How Do You Go Bankrupt? Very Slowly. And Then Very Quickly.

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth.

Or maybe you can. It hardly matters. The truth correlates to the facts and the facts are embedded in reality. Reality doesn't change, so you are going to handle reality, the facts, the truth, like it or not. Or, put another way, failure to observe reality will not stop reality impinging on you. So far, this all sounds self-evident, but give me a minute and I'll get to where it isn't. If you find the current reality confusing, it will all become clear by the time I'm done.

To clarify requires some structure that is solidly based in reality. The first questions should be, what is real? What is the most fundamental statement about reality that pertains?

Biological organisms compete.

If anyone cares to undertake the endless quest for a biological organism that does not compete, feel free.

Competition is conflict.

No matter how passive that conflict may be, it is still conflict. A strangler vine is unaware of the existence of the tree, but at the end of the day the tree is still dead.

Conflict is war.

That may seem a little less firm, but observe that though there was no malice on the part of the strangler vine, the tree is still dead. It may have reproduced before it dies, but so did the strangler vine. The conflict continues. You might argue that war is a property of organisms that organise, but that is us so I find no comfort there.

Competition is conflict and conflict is war. No malice is necessary on the part of anyone at all.

Just for fun, let's take a human example. 'The abiding mystery of Easter island' is one of my favourite falsehoods. Observe the events in sequence and there is no mystery. Europe stumbled across the island accidentally; Europe being the Dutch, the accident being that they were looking for a posited continent that didn't exist. They fund an isolated nation, a people of one culture, without internal conflict, without external contact and so no external conflict. They apparently didn't even have weapons, subsuming the natural desire of young men to compete in an annual competition, the winner gaining some advantage. The Dutch describe a fairly stable farming nation. The statues were in place at the edge of the island. By the mid 1800's the statues had fallen and the island was a depopulated ecological disaster zone.

So, what happened? Did the Dutch arrive with the malicious intent of destroying the nation of the people of Easter island, wrecking the totemic statues and destroying the ecology? No. They primarily stopped to re-supply food and water. The conflict of cultures was sufficiently immediate that on the beach a dozen people died, despite being welcome enough to land, lead by a local, greeted with curiosity by locals who didn't recognize a gun as a weapon and so tried to take it from the hand of someone who did know it as a weapon. The Dutch wanted food and water, they got food and water, they left.

As ships from other European nations stopped by to visit, the interactions resulted in further losses. Pathogens from outside the isolated people took a toll, the introduction of a non-indigenous religion lead to internal conflict, they people toppled their own totemic images, ships took some for sailors due to losses of their own men to disease, some were taken as slaves and were later freed from Peru, taking smallpox home with them. This would be the mid 1800's and soon after the almost unpopulated island was turned into a sheep farm – and that accounts for the destruction of the ecology.

Competition is conflict and conflict is war.

How much malice was involved in the destruction of the nation of the people of Easter island? Some at some times over that few hundred year competition-conflict-war, but for the most part, very little.

[If you're wondering how the statues were moved into place in the first place, the locals were asked on many occasions and answered the same way, “They walked.” I see no reason not to believe them. Having walked an upright fridge-freezer across a kitchen floor and a wardrobe across a bedroom floor, it looks to me like an eminently sensible answer. The scale is different, but the principle is the same.]

Off the coast of India, there is another island. The nation of people here kill anyone who turns up. No one goes there.

Competition is conflict, conflict is war.

Views through this lens, the whole of human history adjusts itself into better focus.

It should be obvious that a competition of ideas is a conflict of ideas is a war of ideas. Any doubts about that are easily dispelled by by a brief examination of The 30 Years War, The Cold war, or indeed most or even all wars to some degree or another, in that ideas played a part in the divisions.

If you think that's bad, this next obvious logical deduction will make you wince (or howl or something). Different nations of different peoples express different cultures and have different ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, lawful and unlawful, and self-evidently want to live under political systems laws that reflect that. Where two nations inhabit the same territory, there will be competition to determine these things; some people(s) will find themselves living under laws they find abhorrent, and this will lead to conflict.

Shall we take a look at some of these conflicting idea? Well, why not. You must be familiar with some of them, or at least aware of the existence of same.

Equality.

Of all the dumb ideas I have come across, this one is so self-evidently absurd that it's barely worth a mention, yet it will get the longest. There isn't any. It isn't possible to have what doesn't exist. Equality of outcome is impossible, equality of opportunity is equally impossible. That the bell curve concept exists in mathematics and can be applied to any and all areas of human endeavour makes the impossibility of equality obvious. The consequence that there are things I can never have and never be is mitigated by the fact that there are thing is I can be and can have. Same for everyone.

Tolerance

You won't have to think very hard before you stumble across something you will not tolerate. It probably took you about three seconds.

Inclusion

The same as tolerance. No, I don't want to include cannibals in my family, community, town, country, culture, nation.

Diversity

Diversity simply ensues competition of what must by the definition of diverse be different from each other, ensuring competition between the diverse, and competition is conflict and... well, you know the rest.

Freedom of Speech

If you are surprised to see this one included on the list, I would respectfully suggest that you have not been paying sufficient attention to some of the things some people are openly saying. Some of those things are openly and self-evidently evil (and there's a word I don't use often) and no, I can see no justification for a society permitting freedom of lying and freedom of promoting evil things. A society is partly defined by those things which are a taboo, verboten, or whatever. The only competition is over which things, competition over this is conflict, and I'm not going to bother saying it again.

That there are people who will immediately attempt to jump all over me for expressing the above repudiation of ideas that have been permitted to become so mainstream that conservatives now passively or actively defend them will be proof of the underlying reality – competition is conflict...

While I'm here, a quick word about Sumto. The series is called The Price of Freedom, and really that should have been phrased as a question, because that's what I was trying to have Sumto work out over time. Well, reality overtook the project and I have put the work aside for now. The truth is that the price of freedom is everyone else's freedom. And the price is too high. A culture develops over time, through competition and conflict and war, over what freedoms the people of the nation decide they can give up, enforce others giving up, and which freedoms they can afford to keep or cannot abide to live without. This process is ongoing. It never ends. These are decisions the individual doesn't get to not make. They are what make an individual who he or she is, a family what it is, a community what it is and a nation of people what it is. The process becomes particularly sharp where different nations of different peoples inhabit the same territory, as they have different answers and … well, again, you know the rest.

I'm about done here. Read back from the top and you will come to a place where I point out that malice is not necessary for competition to be real (it's optional). Competition may be real yet unnoticed by one or either party, that conflict arises by the nature of the competition inherent in being a biological organism, no matter how passive that competition may be. As we are a species that organizes, war is an inevitability and viewed through this lens it should now be no surprise that history is written as though it were the history of war (and attempts to avoid or defer war), as war is conflict and a history of conflict is a history of competition, and competition cannot be avoided, even if no malice existed in any human heart.

Now I recommend that everyone go and sort themselves out.

I was going to leave it there, but by chance I came across someone literally frothing at the mouth. This concerns specific subjects, current subjects, but is as an apt expression of the foundational reality expressed above.

Competition is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkP65B8q0pU

https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkP65B8q0pU

On Belief

Thoughts as a River

Yes, my own thoughts on the subject meander some, as usual.

If belief is the consequence of our interactions with observable reality before we are even conscious enough to be aware of either ourselves or observable reality, then no wonder it's no wonder that belief is so foundational as to be practically unnoticed within our own minds.

An infant cries from instinct and is fed, and so believes if it cries it will be fed. The interaction with observable reality forms the belief, and the belief is reinforced as true. That this is selective in an evolutionary sense is clear; the parent who does not respond to the cry permits the infant to die from hunger and the genetic material of the parent is removed from the gene pool.

Perhaps belief is the foundation of observable reality for the individual. That our earliest beliefs matched observable reality before we were even conscious seems clear enough. When an infant make a noise the infant will get fed. Belief in that is reinforced with repetition. A different noise gets the infant cleaned so that sores do not develop, become infected and kill the pre-conscious individual. Belief then, might be said to be selective. When belief did not match up with observable reality, the individual died and the genetic material of the neglectful parent disappeared.

Belief that a noise in a tone of voice would get one cleaned and fed so that continued life occurred is foundational to experience. Further interactions with observable reality laid down further beliefs.

Belief can then be considered as the banks of a river though which our thoughts process. The more experience, the more interactions with observable reality, the more substantial and fixed the banks of the river of our thoughts.

Inevitably, some beliefs will not match up with observable reality though the individual continues to survive. Some beliefs are not selective, at least not immediately. The belief you can fly unaided is usually immediately selective when tested against reality. The belief that it is possible to lie without consequence is not usually immediately selective, though it is corrosive to society. The belief that you can lie to yourself about being able to fly unaided may eventually prove to be so, if ever tested against reality.

As the individual develops and encounters more ideas, often in fragmentary, unconsidered form, beliefs are added to the banks that channel our thoughts. Our thoughts erode the bank and our beliefs shift and adjust. Ideas are what we think with, so exposure to an idea can build up and channel our thoughts in new directions, linking up with other ideas and making firm channels. A good deal, perhaps even most or even all of this shifting of our beliefs may happen without conscious direction by the individual.

In the information age it is possible to be bombarded with ideas contextualized by other peoples beliefs.

Sometimes the banks of the river wear away completely and our thoughts flood. What is real? What is true? What is good?

Belief, the banks of the rivers of our thoughts, gets worn away here and reinforced there by interactions with observable reality in a process that is only sometimes selective. A belief may be initially harmless to the individual, yet harmful to others when applied to reality. For example, a belief in Global warming-Climate Change is not immediately selective to the individual, yet the decision to burn grain to produce energy has the immediate causal effect of reducing the amount of grain available to the market, the law of supply and demand kicks in immediately and the price of food increases, subsidized exports cease and a number of countries who relied on cheap grain imports find themselves unable to supply sufficient food to their domestic markets, the population finds itself unable to purchase the more limited supply of food, food riots follow, suppression of food riots follow logically - as burning down the bakery is never a successful strategy... and yes, I'm talking about the middle-east here, though I'm not going to go into it further as I suspect my point may be made. Belief can be selective on those who do not hold the belief when those who do believe test their belief against reality.

Causality is often obscured by its own existence. As individuals we move through time at one second per second though a sea of perceptions, many of which bare little or no relation to each other. Without notice, belief can build up from fragments of ideas that appear to link to others the mind has already been exposed to, each snagged from the sea of information that washes past our senses in a constant stream. AGW, or Climate Change, is a fair example. To the best of my knowledge, from some thirty years of paying attention to the subject, there is exactly zero evidence supporting AGW and an absolute mountain of evidence which causes the belief to dissipate like morning mist exposed to sunlight (ironically enough); yet the belief persists in the minds of a multitude of people for a variety of reasons almost as plentiful as the individual who hold the belief. Had every individual who believed in AGW had the idea tested against reality in a fashion design to be selective in evolutionary terms the belief would have faded from reality almost immediately. The actions taken to combat this demonstrably false belief have been selective, and will continue to be selective, over time. Nations that continue to pour hard won resources into imaginary methods of producing energy will decline economically as lower production increases price – when the price of energy is increased due to lower production the price of every single commodity is increased and the methods of generating wealth to purchase commodities is also increased. That cannot end well.

And I think that is where I am going to stop for now, partly because I just read this: “The more I contemplate the universe, the more I am convinced that the fundamental core of Man's philosophy must revolve around a single question: to pretend or not to pretend. So much human evil stems from the fact that we deceive ourselves, we deceive each other, and we seek to deceive God.* And one of the primary locuses of deception is the language we choose to employ.” - Vox Day

What Vox says here neatly expresses an idea that I have been struggling to tease to the fore sufficiently clearly to state succinctly. I'm just as happy to see someone else get there first as it saves me the bother of getting the idea crystal clear so that I can think with it.

*The whole of Society, past, present and future has been for me a very useful conceptualization of the many meanings of the word God and is useful in this context. I should say that the work of Jordan B. Peterson is quite simply full of useful ideas.

Just to finish up here for now, the subject is belief and selectivity. The meaning of a given word is a belief as well as being a deliberate structure to express meaning. A fair example is the word discriminate, a word that is now generally used to be, and therefore believed to be synonymous with prejudice. Society has long accepted that prejudice is bad. Discrimination is prejudice. Discrimination is bad. The bank of the river of belief is shored up in one section and the thoughts of the individual are channeled. Belief is selective. The word discriminate has a primary meaning which is now no longer to the fore of those who accept the belief that discrimination is wrong. Discriminate means the ability to tell the difference between one thing and another and make value judgments between them.

If a man believes discrimination to be bad then he might neglect to discriminate between boiling and warm water taking a dip at Yellowstone Park. When I heard the story of a group of youths literally diving into boiling water when there was warm water to swim through just a few yards a way I did wonder how it was possible to be so willfully negligent of their own survival potential. They did not take time to discriminate between boiling water and warm water. That lack of discrimination killed them. Being negligent of discriminating between snakes with similar markings to a Copperhead might well also lead to negative consequences. There is a mushroom that looks exactly like a button mushroom but is deadly poison, and it would clearly be wrong to discriminate between them. The use of the word discriminate as only synonymous with prejudice is insidious and undermines the individuals relationship with observable reality.

Belief is not some bolt on optional extra to existence.

Belief is instinctive and initially in accordance with observable reality.

Belief is selective in an evolutionary sense.

That is clear enough. Where things get muddy is in the established fact that evolution favors good enough solutions and that false belief need not be immediately selective. Existence would be a good deal simpler if belief that was not in accordance with observable reality were immediately selective, though if it were I seriously doubt any of us would survive to adulthood.

The quote from Vox Day was on a slightly different subject

I really don't care what people think. I really do care that people do think. Most of what we call thinking isn't. 

Why Do We Tell Stories?

Why do we tell stories?

It's a fair question and I guess the answer is clear enough from our evolutionary biology. Once our species grasped the idea that the future is real, that the fat lion under the shady tree will tomorrow be hungry and we might be its prey, then we needed a way of conveying the idea of what might be done about that fact, especially to our children, in a form they would accept and remember. A story.

JBP (link below) has shown clearly that the idea that the future is part of reality was selective in evolutionary terms, that our distant ancestors who planned for the future were more likely to nurture children to adulthood. So telling stories about that is clearly also selective in evolutionary terms. We express ideas in stories – such as The Boy Who Cried Wolf. A child who hears and understands that story, who acts the principle out in reality, is literally more likely to survive to adulthood than a child who does not.

Stories are thus demonstrated to be selective in evolutionary terms, and brain functionality follows trends that are selective. We likely evolved to accept the premise of a story and act it out in reality. True stories clearly lead to better results than false stories, and when evolutionary pressure was high this would have become a dominant trait. Societies who tell true stories, that acted out improve life for everyone, succeed, while societies that tell false stories break against reality, they fracture, fragment and collapse, often with great loss of life. But there are always survivors, and evolution favours 'good enough' solutions. Survivors of failed communities, built on false stories, will still reproduce. The trait of accepting a story as true and acting its premise out regardless of how it resolves itself in reality is a good enough solution.

As a species, we literally evolved to accept stories as true and act them out in reality. Results of this vary, but those who have a feel for or who tend to analyse a story for factual accuracy and imagine forward before acting it out in reality, are apt to be more successful. As a consequence, there are more people who have a feel for the truth of a story than not... but the trait to uncritically accept any story will always be part of the whole of a given society and part of the brain functionality of the individual.

The tendency to compare the consequences of a story acted out in reality, say stories in history, with a currently prevalent story and imagine the story forward to its consequences should become dominant over time. Fact checking, comparison with the known consequence of similar stories recorded in history, critically analyzing a story and rejecting or accepting it accordingly is also selective – those who do this would literally be more likely to produce children who survive to adulthood and perpetuate the trait. I say 'would' here because we now effectively live in a human version of Mouse Utopia (link below), a situation where practically all individuals might well survive to reproductive age regardless of what survival strategies they are taught and adopt.

With this in mind, it might be as well to now take a look at what is frequently called 'the sacred narrative of the left' and dig into the foundations of that collective story to see for yourself what veracity the story might contain.

Jordan B. Peterson & The Significance of Stories

Mouse Utopia

The Lindsay Shepherd Affair: Context & Analysis

These matters are not simple and straightforward, and I am glad that there are those with developed skill, knowledge and understanding who are shining a spotlight on these matters.

There is a historical context here - to large degree, the west is struggling through the long term consequences of recent history. The threads are often tenuous, tangled, and reach back decades. It takes time and effort to follow them back to their origins, and some of the origins go further back, they are ancient, seemingly written into our evolutionary biology - which would neatly explain why these issues continue to reoccur in one form or another throughout human history.

Though small groups, such as a family, can and do work according to the underlying ideas of socialism, the connection between effort and gain within that unit is still understood - children gain much but can contribute little, the family exists exactly because of this reality. That situation is transitory; children grow, contribute more over time, become self-sufficient, self-supporting adults. The connection between gain and effort, between effort and gain, re-establishes itself over time. In any larger society, should the principle be applied, that connection becomes increasingly tenuous, (the connection between effort and gain is not re-established over time), and as soon as it becomes invisible (through distance between members of larger society) the whole social system collapses. In short, when it is possible that an individual gain from the efforts of the group while contributing little, it is entirely consistent with human nature that they do so, and that the inclination then spread through the group as it becomes more obvious that some gain as much as others through little effort. The whole output of the group declines, eventually to the point that there is no output and the whole group suffers the consequences of that.

There are so many examples of collectivist principles applied to societies of various sizes, including but not limited to entire nations and empires that failed - every single time - that it seems incredible to me that it is not generally accepted common knowledge. Here is just one example... yes, it is a long piece by Stefan Molyneux (who has a problem being brief, but these matters are complex and require full analysis) but worth your time:

Now, back to the title.

"During the proceedings, Shepherd was accused of breaking the law, both federal (Bill C16) and provincial, violating Wilfred Laurier's standards of conduct, and of being actively transphobic. Rambukkana compared me directly to Hitler (and Milo Yiannopoulos, to be fair), failing to recognize that what I predicted would happen in the aftermath of Bill C16 (see http://bit.ly/2AZqj4B) was exactly what was undertaken by the tripartite disciplinary panel he headed."

Yes, this is also long, but also very much worth your time.

If you tend to feel you don't have time, then here's something shorter and more fun. I'm pretty sure that no one who reads my very occasional posts will fall into the snowflake category of human being, so I'd guess you are more likely to laugh than be offended.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

RIP Jerry Pournelle

Though we never met, I find I feel the loss quite personally.

We have lost a Champion of Reason.

Dr. Pournelle's blog holds a wealth of insight and information spanning many years. You will not have to spend much time there to realize that we have lost someone far more than significant that those who think of him primarily as a writer of Science Fiction.

Chaos Manor

Libertarian Game of Thrones

Stumbled across this today and thought I would post it here. Yes, it is as funny as you might think, but...

... but there is as deep a flaw with Libertarianism as any there is with other ideology. Real world functionality relies on all members of a society understanding, accepting and acting on its principles at all times. And that isn't going to fly.

There are several reasons why, but the most obvious is that the Big Five personality traits exist - they are real - and we are each born with a propensity toward a mixed bag of those traits, which leads to us each being unique, especially when factors of environment and personal experience are figured in. In short, getting a society to abide consistantly by the same set of rules is no easy task. Bad enough, but worse when it is clear that our species has a desire to control its environment... a passive, non-controlling ideology is about as contra-evolutionary reality as you can get. As a species, we did not evolve to be Libertarians, and attempting to adopt a philosophy that is fundamentally against our evolutionary biology is just about as futile an objective as I can imagine. A significant percentage of people wil work against it, work to influence, control, steer the ship, grow their following, and utliamately dominate.

Yes, it's a shame. But we are what we are and need something a little more robust and structured to keep more-or-less all of us more-or-less in line within a functioning society more-or-less all of the time. One society, one set of rules, within which we can compete without violence.

I don't think I'm going to explore that line any further, right now. Instead I'll pass you on to someone else who has a few thoughts to express that might be useful in developing or refining your own ideas: /Before western civilization - sowing the wind

There is more to the article than I reproduce here, and I recommend the visit required to read the whole piece.

"It is self-evident that men and women are not equal in all respects. It is self-evident that all men are not created equal. It is self-evident that all women are not created equal. The Bible exhorts us to be kind to strangers – but not submissive to them. Western tradition tells us to act as if it were self-evident that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; those principles became the common heritage of much of the west, but they are only an assumption; we have no proof, only the observation that things work better if we accept them.

That, of course is not strictly true; there is a great history of philosophy that leads to modern Western ethics and moral principles; but the average citizen of the west does not know this, other than having a vague knowledge that those who should know can teach it to those smart and interested enough;  but for practical discussion, the fundamentals of Western ethics and morals are assumed. We assume these truths to be self-evident even though it is really self evident that they are not literally true.

But like all rules contrary to observable facts, it is easy to carry them too far – and to assume that others share them when they do not."

That's Not Fair!

Stumbled across this vid' just a little while ago and had some thoughts about it. Probably best watch it first or you won't know what I'm talking about. It's short but sweet.

So, something we probably already knew is demonstrated fairly well. What child hasn't spontaneously put together the concept of 'That's not fair' all by themselves?

What this Vid' demonstrates is that the concept is built into our evolution at a very early stage. In a natural environment, effort and reward would be fairly equal. When inequality is artificially introduced, it is noticed really fast.

For me, this is kind of a wasted experiment, though. Wouldn't ti be interesting to push the boundaries a little? What would be the response if the greater reward were given for greater effort, or a more complex task? What response without access to the tools of that task, and then with the needed tools? With and without the ability to watch and learn the complex task? I think a good deal more insight into our own nature could be squeezed out of a series of experiments building on this theme.

I was instantly reminded of the story of Cain & Abel, for reasons which will only perhaps become clear if you invest the time in watching a much longer and more complex Vid' - but I do recommend it. The insights here have great value and are worth your time.