It Is Really Pretty Simple

For all the complexities that we face in this crazy world, there are still general patterns of simplicity that can be discovered.  There are many examples, but these two give the flavor:

•The millions of substances of the universe are combined from the 90 or so natural elements by quite simple rules systematized for clarity in the Periodic Table of Elements.

 

•Millions of extant and billions of previous species of living things are, or were, organized into integrated systems of interaction called ecosystems, and all by the very simple and easily comprehended principles of natural selection functioning through the DNA/protein information nexus.

But what about the political and economic confusion that we presently endure, to which we respond in an ad hoc process that seems to carry us deeper and deeper into trouble and uncertainty?  Might there be an understandable organizing principle, a comprehensible simplicity that, while it may not give us the tools of control, could help us avoid the gravest dangers?  I think there is, though it is not so simple as the theories of electron structure and evolution.

Comprehending the overall simplicity our human muddle can come from understanding that every species has characteristic behaviors, often as, or more, defining of the species as physical characteristics.  Therefore humans have an expected behavioral set.  Secondly, the behavioral characteristics of a species are evolved to a defined environment.  Therefore humans have expected conditions of environment to which and in which their behavioral set is evolved.  And thirdly, organisms living in environments to which they are not evolved either die outright or adapt their evolved behaviors in ways that almost always are destructive of both the species and the environment.  Therefore humans, by creating their own ‘environments,’ are adapting a behavioral set evolved to the environments of their origin in ways destructive of themselves and the earth.

This is really pretty simple.  What makes the application of such simplicity very very complicated is the aberrant behavior that forms as adaptive product from evolved behaviors in inappropriate environments; there are no real limits to the variety of such adaptive behaviors, these are behaviors that arise without orderly underlying principles.  Sociology and psychology find patterns, correlations, but no satisfying unifying principles.  Freud tried.  Skinner tried.  Maslow tried.  Others tried.  But they were attempting to organize aberrant behavior into coherent species-consistent principles.  This would be like trying to find the underlying principles that generate baseball, poker, field hockey, chess, clue, chicken, marbles, war, ‘cowboys and Indians’, etc.  Wittgenstein tries to explain this one: we “know” that there are combining qualities, just not what they are. 

In a perverse symmetry, the more complex the understanding required the more numbingly empty the attempts to understand.  So that today’s thousand generations of efforts and distortions are reduced to “God is in his Heaven” and “greed is good.”  We must do better.

Often a metaphor helps: Imagine a regulation pool table with 16 balls on it.  With sufficient accuracy of measurement, the behavior of the balls could be well described through many changes.  If the size of the table were to be increased to that of a basketball court with the number of balls corresponding, detailed description becomes more difficult, but only by the addition of the number of interactions; each interaction remains in the strict service of the laws of motion.  Nothing is changed by moving to a ‘table’ the size of a city, a small nation or a continent. 

But what if somehow the balls contained a ‘memory’ of the regular sized pool table, if table size and ball number were important in developing the orderly response to the laws of motion, and that the ‘memory’ influenced the way that the balls performed the motion laws – with great accuracy on the regulation table, but less and less so as the table grew larger and larger.  On the basketball court sized table the balls began to ‘forget’ how to exchange momentum, began to vary the elasticity of collisions and vector collisions developed subtle confusions of angle.  These affects increased with increasing ‘table’ size until regions of the ‘table’ functioned by regional pragmatically adopted rules of motion attempting to give order to less and less well ordered interactions.  The ‘memory’ was sufficient to realize that there was something to remember, just not what it was. 

In such a situation there could be only one form of solution; to recreate the essential cues of the regulation size table.  The most obvious way would be to cut the huge tables down to “natural” size, but there would be other ways also.  Balls could spend a certain amount of time on regulation tables, return to the big tables with the restored ‘memories’ for a time until they began to forget how to perform the physical laws again.  The big tables could be sufficiently demarcated into regulation sized areas that most of the balls most of the time retained reasonable behavior.

It is possible that some balls, once having lost the capacity for exact correspondence with the physical laws of motion, might never recover; they would need to be kept away from the others on the table since orderly interactions would always be disrupted by them.  They would be easily identified on a regulation-sized table, but not necessarily recognized at all on a huge one.

If the metaphor is appropriate, then we need to define the size and nature of our human informing space.  It is becoming clear that our present expanded world will not give up its secrets of order – because it has no secrets of order.  I believe that we must begin by looking at the Paleolithic and prePaleolithic forms of human organization and at the patterns of behavior that are found in those primates most like us.  If that informing space can be reasonably guessed at and tested for its consequences, an option to our madness is possible.

This, of course, has already been done and for thousands of years.  Looked at in terms of the metaphor above it can be imagined that some balls, by chance, would find themselves in appropriate spaces and regain the capacities for “normal” function; then try to ‘report’ (interact by the rules) this to others.  But the telling of ordering and purpose is not feeling it and only the feeling of it is informing; the telling is just another story among a thousand stories.

This is so important that I am going to, perhaps, over explain.  If you are confident that the meaning and application of the metaphor are clear to you, then just skip to the end.

What are the parts of this metaphor in the natural and unnatural history of our species?  We are, of course, the balls and are generally of common form and function. Humans are formed by the same biological process of development as every other living thing: a set of instructions stored in the form of a DNA/protein structure.  But, and this is vital, no information that is stable and readily available from other sources will be stored as the DNA/protein instructions, but will be ‘stored’ in the stable and consistent surrounding conditions.  In terms of the metaphor, there is no reason for the memory of the balls to include the dimensions of the table if tables were always of regulation size; however, the information for properly relating to physical laws would require the regulation sized table to be properly expressed. The table is the environment in which our form and function are expressed.

When we make large and self-generating changes in the environment, we remake and remove the essential conditions for the development and expression of our specieshood.  And so, our relationship to the very conditions that inform and allow life to exist begins to fail.

There is no way to recover our true understanding or integrating behaviors by “understanding” our present functioning.  Only by having a sense of specieshood can a perspective be had and maintained that will guide the Many toward the behaviors of organized demand and sacrifice that can restabilise both our material and behavioral relationships with the planetary surface.

The first and most important step is to localize power.  The consequent distortions of national and international power relations cannot be incorporated into any meaningful action for the recovery of either environmental stability or psychological health.  A new book, A Perfect Moral Storm, by Stephen M. Gardiner (Philosopher, Univ. of Washington) purports to struggle with these very issues.

Somehow a significant number of us must discover ways of ‘returning to our roots.’  You see, we have known this all along!  The ‘easy way’, like taking up the plow and raising chickens, however, will not do for enough people to make a difference beyond those that actually raise the chickens.

We have overshot too far for the landing to be soft.  But that doesn’t mean that we must despair as the only or even first emotion.  There are ways to discover how to live the life the human animal was born to; given the press of the future perhaps some of us had best get to it.  It is only in the act of real self-preservation, as a functioning member of the human species, that there can be a future for our species and for many others.

Such a way of life sees the present Randian capitalist/fascist thinking for the insanity that it is.  Being fully human is a community based life, meditative and active.  And today it must be scientific – not supplicant to the science establishment – in respect for the processes of skepticism and discovery.  

A species values, that is, evolves its behaviors and material actions for, its young above all else; even a digger wasp has a longer functional ‘sense’ of generations than modern human institutions.  The most difficult concepts to put into action in the present economic environment (a very big pool table), concepts of present restraint in support of generational fecundity, are natural to communities of affection and responsibility (the regulation table).

It is really pretty simple after all.  We can understand and we can decide for ourselves to make the effort to become sane and retain sanity.  Build and find community.  Seek the clues and guides to living as a human, what I call specieshood.  And if there are enough of us, we might even become the barbarians at the gates of the Mad Empire.

The Day I Didn’t Kick John Ehrlichman

John Ehrlichman was a criminal.  He was convicted of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice for his role in the Watergate/Nixon conspiracy, but his real crime was contributing to the destruction of constitutional governance, destruction of the patterns of belief that gave a little power to the common man, woman and child.  I am not sure there is a worse social crime.  So he and his co-conspirators must have received serious jail time with maybe torture and other really bad stuff…

Then what the hell was he doing standing in front of me in line at the post office looking prosperous and happy!  I so wanted to kick him and yell out his crimes.  But I was a coward, too socialized, too frightened for my little business that depended on the most important segment of the community… and he was out of jail after only 18 months for one of the nation’s worst crimes; so maybe a simple ordinary citizen could get into serious trouble kicking him.

This was all many years ago.  (Ehrlichman is dead and I am still alive – I win. I know, really petty, but I have regretted not kicking him for 30 years).  The next year he and I were coaches in the same Lamaze class, and my attitude relaxed a bit, but only as I thought of him going “fuu, fuu, fuu, fuu” in the almost completely useless support of the birth of a new human being – maybe the kid would kick him.

But he did go to jail, even if for only for a year and a half in a country club prison.  The high crimes of the Bush administration, the continuing crimes of the Obama administration, the failures to enforce financial sector laws and the failures to bring the appropriate pressure on almost untouchable Supreme Court members who publicly flaunt conflicts of interest, these crimes and more – even more insidious than Ehrlichman’s crimes – will not even be admitted as having happened, much less be prosecuted, no matter how weakly.

Laws have two basic functions; one is to inform as to the rules of the society and the other is to indicate the seriousness with which those rules are regarded.  If a law is claimed to be essential and yet is not enforced by using popular and state power to demonstrate the seriousness with which society holds the law, then it is no law and only a suggestion.  Since laws tend to be created about things that people actually do, often for personal gain, things that destabilize or disrupt social functioning, the failure to enforce laws is certain to increase the incidence of and danger from the prohibited action.

The essay that began this blog opens with: “Is it possible in today’s political climate to apply the rule of law to the powerful?  If it is not, then this nation is only a structure of power-relationships that adapts to the exigencies of subterfuge and force.” 

I think it a pretty simple proposition: if the economically and politically powerful are not subject to the rule of law it is only a short matter of time before there will be nothing left of democratic design and rule of law that gave hope and security to our daily lives. 

It was clear from before the 2000 election, and abundantly clear after, that the Bush administration was a criminal enterprise flaunting law and assuming royal prerogative, literally in the manner of a despotism: Cheney’s energy task-force, which we now have very good reason to believe was dividing up Iraqi and other Middle Eastern oil properties, refused legal oversight; the many violations of law in the run up to the Iraq war and questionable dealings even in the funding and movements in Afghanistan.  It is a long list, available at various sites on the Web. 

It is my belief that the promise of the United States of America, as compromised as that promise has been, will be irrevocably lost if Bush, Cheney, Rove, Addington and others are not prosecuted for their crimes in office, and if the continuing violations of the Obama administration are not prosecuted.  I, frankly, see no way that the nation will recover without clearly reestablishing the rule of law in the public mind. The U.S. Constitution cannot function as a series of suggestions.

In the very most generous interpretation, that laws are broken to protect US citizens and business, there is still no defense.  Lawlessness at this political level can tolerate no assertions of ignorance of the intent of the law. There are many options for gaining full legal authority if some change in the application of law is actually needed.  These people willingly violated the letter and spirit of not only statutory law, but also the Constitution and its established interpretations.  They can have no defense other than innocence – there are no mitigating circumstances.  This is not a matter of being unsure of what the law was.  They clearly knew, demonstrated by their active efforts to cover up, hide and obscure rather than to openly explain their concerns and find lawful means to deal with those concerns.  Their criminality was against us all; against the very fabric of our society.

Perhaps if I had kicked Erhlichman and others had joined in, yelling their condemnations, if it became common knowledge that people would rise up against those who commit crimes destructive of the common good when they go to the post office, then, sometimes I wonder, might future generations of evil men and women have been chastened.  I think not, but still I will never know.

Understanding Our Dominating Issues

We are deluged with stories of events from the larger world around us, and much of what comes as news is more intended to persuade or confuse than to inform. Wars and suicide bombings, soldiers and civilians killed, money spent, changes in laws, elections in other countries, natural disasters, social and economic dangers, international economic actions and much more. Our personal lives seem to be lived in a reign of terror if we pay even the minimum attention to what seems the essential news of the day.

Our frustration with the news and with actually much more: the way the world is going; so much seems to be either falling apart or slipping beyond our understanding or control; our frustration comes from not knowing how to make sense of it all. Of course, some people know exactly; they’ve locked up a set of beliefs, including what fits and rejecting the rest. But the rest of us need a better model, something broader that includes as much of what is real as possible.

We all want essentially the same things: we want sufficient material goods to not be in want; we want sufficient freedom of action and freedom from interference to feel that we are in control of our days; we want the opportunity to associate with people of complementary values and the opportunity to be with other humans in the closest forms of human communion. We want most of our hours, days and years to be protected from the world's greatest dangers, medical and criminal.

And after we have these things, or sufficient imitations of them or substitutes for them, many people often want more. Some feel the need to have everyone else believe just as they do. Some people want more and more things, much more than they could ever use. Some people want to have power over others and need to be able to tell others what to do. Given the power of uninhibited human imagination there is almost no limit to the variety of potential needs, to what people might require to feel finished, to feel okay.

While it is not especially useful to call what we do today ‘Madness’ -- finer understanding is clearly needed -- the above description sounds both pretty accurate and pretty mad to me. It is useful to understand that Sanity is based on ways of life that are defined by a full representation of species (human) qualities functioning in reality. The absence of human normalcy within reality is what we understand Madness to be. There is basically no limit to Madness; it is only Sanity that is limited.

Madness is characterized by various forms of excess, various forms of unrestrained options of action and attitude. Sanity is clearly dependent on reasonable restraint. Societies or cultures come to have restraint as part of their traditions over several (or many) generations of essentially stable cultural life. From daily experiences come mores, taboos and proclamations: adaptions that limit specific actions as a way of organizing species behavior, and these behaviors are adaptive because they occur within reasonably consistent environmental contexts. Since these intimate and long-term environmental relationships have been replaced with rapidly changing social relationships, this ability to be deeply integrated into the environment finds expression in increasingly trivial and obscure ways, and restraint as an adaptive environmental tool largely ceases to exist.

This is expressed in two social/economic conclusions which seem to underlie our conception of our present selves, our business expectations and our economic science: a) We say that our individual human desire for things is insatiable, and b) that we have to exponentially increase resource use in direct proportion to exponential population and technical/application changes. In both of these propositions, if we truly believe them, can be seen a clinical description of Madness. To blandly accept them as true is also Madness and to live them and to take advantage of them for short-term gain is savagely mad. That said, all of the above seems to be exactly what we are doing.

It is from this place that we confront a handful of dominating issues in our world -- issues which we can recognize, but which are so bound in a complexity of interests, imagined interests, delusional realities, habits of action and habits of thought that seeing them clearly is very difficult.

It is not just that the dominating issues are shrouded in complexity that we might unravel with enough effort, but we are required to eat the ‘hallucinogenic mushrooms’ to get to the essential nutrients; Madness has become a greater reality than Sanity.

So, what are these dominating issues that are really the basis of our news, our daily experience and ourselves, and how are they perceived by Madness and how are they perceived by Sanity?

1) No animal has ever been in the relationship to its supporting environment that is the current reality for humans. We have come to a place where we can change biophysical cycles, where we are using more energy than all other species of life combined, all in a social, political and economic design that absolutely requires that we continue as we are. This means, in fact, that we must increasingly do and use more. And we have absolutely no method to change direction that is not catastrophic.

The very survival of "life as we know it" -- an expression which also intends to say "life as it should be" -- depends on the exponentially increasing use of the earth's resources. If we were to stop, then reverse, "economic growth" the economic and political structure of the world's nations would collapse into anarchy -- at least so the tale is told. Certainly no one has produced a method that would allow the human train to stop for a moment to consider our situation. It is all go, go, go and none of where, where, where!

The relationship that the species has struck with this planet of our origin, originally one of exceptionally detailed and rapid adaptation to changes in environment, has steamrolled into a domination by human numbers and activities that thoughtful people realize must eventually have an end; the form of that end and when it will occur is the only question. Many signs suggest that a major perturbation of our present order is only years away -- one or two generations.

2) Billions of people are becoming increasingly unnecessary to the global money (and biological) economy. When pondering questions of why we are so passionately doing business or religion or science etc., the statements of purpose almost always leave out the poorest, the sickest, the most marginal people. Billions of dollars for war, for space exploration, for social services in rich countries; private billions for our cars and boats, second homes, travel, movies, CDs, DVDs, makeup, etc.: some poor starving wretch in sub-Saharan Africa wrapped in a rag makes nothing, consumes nothing and is nothing in the halls of power. Yet these billions of people are there living on the land, using resources and demanding as well as they can that they not be ignored to death.

Much of the human world lives today in a state of extreme stress; from regional wars and local conflicts, from disease and from economic forces over which they have no control and no escape. Only a minority are largely free of such concerns at any one time and only a very small minority can reasonably control their situations so to be rationally confident that they will remain free of the more dreadful possibilities.

3) The design of our world is ugly and getting uglier, it is becoming impossible for many millions of people to find moments of quiet, to spend even a few minutes a day in meaningful contact with the simplest aspects of the natural world -- a world in which and to which our bodies and minds are evolved. Not just our information and entertainment comes from human controlled and designed sources, but it is becoming our whole life experience.

The human capacity for action, capacity for doing anything imaginable and almost limitless capacity of imagination, tools that were evolved to the needs of a troop or tribal hunter living in immediate contact and communion with the primary forces of the world, can be turned into any purpose when set free from environmental conditions and necessities. In large measure these capacities are now used in a world in which humans are the environment.

4) The terrible distortions of power: Power attracts people who are the least restrained in its application; it is adaptive: those who are restrained, who have very high standards for the use of dangerous tools, will tend to be replaced by those who will use such tools. This is ultimately not good or evil; it is about the simple fact that the presence of a tool or opportunity will gather to it those who will attempt to use it in all possible ways. As a corollary, it should also be clear that there is no standard of truth: those who would act without restraint in the application of power would also act without restraint in the distortion of truth.

There are, of course, many more issues and many variations of these, but much of the variety comes from how we approach the issues; whether we approach them in Madness or Sanity.

Issue one: ‘Madness’ usually begins by denying either the issues themselves or their formulations. For example, the very notion that humans are animals is often denied. Then, it is rejected that humans can have an impact on the biosphere, either followed or preceded by the argument that humans have the right to do with the world whatever we wish since we can (that it was a gift from God or some other nonsense). Since Madness is not required to stay within the bounds of logic and reason -- it is Madness, remember -- none of the rejections, denials and distortions need be coherent or need there be response to the pointing out of inconsistency.

‘Sanity’ on the other hand seeks to understand these processes in a general sense through the study of the sciences, philosophy, history, humanities, through personal reflection and to adapt a way of life that meets the species needs as well as possible in a world that doesn’t particularly support the effort. This is, in fact, what most people do even as they ‘try to be mad’ to fit in. Most people do not have insatiable desires and most people know that living within one’s means is a bedrock of Sanity. But, Issue three combined with Issue four drives the human ‘little engine that could’ on and on without regard to the consequences, and that is Madness.

Issue two is largely ignored by Madness; it is a problem that is taking care of itself by disease, starvation, local wars and genocides. The issue becomes interesting when the region in question has natural resources and the people must be moved (removed), but other than that, interest is only peaked when the people in question gain the power to be heard in military, economic or terrorist terms.

Sanity doesn’t have to be “humane” to be sane. There is the case where honest recognition of the reality of our terrible overpopulation and the literal overwhelming of the earth’s resources by billions of people can lead Sanity to awful solutions. Even if every human on the earth were to reduce their use of resources to a small but “comfortable” level (about 10 productive acres per person: there are about 2 to 4 productive acres available per person for the present population depending on how much productivity is allowed for the rest of the world’s living things) we would still be using the earth’s resources at twice to four times the sustainable rate; more that we are using now. At present the people of industrial nations are using resources at a rate of 15 to 30 acres person (The wealthy use 100 to a 1000 or more productive acres per person to feed their consumption. Wealth also “assigns” demandable unperformed productive use to the wealth holder) while in many of the poorest nations people are using 3, 2 or less productive acres per capita. This is below the level of survival. Never before have so many lived on so little.

Sanity would argue for immediate redistribution of the world’s wealth from the wealthiest nations and persons to educate the world’s billions in birth control and other vital skills and to generate changes in national economic systems and governments that would advantage smaller families. Arguments would be made for the nationalization of foreign held lands and redistribution of lands with strict conditions of use and resale.

Sanity would also argue for a Manhattan project/Marshall plan/Moon Mission level effort to comprehensively understand and design new economic and technical systems aimed at escaping the growth trap and changing direction toward a much lower population sustainable system. It would be understood that such a process would be painful for the poor and the rich.

It is clear that unless Sanity finds expression there will be continuing and increasing catastrophes involving millions and eventually billions of people. This process will also eventually overwhelm Madness. So, as is expected, Sanity would benefit Madness if Madness could only see it.

The expansion of human populations into wild lands and the expropriation of the lands of the few remaining indigenous peoples would have to cease in the clear understanding that we have lost a huge percentage of our native ecosystems and most of the peoples of the world who were adapted to the native environment, and these are losses that we need to realize are unrecoverable, wasteful, and deeply immoral if anything is immoral. The biodiversity of the earth and the ways of cultural life adapted by different human groups should be preserved; their destruction in what is really a biological explosion of unprecedented force needs to be prevented to the extent possible. To lose what we understand is one thing, but to lose what we have no conception of is another.

Issue three: Madness basically has nothing to say here. I am reminded of my children when they were about 14 or 15 years old. I would suggest that their rooms were messy to the point of being a sin against the mind (Madness!) and they would look at me like I was crazy; they saw no such thing. And then we would attempt to go somewhere -- to the river, the pool, etc. -- and they couldn’t find (whatever) and would wail their woes, toss and dig, in torment. Other times they would avoid their messy spaces preferring the neater lands of the living room or kitchen. Madness messes its messes and moves on.

Sanity attempts to clean a spot, often only in the mind, where the species spirit can meet the native world for a daily few moments of communion.

The larger image here, of course, is the human use of the earth in neglect of its exquisite designs. When humans were few they lived within the designs by necessity. Now that they are many they overpower the designs without realizing that they are necessity.

Issue four is where Madness truly shines. All events and processes are guided by the design order in which they occur. Without the design order of the environment to organize the potential of humans to imagine and to act, only limitations on the power to act are ultimately functional; options are essentially limitless and thus in the province of Madness. In this design, everything possible will be discovered and everything discovered will be applied and used. Commitments to styles of design, to Communism, Capitalism, to Democracy, liberalism, conservatism, etc. may be passionate, but they will be fleeting. Power will ultimately overpower.

Sanity in this case recedes into a very dark corner; its cornerstones, restraint and truth, are mushed like turtles on a busy highway; road kill in the fast lane. We have witnessed, over the span of recorded history and have seen in the evidence of paleoanthropology, the unrelenting application of discovered power in fuels, mechanical devices, materials and energy sources. At the same time we have seen increasing numbers of people organized in power based designs that compliment both the human numbers and the physical energies and means of control available. In this region of human action, Sanity only acts within the person since restraint and truth can only function within the person; the power world, in general, belongs to Madness.

Real Austerity and the Austerity of Theft

The two pervious essays discuss the ‘real austerity’ that the human animal must begin to accept and adapt to: the austerity of living within the limits of ecological reality.  These limits are composed, broadly, of two parts: the productive capacity of the earth and the absolute requirement that all living things be integrated into the ecological economy (see the essay ‘Taking Without Compensation’). 

The austerity being argued over in today’s quarrelsome politics is not austerity at all, but the more tiresome concern of who can steal from whom with the sanction of society.   It has become standard that when a poor person takes from a wealthy person – almost always such stealing is limited to some direct method – that the act is defined in law as theft.  However, when a wealthy person takes from one person, or many persons, the method has usually been sanctioned in law as proper.

The present attempts to impose “austerity” on society at large is, of course, not really “on society at large”; it is the imposition of austerity on the weakest members of society (or those who can be made weak) so that more of society’s production can be collected into a few very wealthy hands.  In the present Story that we tell ourselves it is the ‘natural’ right, even the obligation of an “owner” of a business to take as much of an “employee’s” labor as possible giving as little of the employee’s productive contribution to the employee as possible.  If the employee’s contribution is twice his or her compensation, or three times, the owner gets the benefit.  The employee is not even supposed to know the value of his or her contribution.  If the employee can be made to believe that there is just not enough wealth created by his or her activity to warrant compensation, then the employee can be made to agree to be stolen from.

The argument is not especially ingenious, but is effective: there is not enough to go around (which is true in the ecological sense).  So, everyone (meaning everyone but the rich) must do with less….  And then the real slight of hand: since government is taking, with taxes, from everyone and spending the accumulated wealth on services for everyone, then ‘you’ are paying out of your tiny incomes for everyone when ‘you’ should keep ‘your money’ for your own uses – the government is stealing from you and giving your money to other people.  Ergo, no one should have to pay very much in taxes, including the rich.

I take it back; it is a pretty ingenious argument.

Of course, it is a complete fabrication.  The very essence of human success as an animal and as a force of nature is the economies of scale that banding together in collective action have provided us (and of course the rich band together to act as predatory communities).  When a society pools its resources it can provide for the needs of its members with far greater efficacy at far lower cost than “every man for himself.”  It is, however, when the distribution of wealth becomes distorted that the human mind becomes distorted in relative proportion.

The reality is that a certain percentage of each individual human production needs to be collected into the community pot for economies of scale in the building of infrastructure, education, healthcare, energy, basic biological needs and other natural monopoly functions.  If one person’s production is 100 units and they are expected to provide the community with 20 of those units, but they are only compensated 50 units, and if laws are created to protect from taxation the 50 units collected by “owners”, then the worker is being stolen from.  The owner gets to amass the productive labor of the worker without contributing to the community wealth intended for community needs.

If there are 100 workers being compensated at 50 units, being taxed 20 units and supplying 50 units each to the owner, the owner is receiving 5000 units.  Assume the owner takes a reported income of 500 units (without ever being required to demonstrate that the amount is appropriate to his or her productive contribution) and then pays 100 units in taxes.  This means that 4500 units of production have not been taxed for the community services.  The true tax bill should be, at a minimum, 1000 units with an additional 20 percent for the owner’s legitimate productive addition to the total activity.  The worker’s tax contribution should be 10 units on their 50 unit compensation (progressive taxation is easily derived from this simple model, but that will have to be for another time).

But, owners have accumulated access to wealth at such levels that politicians and other community service people can be bribed to protect both the owner’s wealth and methods of stealing from workers.  The rentiers, the nature of many ‘owners’ today, have little need for the community services – actually seeing such services as competition in their efforts to extract more wealth from the exchange transactions of the populace.  The power of wealth constructs the laws as well as having outsized influence on population attitudes through the control of the society’s Stories about itself: the impunity of wealth requires that wealth be increased without limit.

The theft of worker’s labor is not allowed to be a prominent or even acceptable Story theme.  The old fairy tales about the dangers and evils of greed have been largely disappeared or are considered quaint vestiges of an unenlightened past.  The new Story is that the rich are smart and deserving – that proof of virtue is found in the wealth accumulated.

There are really only a few ways to accumulate wealth above one’s actual productive contribution and they almost all involve taking more from transactions than one’s contribution by using some form of power to reduce the legitimate compensation for contribution of the less powerful.  The present drive to enforce so-called austerity on the non-wealthy is really just the same old game: create a Story to support an asymmetry of power, hide those actions that would violate the population’s expectations and use power to generate laws and governing authorities that will allow theft.  And if the non-wealthy can be convinced by the Story that they are somehow “enriched” through some contrived association with the truly wealthy, so much the better.

* * * 

I am not suggesting that every person contributes the same productive effort or result or that everyone should be compensated the same.  I am saying that just as the production of the worker is measured, that the productive contribution of all contributors should be measured and compensation made contingent on objective contribution.  This would require that power imbalances be corrected and that the present inequity in our economic design be reduced to the point that one group could not so overpower another that theft can be carried out with impunity; people will still steal, but it should be called theft and not earnings.

The first step is to challenge the present Story and to spread a new Story that supports the form of society that we want and must have if we are to survive.  Revolution without a new Story would only change the players, not the play.  And it is unlikely to lead to anything reconstructable into a society we would want to live in. Large scale violent class warfare that would almost certainly spiral into an economic and ecological conflagration of unimaginable horror, depth and longevity involving the very capacity of the life sustaining space to support complex life forms.

As it becomes clearer that destruction of almost unprecedented proportions is the likely endgame for failure to come to grips with the kind of animal we are; if we can begin to realize both the dangerous capacities we have for illusion and the constructive capacities that we have for communities of biological integration, then just maybe we can, under the pressure of literally undeniable biophysical forces, awaken to the Story that tells of our sense of fairness, our desire to see worth in others, our rejection of thievery and our reverence for the living world.

It is no coincidence that the world’s mystics, prophets and enlightened thinkers have lived austere lives.  It will be from living with the real austerity of ecological integration that the Story of our successful adaptation to biophysical reality will form.  Otherwise the story telling species will cease to tell Stories.

Of course, there are monumental difficulties, obstructions to our needed travels greater than the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China or the expanse of oceans – all of which, I will remind, have been crossed.  The breaching ladders are there: the Internet and its kin, as well as the more traditional devices of the printed page and word of mouth.  The elements of the needed Story-of-Ourselves are there in the best of our moral Stories and in the growing science of our nature.  The world to which we must adapt our aspirations has been clear to many thinkers for centuries, but is now becoming clear to scientists and more and more of the general population.

But, there is also the terror of an uncertain future and the human capacity for denial, distortion and illusion in the face of danger: even though humans can organize experience into vast landscapes of time and space, troubles narrow the focus.  This narrowing is an effective way to survive in a savanna landscape as a gatherer/scavenger when the focusing is on the moment of danger, but not when the comprehension of big-picture reality is needed, when restraint and organized action are required.

The Stories that we must tell are of how we live together with each other and with the other life on the earth, no matter how seemingly insignificant or even annoying.  Our Stories must see us as participants, not as possessors; and contributors, not as takers.  We must tell that ‘property’ is not a right, but a responsibility; that wealth beyond one’s contribution to community success is theft; and success must be defined as integration into the sustaining flows of environment.  We must clarify in our Stories that making the most enjoyment of life, with the least extraction from the ecosystems in which we live, is life’s best goal.  Our Stories must celebrate the reward of living with material simplicity and with emotional and intellectual opulence and depth.

With such a Story or Stories as our underpinning and using sound ecological economics and science, choices could be made to develop technologies that support our Stories and to reject both the technologies and behaviors that violate the Stories… just as we do now for the present destructive Stories we are telling.

The Final Word On Guns

The big picture:

It has never been a good idea to begin the consideration of an issue from either irrational fear and hostility or eye-glazed devotion and longing. With that in mind, I begin looking at guns from the history of the forces from which they arose.

Human inventions have been and are most often about doing more, faster, with mechanical advantage and at greater distances than arm’s length.  And we almost always end up having complex and mixed feelings about our inventions.  I can, with two hands, scoop up a couple of pounds of dirt, if the ground isn’t too hard.  The big mechanical shovels can reach out a hundred feet and scoop up 25,000 pounds of dirt and rock in one dip (the very biggest excavators pick up 150,000 pounds in a single scoop). 

“Biting” or hitting something from 10 or more feet away has been a project of our genus (and genius) for millions of years: rocks, pointed sticks, spears, atlatl darts, bows with arrows, tubes with soft metal ‘rocks’ and explosive powder. This last has, of course, become the gun.

A man can throw a rock by hand with about 80 foot-pounds of energy (the amount of energy required to lift 80 pounds one foot, but concentrated into the striking surface of the rock and transferred to the object struck over a very brief amount of time).  A powerful handgun can throw a chunk of lead with an initial 700 foot-pounds of energy and, the most powerful commonly accessible shoulder arm, with 5000 foot-pounds of energy. 

A rock, with natural skill and practice, can be fairly accurately thrown over a distance of no more than about 50 feet (15 meters).  A handgun can be pinpoint accurate with average skill at 60 feet (18 meters) and much more with fully developed skill.  A shoulder arm can be pinpoint accurate at a quarter of a mile (400 meters).  These are the kinds of, and rates of, development that would be expected from something that hominids have been working at for a million years.

There are three points here: guns are one present technological product of a process that humans have been at for a very long time; the sophistication and power of the result is typical of many of our other technological pursuits – and, as with many of them, overwhelming and beyond our biological capacities to either understand or control; and guns are the present device in support of behaviors, specific to killing other animals and other humans, that have long been a part of the species.

But, before we get to the critical element of lethality we need to understand there are many things we have invented that may very well be doing too much more, moving too fast and pushing our actions out beyond the reach of our foresight, things that we have lost control of to our peril.  In this sense an AR-15 with a 100 round drum is similar to the mechanical shovel in its relationship to the non-mechanical power of the basic human.  Each bullet leaves the gun barrel with about 1100 foot-pounds of energy; that times 100 equals 110,000 foot-pounds of energy per magazine.  The two responses, “Wow, I gotta get me one o’them,” and “That is completely fucked up,” pretty much sum up the range of argument.

The primary difference between guns and almost all of our other inventions, that have come to dominate our lives rather than us controlling them, is that lethality is their intended purpose.  All the projectile tossing implements are to prevent a living thing from either running away, or from running at us, by killing it.  The origin and function of a firearm is not target or skeet shooting; these are devices with the intended function of creating incapacitating injury to another living thing from a distance.  This is the primary reality that must be factored into our response to them, not their other “utilities.”

The most basic question we must ask is: Does a community have the responsibility to control the products of human invention, and specifically to guns, the sources and methods of lethality available to its members?  A related question is: Who in a society should have access to devices with lethal capacities, should that access be regulated and, if so, how?  It would be a very hard case, indeed, who would claim that there should be no limitation on any invention or source of lethality.

(Let us dispense with the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; it really is a red herring.  Any honest reading of the amendments to the Constitution and the arguments surrounding their creation make quite clear that the intention of the Second Amendment was other than the freedom to have firearms in the hands of private citizens with no limitations.  Those who claim Second Amendment justifications for uncontrolled gun availability are seeking official justification for personal, and commercial, desires and fears by selective and dishonest reading.

Full text, Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.  Ignoring the opening conditional clause of the Second Amendment distorts its meaning and intention just as much as ignoring the conditional clauses in the Third Amendment which then might be read to mean that no soldier can ever be quartered in a private home, which is clearly neither the meaning or intention of that amendment.)

 

It is only sensible that a thing that can (be made to) kill with only the slightest of physical effort must be treated differently than other more difficult to use potentially lethal instruments, even those made specifically for that purpose.  Knives and swords, spears and lances, bows with arrows, combat hatchets and clubs(and like instruments), garrotes, various poisons, and all those hundreds of kinds of large war making machines are all moderated in their availability and use by either social custom or law.  Let’s just say that humans must come to realize that the whole pantheon of our inventions, all manner of weapons among them, need to be brought into ecological balance – as every species and living behavior has been in obligatory ecological balance for billions of years.

A Personal Reflection:

But here the argument gets awkward and spins into regions where, in general, humans have difficulty: probabilities. We like certainties better and do our damnedest to build sophistries that convert ‘maybe’ into ‘for sure.’ “No one needs a gun” and “everyone needs a gun:” the results of either certainty are both foolish.  Admittedly, the “no one needs a gun” argument, in most present societies, has more merit, but there are times and certain human activities when the capacity to deliver lethality is a desirable option to have at hand; our question is what are those times and activities.  And then, how are we to control and enforce our choices?

What are the unquestioned justifiable reasons for having (and therefore using) a gun, not generalities like “self-protection,” but the actual occasions when the legal standard, “most reasonable people,” would agree?  While in some larger context there can be strong counter-arguments, guns can be considered appropriate in the hands of soldiers, police, forest rangers, subsistence hunters and others who potentially (that tricky probability thing again) face lethal force from either anti-society elements or natural sources of lethality.

There are a few people in the world who have so slipped the bonds of the social order that they are a danger to people in general, very few, but they are none-the-less real.  There are also, still, a few animals that, if confronted in the wild, can threaten life and limb.

Whether it is the best solution or not, I feel better carrying a powerful sidearm when I am walking alone in mountain lion country, miles from any sanctuary.  And yes, I have been followed – stalked – before: it was marvelously invigorating, but it was also dangerous (which, of course, is why it was invigorating).  Given the only choice between not going at all and going without a sidearm, I would go in the wild country anyway, but finding fresh tracks or scat, or surprising a lion up-close as I did one day, is a more pleasant and desirable experience with even the illusion of the capacity to stop the very small chance of attack.

So, there it is! The argument: When there is a danger for which a gun ‘might’ be the appropriate palliative, then its availability should not be denied (you will note that is not the language of the second amendment).  On the other hand, when the gun is the danger, then a clear case can be made for it to be denied.  You can easily see that this quickly becomes unwieldy: if the gun is the danger for which we need a gun… and so on.

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Almost true; though true enough to ask the question: “What people should be allowed to kill people?” (This is really the correct form of the question of who should have access to guns.)  If the answer is that no one should be allowed to kill people, then, at least, those guns clearly designed for the killing of humans should be outlawed, no longer made and confiscated.  However, as much as we might like that simple and non-probabilistic answer, some people must be empowered to kill.

I should be able to kill a person intent on doing me serious bodily harm.  That sounds reasonable, but in my 70 years, lived in a great variety of circumstances, I have never been attacked in such a way (even by a wild animal).  The probability curve of my being seriously harmed or dieing has been pushed into the large positive standard deviations by automobiles, mountains, weather, water, my own hubris and occasional human general foolishness.  I suspect that this is the case for more than 99% of people in the developed world.  In fact, were I “attacked” by a gang of gun-toting blood-thirsty drug-addled criminals (like Charles Bronson in “Death Wish 3”) my odds would not be good even armed with what society currently accepts as reasonable for a private citizen. 

It would make much more sense for me to always wear a crash helmet and body pads, than to carry a gun, if I am concerned about dangers with substantial probability – even in wild country.

More arguments:

1) Guns as a hedge against “the government:”

Thom Hartmann’s consistent argument that an Apache helicopter or f16 (or Randi Rhodes’ Bradley fighting vehicle) vs. a few guys with AR-15s or Kalashnikovs would be so uneven a confrontation as to be hopeless misses the point entirely.  First and most obviously the confrontation described is the one at present in Afghanistan, but even that misses the point; which is, that the mistrust and fear of coercive institutions (seen as government even if really corporately inspired) is creating a variety of both impotent and semi-potent responses.  Aaron Swartz represents one response and Alex Jones represents another – but to essentially the same stimulus.  The same can be said for a wide variety of unlikely combinations: Julian Assange and Sean Hannity (government secrecy), Michael Savage and Mike Malloy (need for overturning common perceptions),

They each may draw lines around different regions of specific content, but like a Venn diagram, they also share an important origin; that is, the outsized concentration of power in the corporate-government hegemony over almost every aspect of life.  ‘Back to the land’ hippies, secessionist militias, crime-watch groups in minority neighborhoods, “sovereign” citizen movements, while having different levels of connection to Reality, all share the common motive force that something is terribly wrong with how power is allocated and relegated (limited) in our daily and personal lives. 

Each group has, in the past, seen their way as the way forward and have taken the word of the corporate-government sophists that it is the “other guy” holding them back.  But that misdirection is growing old.  The Shultz’s and the Limbaugh’s are sounding more and more alike as are the Frum’s and the Hartmann’s.  But it is the callers-in to talk radio that are telling the story.  Even when screened, as some admit “to make the host look good,” the depth of the more general angst comes through.

Guns are one of the few sources of a sense of power in the face of such confusing, mind-boggling domination – no matter how futile they might be. Even a grizzly bear is loath to attack a badger for fear of that one lucky bite.  An organized body public with weapons, even greatly inferior weapons, will be treated with more caution than a body public that is disorganized and individually powerless.  While the actions of such a public may be incredibly dangerous and ultimately wrong-headed, the fact remains that an armed public is more powerful in absolute terms than an unarmed public.

2) Gun “loving:”

The ‘little dick’ theory of gun affection is as juvenile a notion as the gun loving itself, and is certain to prevent either the proclaimer or the one proclaimed from discovering or sharing a more honest and accurate set of motives for their behaviors and beliefs.  This is equally true of the opposite number, the “wimp, coward and ignorant” theory of gun rejection.  Just as most male gun owners have normal genital endowments, gun refusers are just as likely to be tough minded, brave and well-informed as anyone else (though perhaps not about trivial gun detail).

Something else, and more, is working to attach some people to weapons and to cause some people to reject lethal instruments.  This is one dynamic that needs our understanding and attention.

That guns of different designs and capacities have different consequences is another dynamic, just as people are not simple, so guns, even though they share many common elements including lethality, have differences that need attention.

3) Guns as sport and survival tool:

This comes in two forms: hunting and the various kinds of target shooting.  Neither are the benign activities posited by advocates or as ruthlessly blood-thirsty as presented by detractors.  But that doesn’t mean that there is a complete or easy symmetry between the two views. Hunting by humans has changed the ecology of a majority of the planet’s surface – including the oceans.  Many species have been driven to extremis or extinction.  These are not good things.  Hunting was once an essential part of human survival and so is still a motive in our actions as well as a cultural relic.  But our vast numbers and the incredible power that present weapons bring to the “game” have removed sport and most commercial hunting from almost any usefulness (beyond that tiny few who still live close to the land) and have made hunting a seriously non-adaptive activity.

Target shooting may be practice for hunting and killing, but “plinking’ is also just fun: knocking things down from a distance to the accompaniment of a loud noise.  Getting good at something is pleasurable.  There is a language and a mystique around the whole process.  People can be together, “play” together, in the company of a powerful object.

But if we are doing these things so that we can survive when ‘the shit hits the fan’ we are kidding ourselves.  We should rather be working on organizing communities and learning to garden with both heritage seeds and native plants.  The earth’s billions would kill and eat every animal (as well as each other) much faster than most animals could reproduce – until the commercial ammunition ran out, until the handloaders used up the last of their powder and primers.

The symbolic, psychological and commercial uses of guns:

Guns are a source of power: It is a reality; it is also a reality that the power of guns has been mythologized and taken on a psychological, as opposed to a purely practical, quality. 

A person with a gun is a decidedly different thing than a person without a gun. The small and weak can be the apparent equal of the large and strong if they have equivalent “fire power” and expertise.  This is really not in question and is, also, not the question!  Which is: why would one need the “fire power” and the expertise?

A person surrounded by a community of trusted others might want to have weapons available against some form of outside threat, but would not feel the need of them when in the protection of community.  But, in a world in which individual power is held up as the ultimate currency, being in possession of guns seems to be an inexpensive buy-in to power.  It is completely understandable that a person who feels threatened as a generalized condition will desire a remedy.  Creating the ill-ease and then selling the remedy would lead to big money.

The fact is that millions of people go about their lives everyday without the felt need for the power of a serious weapon immediately at hand; and moreover, the general safety of their day-in and day-out existence supports their feeling.  There are others who have the felt need for the most powerful weapon that they can comfortably carry with them; there can be no argument that the existence of such weapons in the community increase a certain kind of danger to everyone. 

Summary:

All of which returns us to the opening arguments.  Humans have created objects of great power, power to dig, to lift, to transport, to communicate, to coerce, to store perishables, many more, and to kill living things in massive numbers – it is one of our greatest achievements!

• As long as our societies present us with the design that we are isolated individuals fending for ourselves there will be an increased felt need for the most powerful weapons of protection possible… until the people are more afraid of the weapon’s misuse than they are of each other.   

• Guns have come to represent to people more than the sum of their actual uses, be those uses positive, benign or negative: some people only feel whole and right with the world when they possess them and others become some degree of physically sick when they see them; they are an irrational source of both power and dread.

• Much of the anti-gun rhetoric is demeaning of those who have guns and is based in the fear of the anti-social use of guns; much of the pro-gun rhetoric is deeply illogical and based in the fear of others who might wish to harm them and the fear that guns will be taken away.

• Guns are not just “guns.”  A well-made .22 revolver is a very different thing than a poorly made .22 semi-auto, a .44 magnum, a 30-06 hunting rifle, a 10 gauge goose gun, a semi-auto military look-alike .223 or a .50 caliber machine gun.  They all share lethality, but that alone does not make them the same.  They are made for, or intended for, different uses and for different markets.  Treating them all the same only distorts and confuses the arguments.

• Present humans are not the blood-drained castrati of our deepest “civilized” fears, and neither are we the Hobbesian brute hiding our bestiality in a 3 piece suit.  But, we are an animal with great power, magnified immensely by our technological productions. The community (or society) has the obligation to maintain an order of rules and expectations that give the social structure predictability, opportunity and community standards of protection and safety.

• There can be no “magic bullet” for the gun issue.  Much of what is said about guns is true: in the hands of good, well-trained people guns have positive utility; the more guns, the more gun crimes and gun accidents; in the tension between the people and government, an armed population must be treated with more caution than an unarmed population, even if official forces are overwhelmingly more powerful; guns distort social relationships and magnify the affects of those distortions. 

As is so often the case today the underlying conditions of education, honest presentation of data and honest discussion that would give a chance to deal effectively with the issues are denied us by the misuse of several other of our massively powerful inventions.  As with so much at this critical point in the history of the species the massive concentrations of wealth and political power will dominate the outcome for what the economic elite see as beneficial to themselves. Quite frankly, the rest is sideshow.