A Stroll Past the Overton Window

This is a letter I wrote to a local news organization, that I thought I’d post here. It covers various of my usual screeds, but condensed and combined.

Editors,

I thought I’d take you up on your commitment to hear marginalized voices, by offering up some outside the box observations.

Human culture is very much a process of patching over the tears in the previous patches, essentially going back to the dawn of history.

At this moment in time, our two current favorite solutions, printing more money, or building out the computer capacity, would seem to have also reached the point of negative returns. So what is next?

Most people are intent on solving the immediate problems they are focused on and don’t want to be distracted by more abstract issues, but if the whole ship sinks, this is just fighting over the deck chairs.

So I would like to point out various problems that go to the foundations of society and culture;

Time;

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is the present moving past to future. It is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and history. Where those with the most authority in any topic are those who have devoted much of their lives to studying what prior people thought and did. That centripetal accumulation of knowledge.

Yet the evident fact, for those of us living life firsthand, is that activity and change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

It is like a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven. So there is this inherent circularity and feedback that we keep imposing our linear frameworks onto. It’s like we haven’t really come to terms with the world being round, not flat. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s a part of a circle. Life is a dance, not a race.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. That culture is about synchronizing and centralizing society as a larger super organism, based on the same languages, rules, measures, it might seem there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time, but it’s rabbit time and turtle time and the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died. Different frequencies.

The energy is “conserved,” because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees. So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns being generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy. The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise. With the circulation system in the middle. Motor and steering.

There are many aspects of this point I can build on, but I’ll move to the next observation.

God;

To the Ancients, gods were metaphors. Gods of power, tribes, seas, hunting, etc. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The various factions and elements interacting. In this context, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Which tended toward a centralized focus. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

This is a very powerful dynamic, because if you step back and consider that relationship between energy and structure, especially as expressed by the most significant entities in existence, galaxies, the energy radiates out, while the structure coalesces in. So structuring is inherently centripetal. Consider any process of building and it is condensing energy into structure. With excess radiated back out, as noise. Signal from noise.

Yet where is that centripetal dynamic going? All structure necessarily needs some focal point, from the black hole at the center of a galaxy, to the totem at the center of a village. It is like the eye of a storm. It’s not so much that presumed entity, but the dynamic drawing into it. Consider religions as like the childhood memories of cultures. That very earliest collection of memories and lessons that form the grain of sand at the center of the pearl of the culture.

Though over time, these foundation stones become encrusted, like some stone god in a temple. The actual reality is more like rings of a tree. Just so long as the growth ring is healthy, as each generation builds on the prior ring, the tree will keep growing, no matter how many bugs might be chewing through it, or hollow spots it might have. In fact, the whole center might be rotted out and it still appears healthy on the outside. The Catholic Church and its issues with priestly misbehavior come to mind.

The problem is when some enormous storm come along and the weaknesses become evident. Often those old trees fall.

So the problem with monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at that center of every culture are ideals. The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it. Remember, the light goes past to future, the frames go future to past.

Morality is obviously not absolute, as it couldn’t be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero. Morals are the ideals, the codes, habits, relationships, principles, etc. that enable a healthy society. Traditionally that one’s status be a function of what one adds, not what one can extract. Which is parasitic. While this last 3000 years might seem a long time from our personal point of view, from mostly tribal societies to nations of millions and now billions of people, it is fairly short, from an evolutionary perspective.

Which leads to the last point;

Money;

As super organisms, societies naturally form systems of government, executive and regulatory, as the nervous system, while mediums of exchange and channels for it develop as money and banking. Like blood and the circulation system.

Since individuals function as cells within these bodies, there tends to be some resentment toward the authority and control of government, while the potentials of money and wealth are fawned over. We have evolved enough to understand that government has to be a form of public utility, since its purpose is the health of the entire society, not just that centripetal focus on power for its own sake. Yet we are not yet to the point of understanding the same principle applies to banking. That the focus needs to be the health of the society, not just using wealth and power to leverage ever more wealth and power, until the entire society collapses, or rebels. The feedback loops need circuit breakers, or it all goes spiraling into the vortex in the middle.

Since we are these linear, goal seeking creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people tend to seek money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 describes money as both medium of exchange and store of value.

In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Try mixing them up and see how long you live. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would all be fighting over our lots. As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It’s not your picture on it, you don’t hold the copyrights and, most importantly, are not directly responsible for its value, like a personal check.

Money is a public utility and social contract, enabling systems of exchange, not just a commodity to mine from them. Think community tokens. To store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be a debt to back it. Given the only real job the puppets in DC seem to do well, is run up the debt, maybe this isn’t entirely coincidental? That the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.

The simple fact is that enormous numbers of people essentially working collectively, cannot effectively turn around and save individually. There has to be those large investments in the infrastructure supporting everything. Not just roads and other obvious systems, but investing in the next generation, not just piling them full of debt to support everyone else. It’s necrotic. It’s like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, because it’s keeping all the money for itself.

Consider the deficits started growing with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well. Then World War 2 came along as the largest public works project in the history of the country and the military became the golden child.

Now it seems whenever those seat warmers in Washington need to feel important, they go play cowboys and Indians on the other side of the planet. Which is what happens, when you give people lots of money to play with, but no real sense of responsibility to go along with it. Delinquent children with matches and gasoline.

Obviously I can keep building on and tying these various observations together, but this should give some idea of the issues being overlooked, as we stare into the abyss.

Regards,

John Merryman