I think I accidentally made myself a Marxist.
Okay, that's actually a bit misleading. I was already a Marxist and (hold on to your hat, conservatives) so is everyone else. You see, Marxism is mostly a method of historical analysis based on resource distribution. It basically states that the interactions of people and societies are based primarily on wealth and identifies population based on their access to resources. It's pretty much population ecology with humans and is more Darwinian that Social Darwinism is, because it understands that the behavior of species is more complicated than "might makes right" aristocracy. Even the most staunch conservative is a Marxist if they use the term "class" to describe an economy. But like I said, calling myself a Marxist is a bit misleading.
What I actually meant is that I think Capitalism is fundamentally flawed.
Don't get me wrong, large scale Communism basically was a failure. It was horrendously inefficient, totalitarian and overall fairly shit. But Capitalism isn't much better. It's horrible at fair resource distribution, imperialistic, conversely totalitarian and overall also pretty shit. But, because the US won the Cold War, the great war of ideologies, we assumed that Capitalism fundamentally worked. Of course, this assumption does not necessarily have to be true. The Cold War left the US an empty shell of what it was before: an avaricious, hollowed out shell of a Military-Industrial complex stricken pseudo-empire. It was like knife fight: the looser dies on the street, the winner dies in the ambulance.
When I read the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, I was actually very much intrigued by how Athens paralleled the US, and how they decayed over the course of constant war. The Peloponnesian War for Athens and the World Wars and the Cold War for the US only reinforced the sense of entitlement to everyone's resources. Quoth Athens in the Melian Debate "For of the Gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will," and likewise the famed spokesman for Neo-Liberalism, Gordon Gekko: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A."
Now, I know I am making a bold claim about Imperialism in the US. After all, empires need emperors, right? They have flags and conquest and stuff. I am not the sort to employ ad hominem, and so I will explain my reasoning. Capitalism cannot work in a closed system because it requires growth, and it is a law of nature that things decay in a closed system. I'll give you an example: a bank distributes $100 to five people, and because it's a dick (and to keep the math simple) it charges 20% interest, which means each of the 5 people need to give back $1 interest in addition to the $20 loan. Now each person converts $5 into goods (production) and they sell it to each other for $15 apiece, each person making a handy $10 profit. The bank, pleased at these excellent returns, calls in the loans. To its dismay, the 5 people can only cough up $15, not the expected $21, and so the bank forecloses on the $5 goods. The bank liquefies its assets and has $100 while the five people are penniless. No one has any profit, because the bank expected $105 worth of returns in a closed system of $100. You can't create something out of nothing. There are further complications when you remember that entropy will take a cut of anything you produce and so $1 of the $5 goods cannot be liquefied. This means that the bank gave out $100 worth of loans expecting a $105 worth of returns, but actually only got $95. The bank played against the House and forgot the most important rule: the House always wins.
Still you insist America can't be an empire, because we have a parchment with scribbles on it saying we aren't. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what empire consists of. Empire is the creation of an open economic system from a closed one through colonial resource extraction. In the colonies, it is assumed that there is no demand for the resources in the area in which they are extracted (for Athens: no demand for tributary wealth by the Delian colleagues, Rome: no demand for arable land or loot by Barbarians, Vikings: no demand for land and treasure by the Christians, Spain: no demand for labor by Amerindians, Britain: no demand for mineral wealth by Africans, America: no demand for petrochemicals by pretty much everyone who has it). Of course, it is not just America who benefits from empire. Its satraps too, also known as NATO, benefit from this imperialism by giving tribute of their economies and metadata. America actually stands out among these empires that it has found an effective way to pilfer its own citizens too, presuming that there is no demand for privacy on their part and thus collecting all information to use as it pleases.
Of course, in this day and age, Empire is delusional. Like the bank above, we're trying to play against the House, and as we globalize even more we are learning that it is indeed a small world after all. If you're feeling claustrophobic right now, good. At this point there are only three directions to grow: reducing the House's cut by increasing efficiency through science and technology (it's working but not fast enough), expand into frontier (places that actually have zero demand), which we're doing but again, it's not going to cut it, and lastly stick our heads in the tar sands and continue to create artificial growth through imperialism, which is what we are insisting on. I can't blame them, honestly. This is how civilization has been working for the past 8,000 years, and it's just now reaching its limiting factors.
Or, perhaps it is time to put away Capitalism for now. After all, I'm sure humans have found good options for closed system economies before, right?
Yeah, no. Fuck that.
Sincere Regards
Michael Coffey
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
On Brothers and Secrets
... Epistemology
*Angry screaming*
Oh, Christ. Okay, stop, stop it! I know this can be a contentious topic, because it basically either credits or discredits every other pursuit that humans have, but it is kind of an important one so shut up and listen. It is pretty much the most fundamental branch of philosophy. For those of you who don't believe me, I have a transcript of the first philosophical debate in the world:
Philosopher: "Things exist"
Skeptic: "How do you know?"
...
Philosopher: *Clubs skeptic's head in* "No further questions."
You see, one of the major problems with any part in philosophy is that it's kind of based on the assumption that we actually are capable of understanding things. Of course, this is an annoying question to answer, because any conclusions we make are made within the confines of our own knowledge. The reason I have always stressed the importance of axioms and definitions of words is that these define our logic and meaning respectively. But at the same time both these are entirely arbitrary decisions, and are actually quite meaningless when you get right down to it
For example, take the infamous Orwellian spookitude, 2+2=5. When I read 1984, this particular doublethought struck me. The mind, after all, takes the path of least resistance, especially under duress and so it seemed much more plausible to me that when Winston was convinced that 2+2=5, it was not his observation of reality that changed so that a pair of pairs actually appeared as a pair and a half of pairs, but rather the four letters "five" the phoneme "faɪv" and the squiggly line 5 was the visual, audible and numerical representation of a pair of pairs. That is not to say that you couldn't convince someone that 2+2=5 in the sense that it was meant, but it would take a lot more work. Honestly, it would have been easier for O'Brein to give Winston the ol' lobotomy spike and called it a day.
My reasoning for this is as such: pattern recognition is one of the primary functions of the brain. It has literally been doing this ever since we developed photosensitive cells, back in our younger days as a proto-chordate. For hundreds of millions of years we have been honing our ability to instinctively recognize ++++ is as many pluses as ++ and ++. It's actually hard to explain, it's that innate. Then, this upstart of a prefrontal cortex with its fancy symbolic reasoning and linguistic representation comes waltzing in and declares that they've got it all wrong, that actually 2+2=5 and since 2+2 is ++ and ++, then 5, which is defined as +++++ is also ++ and ++. Of course, our old pattern recognition is having none of this whipper-snapper's bullshit and promptly tells him that his definition of 5 is wrong and that the actual definition of five is ++++, as per pattern recognition rules. Then the symbolic reasoning says oh and changes it's ledger while the pattern recognition grumbled that back in its day, visual aides were all they had and they were grateful. When you get right down to it, nothing has changed: ++ and ++ is still ++++, but that is defined by the logical phrase 2+2=5, rather than 2+2=4.
Of course, if you're anything like my high school English teacher you would probably be yelling something along the lines of "But Big Brother is just that good! He can change you innately using mind tricks alone!" And if this is so, just like in my English class, both of of us don't actually care about the points we are trying to make. I don't care about a depiction of an implausibly efficient totalitarian society, and you don't care about the limitations of the psychological mutability of the human brain. However, this blog isn't about 1984, now is it?
Nevertheless, people fail to accept that our mental capacity is physically limited by our chunky pink salsa. It's actually kind of disturbing how much people buy into the cultural epidemic of delusional positivism, positivity fueled-latent-omnipotent-telekinetic-wizard magic, and the idea that humans can know everything, do everything and change everything if you just try hard enough.
For those of you who do by chance believe that here's an experiment for you to try out: do a back flip to the moon. Go on, I'll wait (don't forget, pics or it didn't happen).
...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you didn't do it. If I was being a real dick, I could say that it's your own fault that you couldn't do it. Under the axiom of human exceptionalism, a human is intrinsically capable of everything, disregarding the limitations of anything, be it psychological limitation, economic inflexibility or the laws of physics, and if you can't well then you're probably not a real person anyway, so fuck you.
I won't consider the No True Scotsman fallacy in this argument, because the main point its that it's fundamentally flawed. Humans are limited. I know that because everything is limited. For those of you who've forgotten, let's review the laws of thermodynamics
1: The house always wins
2: The house always wins
3: Hit or stand, chief?
Sincere Regards, Michael Coffey
(PS: it turns out the Bible of all things already covered this point. Talk about not listening the first time...)
*Angry screaming*
Oh, Christ. Okay, stop, stop it! I know this can be a contentious topic, because it basically either credits or discredits every other pursuit that humans have, but it is kind of an important one so shut up and listen. It is pretty much the most fundamental branch of philosophy. For those of you who don't believe me, I have a transcript of the first philosophical debate in the world:
Philosopher: "Things exist"
Skeptic: "How do you know?"
...
Philosopher: *Clubs skeptic's head in* "No further questions."
You see, one of the major problems with any part in philosophy is that it's kind of based on the assumption that we actually are capable of understanding things. Of course, this is an annoying question to answer, because any conclusions we make are made within the confines of our own knowledge. The reason I have always stressed the importance of axioms and definitions of words is that these define our logic and meaning respectively. But at the same time both these are entirely arbitrary decisions, and are actually quite meaningless when you get right down to it
For example, take the infamous Orwellian spookitude, 2+2=5. When I read 1984, this particular doublethought struck me. The mind, after all, takes the path of least resistance, especially under duress and so it seemed much more plausible to me that when Winston was convinced that 2+2=5, it was not his observation of reality that changed so that a pair of pairs actually appeared as a pair and a half of pairs, but rather the four letters "five" the phoneme "faɪv" and the squiggly line 5 was the visual, audible and numerical representation of a pair of pairs. That is not to say that you couldn't convince someone that 2+2=5 in the sense that it was meant, but it would take a lot more work. Honestly, it would have been easier for O'Brein to give Winston the ol' lobotomy spike and called it a day.
My reasoning for this is as such: pattern recognition is one of the primary functions of the brain. It has literally been doing this ever since we developed photosensitive cells, back in our younger days as a proto-chordate. For hundreds of millions of years we have been honing our ability to instinctively recognize ++++ is as many pluses as ++ and ++. It's actually hard to explain, it's that innate. Then, this upstart of a prefrontal cortex with its fancy symbolic reasoning and linguistic representation comes waltzing in and declares that they've got it all wrong, that actually 2+2=5 and since 2+2 is ++ and ++, then 5, which is defined as +++++ is also ++ and ++. Of course, our old pattern recognition is having none of this whipper-snapper's bullshit and promptly tells him that his definition of 5 is wrong and that the actual definition of five is ++++, as per pattern recognition rules. Then the symbolic reasoning says oh and changes it's ledger while the pattern recognition grumbled that back in its day, visual aides were all they had and they were grateful. When you get right down to it, nothing has changed: ++ and ++ is still ++++, but that is defined by the logical phrase 2+2=5, rather than 2+2=4.
Of course, if you're anything like my high school English teacher you would probably be yelling something along the lines of "But Big Brother is just that good! He can change you innately using mind tricks alone!" And if this is so, just like in my English class, both of of us don't actually care about the points we are trying to make. I don't care about a depiction of an implausibly efficient totalitarian society, and you don't care about the limitations of the psychological mutability of the human brain. However, this blog isn't about 1984, now is it?
Nevertheless, people fail to accept that our mental capacity is physically limited by our chunky pink salsa. It's actually kind of disturbing how much people buy into the cultural epidemic of delusional positivism, positivity fueled-latent-omnipotent-telekinetic-wizard magic, and the idea that humans can know everything, do everything and change everything if you just try hard enough.
For those of you who do by chance believe that here's an experiment for you to try out: do a back flip to the moon. Go on, I'll wait (don't forget, pics or it didn't happen).
...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you didn't do it. If I was being a real dick, I could say that it's your own fault that you couldn't do it. Under the axiom of human exceptionalism, a human is intrinsically capable of everything, disregarding the limitations of anything, be it psychological limitation, economic inflexibility or the laws of physics, and if you can't well then you're probably not a real person anyway, so fuck you.
I won't consider the No True Scotsman fallacy in this argument, because the main point its that it's fundamentally flawed. Humans are limited. I know that because everything is limited. For those of you who've forgotten, let's review the laws of thermodynamics
1: The house always wins
2: The house always wins
3: Hit or stand, chief?
Sincere Regards, Michael Coffey
(PS: it turns out the Bible of all things already covered this point. Talk about not listening the first time...)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)