Waking Up

There will no progress until the mass of humanity are no longer walking around in an artificial reality.  That reality, generated by our institutions and media, does not reflect the true nature of the world around us.  It doesn't have to be accurate.  A skewed approximation is more than adequate to get people through their structured lives.  It is not adequate to make the advances we will need to live secure, peaceful lives on a planet with 8 or nine billion people.  We have made great strides in solving material problems, no era before can match us in material comfort (Third World excluded).  We have also made some progress in our social evolution.  Education is more widespread, children aren't farm and factory labor (Third World excluded).  However, we still fight wars, distribute wealth inequitably, have a sizable per cent of the population unwilling to accept the social contract, and generally act in a short-sighted manner.  We have to wake up.  We have to see the world as it is and make a conscious effort to evolve our social institutions in such a manner that will leave us the possibility of a better place to live.    

Entertained into submission

The United States is interminably in debt and the people running the government are  interminably corrupt.  The Catholic church protected pedophiles.  The same politicians keep getting elected to office and the new Pope is celebrated throughout the world.  The reason sports on television is so profitable is that the viewer's visual cortex is telling the brain things on the TV are real.  We react emotionally to what we see on television as if we were part of the sporting event.  When we see the pomp and circumstance of the new Pope we get a happy limbic response.  There can be no revolution, no change without deprivation.  We have to be in a fight, which is hard to do when we are so well entertained.  Video games are so addictive because physiologically and emotionally they resemble the real world.  We have become satiated with our entertainment and as a result, we haven't the strength to fight.  Our emotions have been co-opted by the glowing box, phone, and computer.  Our destiny is in the hands of others because the masses are satisfied with a virtual reality.  

Opinion or Certainty

I express my opinions here and somewhere on the web exists the exact opposite blog, or perhaps thousands of exact opposite blogs.  How then do we proceed?  No matter what my or thousands of opinions represent, we have the ability to discern the truth.  It is the anthropological equivalent of the cosmological principle.  The cosmological principle in essence says that the Universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.  The world and society are knowable and is playing fair with us.  We do not play fair with it.  We manipulate and capitulate to the social conventions of our time and defend it with the vagaries of language.  This is the core of contention in public discourse and policy.  But society is knowable and our goal as a society is universal:  survival.  This is where I begin, with the premise that our survival and evolution as a species is the ultimate good and that we have the intellectual tool (science) which can provide us with the solutions to our troubled advancement.  Therefore, the politicians wasting money and the salivating masses dutifully following the siren songs of advertisers are detrimental to our survival.  It is not an opinion, it is a certainty that if we continue on the road we are on, it will lead to our extinction.  

The Failed Educational System

The educational system in the United States is failing not because students are not absorbing the curriculum but because the curriculum and methodology is not applicable to the age in which we live.  Children, unfortunately, have more to learn than at any time in history.  They also have to learn it sitting in a classroom while teachers use variations on the methodology under which they were taught.  The world is more complicated and the answers to our problems require a higher level of understanding of the English language, math, and science.  There are more things to know and they are more complex.  Children are more in command of their world and should be of their learning.  Invoking the promise of technology to allow children to dictate their curriculum and learning methodology will certainly help with the problem.  That will also put the unions into a panic because if the K-12 curriculum were available online with testing and guidance, they would lose membership, the antithesis of their existence.  Meanwhile,  the gap between the undereducated and the educated will continue to grown and polarize the society much in the same way the difference in wealth has eliminated the middle class and polarized the US into the dreaded 99% versus 1% allegiances.   

Definition of a Bureaucracy

Test scores for K-12 education have increased slightly over the past 60 years.  Costs have quadrupled.  This  is the very definition of a bureaucracy.  At least, the unkind definition.  This is a negative return on our investment in our children, our future, as politicians love to drool over.  The bureaucratic monolith that is education in this country merely throws money at the problem to perpetuate its own existence.  I am intimately aware of how the money is spent in education locally.  Hundreds of six-figure salaries for the county in which I reside, hundreds of post-graduate and doctoral degrees, and little to show for it.  Teachers receive more training than any other private organization of which I am aware.  Teachers are also the single most important factor in student achievement.  But the teachers and administrators are there not to educate, but to perpetuate the educational system.  Pass or fail, the cost is payed by the taxpayers, now and when  the students cannot compete in or understand the world.

words are not things they are symbols of things

The Los Angeles mayoral campaign had its preliminary bout yesterday with two candidates qualifying for the runoff election.  What was significant was the boundless nonsense that spewed from their pie holes when asked why they should become mayor.  It was the sound of this used car salesman pablum that reminded me of the first rule of knowledge:  Words are not reality.  Words, whether these patterns of light and dark on a page or vibrations on the air are only symbolic of reality, not reality.  QED.  The problem that keeps politicians in office and used car salesmen in business is that most people cognitively don't make the distinction.  When politicians vehemently pontificate with happy words and promises of a Utopian  future under their leadership, the public doesn't do the math.  The promises fade and the details wash out with the continuous bombardment of obfuscation, Doublespeak, and outright falsification.  We would be better off as a society if the sheeple were to believe nothing a politician says than fall for Madison Avenue propaganda that passes for political debate.  

Chaotic Change

Change can occur without the guiding forces of religion, economics, politics, or civilization.  There are no truly chaotic events.  Underlying everything are the natural laws.  It is chaos from a human perspective. Revolutions, natural disasters, and man-made disasters are as close as we can get to Chaotic change.  Even the suggestion that we abandon the current economic system would evoke visions of chaos.  How would we work, produce, and live without the fundamentals of the capitalist system?  But modeling this type of change is exactly what we should be doing because the current system is not sustainable or equitable.  We can cling to the current model which has outlived its usefulness or invite chaotic change, perhaps guided by the empirical analysis it will provide.