I think we have now come to a stage where things may be a bit more familiar to the reader - in that we shall be dealing with issues that are a bit more mundane.
We have now gotten out of ether and universal consciousness and into the world of form, of individual physical entities. As an individual born with a stomach and a sexual reproductive organ, our true calling is to each and to procreate. The sex part is quite intuitive and I shall not be dealing too with that because it has been very well treated by the arts. I shall instead delve into the eating part.
Stage 1. Humans and Environment
In my version of the art of war - of war between humans and non-humans - a person stands alone in this world and ask: What is my next step?
In my little garden of eden, the next human step is to stretch out the hand and it shall be provided by the fruit of the nearest tree for sustenance. But even in paradise, there is need for knowledge, for some have eaten the fruit and lived, and some have eaten the fruit and died. Distinction comes into being - between the fruit that gives life (edible fruit) and the fruit that takes away life (poison). Which this distinction, one can be creative in the identification of food. The community that succeeds in finding the best way to classify food and poison becomes the most thriving one.
At this stage, it is still possible for humans to stay put in the original state and stand naked with outstretched arms and be provided.
Stage 2. Population Growth and Food
Stage 2 is when the population grows and there is pressure on the supply of food. There will come a time when what nature provides in the vicinity is insufficient for the growing population, and the only concern of the human race is food. This is as if the human race has been cast out of the garden of eden. Food is no more a sure thing for the existing population. The option is to fight for the existing supply of food (those who fail die), or to migrate out of the community into the big wide world and hope for the best, or to be find ways of increasing the food supply from the same existing immediate environment. By the way, all these three options call for some degree of creativity - to think out of the box, meaning to think differently from the traditional way of looking at things, as well as doing things and handling things.
Creativity in fighting for food requires the acquisition of power, the art of war and the organisation of slave labour.
Creativity in out migration requires the construction of the means of transportation, communication, organisation of autonomous societies, the saving of scarce resources, the investment in useful knowledge and contraption, the art of living with different cultures.
Creativity in the production of food in existing environment involves conservation of the productivity of the environment, the consumption at necessary levels, the preservation of surplus food for the uncertain future supply or increase in members of the community.
Stage 3. Social Organisation
In moving out of the garden of eden, there is a need for organisation - which in the primary stage will involve sacrifice by members of the cooperative to do committee work and in the secondary stage a group of professional organisers who are paid out of the communual output for them to tell the community what is the best way to organise themselves.
This organisation leads into the problems of how to get that portion of the output to be paid to the non-production team. One method is to fixed the portion in quantity terms, another is to pay according to tokens the quantity of which may be fixed or not, and the number of tokens may or may not match the quantity of output available for exchange. All these issues lead to the problem of the economy concerning production, distribution, consumption and the supply of the money stock and the demand for money, as well as price of output and the interest on money should lending and borrowing be allowed. The very simple problem of organisation of human society in as non-violent way as possible leads to arms-length and informal dealing that are signaled by price (or the number of tokens).
It can be seen that the economic system can be corrupted by the pursuit of the acquisition of tokens as an end in itself (thinking that these are valuable) and if not realising that valuable necessarily means hard-to-get, some token control authority may try to ingratiate himself or herself to the political masters in the guise of trying to smooth the production of output without being blamed for any hardship that must arise with any attempt at adjustment (i.e., getting some people to work or work hard or work harder) and end up printing more tokens and distributing them to the political masters (quantitative easing) so that the political masters may suffer no inconveniences while the general public may have their consumption curtailed as a result of inflation.
7 comments:
From eden, man prioritizes what he needs, for without food first, procreation is unsustainable.
And when his eden expands because everyone else like him latches onto the same success formula of prioritization, one must add to the urgency of hunger pang a more future-oriented concept called survival which is based on preparing for risks by over-providing for immediate needs. The power of more overwhelms the power of less.
Since this condition itself is replicated in other edens fighting for longer survivals, yet another concept comes into being. That of material progress.
As no one can make everything to maximum standard, itself a feature of progress, there will soon be specialization. This leads to exchanges which thus creates markets which leads to monetization of produce which thus leads to pricing and hence to the notion of value.
That next we ask what is the value of nothing must imply man has reached again the same crossroads that those before him have arrived at. The discord between price and value.
So, thinking we are moving away from the ether, we find we are in fact back where we were, in the clouds.
Does progress bring failure inasmuch pride comes before fall?
Is the discord between price and value reflective of something deeper and more persistent that remains entrenched in the human condition beyond economic doctrines as tools to define how man should regulate his life?
Vermeij argues that economics and evolution share the same processes - competition, cooperation, adaptation and feedback - against the backdrop of history.
The drive to make progress fosters competition/natural selection and cooperation/symbiosis to spin innovation/diversification that increases the tension in the supply-demand chain.
People seek to relieve that tension by trying to exert control over the chain. Namely the more efficient means to produce and the craftier means to generate new demands.
The catalyst for the chain of market reactions is the notion of progress as the seed of the original edenic impulse.
An impulse that was triggered in the mind. A mind that is beyond the organ called brain by the addition of a concept called the subconscious zone. A zone that accumulates all the knowledge and experience acquired by each person and emanates the feature called subjectivity which is the heart of the dilemma called consciousness beyond the secular memories residing in physical systems. The dilemma that puzzles why physical systems have qualia or subjective qualities.
Take, for instance, the hotness of a mexican chili. Someone whose natural diet is bland food will find its hotness exceedingly high. Someone whose natural diet is spicy curry will find its hotness invitingly moderate. Subjectivity at work which differentiates the levels of consciousness between what would otherwise be physical systems that separate man from presumably other species.
So, man next invents the scoville index for the hotness of a chili in an attempt to globally standardize the hotness of chilis and thus reduce the subjectivity of hotness to some quantitative measure. But the awareness or experiential factor remains subjective because the measure itself is relative to some assigned scale.
Thus economic value beyond assigned pricing mechanisms is dependent on relativity of qualia in the conscious id.
2
Perhaps the human condition where anxieties abound from distortions around emanates from losing our awareness of that relativity.
In the chase of progress fed by greed overwhelmed by fear of losing the means of our survival, we have become unconscious that we have lost our consciousness about values by losing sight of the relativity of things in and around us.
Which comes back to the stone. It may change but only imperceptibly over the eons. For all intents and purposes of a single lifetime, namely ours, it just sits there in some taoistic repose, silent, calm and dignified in its own way, and...impervious to all relativities.
While we innovate and invent leveraging tools like derivatives to create future markets today in order to accumulate more than what we need now because we want an advertisement-fed insurance for the continuation of our own well-being and that of our species.
Even when our subsconscious zone pings out signals now and then to say let's not celebrate too early the triumph of man in his progress towards growing his ability to control things.
For we have yet to control our own human natures.
Despite the nagging feeling that the balance sheet of life will always...balance out.
Which next brings us to our little corner in the vast reality of a bottomless universe.
If we continue to break the rules of life, economic or otherwise, and if we continue to deliberately suspend our consciousness of the relativity of our national condition vs-a-vs the global supply-demand chains, how can our social organization survive for long beyond our aging eden garden?
The way we have been doing things has been to create a drive to institutionalize the very factors of failure in the rubric of both our national administration and the demands of our society that will only lead to loss of our collective survivability.
Which is why the more canny have seen through the mess and have made their own decisions not to subscribe to those factors, but instead to adopt evolutionarily stronger means to ensure their survival in the global ecosystem as opposed to the self-cannibalizing mini ecosystem here where we are still chasing forms over substance, prices over values, epicurean cultures over the consciousness of reality.
In a multiracial economy, the x which only thinks it needs to win against y in order to survive will soon enough die in the gladiatorial pit of N, the sum of all fears.
It is already small wisdom to say that if one cannot compete, one must cooperate just as natural selection must give way to symbiosis.
But the symbiosis has to be clean, for if it feeds on the very ecosystem that ensures the survival of all, N, then the ecosystem like markets will soon learn to marginalize what threatens its own march to make progress.
That's why the culture of asking for tokens in exchange for advantages is a culture that takes from the future to pay for the present at inflated price disproportionate to the value that all seek to realize beyond economic considerations of survival.
In this case, its value is really nothing. Ask both Black and Scholes.
After all, if even a cyborg in Bladerunner could save a human life despite 'conscious' of its own impending erasure, why can't people who yearn to control one and all realize what damage they are really causing to men, women and children when they succumb to the improprieties of high office?
Unless all the while they have only been really looking down on them as stones.
3/3
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4/5
...miscellani...
Some time back, a thought dropped in from nowhere.
'All cannot if man does not.'
The acorn seed that drops from its parent tree drops where enough shade is provided to nurture growth.
If a wind blows it far away, its chances of survival are diminished. If it is resilient and wants to live and if the elements so favor that, it will grow into a stronger oak tree than its parent or even its siblings which enjoy the shade.
If it is less resilient and does not survive fate's ill-humor, it wrinkles and becomes permanently dormant, or ends up as winter food for a lucky squirrel.
The element of chance permeates the living world to deliver the message that life is fragile.
Which makes every achievement beyond just survival so much the more poignant. Noble, even.
The empty space in between our visible realities is actually alive with one message --
'ennoble all life'.
The old who are passing on should help the young to achieve that. For we live on who live more for others.
In the hierarchy of the living world, man seems to stand up the most. Yet we see in domesticated animals glimmers of some humanness just as we can occasionally see in some humans shadows of animals.
The storm or eruption that takes animals down can take man down as well. The sunlight that nourishes the growth of plants will nourish the global ecosystem that nourishes the growth of man too.
So that man and other living things are as one before a world peppered by the neutrinos of chance.
But just as most look up to their parents when young, look up to specific peers when older, look up to their bosses and leaders when yet older, look for inspirations from companions when eclipsing, and look inwards or upwards when alone, the one who binds all living things in one common ecosystem edicts that man can be the first and last role model for the living kingdom. As defined for this planet. One amidst n-zillions.
Mayhaps that is what is meant by all cannot if man does not. All others are just waiting for man to show the way inasmuch man is waiting for the Unseen One to show the Way.
So that when the connection is finally made, the smallest and lowest will be joined through man to the biggest, the highest, the loftiest.
Diversification mandates progress.
Progress takes many forms. Material accumulation and refinement is one. Spiritual awareness and insight is another. The courage of blankness yet another.
5/5
What all life on earth cries for is the animation of all life with an infusion of something that is hard to describe but palpable in its repeated calling. If only we will listen intently enough for it amidst the noise and distractions that bedevil each living thing's daily life.
Within this framework, bread and butter issues are just the nuts and bolts of economies and monies.
Man's most piquant dilemma has persistently been how to bridge the gulf between the callings to solve his bread and butter issues, and to fulfill his innermost role as leader of some spiritual pack beyond the hollowness and emptiness of life chanced together in an unimaginably large void.
That his universe is comprehensible to him and others, products of so-called accidental collocations of atoms, if some are to be believed, is itself mystifyingly incomprehensible.
Perhaps that mystery is a clue to the puzzle within an enigma inside a conundrum hiding a message.
.......................................
But the diversification we have been pushing is not that of conscionable ennoblement. We have focused only on material progress when diversifying and then take commoditized diversification itself.
Take taste. So food. A plate of rice is food. A plate of rice with veges is food. A plate of rice with veges and meat and soup is food. But a banquet hall stuffed with a hundred different buffet dishes is not food. It is choice. Taste of food to meet a primal need is replaced by choices of taste to meet a secondary need.
That we are asking whether nothing has value today is perhaps because we are having problems dealing with secondary needs.
Perhaps, again, why we are having such problems is due to collateral effects from parallel processing of a multi-tasked mind.
We replace our 286 with a 386 with a pentium NT with a duo-core ASIC and pump up our computing performance in order to enjoy the latest multimedia. Which we could not enjoy before.
The effect of that material progress on our minds is to trigger the same urgings when we walk into a banquet hall for lunch. Computing power has seeped into food tasting.
Likewise our mode of transport. Bicycle to biped to tinpot car to fiber-glassed twelve-cylinder turbocharged aspirated monster. With papercup holder and recessed usp port.
Abetted by glossy brochures, our minds grow inured to basics, our hearts crave for the next better model until we forget why so much has to be spent on something which is just to carry one from a to b.
For the real costs come in the spare parts and maintenance charges and the burning of unreplenishable fossil fuels.
For the excess spending could well have been used to create ennoblement tracks for others instead.
YET without the drive from material progress and without commoditizing its diversification, how do we drive improvements to free time for pursuit of ennobling activities?
It's all about balance.
Inspired, I see. Great!
bro walla, is in full flight! It's a wonderful sight!
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