On Rudolf Steiner’s prediction of the Third World War and its Spiritual Background

‘‘Wherever love and compassion are active in life, we can perceive the magic breath of the spirit blowing through the sense world.” ~Rudolf Steiner

World History in its Making

What we are seeing now is going to change the world for all time. Materialism in the West is on the decline and the Czarism of the East is likewise going to disappear, and this last is what the current war is about. Between the East and West, we have Europe, and it has been split between these two paradigms, but now it has begun its fight for the independence of these two world views. Steiner describes the three in this way:

“The religious impulses of the particular ethnic groups will contribute in their different ways to an understanding of this tripartite division of man.

• The East and the Russian people to the understanding of the spirit;
• The West to an understanding of the body;
• Central Europe to an understanding of the soul.

But all these impulses are interwoven of course.” ~From GA 185

In the following, I will look at Steiner’s prediction of a potential WW between the USA on one side and Russia and China on the other, and on USA’s first Pluto return and its connection with the prediction, and Steiner’s description of the background on the polarity between Russia and America, and between Czarism and the Soul of the Slavs. Steiner on Czarism versus the Russian folk soul:

“Czarism and Russianism have always been strangers to each other, they never had anything in common. Those who understand the Russian nature, especially its piety, must have found the attitude to the elimination of Czarism as something self-evident when the time was ripe.” See From Symptom to Reality in Modern History.

I made a horoscope for 2020 in March that year, seen from an astrological, esoteric, and karmic historic view, and it was maybe the most impressive horoscope in 2000 years, it was about the end of American materialism. I predicted that Trump would lose, but still try to keep the power, but would fail in the attempt. Three times before the same happened in Rome, France and Germany, but this time without success: Horoscope for 2020.

I looked into the many texts on the Return of Christ and the resistance the opposition would present us with, and my conclusion was that 2020 was the crucial year where we would show if we had understood our curriculum, and we had.

Greatest Potential for Violence

As a result of the return of Christ I began looking at the three major cultures where people have difficulties becoming free on their own, where the potential for violence is greatest, and that is Russia, China, and the Islamic world, so I expected that we would see confrontations in one way or the other in the coming sunspot (See Steiner on Sunspots) period, but in a lesser scale than in the previous periods, as the potential for evil is weaker now than in many many years.

I have followed how Russia and China have increased their military involvement in recent times, especially China has increased the pressure on neighboring countries, such as India Nepal, and especially Taiwan, just as they torment their minorities, such as the Tibetans whose monasteries and shrines they destroy.

The Return of Christ

We are living under the return of Christ, it’s not just something abstract, the spiritual world is full of light. See: Steiner’s description on what happens now.

The coronavirus created a gap between the etheric and physical body, making people more perceptible to the spiritual and less inclined to act out of the physical, less inclined to create karma. Steiner has described it with Goethe and in connection with the smallpox vaccine, and I have written about it in more groups and in my 2020 astrological prediction. Many spiritual people have experienced this separation. Materialists are less motivated to manifest their will in the physical world, golf may be more interesting than winning an election. See Horoscope for 2020.

It seems that the Russian soldiers are disillusioned, that they even disobey orders when ordered to shoot at villages with civilians. Many soldiers thought it was an exercise other was told the Ukrainians welcomed them with roses, but they were stopped by civilians who stood in front of their vehicles or they were shot at in combat.

The world has become magical, it may mean that war becomes near impossible in the future when all are permeated by the etheric, with Christ. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I think we are out for some surprises. I expected some miracles in Ukraine, but the reality has surpassed my expectations, and I think everyone’s expectations.

Steiner’s Predictions

I had started looking at the horoscope for 2022 as there seemed to be something relevant for the tensions at the Ukrainian border. Under this work I was made aware that Steiner had warned about a new world war between USA On one side and Russia and China on the other side if we hadn’t solved the problem of materialism (Ahrimanic) through the twentieth century.

If the west hadn’t incorporated the spiritual in its thinking, so we could meet the east through the spiritual, we would end in a world war again. 2020 was the test, if materialism had won we would have had Trump as commander in chief for the American military forces today.

One of the biggest problems is that people react against the ruling classes, and this will be the trigger for the rulers to start the war, following Steiner, but because the underlying evil has been weakened through the twentieth century there is no will for war, humanity had learned of their pain.

Steiner on the War

“The Second World War [Third, see *1 below] which will be fought between Asia and America — along with what is between them — is absolutely necessary to happen and the reasons for this will be economic. You must be hearing the calls of the lower classes for a world revolution — the only way to obscure and hide this idea of a world revolution would be to ignite the catastrophe of another World War. It just has no alternative.” ~The Course for Speakers to Promote the Idea of Threefolding CW 338. Lecture 12, Jan 2, 1921

The main opponent will be China, even though it looks like it is Russia now. China is building silos for atomic missiles all over the country, and they create artificial islands in the Chinese Sea on other countries’ territory, where they place their military, and they move into the Indian Ocean too. They prepare for war.

Steiner on China:

“The real opposition (Gegensatz) is not between America and Russia — it is only apparently so. The real clash will be between China and America. And the question is whether it will be fought in Europe or in the Pacific. Europe can only hope that this will happen in the Pacific area.” Koberwitz in June 1924 Rudolf Steiner – I can’t find the original.

Steiner’s goal was to spread the spiritual way of thinking out to all of humanity so the world became one, as it would hinder the devastating World War, and he succeeded, he coined the phrase New Age and this is shared between all of humanity, making it possible for all of humanity to speak in a shared language. The old tribe or national cultures are destroyed everywhere through materialism, most visible in Mao’s cultural war, in the USA have Hollywood and it’s entertainment industry done the same on world scale.

Steiner on the Background and How not to End in a Devastating War:

“Let there be no mistake about it — so long as the dealings of Europeans and Americans with Asia are confined to purely economic and industrial interests, so long will there be distrust in the hearts of Asiatics. People may talk as much as they like about disarmament, about the desirability of ending wars. …A great war will break out between the East and the West, in spite of all disarmament conferences, if the people of Asia cannot perceive something that flows over to them from the Spirit of the West.

Western spirituality can spread over to Asia and if it does, Asia will be able to trust it, because with their own inherent, though somewhat decadent spirituality, the Asiatic peoples will be able to understand what it means. The peace of the world depends upon this, not upon the conversations and discussions now going on among the leaders of outer civilisation. …

Everything depends upon insight into the Spirit that is lying hidden in European and American culture — the Spirit from which men flee, which for the sake of ease they would fain avoid, but which alone can set the feet of humanity on the path of ascent.

People like to put their heads in the sand, saying that things will improve of themselves. No, they will not. The hour of a great decision has struck. Either men will resolve to bring forth the spirituality of which I have spoken, or the decline of the West is inevitable. Hopes and fatalistic longings for things to right themselves are of no avail.

Once and forever, man has passed into the epoch when he must manipulate his powers out of his own freewill. In other words: it is for men themselves to decide for or against spirituality. If the decision is positive, progress will be possible; if not, the doom of the West is sealed and in the wake of dire catastrophes the further evolution of humanity will take a course undreamed of today. Those who would strive for true insight into these matters should not, nay dare not, neglect the study of the life of soul in mankind at large, and in the different peoples, especially of East and West.” ~Cosmic Forces in Man, Lecture 1, Oslo, November 24, 1921 ga209, https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19211124p01.html

Evil is Cyclic – or like a Pendulum

Steiner told also how the sunspots visualized the strength of evil, and all wars started at the spikes, and ended in the valleys, no exceptions in the twentieth century! See Sunspots and evil activity

In the twentieth century the amount of evil was immensely high, causing WW1 and 2 and especially the Vietnam war, but from the Vietnam War and forward evil began to dwindle, so the will to kill is little today, and our attention on war is more focused today. Humanity transformed evil to wisdom and pain to love.

Evil is cyclic, it’s like flood and ebb, and now it’s flood, but the maximal possible watermark isn’t very high. The activity of evil has been increasing toward a local maximum since 2020, so something is brewing, but it will be weaker than it was at the top at the previous maxima.

On April 12th Jupiter meets Neptune

On April 12th Jupiter meets Neptune in their home in Pisces, and the last time that took place was in 1856 when the Crimea peace was signed. It was of course at the bottom of a sunspot as wars end in valleys, and as evil is increasing now it may dampen evil or there may come a temporary peace agreement.

Added May 27: after April 12 the world began helping Ukraine with heavy weapons, and the EU began talking about starting the process for Ukraine to become a member.

I think we are at the first spike now, wars typically start at the second spike, five to eight years into the period, but we will see.

The USA out of Childhood

The other important astrological transit this year is when Pluto becomes conjunct with Pluto in the birth horoscope for the USA, and Pluto describes the ages for countries where Saturn does for humans.

This is the first time, the USA is coming out of childhood. Pluto is leaving the darkness in 2023, and although a short trip backward, the air becomes lighter when it moves into Aquarius. The USA becomes a teenager, it’s time for a love affair, and leaving the materialistic childishness behind.

On the first return on February 20-21, the problem presents itself, the annexation of the eastern territories of Ukraine was the first physical step in defining the problem.

Around July 12, Pluto goes retrograde, and as Pluto is about transformation there may come outer problems that will force inner transformation, where China may become tired of awaiting its chance. The last return will be on December 27 with a kind of result.

World History – Putin versus Ukraine

What we witness is world history, and the Ukrainian fight will stand as the most important in modern history, and their president will earn monuments. They defend Central Europe as they have done before.

The Ukrainians come from Scandinavia, then fighting with Thor now with Michael as a symbol of freedom. It is very symbolic that both Vladimir and Volodymyr come from the old Scandinavian Valdamarr, today Valdemar in Danish, meaning the Ruler of the World. I am impressed by the Ukrainian and I can recognize the Viking inheritance, although the Danes have been more spoiled by fate. I am also impressed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Russian-speaking Jew whose family lost members to Holocaust. I think this is also telling about the Ukrainian people, that their trust is not dependent on language or genes. He has risen from a comedian to be the perfect world leader, this is so surprising that it should make esotericists think!

The question is what Ruling tradition do we want, czarism or a Goethean tradition of Central Europe?

Taiwan in the Chinese Sea corresponds to Ukraine, and the countries around China lie between China and USA in the same way as Europe lies between Russia and USA!

Rudolf Steiner on the Spiritual Background

The Slav Spiritual Stream versus Czarism

What we see now is a continuation of what happened many times before, that the Russian state has tried to bind the Slav Soul to the Russian state.

“The testament of Peter the Great appeared on the scene in 1813, or perhaps a little earlier, and was disseminated for good reason as though it stemmed from Peter the Great himself.

Peter the Great

This document is used to seize hold of a natural stream, such as the stream of the Slav soul, in order to guide and lead it by means of suggestion. Whither is it to be led? It is to be led into the orbit of Russianism in such a way that the ancient Slav stream should become, in a way, the bearer of the idea of a Russian state!

Because this is so, a clear distinction must be made between the spiritual Slav stream, the stream that exists as the bearer of the ancient Slav tradition, and that which strives to become an external vessel to encompass the whole of this Slav stream: Russianism. …

For Russianism wants to confine the Slav element within its own framework and use it as its tool. It wants to contain it within the confines of the testament of Peter the Great. …

Obviously, therefore, only those who understood the Slav element more deeply could understand what web was really being woven, and also that those who wanted to destroy the Slav element through Russianism had to work against more healthy endeavours.” From R. Steiner, “The Karma of Untruthfulness”, Vol. 1, GA 173, lecture 3.

Linguistic Divisions of the East Slavs

Putin have studied Peter the Great what the following article show: What Putin Learned from Peter the Great.

Russian Intelligentia and the Group Soul

Steiner says that the folk soul is revered by the Russian intelligentsia as something great and significant something they aspire toward, not understanding that they are holding the Russian people back in their development. Steiner from Preparing for the Sixth Epoch:

“What we call the group soul, out of which mankind has gradually emerged and in which the animal kingdom still lives, that is what is revered by the Russian intelligentsia as something great and significant among their people. They cannot rise to the thought that the community of the future must hover as a high ideal, an ideal that has yet to be realized.

Yes, but this life in the group soul does not in reality belong to the future at all, for it is the old form of group soul existence. If it continued it would be a Luciferic group soul, a form of life that has remained at an earlier stage, whereas the form of group soul life that is true and must be striven for, is what we try to find in spiritual science.

▪️What we should like to say to the East is this: It is our task to overcome entirely just what you are trying to preserve in an external form, namely, an old Luciferic-Ahrimanic form of community.

In a community of a Luciferic-Ahrimanic character there will be coercion of belief as rigid as that established by the Orthodox Catholic Church in Russia.

▪️Such community will not understand true freedom of thought; least of all will it be able to rise to the level where complete individuality is associated with a social life in which brotherhood prevails.”

This also explains the way they sacrifice their soldiers in war. It’s reminiscent of the Mongol horde, they send the soldiers against the enemy in endless numbers without any other strategy than spread fear and chaos and thereby tire the enemy. No other army in the world loses more soldiers than the Russian. They have in the short time of this war lost more soldiers than in their Afghanistan war, the war that crippled the USSR.

What the intelligentsia stands for is Czarism:
“Czarism and Russianism have always been strangers to each other, they never had anything in common. Those who understand the Russian nature, especially its piety, must have found the attitude to the elimination of Czarism as something self-evident when the time was ripe.” See Steiner: From Symptom to Reality in Modern History.

On Rudolf Steiner’s prediction of the Third World War and its Spiritual Background

The Goethean Central Europe as a pendulum between East and West

Europe is in the center between the Egoism symbolized by the rulers of Russia and the Heartlessness of the materialistic system of America, swaying from side to side, split in two over many years.

What we have experienced in connection with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that Europe and even the world have shown compassion for the victim, usually, the world is separated into two equally large blocks. Humanity are now following an inner moral where they earlier followed an outer moral.

The Founding Fathers of the Central European Culture.

Rudolf Steiner in Central Europe between East and West:

“Our souls have to tend to that which was prepared in the Central European culture especially expressing that we are put pendulum-like between two powers permeating the world and that we must find the balance.

We have to realise that, on the one side, the world strives for ahrimanic hardening, strives to get solidified in the fire of the purely material; that it strives, on the other side, to ascend egotistically to an abstract spirituality. Following the one or other side would ruin the Central European human being.

Following only the science engaged in the external senses would persuade us to tear the roses from the cross and only to look at that which solidifies. We would gain a world view gradually which would completely deflect the human being from looking at the spiritual. It would allow to only looking at that which has solidified ahrimanically. …

Therefore, the cross wound around by roses was the symbol of Goethe who positioned himself in the spirituality of the Central European culture. It must be our symbol. …

It is expressed to us in our symbol, in the rose cross, what we want to take up more and more in our souls, in our feelings when we come together in a room dedicated to our attempts. Then we can be sure that the spirits who lead the earth development in good sense exist invisible among us; that our words, that all our thoughts and feelings, while we dedicate ourselves to the spiritual-scientific attempts that all this is really supported in such a room by the spiritual powers guiding our attempts.” GA 159

Europe becoming one again

The Origin of the Eastern and Western Poles

To develop an I without egotism Europe was placed between Egotism to the East and Heartless materialism to the West. Europe became a pendulum that moved between these extremes.

Today Europe is finding their Equilibrium and is beginning to stand on their own feet, and both Russia and USA is becoming free of their curses.

From Rudolf Steiner’s “Genghis Khan and the Discovery of America”:

The East Pole — The Luciferic powers of the Mongols

“It was actually the descendants of the old Atlantean teachers who were now working from a place in Asia. A priest there had been educated to behold — to have a belated vision, as it were, of what the Atlanteans called the “Great Spirit,” and to receive his commands.

These the priest communicated to a young man of remarkable energy and strength who, by virtue of this authority, received the name “The Great Ruler of the Earth” from his community. This was Genghis Khan (c. 1158–1162 – August 18, 1227). The Great Spirit, through his follower and through that priest, gave to Genghis Khan the command to summon all the powers of Asia to spread the influence that would lead the fifth post-Atlantean age back into a luciferic form. …

Genghis Khan’s generals

All the unrest and disturbance that came into the evolution of modern man through the Mongolian invasions, everything connected with them that has gone on working into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch — all this unrest, which was prepared long ago, is nothing more than the great attempt that is being made from Asia to bring about a visionary European culture.

It would cut it off from the conditions of its further evolution and lead it altogether away from the earth, just as the East has experienced again and again this feeling of being filled with vision and of wanting to be estranged from the earth. [Eighth Sphere.]

Something was needed to counterbalance this tendency. An opposite trend had to be created as a counterforce that moves in the direction of the normal evolution of mankind.

The influence of Genghis Khan’s priest was intended to bring about a kind of buoyancy and lightness in the human race that would draw man away from the earth.”

The West Pole — The Ahrimanic Powers of Taotl

“Over against this, a corresponding heaviness had to come to man from the weight of the earth; this was provided through the discovery of the western world. America, with all that it holds, was discovered and thereby earth heaviness, the desire to remain on earth, was given to man.

Europe discovers America in 1492

The discovery of America and everything connected with it, and the way man carried his life into the many new places of the earth, all this, when seen in wider connections, shows itself as a counterbalancing force to the activity of Genghis Khan.

America had to be discovered so that man might be brought to grow closer to the earth, to grow more and more materialistic. Man needed weight and heaviness to counterbalance the spiritualization that was the aim of the descendants of the “Great Spirit.” …

While it is comparatively easy to see how the luciferic [Egoistic] influence worked on Genghis Khan — we have exact knowledge of the fact that a priest was initiated by the follower of the “Great Spirit” — it is much more difficult to say how the ahrimanic spirit worked. This is because the ahrimanic [materialistic] influence is dispersed and scattered. [Materialism is a system not individuals.] …

Study the reaction of Europe to the gradual discovery and opening up of America and you will see what temptations came from that direction. Taken all in all, it is a history of temptation woven in with a history that runs a normal course.” ~GA171

It is interesting that Vladimir and Volodymyr both are of Viking heritage, Valdamarr in old Scandinavian, Valdemar in modern Danish, meaning Ruler of the World. This is the choice, the egoism of Djengis Khan or the freedom of Michael.

East, West and the Double

Man consists of body, soul and spirit, but besides that there is a foreign element called the double, containing elemental beings we fight with through our life. The double is the animal part in us, what we developed through the old Moon, together with the added karma and trauma developed on earth. This double is like a nature power influenced from the earth depending on where the person lives. In America the double is influenced by Ahrimanic powers and in Asia by Luciferic powers.

From Rudolf Steiner’s “Individual Spirit Beings and the Undivided Foundation of the World”:

“The strange thing is that this subconscious that we carry within us is taken hold of by another being under all circumstances. This means that we are not only a fusion of body, soul, and spirit, carrying within us through the world our soul, which is independent of our body; shortly before birth another being takes possession of the subconscious portions of the human being. This being is there, this subconscious being that accompanies man the entire way between birth and death. Somewhat before birth it enters man and accompanies him.

One can also characterize this being as one that permeates man in those parts that do not come into his ordinary consciousness: it is a very intelligent being and possessed of a will that is akin to the forces of nature; in its will it is much more closely related to the forces of nature than is man. …

This earth, however, not only consists of skeleton but is a living organism, and this earth sends from its center to every point on the surface, to every territory, special forces. Picture for yourself the surface of the earth (see drawing):

Ahriman, the heartless, to the West, Lucifer, egotism, to the East.

Here is the Eastern region, there the Western region, to take it only on a large scale. The forces that are transmitted from the earth are something that belong to the life organism of the earth. Depending on whether a human being lives on this or that spot on earth, his soul, this immortal soul, does not come directly in contact with these forces but only indirectly — the immortal soul of man is relatively independent of earthly conditions. The soul is only artificially dependent upon earthly conditions, as was shown today. …

It is thus this “double,” which man bears within him, upon whom the geographic and other differentiations particularly exert their influences.”

Why are there so much pain on Earth?

It’s a question often asked by atheists, and a good one too, but they use it as an excuse to set themselves out on the sidelines yelling at those who try to make the world a better place.

God didn’t create our paradise, he created a paradise, the beautiful Earth, and gave it to us. We have the responsibility for the Earth, and it’s not better than we make it. It’s so to speak our apprenticeship what we do with ourselves and the Earth, we are a unity.

Suffering, the short story

Why do people suffer as they do? The short answer is that they have created the situation themselves, that they had acted in a way so they needed to experience the situation seen from the other side. As everywhere else, there are exceptions.

It’s not God or gods who punish the sinners, we create the situation ourselves.

We should of course help each other, it’s not punishment, it’s teaching, and being helped and being a helper is part of the teaching, Love is the primary goal of the teaching on Earth.

If we have Hell in our inner when we die, it follows us into the afterlife and when born again, the new life is created based on our inner.

If Vishnu/God had been the only creator, mankind would have been a beautiful creation, a beautiful robot, acting as the gods decreed, but Shiva/Lucifer gave man the ego so we became independent. We were still only animals with egotism, we weren’t truly independent, we acted fully following the rules of Karma.

Prometheus/Lucifer stealing the fire of knowledge
from the gods to give to humankind.

At a certain time where the body was ready, the outer gods died and was reborn into the inner of man. Man got a soul with an I, the I AM entered the body. The I was like a rider taming a horse, the ego. Now humanity began changing from tribe mentality to individuals.

This is where we are now. The karma you see is where the bodies with their ego have brought them, their soul have a strong fight getting the body and ego out of the misery.

Life, Death and Compassion

The Earth has a beautiful geography kept alive through movements in the underground, earthquakes and volcanic activity, giving new minerals for plant life to work on.

The Earth is covered with a diverse flora transforming the Earth to a place for life to live and a varied fauna lives in this garden of Earth.

The Earth is beautiful, but Earth has no compassion, every being fight for their place, although so wisely that it makes room for all.

Life dies in this struggle for a place in the world, or they die when earthquakes or fires roams the land, creating new worlds and new life.

Death is no exception, it’s a path out when life has no purpose any more.

To create compassion something new had to happen, and out of the animals was the best suitable selected for developing a being having compassion.

It’s of course a painful process. To develop compassion we need to give the animal an ego, a stepping stone to something higher, but in the process egotism gives many problems.

Is compassion worth the painful process?

God is not a magician, he can’t create something as precious as love by a magical invocation, it has to be created by individual beings who develop love in freedom. And we can’t develop love in a paradise, we can only develop love where people are depending on each other to live.

We are in the last third of that process, and we are in a situation where things are going to change for the better.

Materialism is the last great teaching, we should understand that material things is not making us happy, that it’s really slavery for all.

All development happens through correcting errors.

Errors are build into the system. Just look at nature, there is always exceptions that are corrected. Karma is the mechanism behind the process, orchestrated by the Zodiac.

So of course there are injustice, but they become corrected sooner or later. Black magic is a way to make it later.

The strongest power on Earth is karma. Black magic is manipulating the power of karma, using karmic beings, and in some cases being used by something much worse. It’s really nasty.

The Creators – the Logoi

All creation is defined through three powers, called the three Logoi, but each religion have their own names for them.

They are also called Father, Mother and Son, but each are both genders.

Their work in the creation can be seen through the Fibonacci series, everything from the smallest to galaxies are formed after the Fibonacci series. It also describes sexual reproduction and the development through reincarnation.

It says the new is the result of the two previous instances/incarnations. Creation equal form + idea.

We also have it described in Hegel’s synthesis = thesis + antithesis.

This is the most optimal and simple algorithm for creation where there is only one god.

The Logoi is different consciousnesses in God, every being in God act God’s will, they don’t think independently about what they do, they can’t modify the creation if something goes wrong, so the correction is build into the creation. Or so it was!

In the Bible God sees at the end of the day that the creation is good, it was not possible while creating. The beings of God is to him as our organs is to us, we really don’t know what they do until they fail.

Our creation is different from earlier, except the prototype(s) in whose picture we are created. When we are fully developed we can instantly correct new creation where it goes wrong, and thereby avoid pain.

It is said that this creation is the most painful of all as it’s the most complicated. To create individuals is complicated.

It is said that God before he started, asked the potentially created humanity if it was worth it and we answered yes. First then started the creation.

More here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/kim-graae-munch/golden-mean-key-to-the-universe-/362626749158/

Problems of our economic and political systems of today

Centralization is the problem of our current economic and political systems, evident in political decision-making, public institutions, companies and capital. The mantra ‘Big is Beautiful’ is wrong: The productivity per employee drops with the increasing size of the organisation, and that is because the single employee has less possibility to influence his own work and is too bound by rules. Also the large organizations are difficult to manage.

Centralized decision-making, for instance in the distance between government and population, increases the damage by wrong decision. The same goes for large corporations: the bigger the organization, the greater the danger for wrong decisions and for catastrophic results. However, this is only a small part of the danger of centralisation. In the following paragraphs I will look at its implications, which will be seen in greater aggressiveness, fewer social skills and decreasing possibilities to control our future. In other words, there are less possibilities to make decisions on a large scale as well as in our own lives, at home and work.

The danger of centralization works through various mechanisms, as

• Materialism, a purely physical view of the universe,
• Pervasive Politics, proliferation of the political system in daily life,
• Groupings, emphasis on group, race, and ethnicity, us and them,
• Orthodoxy, literal and “simple” interpretation of the Gospels,
• Superstition, spiritual beliefs without foundation in thinking skills,
• Abstract Thinking, cultivating abstract theorization,
• Quantitative Thinking, purely quantitative (statistical) observation.

Combined with a dualistic worldview where everything is black and white, these will increase the strife between people all over the world.

Dualism

Dualistic thinking sees everything in opposites, and this is one of the greatest dangers today: “If you are not with me, you are against me”. This is a widespread sickness, especially on the internet where you can hide under anonymity. However, orthodoxy of any kind – religious, atheistic, or political – moves our future in a dangerous direction. What makes it so dangerous are that both sides believe that they fight on the side of good, but the reality is that they both fight for extremism, whereas truth is always somewhere in-between.

The deception is not to see the full picture, to understand both sides in any relation!

The challenge is to find the golden mean between the extremes.

The following paragraphs will look into different areas where dualism endangers our society.

The deception is not to see the full picture, to understand both sides in any relation!

The challenge is to find the Golden Mean between the extremes.

The following paragraphs will look into different areas where Dualism endangers our society.

Materialism

Science is seen as the absolute truth against black superstition represented by religion. The latter is not seen as having different and complementary views on the same reality. It has become a kind of atheistic religion in itself, attacking spirituality and moral values. Darwin is their prime god, and their Messiahs are the sentient robots they hope will come and save the world. The problem are that most of the atheists don’t really understand what they are preaching, and they don’t accept scientific evidence if it’s against their own beliefs. See Is it possible to make Intelligent Machines?

Science can’t make decisions or take responsibility, as Science in itself has no morality per se. Science is always used by others: more dynamic groups in society, by players on the market or in politics, whose morals aren’t better than that of the courts or the voters.

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Martin Luther King Jr.

“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” Richard Feynman

“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.” Noam Chomsky

Pervasive Politics

You see dualism in politics, especially in two-party systems, where there is no space for other views. Politics dominates today everybody’s life, in contrast to forty years ago, where politics was talked about at the elections every fourth year. Back then, the laws gave rules for the relation between citizens, whereas today the laws regulate the relation between state and citizens.

The political invasion of the private sphere destroys the natural equilibrium of society. The economic system today is an example of this: the equilibrium of that system ends regularly in chaos, as the system is made for speculators, not for companies, nor for the country and its citizens. Today the decisions are taken via regulations or laws on behalf of groups, whereas in earlier times, the decisions were taken on behalf of individuals by those who were familiar with specific cases. Wrong decisions had only small consequences then, whereas wrong decisions today have far heavier consequences as more people are dependent on these decisions.

“Justice without mercy is unjust.” Eli Wamberg

This is a problem all over the world, and it gets worse the more laws and rules people have to follow.

One of the biggest lies of today: We need more regulations as a result of society’s complexity. Wrong, it is more complex as a result of all those regulations. Computers take the complexity out of complex tasks, and prefabricated goods take the complexity out of manual work, so what is complex today, except the laws?

Groupings

There is a tendency to split up in groups, instead of seeing mankind as one: people split up according to race, religion, language, land, locality, sex, or whatever. There is a lots of hate in this, not least on the Internet.

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

Orthodoxy

There is a tendency to read religious texts too narrowly. For instance, the Jehovah Witnesses and other religious groups who take their holy books too literally. Durban Two, where the Islamic countries tries to prohibit any criticism of religion, is a typical example showing that discussions of religious content is unwanted. New religious movements like Scientology, Atheism, the Moonies, and so on, are also too rigid.

“Beware the man of one book.”  Saint Thomas Aquinas

Superstition

Another trap is to accept words of religious, esoteric, and scientific origin without thought. The spiritually-inclined are in danger of reading spiritual literature without conscious understanding, but that includes also atheists reading scientific texts without understanding.

“One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”  Malcolm Muggeridge

Abstract Thinking

In contrast to real understanding, abstract thinking is seen everywhere, including the previous subjects discussed. Man is seen as a thing, not as a being. But reality is not abstract, and every decision based on abstract thinking is wrong, especially if living beings are involved.

Quantitative Thinking

This involves statistics, but without understanding. Let us say a politician want to make a law, and it will make 0.123% of all families go bankrupt, but as the percent is so low, nobody sees it as a problem. Nobody understands that there are real people behind those figures. Quantitative thinking always works through abstractions.

Big Mother

The development moves in a direction where we can expect that our personal ‘I’ is assimilated by the masses, the collective. In the western world we talk about freedom: that nobody should tell us what to do, and we fight (duality problem) against conspiracies, against CO2 pollution, against many other things, but we don’t define and work consistently for a world worth living in. At the same time, our capabilities to decide our own destiny are diminishing, regulated by law, organizations, computers, and infrastructure. The result may be that everybody just follows the paths with least resistance, which are built through directives, regulations, computer capabilities, ending in a situation where nobody thinks or makes decisions any more. And it’s all made for the good of the citizens by Big Mother.

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” Noam Chomsky

Political Correctness

Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” Noam Chomsky

No Childhood

Many of the restrictions and laws are made because of poor parenting: children no longer learn to live in a community; they are each and all small kings and princesses, who don’t understand that others don’t see them as such. Their understanding of scientific, historic or creative endeavors is as small as it has ever been. Children of olden times learned more at the campfire than the children of today. As they don’t know how to behave, more and more laws are created to remedy this deficient parenting.

The central problem are that children aren’t allowed to be children any longer, or as Michael Jackson says:

“Childhood has become the great casualty of modern-day living. All around us we are producing scores of kids who have not had the joy, who have not been accorded the right, who have not been allowed the freedom, or knowing what it’s like to be a kid.

Today children are constantly encouraged to grow up faster, as if this period known as childhood is a burdensome stage, to be endured and ushered through, as swiftly as possible.”
…
“Love, ladies and gentlemen, is the human family’s most precious legacy, its richest bequest, its golden inheritance. And it is a treasure that is handed down from one generation to another. Previous ages may not have had the wealth we enjoy. Their houses may have lacked electricity, and they squeezed their many kids into small homes without central heating. But those homes had no darkness, nor were they cold. They were lit bright with the glow of love and they were warmed snugly by the very heat of the human heart. Parents, undistracted by the lust for luxury and status, accorded their children primacy in their lives.” Michael Jackson, Speech at Oxford University(2001)

Complicated Structures

You can’t make tax-systems as complicated as they are today without computers, and you can’t control the many citizens or employees, as we can today, without computers; the amount of data is enormous. They make it possible to create structures which are difficult to manage without using computers, and computers don’t know HR.

GM and the American Automobile Industry are good examples of these gigantic companies, who would be impossible to manage without stiff administrative structures and computers, and it’s extremely difficult to change these structures if it were needed. But modern software organizations have the same problems, with their software bases: Microsoft with its operating system, and Office system, Yahoo with it’s big software base. There are also problems with reduction of labour, and new organizations such as Google with its extreme growth, will quickly get into the same problems. The only way out is to regularly rebuild old systems from the ground without any application reuse, to keep different applications separated on application level and to use methods which make the programming as simple and cost effective as possible.

These big organizations are extremely susceptible to the Peters Principle:

“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

I believe computers can be a boon to mankind, but we have to control how and what they are used for, not letting their possibilities decide our future, as their strength can be used both for good and evil purposes.

Management and Computers

You can use computers for many things: they can plan routes for transport, or decrease energy consumption, and many other useful things. This sounds good, but if we don’t take care, it could mean that it makes the knowledge and experience of man superfluous or even dangerous: man’s role can become degraded to that of a machine.

The need for knowledge is diminishing everywhere in society, except within the computer world. Many jobs which needed educated craftsmen can now be done by unskilled labor, as building materials don’t need special skills any more, and the computer has taken over a lot of paperwork and decision-making. This turns everyone into secretaries except the secretaries: Even executives write their own letters and calculating sheets on their computers, instead of using secretaries, so they don’t do what they were hired and paid for – manage.

The term “human resources” is in itself a degradation. People are no longer individuals: They are a kind of commodity. See “Human Resources” by Scott Noble.

Large Structures

The physicist Geoffrey B. West studies large structures like cities and corporate organisations, and has found that cities increase their productivity and also their problems, while corporate organisations decrease their productivity as they grow.

“Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. “

“The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”

“The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.”

The New York Times

Public organisations have of course the same problems as the corporate companies, they don’t trust their employees.

Cities are good examples on how the unstructured principles works, how the size of the city increases the production per citizen.

“According to the data, whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by approximately 15 percent per capita. It doesn’t matter how big the city is; the law remains the same. “This remarkable equation is why people move to the big city,” West says. “Because you can take the same person, and if you just move them to a city that’s twice as big, then all of a sudden they’ll do 15 percent more of everything that we can measure.”

“When Bettencourt and West analyzed the negative variables of urban life, like crime and disease, they discovered that the exact same mathematical equation applied.”

“For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”

The New York Times

No Competent Leaders

What makes it so frustratingly absurd is that we are giving away our independence to a system, a network of directives and conventions, without any persons being in charge. There is nowhere you can go to say that it’s wrong and it should be otherwise. Everybody will tell you, “That’s how it is and it has always been that way, and it can’t be in any other way, as it’s too costly to change the computers programming just because of you!” Of course we have leaders at the top of the state or the corporate companies, but as the decision-making is moved up through the hierarchy (following automatic rules,) it therefore becomes more and more difficult to manage big organizations, as everything becomes dependent on one decision- maker alone, and few can, or know how to, change the course. It’s more difficult to change the direction of a state, organization, or company than a supertanker. Consequently, organizations becomes automatons, and companies go under in the event of unanticipated events, when structural change is what is actually needed.

GM and the American automobile industry are good examples of this inability to change: They had known for decades that they should change their models to compete with Japanese and European manufacturers, but they couldn’t.

The incompetence of these organizations gives rise to conspiracy theories as Hanlon’s Law warns about:

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

A book by Thomas Ricks: “The Generals” (New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic) gives a deep analysis of the US army, and the conclusion is that it is a uniformed bureaucracy with incompetent leaders.
There are 945 generals and admirals, which is one general per 1,500 man. The army has ten active divisions and 109 major generals to command them, and more and more generals are being created, according to William Astore
The army is only good at one thing – spin, Donald Rumsfeld secretly hired 75 generals and other top officers to sell the war.

During World War II, top officials expected some generals to fail in combat, and were prepared to remove them when they did. The personalities of these generals mattered enormously, and the Army’s chief of staff, George C. Marshall, worked hard to find the right men for the jobs at hand. When some officers did not work out, they were removed quickly—but many were given another chance, in a different job. (Ginder, Landrum, and Williams were all given second chances, for instance—and all, to varying extents, redeemed themselves.) This hard-nosed but flexible system created a strong military, not only because the most competent were allowed to rise quickly, but also because people could learn from mistakes before the results became crippling, and because officers could find the right fit for their particular abilities.

In World War II, the firing of a general was seen as a sign that the system was working as planned. Yet now, in the rare instances when it does occur, relief tends to be seen, especially inside the Army, as a sign that the system has somehow failed. Only one high-profile relief occurred during the American invasion of Iraq, and the officer removed was not a general but a Marine colonel. Relief has become so unusual that even this firing made front-page news.

The Atlantic.

The following video shows many of the tendencies mentioned. Most banks don’t have such types as Potter any longer: the bank works and thinks like a machine without any feelings or empathy at all, customer service is merely a word, not a fact.

From Move Your Money who tries to resist the Corporate Ideology.

Automated Decisions

Buying and selling on the stock market are for a great part based on automated decisions made by computers, but as we have seen, it can go terrible wrong when some unanticipated events shows up. What’s worse, the stock market was made to foster strong and sound companies: not for computer-controlled gaming, but for intelligent investment.

As fewer and fewer managers can make decisions, these decisions will be automated as rules in computers, and it will be impossible to make decisions based on individual concerns.

Decreasing Social Intercourse

Computers are very effective for entertainment: you can live your whole life on the internet, without any direct social contact. You can play games and do your work through the net if necessary. You can also discuss, shop for sex/ books/ programs/ random data on the net (It can be like a drug in itself). You can book your food from a local pizzeria, book escort girls, men, and boys, eventually finding mates on the net if you really want to live together with another living being. The film Matrix is a plausible destiny, not by force, but semi-freely. It’s not Big Brother, it’s Big Mama.

Less Social Skills

In the old days, children, teenagers, and adults learned by living in a community, and there was room for everybody, even the village idiot. These and other unusual persons were educated by their social environment which were mostly normal. We are today living more and more on the internet, learning our social skills through social applications and computer games. The old community’s influence is replaced by the internet friends, and as like seeks like, they can only increase their phobias or other disorders. Examples are numerous: pedophilia, school killings, terrorists, all kind of surrealistic interests, and so forth. The Law of Sayre’s is relevant in many of these cases:

“In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”

No Privacy

Children and teenagers can be reached by mobile and GPS always and everywhere, followed on the internet through Twitter or Facebook by their parents: no privacy. The same goes for the adults: no privacy and always available for state officials, economic institutions and employers. Password protection, pseudonyms, and like precautions are no hindrance, Cyber-Investigators will find everything, relevant or not. You cannot even go to the North Pole or to the Himalayas in peace: they can always reach you, and you them.

Where’s the remotest place on Earth?

In our hyper-connected world, getting away from it all is easier said than done. New Scientist.

Conspiracy Theories

The frustration has to go somewhere, and while there are no one responsible for our situation, and no one with enough insight, determination, and power to change the situation, we invent some god-like powerful conspirators who in all secrecy, with hundreds of employees, stands behind all the bad in this world. The truth is that most leaders are so incompetent that it hurts. Just look at Iraq: The military invasion was well thought out, but the rest was incompetence par excellence. And that is not an exception, it’s the rule. Of course, there are conspiracies and secret operations, but if more than one participant knowing about the conspiracy is alive a year later, it’s just a question of time before the world know. Another reason to use few people is that really competent people are difficult to find, and the more people involve, the bigger the risks for failure. Moreover, the bigger the consequences of a possilble failure, the less interesting the project becomes. The best way to check if a conspiracy theory is viable or not, isn’t to examine the technical evidence but rather the psychology and the necessary resources that would be needed behind the scenes, also how big is the risk, who gains, what’s their gain, how many participate, and what expertise is necessary.

A sober view on conspiracy theories from the left:

Noam Chomsky on Conspiracy Theories
In case the video is not functioning look here

The the Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis:

“I don’t believe in conspiracies. Politicians don’t have the capacity to conspire, except in the most short-term way. [The distorted image of bin Laden] just suited a lot of people’s purposes at that time.”

Literature

Thomas Piketty

The Independent: The French economist forcing America to wake up to the end of The Dream.
Out of America: Thomas Piketty’s tome which skewers the idea that anyone who works hard can make it in the US seems to have hit a nerve

“Capital In The Twenty-First Century”, all 685 pages of it, is the No 1 best-seller on Amazon – apparently the first time that anything published by the venerable Harvard University Press has attained such dizzying celebrity. No self-regarding dinner party in Washington or New York is worth its salt without a discussion of it. Last Friday, came the ultimate accolade of a multiple coronation on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

The Huffington Post: Economist Thomas Piketty Explains Why Income Inequality Is Just Getting Started

Michael Lewis

Wired: Michael Lewis on Exposing Wall Street’s Biggest High-Tech Swindle in the book: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower traders, thereby acting before others can respond. Critics of the practice–Lewis chief among them–argue that high-frequency trading creates something akin to insider trading: a predatory environment for less advantaged investors. WIRED spoke with Lewis at an event organized by Live Talks in downtown Los Angeles.

Elizabeth Warren

A Fighting Chance (Apple, Amazon)

An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn’t.

In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America’s government can and must do better for working families.

New York Times: Book review of A Fighting Chance

A good review, also giving a good idea about who she is.

Adam Curtis

The the Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis:

Philosophy of Materialism

Allan Bloom

The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster Inc.

Christopher Lasch

Haven in a Heartless World, 1977, Basic Books, Inc.

In the American political vocabulary, “family” and “family values” no longer simply evoke pictures of harmonious scenes; they also push our buttons (left and right) about what is wrong with society. One of the earliest and sharpest cultural commentators to investigate the twentieth-century American family, Christopher Lasch argues in this book that as social science “experts” intrude more and more into our lives, the family’s vital role as the moral and social cornerstone of society disintegrates – and, left unchecked, so does our political and personal freedom. Haven in a Heartless World is a trenchant analysis of the plight of the family. Lasch takes a clear-eyed look at the institution in which America’s future generations are being raised and finds it faltering.

Geoffrey B. West

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation:

A New York Times article on his work.

Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities:

Describes the mathematical background for his work.

Atticannie’s Blog

Why Teacher Drink, the sequel: Natalie Munroe speaks out

Huffington Post – The Psychology Of Materialism, And Why It’s Making You Unhappy

Matt Walsh:

That’s our entire economic system: buy things. Everybody buy. It doesn’t matter what you buy. Just buy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have money. Just buy. Our entire civilization now rests on the assumption that, no matter what else happens, we will all continue to buy lots and lots of things. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And then buy a little more. Don’t create, or produce, or discover — just buy. Never save, never invest, never cut back — just buy. Buy what you don’t need with money you don’t have… Buy like you breathe, only more frequently.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

have written a little book called “Night Flight” which describes man’s fight against the Materialistic docility to keep man competent and responsible.

Rudolf Steiner

The Social question from an esoteric view, in German and in English.

Political Correctness

Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Noam Chomsky

The Philosophy of Materialism

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

The Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis have made a documentary series called “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, describing the philosophy of materialism. He says about the background:

 “about how we have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of computers. My underlying argument is that we have given up a dynamic political model of the world – the dream of changing things for the better – for a static machine ideology that says we are all components in systems.”

This is the best description of the materialistic problem of today, the film is pure art, making the viewers stop and think.

Adam Curtis shows how this “machine ideology” have entered the thoughts of man up through time, starting with ideas of the economic policies of Alan Greenspan and his fascination with the philosopher Ayn Rand; the  “selfish gene” popularised by Richard Dawkins; the “self-organising” dreams of hippies in the 1960s; and utopian visions of the internet preached by cyber-nerds in Silicon Valley.

His point is not that computers are worryingly ubiquitous, or that machines are enslaving us, but that we have fooled ourselves into believing that every sphere of human experience – from the democratic nation state to the global economy and even the natural world – can be thought of like a computer, as an ordered network of millions of individually insignificant nodes (i.e. us) whose only achievable goal is to maintain order and stability within the system. Andrew Pettie

And, Curtis says:

“One downside of this machine organising principle,” he says, “is that it undermines something really important: the old Enlightenment idea that human beings have the power and the imagination to change the world, to make it what they want and bend it to their will. [This] can be dangerous, but it can also be wonderful.”

Wikipedia have a good article here.

The three documentaries are comprised of:

1. Love and Power.

This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.

The film tells the story of two perfect worlds. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires.

The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s. Many of them were also disciples of Ayn Rand. They believed that the new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone could follow their own desires, yet there would not be anarchy.

They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand. He became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism. But the dream of stability in both worlds would be torn apart by the two dynamic human forces – love and power.

2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.

But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has again become the model for utopian ideas of human “self-organising networks”, with dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory.

This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counter-culture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world.

But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways.

But it was too late, the dream of the self-organising network had by now captured imaginations…

3. The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed – so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.

At the heart of the film is Bill Hamilton, a scientist. He argued that human behaviour is really guided by codes buried deep within us – a theory later popularised by Richard Dawkins as the “selfish gene”. It said that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure the codes are passed on for eternity.

This final part begins in 2000 in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda, where Hamilton is to help prove his dark theories. But all around him the Congo is being torn apart. The film then interweaves the two stories–the strange roots of Hamilton’s theories, and the history of the West’s tortured relationship with the Congo and technology…

The title is borrowed from a poem handed out on the streets of San Francisco in 1967 by the writer Richard Brautigan:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Richard Brautigan

Literature

Problems of our economic and political systems of today

Other places with videos: topdocumentaryfilms.com

Wikipedia

The End of Materialism

Quantum physics and Consciousness

A friend of mine have just made me aware of the physicist Amit Goswami:

Quantum physics, as well as a number of other modern sciences, he feels, is demonstrating that the essential unity underlying all of reality is a fact which can be experimentally verified. Because of the enormous implications he sees in this scientific confirmation of the spiritual, Goswami is ardently devoted to explaining his theory to as many people as possible in order to help bring about what he feels is a much needed paradigm shift. He feels that because science is now capable of validating mysticism, much that before required a leap of faith can now be empirically proven and, hence, the materialist paradigm which has dominated scientific and philosophical thought for over two hundred years can finally be called into question.

And

Consider instead the possibility that the entire story only existed as an abstract potential—a cosmic dream among countless other cosmic dreams—until, in that dream, life somehow evolved to the point that a conscious, sentient being came into existence. At that moment, solely because of the conscious observation of that individual, the entire universe, including all of the history leading up to that point, suddenly came into being. Until that moment, nothing had actually ever happened. In that moment, fifteen billion years happened. If this sounds like nothing more than a complicated backdrop for a science fiction story or a secular version of one of the world’s great creation myths, hold on to your hat. According to physicist Amit Goswami, the above description is a scientifically viable explanation of how the universe came into being.

And

Goswami is convinced, along with a number of others who subscribe to the same view, that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it. Without an observer, he claims, it only exists as a possibility. And as they say in the world of science, Goswami has done his math. Marshalling evidence from recent research in cognitive psychology, biology, parapsychology and quantum physics, and leaning heavily on the ancient mystical traditions of the world, Goswami is building a case for a new paradigm that he calls “monistic idealism,” the view that consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of everything that is.

He is not the only one, Martin Rees:

“In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.”

From the interview (it’s simply filled with Goodies):

WIE: In your book The Self-Aware Universe you speak about the need for a paradigm shift. Could you talk a bit about how you conceive of that shift? From what to what?

Amit Goswami: The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call “upward causation.” So in this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.

Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness. That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes “downward causation.” In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency—it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation—but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.

WIE: In your book you refer to this new paradigm as “monistic idealism.” And you also suggest that science seems to be verifying what a lot of mystics have said throughout history—that science’s current findings seem to be parallel to the essence of the perennial spiritual teaching.

AG: It is the spiritual teaching. It is not just parallel. The idea that consciousness is the ground of being is the basis of all spiritual traditions, as it is for the philosophy of monistic idealism—although I have given it a somewhat new name. The reason for my choice of the name is that, in the West, there is a philosophy called “idealism” which is opposed to the philosophy of “material realism,” which holds that only matter is real. Idealism says no, consciousness is the only real thing. But in the West that kind of idealism has usually meant something that is really dualism—that is, consciousness and matter are separate. So, by monistic idealism, I made it clear that, no, I don’t mean that dualistic kind of Western idealism, but really a monistic idealism, which has existed in the West, but only in the esoteric spiritual traditions. Whereas in the East this is the mainstream philosophy. In Buddhism, or in Hinduism where it is called Vedanta, or in Taoism, this is the philosophy of everyone. But in the West this is a very esoteric tradition, only known and adhered to by very astute philosophers, the people who have really delved deeply into the nature of reality.
…
AG: Yes, it is. Henry Stapp, who is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, says this quite explicitly in one of his papers written in 1977, that things outside of space and time affect things inside space and time. There’s just no question that that happens in the realm of quantum physics when you are dealing with quantum objects. Now of course, the crux of the matter is, the surprising thing is, that we are always dealing with quantum objects because it turns out that quantum physics is the physics of every object. Whether it’s submicroscopic or it’s macroscopic, quantum physics is the only physics we’ve got. So although it’s more apparent for photons, for electrons, for the submicroscopic objects, our belief is that all reality, all manifest reality, all matter, is governed by the same laws. And if that is so, then this experiment is telling us that we should change our worldview because we, too, are quantum objects.
…
AG: We all hope so. Now this is called the “quantum measurement paradox.” It is a paradox because who are we to do this conversion? Because after all, in the materialist paradigm we don’t have any causal efficacy. We are nothing but the brain, which is made up of atoms and elementary particles. So how can a brain which is made up of atoms and elementary particles convert a possibility wave that it itself is? It itself is made up of the possibility waves of atoms and elementary particles, so it cannot convert its own possibility wave into actuality. This is called a paradox. Now in the new view, consciousness is the ground of being. So who converts possibility into actuality? Consciousness does, because consciousness does not obey quantum physics. Consciousness is not made of material. Consciousness is transcendent. Do you see the paradigm-changing view right here—how consciousness can be said to create the material world? The material world of quantum physics is just possibility. It is consciousness, through the conversion of possibility into actuality, that creates what we see manifest. In other words, consciousness creates the manifest world.
…
AG: I mean that literally. This is what quantum physics demands. In fact, in quantum physics this is called “delayed choice.” And I have added to this concept the concept of “self-reference.” Actually the concept of delayed choice is very old. It is due to a very famous physicist named John Wheeler, but Wheeler did not see the entire thing correctly, in my opinion. He left out self-reference. The question always arises, “The universe is supposed to have existed for fifteen billion years, so if it takes consciousness to convert possibility into actuality, then how could the universe be around for so long?” Because there was no consciousness, no sentient being, biological being, carbon based being, in that primordial fireball which is supposed to have created the universe, the big bang. But this other way of looking at things says that the universe remained in possibility until there was self-referential quantum measurement—so that is the new concept. An observer’s looking is essential in order to manifest possibility into actuality, and so only when the observer looks, only then does the entire thing become manifest—including time. So all of past time, in that respect, becomes manifest right at that moment when the first sentient being looks.

It turns out that this idea, in a very clever, very subtle way, has been around in cosmology and astronomy under the guise of a principle called the “anthropic principle.” That is, the idea has been growing among astronomers—cosmologists anyway—that the universe has a purpose. It is so fine-tuned, there are so many coincidences, that it seems very likely that the universe is doing something purposive, as if the universe is growing in such a way that a sentient being will arise at some point.

And

Connie: We think science and spirituality are mutually exclusive but lately it seems that the two ideas are moving closer together.

Amit: The division happened because of a quirk of history: that classical physics was discovered before quantum physics. If quantum physics had been discovered first we would not have these separations between science and spirituality. Carl Popper coined the phrase “promissory materialism.” Materialism will always remain promissory in those areas of spirit, soul, mind, meaning and what life is all about. Science based on materiality will never make total sense. It fits some questions that have a reductive tendency. Some things we do are materially oriented. If you need a job you learn a skill. But on the other hand if you want to be happy, to think money or work will make us happy is foolhardy. One becomes happy by connecting with wholeness. This wisdom has escaped most scientists.

I am finding a shift among budding scientists who want to find real answers to questions like happiness, soul, reincarnation and the meaning of life. All those questions that science thought it could never answer. It’s clear that if we continue our present direction, the decline of the stock market and business ethics are just a few of the symptoms of the disease, which is leaving spirit, ethics and values out of the equation. If you understand reincarnational philosophy, you’ll know that we come back again and again if we are unethical. No one would ever dare to be unethical. You do come back and you have to answer for those propensities. So there’s no sense in building bad karma, bad propensities.

Video’s

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Biography:

Amit Goswami: Amit Goswami is a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics since 1968, teaching physics for 32 years. After a period of distress and frustration in his private and professional life starting at the age 38, his research interests shifted to quantum cosmology, quantum measurement theory, and applications of quantum mechanics to the mind-body problem. He became best known as one of the interviewed scientific experts featured in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?. He is the author of six books including the successful textbook, “Quantum Mechanics.” Amit is a pioneer of science within consciousness “science based on the primacy of consciousness” which is developed in his books “The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World” and “Science and Spirituality.” He has also authored “Quantum Creativity” and “A Quantum Physicist’s Guide to Enlightenment,” “The Visionary Window” and “Physics of the Soul,” and the upcoming “Integral Medicine.” Amit gives workshops in the United States, Brazil, Sweden, and India on the subjects of quantum creativity, quantum healing, physics of the soul, and science and spirituality.

Further

Blog of Amit Goswami

Wikipedia

WikiQuote

Amazon

Also read-worthy The Universe, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness by Subhash Kak, Ph.D.

Max Planck

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

As quoted in The Observer (25 January 1931)

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Florence, Italy (1944) (from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797)

From WikiQuote

Hanlon’s Razor, Common Sense, and Conspiracies

There are no problems today which don’t need a commission. Nobody dares or can take a decision, as no one trusts common sense any more. This missing common sense is the explanation for many so-called “laws”, as in the quotes below about malice versus incompetence. These “common sense” laws describe some of the symptoms of the Trap of Materialism. Many conspiracy theories are constructed on the theory of underlying malice, where in reality it is merely incompetence.

The following law’s are taken from Wikipedia.

Hanlon’s razor:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Robert A. Heinlein‘s 1941 short story “Logic of Empire”

“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity“

“Heinlein’s Razor”

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice. or … but keep your eyes open.

Grey‘s Law

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.“

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

“…misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.“

Albert Einstein:

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.“

Compare Schiller‘s ”

Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.“

Elbert Hubbard said,

“Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord in Truppenführung, 1933:

“I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!“

Sir Bernard Ingham’s Cock-up theory

“Cock-up before conspiracy“.

The full quotation

“Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.“

The Trap of Materialism

The Materialistic society we are living in have some build in dangers, which will draw our society in a direction of less faith or trust in man, giving more inhuman conditions for all, and the problem is that we may see it as inevitable.

Centralization is the problem, both politically, of public institutions, of companies and of capital. The mantra ‘Big is Beautiful’ is wrong, the productivity per employee drops with the increasing size of the organisation, and that’s because the single employee have less space to influence his own work, too bound by rules, and because the large organizations are difficult to manage.

In the following paragraphs I will look at its implications, which will be seen through greater aggressiveness, less social skills, and decreasing possibilities to control our future, less possibility to make decisions both in grand scale and in our own lives, both at home and job.

The Trap works through various mechanisms, as

• Materialism, a purely physical view of the universe,
• Pervasive Politics, proliferation of the political system in daily life,
• Groupings, emphasis on group, race, and ethnicity, us and them,
• Orthodoxy, literal and “simple” interpretation of the Gospels,
• Superstition, esoteric beliefs without foundation in thinking skills,
• Abstract Thinking, cultivating abstract theorization,
• Quantitative Thinking, purely quantitative (statistical) observation.

These combined with a Dualistic world view, where everything is Black and White, will increase the strife between people all over the world.

Dualism sees everything in opposites,

and this is one of the greatest dangers today: If you are not with me, you are against me. That is a widespread sickness, especially on the Internet where you can hide under anonymity, but orthodoxy of any kind: religious, atheistic, or political, moves our future in a dangerous direction. What makes it so dangerous are that both sides believe that they fight on the side of good, but the reality is that they both fight for extremism, truth is always somewhere in between.

The deception is not to see the full picture, to understand both sides in any relation!

The challenge is to find the Golden Mean between the extremes.

The following paragraphs will look into different areas where Dualism endangers our society.

Materialism

Science is seen as the absolute truth against black superstition represented by religion. It’s not seen as different and complementing views on the same reality. It has started the Atheistic religion, attacking spirituality and moral values. Darwin is their prime god, and their Messiah are the Sentient Robots they hope will come and save the world. The problem are that most of the Atheists don’t really understand what they are preaching, and they don’t accept scientific results if it’s against their own beliefs. See Is it possible to make Intelligent Machines?

Science can’t make decisions or take responsibility, as Science in itself have no moral. Science is always used by others, more dynamic groups of society, by players on the market or in politics, whose moral aren’t better than the Courts or the Voters.

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Martin Luther King Jr.

“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” Richard Feynman

“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.” Noam Chomsky

Pervasive Politics

You see Dualism in politics, especially in two-party systems, where there is no space for other views. Politics dominates today everybody’s life, in contrast to forty years ago, where politics was talked about at the elections every fourth year. The laws gave then rules for the relation between the citizens, today the laws regulate the relation between state and citizens.

The politics invasion of the private sphere destroys the natural equilibrium of the society. The economic system today is an example of this, the equilibrium of that system ends regularly in chaos as the system is made for the speculators, not for the companies, nor for the country and its citizens. Today the decisions are taken by regulations or laws on behalf of groups, where prior the decisions were taken by those who knew about the concrete cases on behalf of persons. Wrong decisions had only small consequences then, where wrong decisions today have far heavier consequences as more people are dependent on these decisions.

“Justice without mercy is unjust.” Eli Wamberg

This is a problem all over the world, and it gets worse the more laws and rules people have to follow.

One of the biggest lies of today: We need more regulations as a result of the society’s complexity. Wrong, it’s more complex as a result of all those regulations. Computers takes the complexity out of complex tasks, and prefabricated goods takes the complexity out of manual work, so what is complex today, except the laws?

Groupings

There is a tendency to split up in groups, instead of seeing mankind as one; people split up after race, religion, language, land, locality, sex, or whatever. There are lots of hate in this, not least on the Internet.

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

Orthodoxy

There is a tendency to read religious text’s to narrowly, as Jehovah Witnesses, and other religious groups who take their holy books too literally. Durban Two, where the Islāmic countries tries to prohibit any critic of  religion, is a typical example showing that discussions of religious content is unwanted. New religious movements like Scientology, Atheism, the Moonies, and so on, are also too rigid.

“Beware the man of one book.”  Saint Thomas Aquinas

Superstition

Another trap is to accept the words of religious, esoteric, and scientific origin without thoughts. Spiritual inclined are in danger of reading spiritual literature without conscious understanding, but that includes also Atheists reading scientific texts without understanding.

“One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”  Malcolm Muggeridge

Abstract Thinking

in contrast to real understanding. It’s seen everywhere, and is also part of the previous areas. Man is seen as a thing not as a being. The reality is not abstract, and every decision based on abstract thinking is wrong, especially if living beings are involved.

Quantitative Thinking

and Statistics without understanding. Let’s say a politician want to make a law, and it will make 0.123% of all families go bankrupt, but as the percent is low nobody sees it as a problem. Nobody understands that there are real people behind those figures. Quantitative thinking always works through abstractions.

Big Mother

The development moves in a direction where we can expect that our personal ‘I’ is assimilated by the masses, the collective. In the western world we are talking about freedom, that nobody shall tell us what to do, and we are fighting (Duality problem) against conspiracies, against CO2 pollution, against many other things, but we don’t define and work consistently for a world worth living in. At the same time our capabilities to decide our own destiny are diminishing, regulated by law, organizations, computers, and infrastructure. The result may be that everybody just follow the route with least resistance, which are built through directives, regulations, computer capabilities, ending in a situation where nobody thinks or makes decisions any more. And it’s all made for the good of the citizens by the Big Mother.

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” Noam Chomsky

Political Correctness

Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” Noam Chomsky

No Childhood

Many of the restrictions and laws are made because of lacking parenting, children no longer learn to live in a community, they are each and all small kings and princesses, who don’t understand that others don’t see them as such. Their understanding of scientific, historic or creative endeavors is as small as it has ever been. The children learned more at the camp fire than the children of today. As they don’t know how to behave, more and more laws are created to remedy the lacking parenting.

The central problem are that Children aren’t allowed to be children any longer, or as Michael Jackson says:

“Childhood has become the great casualty of modern-day living. All around us we are producing scores of kids who have not had the joy, who have not been accorded the right, who have not been allowed the freedom, or knowing what it’s like to be a kid.

Today children are constantly encouraged to grow up faster, as if this period known as childhood is a burdensome stage, to be endured and ushered through, as swiftly as possible.”
…
“Love, ladies and gentlemen, is the human family’s most precious legacy, its richest bequest, its golden inheritance. And it is a treasure that is handed down from one generation to another. Previous ages may not have had the wealth we enjoy. Their houses may have lacked electricity, and they squeezed their many kids into small homes without central heating. But those homes had no darkness, nor were they cold. They were lit bright with the glow of love and they were warmed snugly by the very heat of the human heart. Parents, undistracted by the lust for luxury and status, accorded their children primacy in their lives.” Michael Jackson, Speech at Oxford University(2001)

Complicated Structures

You can’t make tax-systems as complicated as they are today without computers, and you can’t control the many citizens or employees, as we can today, without computers; the amount of data are enormous. They make it possible to create structures which are difficult to manage without using computers, and computers don’t know HR.

GM and the American Automobile Industry are good examples of these gigantic Companies, who would be impossible to manage without stiff administrative structures and computers, and it’s extremely difficult to change these structures if needed. But modern software organizations have the same problems, with their software base, as Microsoft with their operating system, and their Office System, Yahoo with it’s big software base and reductions in labor have their problems, and new organizations as Google with it’s extreme growth will quickly get into the same problems, the only way out are to regularly rebuild old systems from the ground without any application reuse, and keeping different applications separated on application level, and using methods who makes the programming as simple and cost effective as possible.

These big organizations are extremely susceptible to the Peters Principle:

“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

I believe computers can be a boon to mankind, but we have to control how and what they are used for, not letting their possibilities decide our future, as their strength can be used both for the good and the bad.

Management and Computers

You can use computers to many things, they can plan routes for transport to decrease energy consumption, and many other useful things. This sounds good, but if we don’t take care, it could mean that it makes the knowledge and experience of man superfluous or even dangerous; man’s role degraded to a machine.

The need for knowledge is diminishing everywhere in the society, except within the computer world. Many jobs who needed educated Craftsmen can now be done by unskilled labor, as building materials don’t need special skills any more, and the computer has taken over a lot of paper work and decision-making. This makes everybody to secretaries except the secretaries, even executives writes their own letters and calculating sheets on their computers, instead of using secretaries, so they could do what they were hired and paid for: Manage.

The term “Human Resources” is in itself a degradation, people are not individuals any longer, they are a kind of commodity. See “Human Resources” by Scott Noble.

Large Structures

The physicist Geoffrey B. West studies large structures like cities and corporate organisations, and has found that cities increases it’s productivity and also it’s problems, while corporate organisations decreases their productivity as they grow.

“Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. “

“The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”

“The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.”

The New York Times

Public organisations have of course the same problems as the corporate companies, they don’t trust their employees.

Cities are good examples on how the unstructured principles works, how the size of the city increases the production per citizen.

“According to the data, whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by approximately 15 percent per capita. It doesn’t matter how big the city is; the law remains the same. “This remarkable equation is why people move to the big city,” West says. “Because you can take the same person, and if you just move them to a city that’s twice as big, then all of a sudden they’ll do 15 percent more of everything that we can measure.”

“When Bettencourt and West analyzed the negative variables of urban life, like crime and disease, they discovered that the exact same mathematical equation applied.”

“For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”

The New York Times

No Competent Leaders

What makes it so frustratingly absurd is that we are giving our independence to a system, a network of directives and conventions, without any persons being in charge. There is nowhere you can go saying that it’s wrong and it should be otherwise, everybody will tell you, that’s how it is and it has always been that way, and it can’t be in any other way, as it’s too costly to change the computers programming just because of you! Of cause, we have leaders in the top of the state or the corporate companies, but as the decision-making are moved up through the hierarchy (following automatic rules,) it becomes more and more difficult to manage the big organizations, as everything becomes dependent on one decision maker alone, and few know how to or can change the course. It’s more difficult to change the direction of a State, Organization, or a Company than a Super Tanker. The organizations becomes automatons, and the companies go down in case of unanticipated events which craves structural changes.

GM and the American Automobile Industry are good examples of this inability to change, they had known for decades that they should change their models to compete with Japanese and European manufacturers, but they couldn’t.

The incompetence of these organizations will give rise to Conspiracy Theories as Hanlon’s Law warns about:

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

The following video shows many of the tendencies mentioned. Most banks don’t have types as Potter any longer, the bank works and thinks like a machine without any feelings or empathy at all, costumer service is a word not a fact.

From Move Your Money who tries to resist the Corporate Ideology.

Automated Decisions

Buying and selling on the stock market are for a great part based on automated decisions on computers, but as we have seen, it can go terrible wrong when some unanticipated events shows up. What’s worse, the stock market was made to foster strong and sound companies, not for computer controlled gaming, but for intelligent investment.

As fewer and fewer managers can make decisions, these decisions will be automated as rules in computers, and it will be impossible to make decisions based on individual concerns.

Decreasing Social Intercourse

Computers are exceptional for entertainment, you can live your life on the Internet, without any direct social contact. You can play games, make your work through the net if necessary, discuss, hunt sex/ books/ programs/ random data on the net (can be like drugs,) book your food from a local pizzeria, book escort girls, men, and boys, eventually finding mates on the net if you really want to live together with another being:). The film Matrix is a plausible destiny, not by force, but semi freely. It’s not Big Brother, it’s Big Mama.

Less Social Skills

In the old days, children, teenagers, and adults learned by living in a community, and there was room for everybody, also the village idiot. These and other unusual persons were educated by their surrounding who were mostly normal. We are today living more and more on the Internet, learning our social skills through social applications and computer games, the old community’s influence are replaced by the influence of the Internet comrades, and as like seeks likes, they can only increase their phobias or other disorders. Examples are numerous: pedophilia, school killings, terrorists, all kind of surrealistic interests, and so forth. The Law of Sayre’s are relevant in many of these cases:

“In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”

No Privacy

Children and teenagers can be reached by mobile and GPS always and everywhere, followed on the Internet through Twitter or Facebook by their parents. No privacy. The same goes for the adults, no privacy, open for state officials, economic institutions, and employers. Password protection, pseudonyms, and like precautions is no hindrance, Cyber-Investigators will find everything, relevant or not. You can not even go to the North Pole or to Himalaya in peace, they can always reach you, and you them.

Where’s the remotest place on Earth?

In our hyper-connected world, getting away from it all is easier said than done. New Scientist.

Conspiracy Theories

The frustration has to go somewhere, and while there are no one responsible for our situation, and no one with enough insight, determination, and power to change the situation, we invent some god-like powerful conspirators who in all secrecy, with hundreds of employees, stands behind all the bad in this world. The truth is, that most leaders are so incompetent that it hurts. Just look at Iraq. The military invasion was well thought out, but the rest was incompetence par excellence. And that is not an exception, it’s the rule. Of cause there are conspiracies and secret operations, but if more than one participant knowing about the conspiracy are alive a year later, it’s just a question of time before the world know. Another reason to use few people are that really competent people are difficult to find, and the more people involved the bigger the risks for failure, and the bigger the consequences of a failure, the less interesting the project becomes. The best way to check if a conspiracy theory is viable or not, isn’t the technical evidence but the psychology and the necessary resources behind, how big is the risk, who gains, what’s their gain, how many participate, and what expertise are necessary.

A sober view on Conspiracy Theories from the left:

Noam Chomsky on Conspiracy Theories
In case the video is not functioning look here

The the Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis:

“I don’t believe in conspiracies. Politicians don’t have the capacity to conspire, except in the most short-term way. [The distorted image of bin Laden] just suited a lot of people’s purposes at that time.”

What’s the mechanism behind the development?

Literature

 

Thomas Piketty

The Independent: The French economist forcing America to wake up to the end of The Dream.
Out of America: Thomas Piketty’s tome which skewers the idea that anyone who works hard can make it in the US seems to have hit a nerve

“Capital In The Twenty-First Century”, all 685 pages of it, is the No 1 best-seller on Amazon – apparently the first time that anything published by the venerable Harvard University Press has attained such dizzying celebrity. No self-regarding dinner party in Washington or New York is worth its salt without a discussion of it. Last Friday, came the ultimate accolade of a multiple coronation on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

The Huffington Post: Economist Thomas Piketty Explains Why Income Inequality Is Just Getting Started

 

Michael Lewis

Wired: Michael Lewis on Exposing Wall Street’s Biggest High-Tech Swindle in the book: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower traders, thereby acting before others can respond. Critics of the practice–Lewis chief among them–argue that high-frequency trading creates something akin to insider trading: a predatory environment for less advantaged investors. WIRED spoke with Lewis at an event organized by Live Talks in downtown Los Angeles.

Elizabeth Warren

A Fighting Chance (Apple, Amazon)

An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn’t.

In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America’s government can and must do better for working families.

New York Times: Book review of A Fighting Chance

A good review, also giving a good idea about who she is.

Allan Bloom

The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster Inc.

Christopher Lasch

Haven in a Heartless World, 1977, Basic Books, Inc.

In the American political vocabulary, “family” and “family values” no longer simply evoke pictures of harmonious scenes; they also push our buttons (left and right) about what is wrong with society. One of the earliest and sharpest cultural commentators to investigate the twentieth-century American family, Christopher Lasch argues in this book that as social science “experts” intrude more and more into our lives, the family’s vital role as the moral and social cornerstone of society disintegrates – and, left unchecked, so does our political and personal freedom. Haven in a Heartless World is a trenchant analysis of the plight of the family. Lasch takes a clear-eyed look at the institution in which America’s future generations are being raised and finds it faltering.

Geoffrey B. West

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation:

A New York Times article on his work.

Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities:

Describes the mathematical background for his work.

Atticannie’s Blog

Why Teacher Drink, the sequel: Natalie Munroe speaks out

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

have written a little book called “Night Flight” which describes man’s fight against the Materialistic docility to keep man competent and responsible.

By Rudolf Steiner

Inkarnation Ahrimans in German/Deutch and in English.

The the Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis:

Philosophy of Materialism

Political Correctness

Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Noam Chomsky