Immobilizing the Masses

Last summer, the band Wilco released a new single, "You Never Know", a very George Harrison-esque song. In the first verse, the singer, Jeff Tweedy, sings "Come on, children, you're acting like children, every generation thinks it's the end of the world." He managed to capture, in that verse, something I've noticed for a long time; we seem to be braced for the worst at all times, and this psychosis seems to be passed from one generation to the next.

And the newer generations are better equipped to experience that paranoia even better than the previous.

Our generation has taken it to new levels, in fact. With the advent of the Internet and the 24/7 news cycle, our need to believe that the sword of Damocles is hanging over our collective heads is taken to even greater heights. What is this accomplishing?

Nothing.

This mass hysteria, this belief that the end is forever nigh, is a poison, a neurotoxin on our society. It freezes us, it paralyzes us. We are unable to think clearly, we are confused, easily befuddled, and for the most part perpetually angry but with no real focus.

Trust me, there are people out there who will help us to focus that anger.

A quick look throughout history shows that those who are willing to help us focus that anger have their own agenda, and you may be assured that ultimately your best interest is not in mind. Think of them as fear peddlers, who also throw in a heaping helping of hate with every sound-bite.

A really good example would be the politician who can only win an election by demonizing his opponent. Or a minister that is always waiting for the Second Coming, and they need your donations. Or a newspaper that can only maintain circulation at the expense of rational thought.

In many circles, this is referred to as FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, an effective tool to achieve control of populations by playing on their neuroses.

As long as they keep us befuddled, we can't really think.

Do they honestly believe it?

Maybe, but the cynical side of me can't help but notice they are laughing all the way to the bank. Some of the people who are playing on our fears are raking in money, be they politicians, talk show hosts, televangelists or entrepreneurs.

They play us for suckers, and if I had to guess I would say they have done a very good job of it. We are effectively paralyzed.

Even worse, we are also controlled, and like a spider that has received the sting from a ground digger wasp, all we seem to be able to do is lay still while our very souls are devoured by their schemes.

Remember, people, this is still a democratic republic. If we wake up and shake off our fear and move forward, we, the people, can take it back.

And that is what they fear the most.

Living In These Modern Times & Trying To Keep Perspective

Recently, I had an email exchange with the CEO of a toy and model company. It was basically pleasant banter of sorts. I wrote to the company with my concern that they were going to price themselves out of existence; some of the model kits they are selling are very overpriced, especially compared to imports. He replied that production costs for the workers in the plant works out to almost $20 an hour including benefits, and this simply for the people working the dies.

If this sounds familiar it's because Detroit has made similar remarks about their employees.

While I'm not sure of the risks associated with working injection molding equipment, I do know the risks associated with manufacturing a car are surely magnitudes greater, which is why an autoworker can demand greater pay, even if they aren't in a union.

But plastic models are not cars, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Ironically, the fastest growing fields of employment in this country are in areas where there are no real tangible products, aside from one. This has been in financial, insurance and real estate, the so called FIRE economy. Aside from the latter (real estate), there are no real products being manufactured. Ultimately, the bulk of the FIRE economy has been the movement of data from one institution to another, of inflating one set of numbers and agreeing that another set was either going to increase or decrease. This may have been based upon some real products being moved or produced, but in the end it is all simply numbers, an agreed upon insanity that has gripped our economy for the past three decades.

This insanity has spread to almost all walks of life; we expect more, it seems. We want our slice of the pie, even if minimal effort has been applied. The pursuit of life, liberty and happiness has meant, frequently, that we have had to sell our very souls to ideas that we once would have found repugnant, even repulsive. In the end, we justify those feelings as simply the costs of living and staying ahead.

Staying ahead. Competition. Pretty much what it is really all about too often, isn't it?

We wanted to stay ahead of our neighbors, and for a long time that seemed to be the name of the game. Now, thanks to a lifestyle that had us behave more like racehorses not people, many of us find ourselves trying to stay ahead of the wolves, those forces that seek to undo the lives we have made.

Thanks to that idealistic notion of the American Dream, we have nearly bankrupted a nation, and not just financially.

Morally.

Why is it not enough to simply have enough?

Because it is bad for the economy that we had produced. We are a consumer oriented society, and a lifestyle that emphasizes "enough", or God forbid "less", runs counter to that notion. We openly mock people who choose lifestyles that are perhaps austere as being backward and Luddite. People who choose to ride bicycles over driving, or if they drive a used small car. People who choose to live in tiny houses and apartments. People who have ditched their televisions. We look upon them as quaint and awkward and not really fitting in.

But maybe there is a voice in our heads saying that perhaps they are more right than we realize.

During the nineteenth and going into the twentieth century, many practitioners of the still young art of economics had a tendency to base many economic models on physics. This certainly seems logical enough, on the outset. Of course, in the end it was a failed idea due to the fact that the economy is a social construct and as such can be manipulated far easier than one can manipulate the law of gravity, for instance.

If we must base our belief in an economy following a model closer to physics, here's an idea that nobody seems to remember.

The second law of thermodynamics.

This law states, basically, that everything decays. Energy can only be lost, not gained, and over time, complex systems break down. Entropy, friends and neighbors, is defined as order collapsing into chaos.

Welcome to our world.

How do we overcome this? I haven't a clue. I'm not going to break out a chalkboard and draw figures and connect dots and pretend I know, as some pundits have. The fact is that our economy, indeed our society, is simply a mass agreement. It is not based on reality, let alone physics. It is based on human nature; ever changing, subject to whims and trends and God knows what.

It is that last fact that those in power are all too aware of.

The ones who actually hold the monetary reins are all too aware that this house of cards that they have produced could collapse if the populace should suddenly wake up and realize that they have all been collectively had. The past thirty years years have seen the largest redistribution of wealth in this country's history, all of it towards the upper few percent. We may be the wealthiest nation in the world, but that wealth is concentrated, and insanely so, at the top.

In short, trickle down economics became tinkle upon economics. This, my friends, is the very definition of plutocracy, rule by the rich.

When a simple medical operation is enough to send most American families into bankruptcy. When we keep sending jobs overseas and laying off workers here. When public schools are forced to lay off teachers while enrollment grows. When it becomes painfully obvious that the United States is well on its way to becoming a third world country with pockets of modest prosperity. When something that used to cost $5.95 suddenly jumps to $15.00.

I could go on with the "whens". It'd be insane to. But there is one more "when", and that is when are we going to wake up from this fugue and pull ourselves out of this morass? Or are we going to continue along this path as long as we are forced fed and willingly consume our daily bread and circuses that keep our minds mushy and the powerful assured of their lofty perches?

Trying to keep this in perspective is an exercise in futility, because sadly the perspective shifts. I understand and emphasize with many viewpoints. It'd be better or simple enough to say that we are all collectively screwed as long as this continues.

And from where I sit, I see this only getting worse.

The Rented Life

One of the things I find most humorous about humanity is our ability to be contradictory. We say one thing yet clearly mean another. Human nature, yes?

We are ultimately self serving. It is something in our makeup, our biology even, that produces this selfishness. We tend to place emphasis on ourselves first. I'm not saying it is good or bad, simply a trait of humanity.

However, the one thing that almost everyone fails to remember is that we are here on borrowed time.

On average, the human lifespan is eight decades. During a single human lifespan, several other generations come along (I find the idea of generations itself interesting; there will always be others born after you, and in a real sense every year following your birth is yet another generation, as really they blend together). The newer these generations, the longer they will survive you. Somebody born thirty years after you were born will likely be around thirty years after you've died.

While it is said that humans are the only animals on Earth that are aware of their own mortality, we also seem to be the ones least likely to acknowledge it. That same selfish streak that so defines our actions seems to make us think that the only life that truly matters is our own, or at least that which is around as long as we are. We say that we care about children, about the young voices, and indeed go to extreme lengths to protect them. However, that protection, that care, seems to wane as they age. By the time the young become adults, they have joined our ranks and are treated with the same regard we show toward other adults.

In short, it's sink or swim.

And as with all the others amongst us, the selfishness begins its cycle anew.

Each generation treats the world as its own, yet feigns concern about the young. We talk about how much we care about children yet treat the world as if it were ours and ours alone. It is a world that they will inherit from us, yet we seem to give that fact little thought at all.

In his book "Next", author Michael Lewis explored how the then up and coming generation in the 1990's and early Aughts were handling the world that they were being handed, and their use of this nascent technology to make a better one for themselves, usually to the consternation of the adults.

One theme that was a constant in his book was the fact that there is actually generational warfare going on. While we say we care and want the best for our children, the truth seems to be that we fear them and what they might do to the world that we have really created for ourselves.

I find this idea fascinating. It actually makes sense, for it never really becomes so apparent as when the younger generation reaches adulthood. There seems to be a cut off point for caring about those younger than us. There is some logic to it, to be honest. But all this posturing we do for children and making their world better seems to be insincere at best; they will eventually become adults, and at that point we won't care.

Perhaps this dichotomy is no better illustrated then the lengths we go to protect the rights of the unborn yet how we also seem to be underfunding public education and simultaneously destroying the very world that they will inherit.

We love babies, we hate people.

And we love our own babies more than anyone else's. If you need proof that humans are nothing more than animals, look no further than that; our offspring first, our genetic heritage first.

This tendency to only think of what benefits us and our offspring is indeed linked to our very genetics. We want to give our own gene pool a better chance to propagate.

If we expand our point of view to beyond our own lives, we will find that thinking of our own life as the only one that matters is ultimately destructive. Too many of us think this way already. We are not immortal, we rent this life at best. One day, we will die, and our true heritage is what we leave behind, who we leave behind. If we think beyond our own mortal lives, we can truly produce a better world not just for the here and now but for the yet to come.

That's real immortality.

Digital Ghosts

I had a few errands to run today. As I was driving, I was listening to Neal Conan on "Talk of the Nation". The topic; preparing for your digital demise, with guest Robert Roper.
This gist of the story was basically this; how do you close out your online life after you have shuffled off this mortal coil? It was an interesting discussion indeed, but it touched on many things that have been on my mind of late and the subject of much philosophy for centuries, not that things digital have been around that long.
We leave much behind. There is always unfinished business, to be sure. With the advent of the Internet, some of this unfinished business gains a new digital dimension that previous generations would have never even speculated on (though certain science fiction writers certainly have). Imagine receiving email from someone recently deceased. It has happened. Or online accounts that continue with their activity after the account holders have died (I can't help but wonder how this will affect online role playing games). There are blogs, Facebook accounts, documents and other files stored online. With more and more of our lives being stored in this Cloud (as it is often called), this likelihood is great. We are virtually all over the place.
The first time I read about someone posting about their lives as they were dying was in "The WELL: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community" by Katie Hafner. One of the principle characters in the book, futurist Tom Mandel, was aware that he wasn't long for this world and posted his thoughts shortly before died, and there they remained after.
In a very real sense, what we write is what we are. It can be thought of as one-way telepathy; you're putting your thoughts out there, straight from your brain, through the nervous system to your fingers and then through your stylus or pen or the keyboard you are punching. You have now converted electrochemical energy into tangible form that others can see. Through that, perhaps they can get a sense of who you are.
Or were.
For many years, I kept a journal, recording my thoughts and ideas. When the opportunity to share these with others arose, I really didn't hesitate to do so. It allowed me to share... me. Like my journals, I want these to survive my physical body. Perhaps its buying a little bit of immortality to have my ideas, those firings (and occasional misfirings) of synaptic activity moved someplace else. Of course, there are always the journals as well.
I would want to be remembered.
The notion of my email and networking accounts surviving me, though, is an intriguing one. I suppose I could always set them up to send out an occasional haiku or some random verse. A message in a digital bottle from the afterlife, if you will. Certainly fits in with my sense of humor.
All the random bits I've thrown around, that all of us have, are now digital echoes in electronic space. From time to time they are our own ghost in the machine.