerment and “the dignity of the human person”, but the document is self-contradictory in many places. More importantly, the observable reality is that super-elite policy is going in the opposite direction of the stated UNA2030 goals that advocate for the average person. The ‘partnership’ of “all people”, presumably managed through “work with local authorities and communities” has not been honored absent a grassroots push by people who became aware of what was happening under the radar. Needless to say, the awareness happened through the decentralized Internet and not the thoroughly compromised legacy media.

Lord Acton’s most famous maxim was ”‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. However, a less publicized, but very important insight of Acton was that ““the issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks”. Acton’s dichotomy does have a peaceful solution in which banks are intermediaries in empowering people through widespread ownership of productive property through an economic structure known as binary economics. 

In summary, the knowledge age holds the promise to at last end the feudalism era in both the capitalist and the surviving socialist countries. New production technologies can enable freedom from want of the basics and in a way that is not centrally controlled. Modern communication technologies can enable the first societies in history with true political freedom since tribal times. A justice-based, honest money system can diffuse power and enable a higher level of civilization for human society in general. Widespread ownership of productive property is the key to the future. 

Temporary Devolution

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

 - Rollo May

Creative destruction is a standard elite strategy for change. Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term to describe how free markets make old technologies redundant. Free market creative destruction has led to higher standards of living, as old obsolete ways of doing things give way to new, more efficient and effective ways of doing things. The super-elites have stood the concept on its head by using their monopoly on money  to push a centralized, top down destruction of enterprises, the opposite of free markets.

The idea behind the elite perversion of creative destruction is that the masses will more easily flow into the supposedly higher existence of a new age being designed for them, once their existing way of life is destroyed. Given the noises coming out of elite structures, one can ask how a return to full-on serfdom is a higher existence. In reality, it is a regression, which is not an unusual elite reaction to an age change. 

The excessively top-down method itself militates against sustainable, workable new structures self-organizing. Instead, the creative destruction strategy creates a fearful, traumatized, inward looking, resentful population; the opposite of what is needed for positive change. It is like a contractor remodeling a house without regard for the people living in that house. Inevitably, serious conflict will ensue.

When the creative destruction policies predictably fail, the fallback is a push for even more top-down control of the change process. The failure is blamed on the people themselves, rather than the thoroughly deficient plan. The current elite strategy of a medical tyranny, starting with the covid coup, is one of the more aggressive, global historical examples of the creative destruction dynamic. 

Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski covered the usual police state tactic of elites avoiding real change in his 1970 book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. The Technetronic era was Bzezinski’s term for the digital age. He warned: “Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know­how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Brzezinski also opined “in the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.”

This theme of loss of freedom echoes through the sterile chambers of the old guard. Previous Bank of Canada governor and current Bank of England head, Mark Carney, is among those opening proclaiming such a necessity. As one researcher put it: “[in] his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, he claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a “climate emergency” that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom and investment. The ex-banker does not mention the central role of the monetary fraud in both the decline of morality, driven by a contrived shortage of money, and senseless environmental destruction, an offshoot of the many inanities resulting from compounding interest, One more arsonist, pretending to be a firefighter.

The tunnel vision that ignores far more desirable and just alternatives is fed by the desire to acquire power and prestige. The obvious shortcoming of trying this age-old tactic is that the explosion of information would overwhelm the ability of would-be rulers to act effectively. There is a reason communist totalitarian states did not succeed even though information requirements were quite a bit less at the time of their collapse. As society becomes increasingly complex, distributed information flows are favored over concentrated information flows. 

The new aristocrats are counting on AI, robotics and other new developments to overcome the command and control deficiencies of the previous communist regimes. However, humans are spiritual beings, and solving the food, shelter, and clothing issue at the cost of our freedom is not a trade off most would do for any significant period of time. A point to remember here is that elites are not a monolithic body. One could do worse than identify elites who are doing real work in protecting human freedoms and backing them against the power hungry reactionaries.

Communist states collapsed in their competition against freer nations. Not learning from history, the elite solution is to scale communism up to a global level, such that there will be no opposing freer states. If the totalitarians succeed, eventually nature will still come up to bat last, but this time around with apocalyptic results. The current short-sighted, unimaginative, dictatorial approach will end up like all dictatorships; back in the jungle. From a systems theory perspective, this has been expressed as “the easy way out often leads back in”. There could be improvements in the short term, before the concentration of power slowly corrodes the structure to the point of an explosive collapse. 

There is still time to change the road we’re on and there are promising developments. Historical lessons on the horrors of totalitarianism, whether communist or fascist, have left a deep impression on society in general. Constitutional protections in democracies provide an additional layer of protection and are slowing the efforts of would-be dictators and oligarchs. The best hope for the future is that the Great Reset continues turning into a Great Awakening, where individuals and grassroots organizations stall and then subsume the attempted totalitarian top-down change method.

The Great Reset follows in the footsteps of other megalomaniac projects. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Stalin’s forced farming collectivization, Hitler’s Superman project. All led to mountains of corpses of innocents, and all ended up being temporary and miserable failures. There is growing evidence that the Great Reset also has a body count in the millions due to how covid was promoted and exacerbated to attempt totalitarian control. It is estimated about 75% of covid deaths were preventable if early, effective treatment had not been withheld and demonized. Add to that the indirect death tolls from the lockdowns, including millions in the poorest countries, and the covid travesty could be the greatest crime against humanity.

Creating Value in the Knowledge Age

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom 

- Friedrich Hegel 

Futurist Alvin Toffler’s work was mainstream enough that he dined at the U.S. White House and a congressional house speaker wrote the foreword to one of his books. Because of his establishment approach, some of the specific concepts behind his concerns could only be hinted at. Self censorship has been a dominant theme in Machiavellian societies for millennia. 

Finally, half a century after Toffler published the first of his groundbreaking trilogy on age changes, self-censorship along with the usual establishment censorship is no longer necessary nor desirable. A knowledge age requires replacing lies of omission and disinformation with relevant and truthful communication.Other key facets of the knowledge age, such as lifelong learning and artificial intelligence (AI), also rely on the bedrock of honesty to be effective. Otherwise, it’s garbage in, garbage out. 

The sharing economy touted by the establishment as part of the new age is thoroughly compromised by the top down structures. Beyond the propagandized buzzwords, the reality is a sharing economy has been a facet of economics since the beginning of history, rising and ebbing through the ages. Early Native Americans could not imagine letting a tribal member suffer from the elements, or go hungry while others feasted. In the digital age, free software was promoted by many, often developed under the creative commons license. Like so many other good concepts, once power addicts decide to use something like a sharing economy as a tool, it rapidly degenerates into another control mechanism. 

The increased marginal efficiency promoted by the elites as something new is again old hat, and more importantly still calculated according to GDP, which is to say, destructive activities are lumped in with constructive activities to determine productivity. It is like a mathematical formula where plus signs and minus signs are used interchangeably. The very inanity of the GDP measurement is part of the reason it continues, as most people have trouble believing something so silly could be central to their economic life. 

Some basic thermodynamic terms were introduced by the compromised change agents, heralding the end of GDP, but without other institutional changes, this change will follow the concept of putting lipstick on a pig.

Evolutionary economist and cybernetician Kenneth Boulding was an early adopter of the knowledge age term. In his 1956 work The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society the relationship between the image individuals and societies have of reality, and the truth, is highlighted as a key concept for the future  The wholesale rejection of mainstream economic misinformation was necessary for Boulding’s scientific approach to wealth creation. In the simplest terms, his formula is that wealth is created through knowledge applied to matter/energy in spacetime. For example, a farmer would apply his knowledge, with muscle, then machine power to an acreage.  

In thermodynamic or scientific terms, this is the human element applied to the natural entropy or disorder of the universe, creating negentropy, or order from chaos. Instead of god-like super-elites running the show, Boulding believed in “the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit, or Inward Light, available to every man to teach, guide, reprove, and draw him up toward goodness”. This outlook is in keeping with Thomas Jefferson’s precept that it is error alone that needs government. This would include legislation ensuring no tragedy of the commons. Self-organizing individuals, with just laws the community creates, are the way forward.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

When precedents fail to assist us, we must return to the first principle of things for information and think, as if we were the first people that thought. 

- Thomas Paine

Despite institutional shortcomings, the digital age did develop structures that make the first relatively peaceful age change possible. Widespread communications and nascent global organizations are two of the primary vehicles for this. Unfortunately, reactionaries are trying to direct these developments to serve a totalitarian agenda they see as necessary to ensure the earth’s carrying capacity is not exceeded by the demands of humanity. In their view, only totalitarianism can prevent what is known as ‘the tragedy of the commons’. In the ‘tragedy of the commons’, individuals seeking to maximize their returns from a resource will destroy or exhaust that resource, regardless of needs for the future. An overarching control mechanism is needed.

The philosopher Friedrich Hegel pointed out the correct way forward with his observation: “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” A product of his time, Hegel also thought the state would best advance the cause of freedom for all. Communism had not yet been tried and found wanting. More usefully, Hegel proposed a dialectic where some advances are arrived at through the melding of a thesis and its opposite, the antithesis. Creatively incorporating ideas from each side of an argument for and against a course of action can result in the best solution to many problems. This synthesis process can be iterative, leading to higher and higher levels of understanding or progress over time. 

One caveat, as cybernetician and economist Kenneth Boulding pointed out, is that many knowledge building blocks fall into place through natural symbiotic arrangements. However, the Hegelian dialectic is a good tool where this does not take place. 

Another caveat is that some elites have corrupted the Hegelian dialectic to push in the opposite direction of freedom. Their method has been described as ‘problem, reaction, solution’. In this, the rulers will create or point out a problem, the thesis, create a desired reaction or antithesis in the public through their propaganda organs, and then offer up a predetermined solution or synthesis that enhances their power at the expense of the citizens. The pseudo-synthesis seemingly takes in the concerns of the public over a loss of freedom to scale back some of the authoritarianism in a proposed solution to the problem. However, this can be temporary. The iterative part of the dialectic can be used to claw back yet more individual freedom during the next crisis, manufactured or not.

A seemingly endless series of issues follow this pattern, from global warming, to terrorism to pandemics. The truly free exchange of ideas necessary to a healthy dialectic are nowhere to be found. Desirable parts of a synthesis to solve real problems are generally rejected where they don’t lead to the centralization of power. In response, some change agents condemn Hegel’s dialectic outright. This is a mistake. The Hegelian dialectic is like any tool. It can be used for good or evil.  

Where the Hegelian dialectic can be used to good effect is to deal with seemingly insatiable demands on the environment by individuals and the carrying capacity of the earth. A systems theory concept that is useful here has been termed as ‘the freedom of the whole versus the freedom of the individual’. The idea can apply to any system but is used here in the context of society. The Principia Cybernetica Project was an early computer group that defined and explored this concept in some detail. 

The theory is that the more individual freedom increases, the less free an overarching society is to follow a predefined course. Conversely, the more free the larger community is to follow a plan, the less free the individual constituents will be. The Prime Minister of Canada spoke to this idea when he expressed admiration for China being able ‘to turn on a dime’. China is able to do this because the individuals in the country are relatively constrained. In a shocking oversight, the inferior human rights record of communist China, past and present, went unmentioned. 

The carrying capacity of the earth can be shielded from ‘the tragedy of the commons’ by non-totalitarian means. A synthesis to the environmental sustainability dialectic can be found by separating the lower and higher needs, defined here from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the lower levels of existence such as food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and communications, the most ecologically sustainable design would be mainly technocratic in nature; extending the concept behind the fluoride-free public water systems in many countries.

A key point is that the ownership of the machinery providing basic needs is widespread. Among many other advantageous outcomes, this design will forestall the problems inherent with the concentration of power. For the higher levels of our existence, our sense of belonging and self-actualization, freedom should be as unfettered as possible. 

There are also natural aids in bridging the false dichotomy between what cyberneticians term the freedom of the individual versus the freedom of the whole. This theory does not account for many things, such as most individuals choosing freely to do the right thing for society in general if given good information. Enlightened self-interest and morality are absent from the hypothesis. It seems the cyberneticians pushing this theory forgot Boulding’s warnings that the dialectic can be over emphasized and that many knowledge building blocks fall into place naturally. 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a good starting point for knowledge-age institutions. The section on the rights of property ownership in this document is of particular importance. In the final analysis, widespread, individual ownership, particularly of productive property, is what makes the other rights sustainable. 

The campaign coming out of the World Economic Forum (WEF) suggesting people should own nothing and be happy is stunningly misdirected in view of both history and the real human condition. In the opinion of this writer, reading the articles on the WEF website is an exercise in how power corrupts the thinking process. They want to “lift humanity into a new collective” in the words of founder Klaus Schwab. Another article concludes “it still supersedes individual choice” regarding implanting devices in other humans. The arguments for this are astoundingly weak. Implantation itself can have merit. Stents to prevent heart failure are a low tech obvious example. However, once fully informed consent has been bypassed, implantation procedures are an offense to humanity in general. It is as if the puppeteers now see themselves as gods, much like rulers from the ancient past. They are blinded to the fact that the earth is not an isolated system, but open to information from its exchange of matter and energy with the universe, which includes a higher power.

The Best of Both Worlds

A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”

- Chip Heath

Despite better communications technologies, legislative bodies are growing increasingly distant from those they are supposed to represent. Widespread cynicism and opportunism are the new dominant motifs in establishment politics. Long-running surveys show that public confidence in the government fell precipitously in the 1960s and ’70s, recovered somewhat in the ’80s and early 2000s, and is at historic lows today. Increasing electoral fraud coming to light promises to push this even lower.

Another sign of the obsolescence of current political structures is the increasing divisiveness within electorates, to the extent that violence is bubbling to the surface even in developed nations. Separation movements are on the rise to try to bring more government closer to home; both physically to enhance accountability, but also culturally, to get away from the one-size-fits-all of a more totalitarian central government. Separatist movements are not unusual, it is the dramatic increase that is discontinuous, particularly within previously comfortable developed nations or the European Union, Alberta, Texas, Catalonia, and Britain with Brexit are some of the examples. The Economist magazine covered the growing list in The World in 2020: The coming surge of separatism. Recall and referendum movements also look to be on the rise. 

Something new is needed, to keep people from drifting apart when it comes to problems that occur on a global level. The governance structure changes required today would be similar in effect and degree as what occurred during the change from agricultural-age aristocracy to industrial-age elected representatives; either accept the change gracefully or be dragged violently along. Periodic elections of candidates heavily compromised by election financing requirements no longer suffice.

Communication technologies comprise one key here. As Nicholas Negroponte points out in Being Digital, connected computers globalize and harmonize while simultaneously providing decentralization and individual empowerment. In other words, the devices can create a synthesis from the thesis of individual empowerment and decentralization, and the antithesis of harmony and globalism. The networks can also exchange more information in seconds than all of the pre-computer communication in recorded history. 

An additional requirement for new governance structures is a better-informed populace. In the industrial age, indoctrination, not education, became a primary goal of schools, often out of the necessity of defending a nation-state. Now it’s time to teach students how to think, not what to think. Computers would again play a central role in online learning. Many of the specific changes cannot be determined in advance but would emerge in tandem with the other institutional changes. The overall goal and theme are what is important. There are some excellent designs to prototype, including one by the late social credit theorist Tom Taylor, who served as the Dean of Industrial Sciences at the University of Manitoba. 

An educated, informed populace is a necessity for the future because an oligarchy, benevolent or not, is unsustainable in the upcoming age. The flow of information today cannot be adequately addressed by excessively top-down structures. By the time information has passed up and down a decision tree, the situation on the ground has often changed. A truly aware person closest to the action is needed for the most intelligent decisions today. Artificial intelligence, or AI, cannot fill the gap because it is susceptible to garbage in garbage out rule. This also applies to machine learning algorithms, perhaps more so. Intelligence Amplification or IA in the general populace is also required. There is much unknown about human information capabilities, especially as it relates to higher information sources.

Less deception also results in strengthening the moral glue that helps align much of the lower-level decision-making to the common good. Currently, morality is declining in the West, as more and more people see through the lies of the leadership and lose faith in the system.

Even if a dictatorial leader resists the tendency of power to corrupt, the relative decency of such a person and the oligarchical structure itself leaves them wide open to a coup by those with fewer scruples. A broad base of informed popular support is needed to prevent a downward spiral into increasing tyranny. It was not an accident that Machiavellians came to dominate our current leadership.

As Machiavelli pointed out, the people themselves are ultimately at fault because of their own grasping for material gain. However, much of this is driven by what is known as a ‘scarcity mentality,’ where financial insecurity leads many people to try to obtain as much as possible during good times to be able to survive during the bad times. Economic security bolsters what is known as an ‘abundance mentality,’ where people are secure and so do not feel the need for greed. Of course, there is also the driver to keep up with Joneses or be the alpha ape in a town, city, country, or globe. But this can be redirected and subsumed within higher callings. Indeed, higher callings is the only way to attain any significance at all in a universe where the tallest buildings do not even register.

As it is, our societies are caught between the law of the jungle and true civilization. The worst of our leaders are opportunists, looking for a material advantage and with little to no thought for the common good. They may be vaguely aware that all is not as it seems with regards to budgets and deficits, but there is little thought given to this. They are not motivated by the primary goal of many players in the international financial field, which is a world government to end warfare and introduce environmental sustainability.   

However, the best of our current leaders also constantly lie or tell lies of omission. With some justification, they think truth and participative democracy would lead to anarchy; or worse the raw opportunists gaining more power. In their eyes, they lie to us for our own good. They do evil in order to do good. At some point, these leaders have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. By keeping the public in the dark and subverting our educational and mainstream mass media systems, they have ensured that the average person does not have the tools to participate fully in their future. Yet the old feudal structure is no longer viable or sustainable in the information age.

The CLDC is a for-profit, professionally-managed, citizen-owned-and-governed community land planning and development enterprise. Also referred to as the for-profit “Citizens Land Development Corporation” (“CLDC”), “Citizens Land Bank” (“CLB”) and the “Community Investment Corporation” (“CIC”), it is designed to enable every citizen of a community of any size to acquire a direct ownership stake in local land, natural resources, and basic infrastructure.

A social vehicle for every man, woman, and child to gain, as a fundamental right of citizenship, a single lifetime, non-transferable ownership interest in all the Bank’s assets, share equally in property incomes from rentals and user fees from leases or use of the Bank’s assets, accumulate appreciated equity values from enhanced land values and gain an owner’s voice in the governance of future land development.

An innovative legal and financing tool empowered to borrow on behalf of all citizen-shareholders and service the debt with pre-tax dollars to meet the land acquisition, capitalization, and operational needs of the Bank. The CLDC shelters from taxation the equity accumulations of citizen-shareholders and protects the outside assets of the citizens in the event of loan default or if the enterprise fails.

A social tool designed to encourage a just, free and non-monopolistic market economy. It applies the democratic principles of equal opportunity and equal access to the means to participate as an owner as well as a worker. It demonstrates that anything that can be owned by the government can and should be owned, individually and jointly, by the citizens.

A major feature in a proposed national economic agenda known as “Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen,” which is designed to reform existing monetary, credit, and tax barriers to provide every American an equal opportunity to share in the governing powers and profits from new entrepreneurial ventures, new technologies, new structures, and new rentable space built upon the land. Capital Homesteading offers a “Just Third Way” of reversing unsustainable federal deficits and debt, and revitalizing and growing the American free enterprise system in a sustainable and environmentally sound way.

The logical structure for a new age prototype of a CDLC is The Venus Project Center for Resource Management. It promotes what is known as resource based accounting. Essentially, it has followed Cybernetician Kenneth’s Boulding concept of thermodynamic accounting. It is a proposed development meant to showcase an economy that has environmental sustainability baked in and can act as a stepping stone towards the development of our proposed network of cities. A Living Lab For Global Solutions is how the organization describes it. It would be designed to test and advance solutions for an entirely new social system, along with approaches to restoring the Earth’s collapsing ecosystems. 

A community of non-professionals would be an important part of creating sustainable housing, food, energy, and more. They would be every bit as much a direct owner of the project as the leading designers. Shareholders of the first order. This would be the opposite of communism, where absolute control rests in an elite. Education efforts moving away from current industrial age models would be front and center. As an integrated total system, the Center for Resource Management will showcase a systems approach to sustainability across the entire social complex. It will act as a social blueprint for future cities and create an evolving social blueprint upon which highly efficient future cities can be built.

The CDLC as thesis, TVP as antithesis, can be the beginnings of a  true synthesis in such an experiment. Widespread educational, media, and legislative reform will work in tandem with the first post-feudalist, and post-Machiavellian society. Widespread support among the general populace is already there for such changes, as it is obvious these obsolete industrial age institutions and others are no longer working.

With widespread ownership of property, and most importantly, productive property, individuals would have attained the level of economic freedom necessary to give environmental sustainability a central role in their thoughts and activities. 

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

Between Two Species

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: a person is not truly one, but truly two.”

― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886, after Western society had time to digest Origins of the Species by Charles Darwin, first published in 1859. Darwin’s ground-breaking scientific treatise posited humanity evolved from a common ancestor of the ape; an idea that shook the foundations of major religions.

Despite rejecting the literal interpretation of creation in the Bible, Darwin maintained a firm belief in God throughout his life. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of people; and I deserve to be called a Theist.” As will be seen, there is a solid scientific basis for Darwin’s continuing belief in a Great Spirit.

The fictional classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde played on the human evolution theme of Origins of the Species to relate the genesis of how unaccountable power has a tendency to corrupt.

After drinking a potion, Dr. Jekyll transforms into a smaller, squat, and hairy Mr. Hyde, whose characteristics include “ape-like tricks” and “ape-like spite”. When Jekyll’s servant witnesses the Hyde character, he describes him as a “thing like a monkey”. As befits a jungle creature, Hyde operates on instinct rather than morality. Animal cunning and violence replace conscience and consideration of others: a psychopath in today’s terms.

Imbibing an antidote brings Jekyll back to his civilized self.

Jekyll had planned to isolate and expunge his hidden dark side with his serum but his experiment goes horribly wrong Instead of being repelled by the brutish actions of his psychopathic alter ego, he finds himself stimulated by the power inherent in unchecked immorality.

To Jekyll’s horror, one night he transforms into Hyde without drinking his elixir -- as if his thoughts alone provided the necessary chemicals. Shaken by the experience, Jekyll decides to stop his experiment. However, he’s become addicted to the chemical rushes, from his vial and now his thoughts.

Jekyll reverts to the thoughtless indiscretions he indulged in as a youth in an attempt to sate his addiction. But it’s not enough. Eventually, he breaks down and takes his potion again, to prowl Victorian London as the demonic Hyde. 

He murders a man with “ape-like fury” by the light of the full moon. Police get his description and go on the hunt for the beast.  

Jekyll now has difficulty hiding in his civilized form as the uncontrollable transformations to Hyde have become more frequent. When it transpires he cannot make a new batch of his antidote due to a missing ingredient, Jekyll is in danger of being trapped in his brutish Hyde persona for the rest of his life. 

He takes the last of the antidote to regain his humanity long enough to write a confession, and then commits suicide before he can be brought to justice.

The theme has been echoed in other literary works, such as H.G. Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau, where animals are given human characteristics by a scientist through vivisection. Once the protagonist escapes to London civilization, he discerns humans as “another Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that." 

The Angel and the Ape

“The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”

-  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Journalist Nick Spencer provides a more balanced account of the conflict between our bestial past and evolving humanity. In a series on Machiavelli for The Guardian newspaper, he wrote: “the tussle between the person and the creature, the subject and the object, the angel and the ape, the human and the animal, as various generations have described it, is as old as there are written records – for the simple reason that neither side holds the winning cards, and the two natures wrestle, like Jacob with his angel, within each of us”.

However, evolution doesn’t stop, even if it appears so from our limited time frame. Humanity holds the winning cards, but it is not always apparent in a game played out over millennia. A caveat is that there is no guarantee the cards will be played correctly, given the double-edged exigencies of our free will. 

Free will looks to be necessary to lead humanity to fulfill a special role on earth: it creates unique individuals, spurring creative problem solving; but carries the risk of an apocalyptic end.

A mitigating factor is something known as punctuated equilibrium. Evidence shows periods of rapid changes in evolutionary activity occur when a tipping point is reached. A dramatic change for humanity could be just around the corner. It can be an awakening that helps humanity move forward to a wondrous destiny. It may also be a regression to totalitarianism, a jungle under the cover of civilization, on a trajectory to a jungle in reality.

Machiavelli himself, as could be expected, took a pragmatic view of the duality of human nature. He advised: “there are two kinds of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first is proper to people, the second to beasts; but because the first is often not enough, one must have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a leader to know well how to use the beast and the person”.

History shows that all too often the beast takes over, much like Hyde took over Jekyll’s personality. Lord Acton’s dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” seems an immutable intelligent design feature. One reason for this could be that the information processing requirements of the future require ten billion creative, engaged, educated minds.  An indicator of this is that a few power-hungry elites trying to direct everything from the top have not had any success, and many disasters, since the start of the industrial age. So why is there yet another try at totalitarianism? 

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

“Everybody wants to rule the world, It must be something we get from birth.”

- The Clash

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. ”

― George Orwell, 1984

Art foreshadowed neuroscience in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jekyll had started turning into Hyde without taking his potion, as though his thoughts alone provided the necessary chemicals. The discovery of the chemical receptor theory and its role in anger, aggression and dominance occurred more than a decade after the publication of the book.

Later neuroscience research showed why Acton’s famous quote “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” holds true so often. Due to humanity’s obsolete jungle survival instincts, winning out over others can provide a high. Some will go to any lengths to achieve this.

As award-winning neuroscientist Nayef Al-Rodhan points out “[p]ower, especially absolute and unchecked power, is intoxicating. Its effects occur at the cellular and neurochemical level. They are manifested behaviourally in a variety of ways, ranging from heightened cognitive functions to lack of inhibition, poor judgment, extreme narcissism, perverted behavior, and gruesome cruelty….It is important to remember that power, like all human emotions, is neurochemically mediated and that unchecked power can create irrational, addicted and destructive impulses.”

Weak or undeveloped personalities will not feel bound by morality in seeking their fix. The reason the democracies prospered, while totalitarian states withered and died is because imperfect checks and balances partially kept the power addicts without morality in line in the nascent states.

As Al-Rodhan further explains: “[t]he neurochemistry of power has implications for politics and for political change. Since power activates our neuronal reward systems in the brain and, as such, is addictive, people in positions of unchecked power are likely to lack the self-awareness required to act with restraint or to seek a consensual form of decision-making…Addiction is an extreme form of behavior that employs existing neuronal networks that produce manic behavior, manifested as elation, increased cognition and grandiose self-perceptions. Hitler, Stalin and Napoleon, for example, all appeared incapable of empathy and of comprehending the value of human life…it is likely that power itself (rather than any specific behavioral aberration), may have been responsible for exaggerating certain behavioral traits that each individual exhibited... Dictators are, therefore, more likely to appear in situations where checks and balances are not present or consolidated. Brutality and a lack of regard for citizens of countries governed by leaders with absolute power will tend to be the rule, regardless of the psychological state of the ruler.”

Hence we have the newfound, wildly aberrant behavior of the leadership of many previous democracies such as Canada and Australia. They went ape-wild once covid restrictions gave them an excuse to exercise power that went unchecked by human rights or constitutional legislation.

Naturally, all people have the remnants of our ape ancestor urge to be the alpha ape. As neuroscientist Nayef explains “[w]e are therefore, all addicts, of one sort or another, to the extent that we are all engaged in pursuits that ensure dopamine and other neurochemicals flow”. The covid affair hi-lighted this at all levels of society.

However, this drive is not a problem when aligned with morality.

Back when science had a firmer grounding in ethics, physicist and philosopher Albert Einstein one of many scientific lights who elaborated on the importance of morality. He wrote: "knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth.  What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind. What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength, if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living".

Morality tempers the drive to dominate so it has evolved into harmless or beneficial activities. From dominating at ping pong to growing the biggest zucchini to inventing insulin or being outstanding in other ways, healthy humans have thrived by evolving aggression and dominance urges towards technological progress, prosperity and necessary physical exercise.

Freedom and consent are of course key markers of morality on this evolutionary path. A tackle can lead to a helping hand up and maybe a beer together afterward, or a violent, sometimes deadly, fight. It all depends on if consent is involved or not. There must be consent before there can be peace. Peace is necessary to make further evolution possible, including the overdue institutions of a post-Machiavellian age, where the angels of our better nature can predominate.

Also caught up in the complexity are leaders feeling ensnared in damned if do, damned if you don't dynamics, or as Machiavelli put it; it is necessary to do evil, in order to do good. To recap, Machiavelli observed that: “princes who have little regard for their word have achieved great things, being the experts at beguiling man’s minds. In the end, these princes overcame those who relied solely on loyalty.”

Secrecy was necessary for the beguilers to triumph. Fortunately the decentralized Internet is putting an end to that. With such widespread communications, the ultimate culprit now is the everyday person who does nothing, or even collaborates, with unjust systems. The hate crimes committed against the unjabbed, mostly by official sources, during the covid affair is one indicator of this. As the reality around the lack of safety and effectiveness of the covid concoction comes to light, hopefully, the Great Awakening will accelerate with the addition of people who have the fortitude to admit they were fooled, as we all have been, at one time or another. 

Kick Tomorrow

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” 

― Thomas Sowell.

Many people who seek power over others at the expense of morality are in thrall to the most destructive of addictions. It’s an addiction that eats away at the soul instead of the body. Instead of losing their health, they lose their humanity. The interplay between human and bestial thoughts and actions, the angel and the ape or Jekyll and Hyde brings to mind Charles Darwin’s assertion that “[i]n a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to human as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term 'human' ought to be used.”

To expand on this, one could add that modern humans often revert to bestial actions, such that the term ‘human’ is even now a situational affair. Our language is peppered with references to this throwback behavior, such as brutish, feral, and inhumane. Again, the dividing line is of course morality.

Like other addictions, more and more of a drug is needed to obtain the same high. No matter how much power one has over others, it is never enough for those addicted. This drug tolerance is a result of the body seeking to return to a healthy equilibrium through molecular and cellular adjustments.

Then there is learned or behavioral addiction tolerance. It is different than physiological drug or chemical tolerance. In behavioral addiction, an alcoholic can appear normal performing tasks they are experienced doing while drunk. Likewise, a power hungry psychopath can appear normal, affecting practiced mannerisms and words giving the appearance of being kind and civilized, while engaging in deeply immoral acts. The serial killer Ted Bundy was a classic example of this at the lower levels.

The alpha ape impulse springs from a basic jungle survival mechanism inherent in many species. The strongest, fastest, and wiliest animals in these species aggressively dominate other members of their group in order to obtain a breeding advantage and access to resources to further their advantage. Group offspring are then more likely to inherit these traits, which increase the chances of survival in a brutal jungle environment.

The genetically derived traits also help the group protect its territory and resources from other groups of the same species. The more adventurous groups seek to expand and invade the territories of others, the better to spread their genes. In a precursor of the Machiavellian dilemma, a group or herd that did not follow this instinctual drive in most jungle contexts would become extinct and displaced by groups that followed the law of the jungle.

Endemic tribal warfare sprang from this survival impulse and is ongoing today, at a scaled up level, albeit with less frequency. However, the reality is that the evolutionary drivers of force and deception are now obsolete for a species wherein a 99-pound weakling can easily kill a 200-pound gorilla with readily available weapons. With the advent of nuclear bombs and the capability to destroy all jungles, our situation has now completely reversed. Instead of force and deception, our technology has made justice and peace the new survival traits for humanity. This dovetails well with the information requirements of the future, where situational and servant type leadership will be needed, along with widely distributed decision making ability. Bottlenecks are far less likely in mesh configurations.

The relatively recent reversal of survival requirements has led to the situation where many of the least evolved humans temporarily dominate those who are more evolved, a case of the first shall be last and the last shall be first. As the American author Kurt Vonnegut put it, the animals trying to evolve were always being snapped up by the more practical animals.

To recap from earlier parts in this series: the realpolitik of high-level politics, brilliantly analyzed by Nicolo Machiavelli centuries ago, keeps the critical ingredient of morality in short supply at the highest levels of governance. The father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, in his book The Human Use of Human Beings paraphrased this method of operation with the ‘rule of ruthlessness’. The situation is kept in place through propaganda. The ultimate responsibility for this state of affairs does not rest with the corrupt elites, but with the people themselves. Finally, our communications technology makes it possible to create a post-Machiavellian world by ensuring transparency, and hence accountability for inhumane actions at the highest levels.

The Evolving Door 

In The Goodness Paradox, anthropologist Richard Wrangham related how “chimpanzees engage in physical aggression with other group members at a frequency hundreds or thousands of times higher than humans do. Nowadays any human that got into fights as frequently as a wild chimpanzee would be locked up within days”. The genetic degree of separation between ape and human is approximately 2% or roughly that of a dog and a fox. Since the fox does not launch satellites into space while the dog learns tricks by rote, we can conclude something fantastic, beyond genes, happened to humans along the evolutionary path. Less violence within groups is just a tiny part of the difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom of course. The development of miraculous technology and art is the major part.  

Strangely, Wrangham theorized the reason for less violence within human groups is that 300,000 years of capital punishment helped select out genes with a propensity for violence. However, from world wars to the killing fields of totalitarian societies, murderous violence in human society perhaps reached its apex at the tail end of Wrangham’s 300,000 years of capital punishment. Logically, the theory should be that capital punishment did not select out genes with a propensity for violence. It may have protected society from low level re-offenders, but that’s about it.

Further to this, capital punishment in primitive and feudal societies was often for non-violent offenses. Religious heresy, practicing ‘witchcraft’, and hunting large game to feed one’s family were among actions that were punishable by death. Capital punishment was also routine in the past against those protesting the injustice of powerful people, yet here we are, genes and all.

There is obviously something much more at play in the decline of inter-group violence than capital punishment in the past. In a complex interplay of nature and nurture, part of the reason for far less inter-group physical aggression in humans would be fines and laws. Another is technology wherein a weaker group member could retaliate with weaponry. Bigger, stronger chimps would quickly lose their propensity to casually smack a physically weaker group member if that member could grab a spear or gun. God created all people, but Samuel Colt made them equal was a tongue in cheek saying about the most popular pistol of the old west.

Wrangham also reviewed The Origins of Virtue, by science writer Matt Ridley and concluded Ridley “wants to have it both ways, that we’re both nasty and nice. We’re nasty at one level (the unconscious genetically driven self); but in the real world, we’re nice, genuinely pleasant.” Wrangham again misspoke. The overall theme of Ridley’s work is that the reason we are pleasant is not at all genuine. We are nice only so that others are nice back to us. This holds to the evolutionary biology theory that altruistic acts are simply another survival tactic and not a result of any innate morality. 

The seeds of this doctrine surfaced in Charles Darwin’s second book entitled The Descent of Man, first published in 1871. Darwin argued instinctive altruism effectively enables individuals to guarantee the survival of the group, which in turn will aid the survival of the individual. It’s the reason nations and bands of chimpanzees stop their internal squabbling and pull together when threatened by an outside force. Eminent biologist E. O. Wilson summed it up with "in a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals."

However, the survival of the group did not always aid in the survival of the altruistic individual. In the main this holds true, but what about when individuals sacrifice themselves for the good of the group, often in large numbers during times of war? This discrepancy led some researchers to conclude that the main evolutionary driver was the survival of the genes in the group, not the individual. In this theory, soldiers dying in the front line were not protecting a country or even individual personalities in their families so much as they were protecting the raw genetic material back home.

Regardless, the ideas that morality evolved to increase the survival of individuals within groups, or just their genes, are hopelessly short-sighted. Like Wrangham’s insupportable capital punishment theory, it seems experts can become locked within their scientific silos. This insular viewpoint perhaps reached its apex in Richard Dawkins’ bestseller The Selfish Gene, now mainly considered as hopelessly reductionist by most other evolutionary biologists. Humans are awash in influences from higher sources of information, yet scientists ignore that which they cannot measure, no matter how obvious. There is much, much more at play in regards to altruism and morality than the survival of the individual or that individual’s genes.

The next issue of Post Machiavellian society will explore genetics, and how nested hierarchies pass through humans, to encompass the stars and beyond, to that incomprehensibly powerful and beautiful force many refer to as God.

OUT OF THE HEART OF DARKNESS

Mean Gene

In his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins developed the gene hypothesis further. He reiterated organisms and individuals operated largely as vehicles for genes. A vehicle was defined as a collection of genes that survive and reproduce as a unit, which Dawkins compared to rowers on a crew that can only win the race by pulling together. Genes do occasionally evolve to succeed at the expense of other genes within the same organism, such as cancer, but they are relatively rare.

In the view of Dawkins, and the early work of his mentor, George C. Williams, individuals don’t qualify as replicators. Replicators are the theoretical basic unit of evolution in the gene-centered view of evolution. Instead, the theory holds individuals can remain important as vehicles of selection, but they are basically automatons. The Guardian newspaper listed The Selfish Gene as number 10 on the all-time list of non-fiction books and it can be argued it brought evolutionary biology into the mainstream. 

The reductionist viewpoint championed by Dawkins and others crumbled under criticism. Entrepreneur Jag Bhalla wrote The Selfish Gene fell into a fallacy of composition; “Dawkins inappropriately extends properties of parts to wholes. An absurd example is: each atom in a teacup is invisible, therefore the teacup is invisible. Dawkins projects his preferred “selfish” zero-sum property of genes onto everything built by genes, and falsely concludes everything that has ‘evolved’ should be selfish. Biology isn’t that simple. It mixes competition and cooperation.”

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould also rejected Dawkins’ doctrine and wrote: “adaptations evolve at all levels of the biological hierarchy...a fully developed theory of evolution requires such a hierarchical view in which natural selection operates in different ways at a series of different levels, from the gene, the cell and the organism to the sub-species and the species”. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson added “adaptations evolve at all levels of the biological hierarchy, including individuals, social groups, species, and ecosystems.”

Multi-level selection theory was the term coined to describe how these different levels function together to maximize fitness or reproductive success. Biologist E.O. Wilson compared the various levels of co-mingled evolution to nested sets of Russian matryoshka dolls. David Sloan Wilson looks to have tumbled into the science trap of measurability when he ended his multi-level selection at the level of an ecosystem, not commenting on the informational possibilities of being immersed in an electromagnetic sea of information spanning universes and beyond.

Dawkins did give some good advice on the way out of our concrete jungle. In the conclusion to The Selfish Gene he wrote “to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly… you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then have a chance to upset their design, something which no other species has ever aspired to. We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.… We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” The only thing he missed here was the ‘we’ factor goes beyond the human level.

Genes and Memes

The Selfish Gene also introduced the term meme, now in widespread use, to describe cultural transmission and the evolution of ideas. In essence, Dawkins advocated reversing the relationship between genes and memes. Civilizing influences and ideas subsuming instinctive gene-driven bestial behavior. The angel overcoming the ape, Jekyll winning out over Hyde. Red of tooth, claw and gun, to the first true civilization in history. 

Long overdue fundamental educational reform would be a foundation stone of course. Not only to discuss genes and how to overcome their negative aspects on modern society, but also the reflective industrial age systems that encourage bestial behaviour. This would include currently taboo subjects such as how our money system really works. Behind the headlines, it is a massive fraud that creates artificial shortages that force people to turn on each other in order to financially survive. Frequently, there is not enough money circulating to enable all to pay their debts and interest on those debts. It’s a real life version of musical chairs where instead of losing your seat, you lose your home and business; a sure way to ensure cunning and ruthlessness remain central to our society. Former central banker and financier Bernard Lietaer covered the details of this dynamic in his book Beyond Greed and Scarcity. 

In one sense, the financial deception is about doing evil to do good. It is behind the development of many international bodies that have resulted in less warfare over the decades, and created a platform for world peace. It has also damaged much of that which makes the good possible and has totalitarian control built into its current design. Money cannot continue in its present form, if positive change is to be sustainable. It is overdue for a transformation. 

Regarding the future, Charles Darwin deduced “as man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent these sympathies extending to the people of all nations and races.” As knowledge of the shortcomings of the current top-down world government design becomes more widespread through the Internet, there is a natural backlash that works against this natural, grassroots sympathy for international institutions that could ensure peace and sustainability.

E.O. Wilson summed up humanity’s progression to our present day with: “out of the warlike peoples arose civilization, while the peaceful collectors and hunters were driven to the ends of the earth, where they are gradually being exterminated or absorbed, with only the dubious satisfaction of observing the nations which had wielded war so effectively to destroy them and to become great, now victimized by their own instrument.”

Hence the need for international institutions to end war on earth; and to build out to another level of multi-level fitness for human survival, before war ends us. And to avoid repeating the cycle, an empowering, accountable federation of nations, not a dictatorial Machiavellian world government. This is the necessary foundation to start fulfilling humanity’s destiny, which is another story in itself.

In a Machiavellian society, it is often a case of the first shall be last, with leaders and their minions often among the least evolved humans. Corrupted countries, and now international bodies are at the top of non-consensual dominance, through both force and deception. To use another biblical analogy, this could change in an instant,  like Paul on the road to Damascus, since evolution today is stalled by ideas, or memetic evolution, rather than genetics.

Complex interplay between genetics, environment and morphic resonance, allegorically the father, son - future, and the holy spirit.

Multi-level Memetics and Selection

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.”

– Albert Einstein

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. - Buckminster Fuller

The tendency of most modern scientists to ignore or even attack the idea of a higher intelligence is a strange one. There is no argument that our reality exists in a system of nested hierarchies. They span the gamut from the sub-quark to the supra-universal. In between are quarks, atoms, molecules, genes, organisms, groups, ecosystems, planets, solar systems, galaxies and universes. Wavicles (particles and waves) travel from the smallest to the largest, and in the purest sense of the word carry information between them. In addition, information travels by other means, such as entanglement, something Einstein referred as spooky action at a distance. Entanglement is a phenomenon by which one particle can effectively "know" something about another particle instantaneously, even if those two particles are separated by a great distance. For the ‘science is settled’ crowd, it’s worth pointing out this 1964 discovery superseded the locality principle which had previously been considered the bedrock of basic physics.

The groups of humans are now nested within nations, in an emerging global society, within our solar system, enclosed in our galaxy, nested in a universe of many galaxies, and so on beyond what we can observe. Information flows through all levels, from the largest to the smallest. Humans, along with the rest of the planet, are being constantly bombarded by and exchanging atoms with cosmic rays, and their secondary effects from colliding with earth’s atmosphere and atoms, from both inside and outside our galaxy. Still,many scientists continue to ridicule the idea that this interchange of atoms, and wavicles can contain any information that can have an effect on human behavior. Quantum entanglement between humans and something at a great distance is not considered.

The reductionism of The Selfish Gene looks to be put on the shelf where it belongs, with Dawkins himself softening his views. His mentor, evolutionary biologist George C. Williams went further and changed his views dramatically over his working life. He moved from his focus on the gene to eventually conclude current theories could not account for evolutionary phenomena over longer time scales, and was thus an "utterly inadequate account of the evolution of the Earth's biota". The difference between instinctive altruism and the cooperative, symbiotic arrangements found everywhere in nature relies on more than a multi-level hypothesis that currently ends at ecosystems for many scientists. But why would it stop there? 

Is it not logical that the pattern would continue until evidence proves otherwise. Pattern recognition and probability are stalwarts of science. If Pi has been calculated to a certain number, the view is that there is additional information that can be accessed after that, because of probability and pattern recognition. And then Pi is calculated to the next number. How improbable is it that higher forms of intelligence will not exist throughout the intertwined, nested hierarchies of systems reaching out to infinity? Multi-level selection goes beyond genes, organisms, individuals, species, ecosystems, to earth as a whole; and then up through solar systems, to galaxies, the universe and beyond. And likely down past the genetic level, to molecules, atoms, quarks to quantum mechanics. 

It is improbable to the point of impossible for all intents and purposes that it is simply a coincidence that cognition and awareness stops at the highest level we can observe it at. Such close mindedness has occurred through the ages. The earth was flat, when it could only be observed from the ground, our galaxy was held to be the entire universe, when early telescopes could only observe that far, atoms were held to be the smallest element, before quarks could be observed and so on.

Intelligent design is a nascent discipline working on how cognition and awareness extends to higher, more complex systems. There are strong arguments made that it is highly improbable the speed and complexity of evolution operates from simply blind variation and retentive selection; that, inexplicably, the environmental effects stop at that which we can observe. Artificial intelligence or AI can do much on a lower plain, but to imagine it can outdo humans on a higher plain, of which morality is the bedrock, is to imagine we have more knowhow somehow than the infinite universes that created us from stardust.

Biologist Lynn Margulis is one of many scientists arguing for a more inclusive definition of consciousness and intelligence. She writes: “Not just animals are conscious but every organized being is conscious. In the simplest sense, consciousness is awareness of the outside world”. It is relatively easy to study and understand systems that operate at a lower level of intelligence than us. In studying the ultimate hierarchy, that which some have termed God, Einstein is correct that "the problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.” However, we can look up that path, no doubt guided somewhat by that which flows down to meet us, aware that “natural selection operates in different ways at a series of different levels.”

To Infinity and Beyond

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

-  Psalm 19: 1-4

Humanity’s search for God, along with the endeavor to represent God symbolically, is a cultural universal that is older than civilization itself. Calling out to the silent stars for an Everlasting Light, our species has sought to grasp the Transcendent through symbols since before the dawn of written language. Constructed nearly 8000 years before the Great Pyramids, “the faceless, counterintuitive, T-shaped monoliths of Göbekli Tepe can readily be understood as representations of powerful, supernatural beings.” Here, solemn inscriptions, whose meanings are now long lost, testify to the beginnings of our iconographic endeavors to capture the mysteries of the heavens. The search for God through symbols that began at Gobekli Tepe would continue through numerous philosophical traditions to become expressed ultimately in the formal language of mathematics.

 

“Faith Seeking Logical and Mathematical Understanding By Joshua Moritz

About 1500 years ago the Christian mathematician, physicist, theologian, and philosopher John Philoponus (490 to 570) was the first to use detailed mathematical arguments to make a case for the existence of God. Striving to demonstrate the logical consistency of the Christian faith to the pagan philosophers of his day, Philoponus discovered a deep contradiction at the heart of Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of the world that opened a path to a mathematical case for the Christian concept of a creator God. Philoponus proposed a simple and logically consistent argument: (1) Whatever comes to be has a cause of its coming to be; (2) The universe came to be; (3) Therefore, the universe has a cause of its coming to be. Through a variety of subsequent arguments Philoponos argued that this transcendent cause of the universe is God.

The medieval tradition of faith seeking understanding, exemplified by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), Bonaventure (1217-1274), and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) inherited and further developed the arguments of Philoponus. Anselm also constructed a novel type of proof for the existence of God, known as the “ontological proof”, which aims to demonstrate that God’s existence is logically entailed by the very concept of God. Natural philosophers such as Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) further elaborated the proofs with regard to their mathematical formulation and logical consistency. Leibniz, the “founder of computer science” who invented both calculus and binary code, continued to refine Anselm’s ontological proof, arguing that 1) a Most Perfect being [aka God] is Possible, and 2) If God is possible, then God exists.

This idea that there may be some higher intelligence influencing human morality, above the groups, is rarely discussed. One reason of course is that this is the highest level of the drivers of human behavior that we can observe with any degree of certainty. Out of frustration, perhaps politics, there is often vehement opposition to the idea of a higher power, as evidenced in another of Dawkins’ books entitled The God Delusion. And as always, some people would like to carry on the ancient tradition of the leaders themselves being gods, in a backwards attempt to transmute the alpha ape syndrome to something divine. Perhaps the outsized publicity for The Selfish Gene could be partially due to the idea that humans as shambling Frankenstein machines for genes, written by a vehement atheist, fits well with such ancient agendas. The addiction to unaccountable power over others is by far the most dangerous addiction of all.”

 

Das Kapital 1867 state atheism, China, USSR, Falun Gong.

Spiritual beings having a human experience, transforming monkey minds and hands instead something transcending the rest of creation on earth. As will be seen, startling analogies, and now predictions, infuse holy books such as the Bible. Information has reached humanity in unknown ways.

E.O. Wilson took a more mature attitude and described his position as provisional deism or agnostic. He went further and explicitly denied being an atheist for those that somehow think atheism and agnosticism have something in common, even though they are opposites. In his book The Creation, Wilson suggests that scientists ought to "offer the hand of friendship" to religious leaders and build an alliance with them, stating that "science and religion are two of the most potent forces on Earth and they should come together to save the creation." Since then he has changed his views and advocated that organized religion should be eliminated as it is dragging us down. There is a middle ground on organized religion that E. O. Wilson is missing and multifaith groups are bringing into play.

As E.O. Wilson realized, organized religions can drag things back to the bestial by claiming to be an exclusive gateway and holding all religious writings to be error free, even though they were transcribed by fallible humans. However, the charge that religions cause wars would be more accurately stated as a lack of true religion causes wars. Early human tribes aped chimpanzee bands routinely engaging in genocidal combat over territory, long before any organized religion existed. The bloodiest wars in history had Christian religion against Christian religion. In short, the alpha ape selfish gene can take on religious trappings. Wars fought in the name of different religions are based on humanity's dark territorial past and not the guiding light of spiritualism.

There is extremely valuable guidance in the holy books, but the analogies and parables need to be regarded through the corrective lens of justice, peace and love, which are common to all the major religions.  The different perspectives on these concepts brings the needed religious diversity to an area where little precise knowledge exists.  Wars fought in the name of different religions are again based on humanity's dark territorial past and not the guiding light of spiritualism.  Einstein again said it best when he stated "if the believers of the present-day religions would earnestly try to think and act in the spirit of the founders of these religions, then no hostility on the basis of religion would exist among the followers of different faiths.  Even the conflicts in the realm of religion would be exposed as insignificant."

As could be expected, Einstein was adamantly against the anthropomorphic idea of a God that took human form and favoured one religion over another. This sensible stance was often taken out of context to paint him as an atheist rather than agnostic. Einstein wrote "The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgement and action."

In using the qualifier 'personalities like' for the religious founders, Einstein managed to emphasize both the importance of all inclusiveness and the dangers of idolatry.  Despite the conflicting claims of praying to the one true word, the information in the religious books has been decoded, added to and edited by fallible humans.  The certainty of a destructive apocalyptic is more religious dogma, with discarded gospels discovered in the 1940's showing a Jesus who taught God was present in everyone and everything, and that this beauty was very much about the here and now, as well as the future.  The apocalypse is meant as a warning, not what must come true. The promised Messiah could arrive as promised, through the word made flesh in the hearts and minds of billions of people.

As will be seen, the religions are still correct that the creation of humanity is through the intelligent design of a higher power. The holy books, limited, fallible humans mixed folklore with celestial messages couched in analogies that we can understand enough to put into action. The divine information live harmoniously with creation through moral actions.

Einstein also offered some insight in connecting spiritualism, philosophy and science with: "a human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security." This impetus was described by philosopher Fredrich Schiller as "sympathy or participatory passion, that is an involuntary affection of the emotional faculty, determined through natural law."  

This seems the best approach and indeed there is much happening along these lines with the proliferation of multi-faith initiatives. The commonalities such as peace, love and justice are the focus, rather than the differences in how to interpret teachings on these coming down from a higher information source. The lead WEF scientist smirking about cloud computing being the real basis of intelligent design is an indication of the higher qualities of science degenerating, rather than advancing. Given the machinations for dominance and world totalitarianism emanating through the World Economic Forum, Machiavelli’s beast seems struggling to coalesce into the analogous biblical beast. Alternatively, the human, moral side of the species is rising to meet the challenge.

Even when the information excluded by obsolete institutions is computed, the seemingly chaotic complexity of modern society can never be fully addressed by hard science alone.  Quickly changing variables and massive amounts of immeasurable data make it impossible to design adequate communication and control systems from just an outside in process.  A unifying perspective that springs from within the individual is also needed to bridge the modulating information gaps.

Einstein again displayed his insight when he wrote "The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.  Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on this.  Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.  To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education."

Any individual within an organized religion that primarily promotes the essence of the golden rule common to major religions cannot but help be a step in the right direction. The current attack on organized religions is misguided. It is wrong to attack an individual’s belief system when they are not infringing on your rights, are striving for morality personally and often doing good works for the community. Newer religions are often vilified as they can attract the enmity of both anti-religionists and establishment religions, but the same criteria apply. 

One, lower level, obvious role for humanity is as defenders of the planet. Without humans, the earth’s fate statistically aligns with that of Mars, a once living now comatose planet. Universes are collision zones. A asteroid belt crossing paths with a vibrant planet can result in atmosphere being thrown beyond gravitational pull faster than it can regenerate, or a larger body could outright shatter the earth. Humanity cannot destroy the earth, as is so often propagandized, but with our monkey hands and technology, we are the only thing that can save it. A less urgent mission would be to wake Mars up, to serve as backup and expansion. Outfitting the twin planets with the gift of independent mobility will also take on importance as the sun runs out of juice. 

In a Machiavellian society, it is often a case of the first shall be last, with leaders and their minions often among the least evolved humans. Corrupted countries, and now international bodies are at the top of non-consensual dominance, through both force and deception. To use another biblical analogy, this could change in an instant,  like Paul on the road to Damascus, since evolution today is stalled by ideas rather than genetics.

The Just Third Way

There is an ultimate Source of all creation and of all universal and absolute values such as Truth, Beauty, Love and Justice, which represent the highest ends of human actions. Many people call this Source, God

       Norm Kurland

 

The Just Third Way in Our Global Justice Movement brings it all together for the next baby step of evolution. It follows a multi faith approach, with priests, rabbis and muslims all involved in founding and running our mentoring organization, the U.S. based Center for Economic and Social Justice. People of good faith are of course central as well. They do not belong or take active part in any organized religion, but follow the agnostic concepts espoused by Einstein, E.O. Wilson and others.

 

A foundation stone of the Just Third Way is the Core Values as follows:

There is an ultimate Source of all creation and of all universal and absolute values such as Truth, Beauty, Love and Justice, which represent the highest ends of human actions. Many people call this Source, God.

•  Nothing should stand between God and the human person.
  
  
• There is a hierarchy of human work: The highest form of work is perfecting the social order to elevate each person in his or her relationship to God. The lowest but most urgent form of work is for sheer personal survival.
  
  
• In interacting with nature to promote one's own perfection, every person must respect the rest of creation. Each human being, a steward of nature, remains responsible for conserving natural forms of existence, each of which is interdependent and shares the same divine origin with humanity.
  
  
• Under the ultimate sovereignty of God, all sovereignty in the social order begins with the human person—not institutions including the family, the State, organized religion, the business corporation, the labor union, or academia.
  
  
• The essential means to achieve the sovereignty of the person include such inalienable human rights as the right to life, liberty, and access to productive property and free markets, equality of opportunity, and the secret ballot. These rights—including the rights of property—are not ultimate ends in themselves, but they are intermediate ends or fundamental means to enable each person to pursue Truth, Beauty, Love and Justice.
  
  
• People create tools, shaped from the resources and energies of nature, to support the economic and social sovereignty of the person. Through private property ownership, each person can become master of the technology needed to realize his or her fullest human potential and dignity.
  
  
• People also create and maintain social institutions as highly specialized "invisible tools" designed to serve highly specialized social functions within a just social order. Institutions, as organized expressions of society's values and goals, largely determine the quality of each person's individual and social life. As historical creations of humanity carrying within themselves the wounds of history, institutions are continually in need of healing and perfecting.
  
  
• The highest responsibility of each person is to pursue absolute values and to promote economic and social justice in his or her personal life and all associations with others.

God Relented

by Mike Bennett

Jonah 3:10  

6 When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh:

“By the decree of the king and his nobles:

Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

Not only did the people of Nineveh do something very rare in the history of the Bible by repenting, God also did what was to Jonah very upsetting. God relented and didn’t bring the destruction that Jonah believed Nineveh deserved. God let the 40 days end without bringing destruction.

God tells us He does not change (Malachi 3:6). His laws and justice are not changeable or fickle. But this “failed prophecy” actually helps illustrate one of the purposes of prophecy. Many times prophecies clearly stated that God gives warnings because He wants people to repent and change, but sometimes this went unstated.

God wants to extend mercy and show His love. Jonah was not nearly as eager to see God forgive the brutal Assyrians who would eventually enslave his people. But the book of Jonah shows where Jonah’s thinking did not match God’s. God wants us to learn mercy and to become like He is.

For more about the story of Jonah and the lessons it teaches us, see our articles “Jonah” and “Purpose of Prophecy.”

PART 2 

DOORS OF PERCEPTION

Paradigms

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. - Henri Bergson

A paradigm is considered a self-evident truth that helps the efficiency with which people think and act day to day.  It is regarded as an obvious fact by a profession, a political faction or an entire culture.  As the flat earth paradigm proved, general acceptance and truth are not the same things. 

Sometimes paradigms come full circle.  An ancient reverence for the power and beauty of nature was thrown out when it was thought that industrial society had conquered the natural world.  People are again coming to the obvious conclusion that we are a part of nature, and risk destroying ourselves by indulging in this conceit of the early industrialists. 

Author Stephen Haines has assigned the following characteristics to paradigms:  they are rules that regulators use to establish the definition for success; data and facts tend to be ignored if they don't agree with a paradigm; when there is a paradigm change "we all go back to zero"; a successful past blinds one to the requirements for the future; and what is impossible to do with one paradigm is relatively easy to do with another paradigm.

Past illusions are easy to see once a general culture has undergone a paradigm shift.  It is tempting for modern society to scoff at previous generations who believed in a flat earth, the science of alchemy, the evil of witchcraft and the unsinkability of the Titanic.  However, illusory knowledge is no less prevalent today.  Fact as fiction continues to flourish, with a primary reason being that individuals are still involved in a fiercely competitive milieu.

What makes paradigms so efficient and so hard to change is that the brain itself physically optimizes the mental associations made in response to basic beliefs.  New thread-like connections grow between neurons, while others are strengthened, and yet others are weakened or discontinued.  Certain brain cells also shrink or grow.  Researcher Leslie Ungerleider showed how the process is ongoing by expanding small sections of the brains of volunteers who practiced picking out a tiny pattern against a confusing background.  Repeated exposure to a valid idea can overcome an obsolete paradigm. This neural plasticity is present throughout life

Cave Shadows

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” - William Blake

Mistaken beliefs are held tenaciously, often regardless of any contradictory evidence.  One study found that most people would believe in a credible negative prediction, until it was applied to them, at which point belief dropped off precipitously.  As psychologist Daniel Goleman states "there is an almost gravitational pull toward putting out of mind unpleasant facts.  And our collective ability to face painful facts is no greater than our personal one.  We tune out, we turn away, we avoid.  Finally we forget, and forget we have forgotten.  A lacuna (blank spot) hides the harsh truth."  .

Another perceptual problem, according to Therry Melchior and other hypnotism researchers, is that there is no fundamental difference between susceptibility to suggestion in everyday life and that of the person clucking and pecking onstage.  It is simply a matter of degree.  When a Walmart employee is injured by stampeding shoppers who need Tickle Me Elmo dolls to celebrate Christmas, it's hard to believe the degree of separation is a substantial one. 

In the late 50s, social scientist Erving Goffman published Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which dealt with how much time people spent performing off-stage.  Goffman marveled that sometimes a person is "sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality." 

Evolutionary theory brings a dark side to the misconceptions.  In his foreword to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Robert Trivers noted Dawkins' emphasis on the role of deception in animal life and added that if indeed "deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced."  In other words, we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better.  

Trivers concludes "the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution."  If Dawkins and Trivers are correct, pathological behaviour could be more common than is generally thought.  A question of the age would seem to be how to create the conditions to, as poet William Blake put it, "cleanse the doors of perception".

Robert Wilson coined the term fnord to describe, among other things, how unease created during newscasts is followed by a commercial that promises security and stability. Doctor Richard Gunderman provided insights to the societal health implications when he wrote of a giant in this field: “Often referred to as “the father of public relations,” Edward Bernays in 1928 published his seminal work, Propaganda, in which he argued that public relations is not a gimmick but a necessity: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

When propaganda became a pejorative term, he rebranded the concept as public relations. Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.

In the 1930s, Bernays promoted cigarettes as both soothing to the throat and slimming to the waistline. But at home, he was attempting to persuade his wife to kick the habit. When would find a pack of her Parliaments in their home, he would snap every one of them in half and throw them in the toilet. While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.

Bernays used the same techniques on children. To convince kids that bathing could be fun, he sponsored soap sculpture competitions and floating contests. These were designed to prove that Ivory bars were more buoyant than competing products. Bernays also used fear to sell products. For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups were sanitary. As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.

Today we might call what Bernays pioneered a form of branding, but at its core it represents little more than a particularly brazen set of techniques to manipulate people to get them to do your bidding. Its underlying purpose, in large part, is to make money. By convincing people that they want something they do not need, Bernays sought to turn citizens and neighbors into consumers who use their purchasing power to propel themselves down the road to happiness. Without a moral compass, however, such a transformation promotes a patronizing and ultimately cynical view of human nature and human possibilities, one as likely to destroy lives as to build them up.”

Diversity

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. - Anais Nin

Differing cultural and personal experiences, along with unknown influences, are critical for creating needed diversity.  Yet the separate perceptions they build can sense only a shadow of the truth beyond basic morality.  If the issues aren't directly experienced, even the shadow can be blocked out by lies.

The role of perception in reinforcing illusions has often been illustrated by a fable about three blind men and an elephant.  In the story, each blind man felt a different part of an elephant and none of them felt more than one part.  Being closed minded, each insisted their perception of the elephant was the only correct assessment.  The person who had felt a leg said it was like a tree, while the man who grasped the trunk thought it was similar to a snake and the third who pulled the tail argued it was like a rope. 

Of course the blind men and the elephant fable does not accurately portray how blind people feel something to determine what it is.  An elephant would be considered an unknown without a step ladder and a patient elephant.  However, the metaphor fits because sighted people can be blind to the incompleteness of their perceptions. 

The differing views are invaluable, since it's impossible to synergize anything in which the inputs are identical.  The more peaceful co-existing variety there is in a social system, the more options that system has to progress and meet the challenges of a changing environment.  The principle of requisite variety is the jargon for this phenomena in cybernetics.  Two heads are better than one is the folklore win/win expression, while it takes two to fight is the win/lose or lose/lose folklore aspect of diversity.  The first law of cybernetics is that diversity is strength. 

Can I See What You See

What we see depends mainly on what we look for. - John Lubbock

The variables that affect perception and conception are virtually limitless.  Not only are they innumerable, but the combination is continuously changing.  The old game of telegraph, where a phrase is whispered from one person to another shows how conception can completely distort audible, well understood language codes by the time the fifth or sixth person expresses their interpretation of the facts.  As stated, fascism has tried to overcome the confusion caused by perceptual diversity by molding rigid conformists, with the predictable disastrous long term results.  Even the short term results are often poor, with the British outproducing the Nazi's during World War Two.

Standing back from a situation and mentally placing it in a larger context can help see how different perceptions can all contain some elements of truth.  Musician and scientist Onar Am coined the term perspectivism to describe how looking at apparently divergent views from several different perspectives can bring one closer to reality, much as if the blind men had felt all three parts of the elephant.  Walking a mile in someone else's shoes is another good way to get a wider worldview.   

Educator Tom Taylor relates an anecdote about using visual flight rules to guide a bush plane along a river course.  On one trip, the pilot encountered fog, and lacking instrumentation, was in danger of crashing into the water.  By gaining altitude, he was able to see the fog was only over the river and that the fog trail could be followed to the destination.

Management consultant Stephen Covey relates the same theme by using a fable about workers hacking a path through a jungle.  When the misguided leader finally climbs a tree he calls back to the workers that they have been cutting a path through the wrong jungle.  This kind of perspectivism is critical to some of Covey's other central teachings which are to begin with the end in mind and to deal with first things first.

In a relationship, the thesis and antithesis of two people who think differently can be more easily transformed into a synthesis if perspectivism is practiced.  Team learning provides even more possibilities for natural and creative synergy and is critical for shaking out misconceptions regarding complex situations.  One should also be careful not to overemphasize the dialectical.  As economist and cybernetician Kenneth Boulding points out, many dynamics are naturally symbiotic.

Patterns

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind. - William Blake

Paradigm comes from an ancient word that meant to show side by side.  Conceptualizing differences and similarities between things, or determining patterns, is a primary determinant of learning ability.  For example, when Columbus believed the world was round, he was able to educe from the round objects within view that a point could be reached by sailing in either direction.  In his mind, he imagined the two things side by side.  The difference was the size and the similarity was the shape.  In the flat world paradigm, mariners were afraid to venture too far from the coast because a table was their point of reference.

The mind is always looking for patterns in order to learn more, and can sometimes project or imagine patterns where none exists.  If a person stares at the snow on a television screen long enough, the mind can create a pattern.  Those exposed to a monotonous hum will sometimes start to hear music.

All of an individual's experiences act as filters in determining which information is given emphasis in looking for a pattern.  If a black king of hearts is flashed at a subject, most people will read it as a king of spades.  As stated, this could be changed or even reversed with practice changing the brain's associative network.  

Context is another important concept for pattern recognition.  For acquiring firewood, an axe and a saw could be perceived as being very similar.  In the context of war, the axe would be regarded as more similar to a spear.  In less obvious instances, the context of a situation can vary widely according to the perception of an individual and create all kinds of possibilities for misunderstandings. 

Context also relates to what is given emphasis in an observation.  If a person is picking someone up at a crowded airport, much of the other activity will be filtered out unless there is an unusual disturbance.  What is not consciously observed is also recorded by the brain and can affect subsequent behaviour.  Sometimes this subconscious memory can be brought to consciousness by an appropriate trigger.

Mind and Matter

Every type of crucial experiment proves that what we see, and where we see it, depend entirely upon the psychological functioning of our body - Alfred Whitehead.

The physical circle of causality, where a system's components and its larger environment act on and change each other, is related to the informational circle of causality between perception and conception.  Psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung commented on this phenomena when he stated "bodily traits are not merely physical, nor mental traits merely psychic.  The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy". 

The more obvious aspect of this is that the physical alterations in the brain occur because perceptions and conceptions can continually reinforce or change each other through positive or negative feedback. A wine taster's conception allows a heightened sensitivity in taste perception while another person might acquire a taste for scotch through repeated links between perception and conception.  A bad experience in early childhood can lead to long term negative feedback regarding the event.  When two adversaries engage in growing perceptions and misconceptions the outcome could be termed a self-fulling prophecy.

On a higher level, there are thought to be several ways of perceiving things that do not fall into the realm of the five senses.  One researcher has identified 53 possibilities.  The electrical energy of the heart is thought by some to be an information receiver.  The large ganglia of nerves behind the stomach is another strong candidate for perceiving information.  A nose for the news or smelling a rat could be indicative of another intuitive input.

If humans did not possess less obvious perceptual abilities, they would be the exception in the animal kingdom.  Sea turtles migrate accurately because electrical receivers in their head can pick up information from the earth's magnetic field.  Cats can attenuate their whiskers to pick up information from the most miniscule of air movements.  Some animals can know a storm or earthquake is coming, even though sophisticated scientific devices are inaccurate or are left in the dark about the phenomena. 

Language

Togetherness is the true principle of reason and language, but means of which are sensations and representations are modified - Johann Hamann

It's well known that word choice can affect perception with freedom fighters becoming terrorists and vice versa depending on who is doing the reporting. Less obvious is that the structure of language can also cause misleading perceptions. 'Joe sees the dog' is an example of the linear format of English.  Other languages would structure this as  'Joe and dog seeing', which creates the perception of a circle of causality.  In this simple case, Joe will know from experience that the environment can bite back but in more complex situations, linear language will reinforce a false impression of his relationship to the environment.

The Somnambulist Society

There is only a rough correspondence between the sensory order and the physical order. - Gerald Edelman

As stated, leading hypnotism researchers, such as Thierry Melchior, postulate there is no clear boundary separating the memerized onstage people from the susceptibility of people to suggestion in everyday life.  It is simply a matter of degree. Old cigarette advertisements established a firm connection in the minds of its customers between smoking and glamour.  When ads connect personal worth to net worth and are shown at Christmas, their suggestive power contradicts and overwhelms the message of the founder of the holiday. 

The disconnection grows when the buying binge devolves into a fixation on a few particular items, in which the worth of something is determined by the fact everyone else wants it.  The connection between the buying and Christian reality is non-existent, except in the receiver's mind.  This is referred to as binding the referent to the receiver by hypnotism researchers.  In advertising, politics or news, the disconnection becomes less obvious than in hypnotism simply because almost the entire audience believes in the representation. 

Decades ago, there was an uproar when the advertising industry flashed subliminal messages on movie screens to get patrons to buy soda pop.  The image would not stay on long enough to register on the conscious brain, but sales increased noticeably after the blip was shown.  A public outcry soon led to the practice being outlawed.  Since then the advertising industry has spent untold amounts of money on further mind control research. Bernays

Careful studies are done on the psychological effects of colours, shapes, movements, eyescan and other criteria.  An object that moves from right to left creates an unconscious feeling of unease in western cultures because the eyes are accustomed to moving in a left to right motion for reading.  Three objects arranged in a pyramid shape will create an inner feeling of stability, while insecurity can be caused by having the same three objects placed in an inverted pyramid.  In ambush research, a marketer will pretend to be conducting a survey on environmentalism for example, and then make notes about the reaction of the subject when an arranged interruption involving the product occurs.

Relevant focus groups are hooked up to perceptatron machines that measure their involuntary responses to the stimuli, while surveys and written reports compile psychological profiles to determine the weak spots of the target customer.  Often the product itself goes unexplained, while the hopes, fears and desires of the target are twisted to have the desired subconscious and conscious effect.  At the point of sale, the brand colour or shape can trigger the subconscious associations with the product.

Over $450 billion is now spent annually on the advertising, which to a large extent is disinformation of the worst sort. 

The conquest is helped by our present institutions, which ignore many of the basic community or spiritual needs of people.  The advertised substitute promises to rectify the situation by filling up any feelings of emptiness.  The inevitable dissatisfaction that follows such misrepresentations sets the target up for the next round.  Idyllic scenery or family moments are often associated with a product, even though the business culture has to be committed to destroying the reality behind such images, simply because maximizing shareholder returns is what allows them ion that is endemic to modern societies, like all repressions, makes a receiver an easy target for subliminal manipulation.

Children are not exempt from the psychological warfare.  For example, chips and fast foods are presented as part of a normal diet on Saturday morning shows, with only 2 percent of food featured being regarded as healthy.  A study of 160 pre-school children found that those who watched the least amount of TV had diets that generally had less than 30% of calories from fats  Those that watched a minimum of 14 hours of  TV a week had diets with 35% or more of calories from fat.  The food advertised generally contained saturated fats where anything above 30% is held to raise risk of heart disease. 

Like all studies, there could be unstated other explanations, such as parents who insist their children watch less television and also insist on providing a healthier diet.  However, anyone who has gone shopping for a toy with their child is well aware of the effects of television programming.  There is minor legislation that protects the trusting children from the worst abuses, but there is concern that new editing technologies are being used to do an endrun around even these modest restraints.  Again, this is a statement about processes and structures and is not about specific businesses or individuals.  Any executives that didn't scheme how to take advantage of childhood perception would soon be out on the street. 

Television seems to have a more devastating effect on changing a person than other advertising media such as magazines and radio.  There is evidence the medium itself lends itself to hypnotic influencing.  In November 1969, researcher Herbert Krugman convinced his secretary to engage in an experiment involving a brain scan and television.  Within thirty seconds of a television being turned on, the secretary's brain waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alertness, to predominately alpha waves, which indicate an unfocussed, aimless state subconscious state.  When the secretary started to read a magazine, the beta waves reappeared.  The staggering time allotment given to the television must also have an effect.  At a lowball average of 20 hours per week, if television was considered the same as an eight hour a day job, then most people put in 25 years of service.

Marshall McLuhan also studied the differing effects of various media.  He classified television as a cool medium, where an impassioned argument would appear shrill or overboard to the sedated viewer.  The same speech on radio, or what McLuhan classified as a hot medium, would sound stirring.  Polling results after the famous debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon had radio listeners giving Nixon a clear edge, while television viewers were left with the opposite impression.  The extent of the effect of the medium on perception led McLuhan to comment that "the medium is the message", which he changed to the medium is the massage for one of his books.

In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley described how English law evolved so that a Habeas Corpus could be issued against a jailer that stated a person's body, or corpus, had to have his case examined within a certain time period.  Huxley goes on to state that a person can  "be free to be under no physical constraint and yet be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act."

He goes on to say "there will never be such a thing as habeas mentem; for no sheriff or jailer can bring an illegally imprisoned mind into court, and no person whose mind had been made captive would be in a position to complain of his captivity.  The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative."

On a positive note, hypnotism and advertising suggestions can be rejected by the conscious mind before they have a chance to infect the subconscious.  A person cannot be hypnotized against their will.  A knowledge of what advertising is really about can shield a person from its worst effects.  In essence, the conscious mind can act a guard against hijackers of the subconscious.  The subconscious can in turn remain free to guide the conscious mind with the innate potential for intelligence and morality all people are capable of.

School Daze

"Quit Jammin Me" - Tom Petty

Formal education does not leave the populace with many tools to see through the official illusions and delusions.  The school system itself has been accurately described as mass hypnotism in the guise of learning by engineer, reformist C. H. Douglas.  Outside of the science and maths, the subject matter is in many ways a continuation of the preschool lessons taught about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  Christian and other children learn that adults will repeatedly lie to them about major events, but they also learn that the punchline will be given when the fun is over.

The teachings are inconsistent, but they remain about indoctrination rather than learning.  Older students were informed that America was discovered in 1492.  In reality it was an invasion with genocidal overtones.  Revisionist history takes the opposite extreme and portrays the natives as slaughtered innocents.  The Iroquois annihilation of the Christianized Hurons shows this viewpoint to be at the opposite end of the unreality scale. 

There is no consideration that the apportioning of five hundred year old innocence or guilt is a smokescreen.  Instead of presenting various perspectives of the evidence and letting the students draw their own conclusions and interpretations, memorization takes the place of learning.  Instead, there are no classes on the processes of inductive and deductive thinking, systems thinking; or how to see issues in shades of grey instead of black and white.  We are taught what to think, not how to think. 

Schools further dim inquiring, active and open minds but insisting that test answers fall with certain parameters of what comes down from on high.  The value of morality is propagated, but it is combined with creating the mindset to fit in with an immoral system.  The pretense is dropped as the graduate nears working age.  Professor Niel Postman, in Technopoly, states that higher education is now set up to deliver a person with no commitment and no point of view, but with plenty of marketable skills.  The effect of the programming on the alignment of self managing workers with the greater good is evident everywhere in modern society.  In the words of musician Roger Waters, all in all, education is just another brick in the wall 

Beyond the content of the lessons, there is what has been described as a secret curriculum.  Regimentation, obedience, and measuring efforts by the dial of the clock are all designed to prepare the student for the industrial age workplace.  The format creates a mentality that will slog away at something uninteresting, unrewarding and unnecessary simply because orders must be followed.  The structure met the needs of industrial society for standardized, concentrated, synchronized behaviour.  The increasing irrelevance of these traits in the decentralized, fragmented information age means the educational situation is one of short term pain for long term pain.

If anything, there seems to be an inverse relationship between enforced memorization and the creative, reflective abilities that produce real value.  Julian Huxley described many of the high pressure situations in school as the subconscious desire of the adult to revenge himself to ordeals he was subjected to in the past.  Yet, leaders and parents who could never imagine themselves as being a large part of the problem clamour for a return to more rote learning.  Before the recent freefall into indoctrination over education, Albert Einstein has answered a student looking for the meaning in education by remarking "it is undeniable that the enlightened Greeks and the old Oriental sages had achieved a higher level in this all-important field than what is alive in our schools and universities."

Education reform is the most critical need both for freedom and for handling the demands of the information age.  Hitler had joked that when he invaded areas, he would have schools set up to teach the conquered to count to twenty, read the road signs and nothing else.  All the thinking would come down from above.  Except for a few higher education courses, the system today uses subtler processes to accomplish a less extreme version of the same design.  The massive flow of information today would make a dartboard decision as relevant as this type of top down direction. 

The Most Dangerous Addiction

One of the more powerful and interesting motivators to come out of the development of the ego is the fear of death. It is held we are the only such animal to have knowledge of this, which is mistaken.  However, we are the only animal with the luxury to dwell upon it outside of the everyday life and death situations faced by most other animals on a daily  basis. Anyways, as spiritual author Eckhart Tolle relates: “Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.” But only from an atheist viewpoint. Marcus Aurelius said it best with “to fear death is childlike”.

The Denial of Death is a work by Ernest Becker which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1974, shortly after his death. (In the scene above Woody Allen buys the book for Diane Keaton in the Academy Award-winning movie “Annie Hall.”)

The book’s basic premise is that human civilization is a defense mechanism against the knowledge that we will die. Becker argues that humans live in both a physical world of objects and a symbolic world of meaning. The symbolic part of human life engages in what Becker calls an “immortality project.” People try to create or become part of something which they believe will last forever—art, music, literature, religion, nation-states, social and political movements, etc. Such connections, they believe, give their lives meaning.

Furthermore, Becker believed that mental illness, especially depression, results when we don’t feel connected to some meaningful project. And lacking such a project reminds us of our mortality. He also argued that schizophrenia results from not having defense mechanisms against mortality, causing sufferers to create their own reality. (These ideas remind me of Viktor Frankl’s claim, in Man’s Search for Meaning, that mental illness most often results from a lack of meaning.)

Moreover, Becker believed that conflicts between contradictory immortality projects, especially religious ones, are the main cause of wars, bigotry, genocide, racism, and nationalism. Our particular immortality projects are so important to us, that we can’t tolerate others suggesting that our beliefs are mistaken. But, Becker argued, religion no longer offers convincing arguments for immortality or meaning in life. Unfortunately, for most people, science doesn’t fill the void.

 

In response, Becker suggests that we need new comforting “illusions” to give life meaning. He doesn’t know what these new illusions will be, but he hoped that having them might help us create a better world. Still, deep in our bones, we know that we are mortal. As Becker put it:

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-­expression—and with all this yet to die.

DECEPTION

See No, Hear No, Speak No

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. - Norman Vincent Peale

At a learning forum, I used my opening remarks to express concern about growing skin cancer rates after others had commented on the hot, sunny day.  I was the only union member among a managerial group but the speed of disagreement still left an awkward silence, even though the learning forum was about the future and the company held the secretariat for an international environmental paper.  The next meeting opened with the moderator explaining that all comments should be positive. 

But what is positive and what is negative?  Holed up in a Berlin bunker and surrounded by an overwhelming force, Hitler believed he could still win the war if only a certain commander would make a certain maneuver.  It was a positive assessment but it was also completely out of touch with reality.  That being said, there is much that is positive today, but those things will look after themselves as well as help deal with the negatives.  What is needed is to take off the rose coloured glasses handed to us by out of touch institutions and take a serious look at what is really going on. 

Those that decide to do so often find themselves labelled as pessimists.  However, if the problems are proven to be persistent and predictable then it could also be argued that those who downplay or block them out are not really optimists.  A primary reason for ignoring something is a belief that nothing can be done about it. 

Another perspective could be to question why it is so odd for the average citizen to talk about such things as the ozone thinning.  Is it really okay to burn individuals in complicated ways, and because of the time, distance and closed door meetings involved, comment is not welcome?  Yet if an industrialist were in a room flicking less harmful hot matches at a child, and talking about gradually ceasing, there would be an uproar from all. 

Many elites, who are locked-in to a history of short term problem solving through rigid hierarchies and secrecy, encourage the public apathy by labelling those who point out valid problems as complainers and special interest groups.  Often they cite modern advances as proof there is really nothing to worry about.  However, there is little appreciation that these advances, from civil rights to the women's vote, came about precisely because of the type of behaviour they are condemning. 

There has been a recognition of the value of intelligence amplification within leading businesses, with flattened, decentralized organizational structures and worker empowerment replacing layers of bureaucracy.  However, what is considered important within corporations is being held back in the far more consequential society that both corporations and life in general depend upon.  Additionally, what is happening in the larger society hobbles the attempts at empowerment and decentralization in the corporations.  The more efficient the worker becomes, the more likely it is that they or their workmates will not have a job, largely because a long involuntary work week has no place in a highly automated society.   

Good decentralized decisions imply good information flows.  This suggests an upper echelon that does not keep secrets from their staff and honest assessments from workers who feel free to say what they really think. The freedom must be a true freedom in that the citizen is also made aware of how the larger society works.  Otherwise, their decisions and feedback will frequently be incompatible with the health of the overall system, even if they are adequate for short term needs.  Without truth and real empowerment, there is just no way to align individual action, organizational processes and the interests of the larger supporting environment. 

Angst and Apathy

What luck for rulers that the people do not think - Adolph Hitler

Planned ignorance and the resulting apathy has always been a feature of large societies.  When these societies broke down, there was a frontier and the physical requirements to build anew.  Today, it looks more and more like the burn-to-the-ground and rebuild conditions no longer exist, although there seems to be little recognition of this, both from extremist opponents of the present system, and those that imagine a top down imposed solution will have any staying power beyond that of the biblical beast. 

There are several factors working against public participation just when it is most needed.  The non-committal, highly skilled products of today's educational institutions are no doubt regarded as a success story by elites who wish to make decisions with minimal outside interference.  In reality, the decentralization and alignment requirements of today means that a Frankenstein is being created by the education policy of 'business uber alles'.

In 1988, a Parent's magazine study of 290,000 American college freshmen showed developing a meaningful philosophy of life was a priority for a record low, while a record high 76% thought being well off financially was most important.  Twenty years earlier 83% favoured a meaningful philosophy of life, with money being of secondary value.  Without a meaningful philosophy of life, it is hard to imagine that the money of the graduate could come to symbolize anything positive for the future.  Ten years after, a new wave of graduates could change things once again.

The programming started by the school system is kept in place by a compliant mass media.  In doing so, the media helps rob the workers of the information needed to make good decisions at the level where the rubber meets the road.  The corrupting influences of the wrong kind of power and the struggles for dominance among the elites themselves feeds the process.  Only the moral information that insists on shining through in both high and low places has created a window of opportunity to reverse such a situation.

Perceptual problems could also be aggravated by a condition similar to that endured by soldiers during large scale close quarter combat.  Survivors had written how all they could remember were a handful of enemies during the fight.  Later they were astonished to see an aftermath of incredible mayhem surrounding them.  For many parents and CEO's, the day to day economic battle is fought most effectively by filtering out the landscape under assault and concentrating on dealing with the immediate threats to the financial security of the family or company.  However, the increasing devastation is still there, and it is still the inheritance of their children and grandchildren.

A corporate version of the Stockholm Hostage Syndrome also seems to be muting criticism.  This psychological term was coined to describe how people tend to identify with an entity that controls their fate, regardless of the merit of that entity's actions.  In today's brutal economy, it helps short term survival to buy into the myths that are being propagated by a system on the verge of collapse.  Elites are or course not immune to this illusion.

People that have become aware of the need for real change face other barriers.  The increased workload that has strangely accompanied automation has left many with little time or energy to face the larger issues.  Somehow the segue between the glowing descriptions of a leisurely future and the need to work harder and longer happened without comment.  When the topic does come up, it is as though nobody can figure out what happened. 

The employees who view the working world as a master and servant relationship also keep quiet.  It is the rare person that dares make waves about a major company or industry policy that seems ill-conceived or unfair.  Those that do, usually find out that free speech means the freedom to go hungry and homeless and not much else.  Since the destitute are held to be incompetent, this method of silencing dissent is again effective and again detrimental to the long term good of all. 

Regardless of the cause of apathy, to say nothing can be done, is to ignore overwhelming evidence that shows something must be done.  There is now a general consensus among scientists that the present industrial age system cannot continue.  The current downplaying of the environmental problem is based on obsolete business models and not systems science, with 1500 scientists, including most Nobel laureates, signing a proclamation that the current system is unsustainable.  Simple math also shows that dissident engineers and economists are correct in ascertaining the industrial age economic system has the seeds of its own destruction within it. 

The Mind Managers

It is necessary that the prince should know how to colour his nature well, and how to be a great hypocrite and dissembler - Nicollo Machiavelli

Machiavelli is considered by some to be an apt advisor for a prince of darkness.  Yet he also made many astute observations that seemed to belie a cold and cruel heart.  The apparent paradox is of course a result of the rule of ruthlessness.  Those that didn't play this game, at least within the public arena, were soon replaced by others that would.  Machiavelli was just a realist for his time and for all time so far.  The manner in which this too will pass is another question of our age.

Robert Wilson describes some of the ways in which the centralized mindset malfunctions as an information processor.  The short-circuits include: argument by imposture, where the speaker claims to represent something when his actions would prove otherwise; argument by precedent, which has taken such forms in the past as the world is flat because everyone knows it has always been flat; and argument by intimidation, in which a lack of reasoning is accompanied by the often unstated threat of do it or else.

Other common information gaps are: argument by self-interest, where a leader opts for private gain over public good; argument of guilt-by-association in which a valid finding is dismissed because of where it comes from; and argument by evidence alone, where statistics are skewed to obtain the desired results.  As Winston Churchill said about the latter, there are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics.  The numerous statistics in this work are not immune of course, and should not be regarded as objective facts.  Instead they are pieces of data that should be considered within the context of all the other information a person has at their disposal. 

A significant percentage of the population now distrusts both the media and politicians.  Alvin Toffler digs deep in his analysis of the communication methods of those caught up in power plays to show the details of what the law of the jungle information wars have become. 

Deceptions include: the secrecy tactic, where elite missteps are hidden under the pretence of business confidentiality or national security requirements; the guided leak, which is usually elite infighting masquerading as valuable public information; and the masked source, in which supposedly independent bodies have misleading names or affect an academic disinterest in order to give credibility to their message.  One such Canadian animal is The Fraser Institute.  The findings are widely quoted in newspapers, but there is never an admission that the wife and right hand man of the country's most powerful media baron sits on its board of directors. 

Toffler's labels for other modern day variations on the trashing of truth and trust include: back channeling, double channeling, the need-not-to know tactic, the omission tactic, the generality tactic, timing tactics, the dribble tactic, the tidal wave tactic, the vapor tactic, the big lie tactic, the reversal tactic and the blow-back tactic.  The last includes a strategy where a false story is planted overseas and is then picked up and reprinted by a domestic press.  The other tactics are no less disingenuous and become increasingly hard to unravel once they are used in combination. 

In The Book of Lies, M. Hirsh Goldberg describes a history of fiction masquerading as fact.  Beyond the anecdotes are some fairly standardized misinformation procedures such as:  manipulating polling questions to obtain prearranged results; using statistics in a misleading context to create illusions for public consumption; and the use of  'drylabbing' to achieve a desired scientific outcome. 

The latter recently came to light during an inquiry into a false murder conviction in Canada.  In essence, a man had been convicted on his arrest, primarily because of a lack of connections.  The prosecutors, police and forensic scientists then constructed the illusion of justice using methods that would be considered criminal if undertaken outside of a justice institution.  Hundreds of slides were discarded and the written concerns of a technician were ignored, so that less principled scientists could give the police the results they were looking for.  In an American example, chemical evidence was found in strange places, including an incriminating object where it would have washed off due to rain, and in several places in the lab where it never should have been in the first place.  To be fair, the justice system is following the drift of a society in which consistent truth telling is a severe handicap.

Goldberg also relates an anecdote about a spoof column written by the acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken.  Despite a retraction that admitted his satirical account of the history of bathing was entirely made up, Mencken's column continued to be used as a reference in medical journals and elsewhere.  Mencken went on to say he considered such a reaction as typical, and that "out of such frauds and guesses flows much of what passes for human knowledge".  Again, this project is not exempt from false information.

In her book, Lying, Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, Sissela Bok writes how even people who were debriefed after being lied to felt a loss of trust regarding the larger community.  This commonly occurs during social research, where experts will lie to get honest opinions.  The loss of trust process of course accelerates when people discover official lies on their own.  As the trust breaks down, it becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate responsibilities in a free society. 

Lying for Survival

He who will die is he who will kill - The Clash

As belief in the larger system is lost, the misinformation fog grows at lower levels.  As Richard Deacon relates in The Truth Twisters, disinformation on one side tends to induce it in the other.  Routine lying to authorities, such as that prevalent in insurance cases, is often seen as a form of self-defence against a system that seems to have lost its sense of a just price.  A worker group discussing a defendant who wanted to prove his innocence, rather than take advantage of a technicality, passed an unanimous sentence of stupidity.  The hyper-competitiveness of the new economy leaves less room for principles, the two cardinal virtues of any jungle being force and deception.  Bright spots abound, but the overall trend does not look promising.

1. Scott Peck in A World Waiting to be Born, opens with "an illness is abroad in the land" before recounting how a major investment firm bought a page of U.S.A. Today to show how its services could allow a check of a potential contact's credit rating before "buying a beer for my new best friend".  The company that positioned its service in this way was probably right on in its marketing strategy, although it's hard to imagine anything but a negative response in the not so distant pass.  Scott concludes "something is seriously wrong" when such an ad makes the rounds for stamps of approval, and everyone thinks it's a good idea.

In a recent television commercial, a suave character gets a gorgeous girl and a drink of her beer by way of the old fingers in the water trick with a sleeping overweight fellow passenger.  The embarrassed, soaked-for-the-trip stranger exits stage left.  Having conquered one territory by back stabbing subterfuge, the winner changes seats to take up residence beside his prize.

A 1997 study used a broad definition to document how an average of  200 lies a day were conveyed by the modern person.  The researchers then reached the conclusion that many of the lies were required in order to function in today's society.  If this dynamic was within a family, the analysis would probably have been dysfunctional.

The effect of increasing lies in an age that is supposed to revolve around information has not really been adequately considered.  How can something have value if it isn't true?  Even though individuals can gain a temporary advantage by lying, to themselves or others, the damage to the overall support system is becoming increasingly severe.  Even in a slower, more isolated world, folklore recognized this important dynamic long ago and stated it as ‘what goes around, comes around’.  The industrialist who abuses the environment to stay competitive, and dies a rich, accomplished man, has not really disproved this archetype.  Species far less advanced than humans know how important future generations are to existing generations. 

Most individuals, elites and otherwise, would seem to have innate knowledge that more honesty is needed regarding the long term requirements of the modern age.  Unfortunately, they are also aware that openness and truth are more and more becoming competitive disadvantages, regardless of any official company ethics. Trust, sincerity, friendship and family are frequent casualties of this personal battle between two opposing indispensable needs. 

In effect, the communication and control that describes cybernetics must be honest communications and a large degree of self-control.  The term cybernetics itself comes from an old Greek word meaning to steer or steersman.  Trying to steer in a society where many directions are based on falsehood is like asking directions in town full of liars.  The speed and power of today's technological vehicles means that not knowing which roads obviously lead to nowhere can have consequences considerably more serious than just temporarily getting lost. 

Lying is a common pattern in nature, but more advanced species are supposed to discover the increasing value of morality, not move away from it.  As sociobiologists Wilson and Daly relate, "morality is the device of any animal of exceptional cognitive complexity, pursuing its interests in an exceptionally complex universe."  The information age has not only forgotten some basic logical requirements for survival, but even a lot of what it means to be human.

Those that consider a clampdown to be a viable alternative to trust and truth are ignoring today's complexity and have forgotten history.  The false idols epitomized by human dictators are a recipe of disaster for one and all.  In the past, authoritarian regimes have only delayed and exacerbated the inevitable chaos that must occur with a breakdown in community spirit.  As repeatedly stated, there is just no way the massive amounts of information can be intelligently processed by a select few. 

As well, the more lying and manipulative behaviour there is at the top, the more disinformation will spring up at all levels, and the more the larger supporting whole becomes threatened.  The rule of ruthlessness at higher levels means Machevellian maneuvers must continue.  Although they guarantee the destruction of a society, they also prolong its existence.  The only way out is to find a workable global solution, that is protected from the natural urge to power by a knowledge age information structure.

Truth in a Haystack

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free - John VII

Researcher William Bartley offers a checklist of four criteria for assaying given viewpoints.  They are: using basic logic to check for inconsistencies in the theory;  checking personal experiences against the theory; checking one's own biased logic and sense observation by seeing if the theory contradicts any generally accepted scientific hypotheses; and most importantly, determining if the problem the theory is supposed to deal with is being successfully solved.  The last one is particularly useful for judging extremely complex situations.

Philosophy is a very important component in the search for truth, since science and math alone can not even prove it is wrong to needlessly inflict pain.  Rabbi Nahman provides a bedrock analysis when he states "falsehood imitates truth and it seems impossible to know which is which.  What, therefore, is the difference between the upholders of truth and the champions of falsehood?  This is the unfailing sign: people of truth are especially dedicated to the task of redeeming captives.  They hate slavery.  This is the test by which you can tell the difference." 

Nahman's advice on truth and slavery is related to an information source that has been much maligned by those who consider science to be the final arbiter of truth.  Listening to the heart, as well as the head, is a very valuable verification procedure.  Nature has bestowed humans with a conscience which constitutes a rich lode of subconscious knowledge.  While the conscious can only handle 5 to 9 variables at one time, the power of the subconscious is magnitudes greater.  A caveat is that manipulative cultural institutions can detract from, as well as add to, a person's innate sense of right and wrong. 

Hemispheric brain activity can also be used to illustrate how conscious and subconscious information can be transformed into knowledge.  The left side of the human brain has been identified as processing hard scientific facts and is linked closely to individualism and objectivity.  The right side of the brain deals better with abstractions, artistry and tends toward communal reflections and subjectivity. 

An overactive right side generates irrational creative urges while a dominant left side results in a cold calculating rationality that rejects the power of the subconscious.  Both biases invariably lead to short term thinking, either for oneself or for the community support system.  The two sides of the brain function best when they are used as a symbiotic, cooperative mechanism.  Bilateralism is a primary pattern found throughout nature and humanity's thinking ability also rests on this excellent design principle.  Like two legs walking, both oars in the water or two eyes seeing depth and perspective, the artistic and scientific sides of the brain work best when balanced. 

When accident victims lose the capability to transmit information between the right and left brain, the extreme effects of unbalanced brain hemispheres become obvious.  Experiments showed a handicapped subject's thoughts and actions were completely out of touch with the reality of the diagrams that were displayed to one eye only.  The left hand literally did not know what the right hand was doing. 

A caveat here is that hemispheric brain activity, like conscious and subconscious thought, is a highly simplified analysis of what actually occurs.  Like everything, each somewhat arbitrary division can be studied to help understand the phenomena, but the thing itself can only be understood by seeing or intuiting how it interacts with all the other phenomena that make up the various larger wholes.  Think globally, act locally is a slogan that captures this concept. 

While no advice can entirely eliminate misconceptions, a person's susceptibility to lies and misinformation can be greatly reduced by following Bartley's checklist, Nahman's rule of truth and balancing hemispheric brain activity.  It is also important to remember that recently acquired information is overemphasized by the brain and can skew probabilities if a person is unaware of this when mulling over conflicting information.  With practice, information from untrusted sources can be quickly and automatically screened through a personalized truth filter, that in the final analysis rests on all of the above. 

The Chains of Communication

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and will never be.  - Thomas Jefferson

Primitive people were in direct personal contact with most of the information by which they made their decisions.  Immersion in real experience and the resulting observations directed many thoughts and actions, although witch doctors could still encourage mistaken beliefs.  A modern person has most of their information chosen for them with headlines, word choice, camera angles, photograph selections and editorials adding shape to the selection.  Mass media makes it possible to hate someone who has never been met, or experience joy, sadness and anger without being exposed to any direct stimuli. Many people still confuse authenticity with authority and give a high credence to this information.

Researcher John Hannigan questioned the effect of mass media ownership on democracy in his essay Ideology, Elites and the Canadian Mass Media.  He urged serious action on the role of news as business ideology and manufactured product.  Hannigan concluded that the effect of the media was such that a democratic society could not coexist if this information structure was compromised in its ability in what it could publish.  In 1969 and 1981, mounting concern over the concentration of ownership led to federal studies, which were shelved as the diverse, outspoken opinions of small independent publishers gradually became a thing of the past. 

Concentration of newspaper ownership in Canada has now reached the point where one company distributes the news to more than half the population.  In a recent interview, the head of the company had talked of the need to stem the "soft, left, bland, envious pap that has poured like sludge" through the newspapers.  The magnate's right hand man also stated "if the editors disagree with us, they should disagree with us when they're no longer in our employ."

Because of costs and limitations on bandwidth, radio and television are even more closely controlled than newspapers.  A public looking for escapism is also demanding less news and more entertainment, so that what does get through provides very little to meet the needs of a decentralized information society.  Professor Niel Postman described the emphasis on escapism in his book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death.

The conflict of interest situation is worsened by the media’s reliance on business for advertising income.  The general policies required for business needs are filtered down to the newsroom through subtle negative and positive sanctions.  Like most jobs, much of the behaviour modification has nothing to do with quality or efficiency.  It's a tribute to the human spirit that newspapers often contain relevant information, even though they must remain silent on the big issues.

Hebert Schiller in The Mind Managers states "It is not necessary to construct a theory of intentional cultural control. In truth, the strength of the control process rests in its apparent absence. The desired systemic result is achieved ordinarily by a loose, though effective, institutional process. It utilizes the education of journalists and other media professionals, built-in penalties and rewards for doing what is expected, norms presented as objective rules, and the occasional but telling direct intrusion from above. The main lever is the internalization of values." 

The leading American critic, Noam Chomsky, chronicled the role of the media in his book, Manufacturing Consent.  The title refers to a descriptive phrase found in the minutes of a meeting that a powerful business group had held.  The American elites had talked of a plan to use the media to ‘manufacture consent’ for their policies. 

There have been many other comments made about the media by those who access less obvious information sources.  Journalist turned novelist Theodore Dreiser stated that the American Press is kept by big corporations, the way a whore is kept by a rich man.  American author Gore Vidal has opined the genius of the American press is their ability to get the voter to vote against their own interests.  Thomas Jefferson said he had pity on any person who thought they knew what was going on from reading the newspapers.  Noted American educator John Dewey remarked on the extent of mind management by saying “the reactionaries are in possession of force, not only in the army and police, but in the press and the schools.”

The North American techniques of media manipulation are far superior to the overt, crude methods that have been employed by the regimes of police states.  As such, they are being clumsily adopted in post-communist Russia and other areas joining the global economy.  However, the sense of western media sophistication is really a false one. In The Truth Twisters, Richard Deacon writes "the Western democracies are sometimes just as vulnerable as the people of totalitarian regimes- indeed perhaps more so, because they are more likely to accept what they are told as the truth." 

Like other industrial age institutions, the media manipulation has its roots in the jungle mentality that is common in arenas where competition is fierce.  Force and deception are the cardinal rules of the jungle and the human preoccupation with information secrecy was originally developed to provide protection and security in this world of real scarcity.  The camouflage was a necessary shield from hunger, predators, other clans, different tribes, opposing city states, enemy nations and finally competing transnationals.  Like many other security arrangements for past ages, secrecy is now making us less secure. As the globe becomes more and more interdependent, the poor decisions made as a result of bad information, come around and go around with increasing speed.  

PART 3 

SYSTEMS THINKING

Positive and Negative Feedback

Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress. - Alfred A. Montapert

The cybernetic feedback loops, or circles of causality, fall into two main categories.  A positive feedback loop captures the effect of how biases can lead to other biases.  When a microphone is held too close to an amplifier, a positive feedback loop of the vicious circle variety is created.  An exponential process is underway, where each time the mic picks up the signal from the amp, the amp boosts it again and so on.  Positive feedback can take a small variation in a system and create a major disturbance through a 'butterfly effect'.  In building a snowman, positive feedback makes each turn of the snowball increasingly difficult as the limits of a desirable outcome, or virtuous circle, are reached. 

The increased effort necessary to push the snowball as it gets larger, or complaints from the audience as the mic feedback gets louder, are dampening effects caused by negative feedback, which is the second type of feedback loop.  This form of feedback underlies all goal oriented behaviour in that positive feedback loops by themselves are runaway exponential phenomena.  A thermostat provides a classic example of negative feedback in operation in a mechanical system.  The thermostat either starts or stops a furnace to approximately maintain the goal set on the temperature dial.  If the thermostat was programmed to turn on the furnace every time it sensed warmer temperature, it would be locked in a positive feedback loop.

In studying one area of a system, it can be seen that if a negative feedback loop overpowers a positive feedback loop, as in the case of predators reversing a rabbit population increase, then the feedback labels can switch.  The predator's population growth is now the positive feedback phenomena and the rabbit population becomes negative feedback.  Rabbit food supply, weather hunting season and so on are all other feedback loops.  In life, innumerable feedback loops amplify, reinforce, dampen, balance and stabilize each other in a constantly changing dance of infinite complexity.  If one uses the planet as the larger context, the effect of the feedback relationships among the various systems can be summed as a global structure acts on its components while it is created by its components. 

There is no in front of, or behind of, in natural feedback loops.  It's like trying to explain if the chicken or the egg came first.  If one went far enough back in time, the chicken and egg circle would be seen as a helix in which evolution progressively created a species of increasing complexity that reproduced through laying egg.  Blaming any present group for today's social problems is to ignore the evolutionary chicken and egg facet of historical events.

Cybernetics has had stunning successes regarding the design and operation of automatic machinery, but its performance to date in the social sphere has been abysmal.  There are very limited means for dampening the positive feedback of compound interest.  The short term cause and effect bias of other obsolete industrial age institutions also makes the concept ineffective.  

Information Magic

The most basic components of communication are the sender, the receiver and the referent, which is jargon for the subject matter being referred to.  To discuss communication in which information is not directly sensed, two more elements are needed.  They are the transmitter and the medium. A bartender relaying the score of a ball game would be a transmitter, while the sponsor would be the sender of the information.  The television would be the medium, with everything in between, such as the satellite signal, television cameras, commenters and so on, also considered as transmitters.  All of the elements can shape or change the meaning of the information in the communication.  As stated, personal perceptions and conceptions also filter the message.

Educator Marshall McLuhan correctly saw technology as extensions of human communication.  A telephone can quickly extend the voice or ear anywhere on earth, while the video camera can do the same for the eye.  Telescopes and spacecraft transmissions show the relative ease with which the planetary barrier can be overcome.  Communications around the world can have an immediacy similar to that of a conversation with a nearby neighbour.  McLuhan coined the phrase global village to reflect this facet of increased communication capabilities.  However, this term can be misleading in that face to face meetings will likely always have a quality all their own.

In the physical sense, even the low-tech shovel of the hands and arms for the task at hand.  The automobile tire is an extension of the legs that helps allow high speed, comfortable travel.  A gun is an extension of the arm while the bullet becomes an extension of the fist.

In interactive media, such as a conversation or internet chat, a receiver can pose questions to the sender to seek explanations about any perceived inconsistencies concerning statements about the subject under discussion.  Norbert Wiener referred to such a two-way flow of information as cybermedia.  In a free society, the receiver can also seek out other, diverse sources of information to check for mistakes or lies in what was conveyed to him about the referent. 

In systems with one way biases, such as schools, television, radio and newspapers, there is a very limited procedure for a back and forth exchange to nail down discrepancies.  Even classroom discussion is held within carefully defined borders.  Someone who strays too far from the accepted paradigms will fail, while in society a person who can prove the mass media is mistaken or lying, will be drowned out by the massive flows of information that are controlled by the industrial age institutions.  If the accurate information feedback was about an important manner, cybernetics or systems thinking would consider the lack of communication as a breakdown that would inevitably lead to a loss of control and order.

Some Symptoms

Who holds that if way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst - Thomas Hardy

Money has often been described as the root of all evil.  In reality it functions as a useful encoding and decoding tool, that mirrors human production, consumption and distribution realities.  If the reflection seems bestial, money is not the culprit. 

The original version of the proverb states it is the love of money that is the root of all evil.  This maxim makes more sense; if it were possible to love cold metal, decorated pieces of paper, or the possessions and power that money can buy.  Lust would perhaps be a better word than love.

The shortage of money is the major topic of discussion.  The media is full of stories about cutbacks in social spending and runaway debt levels.  A few areas of the globe stave off deficit increases by exporting more than they import, while taxation levels remain high.  Automation can now produce many of our needs, yet more and more people are forced to beg at foodbanks and sleep on the streets.  The sick are also accused of making too many demands on the system. 

Larger issues fade from prominence as the population focuses on immediate financial survival.  Respiratory diseases climb in cities and near factories, but financial strictures leave few funds for better pollution control devices.  Even taking the country air is unhealthy, with the Canadian Dermatology Association projecting that a person born today has a 1 in 120 chance of getting skin cancer, rising to 1 in 90 by the year 2000.  For a person born in 1930 the odds were 1 in 1500. 

In Canada, the youth suicide rate has skyrocketed 600 percent since the happier days of 1955.  Stress levels are on the rise, from both overwork and underemployment, with pharmaceuticals making a killing by pumping drugs into the population. The antidepressant prozac accounted for $1.73 billion in sales in 1996, with 400,000 users being under the age of 18.  Among 6 to 12 year olds, there was a 298% increase. 

What is behind this paradox of increasing capabilities and a decreasing quality of life?  Where did the promising forecasts of the future go and why did the prediction of leisure and plenty disappear?  How is our technology creating nightmares instead of the dreams it is capable of?  When did we become so helpless to change anything? 

Industrial age institutions blame uncontrollable economic forces that have descended on the land like some strange malevolent god.  We are told human sacrifices must be offered up in the hopes good times will return.  The unspoken implication that hangs in the air is that there is no alternative to a more venal, stressful, polluted and divided society. 

Preliminary Prognosis

In a 1996 Maclean's magazine survey, 78% of the public believed traditional political parties didn't have any answers to today's serious problems.  The tidal wave of plans, predictions and promises no longer has much effect on the confidence of the public.  The voter turnout is falling in both the U.S and Canada such that only a quarter of the electorate are voting for the leader.

Self Evident Untruths

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, 'Something is out of tune.' - Carl Jung

Among the illusions that flow from the industrial age institutions is the idea that lean and mean business practices, propagated represent fundamental change.  That this proclamation is made while money flies like confetti around those at the higher levels in an organization is a clue that there is something very wrong with this.  The simple fact is that technological advances mean more is possible, not less. 

A bit of history that goes unreported is that laissez faire economic policies were demonstrably disproved?? over seventy years ago.  The system broke down and socialists, anarchists, communists, fascists, positivists, distributionists and others engaged in pitched street battles and revolutions agitating for a new system.  Communism or socialism won out in some countries, but despite protestations to the contrary, state capitalism is actually a minor variation on private capitalism.  

Marx was economically astute, but politically naive.  His new movement merely accelerated centralized control of information and production, albeit in the hands of different group.  The collapse of communism was not the victory of capitalism, as we are so often told, but a sign of the obsolescence of all industrial age institutions.  Ideology aside, they are doomed because of extremely poor information flows.  Economics professor Ravi Batra wrote a book in 1978 entitled The Downfall of Communism and Capitalism, in which the undiscussables went undiscussed.  But by all the laws of nature and math, it's one down and one to go for this forecaster. 

One serious false assumption of remaining capitalism is that the business bottom line reflects the real costs of a business undertaking.  In reality, everything from landfill expenses to industry related health bills are ignored by the industrial age accounting system.  The costs are either paid by the public through taxes or passed on to future generations with no thought of how or when they are to be paid.  A second false assumption is that the system works on merit and that there is little interference by influential people or the industrial age financial system in the so-called free market. 

A third false assumption is that the macroeconomic measurement systems pass on good information.  The all important Gross Domestic Product assigns the same value to a murder as it does to a marriage, if the same economic activity is generated.  The unemployment index counts a person who has given up looking for work in the same column as someone who has found work.  These crucial information indicators can be expressed more simply as 1 minus 1 equals 2 in the latter case, and marriage equals murder in the former. 

A fourth false assumption is that free trade is always beneficial.  Besides the lack of accountability in globalization without representation, many of these trade practices burn up more production capacity for transport than the product is worth.  Being the lowest bidder for transnational work only means that other areas will be working that much harder to transfer costs to society and that the race to the bottom will continue.  Governmental stifling of real innovation is replaced by the corporate straitjackets of a return on investment indicator that doesn't measure much of what anyone deeply values in the short term, and can only lead to disaster in the long term.

Much of the current economic philosophy is referenced to a 225 year old book entitled The Wealth of Nations.  In it, author Adam Smith coined the term invisible hand to describe how market forces would provide the best standard of living for all, even while people pursued individual, short term self interest.  Smith also emphasized the importance of a governing structure to overcome individual excesses, and that many small competing firms were an integral part of his hypothesis.  This is not to say a few large competing firms are necessarily a bad thing for an efficient new age.  The point here is that primary conditions of Smith's theory are not being fulfilled, yet traditional economists still point to it as their bible. 

Smith was also writing in a age of scarcity, when the industrial revolution was still young.  Today, there is a technological capacity for abundance, where more than enough basic goods and services can be produced for all.  A modern economist explained the need for saving by using an example of a fisherman who sacrificed a day of fishing in order to build a net, and so caught more fish in the future.  In reality, numerous fishing boats sit idle because technological advances have created a situation where the fish, and not the nets, are the limit.

Billionaire author George Soros points there was also a higher recognition of the value of morality during Smith's time.  This tempered the more brutal aspects of the social darwinism lauded by philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, who wrote it was the job of the economically strong to destroy the economically weak.  Spencer also commented that the character of any nation was dependent on the character of its average citizen.  He missed the obvious connection between how a winner-take-all system would have to ignore principles and find ways around rules, and so cause the society it rested on to devolve in moral terms.

With basic morality critically ill, the effects of cut throat, global, economic competition is breeding Hitler's vision of the new man.  The dictator had glowingly described such a being as intrepid, cruel and fear inspiring.  As was the case over seventy years ago, today's neo-liberal capitalist policies can only provide short term benefits for an increasingly small number of people, while adding to the long term problems that must eventually be dealt with.  It's just not possible for corporations to succeed in the long term, when the supporting communities and environment are being run into the ground.

A fifth false economic assumption is the most serious of all and will be covered in a separate chapter.  A hint of it can be found in the historical fact that there was no money to hire people to engage in productive activity during the Great Depression, yet scads of it became available to build things to blow up when World War Two started.  The view here is that the same financial dynamic should be used today, to fund a World War Three against poverty, ignorance and pollution.  The lack of such an initiative drove economics professor John Hotson to comment "could anything be more insane than for the human race to die out because we couldn't afford to save ourselves?"

It is the positive feedback loop caused by compound interest that killed earlier predictions of a future of leisure and automation.  The money supply must increase within a system to meet interest payments, since interest comes out of nowhere and the money does not yet exist to pay for it.  One way to lessen the inflation that results from more money chasing the same amount of goods is to grow the economy.  Working harder and longer grows the economy, whether it is useful production, or pointless and even destructive activity.  The happiness of the people and the health of the planet are not even considerations.  In addition, morality dies when the money supply is not increased fast enough for everyone to make their interest payments, and some in the community must be cannibalized in order for the others to stay solvent. 

Bernard Lietaer  - Beyond Greed and Scarcity

In effect, debt interest money is a classic case of having the cart before the horse.  Instead of issuing a guaranteed income at the grassroots level to people so they can create, or issuing money for what their elected government has promised to do; money must be pushed into the economy to meet interest payments, and something be must produced, advertised and sold so the extra money can flow through the activity.  It doesn’t matter how much is needed or wanted. And since it is a positive feedback loop, with the new money issued as yet more debt, at more compounding interest, the problem just keeps growing.  As it turns out biblical forbiddance of interest was based on simple math, as much as it was on morality.  A very interesting point about this fifth false economic assumption is that it also created the platform for the type of change needed for a knowledge age.  How this change will be effected is of course the question of the age. 

IT IS POSSIBLE

Hanging On and Letting Go

When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity - John F. Kennedy

Fredrich Schiller commented on the tug of war between new paradigms and old traditions over two hundred years ago.  He philosophized that "firstly we possess an impulse to change our circumstances, to give expression to our existence, to be efficient, which all amounts to gaining conceptions, and can thus be called conception-drive or cognition-drive. Secondly we possess an impulse to maintain our circumstances, to continue our existence, which impulse is named self-preservation." 

Schiller captures the complementary nature of the impulses to change and maintain, as well as their duality. The conception-drive to change and be efficient raises the probability of self preservation. The self-preservation drive to maintain tempers fruitless change and helps consolidate new advances. It is a delicate balance act between succeeding on the leading edge, or losing on the bleeding edge.

Schiller continues by stating "we stand thus through these two kinds of drives in double dependence on nature. The first becomes palpable to us, when nature is found wanting in the conditions under which we attain cognition; the second becomes palpable to us, when it contradicts the conditions, under which it is possible for us to continue our existence." 

The constant interplay between maintaining and changing creates a healthy state of imbalance and encourages creativity under the right conditions. The stance here is that these conditions are not being created today, with an increasing gap between rich and poor leading to very different perspectives about the need for change. As one researcher puts it, some people only change when the pain of staying where they are becomes greater than the pain of changing.

Considering the speed of life today, current institutions would do well to look beyond their current comfort zone and work to eliminate the barriers being erected against real change.  Underneath the veneer of change management buzzwords is a system where non-conformity is penalized and rewards are given for actively pushing industrial age models, which cannot succeed. The fringe, where many new ideas originate, is being hit hard by ideological cutbacks that are slowly building the conditions for the traditional, violent method of fundamental change.

Attempts to thoughtlessly impose change on nature when "it is found wanting" have fared no better in the larger environmental system. Instead of looking at whole systems and symbiotic possibilities, humanity has used its increasing capability to thoughtlessly attack that which it wished to change. Yet the only remaining nature that "contradicts the conditions under which it is possible for us to continue our existence" is present human nature. Since nature always bats last, present policies are tempting fate both in the social sphere and the larger environmental system. 

Holistic Healing

 

Ironically, the most serious problem affecting the information age is a lack of information.  The primary source, the mass media, is caught up in a conflict of interest with other industrial age institutions and diverts and distracts people from the real issues.  Minor events receive extensive coverage while critical problems are reported sporadically or not at all.  What the population should be informed about, among other things, is how a new age is like a new territory, where the good routes need to be mapped out. 

This work is compiled from mainstream books and wandering through meetings of radical change agents, scanning the uncensored internet and reading low circulation publications.  The dissident sources are the only ones to clearly confront the obvious mismatch between a falling quality of life and rising technological capabilities.  Mainstream books that broached the paradox cloaked the most relevant information so that only a reader with previous knowledge could pick up the full implications.  What I considered the best of the mainstream and the dissident work was lumped together to attempt three main syntheses that somehow seemed important to the dawning knowledge age.

The first synthesis attempted is bridging the gap between the intellectual and the managerial worldviews, which would entail largely self management from a well informed populace. The second is tackling the centuries old false dichotomy between the scientific and moral perspectives.  The third is exploring possible ways that suboptimizing does not have to occur when balancing the freedom of the whole with the freedom of the individual. 

The last synthesis is based on the concept that the great majority of free citizens will want to do the right thing for themselves, future generations, and the larger support system, once education and information systems reflect the real possibilities.  The overall goal is to show possibilities for transforming these six separate concepts into three intertwined philosophies that ultimately align with the concept of one natural law. 

In its simplest form, this law could be phrased as Oliver Wendell Holmes' "anyone has the right to extend their arm, until someone else's nose begins".  What I like about this is it seems to suggest a practical angle to the golden rule, and its variations, such as Confucius' "do not do to others what you don't want them to do to you".  

Other biases include the need for an accountable global mechanism.  The reflex action by some reformers against the current incarnation should not black out the benefits possible from one that is designed for people, rather than for domination and the money system that makes this possible.  An intelligent, openly monitored, volunteer, quick response, planetary structure would benefit individuals where coordinated action is needed to deal with cross border issues, as well as ensure human rights are not violated by powerful communities preying upon weaker ones.

The global bodies concept is not related to the present day, unworkable, top down bureaucracies so rightly condemned by many.  The eternal resistance to such forces is a healthy natural recognition of the indispensable need for free will and the resulting diversity.  Misusing environmental concerns to extend this type of over-controlling behaviour threatens to derail the benefits of both environmentalism and globalism. 

However, problems that will severely affect individuals everywhere are being downplayed by some reformers. The globe has certain natural law functions, which lead to proven cancer causing material easily blowing through any community, regardless of where on earth the stuff originates.  Giving a community skin cancer from thousands of miles away is really no different than coming into town and poisoning their well. 

Regardless of current management practices, it's obvious that people were not designed to operate in the same manner as bees or ants.  Industrial age management that considers these species as marvels of cooperation and community not only overlook the value of diversity that springs from freedom, but the basic facts about the insects.  The reality was expressed by a humorist who wrote "what do you see when you look in at the bee in million year old amber, but the same stupid bugger that spent his afternoon banging up against your windowpane."

Harvard President A. L. Lowell quoted ant expert William Wheeler as having "shown that ants, like human beings, can create civilizations without the use of reason".  Sociolbiologist Edward Wilson summed up the future of continuing this way by stating "ants commit genocide routinely. If they had nuclear weapons, they would wipe out the world in a week". 

A highly complex society needs IA, or intelligence amplification, as it is impossible for leaders to know enough to make good decisions about many issues.  The leader's new role could include facilitating and optimizing the conditions of lower level decision making.  Others could also switch in and out of a leadership position, depending on their knowledge about a given situation, and what informed followers thought about the knowledge.  More specific possible knowledge age designs are mixed and matched in the solutions section of this book, as long the chosen components met the criteria of Holmes' Law. 

For a serious study on change, the people themselves would have to be given accurate information and be asked the obvious question of what would you like to create with the new technology?  The reason for starting with such a sweeping scope has to do with consultant Stephen Covey's advice that it is best to begin the end in mind.  Flexibility of possible inter-community designs would of course be of utmost importance in any futuristic research.  The pitfalls of precise prediction are many and varied.  An 1890's forecaster predicted that New York City would become uninhabitable once the population exceeded 7 million.  The reason given was that the horses required to transport that many inhabitants would create insoluble sanitary problems.  The invention of the automobile disproved the prediction, and not by solving the sanitation problem, but by dispersing it over a wider area.

Hi Tech Helpers

Computer modelling and community prototyping would seem to be one starting point for any concrete action plans.  Connective, mathematical and psychological components of a new system could be worked out by using continuous learning loops between scientific experts and communities.  Wants and needs could be developed into environmentally sustainable structures, which could then be continually refined and evolved by feedback from the residents.  The computer programs could go beyond defining desirable alternatives to today's deteriorating position, and incorporate flexible transducers for a relatively seamless transition through the first peaceful age change in history.

To reiterate, Nicholas Negroponte points out in Being Digital, new information technologies are like a force of nature with four very powerful qualities that will result in their ultimate triumph.  Connected computers have the ability to globalize and harmonize while simultaneously providing decentralization and individual empowerment.  The networks are also capable of exchanging more information in seconds than all of the non-computer communication in recorded history.

The capabilities hold great promise when one considers that all wealth creation relies on knowledge.  However, computers and amplified intelligence is still based on the principle of garbage in, garbage out.  A population that is left in the dark on key issues cannot give good feedback on issues, no matter how willing they are.  Even AI, or artificial intelligence, can only fulfill its promise to free people from sweat-of-the-brow labour if it is programmed according to the moral truths that only humans are capable of receiving.

Networking individuals would have to be committed to both the job at hand and higher ideals in order to be effective in an interconnected world.  To obtain the necessary commitment in a free society, cohesion and agreement would have to replace the current emphasis on coercion and imposition.  Released from needless work restraints and busyness that has little to do with wealth creation, people could concentrate on successfully concluding what Peter Drucker termed "the unfinished business of capitalism".

Those that prefer solitary, family or group permaculture would of course do so.  However the attraction would probably be short lived if neighbours with alternatively powered, computer controlled farm and hydroponic communities were seen to be working on what they enjoyed as well as playing baseball, swimming, hiking, reading, learning and so on for much of the day.  An interesting and promising facet of hydroponic farming is that it takes care of the salinization problem that eventually kills the fertility of traditionally irrigated soil, and has collapsed civilizations in the past.  Highrise windows might also be useful for something more than trapping people inside all day to churn out useless reams of make work activity.  Most energy waste caused by commuting would also come to an end if people were given their druthers.

Change of Change

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived. - Abraham Lincoln

At the beginning of the industrial age, doctors would argue about the best way to treat a sick person.  Some insisted letting blood out of the patient was best while others would prescribe useless or harmful drugs.  Still others favoured blistering, where heated objects would be applied to a patient's skin to draw out the sickness.  If the disagreeing doctors tried to understand each other, they could learn and increase their odds of finding better treatments than blistering, bleeding or bad medicine. 

When different paradigms are resolved through honest communications, progress is accelerated and win/win, or synergistic, solutions become possible.  In essence, the resulting whole is greater than the sum of its parts and new wealth is created.  A critical part of this process has been described as 'seeking to understand' in tandem with 'seeking to be understood'.  Communicating by dialogue is held to be superior to discussion or debate for win/win outcomes, although all three can contribute in a principled exchange.  Win/win is not related to compromise agreements, where valid information from the both sides is usually left out, often leaving no one happy with the outcome. 

While people will frequently change their minds on minor beliefs, larger issues tend to break down into acrimonious, win/lose or lose/lose situations.  As mentioned, a history of making certain mental associations creates physical structures in the brain that encourage the same associations to be made again and again.  An open minded person will of course have relatively flexible neural connections, although anyone can see a valid new paradigms if they really wish to. 

Win/lose is also known as a zero-sum game, where someone loses whatever someone else gains.  Zero new wealth is created and revenge, strife and destruction are the primary outputs of the process.  Win/lose usually becomes lose/lose where both sides eventually end up with less.  Sometimes it takes a few generations, but what is sowed is what is reaped. 

In lose/lose and win/lose situations, both sides ignore or try to fudge any facts that disagree with their position.  Good ideas are destroyed along with the bad ones and force can come into play.  Even if a competitor is annihilated, the mindset that results leads to the members of a winning side subsequently turning on each other.  This is a genetic evolutionary pattern common in the wild kingdom. 

Some win/lose dynamics can become extremely difficult to recognize because they operate over a very wide area or a very long time period.  Again, perception can be affected where what is seen to be the right thing to do is nothing more than the traditional thing to do.  And again, basic morality can lead one through the haze to the right answer.

The Enemy

All people are good people in their own eyes - William Sarayon

As stated, personal biases or cultural conditioning can create very different pictures of reality for different people.  This book could be considered excessively critical by those doing well under current conditions, especially since most critics seem unaware of the very real limitations faced by even the most powerful.  Latin Americans who have brushed the wrong way against the system would see the same material as understated and restrained.  In a law of the jungle economy, where one stands on the issues, often depends on where one sits, regardless of any intentional dishonesty.

As for the issues themselves, there is a general consensus that many serious problems today are getting bigger rather than better.  A nervous population heaps the blame on fettered leaders for not showing any real direction.  However, most legislators don't even have time to read, never mind understand, the bills they pass into laws in a sped up, information rich world. 

Instead of looking to certain individuals for all the answers, people need to take more responsibility not only for themselves, but for how their actions interact with their community, their region, their country and their planet.  Technologically, the first truly humane civilization in history is easily attainable.  Ultimately, the missing piece of the puzzle could be found by looking in the mirror. 

One could also be wary of subtle scapegoating campaigns, especially those directed against people who are relatively powerless to respond.  Bureaucracies fuel this dynamic by creating instances where token members of powerless groups are given ludicrous rights.  The missteps then make a big splash in the local media, while the countless incidents where powerless people are treated unjustly go unreported. 

Blatant scapegoating is also a tempting, unproductive diversion.  Some individuals, such as those involved in the North American militias, have recognized the flaws of compound interest.  Unfortunately, they have misdirected their rage against the most visible components of their oppression, rather than focusing on what is wrong with the overall system.  In this project, it will be shown that present conditions do not stem from any individual or group action, but instead come from deep underlying traits and systems that are common to all of humanity. 

The cybernetic concept of accidental adversaries characterizes the effect of these structures and processes on thoughts and actions.  In such cases, everyone seems trapped by the requirements of something that is outside of the control of all.  Nations that are at war in one period can quickly become allies under a different set of circumstances.  The individuals who pay the price for this lack of communication and control, can find themselves on shifting sides of a life and death struggle, simply because their ancestors followed different emigration paths. 

Underlying the revolving enemies syndrome is what cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener referred to as the rule of ruthlessness.  In this environment, individuals, groups, communities, nations and corporations, are often saddled with a damned if you do, damned if you don't choose alternatives.  In the global arena there are no enforceable rules other than those that come out of the barrel of a gun or the bomb bay of a plane.  Even in areas under the rule of law, a breakdown in morality will lead to rules being endrun or loopholed wherever and however possible.  As in any jungle, offensive and defensive measures become two sides of the same coin. 

That behaviour is largely caused by structure does not of course preclude the right to self defense.  However, history shows that such actions usually lead to short term relief at best.  A ruthless mindset must be developed to overcome an ruthless oppressor which usually leads any victor down the same pathway.  Hitler had described this concept as terror must be met with equal terror. 

A critical requirement for a successful transition to a promising information age is likely the moral concept of forgiveness.  Engineer and inventor Buckminster Fuller framed this information by proposing modern technology makes it possible to raise the quality of life for all, without dragging anyone down.  However, in the final analysis, as Alvin Toffler stated, it will be up to the elites themselves as to the method of change chosen. 

Finding a way out of their own rule of ruthlessness battles to engage in intelligent action will be the primary challenge for those caught at the top.  Transparent information structures, open to the broad base of an educated populace, will ensure this war of all against all doesn't revive, if the elites are successful.  

Probability and Risk

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.- Thomas H. Huxley

The philosopher Neitzsche stated there were no facts, only interpretations.  Alvin Toffler writes that much of what passes for knowledge is assumptions piled on top of assumptions.  Even scientists say nothing is for certain and that there are only theories for creating better theories.  One common reaction to uncertainty is analysis paralysis, where needed changes are put off while more and more data is gathered, until the situation becomes personally threatening, often after it is too late. 

Regardless of political misapplications, science is still the determination of the most probable.  What's often missed however, is that complexity and interrelatedness means that what is most probable for success in one area can lead to unexpected backlashes from other areas.  Since scientific objectivity is a proven fallacy, a morally sensitive outlook is the scientific tool needed to help sense wider system effects.

When a phenomena reaches a very high probability of being true, through repeatable, observable experiments, scientists consider it to be a fact.  For example, it is a fact that if a book is put on a library shelf and no one touches it, the earth's gravitational field will keep it there.  If a nearby bomb went off after the book was placed, then the fact would not be true. However, the second scenario is so improbable that the fact remains true.

In risk management, consequences determine the probabilities required before a rational action is undertaken.  Obviously, if  the consequences of failure are serious, then there should be a very high probability of success.  Conversely, if there is a very high probability that the present course of action is not working, and that the situation is continuing to deteriorate, then action should also be undertaken.  The second aspect of risk analysis is frequently missed in a complex system because the risk rises through a passive process. 

Most people intuitively engage in risk management on a regular basis in day to day life. Where the information is directly accessed, such as in crossing a road, there are few problems.  Where a person is dependent on others for information, risk analysis is often turned upside down.  Purchasers of a certain car had no idea of the risk of dying in a fiery crash, because the manufacturer did not disclose the test results.  It turned out the manufacturer was also wrong from a business perspective in assuming that the cost of the lawsuits would be less than the cost of replacing the gas tanks. 

The impreciseness of language is the main reason scientists use math to illustrate theories and concepts.  However, the rigidity of math has a tendency to work as a form of 'lock-in' against the formulation of fundamentally new ideas.  When old maths are unable to grasp a new idea, new maths, such as calculus, have to be invented to express the new thoughts.  The formalism of math is an important stabilizer for new ideas; but creative thought can be ahead of scientific ability in expressing valuable new concepts. 

Another thing that makes science relatively stable compared to literary and other creative disciplines, is the concept of redundancy.  Before something is considered as a mathematical fact, it must pass through a series of repeatable, observable experiments.  Scientists have also built redundancy, or back up systems, into technical communication systems to help ensure the accuracy of information transfers.  Redundancy also exists in the literary traditions.  In face to face conversation, body language and voice tone add redundancy to the information of the honest spoken word.  Multimedia and other images can add redundancy to text based articles. 

PART 4

SONGS OF EXPERIENCE

Inputs

"If the technology of 1900 can get 100 ergs out of a whatchmacullum, the technology of 1950 can get 1,000 ergs" - Robert Anton Wilson

As the industrial revolution got underway,    Manufacturing activity has now fallen to about 20% in leading countries and seems headed back to its agricultural age level of 5 per cent, without any decrease in production capacity. 

Information age work spans the gamut from service industry serfs to highly paid consultants.  However, the servant economy, which had taken up much of the slack caused by manufacturing automation, is itself being increasingly automated.  The productive knowledge sector is increasing, but not nearly fast enough to take up the surpluses from the laid off service and manufacturing workers. 

The lunatic argument that workers should lower their quality of life to slow automation is based on nothing more than economic superstitions and perhaps a bestial desire for non-consensual dominance and submission.  Less enforced labour is a natural precursor to improvements in quality of life for all, once obsolete industrial age work week paradigms are abandoned.  A side benefit is that the jobs that are easiest to automate are the repetitive, psychologically damaging chores.  Newer technologies are also generally cleaner than industrial age technologies. 

In short, the physical inputs are there to create the promised age of leisure, with self directed work, learning and laughter, taking the place of high stress busywork and enforced drudgery.  Instead, industrial age information structures have blinded people to the viable future options, with the result that many have become slaves to technology, working harder than ever.  Massive amounts of data have been transformed into information, but the information has not yet been shaped into knowledge or wisdom.

 

Price Added, Value Subtracted

Futurist Alvin Toffler described information age production as super symbolic and wisely commented that society is currently at ground zero.  He dismissed the conflicting corporate and political initiatives as squabbles over the remnants of a dying age.  What is really being accomplished by the last gasp, madcap activity is nothing more than accelerated decay. It is only deeply flawed economic indicators that continue to create an illusion of progress. 

As stated, the unemployment indicator does not measure those who have given up hope of finding a reasonable income.  The ruling politicians finally emphasized this fact during the 1997 Canadian federal election, when a rising unemployment rate was pointed out as a good thing, since it meant more people were looking for work in an improving economy.  Since then, a falling unemployment rate has been held to be a good thing, in much the same way a car speedometer would mean the vehicle was travelling faster, as long as the needle was rising or falling.  There is also a logic gap in that the employment indicator is indifferent to how happy or miserable workers are during most of their waking hours. 

The other main economic indicator, the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is mulled over, reported on and precisely stated to a decimal point, as though it were exceedingly important information.  Yet GDP does not measure debt increases, inflation, environmental degradation, wealth concentration, working conditions, working hours, per capita amounts, and values a car accident the same as a new car, as long as the same economic activity is generated.  The indicator also disregards volunteer work, housework, quality time for raising children and many other activities that add to real wealth, or well being.  

CHANGE

In ignoring debt increases and inflation, the GDP uses logic similar to that of workers bragging about a 5 percent raise, which is 2 percent after inflation, and on the condition 4 percent be added to their unpayable debts.  Increasing wealth concentration means that an increase in overall GDP can actually translate to a decrease in income for most of the population.  If there are ten health care workers at an annual salary of  $35,000, the total GDP would be $350,000.  If nine of the health care workers have their wages rolled back to $32,000 and one is laid off, and enters a drug addled, life of prostitution at $115,000 per year, GDP will rise to a total of $403,000 [(9 X 32,000) + 115,000], or a fabulous growth rate of 15 percent.  Or the laid off worker can go on welfare and a high priced, consultant/friend can generate the $115,000 in pseudo production.  In either case, at least 90% of the population is poorer, while GDP has risen tremendously. 

Alvin Toffler refers to A and B sectors of the economy to illustrate how the GDP is disconnected from other wealth production realities.  In sector B, the growth in constructive and destructive activities is added together to come up with with a GDP figure.  Sector A includes the work to raise children, volunteer activities, home improvements, information transfers over coffee, community fun for psychological well being and so on.  As Toffler points out, the efforts in sector A are inextricably linked to how sector B functions

The most serious shortcoming of GDP is that it does not measure environmental degradation.  To enjoy a sunny day, a citizen adds to GDP by purchasing sunscreen, or later on by contracting skin cancer.  Becoming upset by deteriorating surroundings can also add to GDP if relief is sought through the pharmaceutical or other drug industries.  Yet the destruction of the support systems that allow all wealth creation to take place, does not figure in the GDP. 

A working parent that uses daycare increases the GDP again when a large portion of their paycheque is immediately churned over to a low paid childcare worker.  The psychological costs of an excessive separation of parent and child are difficult to measure and are therefore disregarded.  When accidents and disasters are considered as new wealth, the longer term effects will depend on many factors such as whether the injured are employed and what their disability coverage is.  The recent devastating flood in Manitoba showed up as a surge of wealth, although for the people involved it was backbreaking labour in a sometimes futile attempt to save their homes. 

One community could build a new infrastructure of highly automated, environmentally friendly, wealth production and distribution mechanisms, and its people could spend most of their time creating inventions, music, poetry, theatre and parks.  Another could be a crime ridden area of mansions and slums, with people slaving all day to stay solvent.  If the same amount of money tokens were circulating, these areas would be considered as identical by the GDP. 

The GDP and the unemployment rates could be more accurately described as disinformation rather than information.  Wealth and well being are measured by these indices in the same way a car radio measures the speed of an automobile.  Yet these big lies are repeated over and over again, and gradually become truth to many. 

Some municipalities are waking up to reality and designing wealth measurement systems based on the novel concept of asking the people of the community what it is that they value and consequently would like to measure.  Jacksonville, Florida is a leader in this initiative and has compiled 'quality indicators for progress'  to measure such things as home affordability, air quality and high school graduation rates.  Car accidents are measured as bad.  Other calculations that count include cigarettes sold per capita, health care levels and the citizen's perception of safety from crime.  Racism, culture and recreation indexes are also under development.  The air quality was rated as good for only 260 days of one year and, based on community input, the target was set at 325 days for the next year.  Solid waste per person is 1.24 tons, with plans to reduce the amount to .74 tons. 

Unfortunately, the larger economic system impinges on the community to such a degree that quality indicators for progress often become no more than a symbolic gesture.  The municipality could be downwind from another that increases the pollutants it pumps into the air, or on the border of a high crime county, or a victim of monetary cutbacks from a higher level and so on.  As repeatedly stated, because of natural law, the global level is the only level some social and environmental issues can be handled at.  

Machine Wages

The automation that holds so much promise for the future only worsens the situation when left in the context of industrial age institutions.  The term machine wages is used to illustrate the effects of a machine that replaces workers in the production process. Money that was used to pay the worker is now spent on a machine that does not circulate as much money back into the economy in a way that serves human needs.

Part of the purchasing power of the laid off worker is replaced by the money paid to the producers and maintainers of the automated machinery.  However, the very reason companies invest in machines is that wage costs drop more than enough to pay for maintenance and purchasing costs.  As leading factories expand their production of machines that make other machines, an additional unemployment feedback loop is added.

Pareto's law, which states societies become more egalitarian as production capabilities rise, is now being disproved by the machine wage dynamic.  By leaving the 40 hour work week in place, and even raising it in many cases, automation has created a huge pool of desperate unemployed who will work long hours for less and less money. 

In real terms, the efficiency of machines should lead to constantly falling prices, yet inflation steadily creeps upward.  When consumer demand is weak, stagflation results, which is then presented as a mysterious phenomena.  From the perspective of the overall system, the explanation is quite simple. 

The interest payments on the new equipment must be built into the costs of a company's products or services.  The capital intensiveness of automation and huge leveraged buyouts has kept this factor significant.  As a result, prices do not fall as fast as productivity rises and overall inflation results.  Stagnation occurs simultaneously because money created to meet interest payments goes right back to the bank and is cancelled out of existence.  If the laid off worker has found a new job, current probabilities dictate that it will be at a substantially reduced wage. 

If the efficient machines did lower the overall price of goods the defective system would create new problems.  Every time an industrial age economic system has hit a deflationary period, the results have been disastrous.  since debt servicing becomes a much heavier burden.  Another effect is that the mass of people stop buying large ticket items in the expectation prices will fall further.  Sales plunge and those holding inventory experience a wave of bankruptcies. 

There private investors provide capital to a company, the interest,or dividends theoretically can end up as purchasing power.  However, this usually leads to a success to the successful systems archetype, described in folklore as the rich get richer.  The money goes to those who have money to invest, and not to the people who are doing the actual work.  Automation is driving the stock markets to record levels, but in a way that is slowly disinheriting the majority from the land that was developed by their ancestors.  The trickle down economic theory was discredited decades ago, and the latest incarnation is following the familiar pattern.

Pension funds are used as an example of how average people are also gaining from the stock market.  However, there is no real wealth behind much of the increased value of the mutual funds and myriad real social and environmental costs that will eventually have to be paid.  Additionally, those landing jobs in the new economy are less likely to have pension plans or even be able to afford to save on their own. 

The serious problems with the Canada Pension Plan could be an indication of the future fate of other pension funds.

The government's proposed solutions to this problem includes raising the contribution level or raising the retirement age.  The first solution will leave less purchasing power on the streets, while the second will further reduce entry level positions in what is already a brutal job market for new graduates.  The Canada Pension Plan debacle is an example of problem solving that creates other problems by focusing on immediate cause and effect.  The underlying industrial age system is inherently faulty, and relieving one subsystem will always stress a different subsystem.  Robbing Peter to pay Paul is the folklore expression of the dynamic of failing to address root causes.

When he first saw the possibilities of automation in 1950, Norbert Wiener wrote that the machines were the precise economic equivalent of slavery, and that humans would be forced into the same conditions if changes weren't forthcoming.  He showed his insight into the financial driver by stating he saw "no future for our society, unless Social Credit principles are incorporated at an early date." In his book, The Human Use of Human Beings, he cautioned "the hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door".

Outputs

Trapped in a shiny metal boxes, contestants in a suicidal race - Gordon Sumners

In business jargon, the inputs and the value added part of a process add up to the business output.  However, because indicators are so poor, what is held to be value added work in many cases is actually value subtracted work.  A paradigm shift here is that busyness is not business.  In many activities today, far more is used up in energy, resources and time than is recovered in the output of the process.  Reams of paper are shuffled around and shelved in myriad make work processes that do not add to anyone's quality of life.  To try and see some of the real outputs of the process, events that are traditionally considered exogenous, or unrelated, to  the economy must be looked at. 

Lately, the U.S. is being touted as a successful information age model because subsistence wages and weak social programs have kept a larger percentage of the workforce burning up resources.  In the U.S., there are over 10,000 hardcore militia members committed to violently overthrowing the government with many times that number on the fringes of the groups.  There have been several incidents of domestic mayhem, with the 168 killed in the Oklahoma blast and the Atlanta bombing being incidents that made the news.  Armed standoffs with rebel groups are cropping up, with one group refusing to negotiate and spraying a downtown street with automatic fire in a shootout with the police.  Despite  the news coverage of the events, the media has yet to mention that the militias are fighting against the debt money interest system.  The 1.3 million American citizens who fled to gated communities venture out into a country where there are 35,000 carjackings per year and road rage shootings to contend with even while travelling at speed.

The list goes on, but America is definitely not on the verge of entering another golden age, as some of the reporting implies.  A voice from the alternative media states "many Americans respond to the suggestion that the U.S. economy has performed reasonably well over the last 15 years with disbelief and anger".  The anecdotal evidence is echoed by statistics that show less than 20% of Americans now believe the government usually does the right thing, down from 75% in 1964.  

Back in Canada, a semblance of civility is maintained at the cost of throwing an increasing number of eager young graduates into the unemployment line.  Menial, dead end jobs are another reward for years of study, while older people who would love to do something cannot afford to retire.  The official youth jobless figure routinely hovers around the 20 per cent mark while the overall rate is held at single digits by creative accounting.  A 1996 Alternative Federal Budget put the real number of all Canadians unemployed at 17%, or 2.5 million people.  Yet people engaged in the makework activities work longer and longer hours. 

Children are growing up in an atmosphere of poverty or with a lack of parental guidance in the two-income homes.  In the midst of plenty, lack of a nutritious diet handicaps the mental development of the poor for life.  A Toronto shelter reported that homeless mothers with babies were once a rarity, with only a few a year.  In 1997 they commented they were seeing that many in a week.  A news article states youth violent crime rose 116% in Canada from 1986 to 1994, while another quotes an law enforcement official  as saying youth crime figures from Statistics Canada do not show that "we only charge 30 to 40 percent of the young people that come through" the law enforcement system.  In the U.S. youth crime has doubled overall and tripled in some areas. 

Another record breaking output of the system is Canadian household debt, which now stands at $460 billion with personal bankruptcies breaking all time highs for three years in a row.  A mass media magazine reports the American consumer debt at $1.14 trillion in 1996 with bankruptcies also setting new heights.    This seems like a lowball figure and contrasts with author Jeremy Rifkin's statistic of $4 trillion.  As stated, the bankruptcies themselves represent additional hidden debt.  The money that is owed by the bankrupt is written off and is not included in other debt totals.  Except in the stage managed insolvencies of the elites, the social costs of losing one's work to  

Two fast growth areas in the present economy include the health and justice industries.  In the latter, some accused people add substantially to economic activity by paying lawyers to argue what is right and wrong.  Those unable to pay large sums of money into the court business usually add to the economic activity caused by jail construction and guard employment.  Much of this is being outsourced in America, so that the more criminals created by the system, and the longer their sentences, the higher the profits of industry.

America leads the world in prisoners per capita with l.6 million people incarcerated as of 1996.  If parolees and those on probation are considered, there is an army of 5.3 million Americans presently under open surveillance for acting against their larger system.  In the media, crime is always presented in the context of individual action, but the American figures makes it clear it is only a lack of organization that prevents the process from being called a revolution.  One astute observer went so far as to say the jails are filled mostly with idealists who refuse to adopt the hypocrisy of the present criminal system.

This is the system that Canada is gravitating towards with its slashing of social programs and de-emphasis on community.  The finance minister has bragged that when the planned social cuts are finished, they will be at 1951 levels.  What is not mentioned is that before 1951, Canadians had no national medicare system and no national funding support for poorer people who wanted to attend university or college.  In the peaceable kingdom, the prison population has risen 22% from 1990 to 1996.  Because it costs at least $40,000 per year to keep someone in jail, imprisoning low paid workers and unemployed does not raise the GDP, it substantially raises the standard of living of the individuals according to traditional economists.

The Americanized emphasis on excessive self-sufficiency is really a divide and conquer strategy that encourages the war of all against all.  The so-called rugged individualism is really about conforming to the industrial age institutions.  An individualistic outlook incompatible with either of these will result either in destitution or incarceration.  If one is individualistic in the approved manner, all sorts of dependencies can be formed on those who are in a position to direct the money flows. 

Anyone who really embraces the rugged individualism outlook should try forming a tribe in the African veldt as our truly independent ancestors did.  If a rifle is taken along, then the exercise in self-sufficiency actually depends on the thousands of people through the ages who perfected the tool and then those that manufactured and transported the item.  The scientific reality is that the specialization that has greatly aided production capabilities has also made people more interdependent than ever before. 

Scruples, morals and a true community spirit are all competitive disadvantages under the every-man-is-an-island mindset. Concern for the community increasingly functions as a cover for selfish networking activities.  There is also the troubling concept that a rich society that encourages a severe income split is merely fulfilling ego inflation impulses in handing out the necessities of life to beggars.  True community spirit has been described by one observer as 'random acts of kindness and senseless beauty'.

Some community activities, such as bingo, segue into going profit concerns, with decreasing percentages going to charities.  In many cases the pretense is dropped entirely as widespread institutional gambling funds government responsibilities, while taxes increasingly go to subsidize corporations and financial interests.  The idea that discretionary corporate charity will take up the slack in government social spending is ludicrous by the very definition of how business must and should operate.  The most recent figures show this idle chatter for what it is, with corporate charitable donations at less than one half of pretax profits and falling.  This is less than half the rate of the 1950's through 1970's, when government social spending was significantly higher. 

Distribution

The tax deduction for corporate lobbying expenses now costs Canadians $50 million each year.  A campaign that raised a public furore over political pensions has leveraged corporate influence dramatically.  The global investment option is now backstopped by politicians who have an increased dependence on private sector income, should they be defeated.  The share of federal revenue provided by corporate taxes has fallen from 21% in 1961 to just 7% in 1996.  Meanwhile, the share provided by individuals rose from 32% in 1961 to 48% in 1996. 

This leads to increased public pressure for more social cuts, since most people assume government spending is where government debt comes from, and also assume this is why taxes continue to rise.  In overall taxation, Canada is 15th out of the 24 nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); but the personal share is significantly higher than average, while the corporate share is significantly lower.  Even the pro-business OECD commented that "worrying inequalities were straining the social fabric" and temporarily backed off on its standard proposed solution of driving wages down to cut unemployment.

The transfer of costs to the public has resulted in a 102% increase in corporate profits since the last recession.  In 1991, 62,480 companies with a combined profit of more than $12 billion paid no taxes.  The retired Prime Minister who engineered the free trade deal, lives in a mansion, and sits on the boards of several large corporations.  Recently he exercised a $2.6 million dollar stock option, whereby stocks can be bought at an artificially low price and then sold the same day.

From 1981 to 1993, the share of free-market income of the richest 20 percent rose to 43 percent from 38 percent while the poorest 20 percent share fell to 2.2 percent from 4.8 percent.  290 Canadians making over $250,000 per year in 1994 were members of the wealthy tax-free club, up from 250 in 1993.  Data from 1992 shows nearly 100,000 people with incomes above $100,000 also avoided paycheque deductions and subsequently found enough loopholes to pay no taxes.  Vague hints drift out of Parliament of the tax free transfer of a multi-billion dollar trust out of country, away from where the money was originally obtained.

1997 statscan figures show that "family incomes have been caught in a downward spiral since 1990", the first overall decline since the Great Depression.  Yet instead of no one working, over two thirds of Canadian families now have two wage earners.  The shakedown also had 635,000 Canadians working at two or more jobs in 1989, rising to 944,000 by 1994.  Retail wages have dropped to 1950's levels. 

By 1993 there were 1.4 million people under the age of 18 living in poverty in Canada, the highest rate ever.  45% of food bank recipients are children, in contrast to 21% of the general population.  A recent Canadian study estimated that two thirds of all new jobs fell into the 'lousy' category.  In the US, the pattern is similar with 23 million of 30 million 1995 new jobs being low paying, unstable careers.

Single parent homes were hit hardest and saw their median purchasing power decline 9.5 percent from its 1990 level, while married couples dropped 6.2 percent.  A Canada wide poll stated 80% are worried about finances, 54% say there is too much stress in their lives and 38% expect the job situation to get worse.  Only 10% expect any answers from the current political parties. 

Previously, huge productivity increases had allowed a large amount of interest payments to be made, while still allowing people to enjoy a relatively continuous rise in living standards.  Today's level of debt, unregulated global trade and increasing automation has raised the stress on the present system to the point that the quality of life is falling for most people.  Cuts in interest rates have been unsuccessful in bringing the system back to health.

As stated, America is increasingly held to be the model for Canada to emulate.  Researcher Jay Hansen states that  "for much of America, the glory days came to an end in the early 1970s. For more than two decades now, real wages in America have been stagnating or falling, the distributions of earnings and income have become increasingly unequal, and the bulk of financial wealth has been accumulating among fewer and fewer families."

 "Since 1973, real average weekly earnings for the more than eighty percent of the workforce who are counted as production or nonsupervisory workers have fallen by 19 percent; median family income is no higher than twenty years ago; and the share of total marketable net worth accruing to the top 1 percent of all households has increased from about 20 percent to nearly 39 percent.  Income gains have gone primarily to the already well-off, while those at the bottom of the income distribution have sustained real losses".  This reverses previous trends, where from 1950 to 1975, the bottom one-fifth of the population saw their income grow by 138%.

The rich, who supply most election campaign donations in an era of plummeting principles, had their top tax rate chopped from 68% in 1980 to 28% by 1988.  Other statistics show that in 1951 corporations provided 30.6 percent of revenue for government coffers while individuals chipped in 26.1 percent.  By 1991, corporations were responsible for 11 percent of tax payments while the individuals share had risen to 54 percent.  Personal taxes rose 386% for those designated as low income, 15% for the middle class and 4% for those considered affluent 

The internet article, Dangerous Inequalities, makes the point that the $210 billion spent in interest on the U.S. national debt was a tax transfer from the poor to the rich.  The article does not mention that the money was created from thin air, and that other debt accelerates the process.  The inevitable result was that in 1976, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned 19% of all the private material wealth in the U.S.  By 1996 the figure was over 40% and their share exceeded that owned by the bottom 92% combined. 

Another article puts the kibosh on the lean and mean propaganda by stating that between 1983 and 1989, the top one half of one percent of Americans increased their wealth by 2.48 trillion dollars, or 43%.  The leaders could still have had a 10 percent increase and paid off the entire 1989 US national debt of 2.19 trillion dollars.  Meanwhile, the pay of the average American worker dropped by 6% between 1979 and 1992.

In 1974 the gap between the lowest and highest paid employees was 41 to 1 in the U.S.  By 1992, the ration was 150 to 1, for an increase of 300%.  Compensation expert Graef Crystal comes up with figures that show the average CEO made 35 times as much as the wage of the average worker in 1974 increasing to 187 times by 1994.  The relationship between pay and performance was found to be weak with the statistical correlation between CEO income and returns on investment virtually nonexistent.  One executive rang up $3.5 million in compensation while the company he managed lost $114 million.  His severance package was over a million dollars, while 277 other workers were shown the door with no severance at all.

One compensation board met with the top twenty five executives of a large firm and worked out a package whereby the executives would receive a bonus equal to their salaries if the stock rose 30% and stayed there for ten days. To accomplish this short term objective, the executives froze the salaries of everyone underneath them, slashed spending on long term projects, and threw 12,000 of the company's 86,000 employees onto the street.  By the end of the year, they had reached their goal and earned $18 million in bonuses, with the CEO collecting more than $9 million in salary and bonuses.

The lack of worker leverage in a global economy is behind much of the carnage, but there could also be deeper reasons.  The ratcheting down of purchasing power could be a clumsy attempt to reduce consumption, in order to sustain the environment.  A planned involuntary simplicity would seem to be far fetched in light of the devastating effect the poorer countries have had on their environments.  However, the probability of world leaders backing such a plan should not be underestimated in that the information limitations inherent in elitist decision making has created many results opposite to the intended outcome. 

The immorality and bias toward personal benefit has consistently led to unnecessary suffering.  In the 19th century, Thomas Malthus influenced many economists of the day when he convincingly argued population would grow to match any increase in wealth.  David Ricardo and others attained elite backing when they used this economic law to insist that wages be kept low.  The madness reached an apex when during the great potato famine in Ireland,  when it was thought that feeding the poor would merely make the problem worse in the future and over a million died.

As we know today, Malthus was completely wrong.  A drop in infant mortality and a higher standard of living has consistently led to a levelling off of population.  Poverty and the accompanying lack of educational opportunities are the primary reasons for overpopulation.  If a replay of this mindset is happening, it won't be the first time history lessons have been ignored.  Instead of drastically cutting consumption, workers are putting in long hours and burning up more energy and resources than ever in an effort to quell their insecurities.

Q: You've said, "We can't go on with the present polarization of wealth and poverty." Why not?

Howard Zinn:  I don't know how long we can go on, but I know we can't go on indefinitely. That growing, growing gap between wealth and poverty  is a recipe for trouble, for disaster, for conflict, for explosion. Here's the Dow Jones average going up, up, up, and there are the lives of the  people in the city. The Dow Jones average in the last fifteen years has gone up 400 percent. In the same period, the wages of the working population have gone down 15 percent.

Now the richest 1 percent of the  population owns 43, 44 percent of the wealth. Up from the usual maybe 28 percent, 30 percent, 32 percent, which is bad enough and which has been a constant throughout American history. When they did studies of the tax rolls in Boston in the seventeenth century, they concluded that 1 percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth. If you look at the statistics all through American history, you see that figure, a little more, a little less, around the same.

 Now it's worse and worse. Something's got to give.

- David Barsamian, "Howard Zinn," The Progressive, July 1997. 

Exports

Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. - Che Guevera

The wealth concentration and social problem dynamics arising in North America are the chickens coming home to roost.  The developed countries have had a long history of exploiting less fortunate nations, but the conditions did not give rise to any domestic militias because most of the oppression was out of sight and out of mind.  The exponential debt driver eventually had to run out of fuel in the poorer nations and turn on the populations of the richer countries.  Still, the wealth concentration continues in the less developed nations, and between nations, as it must according to the monetary math.

In 1996, the total wealth of the world's 358 billionaires equaled the combined incomes of 45% of the world's poor or 2.3 billion people.  Between 1960 and 1991 the richest 20 percent of the world's population increased their share of global wealth from 70 percent to 85 percent, while the poorest 20 percent declined from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent.

During the eighties most Latin American countries and African countries saw living standards fall by 10 to 50 percent.  100 countries have suffered stagnation or decline, with inequalities growing not only between countries, but within them.  The computers that could offer salvation under knowledge age institutions are instead used to measure the decline.  Mind numbing, repetitive work that could have been automated is now transferred to less fortunate countries.  It took a Canadian child to point out that much of this work is done by children, with 55 million child labourers in India alone, which also has 60 million unemployed adults. 

All self-congratulatory talk of foreign aid is a smoke screen in that massive amounts of wealth flowing from poor countries to rich.  Any foreign aid donations are paid for by the taxpayer, while the interest payments flow back to the wealthy.  A snapshot of Latin American economics reveals that there was a net transfer of  25 billion dollars to the richer countries in 1989 alone. 

In 1980 third world countries owed $572 billion.  Between 1982 and 1992 they paid back over $1.6 trillion, but by 1992 interest ensured their foreign debt had risen to $1.5 trillion.  The African countries paid back over $180 billion between 1983 and 1990, $40 billion more than they owed in total at the end of 1982.  Most foreign aid goes to corrupt government officials who act as overseers of people who neglect their own needs to make things for the lending countries in order to obtain the hard currency needed to pay interest on their loans.  UNICEF has estimated that the money used for interest payments alone could save the lives of half a million young people each year in poorer countries. 

Chile is indicative of policies carried out around the world in the name of creating paper profits.  The media regards it as a success model by the traditional economic indicators.  Standards of living, as measured by profit per capita,  have gone up as mining transnationals do well in a country with high grade deposits.  Again, the measuring indicator is unrelated to how the majority of the citizens are faring.  The capital, Santiago, also acts as a tax haven for company headquarters.  After a CIA backed coup against a democratic government, the Santiago stadium acted as a roundup center for advocates of democracy. 

Recently the dictator who led the coup was praised by the head of one of the transnational mining companies at their annual meeting.  In the same speech, the CEO said Chilean political prisoners might not agree with his views, but part of the wonderful thing about our world is the freedom to disagree.  The dictator being honoured lives in luxurious retirement for a job well done.  He systematically hunted down and executed those that believed in an elected government.  To help find everyone, his private police tortured people by running over their arms and legs with cars.  Others were subjected to electric shocks or forced to watch as their relatives were raped. See Smedley Butler Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

The mining magnate who had praised the dictator hastened to defend himself when a brave columnist reported the speech and the conditions in Chile.  In a letter to the offending newspaper he stated much of his family had perished in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.  However, Hitler worked wonders for the German economy prior to the second world war, and would have done the same afterward, had he won.  Yet the mining magnate properly expresses horror at the Nazi human rights abuses, but is so clouded by greed he does it in defence of a system that followed the same basic concepts.

This scenario is played out in country after country, with Marcos, Mobotu, Duvalier and so on examples of leaders who gained great personal wealth by selling out the interests of their peoples to countries professing concern for democracy.  Another game that is played involves transfer pricing.  In this dodge, transnationals routinely juggle their books so that the major price added portion of a product is assigned to a country where the taxes are low.  This is easier now that much wealth production has little connection to reality.  

Waste

Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed. - Francis Bacon

The effect of the frenetic busy work extends beyond individuals into the larger system. Scientists say the life support systems of the planet itself are starting to collapse from mindless industrial age economic activity.  There is a tremendous amount of energy spent to move three tons of metal to get a 180 pound person to work, so they can spend most of their time sabotaging each other's efforts, often within the same bureaucracy.  At the same time, the false financial strictures encourage companies to cut corners and use inferior pollution control technology.

In 1900, cancer accounted for only three percent of the total deaths in the United States.  Since the introduction of thousands of new chemicals beginning in the 1940s -- pesticides, herbicides, radiation, artificial hormones, food additives, toxic wastes, industrial chemicals, and toxic building materials -- one in three Americans contracts the disease.  A counterpoint to this statistic is that the diagnostic abilities in 1900 probably attributed some cancer deaths to other causes, but there can be little doubt the increase is serious.

Fishing areas once thought limitless have been destroyed by a mentality that revolves around 90 day stock market returns.  Large nets drag the bottom, destroying the entire ecosystem and catch large tonnages of unwanted fish that are tossed back, usually after they have died.  The entire east coast cod fishery is now all but shut down, with the west coast of Canada seeing the lowest salmon stocks in recorded history. 

Rainforests are levelled to raise cattle for a few short years, until the unsuitable soil is exhausted.  As well as providing biodiversity, the rainforests, along with other forests help function as the lungs of the earth by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.  Since the cattle are converted into American hamburgers, one comedian described the process as killing the oxygen supply, in order to get heart disease.  

In a year, an area twice the size of Nova Scotia, over 100,000 square kilometres, becomes part of the world's growing deserts.  Global warming appears to be a serious problem, with untold consequences beyond the guaranteed disappearance of large areas of land due to the melting of polar ice.  All the while, we are told if only we could accelerate mindless economic activity, our problems would be solved. 

Since 1992, there has been a general consensus among scientists that present activities cannot be projected into the future because it will cause massive damage to human health.  Over 1,500 leading scientists, including 99 Nobel laureates, have added their names to one project calling for action.  The Business Council for Sustainable Development stated bluntly in its report to the UN: 'We cannot continue in our present methods of using energy, managing forests, farming, protecting plant and animal species, managing urban growth and producing industrial goods'.  The Brundtland report echoed the information stating: 'There are thresholds which cannot be crossed without endangering the basic integrity of the system. Today we are close to many of these thresholds; we must be ever mindful of endangering the survival of life on earth' .

The World Resources Institute, in collaboration with both the Development and Environment programs of the U.N., from the world's most extensive environmental databases that 'The world is not now headed toward a sustainable future, but rather toward a variety of potential human and environmental disasters'

In 1993 the Worldwatch Institute concluded: "The environmentally destructive activities of recent decades are now showing up in reduced productivity of croplands, forests, grasslands and fisheries; in the mounting cleanup costs of toxic waste sites; in rising health care costs for cancer, birth defects, allergies, emphysema, asthma and other respiratory diseases; and in the spread of hunger.  'If we fail to convert our self-destructing economy into one that is environmentally sustainable, future generations will be overwhelmed by environmental degradation and social disintegration"

In 1992 two of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions issued the joint statement: "Unrestrained resource consumption for energy production and other uses could lead to catastrophic outcomes for the global environment. Some of the environmental changes may produce irreversible damage to the earth's capacity to sustain life. ... The future of our planet is in the balance."  Even the World Bank admitted in its projections of the necessary economic growth  for 2030 that" if environmental pollution and degradation were to rise in step with such a rise in output, the result would be appalling pollution and environmental pollution and damage".  Since demand must be consumer driven, the advertising industry would at last have the opportunity to create something worthwhile, if the situation were to be reversed.  Under knowledge age institutions this could be accomplished at the same time as a rising quality of life.

There are of course many feedback loops between the deteriorating environment and society.  Sick office syndrome, links between endocrine disrupting pollutants and hyperactivity in Children, respiratory diseases and so on.  Manganese miner's have a tenfold risk of Parkinson's disease.  Roger Masters in his book Environmental Toxicology claims there is a direct linkage between crime and ingestion of pollutants through drinking water.  He compared FBI crime figures with information on the discharge of lead and manganese from the Environmental Protection Agency.  Counties with the highest levels of the toxic metals had crime rates triple the national average.

Global warming is still an unresolved issue, with natural climatic changes making measurement difficult.  However there is still a small gradual warming, that seems to be wreaking a significant amount of havoc on the biosphere if record insurance company losses are any indication.  Since the industrial revolution started, the atmosphere is loaded with 40 percent more carbon that preindustrial era.  By 2030 or sooner, it will be double.  Since 1975, the number of cars worldwide has increased 60 percent, while the population has increased 30 percent.

Half the earth's forests are now gone, with many trees being cut to provide paper with which to convey false information or advertising.  Chemical use continues to increase for reasons of false economies, with theWashington Post reporting 2% of 60,000 chemicals in use were tested, and the interactions between the chemicals largely unknown.  63,000 tonnes of the pesticide methyl bromide are used, even though it has recently been found to cause more damage to the ozone layer than CFCs.

 

Just 10% of the $1 trillion spent on armaments could have implemented some modest environmental proposals put forth at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, but the recommendations remain largely unaddressed. 

Take Home

If you can't be yourself, then who in hell can you be? - Sherry Stratton

In a system based on scarcity and greed, society impells all to turn their relationships into exploitive ones.  Economist E. J. Mishan described the spillover effects as urban blight, congestion, environmental  damage, psychic stress and general neurosis.  What were thought to be the natural allies of individualism, such as representative democracy and rationalism, have been subverted to become its enemies. 

The required lip service to the continuing hypocrisy results in a suppression of feelings and free speech which has been described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild as emotional labour.

Specialization is also held to lead to further alienation of the individual from society.  The satisfaction of creating something can become lost when only a small part of an overall product is dealt with.  However, this seems to be more a result of unappreciative higher ups and the enforced detachment of economic effort.  The latter becomes necessary in a system that draws its strength from public illusions.

Under the right conditions, the benefits of specialization can be combined with the higher satisfaction that comes from being part of a successful team.  In war time, this feeling has gripped entire nations and there is no reason it could not be extended to the global level.  As stated, most of the mind-numbing tasks of specialized production can be easily automated, with the remainder shared out so that most of a community or global effort can be spent on more interesting work.  A scientific and moral approach to the issue would also see the enforced work week fall to twenty hours or less, leaving lots of free time for people to craft their own individual handywork.

An overemphasis on hierarchy is another primary cause of the alienation of a person from self.  It is the rare person who feels in their heart that most of their waking life should be spent following orders that often seem incomprehensible or that they know to be meaningless or damaging.  That current structures demand the promotion of those who excel at repressing others does not help things.  At the same time as a leader is gaining in business skills, the competitive situation demands they deskill themselves in how they truly empathize with others, with exploitation being the key to company success. 

The excessive rewards/punishment motivation that drives the present process leads to a rise in left brain thinking, and a loss of balance with the important, communal and artistic functions of the right brain.  This imbalance extends itself into the current debate over what constitutes poverty in the developed countries.  Often the point is made that someone who has food, shelter and clothing is not really in need and that the poverty line is inflated when it moves beyond what is required for these basics.  What this perspective neglects is that poor individuals are shut out from many community gatherings because so many of them revolve around the expenditure of money.  That they might have a life beyond traditional economics seems to have become lost.  The hidden ghettos that spring up in households that cannot afford the participation fees of pub socializing, sporting events, movies, concerts and so on has been termed social aparthied by some activists. 

Even those that do not have to follow a lot of orders and have no financial concerns can feel unhappy.  In The Poverty of Affluence, clinical psychologist Paul Wachtel argues that having more and more does not really leave us feeling more and more fulfilled.  After basic needs have been met, the thrill of having material goods wears off as quickly as the junkies first few highs, and it becomes necessary to buy more just to keep depression at bay.  Wachtel concludes that excessive materialism has created a society of  unhappy neurotics, and that our frantic pursuit of growth ends up working against the attainment of secure and lasting satisfaction. Hedonic ….

Many glimpses into the lives of the rich and famous reveal a desperate unhappiness.  One rich socialite has left her drug addled home existence to lie fully comatose in hospital; a hieress to billions commits suicide;  a pain racked ex-football star takes out his nameless rage on his wife; God's banker swings by his neck under Blackfriars bridge and so on.  As one author put it, the culture of consumption has consumed many of those that it was meant to serve.

The sacrifices that must be made to do well in the corporate world have littered mansions with lost souls and aimless offspring.  A former General Motors manager succinctly described the forces at play when he related "as you move up the ladder you have to agree to be humiliated as a rite of progression.  Everyone gets the things they cared about, are committed to, or believed in, taken away.  It's the price one pays for proving one's loyalty.  You become a victim in this process, but you end up identifying with the aggressor.  By the time you're one of the top executives of the corporation, you are ready to be the aggressor yourself."

The retarded giant of industrial age production is kept in place by constant advertising.  The human environment is filled with signs, billboards, and constant radio and TV ads.  Even if all the media are avoided, junk mail invades a person’s mailbox while telephone solicitors and door to door salespersons intrude in their struggle to make a living. 

Rich or poor, self-actualization would seem to be a distant dream for most.  Sense of belonging has often been perverted into a feeling of being owned by the unseen forces that bind us to the altar of Mammon.  Through it all we are continually admonished not to waste time, but there is little or no recognition of the wasted lives.  

Most psychiatrists can only mask the symptoms of an unhealthy environment with an increasing array of therapies and drugs.  Like everyone else, they are dependent on the credit monopoly for survival and cannot admit that the majority of the psychological problems are natural responses to the current system.  Thomas Szasz, who published The Myth of Mental Illness, R. D. Laing who used an analogy of a trapped deer, were two pioneering psychiatric dissidents that attempted to put human healing above the dollar. 

Zero sum financial maneuverings, high pressure selling and make-work bureaucracies are, at best, useless endeavours.  Even the manufacturing sector productivity increases are often devoted to shoddy or disposable goods, so that replacements can be churned out and meet the employment and expansion needs of the obsolete institutions.  The social darwinism approach has taken on the characteristics of a headless chicken.  As such, it is undoing the quality of life improvements caused by the industrial age.  It is also killing the planet.

RELICS

Cannibalizing the Sick

Politics have no relation to morals - Niccolo Machiavelli

The Canadian health care situation provides a good example of how the media can manipulate or downplay stories that do not meet the needs of business, even if those needs contradict the public's need to know.  For example, after extensive lobbying by transnational companies, monopolies on certain drugs were extended in Canada.  In the last decade alone, spending on prescription drugs has increased by $4 billion, while needed medical services have been cut back.  Another unreported media story is that the markup on prescription drugs is often higher than that of illegal drugs.

In 1995, a poll revealed that there was strong public support for cutting social programs, including health care.  The findings made the rounds of Canadian information shows and newspapers.  What was not publicized was that the poll was devised by a subsidiary of the world’s biggest public relations firm, which had billed $81 million for fighting against a public health care system in America.  Its clients include 11 pharmaceutical giants and the five largest private health insurers in North America.  The PR firm has many links to a powerful global body known as the Trilateral Commission, including a prominent Trilateralist who sits as the Canadian chairman for the PR firm.  Other Canadians affiliated with the Trilaterals include the country’s main media magnate, and the directors of several large insurance companies.

American clients of the PR firm operate huge profitable health management organizations or HMOs.  They have signed up 50 million Americans and can choose those who are the least likely to actually need medical care.  They can also choose not to pay for some diseases.  A Canadian newspaper published a small story about a woman who waged a long fight against her HMO.  After publicity, the HMO agreed to pay $70,000 for a leg operation instead of the $10,000 it would cost to cut the leg off.  There was no shortage of doctors or supplies for either option.  Even superman, or Christopher Reeves, would be reduced to a miserable existence by his spinal cord injuries if he did not have rich friends to look after him.  Lois Lane, or Margot Kidder, did not fare so well and was bankrupted by medical bills after a car accident. 

During the American debate on a health system, it was discovered that regular debating opponents on a news show were both being paid by health insurance companies.  The millions of dollars in drug money also bought scenes of fearful families undergoing trauma caused by the proposed new system.  The advertising campaign also attacked the Canadian system despite Canada's far cheaper per capita health costs.  The savings occur even though 39 million Americans have no health coverage at all and those with inadequate health coverage are routinely driven into bankruptcy.  The Canadian media also ignored or downplayed Ralph Nader when he gave a cautionary speech in Ottawa about the aims of the $300 billion dollar American private health care industry.  He stated their obvious policy was to subvert or destroy compulsory drug pricing and universal health care in Canada.

Canadian hospital boards are now being filled with bankers and insurance executives who also attend Trilateral Commission meetings.  The giant PR firm accurately claims that it can “manage issues by influencing public attitudes, public perceptions, public behaviour and public policy". A large part of this strategy entails what the PR firm refers to as “media placement.”  Canadian tactics also include the old tried and true method of slashing budgets to create a breakdown and then affecting the role of saviour for those harmed by the cutbacks.  Like America, the solutions will entail directing money away from the patient and towards corporate profits. 

Healthcare could perhaps be regarded as a critical indicator of the level of a civilization.  In an economy in which there is no real scarcity, where does the impulse for feeding off the sick and the old of one's own species come from?  Being humans, people will usually adopt a cost is no object mentality where the suffering of a loved one is at stake.  Being trapped in industrial age institutions, business eagerly pounces on such misfortune as a way to squeeze the maximum amount of resources from something with a minimal ability to resist. 

There are many more connections and specific details about the attack on Canada’s public health system.  Joyce Nelson, a respected Canadian author, has published them in a low circulation magazine. She provides many names and blatant conflict of interest situations.  But the mass media continues to ignore what should be the story of the year. 

Politics as Usual

Since politicians don't believe what they say, they are surprised when the people believe what they say - Charles de Gaulle

So-called democratic institutions no longer fool most of the people any of the time.  It is hardly necessary to go into details about their effectiveness since there are few illusions about trusting elected officials.  A poll taken by Parents Magazine and published in their November 1988 issue showed 10% of Americans considered politicians to be sincere.  Presumably, this figure has not changed for the better since then.  A science fiction novel described people caught in the web of organized politics as being there not to wield power, but to take attention away from those who actually held power.  The structures and processes again guarantee such an outcome. 

People who don't have the time or the inclination to find out what a politician really stands for will depend on having information brought to their attention through expensive advertising.  In a damned if you do, damned if you don't dynamic, the political leader is forced to rely on financing from special interest groups to have a chance of winning.  The special interest groups in their struggle for survival and dominance will demand anything in return for the money, including the right to advertise proven cancer causing products.  To bridge the gap between the interests of the voters and the backers requires lies piled on top of lies.  Over it all lies the industrial age monetary system. 

Researcher Jay Hansen states "the reason that we are unable to adopt a sane economic theory is because of the symbiotic relationship between today's Smithian economic system and today's Machiavellian political system;  they continually reinforce each other.  The reason that we are unable to adopt a sane economic theory is because of the "mother of all flaws" in our political system."  Hansen also coined the term one dollar, one vote to describe the process.

In his new book, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, historian Paul Kennedy argues that the political system of America is so corrupt that America will not be able to save itself.  Kennedy would seem to be correct in that even a politician that feigned being bought to get into power would be assassinated if they strayed too far from the dictates of higher powers.  However, since at root it is the people themselves that are the political process, it is really not up to the current political system whether something can be saved or not.  Even many of the same politicians could become effective, once they were no longer ensnared by contradictory demands of being forced to spend large sums of money to get their image and name in the minds of the voters.

Information advances have resulted in many seeing through the web of lies that constitute the political arena, but the general populace remains unaware of their complicity in this sad state of affairs.  People buy into the nonsense that a leader should have concrete, solid answers to complex questions that are unanswerable without models, prototypes and recursive learning loops from the people themselves.  In their abrogation of responsibility, the public drags even the knowledgeable politicians into simplistic solutions to complex problems. 

Any leader that treats the situation realistically is held to be indecisive and weak rather than forthright and principled.  As a result, they make wild guesses about matters that would best be left to emergent strategy.  The recent insistence on decisive politicians who keep their promises has resulted in some taking action on an issue, even though they are well aware a changing situation has made the policy idiotic for all concerned.

The worst drawback is that each voter also operates from a what's-in it-for-me perspective.  The offshoot leads to what has been termed the tragedy of the commons, where the support system breaks down because everyone is tied up in what the system can do for them, without balancing this with what they need to do for the system.  The result is a politics that, like other official information systems, avoids structural linkages between individual interests and the interests of the supporting environment.  Symptoms are dealt while root causes continually breed the same problems.  Entertainment becomes central rather than responsible work.  At root, all this occurs because this is what the general population has demanded with their vote.

Communication Breakdown

"Men could go to heaven with half the effort they expend to go to hell, if they would but venture their industry the right way" - Ben Jonson

Our schooling, media, political and corporate institutions leave us groping for control of our destiny.  An unspoken assumption is that it is all for our own good.  Some views from the top seem to be that the average person is too unsophisticated to be trusted with accurate information with which to make decisions and cast their vote.  A father knows best attitude will supposedly preserve the intertwined virtues of order and progress. 

But everyday experience creates the opposite impression.  Order is breaking down while progress is in decline.  One reason this is happening, is that despite being less informed, most average people have a much better sense of right and wrong then those who have spent their lives caught up in political and corporate struggles for survival. 

The leadership idea that the population is not educated enough to understand the issues does not hold water.  First of all, a vicious circle feedback loop will develop where educational lies will feed misunderstanding and therefore the misunderstanding of the population requires that they be lied to.  Secondly, the need not to think direction from above feeds into a principle of least effort dynamic, where people find it naturally tempting to fob off personal responsibility onto a higher power and dwell in an ignorance is bliss mentality.  Thirdly, the nature of decision making is changing. 

As repeatedly stated, the current complexity and speed of society requires much of the decision making be pushed downward to be effective.  The individual needs good information if they are to align their actions to benefit the overall system.  They also need a shared vision of  an accurate current reality and a shared vision of the goal that is sought.  This concept is gaining ground in some workplaces, but it cannot be extended to society in general without exposing the fallacies behind the industrial age institutions.

Communication, control and the resulting order in a system depends on accurate feedback.  False feedback is now the standard.  Many people lie because they understandably distrust current institutions to look out for their interests.  Others play the game of telling superiors what they want to hear in the hope of advancement.  The everyday lying that is winked at for short term business expediency also comes full circle.  Wherever it influences a decision, the false information introduces more elements of chaos into attempts at order and progress.

The decision makers should also realize that the innate knowledge of the folklore of the people, is every bit as valuable as more scientific and academic knowledge.  Leaders can lose faith in the decision making abilities of  relatively uneducated people, but education and morale is usually the reason for subpar performances, and not brainpower.  Inadequate job training is also still commonplace, despite the increased knowledge of the false economy inherent in this method of operation. 

The leader's new role is as a facilitator rather than an order giver.  Some also design a system, so that behaviour and efforts can be cohesively directed, without infringing on freedom of speech and considerate action.  Those they are actually doing the work that directly interfaces with consumer wishes are also being given more decision making power.  Information can increase or decrease order in a system.  The context that counts concerns the accuracy of the information and the motivations behind those that use it. 

Advancements in our present hierarchy can also involve a deskilling process where the promoted individual has to display a willingness to put a company's competitive needs ahead of honesty and consideration.  Shortcuts have to be taken in time of change by people who were often promoted for reasons opposite of imagination and nonconformity.  The unbelievable Canadian bunglings that caused the Westray mining disaster, the military Somalia affair and the Red Cross blood scandal are not aberrations.  Where such idiocy does not happen is due to luck, outstanding work by conscientious individuals or both.  They are the tip of the iceberg and the logical outcome of bureaucratic careerism banging its head against the lack of information wall.

No one can force an individual to learn how to learn.  But the opportunity should at least be presented in amounts equal to the escapist fare now dispensed.  This would involve a 180 degree shift from today’s intentionally misleading information.  Schools, mass media and leaders must help people learn how to learn if the needs of an information or knowledge society are to be met.  It is no longer possible to have a few overachievers running everything through the old hierarchical command and control system. Even if the leader is aware of everything that is going on, by the time the communication travels up and down the hierarchy, the situation has changed.  

The Corps

"Business is the only institution that has a chance to fundamentally improve the injustice that exists in the world." - Edward Simon, president of Herman Miller.

Many magnates no doubt are genuinely concerned about poverty and world hunger.  However, the people who run their companies are rewarded according to short term profit, as they must be according to the underlying system.  As Jay Hansen opines "corporations do not "need" such things as clean air, justice, truth, beauty or love to survive.  The only thing that large for-profit corporations need to survive is profit.  It is impossible for these corporations to forego significant monetary profits for moral reasons.  If managers sacrifice significant profits to save important natural ecosystems or a community's quality of life, they may be fired and/or subject to stockholder litigation."  

Where Hansen misses the mark is that corporations do indeed need the finer things in life for their medium or long term survival.  The industrial age structures leave them in a predicament similar to that of the parable about the scorpion and the swimmer.  In this fable, a scorpion promises he won't sting a man if he will take it to the other side of a river.  Once underway, the scorpion stings the swimmer, because it has to by nature, and both drown.  Yet the corporation itself is made of a species that does not have to blindly follow instinct, and can find a way to put a new structure in place.

Researcher Jerry Mander did a study on the driving forces behind business and came up with eleven rules of behaviour that are common to all.  They are the profit imperative, the growth imperative, competition and aggression, amorality, hierarchy, quantification, linearity and segmentation, dehumanization, exploitation, ephemerality or short-term thinking, opposition to nature, and homogenization.  Every impetus goes against the needs of the supporting environment that allows corporations to exist in the first place. 

Another factor is that compound interest capitalism requires constant expansion to prolong the period before it collapses.  Under these conditions, even the top financial institutions become like a pilot who has the autopilot programmed and locked for a continuous climb.  The autopilot cannot be disengaged, even while the plane climbs to where the atmosphere cannot support it.  To do so would be to lose power to any competing entity that continued within the current system.

What Mander does not mention is that efficiency and effectiveness are also two primary modes of corporate behaviour, that could be directed to building a new age, if only the structure made it possible.  However, without a larger change process supported by the very top financial levels, powerful corporate change agents can do nothing but ride the proverbial Japanese tiger, where the rider who dismounts becomes the tiger's next meal.  If the financial institution does not act soon, a deteriorated world situation means the power of structures over individuals and groups will be extended even to them.  As the old saying goes, even kings are slaves to history. 

As it stands, the various factions in business and finance are still saddled with the problems of trust that prevent any cooperative concerted action being taken on serious problems.  A start on devising the information age corporation has been made by Cornelius Brevood, dean of a graduate management school, who surmised corporations should change from an economic production orientation to a total well-being orientation.  He replaced Manders 11 imperatives with 32 criteria which were described as the beginning of what was needed for intelligent, progressive wealth creation.  Under present conditions, any corporation that followed Brevold's recipe for sanity would  quickly go out of business.

The Conspiracy Factor

Power and powerlessness are opposite sides of the same semiconductor chip - Alvin Toffler

There is no doubt that powerful interest groups control much of society’s flow of information with the Trilateral Commission being perhaps the most visible.  The group includes approximately 300 high ranking politicians, business people and media owners from around the world.  It was formed in 1973, with the Tri designating the three areas of North America, Western Europe and Japan.  People who have seen past the elite disinformation campaign list the Bilderberger group as a sort of big brother to the Trilateral Commission.  There are also cross linkages with the American Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, the Bank for International Settlements and the American Federal Reserve, with its coterie of private banking interests. 

Reporters have haunted the hallways of Trilateral and Bilderberger meetings and pieced together impression pieces for non-mainstream magazines.  Most see the groups as constituting an all attack on individual freedom.  Another felt that the infighting and lack of vision added up to a vehicle with no one behind the wheel.  Both views are right when one considers that such top down control mechanisms in the past have always proved to be nothing but an illusion of control.

Those that denigrate conspiracy theories have no understanding of the nature of the beast.  That central power cliques form at the school yard, municipal, regional and national level is a well known fact.  That such a dynamic exists at the international level is a natural development.  Lately the national and local media has become loaded with kooky conspiracy theories in an infotactic that muddies the waters about something very real happening behind the scenes. 

One hundred heroin junkies will plan together if that is the most effective method of obtaining more drugs.  They will break into smaller cliques, if they can increase their share of the drugs by doing so.  All the time they will be robbing society to provide the funds for the drugs.  But they are not really in league with each other, they are in league with a common addiction or need.  That the need is against their and everyone else's long term interests becomes irrelevant.  If happiness is used as the measuring stick, then even short term interests are significantly compromised.

If anything, it is a lack of cohesion among the world power groups that is causing the most damage.  Heroin addiction can be beat, just as an addiction to the wrong kind of power can be brought under self-control.  The problem is that those addicted to the power of subjugation really have nowhere to go to kick their habit.  They would quickly become victims to others who wished to continue the game of kickass or kissass.

The conspiracy element, while serious, is overblown.  It can only effect control efficiencies and not eventual outcomes.  Conspiracies have existed through the ages and did not stop needed change.  The church, kings and nobles all failed in their information control schemes.  The gap always widens between manipulated reality and the reality experienced by the public.  The truth eventually shines through, no matter how much it hurts.

This process is well underway today.  The current public attitude towards politicians and others shows how perceptions are changing in spite of the media miasma.  What remains to be rejected is the learned helplessness propagated along with the official information.  New technology does add another layer of threat to freedom, but even where this is effective in silencing dissent, the internal rot that results from a lack of diversity will do a dictatorial structure in. 

The recent concern about gun control is a sign that more than information technology is being eyed as a means of control.  The arguments for safety are hypocritical from a system that routinely causes death and destruction in its pursuit of profits, and the logic and statistics behind the gun control argument bear this out.  First of all, the weapons used by criminals or militants are already acquired and held secretively and will be relatively unaffected by registration. 

Secondly, accidental shootings are held to be a good reason for registration, although there is again a stunning gap in logic on how government knowledge about the existence of a weapon will somehow guide it to a safe storage and handling environment.  The defence that owners will be more concerned about storage if a stolen firearm doesn't make much sense either when the only witness to the safe storing would be the thief, who have shown an ability to get into actual safes.  Why not spend the time and effort on gun safety education instead?  And if there is no money to speed up health care treatment for people in pain, how do multi-millions materialize for such a hare-brained scheme? 

Thirdly, most of the crime is of the structural conflict variety, that is caused by the  overcontrolling establishment in the first place.  If the lies, greed and ignorance that must flow through industrial age establishments was registered somehow instead of guns, all forms of street crime would pale in comparison.  If the elites acted like true leaders and led by example, the resulting abundance of life's necessities would result in both blue and whitecollar crime all but disappearing. 

Into the Heart of Darkness

The 'law of the jungle' history of humanity is a far more serious problem than any misguided or trapped elites.  Humanity has come so far, so fast, that its ancient historical past is also its recent biological past.  Our genetic profile is over 98% the same as that of  the chimpanzee and the bonobo.  The latter, more peaceable, matriarchal primate could provide fodder for feminists, but this view lacks an appreciation for the individual freedom requirements of the knowledge age.  The simpler, darwinian aspect of evolution works in an environment where there is brutal competition for resources, since successive levels of the food chain can only process so much of the sun's energy into food energy.  The scarcity functions as a natural guide to drive life to ever higher levels of complexity.  The most successful speci expand and mutate, creating marvels of efficiency in organic control and communication.  Red in tooth and claw reflexes are joined by strategies of camouflage, aggressive and passive poisoning, safety in numbers, speed, agility and craftiness. 

Numerous symbiotic alliances spring up in order to raise the odds of survival. 

To ensure continuation of the fittest genes in an unforgiving environment, chimpanzees engage in an almost constant hierarchical battle.  The only time a truce is called to enlarge or defend the territory of the band.  Once the outside issue is dealt with, the apes again turn on each other as the smaller collections of genes compete once more within the milieu of the band.  As in much interspecies competition, the contest is usually non-lethal in an innate recognition of the need for genetic diversity.  Nuclear power was the first development that gave human institutions pause in following the planet of the apes precepts, although even here it's been a very close thing.  The same cannot be said of the more hidden, subtle outcomes of relatively unrestricted competition such as toxins and other industrial age byproducts.

In a jungle environment, the best survival strategy is to take as much as possible until stopped by an outside force.  As a result, genetic urges are designed without brakes, since they are always stopped by negative feedback, such as food supply or predators.  Greed is really nothing more than an obsolete survival trait, where not accumulating an excess when times were good could lead to weakness or death when supplies became scarcer.  The enhanced status that accompanies this erstwhile fitness characteristic springs from the same source. Not all animals can shut off the aggression or greed impulses when conditions have changed considerably.  More than one farmer has had to haul a dead cow out of a grain silo after it broke in and ate itself to death. 

Although some decision makers have genuine concerns about mob rule, others succumb to alpha ape impulses and parade their weakness in the guise of strength.  When personal strength is no longer an issue in an age when a child can pull a trigger, and enough destructive power exists to destroy the planet, the old evolutionary meaning of fitness becomes lost.  The corruption to the point of madness that often accompanies an excessive concentration of power is one of nature's signs of the new reality. 

Those caught in the spell of the dark side will look only to short term self interest and would be considered pathological outside of a business environment.  They will not be concerned about disorder in the system as long as they themselves are shielded from it, in gated secure mansions away from the polluted city air.  Subconsciously or otherwise, they do not want an abundance society where everyday people can survive quite well without being fearful and servile.

Since scarcity also creates value, many vested interests are placed in a conflict of interest situation regarding what new technology can do in creating plentiful basic needs.  The past is full of examples of monopolies creating false scarcities. What dissident analysts refer to as sabotage can take many subtle forms, where make work activity use production to burn up other production under the illusion of creating value 

Because of our recent biological past, genes still provide a reward for alpha ape behaviour that might be described as a psycho-sexual high.  This pales in comparison to the feelings engendered by having a good time, sexual or otherwise, in consensual company.  If conditions are created where the dominators felt free to kick their habit, they will probably be able to appreciate the happiness Scrooge felt at the end of  Dickens classic work. 

Of course there are no absolutes, with everyone being susceptible to irrational power urges to some degree.  As stated, the more conscientious decision makers are along for the ride and will often have no choice but to compete using the same rules as the corrupted decision makers.  Author Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this rule of ruthlessness dynamic in a story where evolution was thought to be impossible past a certain point.  The reason: the creatures trying to evolve would always be snapped up by the more practical animals.  Again, the parable of the scorpion is a valuable lesson regarding this dynamic. 

Following the lead of the top, and giving in to obsolete inborne drivers, lower level examples of domination dynamics abound.  On the same day, two police are charged with sexually assaulting a minority with a toilet plunger while Israeli border guards are sentenced for riding Palestinians like donkeys.  World War Two footage from Nazi Germany reveals a crowd of grinning people standing over Jews scrubbing the sidewalk with toothbrushes.  Numerous subtle and not so subtle variations take place everywhere from office politics to boxing matches.

Personal perception plays a large role, where uncivilized behaviour in others is noticed without a concomitant recognition of personal animalistic behaviour. As one saying goes, we often pitch our animal nature out the front door only to have it sneak in the back way.  The industrial age structure again reinforces this in that, although we know lying and other immoral behaviour is wrong, it is seen as a necessary self-defence. 

All factions of decision makers remain prisoners of all our devices.  Signs of conscience become a signal of weakness to those that want to seize more power for themselves.  If all the present groups disappeared overnight, the second tier oppressors waiting in the wings would fill the vacuum by early morning.  This is not a catch 22 situation, but nature's way of pointing out the value of the diversity that springs from a truly informed and free population.

The innate recognition of the need to transform from instinctive genetic drivers to intuitive spiritual drivers has created a phenomena described as the duality of man. In our hearts we know that the continuation of jungle dynamics is somehow wrong for the needs of the species.  To complete the subjugation of nature, it would be necessary to destroy nature itself, which of course includes humanity.  

Yet scarcity structures combine with the older genetic urges to create behaviour that can bring out the beast in all of us.  Even when material needs have been met, the accumulation of possessions continues in an attempt to fill the spiritual emptiness brought on by the industrial age. Although population has levelled off in developed countries, human ingenuity is continually pushing the boundaries of nature back to feed a hunger that cannot be sated by material consumption.  This of course can only go on so long in the finite system that is earth.  Eventually the bubble will have to collapse.  

In a historical light, the troubles of the information age can be viewed as the epitome of the human evolutionary struggles of all past age changes.  Tribalism, feudalism, monarchism, capitalism, socialism, and communism all worked at attempting to subsume our ape ancestry within the sphere of rational action, before succumbing to the rule of ruthlessness.  Religious beliefs were an early manifestation of this search for a symbiotic immanent and transcendent existence, to construct something different from the rest of nature.  Because of our ability to cripple or destroy the biosphere, spiritual insight will continue to pull us toward a knowledge age destiny. 

What philosopher Thomas Hobbes described as the ceaseless drive to power, that leads to a war of all against all, must obviously be overcome.  Traditionally, rigid rules were applied by progressively larger communities to try to subsume this obsolete driver.  Without creating the conditions for the moral information that flows naturally through the individual, to come into play through an inside out process, any top down control is doomed to failure.  In essence, the mindset at the top control functions must be created by the bottom through successive intermediaries, each level cognitive of the areas of the larger arenas where competition becomes self-defeating.

A constant attention to immediate surroundings is the best strategy for sensing food resources and predators. Now that non-human predators and food are no longer an issue in the developed nations, this human survival dynamic has also inverted.  Reflection on deeper issues, instead of  instinctive acquisition, has become the best strategy for continued self-preservation of the species.  

Real Power

Any human body that attempts to constrict its information flows to a few brain cells and spreads the equivalent of lies through its nervous system would not survive.  The period of captivity, in which many are prisoner's of their own devices, is coming to a close, one way or another.  If the dictatorial model is chosen, the super elites will have blown their chance to be the heroes of any future history, instead of the villains.

 If there is a final push for the dictatorial approach, the ancient warnings in the bible about the great dictator, or the beast will come true.  This mythological being precedes the catastrophic version of the apocalypse and is accompanied by the false prophet.  This again is consistent with the science of cybernetics in that such an information bottleneck would create massive operational and motivational problems. 

World leaders are needed to serve and facilitate not dictate and enslave.  If the powers that be really thought about it, the whole idea of attaining significance through creating temporary business empires of servile employees, or erecting the tallest building, does not make a whole lot of sense.  The biggest operation is but a speck on earth, which is a speck in the solar system, which is a speck in the galaxy, which is a speck in the 500 billion galaxy universe, which could be but one of many universes.

The most successful quest for personal aggrandizement is to discovered reality as an unseen atom is to planet earth.  A cosmic force would find such a pretense about significance amusing were it not so tragic for all concerned.  It is only in aligning with the basic moral codes that any significance whatsoever can be known.  That this aligns with long term personal self interest proves that despite a long and bloody birth, it is indeed a just God that is unfolding the future of the planet and humanity.  As for the atheists, if they thoroughly analyzed scientific processes involved in discovered life, then the description would meet or surpass all of the attributes that have been given to the entity with the nametag of God. 

Jay Hansen writes that "the drive for power is the process by which we seek predictability as a means of avoiding or reducing anxiety. The more we feel in control, the more we can relax. The more power we have been granted or won or achieved, the more we generally assume we will be able to maintain control."  The complexities and power of the miracles that humanity has invented can only be controlled through honest, decentralized communications, that are brought to harmony by the belief in the greater good.  Individual brainpower can only be effectively linked by honest exchanges that recognize how much is still to be learned.  The meek, or inquiring, mindset must inherit the earth. 

God in a Box

In the jungle, genes that constituted a predatory organism would often be at a serious competitive disadvantage if they didn't concentrate on destroying otherness.  Aside from the limited symbotic alliances, other genes would do the same to it if it didn't act first.  Lions routinely search for and destroy cheetah cubs, even though they do not eat them.  If a lion wanders onto the resource base of another pride, the same unthinking attack dynamic takes place.

The difference between human abilities and those of other primates points out the irrelevance of this physical destructive genetic instinct in a species where ideas are everything.  Hitler and Jesus both shared the same 98% genetic commonality of the chimp, with the former attempting to improve humanity through a genetic breeding program.  The idea that the .1% genetic variance between races is a factor when 98% is unaffective illustrates what madness springs from ultra-competitive situations.

Recent controversies over slight variations in racial brain size are also meaningless.  First, people have large areas of the brain that are underutilized.  Secondly, transactive phenomena enables an individual to access outside knowledge in ways both known and unknown.  Cromagnon?Neanderthal? man had a brain that was physically larger than the negroid, caucasoid and mongoloid brains, yet the species became extinct.  The reason is thought to be an overemphasis on the artistic side of the brain, so that they painted beautiful pictures of animals, but did not optimize ways of actually obtaining this resource.  Homo sapiens would seem to have a problem with the reverse emphasis.  The researchers that postulate the mongoloid oriental brain is physically the largest, report this without attempting to explain why caucasoid western culture is overrunning Asia. 

A speculative systems thinking hypothesis that is based on environmental effects is as follows.  Britain was a small island in a brisk climate, that required active sea trading to compensate for a lack of land routes.  A combination of circumstance and invention resulted in cannon that were light enough to be placed on ships.  Seapower ruled because ships were difficult moving targets that could not be approached by infantry.  Being an island in an era of trade, Britain already had the best sailors, as well as access to the largest diversity of ideas and materials from other nations.  This became a positive feedback loop, so that even inland China was subjugated when British ships were able to steam up the Yangtze to bombard towns and cities.  Ironically, the gunpowder for the cannon had originally been invented by the Chinese. 

IQ tests are another example of  measuring something that means very little.  Many Mensa members would have to depend on the brains of an illiterate backwoods person, if they should happen to unexpectedly end up in a backwoods environment.  An overemphasis on science and math has also resulted in a correlation between Mensa members and such policies as eugenics, where genes are held to be everything despite much evidence to the contrary. 

When astrophysicist Stephan Hawking became extremely handicapped, the only reason he did not appear to be exceedingly dense was because of new computer communication technologies.  Autistic people can also appear to be mentally deficient, yet when they are inspired by a certain project, they can race ahead of the so-called normally intelligent people.  Science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut provides a cautionary tale about how much humanity really knows about information flows, when an advanced alien tells a human that all along it had been necessary for nine people to be thinking a certain way in order to conceive a healthy child.  

A new test that is becoming trendy in the workplace measures emotional intelligence whereby employers can determine the teamworking abilities of potential employees.  Like many expert projects, the context is assumed.  In an open environment, emotional intelligence would entail lots of challenging questions, whereas in an more autocratic business the smart thing to do would be to ask soft questions or become a yes person where much of the information is lost.  Any intelligent employee who needed work in a tough economy would research the test, the company culture and tailor their answers to what was expected.  In a business bottom line context, emotional intelligence entails feeling comfortable with immoral policies and practices that are destroying the environment.

The Oldest Trickster

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  I get on my knees and pray, we don’t get fooled again - Pete Townsend

Historically, large systems make a habit of resisting all change regardless of  the amount of  evidence that shows the logic for change.  For this reason, the school of rational thought on the information age will continue to be suppressed unless there is a discontinuous, or path independent, development.  As always, suppression has led to a backlash in which many advocates of change misdirect their justifiable anger. 

Many groups agitating for a new financial system have fallen into the trap of focusing on superficial differences.  Divide and conquer strategies are common in successful subjugations, and are preventing progress from happening in many areas.  Sometimes manipulative forces will accomplish this by prostituting freedom in the guise of imposed alternatives.  The players on the surface change, but the underlying structure remains the same, preventing any real change from happening.

History is full of examples of this dynamic.  The state and the church contended for control of the individual prior to the industrial age.  The church suffered serious setbacks since many of their policies contradicted the tenets of the rising tide of science that appealed to people's sense of basic logic.  An unfortunate side effect of the machinations of the church was the decline in human spirituality. 

Einstein warned against just such a scenario.   A church minister had written to Einstein to ask for a hand written copy of Einstein's supposed praise of the role of the church in Nazi Germany.  Einstein first gently informed the minister that he had been misquoted and actually felt opposite to what the newspaper had printed about him regarding the role of church officials during this dark time.  He did offer to write something else for the minister, who accepted and admitted that he too had reservations about the historical role of the church.

Corporations stepped into the vacuum created by the decline of the church and are now the main player contesting the power of the state.  The power of the state had made a comeback in the industrial age when the defects of laissez faire economics became obvious after World War I.  Britain was the leading industrialized country at this stage, and agitated for change as living standards dropped due to the interest charges on the costs of the war to end all wars. 

The independent papers also reported that well placed individuals had made millions through being advanced loans, against no collateral, and then passing the loans on for war production at a higher rate of interest to the public. The public rejected unfettered capitalism and stampeded towards socialism, without looking at the real causes of their troubles.  As is the case today, the public did not realize that socialism and communism are very similar to capitalism, with communism being described as state capitalism by those who have seriously studied the issue.

The nationalization of many corporations put the British public more deeply in debt.  The capitalists eliminated all their risks and collected interest instead of profits.  Most people became closely controlled by a bureaucratic machine instead of a corporate machine.  The increased centralization of the socialist system was also a step backwards from the relative decentralisation of the competitive corporate system. 

This eventually led to a partial shift of power back to the corporate masters under Margaret Thatcher.  However, the decline continued, as it had to under the structure of industrial age institutions.  Today, Britain is a divided society, where many are experiencing a decline in quality of life.  Increasingly, corporations and bureaucrats are calling uneasy truces to puzzle over the growing breakdown. 

The individuals that champion the current behaviour of corporations, because of experiences with incompetent government standard setting,  are merely choosing the method their own servitude.  It is also possible they are choosing the method of the death of their grandchildren.  It is a choice of serving the corporate agenda rather than the bureaucratic agenda. 

The structure ensures successful capital always seeks bottom and bureaucratic power will always corrupt.  The lawless globalization scenario worsens the situation since capital flight follows wherever people are put before profits.  Current institutions cannot be used by people, they can only use people.  The institutions then abrogate responsibility or blame each other for the resultant mess.  They are often successful in confusing the issue.  since the complexity and distance of the modern structures makes it difficult for voters to apportion blame.  For this the population would need honest mass media.  Even then, assigning blame does not solve anything, when underlying structures are faulty. 

Scapegoating

"There is no blame in the art of systems thinking" - Peter Senge

Many of the groups, particularly the American militias, are aware of the big lie about the monetary system, but attribute the system to those who happen to belong to the Jewish race.  This negates the concept of individual freedom, often espoused by the same groups.  It seems to be human nature to see negative traits in another group, while we ignore similar traits in the group we belong to.  Our troubles stem from biological traits we all share, and not from any inherent racial characteristics.

The most obvious sign that anti-semitism is based on emotion, and not fact, is that history is full of man's inhumanity to man, where Jews are nowhere to be found.  Personal experience would no doubt reveal numerous instances of extremely unfair treatment at the hands of any and all races.  There are also many historical examples of Anglo Saxons brutalizing Anglo Saxons,  even when the Jewish people were powerless outcasts. 

One such case concerns a crusader from the Knights of Malta, who was accused as a heretic and burned at the stake.  The Christian accuser and the Christian king who had condemned the man, then split the considerable booty of gold that the knight leader had managed to amass.  That the gold could be gathered in the first place, by someone crusading for Jesus, is also an indication of inconsistent behaviour.  One can presume that the victimized knight did not see a camel pass through the eye of a needle during his violent confrontations with the Arab infidel.

People who happened to be Jewish were victimized by others who happened to be Jewish.  A recent small newspaper story related how high ranking people with so-called Jewish blood had their origins falsified by their bosses who were appreciative of their talents, so they could continue to serve the Reich and survive. 

A bit of basic logic here.  The Nisei soldiers were American combatants who happened to be of Japanese origins, who fought against the Japanese side in World War Two.  This was used as leverage to abhor the cannibalization of American Japanese who lost their property on the way to internment camps in North America. 

To say the Jewish Nazis are different from the Nisei is to be racist, either against the Japanese or Jews.  And of course the center of the war revolved around various time shades of Germanic peoples whether they were Saxons, Angles or Goth offshoots of the Aryan Race.  The key concept here is humanity, whether it be those of the zionists or those of the other lost tribes, is caught in the age old chimpanzee band mentality. 

The specific anti-semetic charges are based on a shallow analysis.  If the people who happen to be Jewish, are over-represented at the upper echelons of finance, it is because the race is excelling in all intellectual fields.  This itself has a sociological cause, and not a racial reason.  People born Jewish were persecuted throughout the ages, and had to excel or perish.  When they were partially emancipated after the French Revolution, their ingrained excellence enabled them to do more than just survive.  This stimulus is so basic, it is found in everything from weightlifters to trees that have been pruned.

The criticisms of the Jewish holy books are also ill founded.  Like the works of other religions, there is a lot of contradictory material that was added by both well-intentioned and selfish manipulators.  The favouritism angle displayed in some religious passages, such as interest being wrong, unless it is charged to a gentile, has a logical historical background. 

The Jewish race was thrown out of their country over 1900 years ago because they would not submit to Roman conquerors.  The anti-semetic should ask themselves if they would mind if their own race was assimilated, or if they would prefer to see it survive.  The only way a race could survive for almost two millennia without a geographical base, would be to create a structure that would encourage extensive favouritism among members of the group. 

As for the matter of being the chosen race, it's very unlikely the Jews planned to be turfed from their country for repeatedly defying their Roman masters.  If there was a message from God 10,000 years or so ago about who would like to travel the earth for 2,000 being persecuted, despised, gassed and beaten, without a homeland to shelter them, the choice was probably a case of being asleep at the switch.  All the other tribes would have taken one step back.

Again, the drivers are biological forces that are common to all humans.  Even within the cultural context of a secure land base, and even within a race itself, members will often discriminate for those they feel simpatico with.  At root, this is probably a genetic propagation strategy.

The structure of the system revolves around a dog eat dog mentality, inherited from our common biological history.  If a Jewish financier was deposed under the present system, another person would be quick to fill their place, and carry on the same or even more brutal policies.  The system requires it.  Anti-semetics also does not consider that people who happened to be Jewish, such as Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, actively opposed the capitalist financial system. 

Fans of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion postulate that communism and capitalism are both tools for Jewish domination of the world.  This concept can be turned to match the prophecy that the Jewish people are destined to save the world.  However the prophecy is not extended to include the allegory that the entire human race is descended from the lost tribes of Israel, who moved from Egypt, which is near the area thought to be the cradle of humanity. 

Of course Israel was also the birthplace of Christianity.  On a positive note, the current over-representation of Jewish powerful financiers could provide an important element of commonality, required in a system that is going to have to act cooperatively to pull out of its current death spiral.

Manfred Davidmann uses the Torah to show themes that contain wisdom on how to deal with the world problems of today.  Davidmann modifies some of the Jewish teachings to make them more consistent, and to recognize the requirements of the time.  He advocates that interest should not be charged to anyone and that all debts should be forgiven every seven years. 

The debt forgiveness concept might sound unjust, but it deserves consideration due to the "success to the successful'' systems archetype that can keep an indebted individual caught in a vicious circle for life.  On a positive note, this has been legislated into law at the individual level in some countries.  One possible angle that Davidmann does not consider is that under a new system there could be no need for debt of any kind.

Einstein also comments on positive themes in the Jewish teachings when he writes "the foundation of all human values is morality.  To have recognized this clearly in primitive times is the unique greatness of our Moses.  In contrast, look at the people today". 

Sowing and Reaping

Hitler was the last person to depose Jewish people from positions of influence in a society, and there has been no person in modern history that has cared less for the rights of the individual.  It is estimated that 20 million Russians alone were killed after Hitler broke the German/Russian non-aggression pact.  The total death and suffering of civilians was astronomical from this the second world war conflict, including German civilians burned alive in fire bombings and millions more who were victims of the concentration camps.

The Nazi phenomena is also a valuable lesson on the costs of injustice.  Hitler was not a monster that came out of nowhere, but was a national biological response from a country that was waylaid and robbed by the Treaty of Versaille.  It was the familiar cycle of hatred breeding more hatred.

The Germans had retreated back into their untouched country during the first world war, on the understanding that the peace agreement would follow the lines of Woodrow Wilson's fourteen point plan for peace with honour.  Once the front lines were abandoned, the allies occupied Germany and looted it rapaciously.  The proposed treaty was ignored. 

Huge reparations were imposed that left the general populace starving, while rich areas of the country were torn away and handed to other surrounding countries.  One account iterates that soldiers who had proudly marched back to cheers from the population, were reduced to begging and riding at the back of their own buses to leave room for the occupiers at the front. 

When the German army was rolling across France in what is now referred to the second world war, the operation was routinely described by German soldiers as the 26th year of the war.  The surprising speed of the German victory over France is also a lesson in paradigm shifting.  The young German officer corp made short work of the older French generals who could not see past world war one tactics.  The speed was such that even the older German generals in the rear could not protest.  One such hesitant general had just read about the appointment of a new French commander, when the commander was ushered into him as a prisoner.

Hitler's true view of his espoused Christianity is evident in his musings on whether to allow various religions back into conquered Russian territory.  He thought it was a good idea to allow all the sects to revive, because, in his words, the subjugated peoples would be less trouble since they would be busy bashing in each other's heads with their crucifixes.

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Another economic inconsistency is that Alan Downs, a major influence on the downsizing trend, has now announced that he was wrong in his beliefs.  He had neglected the art of systems thinking, and did not realize that business must work principally on short term results.  Instead of cutting fat, the downsizing resulted in gutting structures for short term stock market boosts that paid handsomely for investors and executives with stock options.  Kudos to Mr. Downs for learning and being honest with his new knowledge.  

-memory only remotely related to real learning

-In a movie about German resistance to Nazism, a resistor of the White Rose group stated that rank opportunism and fear were the main motivators behind the popular support for the Nazis. 

-The built in stress high is probably behind modern thrill seeking in everything from circus rides to gambling. 

-rulers deprive masses to ensure their popularity

- The attempts at information control regarding the majority should not be surprising.  Almost all of previous human history has followed the same dynamic.  That doesn’t mean the future has to, or can be, more of the same.

Again, it is only humanity's past successes that puts the species in such jeopardy.  A very big bubble has been created, that normally would have been prevented by the natural cyclical flows of food resources and predators.

The old concept of hierarchy also creates structural problems for leaders with benevolent aims.  The hierarchical method of control is more and more becoming only an illusion of control.  Decision makers that are concerned about societal problems must also contend with the tendency of power to corrupt. 

 However, the larger system that business finds itself in, will prevent these advances from coalescing into a freer society.  As repeatedly stated, businesses that don't take advantage of the increasing desperation of many workers in an automated, globalized economy, will eventually find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.  Canadian Airline employees received accolades from the Conference Board of Canada for their improved performance.  Yet a few short years later, more wage cuts are demanded as the airline struggles in an industry that has the excess capacity of the automated general economy.

His hero, Fredrick the Great, had remarked that if his soldiers began to think, not one would remain in ranks. 

Much of what passes for political information follows the concept of the Nazi big lie technique.  The theory is that the public would be more likely to believe a huge, oft repeated lie; then the smaller lies.  Since schools teach one not to question authority figures, the technique is a success regarding the short term needs of the oppressors. 

Author Kurt Vonnegut also commented on this phenomena when he said conscienceless forces often triumphed because of their capacity to astonish.  Many average people are psychologically unable to comprehend the depths of deception that become necessary in a space age system based on ancient beliefs.  Their perceptions are based on more direct forms of dishonesty and they project their scruples onto the actions of others.

Einstein "I was impressed by the earnestness of your struggle to find a purpose for the life of the individual and of mankind as a whole...we all feel that it is indeed very reasonable and important to ask ourselves how we should try to conduct our lives.  The answer is, in my opinion:  satisfaction of the desires and needs of all, as far as this can be achieved, and achievement of harmony and beauty in human relationships.  This presupposes a good deal of conscious thought and of self-education.

  Instead, industrial age corporations, along with Mander's eleven rules of amoral prerogatives, are being increasingly insinuated into the school system.

-stress addiction from jungle

-Management must bend itself to the corporate will and that will is to enrich the rich.  Today, the richest 1 percent of America's families controls 28 percent of the nation's wealth and 60 percent of the nation's corporate stock.

 to the interest charges on the costs of the war to end all wars. 

The independent

MYSTERIOUS WAYS 

The Same as it Always Was 

Nobody is to blame for anything.  We are in this mess together because our ancestors were mad and a mad society has passed on their repression from generation to generation. - Robert Wilson

There is no controlling conspiracy.  There are only echos from a bestial past, where primate beings formed shifting alliances, in a chess game of maneuvers designed to increase the individual's chances of mating and protecting the offspring.  The mission: pass on the gene, which itself can live through millions of years by such replication.  The solution to the war of all against all has arrived through a twisting valley of death that gradually increased civility at the individual, group, community, and national levels. Underlying the manmade problems that bedevil an age that holds so much technological promise is a global struggle between powerful factions, and their various shifting subsets, in a continuation of the dominance dynamic. 

Many point to the propagators of this fifth false assumption as being the cause of all problems, but the reality is some of these pseudo change agents comprise another power faction and are acting on the 'meet the new boss same as the old boss' motivation, where an even more brutal form of control is being contemplated.  The last time this mindset held sway was in Nazi Germany, although South American facism was another example of its true face.  Also, there is no one particular race on either side of this shifting powerplay.  If anything the frequent alliances formed by both groups to oppress others would make the difference between the two as that of the false prophet, who obtains economic power over earth in the bible, to the biblical beast, which represents the ultimate drive for alpha ape dominance.

As will be seen, the math is such that it guarantees a shortage of money for everyone to pay their debts in such a way that economic survival and morality become mutually exclusive.  The debt problem will be dealt with fairly soon as it must according to the math, with the only question being what method of change will be chosen.  In February of 1997 a Swiss banking institution admitted the obvious by giving professor Antal Fekete a $25,000 award for proving the debt could never be paid, although the gold standard reason given was a smokescreen. 

One reformer has published an offer to pay $10,000 to anyone who can prove the debt problem is not caused by math.   So far there have been no takers, which is not surprising considering the formulae were devised by engineers and the relevant data can be found in official publications.  What the engineers and others have done is simply pieced low circulation information together with basic mathematical knowledge, and expressed the issue in terms almost anyone can understand. 

The false monetary assumption that follows is a facet of this struggle. It is not the problem, as is so often claimed by dissidents, but a symptom that has somehow created the conditions that could lead to a promising new age, and has devised a way out of the debt problem.  While there is a general consensus that many decisions should be made at the community level, there is an uncompromising need for an effective supranational body to deal with certain issues. 

While the industrial age financial system created massive amounts of suffering, it also built the platform for a possible solution to a history of wars, as well as the natural inclination for civilizations to collapse from a destruction of their supporting environment.  This last has been labelled by systems thinkers as the tragedy of the commons.  A minor example would be the case of sub saharan goat herders who gained individual status through how many goats they had.  They subsequently increased herd sizes until the land was overgrazed to the extent it turned to desert and no one was left with any goats.  The one-way cause and effect thinking of more goats means more status led to the predictable disastrous result.  Modern technology means this process is no longer confined to communities, or even nations. 

A minor example of the need for such a control level can be found in the Russian nuclear power accident that rained radiation down on Norwegians.  A badly polluted river flowing through various communities or countries can not of course have the problem corrected at any customs stations.  Again, there are problems with powers who create ecological devastation seeking to use this issue as an excuse for more control over the individual.  This possibility is being played up by another faction and is nothing more than one more chess move in the hidden wars that have comprised all of semi-civilized world history.  However, the seriousness of the issue can be determined by looking at the other angle. 

Canadian Fisheries scientists predicted the collapse of the east coast cod industry six years before the fact.  Since the scientific information did not mesh with political needs, the report was buried.  The fishery has been devastated and individuals are forced from communities where they might have preferred to stay with their friends and family.  The biosphere functions according to natural law and can no more be divided and function than the human body. 

The importance of community should not obscure the history of constant wars that occurred within nations, until a higher national level control function was established. 

The debt money system sprang from a barbaric society where it partially subsumed an even more vicious state of affairs, that could not have continued into the industrial age.  The world wars were the bloodiest ever, but because of the technology involved, not a different human dynamic.  The periods of peace in between were the longest ever in Europe.  Under past conditions, Germany would never have been able to attain one of the highest standards of living after losing a war, without engaging in another murderous struggle, and winning.  To be true, the international financial system did not learn this lesson from World War One, when it imposed a pathologically punitive treaty, and appears to be doing the same thing in post-communist Russia.

Intelligent change would seem to be impossible without effective global bodies, including transnational telecommunications and energy businesses. Even though the past has been riddled with transnationals treating countries like labour camps, new accountability structures, driven by the people, could keep the best of the old design, while replacing the defective.  The freedom of the whole could synthesized with the freedom of the individual.

There are even larger issues involved beyond planetary environmental and social boundaries.  For example, it is a scientific fact that one day humanity will have to work together to construct an asteroid defence.  It sounds like a strange issue but astronomers consider it merely a matter of time before a major collision.  A very intelligent species should think many generations ahead, although there is no real time frame for when the inevitable collision will occur.  It could happen soon, since even detection devices are still very crude, or we might survive as long as the dinosaurs did before a meteorite hastened their extinction.  It's also possible the long and bloody birth of an intelligent globe is also to fulfill a destiny of terraforming and colonizing other planets. 

The Big Lie

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me.  Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow" - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln

The actual truth about money is becoming more widespread, but there is still a general hypnosis regarding this issue.  If you are part of the large majority that believes that all government debt is caused by government spending, then it might be wise to put a case of beer or some other palliative on standby before reading further.  The fact is that what is referred to as the free world is anything but. 

This is a mind boggling assertion for most, that at first glance seems patently ridiculous.  However, once the information starts to sink in, the validity of the statement becomes only too obvious.  As stated, one reformist has offered $10,000 to anyone that can prove the monetary system is not based on unpayable debt.  All smoke and mirrors aside, the debt is based on a fallacy, and it is unpayable, regardless of blips caused by export surpluses. 

Most people have been repeatedly told it is as plain as the nose on your face that a government can no more run continuing deficits than a household can.  Anyone who has ever balanced a checkbook or budget is supposed to see how obvious this is.  So why would 1996 Nobel Laureate economist William Vickrey make a statement that deficit reduction programs are "lunatic"? 

The answer lies in taking a wider perspective.  The variable that makes Vickery's view superior to that of less honest economists is that very few households print their own money.  Those that do so risk being charged with counterfeiting.  Because of this, comparing government finances to household finances is like comparing apples to oranges.  To fully understand Vickrey's statement about debt reduction lunacy, and the extreme importance of this concept to a sane world, one must look deeper into the actual mechanism of money creation.

To start to get a grip on economic reality, the obvious fact that money is only a symbol must be emphasized.  All the money in the world will not prevent a person from starving to death on a desert isle.  Those that advocate a return to the gold standard would have something shiny to look at while they faced a similar fate.  The true meaning of wealth can be found by looking at the origin of the word.  At root it means wellbeing which entails the physical material needs and the psychological health that lead to a happy existence.  A key ingredient of what money represents is energy.  If money is used intelligently then it can also represent knowledge.  How all wealth is really created from knowledge applied to energy and materials, in space and time, will be covered later.

Since the money superstition has had such a long history, the real wealth concept can be illustrated by referring to the Great Depression.  In this period of  money contraction, many farmers outside of the dust bowl conditions fared considerably better than their city brethren.  The reason: traditional economic theory could not be imparted to cows, pigs and hens.  They didn't know there was a depression on and kept on producing milk, bacon and eggs.  The sun's energy couldn't be controlled and therefore was still available to the animals to create wealth.

Yet many other people went hungry, although food was commonly destroyed because there was no money with which to buy it.  They burn the wheat we want to eat was one saying of the times.  Then when World War Two started, unlimited funds suddenly materialized so that people could march in straight lines, gather at barracks, build things to blow up and level certain types of people based on immigration patterns of the past.  Why the money symbol was not available for the population to lead dignified lives previous to the war defies any scientific explanation.

A previous superstition, the gold standard, is nowhere to be found today, although all the capitalist countries had insisted previously that money could not be printed without it.  An 1890's depression caused years of hardship until the Klondike and other gold discoveries could bring back the money that people needed to live reasonable lives.  When world war one started, the gold standard was abandoned within hours by the threatened British elite, who printed up massive amounts of money for another destructive rampage.  Gold as an element has a promising future for wealth production, but because of its health, conductance and outer space shielding properties, not because it somehow adds to life by slaving to dig it up and then reburying it in vaults. 

Today, someone who makes money is held to have made wealth, when this is often not the case at all.  Making money can drift so far from making wealth, that destruction rather than construction is the end result.  Someone who ships arms to a corrupt developing country, or plans a war for business, has made money while destroying wealth.  Again, even the phrase 'making money' is false, since it is only banking institutions that can do this without risking arrest and imprisonment.

A second fact that must be understood is that banks do not lend the money of their depositors.  The Encyclopedia Britannica is one of many sources that states this general belief is a false one.  Graham Towers, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, reported to Parliament long ago that "the manufacturing process to make money consists of making an entry in a book.  That is all.  The banks do not loan the money of their depositors".  The paradigm shift here is that money is literally created out of thin air by the banking system. 

To see how the money from nothing dynamic works, imagine a society, or a household that prints its own money, in which the very first issue of money was $100 at 6% interest.  At the end of the first year the society or household would owe the $100 in principal and $6 in interest.  $106 is owed, yet only $100 physically exists.  This is the phenomena that led Nobel laureate Vickery to declare deficit reduction lunatic.  To balance the budget, $6 more must be loaned or the spending for year two would have to be cut back to $94 to pay the interest, or some combination of a debt increase and spending cutbacks would have to take place.

The first reaction from a mind that has been subjected to a barrage of superstition about the issue is to say, well, I would produce additional value with the $100, and therefore have the extra $6 worth to meet the interest payment.  However, even though an additional $6 of value has been created, the symbol of it in the form of money has not been created by the additional value.  It can only be created by the banking institutions, as more debt, at more interest.

If the spending was cut back to $94, society would still owe $5.64 that did exist, with the result that expenditures for year three would have to be cutback to $88.36 and so on in a downward spiral.  Generally what happens is that the monetary supply is increased.  In the above example, at the end of year two, society would be short the interest on $106, or $6.36.  The eighth wonder of the world, compound interest, is off and running.  At the end of 70 years, the original $100 money issue will have resulted in a debt of $5,907.59, if the process did not cause many bankruptcies over the period.  If you still can't believe the math, try issuing some monopoly to your household at interest, and then see how people cannot pay off the debt, no matter how hard they work, until more debt symbols are issued, at more interest. 

After he retired as vice president of an aerospace company, engineer Theodore Thoren decided to study the money issue, and sooned joined up with fellow engineer Richard Warner, who was also interested in the instability of the money system.  The pair were true to their engineering background in that the numbers were concentrated on numbers to the exclusion of all value judgements.  After studying reams of data going back in time as far as 1800, the pair came up with a definitive statement that deep structural flaws made the economic system unworkable in its present form. 

In its simplest form, money creation was expressed as M = D = P(1 + r) to the power of n, minus L, where M is the money supply, D is debt, P is principal, r is the interest rate, n is the number of years of the loan and L is leakage which constitutes interest and debt free injections of money through such things as bankruptcies, inflation and so on.  The exponential formula was graphed against the actual U.S. debt and correlated with reality.  Thoren also commented that if engineers designed bridges like the monetary system, there would be constant demolition and rebuilding work, since it is the method of money creation that leads to economic booms and busts. 

Finally there would be a complete collapse, since no exponential formula is sustainable.  There are inputs into the formula that vary it slightly, but the overall result remains the same.  Interest debt money not only destabilizes the economy, it has to lead to a meltdown.  The western form of industrial age capitalism is just as doomed as the communist system.

Thoren reiterated that central to understanding the work is the realization that banks do not lend the money of their depositors, but literally create all new money out of nothing, as a debt at compound interest.  He quotes the American Institute of Bankers in its statement that "it is inaccurate to think that banks simply collect money from depositors and lend that same money to borrowers.  When they make loans, they create new deposits".  Thoren flatly stated that debt free money tied to productivity is the sensible way forward.

Once the money dynamic is understood, its not hard to see why banks cannot loan the money of their depositors.  If there is $100 or $1 trillion total money in existence, the bank cannot loan a depositor's money to pay interest, since it does not physically exist in the system.  It must be created from nothing, as more debt, at more interest.  And of course that interest in turn does not exist, until yet more debt and more interest are created.  The ditty that goes something like 'sixteen hours and what do you get, one day older and deeper in debt' is a fact of industrial age society.  Even the decreasing amounts of people who consider themselves on the up side of the debt payment system are not taking many factors into account.

As stated, consumer bankruptcies are at record highs for the last three years in Canada.  Another factor affecting the monetary system is that population growth has levelled off in the developed countries.  New babies can no longer be relied on as a type of frontier for a monetary policy that demands constant expansion.  The system is attempting to create the illusion of a frontier by extending credit to consumers.

This is not inflationary in that the issuing of money is tied to production for which there is an expressed want, that would have to be determined through a new market system.  Money enters the economy as a loan, and then is cancelled out of existence as loan payments are made, to re-enter the economy as bigger loans and so on.  In trying to comprehend the dynamic, it helps to keep some key words of dissident economists in mind, such as lunatic, insanity and tragic absurdity.

For those that stay out of personal debt, the income tax department is there to demand an ever increasing portion of their work.  Dissidents estimate that over 95% of the national debt springs from interest payments alone, and are not a result of any government spending on services for the people.  In 1995, the interest tab on the national debt was $68 billion.  Otherwise, Canada would have a sizable budget surplus every year, and be able to institute a policy of tax cuts and leave social programs untouched.  Instead, health and social programs are scapegoated and slashed, while the infrastructure that creates real wealth deteriorates. 

Another dodge is to value federal government assets at $1, until they are sold off to private interests to pay off the debt illusion.  The low value inflates the perceived need for debt reduction even more, since it puts the government books further in the red.  A dissident once questioned how the balance sheet of the business interests lobbying Parliament for social spending reductions would look should all their assets be valued at one dollar. 

Total Canadian national, provincial, municipal and consumer debt is now pegged at $1.95 trillion and growing.  The Bank of Canada 1996 Spring Review breaks this down as $570 billion federal debt, $180 billion provincial debt, $460 billion household debt, $540 billion business debt and $200 billion municipal debt.  The total American figure is estimated at over $20 trillion.  Anyone who is connected to the internet can watch the national debt numbers spin by, as the nations sink deeper and deeper into unpayable debt. 

The $550 billion now in circulation in Canada is all owed, as would be the $1.4 trillion that would have to be created to even have enough money in the system to pay all the debts.  Total Canadian government liabilities have been estimated at over $3.5 trillion.  Each man, woman and child is responsible for $130,000 owing for money created from nothing.  Again, public finances are not like household finances in that there is no place for the missing money to come from, unless it is created as more debt, at more interest.  Large export surpluses and record low interest rates can provide only temporary relief.

Robert Hemphill, who is a former credit manager of the United States Federal Reserve explained the situation this way.  “ Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation.  This is a staggering thought.  We are all completely dependent on the banks.  When one gets a complete grasp on this picture, the tragic absurdity of our helpless position is almost incredible”.  

The 1988 Nobel laureate economist, Maurice Allais, opted out of the mainstream by proclaiming: “In essence, the present creation of money, out of nothing by the banking system, is similiar — I do not hesitate to say it in order to make people clearly realize what is at stake here — to the creation of money by counterfeiters, so rightly condemned by law.  In concrete terms, it leads to the same results.  The only difference is that those who benefit from it are different people.”  In fact the process goes beyond counterfeiting, in that the banking institutions charge interest to the buyers of their product and enforce a monopoly on the counterfeiting.

Red Herrings

"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can create and destroy money" - Bank Chairman Reginald McKenna

People sometimes go looking to officials for an explanation after first coming in contact with the truth about the money system.  The "say it ain't so Joe" approach is usually met with a quick reassuring, condescending statement that suggests the questioner has been taken in by some not very bright, deluded people.  Quick answers about the future value of money, the velocity of money, and how the deficit is coming down are used to suggest there is nothing to the issue. 

As mentioned, high export surpluses are a reason a deficit or debt can be temporarily reduced.  1995 was a record year for export surpluses as was 1996 in which $34 billion flowed into Canada and was consequently added to the debts of the importing nations.  $11 billion of this was in the energy sector alone, which accounts for the relative balance sheet strengths of the provinces of Alberta and to a lesser extent Saskatchewan.  If the above amounts are subtracted from the deficit reductions, it becomes obvious that borders are being used to obscure the real problem. 

Despite being informed export surpluses are unequivocally good, the exporter has in essence received paper and electronic blips in exchange for oil, trees, work and so on.  The country must eventually become a net importer to balance the ledger of real wealth.  Currency exchange rates are supposed to eventually erase any relative export advantage, but collusion could ensure that a country with a lot of natural resources would be drained of its real wealth before its currency adjusted.  Regardless, the mathematical guarantee of more debt always catches up with a country.  Japan and Germany were the last two major nations to fall from creditor status to debtor and are now doing the deficit reduction dance.

The velocity of money is another superstition used to discredit the debt virus fact.  In this fallacy it is held that an issue of money can pass through several hands, and therefore can somehow overcome the debt dynamics.  First, even if this explanation were true, it would only slow increasing debt, since compound interest is an exponential formula, and nothing overcomes an exponential formula except bankruptcy and destitution.

Secondly, a closer examination shows the entire concept is based on the illusion.  Each time money changes hands, further costs are incurred.  If a shopkeeper sells one hundred dollars worth of inventory, the story is that he or she is free to pass this money to the next person in the economy.  Under such a concept it would be impossible to stay in business, since the money passed on would be unavailable to restock or pay operating costs.  As professional engineers have painstakingly documented, new costs arise, each time the money changes hands.  Even physical labour that adds new value to the economy must be paid for with money that enters the market, as a debt, at more compound interest. 

The future value of money concept is yet another smokescreen used to hide the true nature of company store capitalism.  It's based on the assumption that money invested wisely will become worth more.  Since when an investment is cashed, any increase in its value must be doled out in new debt money, created at more interest, this explanation is also ludicrous.

However, the future value of money concept does alleviate the effects of debt increases in two ways.  First, whenever new money is issued to pay interest, it deflates the value of the previous debt.  If a person owes $100 on some goods, and another $100 is put into the economy as a loan, then inflation occurs, and relatively speaking, the first $100 loan is less onerous. 

It's interesting to note here that one argument against the issuing of  debt free money is that it causes inflation, when it is really debt money that causes it.  As in most corrupt systems, there is no hesitation to blame the problem on the solution.  One of the few truths in traditional economics is that inflation is caused by more money chasing the same amount of goods.  There is really no additional production created by increasing the money supply to pay interest.  Instead of staying in circulation for productive activity, interest money goes back to the bank and is cancelled out of existence, requiring that new loans be issued to continue any activity.

The second aspect concerning the future value of money is productivity increases.  For example, some items actually deflate in price because of work methods and automation and so allow a higher standard of living even though a person might have the same amount of money at their disposal.  Computing power is presently doubling about every eighteen months, yet the price remains the same.  A pocket calculator used to cost $99.99, now it costs $9.99.  Farm mechanization has resulted in food costs being a much smaller percentage of the average household budget than was the case previously.  These have all added benefits to the system, but like the deflation of previous debt phenomena, the exponential capitalism will always catch up.

Two other factors that alleviate debt growth are bankruptcies and bank salaries.  Bank salaries are obviously a tiny percentage of the total economy.  Bankruptcies can cause larger adjustments when the huge debts of failed speculations are written off.  Rod White, a university business professor asks "the bigger question meigh be, why do banks continue to have this episodic loan losses' ' when questioning huge writedowns on bad loans. Even though this is the third record year in a row for Canadian consumer bankruptcies, this amounts to little relief, although relief would no doubt be a strange word to those undergoing the severe stress that accompanies bankruptcy.  

The Economist

"The economics profession is close to bankruptcy in understanding the present situation -- before or after the fact" - W. Michael Blumenthal 

Most economists no doubt understand what is behind their inability to do anything with their knowledge other than to fulfill their role in the grand illusion.  Part of this involves constructing complicated mathematical structures to further confuse what is the obvious problem.  For example, in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine, an article headlined Renegade explains the theories of a leading maverick economist. 

According to the story, havoc is being created with traditional economists by suggesting that their land, labour and capital basis for wealth creation is incomplete.  The renegade uses "swirling algebraic equations" and "convex sets" that "appear to turn orthodox economic theory on its head".  A closer examination shows there is nothing behind the mirage but the obvious fact that knowledge is an important part of an economy.  The truth is that economics will only live up to its potential for constructive activity when the very basis of economics itself is overturned.

Edward Flaherty, from the economics department of  Florida State University, has attempted to defend his position against the growing tide of people with knowledge of the debt virus.  However, he has a dearth of weapons with which to do what he is paid to do.  Since he would only be hurting his descendants in the long term with any real ammunition, it is best for all that his main argument is as follows. 

In the main counterpoint, Federal Reserve figures are presented that show that the U.S. money supply increased by $259.6 billion from December of 1994 to December of 1995.  Additional bank loans were $221.1 billion with 18 billion in new currency and coin being created.  This resulted in a total of  $239.1 billion in new demands on the system.  The conclusion is that "$20.6 billion in additional money that was created by some other means than debt creation."  The debt virus is declared solved even though the biased figures show more than 92 percent of the new money was created as additional debt and there are no allowances for many other variables, including capital flight from other countries. 

In his second counterpoint, Flaherty gives what are called T-account illustrations to show, among other things, that no money disappears because all the debts are owed to someone.  This revelation builds on a strange idea that has been circulating in economic circles for some time.  That is the idea that if a country's debt is held by the residents of the country, then the country does not really have a debt.  Under this premise, if 95 per cent of the people owe the other 5 per cent of the population everything they ever worked for by the time the total debt is paid, then nothing is remiss.

The struggle continues with such statements as “a change in prices, is not a change in the inflation rate” which could be true in the case of productivity decreases, but not in the money creation context it is given in.  Another comment is “inflation is a continuous rise in the average level of all prices in the economy, not just a group of prices”, as though a group of prices is somehow separate from the average it is part of.  The internet page is often linked to economic newsgroups, where the debt virus fact springs up, and is held to 'give a thrashing' to the proponents.  No doubt it is effective for the uninitiated, who would have a hard time figuring out the arguments and would be impressed by the credentials of the author.  

A lot of the more obvious economic theory shortcomings are explained away with the statement that the free market will handle the variables in the most efficient manner.  In reality, the market is riddled with inefficiencies, artificial subsidies and special hidden interests groups.  Even these are relatively minor compared to the basic false assumptions behind the main driver, which is the exponential money growth created from nothing. 

The Gateway to Barbarism

"What gives the financial bubble its specific quality is that without the growth of successive tiers of pure speculation (fictitious appreciation), the growth of the bubble comes to a standstill (and collapses)." economist Lyndon Larouche on the present stock market.

In a system that has lies and superstitions at its very foundation, it is hard to find any institutions that have a solid connection to truth and reality.  Despite claims to the contrary, the stock market is perhaps one of the more wild assumptions about what it is that creates value.  As stated, a major driver for returns on investment is often not new value that is created, but the money supply driver.

The positive feedback loop of compound interest has raised the money circulating in Canada's from $173 billion in 1984, to $550 billion just twelve years later.  The increase is over 300% and would create double digit inflation if it hit the streets as purchasing power.  Another problem would be that the massive cash flow at consumer level would speed up useless production to the point that resources dwindled faster and waste would create even more pollution problems.  In other words, it is a tangled web, in which there are no good options without fundamental change.

The media is full of investment advice and information about the wisdom of investing.  Not so coincidentally, the graph of the stock market is starting to roughly reflect the exponential money supply curve.  The Dow Jones took 44 years to hit the 1000 mark, ten more to hit 2000, six years to post 3000, four more to reach 4000, a year each to move past the 5000 and 6000 markers, 6 months to hit 7000 and finally three months to to go to 8000 on July 16, 1997. 

One thing analysts agree on is that the market has reached record levels regarding the price of stock to 'fundamental' value indicators, which in themselves measure very few fundamentals of real wealth production.  The money is not locked into the stock market vehicle and could easily be redirected as the value discrepancy becomes more obvious.  Control sophistications added since the 1929 crash, and the concentration of wealth, means the illusion can be manipulated in such a way that the environment is the only real observable limit. Bankruptcies from the money supply end could alleviate this side of the exponential dynamic, but are more dangerous considering social tensions already caused by the recent records.

Herschel Harding details some of what drives investment decisions in The New Bureaucracy, Waste and Folly in The Private Sector.  He states many of the pension fund managers play follow the leader, not because of similar analyses, but because there is safety in numbers.  Following each other and overloading a certain sector can have extremely negative effects on the economy as a whole.  If the pressure is too much and the stock falls, the individual managers can point out several analysts were caught by the same surprising downturn.  This dynamic is offset, but not made more intelligent, by the variety of conflicting techniques used by those responsible for efficiently allocating resources.  Chartism, fundamentalists, wave theory advocates, contrarians and astrologers often keep the herd mentality in check by stampeding in different directions.

Economist Ravi Batra commented that the various schools of thought constantly change their forecasts every few months, but still lost no status in the bureaucracy and kept pocketing handsome paycheques.  American writer John Rothschild recounted how he ran into problems playing the contrarian angle because so many contrarians joined in, their views became the mainstream.  In Chaos and Order in the Capital Market, mathematician and financial strategist Edgar Peters joins the growing, but suppressed, chorus that the idea of the stock market as an efficient resource allocation mechanism is a fallacy.

Harding sums up the various schools by stating "only in the most spun out, self-centred and unproductive bureaucracies could backwards become forwards and forwards backwards, and the participants nevertheless be so intensely serious about themselves."   Studies have shown that those who put money into some basic companies and just left it there would have a rate of return slightly better than the average of the analysts.  One investment exercise that involved darts and blindfolds did even better. 

Essentially, analysts accomplish nothing positive from the hive of activity they generate.  Harvard finance professor Jay Light states "Wall street is a multi-billion dollar business dedicated to getting people to change their minds and ringing the cash register each time they do it".  The profligate lifestyles and investor junkets put on by analysts in search of commissions do not add to the credibility of the need for lean and mean efficiency.

In summing up the business style, wall street broker Jim Natoli surmised "we have to spend money.  There's a lot of entertaining involved.  We golf.  We ski.  We go to the opera.  We skydive.  We whitewater raft.  We wine. We dine.  Whatever it takes."  As in much of the dying industrial age economy, petty graft and bribery decide what is the wisest direction the money should take, since production capacity can already provide everything people need. 

Economist Lyndon Larouche provides the most straightforward assessment about the "casino economy".  In essence, he argues that the speculative stock market bubble depends on an income stream taken out away from the economy of real wealth production capacity.  On his internet site, Larouche has constructed a graph that shows three exponential curves, with the first two rising upwards and representing the stock market and the debt money curves.  The third exponential curve points downward and is an indicator of the productive economy to sustain the pace, in the midst of social and environmental degradation. In essence, Larouche argues that financial value has become "decoupled" from real, sustainable economic value.

Computer programs are designed to halt trading under the possible collapse scenario described by Larouche, but this of course does not alleviate the real world negative effects, but instead allows them to grow larger.  Like high level bombers, investors seem unaware of the street level devastation they are causing in communities around the world.  Some of the new growth areas, such as the prison industry, security businesses and drug companies illustrate the decoupling that has occurred between financial value and quality of life. 

In addition to the money supply, automation capabilities, the globalization of labour and offshore taxation policies are creating surpluses of wealth that can be invested by those on the well off end of the growing income gap.  Those that are in a position to collect interest from money created from nothing, are in effect imposing a huge regressive tax on less fortunate people.    Many better paid workers have also gained a stake in the stock market bubble through the use of their pension funds.  However, if the industrial age transition is not handled well, pieces of paper could mean very little to a secure retirement.  

Conclusion

"All new money comes out of a bank in the form of loans.  Because loans are debts, then under the present money system all money is debt." - Graham Towers

The industrial age monetary system was devised before automation, so that the future value of money reflected wealth in a very different way.  Work energy was relatively scarce, so that most people who accessed a lot of it for immediate needs, were heavily penalized for the future, in recognition that the money should be put to the best possible use.  However, the work energy made available by machines has resulted in environmental constraints being the new limiting factor.  The old system does not recognize this and continues blindly in the wrong direction.

The change from the unsustainable monetary system could occur behind the scenes, since the official concept is all based on illusion, with the high priests of finance declaring that they had been correct all along about the necessity of the deficit reduction programs.  However, this is an unlikely scenario since more and more people are finding out about the financial superstitions through such new technologies as the internet and articles printed from relatively inexpensive desktop publishing programs.  If peaceable change does not take place soon, events could soon get out of hand in flashpoints such as Mexico, Texas or Utah.

The truth about the demise of communism goes far beyond the role of domestic repression and central planning.  A very big reason that goes unreported is that the USSR tried to raise the standard of living in the client countries it tried to take over during the cold war, while the U.S. generally embarked on labor camp, genocidal policies to steal as much as it could from poorer nations, usually under the leadership of brutal dictatorships.  Mobutu in Zaire, Marcos in the Philippines and Duvalier in Haiti are just a few examples of the leaders who more openly cannibalized their peoples. 

This repression slowed the fall of the company-store capitalism because most of it took place out of sight, in foreign countries, and U.S. domestic black ghettos.  As for the pretence of foreign aid, The World Bank and other investors were drawing several dollars out of economies, for every one they put in, while presenting an illusion of offering countries foreign.  In reality, the U.S. won the cold war over the USSR because it was more ruthless in more hypocritical, underhanded ways.   It's also a fact that the USSR often withdrew less real wealth from countries than what it put it.  In any case, winning or losing the industrial age war is to attain a prize that has no relevance to the future. 

Paradigm Shift

It is worthwhile to note here that the basic formula for money creation is distilled down from more complex formulae that took into account various short term variables.  John O'Donnell, in his paper Three Steps to Economic Freedom, devised a math formula and plugged in variables to see how they would effect his model.  O'Donnell's formula came up with the same basic insights that Thoren did and that engineer C. H. Douglas had arrived at approximately eighty years ago.

Douglas was discredited long ago but he has never been disproved.  Arguments I have read against his work are juvenile in their lack of understanding about some very basic economic facts.  When contacted, O'Donnell said he had never heard of C. H. Douglas.  In any case, as explained above, the basics are so basic that a junior high education would suffice to understand what seems to be beyond the traditional economic experts of the day.  An exponential formula does not fit into a finite system.  End of story.

What is interesting is the parallels between Douglas and those such as O'Donnell, and Copernicus and Galileo.  There was approximately an eighty year time span before the heliocentric idea that the earth revolved around the sun gained a toehold of general acceptance.  Galileo may have been forced to recant, but that did not stop his views from gaining general acceptance. 

Traditional proponents of the geocentric theory that the sun revolved around the earth used more and more arcane and complex diagrams to explain away astronomy sightings that proved Galileo correct.  At one point the reactionaries had the planets moving in little curly cues and governed by an arbitrary measuring device from nowhere as they orbited the earth along with the sun.  The heliocentric theory had also been popular eons ago, but lost favour during the rise of ancient Greece.

In essence, the reformers are saying money should revolve around sustainable production and consumption, instead of production and consumption revolving around the availability of money.  No one in a position of power is taking them seriously.  This is like when Coperinicus first discovered the earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around.  He was told he was crazy and wrong by the people whose authority rested on the concept of the earth being at the center of the universe.  Other astronomers, afraid of losing their jobs or worse, could not refute the sightings of Copernicus. 

What they did instead was adjust the orbits of the planets into complex movements, instead of saying the earth revolved around the sun.  As stated, it took about 80 years for the theory to gain some acceptance, and even then only because the famous Galileo had stated the theory was true.  As will be seen, the mathematical problems with the monetary system have been obvious to some for approximately 80 years.   

Eons ago, interest was considered to be wrongheaded, and the bible is full of warnings against having this phenomena in the temple.  It's too bad Jesus wasn't better at math so he could have explained his actions a little better and perhaps have convinced more people.  This is not as sacreligious as it sounds in that high school math wasn't even invented yet.  In any case, it was approximately eighty years ago that the scientific data of Douglas proved that interest had to create insoluble problems on earth, just as space flight trajectories would be wildly off target if geocentric calculations were used.

Douglas also proved that production capacity did not revolve around the availability of money, but the availability of money revolved around production capacity.  He used the example of a train running half full because it was somehow impossible to print up more tickets. 

Douglas's view correlates with the historical reality of how it was impossible to create money to allow people to build during the Great Depression.  

Another false economic assumption of today is that the most influential economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, was entirely wrong.   There are other phenomena that cause minor variations of the math problems that attend interest bearing money issues.  The Keynesian view of capital disinvestment is correct and is similar to the interest problem in that it tends against purchasing power matching the costs of the goods for sale.  Money that is used to build factories and machines has usually gone back to the bank and been cancelled out of existence by the time the business output hits the market. 

The Energy Angle

There are several other costs for mindless globalization.  Intraindustry trade, where GM ships cars from its overseas operations to North America, while shipping North American cars overseas, is incredibly wasteful in energy terms.  The overall energy consumed to make and transport an intraindustry trade item averages more than twice the energy consumed to produce the product domestically.  Since pollution and subsidized energy costs are not built into the price of a product, this is another case where humanity will pay in the future for a somabulist policy of today. 

International trade can be beneficial in many cases, such as providing goods and services to a country that for various reasons is unable to supply itself.  It can also save energy when warm weather countries ship produce to cooler countries.  For example, greenhouses do not have to be built and heated in countries such as Canada. 

However, publicly subsidized international trade is a profligate polluter, that may allow President George Bush to brag that 567 models of cars can be purchased in America, but will find people wishing they had only one hundred models to choose from when the full bill comes due.  As well as fossil fuel depletion and pollution, the drive to globalization without representation, the resultant massive social costs are another hidden subsidy to businesses.

The desires and needs of the people are revolving around the system they have created, rather than having the system revolve around what the people want.  Any political or economic statements to the contrary are based on ignorance or deceit.  Modern technology has been loaded onto a runaway train to nowhere.  Because the money supply must continually grow to pay interest, the economy must also grow or runaway inflation would occur.  Because of exponentialism and superstitious beliefs, the growth is only tenuously related to the happiness of people or the health of the planet.

Kenneth Boulding also studied cybernetics, which led him to redefine wealth creation as know-how applied to materials and energy.  Since most energy, including fossil fuels, is a result of solar activity, then economics, like the earth it symbolizes, also revolves around the sun.  The simple fact is that without energy, no food could be grown, so anyone who leaves energy out of a basic economic equation is quite literally dumber than wheat. 

In days past when members of a community had a barn building bee, the barn went up regardless of how much money was circulating.  Today, there could be twenty unemployed people who want to work, materials to build a barn with and a farmer who needs one to help produce food for the builders.  However, if the symbol of money is missing, then somehow it all becomes impossible to do.

The only scientific constraint on production is energy and environmental sustainability, which happens to be two of the few restraints that are largely ignored today.  Money can be created instantly for destructive purposes such as the Gulf war, yet it is held to be a hugh burden to print it up in order to construct more smokestack scrubbers.  Economics professor John Hotson commented on this strange turn of affairs by stating "could anything be more insane than for the human race to die out because we couldn't afford to save ourselves?"  

The powers that be are well aware of the energy connection, and used this lever to bring Japan into WWII, by squeezing the country's oil supplies.  There is also evidence that the Japanese code was broken and Pearl Harbour was forecast by the isolated code breaker, who was found wandering the lawn of his outpost, repeating over and over, "they knew, they knew".    

The scientific reality is that whatever is physically possible is financially possible.  In reality, energy is the key ingredient of what money symbolizes.  Energy from the sun creates food energy for people and animals.  Food energy makes it possible for people and animals to provide work energy.  Fossil fuels, hydroelectric power and other energy sources do the same for the machines that provide today's standard of living.  Materials are also a form of energy while information cannot exist or travel without energy.  That money is just a symbol of this is a primary reason the financial system can be manipulated.

Since the products have to have the capital cost built into their price, there is again a shortage of money in the system.  The standard solution is to build more public or private capital projects, even if they are not physically needed, because the monetary injection is required to have enough purchasing power to buy the goods produced by the original factory.

It is probable that Keynes took his basic ideas from C. H. Douglas, who had also pointed out the major problem with interest demands back in the 1920's.  Keyne's failure to illuminate the compound interest problem ultimately led to the debt crisis that discredited his other work.  Douglas also proposed a financial system based on science and math that would ensure purchasing power matched the cost of the goods for sale, even as automation drove their prices down. 

Money, along with the marketplace, is supposed to function as information.  In its present incarnation, the short circuits caused by increasing the supply to pay interest, instead of building a scientifically sane world, create the type of information that is found in many diseases.  The body's immune system either does not recognize certain enemy bacteria, does not have the information, or antibodies, to fight a certain bacteria and worst of all, can attack healthy cells due to informational miscues. 

MONEY AND HISTORY 

Mammon's Early Childhood

A historical study of  the monetary system shows how the law of the jungle attributes of humanity's biological background was extended.  A higher level of complexity in the system required that energy be encoded and decoded by money, on top of the energy transformation that resulted when food energy was digested by an individual. 

Before there was money, people directly consumed what little they produced, or received their share of the hunt.  As human society gradually grew richer and more complex,  many people came to the realize that raiding each other was not as sensible in the long run as cooperative exchanges. 

Direct barter created problems.   Often a person could not find a customer who had  something they wanted in exchange.  People who needed a common reference point for value created the first money.  Essentially, it was a rough representation of the energy that was expended to acquire or build a wanted product and acted as an encoding and decoding device.

In a disconnected world,  there were several forms of money.  They included furs, hides, shells, beads, opium and salt.  Salt gave rise to the modern word salary.  Cattle became an important symbol of wealth for many.  The latin word for cattle was pecus and is why money matters today are referred to as pecuniary. 

An important development took place when leather discs were created to represent cattle.  It was much easier to take these to the sometimes distant merchant for something the cattle owner wanted.  In turn, the merchant could pay his suppliers with the disc, who could pass the disc on for something they wanted.  At any stage in this process, the disc could be taken to a cattle owner and redeemed for the cattle. 

The disc itself was relatively valueless.  It represented value in that it was a promise to pay by the owners of the cattle.  In all cases, there was a direct physical relationship between the money symbol and the actual item of value.  The first metallic money was bronze, and often took the shape of a small cow or calf icon.  There is an important historical analogy here that relates to Moses and metallic calf worshiping. 

Rare metals themselves, like gold and silver, also became symbols of wealth.  They were often regarded as a mainspring of wealth itself.  This lacked a certain logic since a person could starve to death in a room full of gold.  One reason the superstition arose was because primitive people had given mythical and magical energy values to the two metals.  Some South American natives referred to gold as the sweat of the sun.  As trade expanded, gold gained a wide acceptance as a symbol of value.  It was the best form of money for the time because it was hard to find, easy to work with and would not corrode.  It was heavy, but not much had to be carried to trade for a lot of consumer goods.

The concept of money changed once again when goldsmiths created a bank to protect gold owners against robbery.  The gold was stored in a stronghouse and the goldsmiths gave the gold owner a signed piece of paper as a receipt.  The owner could then go get his gold only when he wanted to make a trade.  It wasn't long before the gold owners found it was more efficient in many cases just to trade the receipts since most people knew that the receipts were as good as gold.  Money had now become a representation of a superstition. 

At first it didn’t matter that the actual owner of the gold was not the one creating the new form of money.  The next step in the evolution of money came when the goldsmiths observed all the receipts were never cashed in at the same time.  A goldsmith decided to issue more in receipts than he had gold reserves for.  Money was now a representation of a superstition based on a superstition.  Butchers, bakers and other townspeople took the receipts and used them to expand their businesses. 

What had started as a fraudulent practice became convention.  This was the start of the fractional reserve system as there was no longer a one to one relationship between the gold and receipt amounts.  The gold was still considered important because most of it belonged to influential people, but now there only had to be a certain fraction of gold to represent each receipt.

The flexible paper symbol of wealth had actually come closer to the reality of wealth than gold.  Real wealth could be defined as the ability to produce the things that people need to live, and then the things that give them happiness.  The economy thrived because the productive capacity had been there all the time.  Some problems arose was when the person with the power to issue paper money was overcome by greed, and issued more than could be absorbed by the productive capacity of the community.  When this happened, paper money lost its value, and the first instances of inflation would occur.  Inflation could be best defined as too much money chasing too few goods. 

However, there was a more serious flaw in the system that is still being ignored today.  The goldsmith demanded a commission or interest fee for loaning out the pieces of paper.  Usury was the word used to describe interest, which was forbidden by the Christain Bible.  Only in modern times has the payment of interest for the use of money been considered legitimate

When the church invented the concept of purgatory, usury activity expanded quickly.  People who would not risk an eternity in burning in hell, figured that they could tough out a spell in purgatory in exhange for a liesurely life on earth. 

Even purgatory was regarded as a worst case scenario, since many of the richer citizens did not believe in religion to the extent that the poorer people did.  However, the penality of eternal damnation was so severe that many had previously hedged their bets by making their money in other ways.  Later the definition of usury was changed so that it meant only extremely high rates of interest. 

Later, rates of 28% on credit cards and bank overdrafts also became known as interest.  Since usury had been defined out of existence, it was now possible for money lenders to be good Christians.  Usury in Hebrew is defined as the bite of the serpent.  The Muslim Koran and Jewish religious works also warn against interest.  The Jewish work discriminated against other religions due to biological factors that effect all humanity and will be discussed in detail later in this project.

A baker or other townsperson had to sign a paper promising to give the goldsmith their property if the original loan and interest was not paid back.  If the baker took ill or met with some other misfortune, and couldn't work, the goldsmith took his bakery.  Since there was not even the gold backing the loan, the goldsmith had risked nothing except the paper his receipt was printed on. As is the case today, money to pay the interest was not in the system.  Unlike today, large gold discoveries could alleviate the problem, since this could have a major effect on the money put into the system.

However there were still serious shortfalls that created cycles of good times and bad times, even though the actual productive capacity of the economy remained relatively constant.  The effects of constant expansion that followed new gold discoveries, was not nearly as severe as today because a large part of the economy was not based on money in the agricultural age.  As well, there was a frontier to expand into that helped create a system that led to a better standard of living for almost all. 

Monarchs temporarily gained control of the right to issue money.  The reasoning they used was that it was their divine right.  Much of the monarchy was closely allied with the church at this time.  The right to issue money gradually passed back to the bankers, since none of the kings could trust each other not to print up money indiscriminately.  The people that know the truth about money often hold the banks responsible for today's situation, even though this situation proves that kings followed methods that were based on even more greed. 

By putting banker's actions in a historical context, we can see these scapegoats are really an extension of the baser motives found throughout mankind.  The original gold owners acquired much of their wealth through piracy, conquest and enslaving South American miners.  Much wealth changed hands through wars.  Greed was mainly satisfied through violence.  The goldsmiths or bankers used deception.  Wealth was also aquired as to buy  protection in a dangerous world.  However, it often had the opposite effect for poor and rich alike when the unscientific system of wealth distribution became too unbalanced.

Not Learning From Experience

The gold standard spread throughout the world when trade expanded in the wake of the industrial revolution.  Money became increasingly important as more and more of the economy became based on exchanges due to higher specialization.  Capitalism went from less than 5 percent of the economy, to become the economy.  This led to further progress, but exacerbated the shaky foundations of the non-scientific monetary system.

Gradually, money based on gold became the only form of wealth that could be used to purchase most goods.  There were also various attempts to tie wealth to silver. 

The gold standard was established to provide a fixed, known wealth indicator that other items could be measured against.  Gold was chosen for the same superstitious reason it had previously functioned as money by itself.  A country using the metric standard can measure the height of any item and it will be accurate according to the basic laws of science and mathematics.  Since gold is actually based on superstition, the standard became the equivelant of a metric ruler made out of a loose elastic substance.  

For example a US dollar that represented 1/35 of an ounce of gold would represent 1/42 of an ounce of gold a few years later.  Today an ounce of gold represents hundreds of dollars, but most of the value is still based on superstition.  The conductivity of gold is making this item more valuable in real terms as the telecommunications industry grows.  However, a person cannot eat gold or use it to keep warm or dry.  It provides little entertainment value.  It is only agreed on mythical properties that give it value.

Usually, all the democracies used a form of the same system.  Every time a private bank put $100 dollars into the system, it demanded more than $100 back.  Since there was no interest money in the system, more money had to be created or more gold had to be found.  Countries that did not have adequate gold reserves, saw their currency devalued if they kept printing money to meet the needs of the people. 

Until the stock market crash of 1929, the period between 1873 and the late1890’s was referred to as the Great Depression in Britian.  North America also eventually fell victim to this crash.  The gold standard had been stretched about as far as deemed desirable by the powers that be.  More money could not be printed even if the population and production capacity were increasing. 

Then a large gold discovery in the Yukon in 1896 allowed more money to be printed.  The idle productive capacity could be fired up again so that people could then start producing things and leading reasonable lives.  The only variable between the good times and bad times was the aquisition of more shiny rocks that were metallicized and then locked in a dark room.

As stated, when the position of England’s controlling class was threatened in 1914, at the outbreak of what was described as 'the war to end all wars', the gold standard was abandoned within hours.  Money was printed at will to pay people to build weapons, march in straight lines and kill large numbers of other peoples.  All the time, production and production capacity were being destroyed at a fantastic rate, yet it was always possible to print more money to finance any activity that was physically possible.

Most other countries did not have to abandon the gold standard until the 1929 Great Depression.  In some cases it was a gradual process that formally ended in 1978.  The United States, which owned most of the gold after world war two, officially abandoned the gold standard in 1971.  The Viet Nam war was doing a reasonable job of destroying production and production capacity, but there was no gold to be found there to back the dollars printed up to finance the war. 

At that time, the world financial system was pretending America had five times as much gold as it actually had.  The International Monetary Fund then completely took over the international standard for financial systems.  Unfortunately, the interest policy was not abandoned with the gold standard. 

Dissident researcher Eric de Mare stated the 1929 Great Depression was triggered when banks suddenly increased their interest rates from 3% to 30%.  When the borrowers tried to unload securities to pay their overdrafts, the stock market crashed.  Many despaired and committed suicide while the banks aquired their wealth at fire sale prices.  The investors were victimized because they were not in a position to victimize the banks. 

There is no agreement among traditional economists as to what caused the Great Depression.  Theories vary widely and are grouped under three main headings.  These are the spending hypothesis, monetary hypothesis and deflation hypothesis.  Under each heading there are various and sometimes contradictory reasons given.  All of the reasons deal with symptons and not causes. 

Even if the economists were aware of the causes, they would not have been able to communicate them.  It is extremely difficult to communicate superstition in an age that demands scientific answers.  Quite possibly the crash was triggered by both traditional and nontraditional explanations.

In the democracies there was little money to hire anyone during the Great Depression.  People criss-crossed the continents looking for work, or more precisely looking for the income that work would bring.  In Nazi Germany, Hitler related money with the physical capacity to produce, and built autobahns, stadiums and advanced weaponry.  Fortunately, the fascist mindset made a fatal mistake by falling into the racist trap. 

It is highly probable that Germany would have had nuclear powered missiles, if Einstein and other people who happened to be Jewish, had stayed in the country.  Without nuclear capability, a massive tank battle in Russia in 1943 was regarded as the last chance for the fascist war machine by the most astute of the German generals. 

The Russian forces received a large boost from the people who inhabited areas near German supply lines, and did not like being treated as inferior 'untermenschen'.  Many Ukrainians who had previously considered the Germans as liberators, turned to tearing up miles of train tracks once they saw the true character of the fascist system.  Polish freedom fighters also kept busy demolishing the lifelines of the fascists on the eastern front.

In the democracies, farmers did not suffer as much as other people during the Great Depression.  This happened because traditional economic theory could not be explained to hens and cows.  They kept laying eggs and giving milk.  Usually there was grass for them to eat, because most wealth really begins with converted energy from the sun.  In this instance, the grass was smarter than the economic experts.  The farmers could eat well even if they couldn’t sell the surplus.  Surpluses were commonly destroyed since hungry city people had little money to buy them.  A popular saying at the time was "they burn the wheat we want to eat".

When World War Two started, enough money was quickly printed and put into circulation to hire all the men, and most women as well.  They were hired to manufacture and transport products that gave a different meaning to the term economic boom.  They could not be paid to live peaceful, productive dignified lives, but for some reason they could be paid to kill and destroy.

In 1935, New Zealand did something different than the other democracies.  The government directed the Reserve Bank to create money and lend it at 1% interest, for building roads, bridges, schools and housing.  Modernizing industries was also on the list of priorities.  As a result, New Zealand prospered and was the only democratic country to reach full employment before World War Two.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

After the war, Canada continued to prosper, even though it had a debt that was twice as large as today’s debt relative to total production.  The difference was that much of the loan money was issued at near zero rates of interest by the Bank of Canada.  The population was also growing rapidly so that expansion of the monetary system could be absorbed.  Since there was less emphasis on finding shiny rocks before money could be printed, conditions were suitable for a period of relative stability.

Many of the people who were angry during the depression had now been trained as soldiers, so it behooved the elites to allow a long period where the wealth distribution created a large middle class.  Many governments adopted a mixture of socialist and capitalist policies to prevent a recurrence of the 1929 depression.  However, the centralization and bureaucracy inherent in socialism made this system only slightly better than unfettered capitalism. 

Some of the underground economic theories that enabled Nazi Germany to rearm, were also obliquely introduced.  In Canada, money was printed up and given to the population under the family allowance program.  In essence, Canadian women were paid a monthly fee for every baby they had.  

Countries that had not yet made the transition to industrial society, had their required revolutions.  The communists were the winning faction in some cases with the result that centralization and bureaucracy became far worse than that of the mixed economies.  The system took away more of a person’s individuality and attempted to use the limited information of at the tops of hierarchies to make all decisions. 

The management systems also encouraged false information propagation by those responsible for meeting certain production targets.  The communists punished loyalty to the truth more severely than the capitalists did.  As well as false reporting, this concept made innovation less likely in the socialist countries. 

Despite all the hyperbole in the media during the cold war, capitalism and communism are very similar in many fundamental respects.  One researcher went on a round the world journey to document the wide differences in different countries and came back with a report that postulated all industrial societies had the same basics.  Dissident analysts have gone so far as to describe communism as state capitalism instead of corporate capitalism.

The financial age could be described as a separate wave by itself.  With its emphasis on  raiding as opposed to creating, it could be described as the second dark age.  The bestseller, Barbarians at the Gate takes this point of view. 

Statistics Canada broke down the changes in personal income per person for each decade since the 1930's.  As might be expected, the depression years showed an actual decline in income until the World War Two started.  The 1940's saw the second highest percentage climb of all time as money was printed to finance the war.  This 50 percent jump occurred even though the second half of the decade showed a flat curve.  The 1950's showed a fairly constant growth that totalled almost 30 percent.  The 1960's accelerated the steady climb to 45 percent and almost reached the income improvements of the 1940's. 

Surprisingly, the 1970's showed the strongest results, with increases totalling over 50 percent.  The 1980's fell back to 20 percent and the first half of the 1990's shows an absolute decrease.  The answer can be found in breaking down the types of income.  Labour income went up 35 percent in 1950, 55 percent in 1960 and started to fall in 1970 to 35 percent.  By 1980, labour increases fell to 12 percent and are now decreasing in the 1990's.  Labour work was responsible for distributing real increases in wealth creation to a large part of society.

What vaulted the 1970's into first place was a 146 percent growth in investment income.  This was the first decade people were paid more to do nothing but gamble, rather than create and produce.  By the 1980's, investment income had fallen to 60 percent, which was the 1960's level.  But labour income was leading the fall.  Now in the 1990's, financial games are everything as the big squeeze play continues. 

This is unsustainable when the rewards for working on the quality of life improvements are non-existent or negative.  The lawlessness of the transnational trading was presaged by a barbarian who was explaining the new law to a conquered Roman philosopher.  He stated rules were created by the weak to enslave the strong.  This motto plunged Europe into the centuries of the dark ages. 

More History Lessons

Historical inconsistencies, such as the abandonment of the gold standard, can help one see the developing pattern of the traditional economic perspective.  In this case, a previous money superstition was easily eradicated.  The problem solving occurred when a paradigm shift allowed society to advance from the belief that all money must be backed by shiny rocks, to a society that lost its belief in the gold and silver standards.

Historical patterns can help develop a mindset to see how the idea of interest is also a damaging superstition.  Possible resource allocation fallacies have been discussed in a previous section, but history can also provide lessons on possible effects of the interest system.  Once expansion or productivity slows down, the results are always seem to be the same. 

According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica; "In Athens, around 594 BC the bulk of the population, who had originally been small proprietors, became gradually indebted to the rich to such an extent, they were practically slaves.  Usury had given all the power of the state to a small plutocracy." 

The book goes on to state “In Ancient Rome the mass of people were yeomen living on their own small estates.  In the course of 2 or 3 centuries the small free farmers were utterly destroyed.  By the pressure of wars and taxes they were all driven into debt, and debt ended practically, if not technically in slavery”.   Historian D. Ferrero writes in The Greatness and Decline of Rome,  ‘the Empire was broken by userers, prices oscillated, fields decayed, commerce languished, men fled from the tax gatherers, towns rotted, and barbarian routs began."

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson stated the greatest monopoly in America was the money monopoly and that a nation was controlled by its credit system.  President Thomas Jefferson was more direct when he said  "The bankers and credit dealers have placed the citizen in a prison house."

Interest was not always a burden.  Benjamin Franklin stated that interest free colonial script was the primary reason the American colonies were flourishing while England suffered through a recession.  The British King attempted to change the American system.  Later Franklin remarked “The refusal to allow the colonies to operate on an honest money system was probably the prime cause of the revolution”.  A tax on tea and stamps was the odd reason later given for the revolution by educational systems.

Abraham Lincoln also underwrote the civil war at no interest with his greenback issue.  England financed the Napoleanic wars with money issued at interest.  The civil war loans were paid off long ago but the interest effects of the older English war are still being felt.  Every time more money is put into the economy to pay interest, it creates more interest owed.

During his research, Thoren came across old records of a debate on funding legislation.  In 1790, a Georgia congressman opposed a bill which proposed money that was different from colonial script in that interest was charged.  He stated “It will be charging the active and industrious citizen, who pays his share of taxes, to pay the indolent and idle creditor.” ... “It must hereafter settle upon our posterity a burden which they can neither bear nor relieve themselves from ...until it brings upon us all that ruin which it has never failed to bring.”  Thomas Jefferson also spoke against the bill.

The problem with interest is not a new problem.  One has to respect the insight of the books of many great religions, that specially warned against the dangers of interest.  Hopefully, these dangers can be learned by modern humanity, without having to fulfill the prophecies of the religions. 

Science, Ethics and the Economy

 ‘The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door’ - Norbert Wiener.

 

Today’s problems regarding the debt and unemployment were honestly communicated some time ago by outspoken professionals.  They were well aware of the logical effects of automation and specialization on employment.  The mechanics of compound interest on debt had also been made obvious .  Being principled, these thinkers also commented about the effects of the financial and employment systems on individual freedom.

One such pioneer was engineer C. H. Douglas.  In the 1920’s, Douglas synthesized several British schools of thought on finance and automation.  He published alongside the leading intellectuals of the day in a paper called The New Age.  Douglas went beyond the conventional ideas of his time that regarded the new technology as a tool for increasing the productivity of the worker.  He correctly foresaw that advances were so great that they would eventually replace a large part of  the human workforce entirely.

He laboured in a time of great change when the shortcomings of unfettered capitalism were becoming apparent to the great majority of the people.  Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, Fascists, Positivists and Distributionists were some of the groups who marched and engaged in pitched street battles throughout Europe.  Douglas saw all the strife and poverty as the logical outcome of an economic system that seemed to be based  on superstition. 

Mr Douglas formed his thoughts from personal observations and an engineer’s love of logic.  He found it odd that the government had previously shut down the automation project he was working on due to lack of funds, but had money for everything after world war one started.  Then he was sent to straighten out the books of an aircraft factory.  He noticed the money paid out in wages, salaries and dividends were always less than the costs of building the product. 

After the war he studied the books of 100 factories and found out the same purchasing power discrepancy was true in peacetime.  A firm had to add the costs of bank interest charges to the product, yet this money had never entered the system as purchasing power.  Capital depreciation also had to be added to the price of a product, yet most of this money had physically left the system by the time the product went on sale.  Accelerating capital expansion was the only way to try to pump enough money into the system so that products could be bought.  Even then the mathematically unsound system was subject to the constant disruptions of depression, booms, deflation and inflation.

Douglas founded the Social Credit movement in an attempt to bring scientific methods to economics.  He was supported in his work by people ranging from poet T.S. Eliot to Nobel Laureate chemist, Fredrick Soddy.  Soddy went so far as to state that science without social credit was sheer suicide.  Douglas used the analogy of a train ticket to show the scientific relationship of money to productive capacity.  Saying there isn't money to give people good housing, education and health care is like saying a train must run half full because it is impossible to print more tickets. 

Douglas argued that anything that was physically possible should be financially possible.  An economy shouldn't have to wait until in was engaged in war to follow this method of operation.  He described the price of production is consumption, which is an interesting take on a circle of causality.  The only real constraints are environmental.  This is ironic in that these are the only constraints all but ignored by the present system.

Hitler used Douglas's findings to rearm Germany.  Douglas then wrote him a letter warning against his other policies, and predicted a war if Hitler continued in his ways.  Douglas told Hitler that full time, full employment was impossible in a peacetime industrialized economy.

In the wild rose country of Alberta, Canada, a political party won election and tried to implement his suggestions.  They were overruled by the appointed governor and then the Supreme Court Court of Canada.  Vested interests gave the term funny money to the scientific social credit wealth distribution system.  The party still exists, but acquiesced to the power of the banks long ago.  The only tenet that it has in common with the founder of Social Credit is the name it uses.

ABERHART HISTORY (WALLY?)

Douglas was a pioneer and as such some of his calculations needed improvement.  Because he was well aware of the divergence between government policy and public interest, Douglas was against the efforts to set up the body that became the United Nations.  He was a champion for the rights of the individual, but could not reconcile this belief with the needed integrating model.  For example, his concepts of a national dividend and just price were based on a centralized body that would run roughshod over those individuals who disagreed with him. 

Even so most of Douglas's ideas were far in advance of any traditional economist before or since his time.  His concepts treated many vested interests as being as obsolete as the feudal lords.  Naturally, he was thoroughly discredited by the mainstream media and politicians.  Douglas overreacted and went from his earlier policy of hands off leadership, to become autocratic as his concepts were overwhelmed by vicious establishment attacks.

Mathematician Norbert Wiener received his Phd at the age of seventeen.  He is quoted as saying “(I) see no future for our society unless Social Credit principles are incorporated”.  The principles concerned him because he forsaw the effects of automation on employment as well as the advantage of a scientific money system.  He chastised some of his fellow scientists for caving in to moneyed interests.

He also compared the mass media to white bread in that it was bland, standardized and made for its selling properties instead of food value.  In his book, The Human Use of Human Beings, he stated the public schools were more interested in formal discipline than intellectual discipline.  According to Wiener, schools were most effective at stifling creativity.  It was only intellectual brilliance that kept such an outspoken person employed for 40 years as a mathematics professor at MIT.

Wiener was known as one the world's top mathematicians but became even more well known among scientists for his work on automation.  He had started this work during the second world war to design systems that could work faster than humans for aiming anti-aircraft guns at airplanes.  He continued this after the war ended and coined the term cybernetics to describe how various feedback loops could affect the control of machines, organisms and organizations.

This study led to reflections and experiments.on the inter-relatedness of different cause and effect stimuli.  By moving beyond the Newtonian concept of action and reaction, Wiener was able to decrease the probability of  error in a decision by increasing knowledge about various factors affecting the outcome.  The increasing complexities of the modern age made this work extremely valuable, but required more computing power than was currently available to Dr. Wiener. 

Buckminster Fuller was noted for his innovative use of technology to deal with global problems facing humanity in the second half of the 20th century.  Fuller dedicated himself to finding entirely new ways to increase the social benefits accruing from efficient and principled use of the earth's energy and material resources.  In 1959 he became a research professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he established his World Game research team to test his design theory on the security of humankind and preservation of the earth.  

He thought enough of C. H. Douglas's ideas to spend time studying them and upgrading aspects to mesh with scientific advancements that had been made since Douglas's time.  Fuller was well aware of the inter-relatedness of the earth's systems and so could not support Douglas in his blanket condemnation of internationalism. 

Fuller also came up with what he called a synergetic-energetic system of geometry.  In architecture he used this to invent the geodesic dome.  He constructed many landmark buildings including  the American Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.  Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth was one of many books he authored.

Fuller summed up his philosophy as "To make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone."

Many people regard the information age as a recent phenomena but in fact the capitalist reached his peak no later than World War One.  Socialism and communism tried and failed to continue on with modified versions of capitalism.  Douglas’s ideas in the 1920’s occurred at the logical time to start the transition to a rational economic system.  The cybernetic work of Dr. Wiener was well underway in 1956 when the majority of workers were no longer engaged in industrial production.  Buckminster Fuller’s ideas were a mature take on the teen rebellion against the industrial system that was in full flower during the 1960’s. 

The Price of  Fame 

Preeminent economist, John Maynard Keynes, was responsible for much of the misguided socialism policy.  He agreed with Douglas’s capital disinvestment concept, but thought that the government should be able to overcome it by issuing and contracting the money supply.  He felt this would synchronize the costs generated by the production of the goods with the incomes available to buy the goods. 

He turned a blind eye to the effects of interest and so avoided attack by many vested interests.  His policies were followed by many governments and contributed to massive deficit spending since every time the governments tried to contract the money supply, the economy started to collapse.  Even huge productivity increases could not overcome the effects of compound interest.

Keynes' reputation received a boost when he wrote a book after world war one in which he predicted the reparations demanded from Germany would cause World War Two.  He considered only the effects on Germany and did not comment on Douglas’s astute observation about the same event.  Douglas wondered aloud why Germany was being punished by being forced to export more goods than it imported.  At the time, the British workers were told they were being rewarded by exporting more goods then they imported.  If the money flows had actually made it to the workers, the additional funds would have been meaningless.  Actual goods could not be available for purchase, unless exports dropped or imports rose. 

Douglas also predicted more war because it was a physical impossibility for all major countries to export more than they imported.  There would be fights to extend markets both by colonization and conquest.  Automation combined with full-time employment would always produce too many useless items when driven by a system that demanded constant expansion.  The wars themselves helped correct this problem by using up production capacity to destroy production capacity.  This was not healthy for the individuals who happened to be anywhere near the production capacity things. 

Like the rest of the financial system, the export/import concept was scientifically unsound from a very basic premise.

Because of the failure of Keyne’s policies, many governments have gone back to the policies of his contemporaries who disagreed with him.  The  1920's Austian school headed by F.A. Hayek and Ludwig de Mises postulated the market would correct all problems by itself.  The politicians and economists did not stop to consider that both Hayek and Keynes could be wrong.  The third way pioneered by Douglas and others was never tried.

The theories of Hayek and his colleagues do not account for capital disinvestment, the true effect of interest or that powerful interests can have any effect on the free market.  As well as being mathematically unsound, they do not account for the costs of pollution or social suffering.

The policies of course ensured ready support from the same powerful interests.  Hayek’s economics were demonstrably disproven during their original incarnation in the adolescence of the industrial age.  Simple logic or math accomplishes the same purpose.  Few people alive today are aware of this and it is not communicated through official channels. 

Powerful interests have a major and growing effect on both the market and politicians.  Modern industrialists in the know about the past history of the false free market will keep quiet.  They must play, follow the leader or be at a competitive disadvantage.  The short term wealth concentration effects of Hayek’s policies are also very tempting.  They are more than sufficient for investment managers who think in 90 day increments.  When they fail again, hopefully there will still be time for recovery.

The transnational nature of large companies and freer trade hastens the devolution.  Democracies that do not weaken pollution, labour or corporate tax legislation, risk having the corporation move on to a lower bidder.  To refuse to engage in this blackmail, is to leave a corporation at a competitive disadvantage in the global market.

Some of the corporate bottom line improvements are evident.  In Canada, corporate tax has fallen from 21% of total revenue to 7% since 1961.  The individual’s share has risen from 32% to 48% in the same period.  Pollution expenses are also under attack.  Of course, real costs to people and the environment are climbing faster than any decline in corporate expenses.

ADD STORY ON EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION

The allocation of costs to the public and profits to private interests has resulted in a 102% increase in corporate profits since the last recession.  But it is the worst sort of short term thinking considering  profits cannot be sustained when people’s incomes for purchasing products and services are falling.  This, and making money with money schemes, will eventally implode if real wealth production does not catch up with them.  At present, real wealth production is losing the battle.  Real wealth could be defined as the things that give people necessities and then the things that give them fulfillment.

The shaky financial system is also threatening the pension plans of some of the people who have worked to build the developed countries.  If the present system continues, many will be living in conditions of abject poverty once they can no longer labour.  In George Orwell's book Animal Farm, the hardest worker was a horse.  He concentrated on contributing to the community more than his own welfare.  When he got too old to work, the pigs sent him to a glue factory generate more profits. 

An example of this dynamic in real life, that was written about some time ago, concerned a poor farmer in India.  Authorities appealed to the farmers to sacrifice their land for a new dam which could be used for the good of many people.  For this, the farmers would eventually be handsomely rewarded.  The dam was constructed, corrupt officials absconded with the majority of the settlement payments, and the poor erst-while farmers were now landless peasants.  By not pursuing corruption vigorously enough, the sense of responsibility to a larger system is sure to be sabotaged.

APPENDIX B

The following is taken from Lyndon Larouche's internet site and details a worst case scenario of how the traditional economic superstitions could come crashing down.  Hopefully, this timebomb will be intelligently dismantled before it goes off.  It is also possible that the stock market is being used as a sinkhole into which to pump the large increases in the monetary supply predicted by the debt virus.  Larouche's analysis is as follows:

"There are three most essential ``mechanisms'' of the resulting, worldwide financial bubble: 1) The numerically largest factor involved is the magnitude of the ``notional'' (fictitious) capital values, which are treated as the equivalent of money-capital for the purposes of the derivatives form of futures speculation; 2) the second largest factor is the flow of monetary stimulus into the maelstrom of financial speculation, in derivatives and related categories; 3) the speculative bubble's root-dependency upon an income-stream of real wealth taken out of real consumption and the production cycle. To determine why and how a bubble will pop, and to estimate when it will probably pop, one must focus upon the function of these combined, interacting three mechanisms.

Since the typical layman has no notion of the meaning or functional significance of the term, ``fictitious capital,'' two clarifying illustrations are supplied here: first, the treatment of a simplified representation of what occurs as speculative appreciations (nominal ``capital gains'') in secondary stock-transactions, and, second, a similar case in speculation in New York slum-rental real estate during the 1960s. To understand how ``derivatives'' speculation balloons, and then, inevitably, collapses in a sudden, ``nuclear-like'' implosion, it is sufficient to carry the ordinary image of purely parasitical speculation, as seen in secondary stock-markets and slum rental real-estate properties, into that domain of which is the ``derivatives'' form of numbers-racketeering.

The first example: A man has 100 shares of common stock in Widgets, Inc., which he has purchased from that company's representative for $10 a share: $10,000. At that time, the stock's expected annual dividend-income is $5 per share.  Meanwhile, a subsequent fluctuation in the prevailing interest increases the relative financial advantage in a financial speculator's holding of that $5 yield per share. As a result, traders are willing to pay $102 a share, instead of $100, for a share of Widget common. The $2 gain in price is purely fictitious, purely speculative, rather than the result of some action related to investment within the production cycle as such. The speculative gain of $2 a share is, as such, a purely financial phenomenon, not an economic one.

Continuing the same example, go to the next step in the hierarchy of speculation. Let a trading company be incorporated whose sole source of income is fictitious capital gains of the type represented by the indicated $2 gain in Widget common stock. Let this company issue stock. Paid-in capital put to one side, the remaining assets which secure the value of that latter stock are already purely fictitious, rather than real-economic assets. Let the price of a share of that stock be $100, and let the expected dividend be $5 per year. Fluctuations in the value of that stock now represent fictitious values based upon appreciations, or depreciations of what are already purely fictitious values.

The second example, the case of the Manhattan slum-rental property, affords a more intimate view of the essential morbidity of fictitious gains in general. During the relevant period cited, the rule-of-thumb market valuation of a Manhattan rental property was calculated as a multiple of the expected annual rental income. Thus, a landlord, by using various devices to increase the rental rate per square foot, could increase the nominal market value of a savagely deteriorating property. This was characteristic of slum rental properties in New York City during that time.

The intrinsic value of the building used as an investment in slum rental property was almost an irrelevance, except as the physical structure provided a means for parking a relatively large number of rent-paying families on a city lot no larger than the standard plot allowed, during the 1920s or 1930s, for an urban single or two-family occupancy in a typical ``working-class residential district'' in a city such as Lynn, Massachusetts. Under the indicated slum-rental investment arrangements for Manhattan, the greater part of the paid-in rental income represented nothing other than ``feudal'' ground-rent, the latter a purely fictitious sort of economic value. Thus, the physical purchasing-power of the capitalized value of the slum could be zooming skyward, while the physical value of the building itself was falling rapidly toward zilch. The fluctuations in the financial value of the investment in the rental property had been ``decoupled'' from the economic value of the building and its use.

Thus, companies which speculated in fictitious gains from such investments could capitalize their fictitious earnings (capital gains) from the turnover in a number of such slum-investments, creating what we shall label Exhibit A. Let the profit of operations involving Exhibit A be labelled Exhibit B. This poses the question: What would a financial speculator pay to own the right to collect the expected annual dividend labelled Exhibit B? Suppose that prospective buyer expects a 10% financial return annually; in that case, the ownership of the right to collect Exhibit B annually would be approximately ten times the price of Exhibit B: creating Exhibit C.

These two examples introduce the principled features of the kind of process upon which all financial speculation in general is based. Financial derivatives represent the shifting of this sort of speculation from investment to pure betting, sometimes called``hedging.'' The point of these two, admittedly much simplified illustrations, is to identify the role of unreal, i.e., fictitious values, in feeding a bubble: as Exhibit A feeds Exhibit B, which feeds Exhibit C. What gives the financial bubble its specific quality is that without the growth of successive tiers of pure speculation (fictitious appreciation), the growth of the bubble comes to a standstill.

At the point of standstill, investors are in a scramble to sell out from under the collapse of the bubble as a whole; the scramble becomes a panic. Consider a panic operating globally, at computer speeds, along pathways of contemporary cable and satellite communications: The panic zooms, hyperbolically, into a ``reversed-leverage'' analog of a thermonuclear explosion: an implosion which causes the disintegration of virtually every financial and central-banking monetary institution of the planet, within a lapsed time of hours, 48 to 72 hours at most."

It should be noted that computer programs are in place to halt trading, if it should fall a certain amount.  There is also the possibility that more and more of this black hole investment is controlled by those who are well aware of what is going on, and will continue the charade at all costs.

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Since environmental problems occur at the global level, there must be a control function at that level to deal with them.  Use Alberta example.  

- From 1951 to 1987, the real cost of U.S. wages rose by 4 times, profits went up 3 times, taxes 1 and 1/4 times and interest costs 25 times.

Even many people we regard as leaders are not consciously aware of much of the manipulation that takes place.  When the first governor of the Bank of Canada, Graham Towers,  was explaining to Parliament how money was created from nothing many of his questioners were amazed.  This occurred even though his questioners were thought to be so knowledgeable, they were elected to represent the interests of thousands of people.  Yet they did not know the basic mechanics of what was the lifeblood of the entire system they represented. 

PART 5

LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO LIGHT

Ending the Four Billion Year War

As stated, the Darwinian aspect of evolution is a ruthless, take no prisoners form of warfare.  Ever since the earth formed, life has been advancing through overcoming, and even changing the environment.  The DNA virus was an later success, that is thought to have triumphed by wiping out all the other viruses.  As the life forms became more complex, the battles became more complex.  Symbiotic alliances were often the most successful strategy and became the main thrust in human affairs.

People formed tribes, then city states and finally nation states, because each larger form of association led to an increase in security for the individual.  Feudalism started out as clans federating for protection under a knight who needed their support services.  In Alberta, Amerindians were originally happy to have the Mounted Police in the area because it was the first chance many had in a long time of sleeping without worrying about being killed by a rival tribe. People worshipped Caesar for bringing Pax Romana to their area, while persecuting the upstart Christians who thought there was something larger behind it all.

Through it all, force and marriage worked to join lands and peoples, only to often have them broken apart again under other schemes from within or without.  One study determined that of the last 3,421 years, 3,153 were major war years, with numerous raids, skirmishes and minor massacres lost to the ages.  China sailed through a long peaceful era under the Sage kings, only to be hurled into the four hundred years war to make up lost time.  Recent history has been the most peaceful era ever, but a clumsy age change could make all of history look like a schoolyard fight.

Now most wars are fought on the economic field with the organizational details of business being the same as the military model.  The previous largest dominant boundary of association, the nation, has been subsumed in continental and world trade agreements, with transnationals and above all, the financial system, trying to form a planetary association.  It is all against one and one against all depending on the demands of the moment.  Alliances will generally milk the most powerless, but beyond that there are no guarantees in this shapeless shifting battle for dominance and survival.  The casualties, both physical and psychological, show the relatively peaceful times to be undercut by a more insidious form of conquest.  The methods used to enable the last joining together of people could cause its demise.  The disregard for the nation state, regional diversity, communities and the individual shows a lack of appreciation for diversity that is so important for both a successful transition and the operational requirements of the knowledge age.

Rav Hanina remarked on the benefits of larger associative structures when he stated "pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for fear of the government, a man would swallow up his neighbour alive."  Philosopher Thomas Hobbes also saw the shadow side when he commented the state was a civil association to keep people's insatiable appetites for power and gain from destroying all civility.  However, governments, with private enterprise, have shown a tendency to also swallow up not only individuals, but entire communities.  Instead of the previous strategy of physically destroying or enslaving the neighbours, the individual has their mind programmed to work against the best interests of themselves, the community and the planet.  To continue using the technology to accomplish an immoral, great dictatorship, control structure must fail according to the most basic of cybernetic requirements. 

In all cases, war led to a relatively short term advantage at best.  People will always rebel against injustice, and the ongoing battles in Ireland and Algeria show the staying power of a force of nature that will not be subjugated.  Only friendly competition and cooperation can attain any lasting benefit.  The quest for security through controlling other humans only leads to a lack of security in the long run.  The attempt to gain an illusion of control by total domination of the environment has led to even more obvious undesirable results.  Nature will out, whether it be the diversity requirements of individual freedom or a lesson in symbiotic behaviour requirements to a species that has taken so much and given so little back.  

Physical to Spiritual

There was a significant school of thought during the European enlightenment that took a different tack on the survival of the fittest aspect of Darwinian evolution.  Some leading intellectuals regarded all strife as necessary for learning how to create the structures for what most people already knew was true in their hearts.  Lessons on how to overcome the inverted survival instincts of our jungle heritage would occur through trial and error on.  In essence, the role of humanity as an animal was necessary for the development of a more spiritual being.  Without a brutally competitive background, the unknown rules for where cooperation should reign could never be discovered. 

Where it only takes one schemer to gradually destroy the civility of a community, the task seemed impossible and that only a destructive apocalypse could end the futile process.  New technology and discoveries just seemed to expand the problem so that one Iago type character could domino their chaos creations over larger and larger areas.  Of course, there was never just one, but all of us at certain times and under certain conditions.  At the same time as structures were sought that allowed moral behaviour, current structures were pushing back at progressive endeavors.  However, for the first time, telecommunications and computers have created the possibility for true government of the people, by the people, for the people, where one bad apple can be ineffective on those that look for something sweeter.  

Hegel, and his contemporary Jacob Boehme, were two of those who viewed the negative to be necessary for the positive to struggle against and thereby progress.  Hegel took the concept further to reiterate that nation states were destined to join in a larger pattern of the behaviour displayed within the community.  Through it all runs the commonality of a centrally controlled commerce, that could provide the final lift or barrier to the entire process.  

The morality of what was basically right and wrong has been in writing for thousands of years.  The view of desirable structures followed a different pattern.  Any judgment passed was not to praise or condemn, but to eliminate anything obviously mistaken.  It was like the dispassionate observance of a chemical reaction or amoebic behaviour.  This point of view did not consider the negative to be evil in the traditional sense.  It was viewed as a necessary part of life, and something that could combine with the positive to lead on to higher life.  The English poet, William Blake, summed up this mindset in his poem , The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 

Our perception follows this survival trait in that many people are unhappy in the developed countries, but what they have would have been considered paradise by the standards of many feudal age people.  Time is subjective in more ways than one.  If there were no bad days, how could good days be determined? 

We sometimes believe our news and forget that barbarism has been the operating standard for both sides in any dispute.  There are rarely any good guys.  Past horrors are often glossed over or unreported in the myths of the victors.  As stated, the genocidal invasion starting in 1492 was presented as a discovery, as though Columbus found something on a laboratory slide.  A Canadian book, Other Losses made a strong case for the theory that a million German POW’s were starved to death by the Allies after World War Two.  In Latin America, proponents of democracy are tortured and killed by those professing democracy. 

Because history is the myths of the victor, the Nazi and communist atrocities have been well documented.  A famous politician was stating a fact when he said nations can not have consciences, they can only have interests.  This saying can now be transcribed to transnationals.  It is now working its way down to lower levels with disastrous consequences.

Much of what was built is good.  It is now irrelevant whether the means used were necessary or not.  As bad as it is, our present leadership is still an improvement on the leadership of most of history beyond tribal times.  We have too much constructive and destructive power to continue to be motivated as the rest of the animal world is.  All nature has been conquered except the animal nature within humans. 

Discontinuity Time

"Those that forget history are condemned to repeat it" - Santayana

The problem facing society today is twofold.  Not only do industrial age institutions need to change, but the process of change itself has to be substantially different than past age changes.  The next age change could follow a discontinuous evolutionary model that is born of necessity.  Instead of variation and selection taking place through acts of force and terrorism, it could occur peacefully in the minds of the powerful decision makers. 

Previous age transitions had resulted in large scale warfare and violent rebellions.  The new mindset that gave rise to the industrial age can be seen through the blood of the civil wars in countries such as France, America and Russia.  England is sometimes used as an example where the industrial age arrived without an overthrow of the ruling class, but this is based on a shallow analysis.  Cromwell and his roundheads had previously plunged the country into a bloody revolution that only ended when the king was decapitated.  When the monarchy was later restored, the powers that had been enjoyed by the slain king were not reinstated.  In effect, England had already started on the road to representative democracy by the time their industrial revolution got well underway.  

During the last transition, single shot muskets and inaccurate cannon were the most damaging agents of change.  Today,  nuclear and chemical weapons, widespread small arms, accessible explosives and a looming ecological catastrophe assure that traditional methods will have radically different consequences.  It is unlikely a darwinian struggle of new and old power groups will allow the survival of the fittest, or even of civilization. 

More of the violently rebellious behaviour against the system is becoming organized.  Daniel Junas, a Seattle-based political researcher, states that American militias already have the capability to make the democratic process unworkable in some areas of western America.  He opines  "the militias represent a smoldering right-wing populism with real and imagined grievances stoked by a politics of resentment and scapegoating -just a demagogue away from kindling an American fascist movement.  The militia movement now is like a brush fire on a hot summer day, atop a high and dry mountain ridge on the Idaho panhandle. As anyone in the panhandle can tell you, those brush fires have a way of getting out of control." 

Junas goes on to state that the militias do not, as yet, constitute a direct military threat.  An important point to consider is that the conventional military is not divorced from the militia movement, and could stay neutral in incidents where they were forced to fire on citizens of their own country.  The Russian military followed this path recently.  It is also not inconceivable that the sympathetic military elements would assist in equipping the militias.  In addition, there are 28 million American veterans who have been ill-treated by the government they served.  So far the threat of violence for the current age change is relatively subdued; but as the Atlantic Olympics illustrated, much of this is because people stay out of certain areas after dark.  As stated, 5.3 million Americans are under enforced supervision by the U.S. judicial system in 1996, either in jail, on probation or on parole. 

There is another compelling reason for a peaceful revolution, even beyond the damage that can be done to people and the environment.  The prospect of building a solid foundation for a peaceful knowledge age decreases as the upheavals increase.  Violence breeds more violence.  Karl Marx's assertion that large scale, fundamental change can only be accomplished through violent revolution must somehow be disproven.  The first humane civilization will require the first peaceful age transition.  

Despite tales of valiant behaviour in war, the victors are alway those that have indulged in extreme ruthlessness.  Whatever rules of engagement existed previously, the levels of civilian casualties in modern conflicts show the illusion of chivalry is long gone.  Whoever wins will have followed the route prescribed by Hitler's observation that terror must be met with equal terror.   Defeating a certain power group will starts the same ape power process in a different group.  Communism did not free the average person any more than socialism or capitalism did.

WILSON ON PEACEFUL CHANGE.

There is little doubt the situation will get worse before it gets better, but it is imperative that alternative methods of change be undertaken before the flash point is reached.  Tyranny destroys individual human rights, but revolution destroys the order that the rights rest upon.  This time around, it is improbable there will be a capability of rebuilding order to a semblance of its former level, once the fighting is over.

There are a few positive signs that decision makers have realized the system has reached a critical point.  There are frequent meetings of international power groups.  The standard muddle through method is being questioned at successively higher levels.  Some leaders can now see that unconscionable immorality has now coincided with unsustainable impracticality.

However, some of the statements coming out of elite meetings are either a smokescreen, or show a complete lack of knowledge about the issues involved.  A 1996 meeting in Spruce Meadows, Alberta involved 100 high-placed business, military and political leaders from around the world.  In their press release they talked of the need for expanding traditional economics, and the ability to fight two or more regional wars at the same time.  Hopefully this is not representative of what happens in the backrooms or at other meetings.  Otherwise, the militias are not the biggest threat to a fascist future. 

The present attempt by Canadian authorities to create a gun registration bureaucracy is likely another unimaginative elite response to the looming signs of social trouble.  No doubt there are those who are genuinely concerned about criminal access to firearms.  However, it is hard to take this initiative at face value, given that the justice department is also home to drug enforcement agencies.  This agency has been unable to keep planeloads of illegal drugs out of the country. 

Any perception difficulties experienced by the elites are overshadowed by the main barrier to peaceful change.  The powerful elites have to find a way out of their own competitive, law of the jungle situation.  It is extremely difficult to build enough trust among such a varied group to accomplish sensible change policies.  Until this happens, there can be no chance of  peaceful change.

As for the speed of change, when the elites themselves are threatened, it is nothing short of amazing with how fast change can happen.  When a loophole was discovered that threatened to overturn the Canadian government's position regarding wheat sales, new legislation was in effect the next day.  Yet when cases of injustice regarding relatively powerless members of the public finally have the attention of top government officials, the cases drag on for a long time.  This happens even though innocent people are suffering and it is obvious to all concerned what the eventual outcome will be.  Other dynamics of this were the previously stated instantaneous printing of money for both world wars, when previously people were suffering from a lack of income.

The minor and major cases where the government does not move quickly unless its own interests are threatened, are the opposite of what the government is supposed to stand for.  Instead of serving the people, the elites engage in what can be referred to as passive psychotic behaviour.  They do not directly attack the people, but fail to act speedily to help them when it is a relatively simple matter.  This differs from active psychotic behaviour in the same way a sin of omission differs from a sin of commission.

Of course elites are not alone in their inability to empathize with the plight of others.  Again, the behaviour stems from underlying structures such as the educational system and the demands of a dangerous world.  Drucker and Toffler are accurate when the comment on a new age as having the potential for the first truly humane civilization ever.

In his book, Post Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker writes he can only hope that a hundred years from now it will be possible to write a book about the knowledge society.  It would mean that we have successfully completed the current transition.  Drucker and Toffler are not alone in their sense of crisis.  Many scientists and analysts agree that our current change is the big one.

Memes and Dreams

As stated, it is the evolution of ideas, rather than genetics, that gave humanity its power over other animals.  Early people found cold temperature extremes could be pushed by the idea of incorporating part of the system that was a fur bearing creature into the system that was the individual.  Other parts of the animal's system or the environment could be used for tools.  The clothing and the tools were especially handy parts of the new larger individual system in that they could be carried only as needed. 

The new science of memetics examines the effects of  ideas on evolution and vice versa.  Changes in cultures and religions, as well as fads and trends, are all facets of memetic evolutionary activity.  Memes (which rhymes with beams) signifies the ideas or conglomerations of ideas.   A meme that men should wear beards combined with a meme that women should wear black and conglomerated with other ideas to form fundamentalist Islam.  Ancient memes are why perceptions can differ among peoples of different cultures while modern or recycled ancient memes produce the diversity of thought within the same culture.  Any meme can be individual, group, community, regional, national or global in scope.  People everywhere can believe the earth is flat, or round as is the case today, but only one might believe it is inhabited underground by alligator humaniods only he can describe.

One way of studying the concept of how ideas can change is to consider memes as being somewhat analogous to genes.  Since animals relate to a less complex environment, they can get by mainly on instinct and experience, with the same flight, fight and hunting lessons being largely inborne with basic lessons taught by some parents that are passed down through the generations.  When the environment changes, most animals become extinct fairly quickly if there are no migratory outlets.  Genetic information cannot evolve nearly as fast as memetic information. 

Genes need physical contact to replicate, with genetic information encoded into a sperm and egg, with the offspring decoding a synthesis of  both parties to the relationship.  Lack of diversity in the genetic realm leads to the problems inherent with inbreeding.  In the animal world, diversity is assured by a variety of means.  Driving offspring away from the parental territory is a method used by the fox, while the lone wolf is a roving bank of differing genetic material for various packs.  The taboo against incestuous relationships in some cultures was an early realization of this fact. 

Fascism and similar concepts lead to this problem regarding memetic diversity.  'Group think' stomps out emerging ideas that are needed to handle the ever changing situation caused by evolution and how it interacts with a changing environment.  The other extreme is isolationism where excessive solitude can easily lead to ideas not relating well to other systems in the real world.  Professor Henry Mintzberg commented on this by stating that ivory tower thinking fails because it is necessary to immerse oneself in the details in order to withdraw the strategic messages.

Memes go through the same process of variation and selection as genes, but the speed of change can equal the speed of light.  The evolution does not have to wait for succeeding generations to pass on new genes, but can take place instantaneously in the mind of the individual.  A BFO, or blinding flash of the obvious, is one manifestation of this.  The biblical parable where Saul became Paul relates to a sudden recognition of the value of morality.  Whether evolution is blind, as some evolutionists contend, is a matter of controversy.  The stance of this work is that there is some sort of guiding force creating the miraculous developments that constitute life.

The environment must also be conducive to allow memetic evolution to be commonplace.  Without this, it can take many years, or possibly lifetimes, to process enough new ideas to change from an animalistic to a humanistic mindset.  An example of fundamental human behavior that was altered very quickly occurred when North American adults switched from having large families to having small families.  The bulk of the change occurred in about three years during the early 1970's.  Previously, social scientists were counting on using decades of consistent government pressure to reduce population levels, but a general innate recognition was far ahead of the experts. 

The storage and travelling capability of memes goes far beyond the temporal and spatial constraints of the genes they depend on.  Memetic information can be stored in the brain, and in non-human media, such as books, movies and digital computer memory devices and last as long as long as the universes if they are stored properly.  They can be transmitted by word of mouth, mail, over the airwaves and through wires instead of physical contact. 

Memes can replicate seemingly endlessly.  Every time a computer program is copied, a book is printed and so on, a meme is propagated.  When replication takes place through several intervening people, each adds or subtracts coding, so that the final information product can be more rumour than fact, even when the sender is honest.  A paradigm shift happens when a new idea, or meme, replicates so successfully it spreads throughout a population.  An idea whose time has come seems to survive extreme attempts to eradicate it by killing the people that carry that meme.  This has been captured in the saying that God works in mysterious ways.

It is possible that memes are an emergent property of the complexity that arose as single cells gradually combined into higher and higher life forms.  It is also possible that they could be related to, or are affected by, photons or any other combination of the low and high energy particles striking earth from outside the biosphere.  The fact that photons make possible visual information, shows there is some sort of relationship between light and the sensory input that affects ideas. 

Since the memes originate, or are processed, in the brain, they depend on the cell in the same way that the gene does.  The interactions between the gene and the meme are unknown, but they are no doubt complex.  Within an individual entity, genes and memes can follow both competitive and cooperative strategies for survival and further evolution.  A peace loving attitude in a savage environment would make short work of the genetic material that carried such memes.  A recognition that world wars are impossible in the nuclear age is an example of how a peace meme can enhance survival probabilities of genetic material.  In essence, memetic evolution could be described as learning, especially as it relates to dealing with higher levels of complexity. 

Often, the most effective memes are those that dissolve anxiety.  This is natural in that solving a problem increases chances of survival.  However, this can be a negative or a positive trait depending on the responsibility the individual takes for their actions or inactions.  Memes can be used to relieve anxiety by providing information that enables successful solutions.  They can also degenerate into escapism, where blind beliefs in irrational systems give relief to those that have lost faith in humanity's problem solving abilities. 

Needless to say, the head in the sand, ass in the air approach does not increase fitness for long term survival for the genes or the memes.  One reformer has commented that if your head is in the sand, your butt is in the air.  Some of the positive aspects of the new age movement seem to have degenerated into this form of thought, where miracle solutions are sought from amulets and a higher vibrational existence, when in reality, the miracle solutions are all around us in the form of our technology.  It only has to be put to an intelligent use. 

Memes can also give rise to an abundance mentality in relationships between individuals.  As stated, genes need food energy to survive and grow, and can be forced into deadly competition for this material in a finite global system.  On the other hand memes thrive on information energy which can be easily replicated and exchanged in win/win situations.  It doesn't matter how many people access the same idea.  Like the five biblical loaves of bread, there is always enough for all.  The only exception is when the meme contains information about obtaining a resource that is too scarce to allow the survival of all genetic material. 

Since this situation is non-existent in the developed world, it is safe to assume that much of today's secrecy is based on obsolete drivers and structures.  The scarcity behaviour creates a self fulfilling prophecy in our present economic system.  Humanity is regarded as basically evil, so systems are built that can most successfully be navigated by using baser instincts.  That all meme evolution has not yet been misdirected towards tit for tat reciprocity or selfishness, is a sign other information dynamics are at work in the larger system. 

A World Waiting to be Born

"There is no energy crisis, there is a crisis of ignorance" - Buckminster Fuller

There is a tacit recognition now among many everyday people that the system is somehow corrupt.  As a defensive measure, many equate any honesty regarding the larger system as synonymous with stupidity.  One wise man had stated that when a nation's young people are the ones embracing conservative values, then that nation is on the way to ruin.  There are positive signs that the latest generation is pulling out of this 'me-decade' slump.  The most popular young musicians are again those that create songs about important issues. 

In reality, old and new forms of energy, not money, are the scientifically proven basis of all wealth production capability.  The average agricultural age person, using their own energy, could barely produce enough food energy to keep from starving.  If they had a horse, then a family could have a higher standard of living because of the additional energy available from one horsepower.  Since then, technology and fossil fuels have created amazing increases in the energy available per capita. 

A article on current Canadian and American capacities notes that the intelligence behind this energy can provide each inhabitant with the energy equivalent of 1,330 slaves.  Like most statisticians trying to make a point, the author did not mention that the majority of this horsepower was incorporated in the family vehicle, which is parked over 95% of the time.  However, the increase in energy available per person is still exponentially higher than that of the agricultural age. 

What is more, some technological helpers can work 24 hours without stopping and generally accomplish their tasks with a speed and precision that would have been the envy of the agricultural ruling class.  Most importantly, no individuals lose their freedom under the machine concept of slavery.

Even this amount of energy is probably only a small percentage of the potential available.  Engineer and inventor Buckminster Fuller had estimated that less than 3 billionths of the total energy available to mankind is being used.  Further scientific work would be required to tap this energy, as well as plan a dissipative mechanism to avoid overheating the earth.  Something else to remember is that massive amounts of energy are in effect being 'flared off' by the brain-dead activities required by the industrial age economic system.

Fuller advocated a model of change that rejected old conceptions about winners and losers.  In the past, what was, and what ought to be, was often driven by brutal competition for a scarcity of goods.  Current capabilities enable a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity.  Fuller described his system as ELABORATE.  Under Fuller's concepts, ignorance and sadism remain the last excuses for enforcing shortages of necessities. 

Work motivational theories are also used to justify a winner take all mindset.  As stated, the Adlerian drive to superiority has been easily sublimated into win/win situations.  An example takes place in wars, where soldiers strive for superiority by risking themselves to aid wounded comrades. 

The history of humanity in peacetime is also one where the people who have been respected have been the ones who gave to the system.  Those that took from others were regarded as inferior by the majority.  A ten to one income differential would also keep new entrants to the economy motivated, without leaving anyone poor by today's standards.  As stated, it is not necessary to take any income from those currently making more.  Hopefully, those with huge incomes would continue and even grow their efforts of giving back to the community.

The abundance mentality propagated by Fuller and author Stephen Covey among others, feeds synergistic behaviour.  The new science of evolutionary psychology detailed a minor example of this when it showed that it is highly probable that physical benefits will outweigh the physical costs of  individual courtesies.  Someone in need gave higher value to the courtesy extended than the person that could afford to do the favour.  This could be something as simple as holding the door for someone who has their hands full.  The bridge to future cooperative efforts and positive psychological effects could be mind boggling.

If the mass media structures and advertising industry were used for education instead of disinformation, the results would be nothing short of amazing.  Anything that is powerful enough to get people to believe in illogical nonsense and act against their own self interests, will be exponentially more powerful when it is aligned with truth and the innate desires of the majority of the population.  As the much maligned Bank of Montreal commercials postulate, "it is possible".

The shape of the metasystem transition, or discontinuity, discussed by scientists and futurists is of course unknown.  It will probably be far more individualistic than the atheist bent so-called objective science would allow for.  The only thing that is certain, by both scientific and moralistic criteria, is that the planet-of-the-apes type system can not continue much longer without a massive devolution taking place.

The economist J.S. Mills remarked on this dynamic at the dawn of the industrial age, when humanity's enormous production potential was first unfolding.  He stated that sooner or later material expansion had to slow and be subsumed within an emergent spiritual expansion.  Such a system would continue to create real wealth in that people could work on what they found fulfilling, after their material needs had been met.  Of course, space exploration or other scientific advances, could once again make rapid material expansion possible and desirable.

The quality of life progress described by Mills does not have to mean the standard of living remains static.  Resource conversion can remain static, while effective output increases greatly, because of  increases in what technical people refer to as the load factor.  Technological advances and cooperative efforts can lead to a dramatic decrease in duplication, and make fuller use of the energy that is being converted.  Car pooling is an example of increasing load factors and conserving energy. 

The possibilities inherent in the load factor concept have barely been touched.  The provision of such basic needs as food, shelter and clothing could be handled under such a cooperative system, while leaving the driving force of friendly competition to operate in the higher needs of sense of belonging and self actualization.  The competition in the sense of belonging realm would probably evolve into a contest to see who could provide the most back to the community and overall system. 

What is needed now is a transformation, where the nature of human evolution itself would change.  In complex systems, such a dramatic change has been referred to as a phase transition.  Instead of genetic impulses that are programmed for constant material expansion, the evolving ideas of conscience and ethics are needed.  Genetic information has to be tempered more with the ideational information about solving such life support threats as overpopulation, deforestation, carbon buildup, nuclear war and so on.  

Spiritual Energy

The insights that are pulling humanity toward a new age are a type of feedforward.  The religious attempts to supply spiritual information have met with mixed success.  The primary reason is that the good old rule of ruthlessness infected and subverted the ideals of the religious founders.

Throughout the ages, the lessons of the religion founders have been saddled with defensive, repressive and outdated supplements.  Sometimes the additions have been well intentioned, and sometimes they have been for selfish ends.  For both reasons, religions became plagued with inconsistencies that, in many cases, were the antithesis of the actual messages. 

Religions were also identified with the paternalistic biases of the times of their founders.  When society advanced, women were still treated as second-class citizens by many of those who continued their idolatrous love of imposed hierarchy.

Rulers routinely ignored or manipulated the basic synergistic outlook of whatever religion their followers adhered to.  If they didn't, they were replaced by a more ruthless competitor, either from within or outside of their group.  Political opponents were tortured in the name of Christ during the Inquisition.  Millions of independent women were burned as witches.  Hitler invoked the Christian God to stir up the populace and win the support of the Vatican. 

Numerous wars were fought with religion being given as the ostensible reason. Islam and Christian fundamentalists preach against science and in many cases, the ideas of the founder of the religion being propagated.  A false morality is focused on that ignores the great sins and concentrates on the smaller aspects of human error.  The ultimate insult occurs when televangelists engage in dragging the moneylenders back into the temple on prime time.  As a result, many ethical people began to question the value of  any religion. 

However, to reject all religious teachings, because of  misuse by some, is like stoning a rape victim.  Such a 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' mentality has crippled humanity's evolution in many ways.  Primitive people would avoid an entire area because of a previous bad experience. 

If they would have been able to pinpoint the exact cause of the trouble, they would have been able to make use of valuable resources.  If the threat was mobile, they would suboptimize their potential even more whenever a boundary was given to a taboo area.  The increasing complexity of life also means that more elements are combined, and that a wholesale rejection consequently means more of value will be lost. 

Much of spiritual value can still be found in religions by ignoring any facets of the modern day teachings that conflict with the central theme. 

Religious philosophy continues to contain many invaluable insights for an individual on reciprocating with the larger system for mutual long term benefits.  Christianity tells us to treat others as you would want them treat you; Confucianism advises, do not do to others, what you don't want them to do to you; and Judaism states, whatever is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour, that is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. 

The basis of Islam is the need for world reform, care of the poor and justice in human relations; the Buddist's nirvana describes a state where greed, ignorance and hate have been eliminated;  and Hindus espouse the absence of a desire to injure as the most important tenet.  The Bahai's sum up these and other religions, by positing they all have the same essential identity of peace, love and justice.

Religions took these three concepts beyond the traditional tit for tat reciprocity found in some species of the animal kingdom.  They devised cooperative behaviour that could work in a large, complex system, where favours might not be returned by any particular entity. The bible contains religious metaphors involving wine, fish and bread that present the idea of  the necessary abundance mentality. 

However, only tit for tat reciprocity can work in today's setting, and even then only where a close eye can be kept on cheaters.  Even the animal forms of reciprocity quickly break down in a dog eat dog economic zone that spans the globe.  But the wisdom of the greater spirit within religions always shines through when the results of the present amoral system are honestly analyzed.

The concept of subjugation to a divine being has conflicted with the concept of free will throughout the ages.  Fredrich Schiller states that we "depend no way on our will, whether we want to sympathize with a creature's suffering. As soon as we have a conception thereof, we must."  Free will re-enters the equation as soon as one realizes that the conscience does not have to be listened to.

However, if we are aware of the reasons for morality, then what Schiller describes as involuntary becomes something we would want to do consciously and thus is not a barrier to individual freedom.  However, there are also countless examples of individuals who used their free will to engage in sadistic rather than "participatory passion". 

There is also the concept of deep will, that is hypothesized to be both a part of our will and a part of larger nature.  Such a sensing device would pick up the information subconsciously and project this information into the conscious mind, without being able to articulate the logical reasons.  As repeatedly stated, morality is needed in a species with the power to destroy the environment,   There is both a logical and sensuous reason that we feel good when we do the right thing. 

Instead of internalizing lessons, for issues involving paradigm shifts people have a tendency to leave it to the leader to tell them what to do.  Some businesses try to overcome this tendency toward dependency by advocating offering help, without taking responsibility.

Monty Python played a scene that showed the tendency of people to pass on the responsibility for change to a leader.  In the skit, a reluctant religious leader was running away from a mob who were demanding that he tell them all the answers.  He finally turns around and demands that the mob "fuck off".  The crowd pauses in shocked silence for a moment before asking, "how shall we fuck off, oh lord?".  Needless to say, the Vatican expressed displeasure about the movie. 

Python's skit could be similar to the fable about looking for answers in a golden calf, instead of trying to understand how the ten commandments relate to everyday life.  Thinking for yourself can be hard work, and its easy to forget industrial age institutions actively discourage such activity.  Check your brain at the factory door was held to be the proper attitude for a system that demands standardization, concentration and centralization. 

Today, the preaching against selfishness in all the great religious works can be seen as not an abrogation of individuality, but an indication of the benefits of enlightened self-interest.  The interdependence caused by specialization enabled the system to reach a point where it could be highly automated.  An age of  automation becomes an age of  plenty, which can become an age of justice.  An age of justice becomes an age of peace.  Contributions go around and come around naturally, without the individual having to worry about obtaining the necessities for a reasonable physical existence. 

It is unrealistic to propose that the competition driver is not needed in some form, at least at this stage of human development. However, when people are competing concerning the higher need of a sense of belonging, efforts will naturally be directed back to the benefit of a larger system. 

In many cases the larger system would be the immediate community or work team.  This is important, because even in an age based on a mindset of abundance, there will be those that succumb to the strongly ingrained genetic drivers to dominate.  However, in a smaller community, such behaviour is much easier to observe, and be gently corrected, than in the industrial age hierarchies.

The cumulative result, enabled by the diversity of individual perspectives, would constitute the highest need of self actualization for both the individual and the larger system.  Such a system would give rise to a collection of communities where behaviour and action can be based on the concept of love. 

INSIDE OUT

Function and Form

The only distinction between systems science and cybernetics is that systems science is more focused on structure, while cybernetics tends toward the process of the structure.  Since form follows function is a basic tenet of both disciplines, in practice there is no real difference between the two terms.  For example, if a frog evolves in a pond it needs to form webbed feet and numerous other attributes to function well enough to survive.  In essence, the structure and process combine to form the content of the thing.

The process by which the feet kick, or the eyes gauge the distance and coordinate the tongue for fly catching, are about nervous communication and muscle control and hence frog cybernetics.  The actual structures, such as bones, muscles and organs of the interrelated parts, constitute the frog system.  The interrelationships between form, or the system, and function, or cybernetics, would become obvious if the frog tried to survive by slithering like a snake. 

Future genetic evolution will depend on the environment, and more precisely on whether evolution can occur fast enough to match changes in the environment.  Conceivably, a frog could evolve into the form of a snake-like creature if given enough time.  The saying that theories come and go but the frog stays the same, remains an accurate observation only because the yardstick of human experience is used.  

Biology is an important field of study for cybernetics because nature has designed communication and control systems that are miracles of complexity and efficiency.  The word miracle is not used lightly here in that Darwin's theory on blind variation and natural selection is seemingly as suspect as the alternative creationist view. 

In the creationist view, God is posited as being concerned with human timescales, much like a sideshow magician.  Miracles are somehow held to be cheapened if they occur over a longer time period.  The bible is also taken literally despite its contradictory additions. 

Anthropocentrism is jargon used to describe how human perception tends to shoehorn grand concepts into humanity's smaller frame of reference.  This is not to say that the traditional concept of miracle is necessarily valid or invalid.  The point is that what is sometimes described as the miracle of life is every bit as much a miracle as walking on water.  As far as this specific example goes, insects like spiders have evolved to match Jesus's feet, although to be fair, the spiders have a significant weight advantage.  

Darwin's theory of blind variation and natural selection appears to be headed the way ot the creationist view.  A leading evolution researcher postulates that all the evidence suggests that Darwin's theory is proving to be unscientific.  Michael Behe in Darwin's Black Box shows how current math shows blind evolution is virtually impossible.

Fred Hoyale, an athiest astronomer, calculated that the odds of such things as eyeballs forming and co-relating with the rest of an organism are 1 to 10 with 40,000 zeros behind it.  The timespans of the evolutionary periods, and even of the earth itself are not long enough to explain the complexity of higher life forms by current, and most probably future, scientific methods. 

Advancements in studying spacetime could provide a scientific explanation that would allow Hoyale to keep his non-belief regarding this phenomenon.  However, if this development follows previous scientific developments, more questions will be raised than answered for any scientist who maintains a realistic perspective.  A cybernetic term that might explain the speed of evolution has been labelled as feedforward, instead of the feedback that is inherent in more traditional evolution.   

Positive and Negative

As stated, circles of causality are also referred to as feedback loops.  The snowball feedback loop has been jargonized as a positive, amplifying or reinforcing feedback loop in systems science.  The term positive can create a false impression in that the feedback loop can be a vicious circle, as in overpopulation, as well as a virtuous circle, as in learning.  Snowball, reinforcing, amplifying and positive are all useful terms that mean the same type of feedback loop.  Feedback itself means the same thing as information.

The term amplifying feedback holds a double meaning for someone who has ever held a microphone too close to an amplifier.  The mike sends room noise to the amplifier, which in turn is picked up by the mike, which goes back to the amplifier along with other room noise, which is picked up by the mike which is again amplified and so on.  This is too much of a good thing that can fly out of control at the speed of sound. 

Instead of amplifying music so that some people can enjoy music at the same time as others are talking and laughing,  there are ear splitting screeching sounds.  At lower levels controlled positive feedback can be used by a guitarist to add variation to music.  At higher levels the equipment would break down after giving off its painful noise.

Positive feedback was also at work during the nuclear arms race.  Every time America increased its missile stockpile, Russia would perceive a gap and do the same, which would in turn lead to another American increase and so on.  This vicious circle dynamic continued long after there was enough power to blow up everything two or three times in each country. 

The second type of feedback loop, or circle of causality, currently used in systems thinking is referred to as a stabilizing, balancing or negative feedback loop.  An example is the predators, food supply and diseases that help keep a rabbit population in check.  Negative feedback can have beneficial effects such as reducing overpopulation or detrimental effects such as in someone who is discouraged from believing they can make a difference.  Again, think context and not the label that is hung on a word.

Balancing or stabilizing feedback underlies all goal oriented behaviour.  Each of the numerous right and left steering corrections made by a driver to keep a car on a road is a form of negative feedback.  How the previous movement of the car interacted with the road affects the driver's corrections which again affects how the car relates to the road and so on in a circle of causality that ends with the trip. 

A good driver will provide enough good information to the car that the trip usually occurs entirely within a chosen twisting and turning lane.  A driver operating under positive feedback would reward a leftward or rightward deviation from the course with more of the same.  They would keep turning in tighter and tighter circles, until the driver either broke the steering wheel or died trying.  Needless to say, such a driver could be said to have only one oar in the water.  

In most cases, the driver senses road information by using sight and the feel of the steering wheel.  Unseen potholes in the environment would give feedback through feeling and hearing while a dead skunk could start with feedback from the nose.  The driver's response to such feedback might involve slowing down or swearing.  There is usually an inner and outer parameter in stabilizing feedback, much like there is a certain amount of room in a road lane for a car to move from side to side. 

A thermostat is a simple example of stabilizing feedback in an automated system.  The goal information is encoded into a sensor system by turning the thermostat dial to the desired room temperature.  The sensing device in turn provides feedback that opens or closes a circuit to turn a heating apparatus on or off.  A boiler or furnace operates over time in a stabilizing circle of causality with the temperature sensor, which in turn operates in a stabilizing circle of causality with the furnace, boiler or whatever.  The operating parameter, or acceptable margin of error, is usually a few degrees

An error in feedback from the room can create outcomes dramatically different from those intended.  For example, if a thermostat is placed by a drafty door, hot air will be added to an already overheated room.  If a thermostat is placed opposite a nearby window, bright sunlight would affect it adversely in the opposite manner.  In systems thinking, it is information from a larger system than the room that is affecting the control actions.  In human communication and control  systems parallels would be mistakes, which leads to misinformation, or lies, which leads to disinformation. 

Homeostasis is a term sometimes used where stabilizing feedback loops are operating successfully.  A person's body temperature is around 98 degrees, with an operating parameter of approximately ???.  Shivering and sweating are heating and cooling balancing feedback loops that work at maintaining the individual's temperature equilibrium in a hostile environment.  Homeostasis is not a static condition as the word implies.  Even diamonds will change over a long enough time frame. 

In humans, when the heart stops beating and there is no brain activity, other processes such as rigor mortis and eventually decomposition will be starting.  Homeostasis can be viewed as a state of dynamic equilibrium, rather than static equilibrium.  Even this depends on the perceived time frame that the feedback loops are operating within.

A person raised in a hot climate will experience more discomfort in a northern clime and vice versa.  This acclimatization is an example of the true state of life, which is evolutionary equilibrium.  Again, it is a combination of linear and circular movements that allows life to progress.  Threats from the environment also change in shape or speed with the result that evolution is not always successful.

Feedback in a person can be reflexive or reflective.  Examples can include taking off a coat because of overheating, voting for a politician because of what is heard, seen or experienced.  In the case of a voting or buying decision, the feedback is often designed to operate without a person being consciously aware of some of the information they have received. 

Another type of feedback occurs over a very long period of time.  A dog will go in circles shortly before it lays down on a floor because its ancient ancestors used to do this, to clear a spot for their bed before they were domesticated thousands of years ago.  A specific gene can live for millions of years and still influence behaviour.  These could be the cause of the primeval archetypes referred to by the psychologist Carl Jung.  This could also be another reason that people continue to resist change, even when an old feedback loop is providing information that no longer seems to be providing solutions. 

Managing Complexity  

Another example of systems thinking can be found in the old saw that for want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the kingdom was lost.  This so-called butterfly effect could have as the real cause, a badly manufactured nail caused by poor employee morale, or a blacksmith hungover because an old friend impulsively visited him the day before he nailed the shoe on. 

In short, it is impossible to consciously consider all the variables.  Redundancy in systems helps keep minor events from having major effects, but it is not enough by itself.  Consultant Stephen Covey focuses on how principle based actions can function as a compass that will point the way through all the complexity.  

In addition to all the constantly changing variables, or dynamic complexity, many feedback processes have long delays and are not obvious for other reasons.  Without the unifying underpinning of ethics, communication and control becomes impossible in a larger system.  Even if all the feedback loops could be determined, they could not be analyzed fast enough to determine if they were beneficial or harmful. 

The amount of information and the speed at which it must flow is why modern corporations are changing their management techniques.  Committed individuals are considered critical for obtaining desirable outcomes.  A changing environment requires many minor, constant adjustments for a design to be successful over time.  If the individuals are treated as cogs in a machine, morale drops and commitment breaks down.  The larger system then falters and is replaced by a new system. 

Leading management consultants have instituted policies of empowerment that give more decision making ability to the person closest to the job.  The feedback loop is much smaller and faster so that the problem is more likely to be fixed before a changing situation makes the information obsolete.  The problem here is that the current corporate design is incompatible with other interacting systems. 

When the design works as intended, effectiveness and efficiency increase dramatically.  In most cases, the market cannot handle the increased production.  The increased inventory results in layoffs.  The trust needed to make empowerment work breaks down once staff see they are working hard to dig their own grave. 

Professor Francis Fukuyama refers to the loss of trust as a loss of social capital and states that empowerment, and hence control of complexity, is impossible without it.  Automation is also held back because it usually worsens the layoff problem.  If new scientific economic paradigms became acceptable, they would make short work of this system. 

The organizational problem extends into the larger system that is society.  If people are laid off and are unable to purchase products,  the manufacturers will have to lay off more people, with a consequent decrease in purchasing power and so on in another vicious circle.  Various new jobs, combined with the automation sabotage to help balance increased manufacturing capabilities.  Still, there are not enough jobs to go around, even though many new jobs are of the 'makework, waste resources' type, or 'share one income among two workers' type.

The shared income scheme is held to be a necessity because of competitive pressures.  A striking grocery store worker comments on how she has to hold down three jobs to make ends meet.  Yet the chain store CEO made $22 million that year.  As everyone knows, you have to pay top dollar to get top talent.  However this doesn't explain why the economy was much better when CEO's made far less, or why brutal dictators around the world have incomes that are far higher than even today's CEOs. 

In a larger system, computer modeling is especially useful for studying the interrelationships between various phenomena.  Simulated actions can be easily plugged in to see the probable effects on the rest of the systems, and how these effects in turn modify the original system.  Any ill effects will not affect real life.  Of course, when using computers, the programmer following the directions of an unprincipled or unsystematic boss has to be aware of the concept of garbage in, garbage out. 

Another consideration is that models are by necessity a simplified version of the phenomena being studied.  A model that was as complex as the system could never give valuable information because events would change as fast as they could be programmed.  The dynamic complexity of the system being analyzed and the resources, including time, for building the model are important considerations for how accurate a model will be. 

The factors left out of the model equation can have serious effects on the viability of the model in the real world.  It's a case of the butterfly theory again, where it is held that if a butterfly beats it's wings in Beijing, and the air movement interacts positively with other air movements, a storm could result in a city on the other side of the world.  Care must be taken that the probability of success is not overrated until the computer model is prototyped in a human environment.  Even then the interconnecting points and boundary permeability of the larger interacting systems could present many surprises.  Again, if all involved are committed and honest, then the problems could be dealt with in the most efficient and effective manner possible. 

With an understanding of the complexity that is involved in systems thinking, one can gain a greater appreciation of the importance of the subconscious knowledge of the conscience.  The innate sense of right and wrong, that is currently being repressed by industrial age institutions, is an underlying unifying factor that pulls information back towards a holistic viewpoint.  Honesty creates a much higher probability that actions will mesh synergistically with other systems and be constructive rather than destructive in the short, medium and long term. 

Framing A Complex World

As stated, systems thinking moves far beyond the simplified Newtonian concept of immediate cause and effect, to look at the interdependency of many causes and effects, and especially the delays in time between some of the phenomena.  For example, several chemicals might test as safe to put into the general environment, yet when combined have a different effect.  Short term thinking could also fail to adequately consider that toxic dump sites should also remain safe for future generations. 

During a recent case in Alberta, experts testified that the plastic liners being proposed for a landfill site had already shown a history of springing leaks due to naturally occuring, unforeseen events.  Another waste disposal company has been found to have had a record of leaks after tests for PCBs showed high levels in wild animals near the plant.  A public group had to fight for information and pay for its own tests to slow down the poisoning. 

Native groups in the area were especially concerned that they were not told about the problem when it first occurred and so continued to take wildlife from the area.  Typically, most of the disposal and subsequent coverup problems revolve around the availability of money. 

How open or closed a certain system is will have an effect on how much it is affected by other systems, subsystems and its larger environment.  In the example of the landfill plastic liners, there would be no problem if they remained closed to the larger environment until the toxins became safe.  Environmental and biological changes are like thinking in this regard, with the open-minded person being more affected by and learning from what is going on in the larger environment than the relatively closed minded person.

What is considered a larger environment could also constitute the subsystem of an even bigger system.  The scope of this project is global, with the earth constituting the environment, and the individual being the system.  In another context, individuals could be a subsystem of a societal system, with the globe still being the larger environment.  In yet a different scope, earth could be seen as a subsystem of the solar system with the galaxy being the larger environment. 

For example, the moon affects tides and other events on earth.  These events in turn affect individuals.  The moon also directly affects individuals and is thought to be responsible for the length of the menstrual cycle.  A full moon can have varying destabilizing effects on the brains of individuals.  How the other planets interact with people is of course a subject of much speculation. 

Travelling in the other direction, the individual is a collection of breathing subsystems, blood subsystems, nerve subsystems and so on.  Each of these subsystems is in turn composed of sub-subsystems, constituting cells, which contains genetic and protein making information.  Each of these elements in turn is composed of molecules, which are made of atoms.

The boundary that defines a system can be arbitrary and change with the situation or according to the perception of the person observing the systems.  For example, the boundary that constitutes the scoring threat of the Edmonton Oilers changes with the health of the players, every shift, and over a longer time period, with every trade.  Instead of grouping people by race, they could be considered as individuals, or grouped according to how they treated others.

As in the sports example, any team constitutes a system, in which individuals are subsystems.  The subsystems can be specialized along the lines of goalie, forward, and defensive player with the coach acting as a facilitator or connecting point for the players.  A defenceman who blocks a shot, or a forward who is a good two-way player also know that specialization does not mean rigid boundaries

The atom system resembles the solar system in the arrangement of its components with electrons revolving around a nucleus and protons.  Each of these particles is in turn made of quarks.  Universes and quarks are the biggest and smallest discovered elements in the  systems perceived by humankind.  In essence, the systems seem to move to infinity in both the larger and smaller directions.  They are nested hierarchically, much like a set of Russian dolls in which each doll contains a smaller doll inside of it.  All living systems are interrelated to some degree in that they have an effect on each other.  The effect can be diluted by negative feedback, or increased by positive feedback. 

The effect of subsystems on larger systems can be illustrated by using the example of a virus.  This miniscule subsystem can destroy a cell while gaining the energy to replicate.  This leads to the destruction of further cells, which can lead to the failure of a larger subsystem, such as the blood subsystem.  If a cure is not affected, the blood system failure can lead to the death of the individual.  Consequently, the death of an individual in the American hospital system could lead to the financial failure of a family system. 

A cell has permeable walls so that it remains an open system and can access converted food energy from a larger system.  When a society, individual or cell is being discussed, the interrelationships are often deemphasized.  Complex things are broken into smaller pieces so that they can be better analysed and understood, but the separate piece has to again be regarded as a part of the environment, including other systems and subsystems, in order to gain fuller understanding of what it really is.

In human industrialized cultures, the overemphasis on separating phenomena in order to understand them has led to many actions having results that were completely unintended.  For example, raising welfare rates in a certain area to alleviate poverty, resulted in an increase of poverty because of a migration of poor people to that area.  Consequently, the area was not able to compete in its tax rates.  The system that constituted the state had a permeable boundary, yet the decision makers failed to relate the state to the system that was described as the country. 

Transactive Phenomena

Autopoesis and allopoesis is systems thinking jargon that relates to the idea of closed systems and open systems.  An autopoetic system has certain characteristics such as those defined as self-organization, and a larger degree of separateness from its surroundings than allopoetic systems.  Despite a tendency to identify systems with one or the other, the theory used here will be that the two extremes are the opposite ends of a continuum.  The term self-organizing will also be replaced with the term co-organinzing to more accurately reflect the interdependence of all systems. 

A completely autopoetic system would be closed and would gradually devolve to chaos under the second law of thermodynamics.  This concept will be discussed more fully in a following section.  A system that was entirely allopoetic would be so open that it could not be deliniated from its environment, and so would not really be considered as a separate system according to human perceptive abilities.  All systems fall on the continuum between the two poles, with varying degrees of openness, or permeability, in their boundaries.  As stated, the degree of openness has a major effect on how the system interacts with other systems.

The concept of positrons and anti-electrons suggest all the systems are mirrored by systems of anti-matter.  These will not be dealt with in this project other than to say that it is likely they carry some sort of information.  This is hypothesized because it seems everything that has been discovered carries some sort of information, even if it is just molecular instructions that keep a rock from changing into something else.  In living forms, the information is usually directed towards change and growth.  For example, DNA or RNA contain coded genetic instructions that affect the formation of evolving cells.

Transactive is a term used to describe the ideas of a person who is aware of how other systems affect, and are affected by, their actions.  They will try to tailor their efforts so that the supporting systems are not damaged in one area while another area is worked on.  This contrasts with reactive behaviour, where someone waits for events to happen before they take action regarding the event.  Since root causes have not been considered, the problem will eventually recur within the system.  Often it will be worse, because the underlying cause has continued working in the same direction.

Proactive is defined in one dictionary as "being interference between previous learning and the recall or performance of later learning".  This is an apt description for this business buzzword.  Proactive is very similar to reactive, except it charges at an event that is predicted, but still does not attempt to gain an understanding of the larger system.  The results are about the same between the two methods, since predictions will eventually be mistaken when only immediate cause and effect are considered.

The bump in the rug analogy is sometimes used to visualize the consequences of non-systemic thinking.  A wall to wall carpet will be affected by the larger system of a room, so that if it develops a bump, the boundaries of the room are a major consideration for proper corrective action.  If one focuses only on the bump and not the larger system, the problem will simply move every time it is supposedly smoothed out.  Flattening out one section will cause the bump to pop up in a different area.  It is irrelevant how many times this exercise is repeated.  It is necessary to either remove a wall from the room, or trim the carpet at the edge of the interacting system.

  

The Entity Inside

Feedback involves cause and effect that can generally be determined by a scientific, ethical approach.  Other influences on a system are feedto and feedforward.  These influences must look to psychology and other disciplines, as well as to science and ethics in order to gain some understanding. 

Feedforward is driven by human inference abilities when outcomes can be partially predicted by inductive, deductive or other types of thinking.  Part of feedforward is directly attributable to previous feedback, or experience, but part of it is generative in nature through a recombination of factors in original ways.  The latter type of learning could be defined as generative learning in that new knowledge is accessed.  Much of this new knowledge springs from recognizing patterns that can help relate a seemingly isolated cause and effect with larger systemic phenomena.

Some theories deal with more speculative ideas about how feedforward can influence subjective behaviour.  One that originated in scientific quarters has been proposed by Albert Einstein and elaborated on by others.  This theory looks at space as being four dimensional, rather than the traditional idea of containing the three dimensions of height, width and depth.  After Einstein proved that time is relative to the observer, he hypothesized that future events could affect the present of the subject, and posited that time was a fourth dimension as far as an individual subject was concerned. 

Einstein used the example of a person traveling at a terrific rate of speed, and flash bulbs are set off simultaneously far in front of and far behind the person.  Because light travels at at fixed rate of speed, the light the observer was hurtling towards would appear to have been generated before the light that was behind the subject.  If the subject was blind, the much slower speed of sound would have altered their reality even more.  As stated, even the pitch of the two sounds would be different because the doppler effect alters a person's relation to the soundwaves when the observer or sound source is moving.  An example is the whistle of a train that seems to change pitch as it passes by an observer.  

Everything in the cosmos can be thought of as information that travels by poorly understood means.  Experiments to determine if waves or particles were the primary transmission vehicles ended up showing that the properties of wavelengths and particles were not understood well enough to come to any conclusions.  The role of the four discovered forces of the universe is also unclear.  The electromagnetic spectrum, gravity, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force all interact in mysterious ways that affect information travel.  For example, it is thought that the massive gravitational forces of a black hole prevent its light wavelengths from travelling through the electromagnetic field.

There is increasing evidence that there is a fifth force of the universe.  Physicist Ashley Deans is among those who describe this possibility as the consciousness force.  Like light waves or radio waves spread through the electromagnetic field, consciousness is thought to be able to radiate feelings through its own field.  If this concept is true, it would provide a strong candidate for how psychic information travels, including humanity's moral codes which go far beyond any symbiotic feelings in the rest of the animal world.  From a universal point of view, the field could represent a connection between life on earth and various cosmic influences, including the planets.   Just because light is the fastest force that we can consciously observe, does not mean there are not faster cosmological forces that affect us. There are many things in the universe that are little understood by scientists.  These include such concepts as anti matter, black holes and the origin of high energy cosmic particles.  These cosmic ray particles have been captured on a special type of film that show them impacting and altering the pattern of earth particles.  Rare ones have been measured as having 300 million times the 1 trillion volts of the fastest particle accelerator on earth. 

Physics professor Guenter Nimtz bolstered the above speculation by announcing in December of 1996 that he has transmitted signals encoded with part of Mozart's music at speeds 4.7 times faster than the speed of light.  This doesn't make the concept a fact as only one scientist has done the experiments.  However, it slightly raises the possibility that people can be affected by information, long before they experience it through their five main senses.

The sub atomic particles that constitute the human body and brain would not be immune to the effect of cosmic rays.  Even the rarer particles start chain reactions with the particles in air molecules, that could in turn impact the particles that make up people.  An interesting concept from the field of quantum mechanics is that if two particles interact, they continue to be influenced by each other no matter how far apart they get.  In the psychological realm, a person can be influenced by early childhood events, no matter how far they recede in time.  However, the postulation here is that damping effects from negative feedback can make the original motion ineffective.  If a person sets their mind to something, they can overcome many opposing natural phenomena by the use of work energy.

Whereas psychologist Carl Jung would have described feedback as information processed through sensation, he would have described feedforward as intuition.  Scientists often make great discoveries by applying the scientific method to hunches.  Carl Jung also theorized that a collective unconscious existed, whereby other influences could move by unknown means.  Synchronicity was a term he used to describe how different entities or systems interact synergistically with no apparent explanation. 

First wave cybernetics was described as general systems theory and enjoyed a brief popularity during the fifties and sixties.  Second wave cybernetics, which includes the effect of the subject on the object being studied, is a more realistic approach wherever humans are involved as observers or subjects.  This of course pretty much covers everything as far as real world actions are concerned.  The case of the perception of light by the observer in Einstein's theory about time and relativity is an example of second wave cybernetics. 

A team of researchers has emphasized the inescapable bias in individuals by stating that anything that is said, is said by an observer.  That is it is coming from a personal point of view and cannot be objective.  The impossibility of being objective has been remarked on by educator Peter Senge as like trying to see yourself in a dark cave, with a miners light that is affixed to a hat that can not be removed.  The brain that we use to look for objectivity, is itself a conduit for only subjective information.

The effect an observer has on the environment has been jargonized as the Heisenberg effect.  It has been studied and documented in science, social work and other fields.  In subatomic research this is especially evident.  The photons from the light used by scientists to study subatomic phenomena, impact and substantially alter the patterns of the subatomic particles being studied.  Polling is an example of a social Heisenberg effect.  The unspoken biases of the pollster can create questions and structures that provide information that can be substantially different answers than another pollster asking the same questions. 

Feedto will be the jargon used here to describe the effect the observer or subject has on feedback and feedforward and other systems.  This has been described as another feedback loop in other works on cybernetics.  The separate distinction is made here to respect the presence of a spiritual being within each individual. 

For example, the car driver in the example on stabilizing feedback used visual information to stay in his highway lane.  Jeremy Rifkins The End of Work relates a sad tale where the feedto of the driver was substantially different.  In this case, the laid off driver used visual feedback to intentionally veer off the road into a bridge abutement. 

To reiterate an earlier concept, the combination of experiences undergone by each person makes individual feedto a unique phenomena.  If the snowflake is the physical representation of diversity, then humans are the ideational representation.  It has also been hypothesized that the nerve system, and other cellular mechanisms in the physical body, are separate from, and also affect personal perception of things that are experienced by the five senses. 

Feedto describes the effect of free will in the individual that makes use of this valuable trait.  Each person can choose or choose not to do something in how they respond to most stimuli.  This is unique in science as well as to each individual.  A person can easily act in ways that do not have to follow the patterns of instinct or previous actions.  Feedto is what makes quick leaps in evolution possible.  However, in an obsolete structure, a person that does not conform to previous patterns can be heavily penalized regardless of the merit of their actions.

Fortuitously, modern telecommunications have provided the hardware for just such an endeavour. 

All this capacity means nothing if it is used to disseminate lies and misinformation rather truth.  According to cybernetics or the bible, it is only the truth that can set us free.  The Hitlerian concept that work makes one free was a cruel joke when it was posted at the entrance to a concentration camp and it remains a cruel joke today. 

Gandhi was correct in saying that wealth without work is a sin, but automation is making it possible to have all basic tasks performed on a voluntary basis.  The disagreeable jobs that could not be automated would simply pay more.  Instead of having the majority work at mundane assembly line jobs or non-wealth creating professional activities, they could be working at rejuvenating the environment, educating children, building better community infrastructure and so on.  Instead of damaging the prospects of future generations, people could be building a firm foundation to ensure that future generations can continue to progress and prosper.   

The Science of Ethics

Many scientists have dedicated their lives to helping humanity in meaningful ways.  The profession as a whole is ahead of most others in expressing concerns about societal problems.  In return, scientists are often blamed for the misuse of  their inventions by people indulging in power plays.  Academic and other political considerations can also hobble experts to the point that truth is often buried by ideology.

However, there are still scientists letting genies out of bottles that seem to be unaware of their responsibility to the larger system.  They are often unconcerned about non-academic phenomena that substantially affect real world outcomes. 

New efforts in interdisciplinary teamwork are alleviating the narrow focus somewhat, but even groups of experts often retain an elitist outlook, that works against an understanding of the larger community.  Few scientists are likely to circulate among the population at large, yet any input from a wider point of view generally comes through the screening of context independent surveys.

One cognitive study claimed that most people promoted into a different environment, would lose the ability to perceptually connect with their previous environment after only six months.  The study advised managers to periodically re-immerse themselves in the shop floor environment, if they really want to keep in touch with what was going on.

The elitist and political influences can be alleviated in many small, cumulative ways, by firmly linking science with ethics.  However, some scientists reject morality on the grounds that it affects the objectivity of the scientific method.  This could be related to the history of science, where obviously correct hypotheses were discarded because they contradicted the position of medieval church authorities.

However, the scientific obsession with cold detachment is itself a personal trait, and as such will affect the outcome of any experiment.  The latest scientific evidence shows there is no escaping subjectivity, so the logical thing to do is to try to align it with a greater unifying force.  Spirituality can help one know why, while science provides the know how.  If both of these ideas are present, work would be more likely to impact the larger community in beneficial ways. 

Whether truth is best discovered through scientific experiments or moralistic meditation is an argument that has gone on through all of recorded history.  These two main foci of human thought and action have seesawed through the ages in regards to their influence on human affairs.

Aristotle downgraded Socrate's emphasis on ethics and heavily influenced western thought in this way when his works were discovered in an Irish monastery after the dark ages.  Medieval religious leaders championed a pseudo-morality at the expense of observable phenomena while Rene Descartes argued that math was more important than the opinions of the authorities enmeshed in power plays.  

Francis Bacon rejected the idols of culture, tradition and intuition because of their propensity to distort perception as romanticism poets railed against the rule of scientific barbarism and the stifling structure of Xanadu.  John Locke insisted on severing all innate feelings from his beloved empiricism while Rousseau condemned science in the name of natural man.

Friedrich Schiller argued for subconscious knowledge when he stated "sympathy or participatory passion is no free manifestation of our temperament, that we would first have to spontaneously generate in ourselves, but rather an involuntary affection of the emotional faculty, determined through natural law."

Other early philosophers, such as George Hegel and Immanual Kant, did not take sides in the science or morality debate.  Instead, they thought the best results would come from a synthesis of scientific, conscious information and humanity's unconscious, ethical information.  Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, described such science as 'know what'.  In 'know what', basic morality is combined with the know how of science to achieve results that are both practical and logical.

Albert Einstein tipped his hat to the romanticists when he stated "philosophy is like a mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences.  Therefore one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children, so that they do not sink into philistinism."

The extropian movement epitomizes the countervailing belief that science will solve all.  They do not express concern about the joy in living or human dignity for the majority.  Extropian thought is fixated on books written on such topics as the potential of nanotechnology.  In this fascinating concept, atoms can be individually rearranged to complement the old 'bulk' method of manufacturing.  Under this premise, any matter can be altered to obtain any desired result. 

However, the technology-as-saviour view is based on high risk assumptions that have extremely serious consequences.  There seems to be little recognition that present environmental conditions represent a first in the history of humanity. The Titanic was a big oops for those that proclaimed the victory of technology over the sea. 

The present situation is global in scope.  There will be no lifeboats, rescue ships or replacement humans safe ashore.  The dice are being rolled on a bet that cannot be paid by anyone, should we lose.  Something else to consider is the abysmal failure of new technology during a pointless attempt to raise a small section of the Titanic to the surface. 

Another assumption is even more troubling.  An intelligent use of today's technology could solve the pressing problems of humanity, yet it is not being used for this purpose.  Why this should change just because the technology is new, seems to defy the type of logic some scientists regard as the holy grail. 

Downplaying current human suffering would seem to disable the thinking processes required to determine Weiner's 'know what'.  For some time now the extropian mindset has been promising that new technology is all that is needed to solve future problems.  The new technology arrives, yet the fundamental problems grow. 

Despite living in a less technologically advanced age  Einstein has so far been proven correct in his views on the value of morality.  The conscience has an important regulating role to fill in a complex, interrelated open system, where all of the external variables cannot be consciously determined.  The most complex models will not contain a fraction of the information needed to solve real world global problems. 

A sense of right and wrong is the deep water that runs through most human perceptions, regardless of individual environments.  Schillers "particpatory passion" through "natural law"  is the powerful unifier needed to align the actions of an increasingly fragmented and increasingly interdependent world.

The unconscious knowledge inherent in ethics is critical in ascertaining the truth and relevancy of how to arrange a flood of information.  Listening to the heart, as well as the head, will refine probabilities, and prevent actions that might be logical in the animal world, but are now illogical for the human species.  The philistinism described by Einstein is likely to result in increased capacity becoming simply an increased capacity for destruction.  If there is to be a successful age transition, it is likely that science and ethics must balance the yin and the yang of life.

Cooperation and Competition

A famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow, defined the lower needs of people as food, water, clothing and shelter.  The higher needs he defined as a sense of belonging and self actualization.  The lower and higher needs have also been referred to as instrumental needs and sacred needs.

Technological capabilities have reached the point where only a few people will be needed to provide an abundance of instrumental needs for all.  It is no longer necessary to have humans slaving away as cogs in a machine, when automation can do a better job.  Telecommunications and computers can go a long way towards resolving the age old conflict between freedom of the whole and freedom of the individual.

To force someone to work at a repetitive job in a factory also requires various threats.   This can be the threat of homelessness or the threat of derision by society in general.  It is only obsolete industrial age institutions that require this method of operation.  Fear and aggression can be replaced with aspiration and happiness as the dominant motivating forces in the economy.

The fear motivator and artifical scarcity drives people to improve their individual bottom lines by passing off costs to the community.  An unemployed factory worker scrambling for rent money or a CEO in a cutthroat competition will often have no choice but to harm the larger system that supports them.  Whether it is armed robbery, pollution, or slave wages, the negative long term effects of this cost offloading are becoming increasingly obvious.

A new cooperative approach in fulfilling instrumental needs would be the opposite from communism in that it is consumer driven rather than centrally planned.  It would build on a system similiar to the EDI, or electronic data interchange concept that Walmart pioneered.  When someone purchases an item, a computer informs a factory that a replacement is needed and automatic machines would produce it.  New products would be determined by consumer pull, rather than a manufacturer push.

Since the system is obstenively devised to provide the needs of the people, a direct, cybernetic tie in could promise the best of resource allocation information and a new facet of real democracy.  The ability to choose and refuse one thing at a time is one description of the ultimate in democracy.

Management consultant Peter Drucker states "what makes the market superior is precisely that it organizes activity around information".  There is no doubt the market did reflect some accurate information for the needs of the the industrial age.   However, the logic of the information limitations of the market mechanism and the experience of polluted, debt-ridden, divided countries, would indicate something new is needed.

Psychologist Alfred Adler made a strong case that a primary human motivater is the will to superiority.  Almost all of nature would seem to be programmed with this evolutionary driver.  However, the will to superiority can be fulfilled under the conditions of fear or aspiration. 

Friendly competition would seem to be the best method for meeting life's higher purposes.  Once people could operate under the conditions of abundance and aspiration they would tend to direct competitive efforts back to the health of the supportive community to fulfill their sense of belonging need.  The sum total of each individual's freely given efforts would constitute Maslow's highest need of self-actualization. 

Even today, there are numerous cases where the superiority drive has been directed back to the health of the larger system.  Many people have been honoured for community service or rescuing others who are in distress.  In war, stretcher bearers often show the greatest courage.  An innate recognition of the interdependence of people and their environment regularly overcomes scarcity and fear motivators. 

However, efforts directed back to the health of the community operate on a sporadic hit and miss basis.  The scarcity and fear design ensures that a relentless, steady pressure is applied that more than undoes the positive work.  The artificial enforced restraint of scarcity is destroying the only real restraint, and that is environmental sustainability.

In essence, a bilateral approach is advocated that recognizes the difference between the instrumental part of life and the sacred part of life.  Cooperative efforts would ensure that energy expenditures could be optimized in  providing instrumental needs to all.  This is a critical consideration for both environmental and fossil fuel supply reasons.

The spark of competition in fulfilling the sacred needs would push efficiency increases in the cooperatives and new inventions.  As stated, computer models and community prototypes would determine the best mixture of cooperation and competition.  Feedback from the community will ensure that they, and not ivory tower experts, will determine the optimum mix of competition and cooperation. 

For moral and logical reasons, knowledge age systems should be extended to the industrializing countries as soon as the post-industrial countries devise them.  Destruction of the forests for short term gain in poorer countries affects the oxygen quality of the advanced nations and the diversity the earth depends on.  The DDT sold for use in poorer countries comes home through the food chains and weather patterns.  Norway suffers the effects of radiation from Russia and so on.

Countries can be useful mechanisms for ensuring diversity and change, but they are no match for natual law.  Nature routinely shrugs off the rigidly drawn border lines that attempt to corral and control her.  The wind would seem to sigh at the foolishness of such conceits as it spreads harmful chemicals thoughout the biosphere.    

The most serious problem facing the planet is the effects of overpopulation.  Humanity is in a unique position in that nature does not determine their population cycles in the short term.  There is a window of opportunity for the species to develop their conscience, the free will to evolve it, and the technology to control their population cycle.  Birth control efforts can solve part of the overpopulation problem, but they are not nearly enough by themselves.  

Working to Live

Under today's paradigm, the employment situation is unsolvable.  However, in the words futurist Robert Anton, unemployment has no cure because it is not a disease.  He goes on to propose that the requirement for less human work is the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.  It is a testament to the brainwashing capabilities of the old paradigms, that this obvious statement is not taught in grade school history classes.  

In the agricultural age, 95 percent of the standard of living came from human work, with waterwheels and horses providing the rest.  Today, 5 percent of production is a direct result of human labour.  The other 95 percent of energy is provided by mechanical devices, most of which perform tasks that are suitable for automation capabilities.

As stated, much of the assembly line work is psychologically damaging.  The conventional wisdom that no one has to stay on the assembly lacked basic logic even when there was a better employment climate.  If everyone engaged in assembly line work went back to school, then the system would collapse or the bar would be raised so that a university degree might only be good for factory labour.

Rifkin estimates 90 million out of 124 million U.S jobs are ripe for automation.

all three engines of the economy, agriculture, manufacturing and services are shedding workers simulataneously, wiht no sector emerging to create new jobs.  "the prospect of a world with few workers could become a grisley reality" - newspaper quote.  Anton how most regard work, a drag, a nusiance.  Growth section could be care of the elderly.

knowledge workers comprise less than 2 percent of the population  Angus Reid "There's an unsettling similarity between the irrelevance of horses to the 20th century economies and the growing irrelevance of large numbers of humans to the labour force of the 21st century."

Douglas - unemployment sign of progress, not industrial breakdown

The employment training that is touted as the answer to full employment and participation in churning over resources is turning out to be a failure, as it had to by anyone who has seen past the industrial age paradigms.  There are enough resources to keep everyone working 80 hours passing bits around in the information economy under a new monetary system.  But why? 

In the long term, such a scenario would be reminiscent of the slave owner who had enough wealth to spend his money on sport, rather than wealth production.  Since the slavery in the democracies today is only made possible by a controlled media, such a situation in an information rich environment would lead only to more revolts.

Intelligent load factors and ending energy wasting makework activities would automate some work right out of existence, while allowing living standards and the quality of life to rise.  The concept of replacing atoms with bits also holds much promise.  Instead of cutting down trees, burning fossil fuels and creating unnecessary labour for many people, such things as phone books, store flyers and newspapers could be accessed through computers.

If real costs were taken into consideration, it would be cheaper for the stores and the phone companies to supply a computer to every household.  Of course, the wired and wireless infrastructure would still have to be upgraded.  This is rapidly being built to complement the extensive phone wiring and the coaxial cable that runs to virtually all North American residences.

Without an industrial age economic system, self-directed work and investments in family life and leisurely reflection would be imminently possible.  Wilson theorized that big unions, governments and corporations have tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of wealth creating automation.  Otherwise social unrest would accelerate because labour is the primary income distribution mechanism of the industrial age institutions.

Even so, there has been a slow steady rise in structural unemployment.  Corporations have seized on the desperation inherent in such a situation to impose contractual work that has more in common with the hunting and gathering age, than the peace of mind and security made possible by our machines.  Like always, they did this because the system demands this kind of behaviour.

The cybernation possibilities were recognized long ago by those with limited paradigm handicaps.  As far back as the 1930's, the U.S. Senate even went so far as to pass legislation on a 30 hour work week.  The measure was defeated when union support was withdrawn in turn for the right to bargain collectively. 

After the second world war employment boom, economic activity was expanded so the returning soldiers could work 40 hours a week.  As stated the math formula of the monetary system makes this necessary.  Veteran's schools cushioned the effect and an adjustment was made so that money could finance cars and houses, instead of tanks and bombs. 

Now that robots are doing a large part of the car making, work was expanded to strange endeavours that often involved trying to trip up someone that was looking after the same customer.  The push towards greater efficiency on the one hand is largely offset by a necessary form of sabotage on the other hand.  Monty Python did a skit on a government department whose mission was to stack things on top of other things. 

The Kafkeques quality of analysis that follows from the employment superstition would be humourous if so many lives weren't being damaged.  Canada Post recently privatized its flyer delivery in the name of efficiency.  When there was an uproar over the job losses, the efficiency experts were able to proclaim that the new policy would require twice as much work, since Canada Post already had the infrastructure in place to deliver the flyers.  By starting from scratch, the private sector was estimated to require twice as many workers to deliver the same amount of flyers.

During the great depression, it was suggested only half in jest, that the way to keep people working would be to have workers bury tins of money, and have other workers dig them up. 

Recently workers in France held a march to demand a 35 hour work week without a reduction in take home pay.  This attitude is more unrealistic today than the 1930's 30 hour work week.  Not for the reasons implied by opponents, since the productive capacity of  France would no doubt allow such a scenario. Globalization without representation is again the culprit.  Intelligent action by the general populace of just one country is not in the cards.  French products would be unable to compete on the open market if workers had more free time.

In the 1920's some of North America's leading technical personnel estimated a that 20 hour work week, with an annual vacation period of almost three months, could provide a higher quality of life for everyone.  Economic degradation would also be reversed according to the design.  Thorstein Veblen is perhaps the most notable of the founders. 

Despite leadership accountability and flexibility flaws, the design is valid from a strictly scientific point of view.  This seems far fetched, until the individual is able to see past the massive conditioning that presently clouds the minds of most people.  Instead of experiments on aspects of the 1920's plan, the system now demands labour from both parents of a child. 

One reason for the continuing enforced work week is that it is a control mechanism for both employed and unemployed.  People are fearful of finding work or keeping work because the income is critical to their survival.  As the Holocaust showed, people that are very afraid, can be compliant and easy to manipulate. 

High amounts of enforced employment are also a means of wealth transfer where income can be taxed for interest payments.  As stated, in Canada, 40 cents of every dollar the government collects goes this route while education, hospitals and social programs are starved of funds. 

The Calvinistic mindset on the need for constant labour is outdated.  Various proposals have been put forward to ensure income is distributed in a world where machines can produce so much.  They include a national dividend proposal, invented by engineer C.H. Douglas and improved on by Buckminster Fuller;  the guaranteed annual income, put forward by economist Robert Theobald among others:  and the negative income tax, which was proposed by Milton Friedman.  There is also a design for a RICH economy devised by inventor L. Wayne Benner.  The title stands for Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis.  Those that think such proposals are unaffordable are stuck on the present superstitious view of money. 

One issue that is not dealt with sufficiently in these designs is the psychological effects of removing the structure imposed by the work week.  ? Stendahl "without work the vessel of life has no ballast".

1. Wayne Benner suggests a massive educational program in the fourth step of his RICH design.  If Benner's plan shows promise, it is likely that the education program should start with phase one and gradually expand when the system reaches phase four. 

In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin suggests volunteer community activities to take up the slack of some of the increasing spare time.  A specific time commitment is still made, but people are able to direct their work to areas that interest them, and where the results can be easily observed to determine the effectiveness of effort. 

Since work is only work if a person would rather be doing something else, this idea could solve the structure problem without taking any freedom away from the individual.  A concern here would be to ensure that the energy consumption of the volunteer activities does not outweigh the good that is done.

The whole concept of intensive labour being necessary in order not to parasitize society, is based on false premises.  First of all, the people that are behind the information structures that propagate this obsolete concept do not do any meaningful work themselves.  Secondly, the great majority of our standard of life comes from inventions of previous generations and patents that have expired. 

1. H. Douglas refers to this as a cultural heritage, that belongs to every man, women and child that lives on the planet.  Douglas stated that no one deserves to monopolize rewards that are made possible by inventions of others.  This is especially true since the monopolization often accrues to people simply because they are born into a certain family or have the ear of an elected official.

The idea of constant labour is so ingrained that researchers at the University of Illinois see nothing wrong with developing cobots, or a robot that must be guided by a worker, so that their job is not taken away.  The effect of the work paradigm would be funny in this case, except the worker will be adding to environmental problems if they commute to work.  There would also likely be some psychological drawbacks from spending the day more or less tethered to an automatic piece of machinery.  Surely there are better ways for modern people to live their days.

Back to the Land and the Stars

Freedom is the ability to choose or refuse one thing at a time - C.H. Douglas

If the tradition of creating scarcity is dispensed with, a riffraff of rules and laws, could be replaced with basic principles that are rigourously enforced.  Oliver Wendell Holmes touched on a basic underlying tenet that should underly human behaviour when he commented that the right to extend your arm ended where someone else's nose began.  Of course in tandem with this would be exceptions for those who insisted on sticking their nose where it doesn't belong. 

The dividing line could be agreed upon by members of an informed community.  The size of the community consulted would depend on the issue under consideration, with a recognition that transborder issues require transborder decision making bodies, if the peace is to be upheld.  Core religious values are also a valuable source for human guidance.

For group progress, shared visioning exercises are effective in getting people to pull together.  In one of these, a group is asked to think back to when they were a member of a team they had fun on.  The feelings that were engendered are then listed and the project is defined in terms of recreating those feelings.  An example of a more naturally occurring community spirit can be found in the barn building bees that used to be fairly common.

As stated, by using the tools of the information age it is possible to form an optimal relationship between freedom of the individual and freedom of the whole.  Computer models can examine the mathematical soundness of a new economic policy, based on the concerns of a community of well informed citizenry.  Since models are simple and humans are complex, the best models would have to be prototyped to see how they worked in actual practice. 

This would involve careful analysis and simulation work on the connecting points to the larger system.  The pilot projects could also be benchmarked against each other, so that information on good systems would be accessible to areas that wanted to try something different.  The work done on the interfaces of the community to the larger system could concentrate on ensuring the community met its responsibilities to the larger system.

New institutions could then be graded on how they met the needs expressed by the individuals of the community.  Also important would be the flexibility of the new systems for interacting with different areas where citizens had expressed different needs.  The difference in cultures and perceptions would probably evolve a wide variety of community infrastructures. 

The interaction mechanisms could look past conflict resolution and towards partnership suitability for larger projects.  Such a framework would encourage diversity and create the necessary conditions to use the diversity for synergy, and not zero sum games.  The monolithic approach, whether it is tried by communist Russia or fascist Germany, is both a moral and practical failure.

Instead, what will be required are community and telecommunications structures that will finally enable a government of the people, by the people, for the people.  This is not related to the current situation, in which freedom is prostituted in the guise of imposed alternatives.  In Canada, a quarter of the electorate has been choosing a dictator who is beholden to anything but the public, while the Americans are so disheartened in the process, their voter turnout is even lower, with 25% of eligible voters choosing the President in a two way race. 

Syntregrity model and Ford Electronics.

Fredrick Thayer has devised a preliminary sketch of a method of coorindinating traditional communities.  In studying associations among work teams, Thayer found that groups of 3 to 9 were best, with 5 being the optimal number for a core unit.  In his model, charrettes are the smallest unit.  Thayer designed them with a hinging mechanism to interface with the neighbourhood.  This hinging mechanism then connects the neighbourhood to the progressively larger systems of riding, city or town, state or province, country and finally the globe.

For an intermediary unit, researcher Robert Dahl proposed that the figure be set between 50,000 to 200,000.  He postulates that in larger groups people begin to feel they really have no say in political outcomes.  Other researchers come up with different figures, which suggests that protyping and continual improvement is the way to go to arrive at an optimum number.  The amount could also vary by community since different personality types and cultures could feel comfortable with different unit sizes.  Of course, it would be a simple matter to weight the voting power of a community based on its size.

Canadian political ridings now constitute something close to Dahl's figure?, but this is irrelevent, because members must vote along party lines.  In essence, Canadians get to choose between dictators, who basically represent the same interests, every four years or so.  Even if the dictators had sustantially different policies, it would still be a case of the majority repressing the minority.  It is necessary for different ridings to have different or looser laws wherever this does not damage the health of the larger system.  An overarching set of human rights, which should allow anything that does not harm others, would be an important to the health of the larger system.

Decentralization itself does not lead to more freedom .  For example Canada recently said it was reducing transfer payments tax allocation to let provinces have more say in how dollars are allocated to welfare.  Voters at the provincial level will be forced to choose between health, education and the lazy bums that won't enter what are usually the worst aspects of the slavery system. The nearly three million Canadians are on welfare their way to join the Mexican brethern of the dispossessed.  Those on unemployment on the waiting list, while the rest cower in the like the shocked Jewish people on their way to the work will set you free camp.  Meanwhile, gun registration is moving ahead full steam although their is zero logic behind the reasons for the move given by government officials - examples of criminal stuff and storage issue in drag as a registration issue.

Mankind’s needs to expand and move onwards, as well as enjoy the benefits of community and individualism, can be reconciled through such intelligent applications of cybernetics.  Stabilizing feedback mechanisms could be operative at several levels.  Amplifying feedback, in the form of virtuous circles, could follow the same dynamic.

The average person still has a better innate sense of right and wrong than cloistered experts or those enmeshed in power plays.  This happens despite the impediments of the education and media system.  The average citizen’s policy making ability would also increase dramatically under an honest informational structure.  However, setting of policy should not be confused with implementation of policy.

Despite the desirablility of individual freedom, it is important to realize that choosing to follow direction is often the wise thing to do.  Because of specialization, people are often engaged in undertakings which they do not have the time to fully understand.  To reject specialization is to look to a return to feudal times. 

Once a system has reached consensus on a policy, it may be necessary to access an expert in a certain field.  Advances in telecommunications could allow some endeavours to be directed without the expert having to travel to the site.  Many of the experts would also shine once they were set free from the politics of public or private bureaucracy.

A back to the land movement, without an innovative infrastructure to ensure technology continues to advance, would have more drawbacks than just mass starvation in many communities.  Without advances in technology, we would have the same defence against the inevitable asteroid hit as the dinosaurs did.  Meteors are not much of a concern under the present system, as we are directing our resources towards our own destruction.  They are a mathematical longshot if we follow the lifespan of traditional dumb species. 

If do start using our heads for more than hatracks, the probability will become a near certainity, as the sun has energy for billions of years.  In this case, we are like the family that lives in a house that is built on seldom used traintracks.  We have the capacity to deflect the trains onto a sideswitch, but instead are using this power to build bombs and scatter toxins throughout the rooms of the house.  This idea will be explored further under a possible new paradigm in a following section.

It is necessary to inject here that the meteor theory of evolution is pure speculation whereas the debt virus hypothesis is based on solid facts.  Those with adversarial mindsets will attempt to discredit scientific facts if mentioned in the same work as speculative theories, by treating the two as the same.  This could be a result of ignorance or dishonesty, but the subversion of truth is the outcome regardless of the intention.

Merit Means What Not Who

"We don't want no gang boss" - The Clash

The idea of expert would also include the concept of situational leadership.  For example in a certain phase of a project, a city planner would take direction from a working electrician or gardener.  Peter Drucker is right when he states that the person doing the job should know the most about it, or they shouldn't be doing it. 

Under the present system, workers often follow orders from their bosses that they know are wrong or inefficient.  Although they will never admit it, some bosses would prefer things be done wrong rather than have their methods questioned.  The workers are well aware of this dynamic.  The primary consideration for policy initiatives then devolve into how blame will be assigned if things go wrong. 

Order takers under a new system would be following a course of action through cohesion rather than coercion.  It would be an agreed on policy rather than an imposed policy.  Since it is the individual that feels the effects of any group action, it follows people should only join any group action through free will.  When someone is obstensibly forced to perform a task for the greater good today, they are really operating under the conditions of slavery. 

In small groups or communities, peer pressure would drastically reduce the number of those who shirked from the small amount of necessary labour that could not be handled by machines.  A sense of actually belonging to the larger system, would also reduce the number of freeloaders.  Anyone who has been to a barn raising bee will be aware of how work can get down without forcing people to do it. 

The jobs that nobody wanted to do would end up paying the most in a free society.  To be effective and ethical, the society should be built up from the individual, not down from the state.  The design would also emphasize beneficial interrelationships between groups of people who had expressed different needs.

Much forecasting would be replaced by backcasting, where people decide what it is they want to create, and then experts design the changes in the system to meet these criteria.  The work on how to most effectively and efficiently incorporate the people's wishes would entail the uncertain, competitive, stimulating atmosphere, that presently is unfolded in a directionless manner. 

In The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, professor Henry Mintzberg argues that formal planning is of limited use today, and that most resources should be directed to a flexible, emergent strategy.  Under knowledge age systems, the same dynamic would occur, but in the context of how to do something, not what to do to adapt to an uncontrollable situation. 

Thayer also postulates that people are only defined through their interactions with others.  Even the recluse does this through books and other media.  However, any individual that wished to be isolated could also be accomadated under a system based on abundance. 

Morality jives with practicality in that only an agreed on policy will be tolerated in a knowledge society.  Self declared successes just won’t cut it where people have access to what really happened.  Of course, some of the above describes how democracy would work now if it weren’t overrun by special interest groups.  

The structure of our present institutions not only allow this, they make it a necessity.  Researcher Jay Hanson has come up with the phrase 'one dollar, one vote' to satirize the present American political system.  It would be naive to think things are substantially different in Canada.

An important additional consideration for democracy, that is also ignored today, is the effect of the majority on minority rights.  This concern is the reason behind one of Alvin Toffler's three main recommendations for the future in his book, The Third Wave.  He states that industrial age political systems are repressing minority groups. 

The increasing fragmentation of traditional voting blocks exacerbates the repression.  Parties and governments often have to lump contradictory interests under the same umbrella in order to garner enough votes to get elected.  The result is that none of the voters have their wishes expressed.

Toffler's second main recommendation deals with the concept of decision division.  This concept suggests that issues be studied to determine the most appropriate level for effective action.  In decision division, Toffler cautions that the appropriate place to solve a certain problem can change over time.  He also laments on the the underdeveloped transnational level, where global problems are often dealt with in a patchwork of ways, or not at all. 

Semi-direct democracy was the third major change advocated by Toffler. 

He iterates that telecommunication advances make it possible for several new permutations of feedback and voting to evolve.  Toffler also cautions that a cooling off period for citizens, or education on an issue, is needed so that emotions and spur of the moment impulses do not lead to a form of mob rule. 

Toffler givers several suggestions on possible ways of accomplishing each of his three main recommendations.  The close interrelationships between minority rights, decision division and semi-direct democracy would lead to a virtuous circle if intelligently handled.  For example, decision division would have an effect on minority power and semi-direct democracy.  The increasing fragmentation that is a central theme of Toffler's can be accomodated under a flexible, cybernetic system.  Of course, this is assuming the Toffler's predictions and suggestions provide a feedback of approval from the people of the affected communities. 

As stated, In his book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte said he remained optomistic about the future because of  computer capabilities.  He does not delve into any speculations about any possible forms a new system might take.  Instead he states digital capabilities can be like a force of nature with "four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing and empowering." 

Negroponte may be underemphasizing the risks of the environmental situation today.  However, the qualities he mentions describe a transcendence of previous conflicts between the freedom of the whole and the freedom of the individual.  Globalizing and harmonizing will provide the holistic abilities needed, while empowering and decentralizing will enable diversity and individual freedom.

 The Indivisible Whole

"If we sink or if we float, we're all in the same big boat"  - Gordon Sumners 

To attempt to break the stranglehold of the transnationals by preferential tarriffs and other traditional means will hobble efficiencies that can be used to benefit the individual.  Instead, new cooperative mechanisms could be researched.  Of course, the global body would have to ensure the interests of the people were an integral part of overall corporate policies. 

Diversity of the workforce is another strength of globe spanning wealth producers.  Intraindustry trade constitutes a huge waste of energy and should be curtailed.  However, manufacturing should be a diminishing percentage of the transnational economy, as the new knowledge economy takes over.  In this case, globalization will allow people to access the best information in the world and see how it applys to their area. 

Increment of association was a term coined by C. H. Douglas to describe the benefits of having larger groups interact freely.  Five people acting synergistically can lift a large beam in a barn building bee.  If each of the five tries separately, the beam would not leave the ground. 

Larger social units can accomplish larger projects that ultimately benefit the individual.  A stone age hunting band could not construct a needed canal.  A city state would be would not have the physical or intellectual resources needed for space travel.  This same synergy can be used on a global scale for information and space exploration projects.  With the internet, time and distance are no longer concerns for international work teams.

Inventions are also stimulated by other inventions, so that isolation may be good for individual concentration, but exposure to the world can provide insights to spark other inventions.  Knowledge is inherently self-augmenting, so that every discovery prompts further discoveries.  A larger pool of knowledge creates stimulations and cross-fertilizations that add to progress, assuming the underlying institutions are designed to keep up. 

The most important need for a global body has to do with what has been described as a tragedy of the commons archetype.  An real life example concerns a case where members of a tribe gained prestige according to the number of livestock they owned.  Individuals increased the size of their herds to the point that overgrazing caused the fragile topsoil to erode.  The nearby Sahara desert expanded with the result that no one in the tribe was left with any livestock.

There was no coordinating mechanism to stop this dynamic, even though individuals had become aware of the situation while there was still time to reverse the decline.  In Canada, a recent meeting on reducing the burning of fossil fuels came to naught.  The business participants explained that Canada would be unable to compete in the global economy if any constraints were placed on the power of the marketplace.

Much of the current fear of a tyrannical world state is well founded, but tyranny can  flourish at any level of government.  It is the accountability and public control structures that are at fault, and not the concept of transnational laws to protect people against transnational events and entities. 

Models could be built to test the merits of accountability made possible by new technology and a rational approach.  What follows is a simplified, quite possibly unworkable concept.  Its purpose is to help people see that the a future global body does not have to be a version of the past unresponsive paradigm. 

The unresearched idea is as follows.  A group of three experts for each of a predetermined subject area could be elected by the people.  There would be no election campaigns or speeches.  Instead, the qualifications and accomplishments of the experts could be widely disseminated and compared by an objective media. 

The successful candidates would be very highly paid and would answer to a rotating, onsite board of directors.  The board could be chosen through the same mechanism that is used to select juries from the general populations.  Additionally, anyone with internet access should be able to tap into any United Nations computer, in the same way that bosses now monitor the computers of their employees.

The board could work through the concept of functionalism, where they would be selected for specific projects instead of specific time periods.  Experiments by Sweden on educating voters on certain issues could also be of benefit to the board of non-experts.

Environmentalism does not have to entail a curtailment of individual freedom.  An example of new ways of meeting needs can be found in the current forestry debate.  Hemp can be grown cheaply and quickly to supply paper products that are superior to those supplied by trees.  If less paper is used because of widespread computer capability, then old growth forests can begin again in many areas. 

Some forestry proponents argue that growing trees is still the most environmentally friendly method of paper production.  However, this argument deserves a second look considering that trees cannot keep up with the industry.  Otherwise there would be no need to cut down the surviving areas of old growth forests. 

Varieties of the hemp plant exist that have negligible levels of the active ingredient found in marijuana.  It has many uses and grows like a weed so that two or three crops a year could be harvested.  In contrast, it takes eighty to a hundred years to grow a tree to harvest size.  It's also possible that the marijuana controversy could be avoided entirely by having the alcohol and tobacco industries produce this less harmful drug.

It is true that some hypocritical interests that cause environmental devastation, profess concern once they see the control possibilities of environmentalism.  One monetary reformist has compared this to the Reichstag fire manveur that Hitler used to seize power, where a self-created crisis was used to justify the need for control of the people. 

None of this changes the fact that the benefits of a healthy environment are obvious, or that some powerful entities are content to obtain their control by the old fashioned method of unsustainable exploitation of resources. 

Increasing pollution means the we are being infected with our own waste at an increasing level.  There is no downstream that doesn't become an upstream within the biosphere.  Every five years, the entire physical body is replaced.  A Buddists tenet is that who we are is changing all the time.

Scientist Norbert Wiener commented on the sub atomic nature of all matter by stating we are not beings of stuff, but patterns of persistence.  These sub-atomic particles of earth, air, fire and water hold their patterns as they move about on an earth that is spinning, which circles around the sun, which flies through an expanding universe.  All of the patterns constantly interact with other particles both from the earth and the universe. 

This miraculous phenomenon called life, holds these patterns as it attempts to construct more patterns from the naturally increasing entropy of the universe.  If more of our scientists and leaders would feel a proper reverence and awe for this process, we would be quickly be on our way to solving the problems that threaten a return of chaos on earth.  

One idea for peaceful change would involve a memetic migration, rather than the tradition genetic change.  In english, it could mean that the present individuals in the positions of leverage, should remain but change their goals and methods of operation.  However this evolves in future generations would be unknown except that it would be an improvement on where things are now headed.

One speculative example of a memetic migration strategy could be to designate the seven oil companies, as the seven energy companies.  This is a macro view of the "I am not my position" mindset needed in individual efforts.  Dialogue between what the community wanted and the biosphere could support could be brought to the attention of the oil companies.  They would then have to design various models that would show where the best balance between competition and cooperation lay.  The score could be broadcast on news updates.  

Another idea is to take the positive aspects of the feelings of wartime and regard the situation as an emergency that requires a temporary cessation of many competitive arenas.  For example, during world war two, Canada and ? other countries formed national governments where all worked together instead of against each other.  The situation today is at least as serious by any scientific criteria. 

The Person in the Mirror

"All people are good people in their own eyes"  William Sarayon 

Only the combination of science and ethics voiced by Douglas, Wiener, Fuller and others can adequately address the concerns of today's world.  As Douglas stated; ‘whatever is physically possible should be financially possible’.  The primary human motivation of self interest would remain the same.  But instead of being a short term, misinformed self interest, it would be a long term, knowledgable self interest. 

Fredrick Thayer has called this enlightened self interest in his book An End to Hierarchy and Competition.  I would like to alter the the message in the title of his book, and agree that there should be an end to hierarchy and competition in entitling all to human rights that include the right to enjoy a standard of living that includes good food, clothing, shelter and electronic communication equipment. 

HEARTS OF LIGHTNESS

Shining On

An international team of cybernetic scientists has described the meaning of life as the need to increase fitness for survival.  This product will take the stance that this is true, but only as a reflection of a force that works at a higher level.  In other words, survival and progression are not ends in themselves, but a manifestation of some greater purpose. 

What this greater purpose represents is up to the individual, assuming the belief does not infringe on the rights of other persons.  It may stand for beer and pretzels for the dedicated athiest.  The agnostic's view of God would of course be as valid as any other.

The philosopher Georg Hegel postulated a great spirit works through each individual to help them bring light and order to the world.  He extended this concept to include the role of nation states for bringing organization and progress to humanity.  He reconciled the religiousity of  his time, with the call for concrete human action for progress, by stating that these ideas originated in, and were a reflection of God. 

After Hegel's time, the traditional Liebnitzian view of the universe as a predictable clockwork arrangement of monads was superseded by the concept of a more dynamic universe.  Scientists, most notably Willard Gibbs, developed the concept of entropy, or the natural transformation of order to chaos.  They discovered that unassisted heat energy will always flow to a colder object, and that some energy is always lost when it is transformed to work energy.  A gradual loss of distinctiveness takes place as heat energy travels until there is an overall sameness in temperature, or molecular arrangements. 

This creates a sub-atomic state, where probabilities, and therefore predictions, become impossible to determine; or a state of chaos.  In a state of  chaos, statistical studies are useless because molecules follow no patterns that we are capabile of distinguishing.  In other words, all of our abilities to reason would become useless due to a lack of differentiation regarding information.  Even if it were possible for the physical body to survive in such an environment, everything would look, sound and feel the same.

As stated, the differentiation that gives us cognition is attained by comparing a pattern to its complementary of randomness; or more accurately a more complex pattern is delininated against a less complex pattern.  The patterns can be sensed through a difference in pressure, colour, shape, smell, perspective, taste and so on, from the state of their immediate surrounding environments.

We can hear something because sound waves are have pressure differentials that create a uniqueness from the surrounding air.  The differences in the soundwaves themselves allows us to distinguish different notes of a song.  The differences in something over time also allow us to distinguish patterns, and predict future probabilities from past probabilities.  Recognizing patterns can be a combination of seeing how something is similar to another pattern, and then analyzing the possible causes of the differences that keep analogies from being clones. 

In essence, a helical progression can be made through this process of cognition.  If pattens can be discerned in events that at first appear random or chaotic, then higher patterns, or order, can be built on the discovered foundation.  As stated, defining patterns in the state of human affairs is critical to a successful age transition. 

The second law of thermodynamics was developed from the work of Gibbs, which stated among other things, that a closed system will always stagnate or devolve to chaos.  The energy of a system cannot be continually transformed into work energy, to create order or organization, because of the heat energy that is always lost to friction.  The total energy of the system remains the same, but it gradually becomes more and more chaotic. 

The unpredictable molecular arrangements of the heat energy approaching equilibrium cannot be pulled back towards differentiation, without burning up more work.  The heat energy must continually flow 'downhill' until the system gradually reaches a state of chaos where everything is basically the same temperature.  A perpetual motion machine would describe an invention that could circumvent the second law of thermodynamics.  An hourglass displays a concept similar to the second law of thermodynamics as it works in a closed system. 

Fortunately for Hegel's philosophy, and for us, earth is an open system, and is receptive to solar and cosmic energies.  The energy from the sun has created differentiated molecular arrangements, some of which we have labelled life.  This feeds our cognition in that we can deliniate such patterns as a tree from the different pattern of the sky.  The sun also energizes life to create more order, or new generations, and negates the natural drift to chaos.  This action against entropy is jargonized as negentropy.

The ultimate source of  co-organizing structures, such as life forms and other matter, is of course, a mystery.  The cybernetic term, self-organizing, can also be misleading, since the larger environment always guides the development of a structure, although to what degree remains part of the mystery of the ultimate source.  The openness of the system of course also affects the relative amounts of the co-organization between a system and its larger environment.

The receptors and effectors of humans allow us to be active participants in the creation of order.  We can take improbable situations, and use our heads and limbs to make them probable.  For example if a stack of bricks was dropped from the sky, it is highly improbable they would land to form a wall.  By conscious effort, we can use our muscles and minds to intervene and supersede this probability. 

It is now a simple matter for humans to accomplish the conscious design or pattern of a brick wall.  Again, it is the sun that gives us the food energy to work against the randomness and unpredictability of chaos.  In the brick wall example, it can also be seen that all forms of energy function as information processors.  The relation between energy and matter is also believed to be very close.  Scientists have even managed to regrow a very rough replacement for a severed salamander leg by the application of electrical energy.  The whole concept of aura and Kirillian photography is also directed at the relationship between energy and matter. 

In building structures, humans have gone from brick walls to create articles, both large and small, that approach the complexity of some of the designs in nature.  Computers and telecommunications networks are themselves organizing into larger and more complex designs.  No one person can begin to cognate how the system works, and if it was physically possible, it could also be shown that the entire population does not consciously understand all that is happening.  Even something as basic as electricity, remains a mystery to scientists in many ways. 

An important distinction to make when creating order in complex systems, is to distinguish between static complexity and dynamic complex.  A computer network, including all the circuit boards, are an example of static complexity.  When information travels over the network, the complexity becomes dynamic.

This is a very important point to consider for creating order in human societies.  They cannot be rigidly designed and run like the computer network, because the information that flows through individuals makes each of us unique.  At the same time, we are constantly changing in many ways as we access more information and learn.  Flexibility and adaptability must be a central feature of complex societies if order is to be maintained.  In this case, the human urge for freedom is the sign of a good design feature of nature.

This is a variation on the concept that in order for a larger system to be in balance, its constituent parts must be somewhat out of balance.  When people learn, they are out of balance.  If they rebell against the loss of the illusion of complete control, then they will not be able to learn.

Energy and Openness

In the same way that we can be viewed as agents of the sun in creating order on earth, the sun is an agent of  the forces that created it, and so on.  There is also the possibility that life could be guided by some of the energies that arrive from light years away.  These scientific energy forces mesh with Hegels philosophical conception of God.  Both the sun and cosmic rays originate in, and are a reflection, of other unknowable forces.  This concept could also be described by such terms as the holy spirit of many European tribes or the great spirit of North American tribes. 

Scientists have determined that the cosmic rays are high energy, but can only guess that they originate from exploding stars in other galaxies.  The planets themselves are also thought to have formed from the debris of previously exploded stars.  By this generally accepted hypothesis, cosmic energies are also present in the heat energy of the earth's interior.  It would also mean that we ourselves are composed of the same stardust, along with everything on earth.  In essence, there is an atomic commonality between us and the cosmos.

One clue to this commonality may be found in how the patterns of an atom resemble the patterns of the solar system, with smaller bodies orbiting around a nucleus.  What appears to us as hard, dense metal would be seen as mostly space at a subatomic scale.  If one considers that the universe is expanding, as is now commonly believed, then the patterns are helical, rather than cyclical. 

For example, if you move a sparkler in circles and then walk forward, the pattern will be a helix.  If the universe is expanding outward in all directions, then the patterns would be similar to the shape of tornados and other vortexes.  To really go on a speculation binge, one could also think of antimatter patterns, and how the two helical patterns could mirror the pattern of the helices of DNA.

The solar energies are responsible for almost all of the work energy that allow us to live and develop.  The sun allows plants to grow, which can be eaten or fed to livestock to enable us to eat further up the food chain.  Old decomposed plants provide us with coal and other fossil fuels, while the evaporation caused by the sun makes hydroelectric power possible.  Wind is another source of power that ultimately comes from the sun.  The earth's contribution to work energy includes the mountain building that causes water to flow and experimental geothermal heat projects.  The amount of this available energy, in ongoing and stored form,  is what led Buckminster Fuller to postulate that an abundance mentality was possible.

Many parallels can be drawn between a scarcity mentality and a closed thermodynamic system, in contrast to an abundance mentality and an open system.  Closed systems shut themselves from external influences and become isolated, just as scarcity mentalities tend towards secrecy and dishonesty

People may think they are in an open system when they seize something from someone else, and thereby gain a temporary advantage.  However, this is a zero sum game when someone loses whatever someone else has gained.  Sooner or later the predatory entity, or their descendants, becomes the victim as the dynamic comes full circle.  Any beneficial results to the overall system in one area, are always balanced by negative results in another area of the system. 

Real progress becomes impossible, both in the scientific and social spheres.  Two heads are the same as one, if the second team member is afraid or secretive about voicing their real opinion on a matter.  A success to the successful archetype leads to more conformity.  Increasing conformity makes the system increasingly unadaptive.  There are fewer and fewer options for consideration during problem solving.

Order breaks down as the conformist mentality is overwhelmed by the complexity of life.  The zero sum interactions prevent the the building of  more order in the overall system.  The system gradually breaks down into chaos.  The friction of each exchange spins off some energy into a chaotic form and speeds the breakdown of the system.

Open systems access energies and remain open to influences from outside of the system, like an abundance mentality tends to openness and honesty.  Anything that is obtained from others is sought under a win/win interaction, so that advantages accrue to both parties.  This is a synergistic or non-zero sum exchange.

The ordered energy in the system builds since both entities have gained from their association.  Beneficial results in one part of the system lead to beneficial results in the other part of the system, as well as the related subsystems and larger systems.  Open communications enhances the flow of information and hence the building of more order.  

The virtuous circle of causality continues to build as openness leads leads to a more honest exchange of different ideas.  As stated, folklore expresses this concept as two heads are better than one.  A diversity of thoughts allows for further synergy and building.  As long as the sun burns, order and progress can advance.

However, virtuous circles can also exponential in nature, just as vicious circles are.  Balancing or stabilizing feedback builds to a point where it can arrest or reverse the positive growth of a virtuous circle.  Sooner or later, the circle must transform.   Providing the proper stabilizing and reinforcing feedback can lead to an intelligent, rational transistion.  The complexity of such studies could be handled by today's combination of computers with telecommunications.

A related point is that care must be taken so that synergy does not degenerate into conformity.  Conformity can lead to group think, which makes further synergy impossible.  Group think is similiar to the rigidity that precedes chaos in a closed system.  If the environment that the system exists in should change, or face a new threat,  the lack of diversity does not allow for sufficient adaptive behaviour to meet the challenge.  A group think system will also eventually break down into disarray and chaos.  The first law of cybernetics has been stated as diversity is strength.

Speculations on a New Garden

"People were made for joy, for creation of meaning, for ritual and drama, for love, for poetry and mystery, for self transcendence, and for union with all." - John Romanyshyn

Christian analogies, with which I am most familiar, might help to seem to have a good view of the proceedings. God the father is the unknowable equations that take place in the universe and beyond the black holes, while the son or daughter is the human who opens their heart to this information, and the holy spirit is the particles and waves that bring us information in chain reactions that prove God to be the ultimate pool player.  The cosmic information could be viewed as the word made flesh.  Of course mother earth also has cosmic energy within it and is likely part of a much larger universal design. 

In addition to Hegel, many ancient religious writings describe how individuals have the light of a great spirit within them.  These writings go beyond hegelian thought to postulate this light could collectively embody what has been described as the promised messiah.  An analogy from the Christain religion occurs when Jesus walks on water and then informs followers that anyone is capable of such a feat.  The Hindu karma and Buddhist meditation also contain metaphors on the need for the individual to change themselves for the better, before they can be participate in a higher level of existence.

Indications are that there will be no saving entity to lead us by the nose into a positive future.  It just doesn't make sense that humanity would have been given its present capabilities, if such an entity wanted a pet.  It is up to each and everyone of us to get involved, and use our free will to create the knowledge age.

There is no physical reason for an apocalyptic disaster in order to create a new garden on earth.  We have already been bestowed with a multitude of technological miracles, abundant energy sources and free will.  We could also ask ourselves why we evolved into self aware, potentially intelligent beings, instead of remaining the same as the rest of the helpless, fatebound animals.  A logical rationale behind our evolution could entail the capability to create a defense system against asteroids.  In addition to wiping out the dinosaurs, asteroids are now being blamed for destroying the atmosphere on Mars. 

This theory of human evolution would revolve around the Gaia concept, where earth itself is regarded as a living organism.  The biological characteristics that had to met by an organism recently rose from nineteen to twenty.  These criteria, such as ingestion ??????etc are all met by the planet.  In The Global Brain, Peter Russel speculates that the internet is form of nerve system for the planet.  Where people often have trouble with the Gaia concept, is in confusing a life form with a level or even definition of sentience.  Even so, if lichen could be considered alive, it is hard to make a case against earth not being alive. 

There is a one in 100,000 chance of a substantial asteroid hitting the earth in any year.  According to mathematicians, probabilities are not cumulative, and each year would entail the same one in 100,000 risk.  However, the mathematicians forget the subjective nature of all experience, with the result that the risk analysis would be dependent on the life span of an entity.  This is best paraphrased in the work of Chilean biologists Victor? Maturna and Francis? Varela.  They keep in mind the effect of different human perspectives by stating everything that is said, is said by an observer.  This will be modified here to state that everything that is experienced, is experienced by a system.  A cell will react according to the information in the cell, a human will act according to the information they have, so its not a big stretch to imagine that a system will act according to all the information of its constituent parts. 

From the perspective of the earth, it is a near certainty that it will be hit with several large asteroids over the billions of years that life is possible.  Scientists estimate that hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets have struck earth's surface in the past few billion years, it's only a matter of time before one big enough to destroy the biosphere hits.

An observation of the shape of Hudson's Bay, and the landmass north of it,  shows there is a possibility that earth has already been hit by bigger asteroids than the one that is thought to have eliminated the dinosaurs.  The gulf of Mexico also has a shape that is hard to accredit to natural movements of the earth's crust.  If an organism such as a cactus can evolve spikes for protection, then something as complex as earth could form humans from its dust for biological purposes.

The worldview espoused here is not contradictory to the teachings of the various religions.  Gaia is simply another step in the process of causuality.  The purpose of the planet is still a mystery in the greater scheme of things.  In fact, this speculation would actually bring humanity closer to the original religious conception of humanity, regarding the importance of the species in the greater plan of an all-powerful entity.  

As far as humanity is concerned, the problems we are creating for ourselves make the asteroid speculation irrelevant.  Many prophetic works also take this point of view.  Fortunately some prophets have stipulated that prophecy is only what will occur, if things continue as they are.  The possible sure thing is that love conquers all. 

Old religious books contain anecdotes of a God who writes off his malfunctioning human experiment, only to relent and give them another chance.  Prophecies and stories are meant as a warning.   Moral bankruptcy in the chosen species can only have dire consequences on such a fragile planet.  The continuation of our present economic system and animalistic outlook can only result in a hellish scenario for both humans and possibly the biosphere itself. 

Mankind's power is simply too great for us to attempt to direct it without a foundation of morality.  The capability to spread order by space travel, or defend the order of life by asteroid defense, is a double edged sword that could create chaos if the species does not mature. 

It is still possible that catastrophic loss of life can happen in the near future.  However, if humanity has made the transition to the knowledge age, it will have at least done everything possible to limit the damage.  More importantly, the foundation will have been created for humans to seek a destiny is in keeping with the potential that we have been blessed with. 

Necessity and Invention

One theory holds that a changing environment forced pre-humans out of the trees, where they had to compete with predators and prey that had been evolving much longer in the growing savannah.  Teeth and nails evolved for fruit and small animals, and legs designed for tree climbing, were a poor match for sabretooth tigers amid a field of speedy deer.  Hands that were formed for holding tree branches latched onto sticks and bands huddled closer together to form a ragged, shakey defence between tree lines.  One theory holds that humans were gradually forced to come down out of the trees due to a changing climate.  Consequently they had to compete with animals that had been evolving longer in the dry savannah.  Teeth and nails evolved for eating fruit and small animals were no match for the sabertooth and other new neighbours.  Tree climbing also does not evolve a body for running.  Grazing animals in the same field as a human would be happy to see the new slow intruder amid an environment of fierce predators.

The system that was a human would have been at an evolutionary dead end in the new environment without some serious head scratching.  Pack hunting and defence helped, but they were not enough considering the armament of other pack animals.  Observations about how a sharp stick fit the pattern of a very big, long claw solved the immediate problem.  Hands evolved for grasping tree branches worked just fine for attaching or detaching this claw as needed.  Navigating the increasingly larger sections of treeless areas became a little safer. 

When the claw was made longer by throwing the sharp stick, the virtuous circle was continued.  Massive amounts of information are required for simple body movements such as walking, but there was a long evolutionary period.  For the throwing needed to catch the faster animals, the brain had to learn to grow quickly in capability since accurate throwing involves extending distance, height and speed information all the way to another system. 

Swinging from tree to tree was probably the physical evolutionary development that jump started the informational evolutionary development for throwing.  The same concepts of speed, height and distance have to be calculated, albeit over a relatively short distance.  While a lizard or frog can develop this ability to the extent that a fly can be snatched from the air, the tongue is not a good instrument for building much. 

South American monkeys have also learned how to throw.  Since they haven't evolved a system for carrying weapons, they throw material excreted by their own body.  While not dangerous, the material has a similar effect on humans as a skunk defensive device.  

Out of the Heart of Darkness

The human brain is made up of three main layers that formed during various phases of evolution, comprising the reptile, limbic and neocortex levels.  The reptile brain, or brain stem, handles basic automatic functions such as breathing and blood circulation, while the limbic section deals with order and maintenance, including the preparing the young to continue the species.  It is the relatively late developing neocortex that enables detailed speech, abstract thought and love. 

This natural evolutionary method of building the new while retaining the best of the old is far superior to the all too human tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  It is the automated functions of the brainstem that allow the higher functions of the limbic system to interact with it and raise the probability of the survival of the young.  In turn, these layers freed the neocortex to develop the higher concepts needed in a species with the power to destroy its environment.  Again, all the processes are not separate, and the neocortex can also raise the probability of the young surviving as well as control the ferocity part of the reptile brain stem that now threatens survival. 

The thesis here is that a fourth and fifth level of thinking are forming through this process.  The previous levels are leading to a moral method of thinking that can again raise survival probabilities by seeing how what is good for the planet is also good for the family and community.  The morality that flows through all of this is leading to yet a fifth level where the earth will not only be protected from humanity's ability to destroy it, but from threats in the larger galaxy.  It is well known that asteroids destroyed the dinosaurs, and according to astronomers, it is only a matter of time before a similar incident occurs.  It could also be dissimilar in that the dinosaur meteorite was miniscule compared to the size of the moon, which also slammed into the planet when it was still fluid enough to absorb the impact without breaking.

The theory here is information that travels in ways we don't understand that is driving all of this.  Whether the label be God, nature or energy seems moot in that any accurate description of the latter two show they are beyond our ken and as wondrous and magical as any attribute given the name tag of God.

An automated supply of basic needs to all citizens would be a parallel to the automatic breathing, digestion and so on enabled by the reptile brain.  In both cases, mundane matters basically look after themselves, so the organism, whether it be an individual or an organization, can concentrate on more interesting and important matters.  Of course varying rewards beyond the basic needs would be a requirement for maintaining the benefits of the good part of competition.