The Human Piece of the π

Where we begin a thought will often determine, if not where it ends up, where it cannot end up.  I don’t mean to be obscure; it just seems to happen.  There are certain beliefs, notions, ideas that must inform the beginnings of any process of thought for us to have a chance of reaching realistic conclusions.

I am proposing what is, in our present mode of thinking, an outrageous proposition: that there is only one right way to think and there is only one right set of actions, albeit with a little wiggle room.  If this sounds fundamentalist, it is. 

What I am not claiming is that I, or anyone, know the right way to act in all cases, or have how to think down pat.  I am only proposing that there is finally, fundamentally, one way.  All the others are wrong! Here is an explanatory metaphor: 

There is only one value for π. It is irrational, it is finally unknowable and it is singular.  All the others are wrong.  We can get close or, better, we can get close enough for use both conceptually and mathematically.  What we cannot do is ignore π or decide to use a value that particularly appeals to us rather than the best approximation for the situation.  

If you were to reject π because you just couldn’t see why the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle should be so very important, then your engineering behavior would be dangerously ill informed.  If you decided that there was no good reason to use 3.141592653589793… when 3 is so much easier, then none of your astronauts would ever get off the ground, much less return alive if by some chance a space vehicle did go into space. 

Our situation, living on the spaceship Earth, is not dissimilar.  We have long passed the point were rounding of π to 3 makes for effective results (it sort of worked in early Egypt) and we have long passed the time when we can make up our own views and values for how humans can and should be functioning in the tiny region of space that can support living things.

Here are some of the rules as I see them: π and the basic equations of human physics 

1) Humans must live in the natural economy the way every other organism does.  We cannot set up our own material and energy economies and ignore the material and energy cycles and systems that necessarily underlie them.

2) Humans must be integrated into the ecosystems in which they live.  We can’t poison ecological systems and continue to extract ‘ecological free services’ from them [1].  This involves a complex interchange of compensations that every other organism, present and past, billions of species, evolved in relationship with every other organism and physical condition of their region. 

3) Humans must live in numbers and with consumption rates that do not overwhelm ANY biophysical process, cycle or system.  At present humans are using almost ½ of the earth’s photosynthetic product and are using the earth’s total productive capacity at a rate of about 150% per year.  That is, the present rate of use is beyond sustainability: we are actually using up the earth’s capacities to sustain life faster than biophysical process (ecological free services) can restore them; eating our seed corn, gambling with our savings [2]. 

4) Humans must see themselves as organisms living in communion with all other living things.  All the belief systems in which humans are exceptional, more aligned with the supernatural than the natural, need to be seen as historical steps in our coming to grips with our powerful adaptations, not as transcendence of the physical world.  Humans are the only animal that can live in a bubble of its own mad realities – but only for a time, only until the distortions of reality must be answered for.  By all accounts that time has come. 

5) Humans must live in communities of such size, design and available activities that it is possible for most members to experience a sense of purpose and live in a state that I call specieshood.  Over the years and cultural changes it has become part of our underlying belief that the society has no responsibility to its members; institutions are the perceived vital units.  Somehow the loss of real, fully formed communities have left the individual without an effective and biologically supporting basis of attachment. 

6) Humans must live with direct expression and experience of our biology and also supportively apply the powers of our Consciousness Order adaptations.  The first requirement here is for an understanding of the Consciousness Order as a new system of order with unique properties to penetrate our belief systems and then to organize a comprehension of ourselves using the best thinking at present and recorded historically and the best science available.  Such a project seems completely impossible in the present intellectual and social environment, but it is the only way for humans to begin to approach living in reality. The time and opportunity to achieve this adaptively also seems impossible; all of our adaptive designs right now are powerfully devoted to strengthening and sustaining the madness of our excesses. 

As a species, humans have been part of nature ‘taking its natural course.’  The human primary adaptation is so overwhelmingly powerful that ‘taking its course’ has led to quite extraordinary results.  From the very beginning of the expression of the Consciousness Order in human behavior, when the ecosystem was the most powerful and immediate force, our adaptive powers fit us in exquisitely without the need to be particularly aware of how this was accomplished. 

But as our powers of organization and technology have lessened and put off the consequences of ecosystem influences, it is necessary that we discover how to use the Consciousness System of Order in other ways than defeating ecosystem limitations; it is exactly such “successes” that drive the need to discover the functioning of our consciousness systems just as we have discovered the properties of the elements, the principles of evolution and the laws of physics. 

We will adapt, in the “taking its course” sort of way, to almost any set of conditions that we confront, but today we are adapting to the conditions of our own making in an increasingly vicious cycle; and it is possible, even likely, that the conditions that we make will not be compatible with the rest of life on the earth.  There is only one tool that can confront such a challenge and that is the ability to appreciate possible futures and act on them. 

Our science can provide the ‘experience’; philosophy can provide the thoughtful counsel.  Democratic governance, community based economics and social experimentation can provide the platform from which to begin.  But we can no longer round off the human π to equal greed; we can’t substitute religion for the realities of human thermodynamics.  

At the moment of the greatest pressure to ignore reality, when Reality is delivering the greatest dangers, it is essential to embrace the reality of our species’ nature and the only answers that can restore the living space to its own sustaining processes. 

While it doesn’t appear so listening to our media world, it is possible for ideas to spread and to have positive, truly adaptive consequences; that is what the CSO has done for 200,000 years as a natural part of our functioning.  The trick, and tricks are the human game, will be to understand ‘understanding’ well enough and to find information sources sufficiently connected to Reality that we can add aware control to the CSO’s other powers.   Those who can must begin this in their own lives and so such a way of living may find roots and spread.  There will be no other way. 

[1] Poison is used in a very broad way in this case.  It includes, but is not limited to, actually chemical poisoning, removing or covering the land surface, redirecting water flows, changing the surface vegetation, removing or replacing animals, changing the chemistry of air and water. 

[2] This 150% doesn’t consider the 10 to 100 million other species of living things and is consequently dooming them to extinction at increasing rates.  Ecological collapses as a result of the loss of species, habitat and mutual compensation integrity would be devastating.

The Uppity Shirley Sherrod

Breaking a self-imposed rule to not write about the daily events that can mesmerize us into thinking that we are doing something, I can’t help but say a few things about Shirley Sherrod. 

An element of the Sherrod story that I have not read in the Oh so voluminous coverage and marination of these events is an obvious one, perhaps so obvious as to not need comment; you decide. 

Bob Herbert in his most recent Times piece, Thrown to the Wolves, goes through a litany of the failures of thought, reason and process that allowed the perversion of bigoted men and a powerful movement to act in, and carry on its bow-wave, a rush to judgment.  But Herbert only ends with wonderment and explains, yet another time, the superiority of Mrs. Sherrod’s character. 

Given the speed with which this quasi-judicial lynching took place and the lack of incredulity, there seemed to be, over purported opinions held by such as Mrs. Sherrod, it is obvious to me that at least three presumptions were being made: (1) that it was natural for Blacks to hold prejudiced attitudes toward whites, (2) put in a position of authority that ‘they’ will work that prejudice and (3) that ‘they’ will not fight back when abused. 

If you take these statements out of the context of the Sherrod case, you have an outline of classic prejudice as it functions in the American south.  Blacks are and have been long mistreated and it is assumed that they will be angry about it.  If it can even be hinted that a Black person is acting in response to that assumed anger, the white south reacts with certainty that it is so.  Hidden in the deep and wide reservoir of southern quilt is the fear that all the presumed resentment for the mistreatment will finally come out and overwhelm.  And so like a bat hearing the faintest echo from the furtive moth, the southern ear is tuned to hear the slightest sign of Black anger.  And southern ‘manhood’ is always tightly wound, ready to stomp on it. 

Mrs. Sherrod and her Georgia audience knew these things completely in a deeply shared way.  To think that the general public can make competent judgments about the 2 minutes in question or even the whole speech is a terrible hubris; imagine men listening to a woman giving a speech about childbirth to a group of mothers and talking about her feelings throughout the process of labor:  “There were moments when I could have grabbed a scalpel and stabbed him.” (A twitter of recognition passes through the audience as self-conscious laughter.) 

Blacks in the south polish their every word and motion when in the white world, every possible sign that could even remotely be seen as hostile is removed.  This has been required, but has also had the effect of making even the most minor slipup standout like a punch in the nose. 

Black 14 year old Emmett Till was tortured and killed in Mississippi in 1955 for speaking to a white store owner’s wife on a dare; his mutilated body thrown in the Tallahatchie River.  No one was convicted.  The only part of the story that is unusual is that it received attention. 

An unguarded look, too rapid a movement of an arm, an inflection of speech that might seem ‘uppity,’ these and other ‘violations’ of expectation have resulted in beatings and worse. 

How many of you former jocks would want your locker room antics to be recorded and played in whole or in edited part.  I am not saying that a speech made to a NAACP meeting should enjoy the same privacy as a locker room, but I am saying that this was a speech made outside of a white world that expects and requires absolute obedience to the southern protocol.  And honest brokers should have known it.

There was nothing strange in the reaction of officialdom: uppity nigger broke the rules, let out a hint of Black anger (it wasn’t even anger so much as confusion – no difference in the south) and had to be stomped.  I was only surprised by how generalized the southern expectation had become.  The NAACP was trying to polish out the rough spot, so their seemingly strange response is really understandable; and perhaps the same can be said for the administration. 

The rest of it is where the real story lies (you may see that as pun): the use of racial fear and prejudice for political power, the hidden support for the whole underbelly of lies and coercive actions that are forming as a substitute for democratic discourse, the increasingly transparent and mad class struggle between the rich and everyone else.  It is here that the hydra lives.

Mrs. Sherrod was not tied to barn fan and thrown in a river.  Happily, the immediate reaction was, and could be, reconsidered.  Finally, I don’t know what this all means.  I know that it is easy to say that we have come some distance from the bad old days; then again, it may be that the only real difference is that the story got our attention.

We Must Get Living Right

As a philosopher with the temperament and behavior of a hermit, I occasionally lose sight of where on the track the most common man is running. I mean this in no pejorative way; only in the sense of median and mode (and I have real allegiance to women’s complete equality, but also value the rhythm of words). Of course, I am aware that as a species we are not equipped to fully comprehend our true place in the pantheon of places offered by the universe. In fact, it is our species that has invented comprehension and is just taking our baby steps with it.

I cannot make clear the pangs – all mixed together – of anger, terror, hatred, amusement, shame, confusion and some pre-fire primate emotion of wonderment when I read an explanation/evaluation of the evolution of some aspect of our human condition that thoroughly misses the point; and leads the mind on wild goose chases through mine-fields guaranteeing detonations of prejudice, excess, apocalypse and murder. For like it or not, we will not get living right, if we are going to live by the fruits of our minds, until we get our comprehensions in alignment with the stars of the sky and the molecules of our manure. Failing this, the physical and living world, with which we refuse to be a full partner, will rub us out indiscriminately, along with much that we have touched.

I am moved to this rant by hearing (and reading) so much lately about selfishness, the selfishness of the phenotype and the selfishness of the genotype. There is no such thing. If it were only a matter of metaphor, only a matter of trying to create clarity about an otherwise impenetrable subject, then fine. But this is a mental suicide bomb in which, it seems, we are wrapping an economic system and a society.

The root from which grows such a complex tree of issues is very simple: that which is of such a stable form that it sustains ‘is.’ That which is labile ‘is not.’ There is no “trying to be” anything. We have these foolish arguments about altruism and selfishness: is it right or wrong, is it possible?

The counterintuitive claim is made that selfishness (always defined more in equivocation than illumination) left to run uninhibited will bring benefit to all in the form of a orderly and inherently just world – though not often explicitly stated – in the manner of an ecosystem. This obvious parallel is avoided given the many unpleasantnesses that might be brought up in the functioning of ecosystems. The very anti-intuitiveness is considered some kind of positive proof – you can see it in the knowing, barely tolerating smiles of the advocates.

But the fact is that humans act with selfishness and with altruism. There are behaviors that we mean by these words and that has nothing, literally nothing, to do with the deeper comprehensions of the biological motives and evolutionary designs that have formed the stabilities that sustain living, animal, vertebrate, mammalian, primate, hominid and human forms.

Our comprehensions have gradually been moved to organizing, in our minds, the earth as a small planet attached to a small star in an unassuming position in an ordinary galaxy among a 100 billion other galaxies. That this planet is favorably placed to have a remarkable physical stability is why we are here, not favorably placed just so that we could be here. However, the madness required to believe that latter is still wide spread.

Still, we have not really even begun to see our species in a similar way, organizing a comprehension that even remotely aligns with the biophysical reality of our origin and place in living space. Even the most enlightened arguments generally available in the public sphere are lightyears away from the comprehensions that would allow us to realign with the biophysical realities upon which our sustaining stability depends.

And the various mental organizing of experience of the earth’s billions are not and cannot be other than the product of immediate, local events and processes. Regional, national and international happenings must have some local effect to be more than a curiosity. And yet, it is the global human impact that must be addressed in collective action. Enlightened comprehension is in a race, not with parochial localism or single-minded political systems (though these act as sea anchors), but with the possibility of avoiding cascading ecological collapses with devastating consequences for human economies and cultures.

A critical mass of people with an allegiance to ‘the’ comprehension that best aligns human capacities and specieshood to the generally recognized physical and biological realities of the living space is necessary. The barest understanding is that we are too many and we use too much; the reduction in both population and consumption required is draconian by almost all measures; and these reductions will be made whether moderated by human agency or not. With that as a beginning the real Devil will be in the details.

It is perfectly understandable that people would reject such a view, just as they would reject government or ‘business’ conspiracies (until they become settled history), but this is no conspiracy, other than a conspiracy of our human capacities working to their zenith.

Yet even as we extract the last barrel of oil and clutter the sky with millions of pieces of space junk (perhaps our most enduring legacy), still we have the potential to comprehend and to include such understandings in our actions; a few people do it all the time and have for thousands of years. The question is: can enough of us do it quickly enough, when under the greatest possible need, to lead the way?

What We Are

There are two primary and quite different models for how to think about and organize human action.  We humans aren’t really determined by the models since we are what we are and will adapt to the models dominating our thinking so to remain as we are, but models can distort our relationships with the rest of life.  Ultimately we have to be integrated into the larger universe, that is, we have to fit into the narrow space that allows life to exist on the earth.  We have not been doing this so very well; the most basic reason being that our imagining of what we are does not comport with what we are, resulting in the distortions that we presently call real life. 

The first error is the error that every species makes by design – it acts as though it is supremely important.  This drive to live and procreate is an essential part of the evolutionary system – the Living System of Order.  There is nothing at all wrong with an organism acting as though it is exceptional, using all the powers of its adaptations to take the space, material and energy it needs, it is that action on the part of every individual, collective and species, all integrated together into ecosystems, that has created the biophysical space.  Without that drive there would be no life on the earth. 

The issue for humans is that our evolution has created a new adaptation unlike any other in the history of life.  It is an adaptation that restructures information, creates past and future and so out classes all other species in meeting those basic drives that there is no organism, no community of organisms and no ecosystem that can keep up or provide the integrating forces that moderate, and has moderated, every other living thing past and present.  We are a creature completely dependent on the integration of the earth’s ecosystems and uncontrollable within them.  This could be, as the perspicacious will realize, very bad news for everything; unless humans also have the capacity to self-regulate.  And so we come to our models of what we are. 

Setting aside the way religion has variously worked and failed as a governor on the human machine, much of our incentive structure derives from our beliefs about ourselves.  The two models: Are we individuals struggling in an uncompromising world succeeding and failing based on the quality of our effort and good luck (in which I include heredity, accidents of birth and accidents of opportunity)?  Or, are we communities of humans supported by common experience, training, infrastructure and the summary accumulations of detail and wisdom from the past? 

The evidence needed for the choice is in, long in.  But the evidence has not been enough and will never be enough in the world in which the drive to ‘have it all’ is supported by an evolutionary adaptation that can make having it all possible for one or two generations; when the due date for the delivery of consequences exceeds a life time, much of their sting is removed.  

The evidence is in: humans are a community-based organism.  Leaving for the moment that every organism is dependent on every other in a functioning ecosystem, it is possible to imagine a lone digger wasp or a lone leopard, but it is not possible to imagine a lone human.  Even feral humans, whether real or myth, were raised by wolfs or apes.  There is no human without tools, without language, without community, without history.  Even the human that denies community, denies association and even denies the need to recognize these forming influences, is utterly dependent on them for everything that they are and have.  Such denial is literally the same as being driven a hundred miles in a car and claiming that you ran the whole way on foot in an hour and twenty minutes, and so owe nothing to the driver or for the use of the car. 

Hayek was wrong.  Rand was wrong. That whole way of thinking is utter insanity.  It is an artist denying the paint, a sculptor denying the stone.  Individualism as presented by the aforementioned and others, Austrian School and Chicago School consequences, is little more that the infantilizing of the human experience.  Building on a theory of gravity that is false can only create structures that will fail. 

Adults are supposed to become aware of the importance and contributions of others; very young children do not realize when they cause pain.  They must learn by associating their experiences of discomfort with situations that cause discomfort in others – we call it empathy.  It is a property of adults, properly grown and socialized adults; the sort of people with the potential to defeat our tendency to try and “have it all” at the cost of the destruction of other humans and ecosystems. 

It is vital to recognize that a properly formed and functioning adult human being does not make harming other people a normal consequence of his/her actions – no matter what rationalizations are offered.  Fully formed humans harm others episodically in disputes over space and resources; with pride of action and remorse for harm done.  Life is hard.  But our distain for lying and cheating, for sneaking around ‘behind the back’ is real and comes from the adult recognition of the destructiveness of such behaviors to social order and stability.  We reject the mad dog as too dangerous to live with us.  Historically, we have banished those who refused to recognize their obligations to the communities in which they lived. 

Many of these expectations and behaviors have been badly distorted as our populations and our powers have grown, but they still reside, recognizable, within us.  We cringe at BP’s chairman’s “small people” remark.   We realize the humanity (even as some marvel and some disparage) of Sean Penn’s efforts in Haiti.  Most of us can still tell the difference.  But we are confused by the Tim Geithner’s of the world, the Hank Paulson’s and Bernie Madoff’s, the ‘Gordon Gekko’s’ that quite plainly steal from the community and smile, explain, demand and justify all at the same time. 

This breed of sociopathology, these intelligent infantilized actors while not new in the world, are dominating more and more the nodes of power.  The true adult human, the biologically complete human, is being displaced in power and authority by infantilized sociopaths.  And this process is supported, given intellectual basis and cover, by the model of individualism.  

A vast sophistry has formed around an economic model of ‘man’ as individual.  While it has its Godless adherents, they are usually quiet about their godlessness (and even disbelieved), religion is often engaged as a supporting structure; it is now a feature of our social landscape that ‘getting rich’ (at the expense of others, often with con-games) is “Godly” and proof of righteousness.  “God would only give wealth to the good,” is classic crazy. 

The aggrandizement of the individual leads to a variety of logical and practical contradictions.  Most obviously there is no origin for an individual outside of community and biology (and thus the need for a perversion of Christian theology in which individuals are made by God).  There is no place for an individual to act other than in a community with stability and opportunity.  And there are no measures of success outside of community standards (and nothing to lord over!).  Further, there is no comfortable material environment without the products of the ecosystem community and the human community.  While I could go on, these should be sufficient to jog the mind. 

We have been driven to this state of affairs by what we are, by our adaptations and our maximizing of their consequences.  It is now time to adapt to our adaptations – this is a constant theme of these essays, the first step of which is recognizing the specific need to do so.  We have the capacity, in the Consciousness System of Order, to discover informational systems to replace the ones gone destructive (religion, for example) and to create political and economic systems that can integrate with the natural “politics” and economics of the biosphere.  But we must select the correct models with which to think and act.

No Truth is an Island

The media (we must come up with a better label) -- right, left and center –  fails to do more than skim the surface of events.  It is like seeing the connections between islands only through the events of the weather – if you read this sentence and say, “I don’t understand, it makes no sense.” then you have captured the essence of it.  

To explain the explanation: most islands are made to exist by the movements of the earth’s tectonic plates; almost all are volcanic mountains surrounded by water. And as such we only see the tops of them.  Often chains of islands are formed by the operation of a single process occurring over many millions of years and are thus related.  The resulting isolated mountain tops can be strung out through several climate zones and thus have very different appearances.  If one only sees the surface relationships the “reporting” on the islands will, at the best, be incomplete and at the worst misleading.  If assumptions of relationship of one island to another are made only from superficial similarities, then much is lost to the understanding and, very likely, to accuracy of action. 

The roots of islands are in the geology of their formation; what are the roots of the stories of national and world events?  First, it should be clear that we treat these events as isolated in one sense and yet we try to organize them into groups of like kinds so to better make sense of them – just like the islands; see there was a purpose to that part.  We can pretty easily come up with the analogies to the islands (the stories) and to the weather (the other stuff going on at the same time), but what would be the roots of the mountains; what would be the plate tectonics?  That is where those who act in the capacity of ‘the press’ are so woefully unprepared, they not only have no clue, but most don’t even know that they need a clue. 

It is important to remember that the first clear theory of plate tectonics comes from the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th century and that the idea was not verified and generally accepted until the late mid-century.  Islands were much more of a mystery before then.  Since news stories are almost all about human actions, with only the occasional avalanche or earthquake, the root is human nature and behavior stirred together with our history and the forms of relationships that we have struck with nature and each other. 

There can be no assumption that the audience for a news story will have any common experience or understanding of these roots, so at a minimum the reporter should be expected to tell us a bit about his/her understanding of these root issues with everything that they write.  And, they must have an understanding in the first place. 

A great problem rises up, however.  There has come to be the incredible notion that the root basis – human nature and behavior, history, etc. – is open to essentially unguided interpretation, that anyone’s view is as good as any other.  It would be crazy to select an accountant to explain the origin of islands rather than a geophysicist/volcanologist.  Why would we not attempt to select those with the best possible basis for the understanding of human behavior for this clearly more crucial comprehension and make such understanding an expectation for those who claim the position of telling us about the events of our world? 

Admittedly the situation is more complex than I have drawn it.  “News” deliverers understand that they need to appear knowledgeable and use a variety of devices to appear trustworthy.  We seek out the stories and interpretations of stories that we find must agreeable.  This has led to a media of appearances and a highly segmented audience.  But these happen to the degree that they do in part because of the vacuum of real comprehension evident in reporting. 

As much as I would like to lay the fault at the feet of the confused and disengaged public, it is impossible to do so.  The Great Many is like water flowing over the land, it seeks a path moved by gravity and guided by the shape of the landscape.  The Great Many cannot, no matter how well intended, do its own discovery, cannot form enlightened opinion in a vacuum of honest information. 

And thus the conundrum: only the public can demand that the media do its job.  The money that comes to the media is supposed, in a “free market economy”, to be a measure of the public will, but is not.  It is a measure of the corporate will and, since controlling what the public sees and hears serves corporate interests, the media responds to business interests from the deeply subtle to the blatantly obvious [1]. 

The passivity of the public has led to the self-serving conclusion that the Great Many are only sheepeople intent on stuffing themselves with fastfood and buying electronic toys.  But people will act in the ways that are available.  Tell them the truth and, after the initial shock and grieving process, a significant percentage of them will begin to refill with their native humanness like a cactus after a heavy rain.  This is understood by the smartest of the elite and watched for. 

It is not clear where the reservoir of courage is to be found, that courage that will risk telling the truth loudly enough and from a high enough place to be heard.  The powers will tolerate little fish like me and others, people who can be ignored, but when JFK might have ended the war in southeast Asia or Bobby might have gained real power or when Martin and his millions began to speak against the Vietnam war and the militarization of the US, then they had to go.  In fact, they need little fish to keep the public confused, to supply an immediate and local danger for the official story.  It is a balancing act that the powerful feel that they are in control of. 

Another way is more likely: the big lie told long enough is believed and then it begins to become tattered.  But by then it cannot be untold, even by master propagandists.  Such is the stuff of desperate revolutions.  A lie too big to stay hidden; life too stressed to resist the seeping in of, if not truth, the emptiness of the lie.  It will be one or the other. 

We are watching the powerful in the process of fortifying their position, building their armies, collecting the computer based ‘crowd control’ systems; preparing for the lie to tatter, preparing for the emptiness of the lie to replaced with tiny bits of truth, enough to whet the taste.  We are also seeing this in the craziness of the militia movement; the second amendment seems to offer a little nibble of solution.  We see it in the blank-stare patriotism of the ‘teaparty’ loonies; grabbing at the tiny crumbs of truth that morph from the emptiness of the lie. 

But is only a small and rapid step from the craziness of the grief process to the actionable potential of acceptance, not of the tattered lie, but of the forming truth left unceremoniously and painfully in its place. 

It will not be long until it is increasingly clear that our Orwellian war on ‘Terror’ is exactly that, a device to control the Great Many, a way to take their tiny bits of wealth and to fortify and arm the elites against the Great Many, against the inevitable tattering of the lie. No truth is an island, it is all connected and rooted in the human tectonic movements. And then we will see. 

[1]  From a ‘conspiracy’ of language that selects the same unquestioned words and phrases to the “army” of army experts explaining our “civilian controlled” military.  Of course, the obvious has become so routine that blatancy is removed and replaced with a fearful and passive bargaining.