Month: March 2016

It’s an emotional time when one is transitioning from what was, to what will be.  America, as a result, appears to progressively be an emotional wreck.   The economy sloths along at an anemic 1-2% growth rate with job growth being led by service industries such as call centers.  The most powerful military in the world has devised rules of engagement that defy any engagement that would secure any meaningful outcomes or strategic advantage.  The political parties are in tatters, with candidates promoting populist nationalism, serving up extreme versions of the past in an attempt to preserve what is no longer viable.  The foundational principles that have adjudicated  so many other previous periods of upheaval  are helpless to buttress an increasingly ignorant population that has only the vaguest notion of what they are. What passes for public discourse is increasingly more reactionary, emotional, and agitated, defined by the slogan, What Do We Want (fill in the blank), When Do We Want It? NOW!!

Its enough to make you want to simply sign off.  That would be denying however any hope for civilization, and we of course, in our own little way, are defenders of the ramparts of that very civilization, so a little more introspection and looking for silver linings are called for.

The first thing is to recognize that we are at the end of one order of civilization, and yet to discern the elements that will begin another.  In the chaos of watching things fail that no longer work, it is easy to believe you are seeing change at work, when you are simply watching the last tired efforts of a society to desperately hold on to what it knows.  The current President thought he was bringing the Change and the Hope, but the reality was that trying to make people’s behavior bend to your will was a worn out idea that was bound to fail. Something new is indeed coming, but we need to understand what is likely gone forever and let it go, if we are going to be able to respond and potentially flourish in a new world.  The answer is leveraged in a return to, and a celebration of, critical thinking, and the challenge is to raise our consciousness to that reality.

Personal Privacy:  The concept of personhood as mysterious as an unbreakable code and  unique as a fingerprint is about to disappear.  Almost every fact and nuance about each of us is available electronically to those who would look, and is progressively given up by many freely without the least concern.  We are a data cache to large companies, governments, and social exchanges to the extent that our behaviors, thoughts and reactions are comprehensively known and open to manipulation.  Social exchanges such as Facebook have discovered people are only too willing to put the most intimate information out into the cloud to any one who wants it.  The health information of essentially every modern society is on an electronic platform, and what you eat, drink or interact with, are increasingly owned by the society rather than the individual.  Governments such as China see themselves as the ultimate owners of every citizen’s thoughts, and have become world leaders in surveillance cameras, internet monitoring, and even proactive policing (predicting and preventing the “crime” before it occurs).

There is no sense to arguing the information is yours any longer, the question is, will we be willing to protect our individuality, our personhood against unwanted invasion or manipulation.  You can’t be comfortable with the loss of some fundamental liberties, and be squeamish about losing others, without losing them all.  A higher definition of liberty and personhood is in order, and the fight for the next generation is to recognize what is at stake.

Labor as a Means of Personal Freedom:  A physical job used to link directly to personal opportunity and freedom.  It provided the stability of predictable income, health care and future pension that allowed the individual to either maintain or position oneself for advancement.  A relatively small group of people had the pride of ownership and production, and the risk/reward equation that came with ownership.  For most people, the job was simply the byproduct of a stable life and other pursuits.  Now, the very concept of “job” is disappearing.  Manual labor, the capacity to contribute to production of goods and services, that would provide the economic means to eventually secure those goods and services for oneself, is, for most of the planet, the relic of a bygone era.  Robots are substantially more productive than people in assembly work, mining, and farming.  Computers reduce the value of human data interpretation, with their ability to summon and source massive amounts of data in infinitesimal amounts of time compared to humans.  What will most people do, when there are fewer and fewer jobs for them to do?  This has been the primary impetus of our current anxieties about immigration, free trade agreements, and loss of industries to other countries.  The very number of jobs in the world are diminishing, as the ability to more productively outsource to machines increases.  No amount of tariffs or taxes as proposed by current candidates are going to protect jobs that will be increasingly performed by machines no matter how onerous we make their transition  to other countries. Governments placating people with safety nets will only delay the critical thinking required to recognize what is at stake. What will more and more people do when their productive value is progressively outsourced to machines?  Critical thinking regarding what brings value to lives, not protectionist tactics, will be necessary to imagine a way forward when industry labor is no longer the source of individual productivity.

Traditional Education Defining Advancement:  Education has become the unholy home of artificial value and pseudo – self actualization. Increasingly exploding in cost beyond anyone’s rational ability to pay, at the very time that the ‘education” offered promotes the lack of any actual skill development, traditional means of education are becoming incapable of providing us with the critical thinkers to help solve our problems.  Degrees lean more and more to dividing our knowledge base into expertise in victimhood, chaos theory, and manipulation of the masses, rather than rewarding critical thought and linking disciplines to provide creative outcomes.  Requiring massive amounts of individual investment or societal support to fund further examination of our divisions – our blackness or brownness, our sexual variance or physical differences, does nothing for recognition of our common problems or contribute to their creative solutions.  Forcing people to identify their intellectual development through a degree rather than an accomplished set of achieved insights or skill acquisitions has led to an enormous ignorance as  to what provides real personal development.  Education no longer requires rigid isolation to  campuses where thinking becomes both expensive and able to be manipulated into a politically correct ‘groupthink’.

Government as the Collective Answer:  The sense of loss of control and situational anxiety  has led to people seeking the comfort of  worn out concepts of the last century to protect them against change, particularly lashing themselves to the masts of  an ever larger  and more intrusive government. Once designed in America to support only actions that individuals could not do for themselves, government has become the dumping ground for every failure in insight.  Designed to exist for our collective defense against attack, it now seeks to protect us against unconquerable foes such as changes in climate and equality of outcome.   The result is a morbidly bloated government that promises everything and secures nothing except the pathologic maintenance of the status quo. We are now inexorably committed to securing our future health and well being through devices that were inadequate from inception, long ago  destined for failure, and financially, catastrophically unsupportable.  And yet we cling to the concepts because the alternative to government’s sclerotic approach is to require some risk of ourselves, and anxiety makes it easier to pass the responsibility onto an unborn generation.  It won’t matter because the virus effecting all world order is the reliance on historical conditions that no longer exist and insight that long since failed.  The beauty of the critical thinkers that fashioned the Constitution is that they built the perfect machinery to evolve a society, rather than codify solutions.  We need a return to critical thought processes in our governance to cleanse ourselves of the last century’s loss of focus.

Nationhood:  The concept of what makes a nation has been traditionally tribal.  A tribe linked by language – Uzbeks forming Uzbekistan, Swedes forming Sweden, Japanese forming Japan – has conceptually been the means of nation building.  Where ignored or artificially  subverted, strife has resulted.  Kurds have seen their cultural whole divided into multiple countries within each they are a restive minority. Catalonians feel little affinity with Spaniards. Yugoslavia was ripped apart by sectarian and religious differences once the totalitarian government fell.   The United States was formed on a unique concept-a union of various peoples bound by a political philosophical culture founded on British juris prudence, British legislative governance and the British concept of freedom of assembly and speech. To best codify this political culture, the tribe became Americans and the binding language of freedom, English.  The permanent nature of this union was never in doubt when America was seen as the beacon of freedom in a world of torment, and the nation was the undoubted economic superpower of the world.  Strains are developing, however, after decades of flat economic performance, progressive assault on institutions, and a general laissez faire attitude regarding the vulnerability of hard won freedoms.  There is a growing perception that there should not be an American “tribe”, and the nation should simply be a repository for whoever sees reason to subsist there.  The critical thought that formed unique nationhood for America is no less critical today, if the idea that a nation of shared ideals rather than genetic commonality is to survive.

This year, America has determined to vote for the end of something, rather than the birth of a new beginning.  The three top candidates for President will be 70 or older, by the time they would be inaugurated, and they are selling a clinging grasp of the past with promises of illogical economics, class and racial envy, and perpetuation of the status quo.  All of which are doomed.  It is understandable that a citizenry, poorly educated about its innate strengths, looks to others to be strong for it.   It is a scary time for those who see human freedom and individual opportunity for what it is – mankind’s most successful means of maximizing our species’ capabilities and conquering our fears and darker instincts.  Inevitably, the choice is ours. And regardless of what we think, history will not wait for us.