tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36372222024-03-13T09:36:41.557-07:00Time's FoolRandom MindburpsJerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-57077539481126333822023-01-06T14:14:00.001-07:002023-01-06T19:51:37.190-07:00How can an atheist be moral?<p> posted originally on Apr 21, 2017, 2:27 PM </p><p>A student quotes his textbook: "morality is a bad fit within the contemporary atheistic world view because there is no good reason to think that creatures who evolved intelligence through purely naturalistic mechanisms would have evolved the ability to correctly discern the content of necessarily true, general moral principles"</p><p>I replied: To the contrary, secular humanism, an atheist philosophy, is intensely moral. Its morality comes from two sources: 1) a rational argument that cooperation is not only more beneficial to individuals than conflict or competition, but also that it is structurally necessary in order that it be possible for individuals to live together; 2) a scientific understanding that the source of psychological individuality is group membership, interaction with family in infancy and early childhood and interaction with peers and other community members in later life.</p>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-30001770127601832522022-11-13T12:22:00.002-07:002023-01-06T19:52:25.796-07:00<p> <span> </span>For years, I have limited my considerations of Foucault to his archaeology, studying almost exclusively <i>The Order of Things</i>. I've mostly ignored his sociology, as iconized for me by his focus on apparatuses of social functioning (disposatifs). Beginning to read about this (in <i>The Essential Foucault</i>) I find myself considering them (disposatifs) to be basic cross-institutional arrangements for providing the functionalities required/allowed by modern societies --as almost a taken for granted sociological common sense view of how things work in modern societies, rather than just as self-consciously intended and arranged sets of social arrangements and thought flow systems.</p><p><span> I understand (perhaps prematurely) that Foucault focussed on the </span>self-consciously intended and arranged aspects and cases of apparatuses.</p><p>...</p><p>I have also begun to read in his lectures on <i>The Hermeneutics of The Subject</i>.</p>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-28688965153253600542022-11-13T12:20:00.001-07:002022-11-13T12:20:48.920-07:00Political CorrectnessThere's a history to this. I'll be brief. <div><br /><div> The social constructionists in general, in particular one of the originators of this approach, the sociologist, Erving Goffman, have revealed clearly what everybody already knew anyway, but hadn't seen it systematically as a major aspect of the processes of social stratification and the enforcement of existing stratification regimes. What was pointed out is the fact that how you talk about someone, how you talk to them, is a major means of exerting social control over them. Particularly, to insult a person is to demean them, to tell them that they are "less than" and to interactionally maneuver them into the position of subordinate to you. Insult a man and he's either got to fight back or accept the insult, accept a position in the interaction of less respect and less power than you who insults him. This is not a matter of “feeling insulted,” but a matter of self-defense in something like micro-class warfare. (That’s why “political correctness” is a defense against “micro aggression.”) </div><div><br /></div><div> Someone you might see as being over-sensitive may actually be rationally self-defensive. After all, those who are not in the categorically subordinate position into which American culture has traditionally placed minority group members may naturally find it difficult to empathize with such “sensitive defensive minorities." </div><div><br /></div><div> The use of "slur words," is insulting, right? To insult a person is to "put him down." It is to claim advantage for yourself in any interaction or relationship with him. It's natural --and right-- to object to being referred to with a slur word. </div><div><br /></div><div> What "political correctness" really is is simply being polite and not using insulting language. (Or that’s how it started out until the rightwing publicists successfully used sarcasm to spin it into a snide insult itself.) </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Erving Goffman (e.g., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) has analyzed the process of stigmatization, as have the social constructionists who followed him. . . . "Inducing people to feel the stigma." . . . What has been called "political correctness" is a strategy for preventing that from happening. . . . To fail to be politically correct is typically to stigmatize some category of persons. "Don't use slur words about people" implies "don't stigmatize people to make life even harder for them." </div><div><br /></div><div> The internal dynamic of being stigmatized is to apply the socially disvalued category to oneself, to see oneself as a member of the disrespected group —of one’s group as disrespected— to define oneself as "lesser than" because of "who" one is. "Black pride" and similar "identity movements" are undertakings to overcome this. . . . When such "reverse identifications," though, institutionalize (socially "lock in") into identity politics, it can become self-defeating. But the origins of identity politics, if not their sclerotic development in an over-institutionalized political-economic system, are authentically liberatory.</div></div>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-78781781102452756902022-11-13T12:20:00.000-07:002022-11-13T12:20:26.896-07:00<p> My natural mode of thought tends to be exploratory, comparative, aggregative perhaps, syncretic. After a fashion (in a way) I naturally assume something like a unitary pool of base --or ground-- subject-matters in/for human thinking. So diversity of thoughts reveals, stems from, diversity of perspectives. Coordinating several such diverse phrasings of "the same" subject matter would thus provide a fuller, a more "true" representation of that subject-matter.</p>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-51029331602986541042020-12-01T19:11:00.001-07:002020-12-01T19:11:37.718-07:0021st Century Nihilism<p> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px;">“Millions who should be ranged against the American oligarchy are distracted and divided – just as their leaders want.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The biggest beneficiaries of [the four years of] Trump’s charade are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html"><span class="s1" style="color: #dca10d;">Rand study</span></a>, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47tn richer.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The upward redistribution of $47tn wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions.”</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p3" style="color: #dca10d; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="color: black;">(Robert Reich, <a href="https://tinyurl.com/yxb92nsf">https://tinyurl.com/yxb92nsf</a>)</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The essentially nihilistic character of the vacuous individualism at the root of free-market capitalism naturally provokes a chaotic nihilism in the workers (who are both both exploited and community-deprived) from the labor of whom the investor class expropriates the wealth of nations.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And the nihilism contained in our only planet’s plundering and garbaging that is the other source of wealth also provokes the nihilism of the mass anti-progressive movements like nazism, populist fascism, and trumpism.</p>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-9992244223139320092020-10-15T16:35:00.002-07:002020-10-15T16:50:55.791-07:00<p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Economic Epicycles</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">(from 6/10)</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The shift from national industrial economies to a global financial economy signals a shift (or an order-of-magnitude increase) into a "Ptolomaic epicycles" model of large-scale economic activity. The free-market model of the economy has become, with the shift from local price discovery focused markets rooted in the dual economic functions of allocating production and distribution activities on the primary or sole basis of "real" population needs to international speculative profit-oriented markets which tend consciously to ignore those base functions of economies in favor of pure profit, an effectively "religious" or "free market faith-based" model. The excessive complication of "financial product" creation, such as swaps and other derivatives, greatly resembles the construction of Ptolomaic epicycles to adjust the coherence of increasing astronomical observations to fit the heliocentric model of the astronomical world. Just as the heliocentric model which was maintained to conform to the then-current theology which held political dominance deteriorated further and further with each additional epicyclic adjustment, so the free-market model deteriorates further and further with each new consistency- and profitability-adjusted "financial product" invention.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">What the global economy really needs is an economic Copernicus and Galileo to state and empirically confirm, respectively, a new model of economics. Perhaps one that cleanly merges the free-market assumption with a central regulation type of economy assumption. Or also with something like the system-theoretic regression-to-the-mean equalization balancing of most traditional economies.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">[Types of economies:</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Tradition</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Central" control</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Free market]</p><p class="p3" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><br /></p><p class="p4" style="color: #0010ee; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="color: black; font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">Cf. <a href="http://www.futuresmag.com/Issues/2010/June-2010/Pages/Kapp-and-trading-the-carbon-markets.aspx"><span class="s2" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">Kapp and trading the carbon </span></a></span><span class="s3" style="text-decoration-line: underline;">markets</span></p><p class="p5" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><http://www.futuresmag.com/Issues/2010/June-2010/Pages/Kapp-and-trading-the-carbon-markets.aspx></p><p class="p3" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13px;"><br /></p><p class="p5" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Cf. "Preparing for the new reality"</p><p class="p5" style="font-family: "Lucida Grande"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">(FUTURES, June 2010)</p>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-42317400522295193482020-06-26T14:58:00.001-07:002020-06-26T18:59:48.782-07:00Reconciliation, recognition, openness: I and ThouReconciliation, recognition, openness: I and Thou<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.crowdcast.io/e/PEPPTalk/clips/5ef66d3d0748db00a94a08d5" target="_blank">Reconciliation; Hegel-Gadamer recognition p.339, openness p. 355</a><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;"> </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">"In that this kind of reconciliation is the historical work of the mind,</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">the historical activity of the mind is</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">neither self-reflection</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">nor the merely formal dialectical supersession of the self-alienation that it has undergone,</span><br /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">but an experience that experiences reality and is itself real.” (G, 341)</span></div>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-44716130677284078372019-12-13T11:48:00.000-07:002019-12-13T11:48:02.170-07:00This country was built on slave labor.This is from March, 2007:<br />
<br />
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Comic Sans MS'}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana; min-height: 17.0px}
p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Monaco}
p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Monaco; min-height: 16.0px}
p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
span.s1 {font: 14.0px Verdana}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
A student<span class="s1"> wrote:</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
I am not sure what you mean by "this country was built on slave labor."<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Are you telling me that this country would not have existed had it not been for slaves?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I do not know where you are getting your information.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
I replied:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
To say that this country was built on slave labor is NOT to say that without slave labor this country would not have existed. (Although that might well be true.)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
To say that you got to work on the bus this morning is not to say that, had there been no buses, you would not have gotten to work. (Drive your car; take a cab; bike; walk; carpool; hitch-hike.)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
However, <i>it is in fact highly probable</i> that, had it not been for the availability of slave labor, this country would neither have quite started nor developed <u><i>as it did</i>.</u> (It probably would have been built very differently. And be very different now.)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
To an important extent, the development of the industrial North was based on the wealth generated in the South by the plantation system. The agricultural wealth created by Southern cotton was utterly dependent upon the cheap labor of the slaves. Without slavery, it would very likely have been impossible for the vast productivity of the South in growing cotton to have existed. Thus, the financing of both the new industry of the American North and the cotton mills of newly industrializing Great Britain would simply not have been available.(I’ve read this claimed by an economic historian, but I have not thoroughly studied and confirmed his argument for myself.) As a result, the world as we know it —not just in America, but everywhere in the world significantly affected by the industrialization of American and Europe— would very (very, very<i>)</i> likely not exist!!</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Without slave labor in the South —this is informed speculation!-- America might well not have had the powerful pull factors of available work and location for immigrant ethnic communities in the cities. Thus, the only immigrants who could come would be ones who could survive in the wilderness. That, of course, happened in the early years and continued as the West was settled. But that kind of immigration would not have created such a populous and wealthy new nation. Agricultural societies have been typically extremely hierarchical, monarchies usually. If America had not urbanized and industrialized, which was largely (it has been claimed) financed by the slave labor of the South, it likely would not have had a successful revolution against the British and likely would not be a Democracy today.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
. . . This is all hypothetical. None of this —since it is a <i>counterfactual argument</i> (what would have happened if such-and-such had been different)-- can be proven. But <u>it is likely that American democracy only exists today because of the enslavement of Africans</u>.</div>
<br />Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-22502336139695049142019-07-24T16:45:00.000-07:002019-07-24T16:45:36.387-07:00What's Wrong with America?<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
I think this may be a (the?) key failing in the US system of governance.</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
<br style="outline: transparent solid 0px;" /></div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
(1) In the charters given by governments to corporations, there is no legally enforceable requirement for social responsibility. The only (primary, major?) real such requirement imposed upon corporations is the fiduciary duty to the (monetary) owners —the stockholders— of the company.</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
<br style="outline: transparent solid 0px;" /></div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
In the constitutive relationship —a relationship that is established/created by the (Constitution of) the US federal government— by states to the economic corporations that are co-generated by state governments (as authorized by the federal government) jointly with the collectivity of the legal-financial founders of the corporation, the only burden placed on the new entity ("corporations are legal persons") by its state-"parent" is the fiduciary duty to the individual founders and to their financial successors. Even though the State-given charter constitutes the corporation as a kind of public entity (its particular private character specified and enforced by a public government) no serious public responsibility is established to balance the legitimation by public entity.</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
<br style="outline: transparent solid 0px;" /></div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
This is why "it’s all about the money" everywhere in America! The State —federal and state, as the legal progenitor of corporations— fails in all its (social) responsibilities to its citizens by failing to institute those social responsibilities upon its children, the corporations to which it gives birth.</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
<br style="outline: transparent solid 0px;" /></div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
Corporate influence over government would probably develop even in the (hypothetical) case where finance is not the predominant reality of corporate formation. But in a capitalist society, the primary receptacle and conveyance of the power to which charter/(legitimation) by the State provides corporations access is the money that defines fiduciary duty.</div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
<br style="outline: transparent solid 0px;" /></div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "Avenir Next"; font-size: 18px; outline: transparent solid 0px; text-size-adjust: auto;">
(2) . . . More deeply [or at a deeper level], the fact that the myth of the insular individual, rather than the peninsular individual, is at the root of the US Constitution is itself probably the "source" of this failure to impose social responsibility on newly-born corporations. (The fantasy that individuals create wealth is a component of the insular individual myth.) (3) Connected with this, of course, is the commitment to the secular religion of the invisible hand, that has been accepted as the core social justification for prioritization of the capitalist "free" market economy over social-responsibility regulation by government, and over all possible social bond-based (communal) modes of organization of the economy.</div>
Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-45120042185613266372019-05-11T15:02:00.000-07:002019-07-24T16:47:33.492-07:00Climate Change & The Meaning of History: Mandlebrodt Sets<b>Climate Change & The Meaning of History: Mandlebrodt Sets</b><br />
<br />
If so (if that joining of ideas is apt), then what is the shape of the present moment? Along what complex fractal trajectory have we come to the present moment in world history? What (therefore) will tomorrow --the big tomorrow-- bring?<br />
<br />
Is it possible to use this configuration of ideas as a template for thinking empirically about the present, past and future. Can using it (as a framework of thought, a potential set of algorithms for perceiving reality, and for acting successfully/adaptively with it) provide us with a sufficient sense of meaning that we can see past and present and future together, to prophecy futures if not quite to predict them? To prophecy the future in its form, if not in its particular details?<br />
<br />
And of what consists an apprehension of the future in its form? [I am circling --looping-- around here in a space of thought. Up a level, over a sub-space, back and forth along a period of time, and between periods.]<br />
<br />
This is, it seems to me, an intuition toward which hermeneutics is heading. In studying hermeneutics via Gadamer (and Foucault in Order, Lyotard too) (and, of course, rooted in Lakoff, Siegel, Thom, Spencer Brown, Bateson and those, as well) I am attempting to grasp a form, a shape of presence and development through historical time. I think Gadamer may know this, but not the mathematics of it.<br />
<br />
More to come, I expect.Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-84313700673726086332018-12-30T13:17:00.000-07:002019-07-24T16:53:03.463-07:00What is wealth?What is really the source, the basis, for economic value?<br />
How is wealth created?<br />
Why does our society locate the "ownership" of wealth in individuals?<br />
<br />
Wealth has its source in production. In result, it is the labor of production, or of resource extraction, or of service, that originates the value of wealth.<br />
Wealth is the materialization of excess labor, of labor value reserved by society to be invested in tools of production to the end of increasing the productivity of labor.<br />
It is socially organized labor that is the basis of economic value.<br />
<br />
Wealth is created by withholding some product of labor from consumption --consumption for sustenance or pleasure-- by the laborer. That is, by reserving and aggregating that withheld product in some form that can be made available to investment in the tools of production.<br />
Toward the end of achieving this investment, society establishes roles (and the corresponding statuses, positions in social organization) that bear the responsibility for aggregating (capitalizing) the withheld and reserved product.<br />
The establishing, organizing, and incentivizing of such aggregative behavior is the foundation and essence of capitalism.<br />
<br />
- - - - - - - - - - - -<br />
Misconceiving wealth as primarily (inherently) private, rather than as primarily (inherently) public.<br />
Conceiving of education as a private benefit rather than as a public good, and refusing sufficiently to finance it from the public share of the national wealth, to finance it like all such necessary infrastructural elements should be financed . . . roads, clean water, the national energy distribution system, health care, education. It is the public disposition of these factors of community life that provides the shared means by which shared labor produces wealth.<br />
<br />
Capitalists are merely the aggregators of the "excess" value generated by cooperative labor applied to appropriated resources. The source of economic value is the material resources, gathered and processed by cooperating labor and distributed similarly, and all organized by social relations which all participants mutually create and effectuate. Individualistic industrial capitalism incorrectly mythologizes the individual as ontologically prior to the group; neither is.<br />
<br />Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-62994555423949559932018-03-02T23:19:00.002-07:002018-03-02T23:19:59.996-07:00Mass killings<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;">Mass killings in America and mass killing abroad are not two separate things. The one cannot be stopped without stopping the other.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;">The mass killings in the US and the overweening influence of the NRA over politicians are not problems separate from American weapons killing thousands of children a year in foreign lands and the utter dominance of the military-industrial complex over the American economy. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;">School shootings are “the war brought home.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;">Stop the war. Here and there.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue; font-size: 18px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><br /></span>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-21953303141716317262017-04-28T23:19:00.000-07:002019-12-22T12:11:56.814-07:00People don't vote their self-interest.People don't vote their self-interest. Nor do people vote rationally to promote their principles or advance their values. Instead, people vote for the candidate with whom they symbolically-emotionally identify. Both self-interest and principles or values enter into the choice of candidate primarily when these things serve as symbols for the expressive-emotional needs of the voter.<br />
<br />
Symbolic-emotional election of leaders is true not only for individual voters, but --even more so-- for the collectivities those individual voters comprise. After all, the result of an election is a collective product; the winner --and thus the winning majority-- represents the entire collectivity. To the extent that it is true that collective actions express the needs of the collectivity-as-a-whole, even the "losing" voters are authentically part of the "we-who-did-that."<br />
<br />
Donald Trump represents us all. Truly. We need to own it. "Us and them" masks the group reality.<br />
<br />
President Trump signifies America's tantrum. This moment in history --the turning over of the Elliot Wave Theory Supercycle fifth wave toward "correcting"(:stock market jargon) the rise in wealth and civilizational advance from the beginning of the Industrial Age-- is an emotional tantrum in frustrated rejection of the "parental" ruling establishment.<br />
<br />
Note: Locating this historical moment in a history that can satisfactorily contextualize it, that can successfully provide meaning for this moment is an uncertain task. For me, two paradigms for historically contextualizing the election of Trump that, together, give me some sense of understanding are called Elliott Wave Theory/Socionomics and Psychohistory. The first is based on an empirically descriptive analysis of the ups and downs of stock prices and other large public events. The second is based on a psychoanalytic approach to group dynamics.Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-69932985983045991982016-11-11T00:54:00.003-07:002019-12-22T12:05:13.397-07:00President Trump: the fall of Rome and the collapse of industrial society.<b>President Trump: the fall of Rome and the collapse of industrial society.</b><br />
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s2">My <a href="http://psychohistory.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Psychohistory</a> maillist said: "</span><span class="s1">The "id candidate" has won.” America’s unconscious, the return of the repressed. Psychoanalytic models for understanding collective behavior.</span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1">Sounds right to me. We already know that resentment drives anti-establishment movements. Trump supporters represent the American unconscious: a little boy, angry at being frustrated in his desires and fearful of losing his self-coherence if he turns to his mother for succor.</span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1">And monied though Trump is, Hillary is too much the face of the existing system. He’s the rich kid who makes trouble right alongside the class losers. So everyone who feels rejected by the elite can find it easy to identify with him.</span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1">Or, more simply, (sociologically, rather than psychologically) America has failed sufficiently to educate her populace. Conceiving of education as a private benefit rather than as a public good, and refusing sufficiently to finance it from the public share of the national wealth, to finance it like any such necessary infrastructural element should be financed . . . roads, clean water, the national energy distribution system, health care, education. (And misconceiving wealth as primarily (inherently) private, rather than as primarily (inherently) public.) Capitalism is distinctively suited for maximizing growth, which is required in the early stages of economic development, but which exacerbates a dysfunctional degree of social stratification after those early stages, besides using up the resource base.</span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1">America, by failing to educate its population, has failed sufficiently to distribute the benefits of rational ego control to everyone. So expressive leaders get elected to satisfy symbolic/emotional needs, rather than functional leadership to satisfy the material reality needs.</span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1">We’ve got a crazy ride ahead, with a mad gilded clown at the helm for the next four years. It’s our great-grandkids, though, that I mostly fear for.</span></div>
Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-58706425182067819432015-08-01T14:31:00.001-07:002016-11-02T17:56:42.544-07:00"Unthinkable": Merging Foucault and Lakoff/Johnson via Borge's fantastic "Chinese" taxonomy<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">A light flashed for me, things clicked into place. I asked what Foucault meant when he said the Chinese taxonomy is unthinkable. That we could speak it and write it out, but not think it?</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I know what “unthinkable” means here. Reading Foucault in the context of Lakoff/Johnson clarifies it. (Now that I see it, it’s obvious. Isn’t that the way of things?)</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I’ll provide a more thorough account later, but for now I can say that the Chinese taxonomy’s unthinkability is due to it being inconsistent with the cognitive unconscious, which functions as a kind of transmission band for the mapping of the sensorimotor domain onto the abstract thought/self-awareness domain(s). Foucault writes:</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li3"><span class="s1">"The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’s enumeration consists, on the contrary, in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible." (Foucault, <i>The Order of Things</i>, Location 329)</span></li>
</ul>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">These metaphors, “common ground,” “site of the possibility of propinquity,” expose the spatial character of our thinking. . . . Without a consistent set of spatial metaphors, we cannot think.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">. . .</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"> (Later: Some clarification, but still with big supporting sections missing. . . . Sections provided by Lakoff/Johnson in <i>Philosophy in The Flesh</i>.) And I’m working on something longer, with more illustrative quotes from Foucault. Not so sure I can condense the L/J material, though.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I conclude from the Lakoff/Johnson analysis that <i>the core, or framework of our thinking, the whatever-it-is that we move around and modify in our heads/minds when we are thinking, the very </i></span><span class="s2"><i>means</i></span><span class="s1"><i> by which we think is comprised of the spatial ‘metaphors’ that constitute the cognitive unconscious. </i></span><span class="s2">Lacking that framework of spatial metaphors, we would be unable to think.</span><span class="s1"> . . . (The representations that comprise human thought are composed for the most part of the mappings from the sensorimotor domain to the abstract thought/self-awareness domains which constitute the cognitive unconscious. Just how this is so is laid out in detail in <i>Philosophy in The Flesh, </i>with plausible consistent theory, some empirical research evidence, and an outline of an extended research program for gathering additional evidence<i>.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">[This, it seems to me, does leave a residue of mental processing in humans that might constitute a kind of proto-thinking, as engaged in perhaps also by animals which have not made the <i>mapping from the sensorimotor domain to the abstraction/self-awareness domain</i> leap (in evolution). That mental processing would be no more than proto-conscious. . . . It also leaves open the issue of what is involved in the speaking and writing out of the Chinese taxonomy, what is involved that is <i>not</i> thinking. Perhaps a more mechanical, formal processing than is (conscious?) thinking.]</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The rules of language use, of how to construct sentences and lists, apparently allow us verbally and textually to create taxonomies that we are incapable of thinking through because those rules have more coverage than do the concepts making up the cognitive unconscious. (I am capable of thinking that sentence, as are you, because the metaphor, “coverage,” links and holds apart the rules and the concepts. Without the spatial metaphor of “coverage,” or some alternative such as “inclusion,” we would be unable to think that thought.)</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The Chinese taxonomy is spatially inconsistent, thus unthinkable. Foucault, starting from this intuition —it is only an intuition for him because he doesn’t have the use of L/J’s systematic model of a cognitive unconscious made up of spatial “metaphors” as providing the means of thinking— from this intuition, and his analysis of Classical thought as depending upon a “tabula,” he elicits the systems of spatial metaphors that constitute the conditions of possibility of knowledge for each of the three epistemes he describes.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">BTW, the space of knowledge for the Renaissance episteme is defined by “Paracelsian circles” while the space of knowledge for the Classical episteme is defined by “Cartesian order.” In contrast, the Modern space of knowledge is characterized by “the analogies that connect distinct organic structures to one another.“ (loc 5115) This, Foucault writes, is “History . . . [as] . . . “the fundamental mode of being of empiricities, upon the basis of which they are affirmed, posited, arranged, and distributed in the space of knowledge for the use of such disciplines or sciences as may arise. . . . History, from the nineteenth century, defines the birthplace of the empirical, that from which, prior to all established chronology, it derives its own being.” Loc 5123</span></div>
Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-8918754547252517602013-04-17T11:48:00.000-07:002019-05-22T17:35:36.283-07:00Right-wing Republican Extremism as Rooted in a Medievalist EpistemologyThe attitude toward knowledge exhibited by the extremist supporters of
right-wing Republicans seems to be a reversion to the kind of thought
that pervaded medieval Europe. It's an anti-modernism. The modernist
attitude toward knowledge, which developed
in the Enlightenment of the 15th to 17th centuries, with the growth of
technology and the emergence of science, relies on reason and empirical
evidence developed and tested by a community of independently thinking
individuals. The medieval attitude toward
knowledge, which had been locked in place for at least a millennium and
a half, was that knowledge was only created by the Deity and only
revealed in the Bible; thus, no new knowledge could ever be created or
found outside the official interpretations of
the Bible. Medievalist knowledge is strictly authoritarian and <i>a priori</i>, while modernist knowledge is anti-authoritarian and empirical.<br />
<br />
Authoritarian knowledge tends to be extremely prejudiced, rigidly
unchanging, and rooted in stereotypes, while modernist knowledge tends
toward flexibility, openness to new information, and critical thinking.<br />
<br />
{There is an authoritarian psychopathology at work here, based on a
family structure that tends toward the gratification of pathological
parental needs, in contrast with a family structure that tends toward
meeting the developmental needs of children. Several
books by George Lakoff discuss this. The website, psychohistory.com,
does so as well. Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's T<i>he Whole-Brain Child</i> focuses on how to raise a child to realize hir full mental and emotional potential, showing how to facilitate the satisfaction of those needs.}<br />
<br />
I draw the medievalist-modernist epistemologies distinction from a fascinating book in the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory series, Walden Browne's <i>Sahagún and the Transition to Modernity</i>, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Browne, in turn, bases that distinction on Michel Foucault's discussion of Kant in <i>Les Mots et Les Choses</i>.Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-8224134364297868692013-01-03T13:21:00.001-07:002019-12-22T12:12:40.611-07:00There is an unacknowledged diversity of sexual reproduction in nature<br />
There is an unacknowledged diversity of sexual reproduction in nature: "<span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Welcome to the world of shelled sea-butterfly sex, in which the all-male population mate, store sperm, then change into females that fertilize themselves."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">From: </span><br />
<b>Bipolar Disorder<span style="text-transform: uppercase;">, </span></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">by Gretel Erhlich</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">a review of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 15px;">Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land, </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 15px;">James McClintock, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 15px;">Palgrave Macmillan.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 15px;">onearth, winter 2013 </span><span style="color: #161616; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px;"><b>http://www.onearth.org/article/bipolar-disorder</b></span></span><br />
<br />Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-39847009047128540222012-12-20T12:10:00.001-07:002012-12-30T12:22:20.466-07:00Profit-&-Cost vs. Values (Comment to a student in my Sociology of Popular Culture course)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">Mature capitalist industrialism has become so intensely commercial, so driven by the profit motive, that its influence intrudes into every corner of our lives. And it's difficult even for us to question whether this is a good thing. (For many of us, at least.) It's "just accepted." To some extent, they bribe us into accepting it, but to some extent, they don't even have to bribe us, we're so inured to the practice. We're deluded --not just by advertising, but by a whole complex of factors-- into thinking that "cost" and "profit" are the most important principles of decision-making. (Not just business decision-making, but political, public-policy, even personal decision-making.) We get distracted from what we really want and what we really need, like health and kindness and creativity and clean air. Money is too easy to count, so its more and more widespread use degrades our ability to reason in a more complex fashion than money allows. Some values just can't, really, be put into money terms. So, mental laziness makes us ignore those values, such as health and kindness and creativity and clean air and compassion.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">Jean-François Lyotard attributes to this a <i>differend</i> and explains it in terms of the hegemony of the economic genre over (all?) other discourse genres: "</span><span style="font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="line-height: 13px;">The accelerating rhythm and, in general, the saturated scheduling of time in communities result from the extension of the economic genre to phrases not under the rule of exchange." (245)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="line-height: 13px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="line-height: 13px;">This has also been called "the commercialization of everything."</span></span>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-64246171353337951192012-11-03T23:14:00.000-07:002012-11-03T23:14:10.019-07:00What is Occupy today?
<br />
<div class="p1">
The Occupy movement receded because the crisis receded. The Occupy movement is a <i>reactive social movement</i>; such movements gather in participants when the public space becomes sufficiently chaotic, when distress increases enough to knock people off their normal apathy-balance point and makes them willing to join together in ways which the apathy of normality does not allow. Furthermore, the organizational kernel of Occupy is not the classic rational-hierarchical model typical in the West. This makes it difficult for the bureaucratic-rational mind to understand. Rather, it is the emergent co-operative/distributive model that has only recently been evolving from the Western counter-cultural reaction against the dominative individualism pervasive in Western culture.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Occupy is not dead. It has not failed "to grasp the moment." It is in an "in-breathing phase" of creating connections between activists, establishing a workable culture of consensus/participation/co-operation (rather than a standard goals-focused hierarchical organizational structure) that will be capable of functioning effectively when the next shoe drops, when the currently-held-in-abeyance crisis explodes again.</div>
Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-67914460430437156652012-06-10T10:34:00.001-07:002012-06-10T10:51:11.218-07:00A Monetary Policy for the 99%: Twelve-Year-Old Reformer Goes Viral<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/9430-out-of-the-mouths-of-babes-video-of-12-year-old-money-reformer-tops-a-million-views#.T9TaodqVHZk.blogger">A Monetary Policy for the 99%: Twelve-Year-Old Reformer Goes Viral</a><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Bx5Sc3vWefE?rel=0" width="560"></iframe>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-33762017048054514892012-04-26T17:07:00.000-07:002012-04-26T17:07:45.465-07:00Contra Libertarianism<br />
<div class="p1">
Here's a core of my critique of Libertarianism. At least of some flavors of it, since, had that label not already been appropriated by the free-market crazies, I could accept it as descriptive of my own political theory/stance. At least of part of my stance. Cooperative Libertarianism, perhaps.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
To speak of “the peninsular individual” is to offer a contrast with “the insular individual.” The latter is separated from others; the former is connected with them via the common substrate of the group. The latter is conceived as independent of others, the former as interdependent, connected, receiving-&-providing from/to others.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Human beings are a social animal, unlike bears, for example. More like wolves, we run in packs. Unlike a foal, which can stand on its own four feet as soon as it is born, an infant human is totally dependent upon its mother for years after birth. And the mother can hardly care for the child, can hardly survive herself, without the aid and comfort of her own immediate social group, the family and its community. (“It takes a neighborhood to raise a child.”)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Furthermore, the child's human self --a symbolic construction, crafted by a team composed of itself, its mother and father and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents and neighbors and neighbors' children, and more-- is composed not only of its biological needs, but of internalized images of the others who relate to it as it slowly matures. The self-concept --the soul-- of a human child is made up of the aspirations and boundaries, the possibilities and impossibilities, it obtains from the behavior of those other humans who care for it in its long years of utter dependency. (Cf., D. Siegel, Mead, Cooley, . . .)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Furthermore, the adult human being retains this habit of dependency (but more than a habit) upon his group, his society, throughout his entire life. No one lives alone; no one is a self-made man. All human economies are group constructions.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In a very real sense, the living of every man is given to him by his society. While he must typically labor to obtain it, he can never wrest it from the earth, from the field or the forest or the ocean, unaided by his fellows. Without the cooperation of our fellow man, each of us is dead. In earlier societies, capital punishment is excommunication; to be cut off from all communication, from all commerce, with one’s fellows is to be sentenced to death.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
No individual can, without the support, the physical and social and cultural infrastructure, of his society, produce anything.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
All wealth is social wealth, community wealth.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The autonomous individual is a fiction. A fiction characteristic of this particular culture.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Melanie Klein:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The assumption was relinquished of an atomistic, only recently socially modeled individual, who is faced with a closed world, in favour of a mental picture in which the subject and his reality are gradually differentiated and mutually developed.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
Rosemarie Kennel, <i>Bion’s Psychoanalysis </i><i>and Edelman’s Neuroscience</i></div>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="p1">
John Donne</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>Devotions upon Emergent Occasions </i>(1624), No. XVII</div>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-1937944038565839552012-01-08T23:26:00.000-07:002012-01-08T23:26:13.902-07:00There is no such thing as leadership!Try out this idea for size: "Leadership" is a reified concept. That is to say, the idea of leadership is constructed from a variety of behaviors (by presumed leaders) and from a variety of experiences by "followers". However, while the concept as a culturally transmitted idea serves useful purposes, there is in reality no such "thing" as leadership.<br />
<br />Think about "leadership functions" or "leader behaviors" instead of about "leadership". Then consider for any particular situation or group or organization what might be the optimal distribution/organization of those functions and behaviors. Do they need to be collected together in a single role/status? Or can they most effectively be distributed among the members of the group/organization??<br /><br />Our culture leads us (!) to assume that a "leader" is needed, when in fact what is needed is that certain functions be satisfied, certain behaviors performed. Maybe they can be spread out among all the members of a group/organization? Sometimes, at least? . . . (And maybe in the long run that will work better for everyone concerned?)<br />
<br />
(Cf., "participatory leadership," "democratic leadership," "group dynamics," "process governance," "distributed leadership," "participatory democracy.")<br />
<br />
OWS clearly has gone in this direction.Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-53840737822516127432012-01-07T18:11:00.000-07:002012-01-07T18:11:55.446-07:00Why OccupyWallStreet?While individual memory builds up to collective memory, collective memory frames/limits/facilitates individual memory. The "big picture" is sometimes hard to see, but it can be seen. This is a pretty clear look at the present in the frame of the recent past.<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wK1MOMKZ8BI" width="560"></iframe>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-9658592327771521852011-11-09T09:26:00.000-07:002011-11-09T09:26:04.012-07:00How Wall Street Occupied America | The Nation<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/164349/how-wall-street-occupied-america?rel=emailNation">How Wall Street Occupied America | The Nation</a>:<div><br /><div> "This article is adapted from a speech Bill Moyers gave in October at Public Citizen’s fortieth-anniversary gala.<br /> <br />During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”"<br /><br /><a style="font-size:13px" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pengoopmcjnbflcjbmoeodbmoflcgjlk">'via Blog this'</a></div></div>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3637222.post-10444450177459169952011-10-11T11:35:00.000-07:002011-10-11T11:35:58.406-07:00Transcending the market economy<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">(from a "Foundations of The Free Market Economy" course.)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">It's an economy even if there is no trade! The arrangement of social relations toward the satisfactory provisioning of all the people involved is an economy. In one extreme, if every individual alone were to provide for the satisfaction of all hir (his/her) needs, that would be the "negative" endpoint of the scale. (Negative in the sense that no economy would exist.) At the other extreme, if everything went into a common pool and everyone simply drew out what they needed, that would the other endpoint. (Still, an utterly simple economy.) In fact, most hunting-gathering cultures arranged for some division of labor and some redistribution of the results of that labor, but a redistribution that involved traditional/customary status-based assignment/choice of labor and distribution patterns. E.g., both the male hunters and the female gatherers would, by customary expectation, give some of the fruits of their labor --meat or vegetables-- to relatives and neighbors, who would pass some on to other relatives and neighbors. Early agriculture, with its new potential for storage of overproduction, resulted in a great increase in hierarchical relationships, differentials in relative power, and opportunities for changing the traditional patterns of labor allocation and product distribution. But</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><em>actual</em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">trade (you give to me and I give to you</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><u><em>in exchange</em></u></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">) is not a</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><em><u>necessary</u></em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">principle of distribution; distribution by status-right is quite sufficient for operating an economy.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">The institutionalization of</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><em>exchange</em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">as the major principle of labor allocation and product distribution is the invention of the free-market system. Sharing can occur without trading, without any formalized exchange as such. (The almost-inability of people in industrialized economies to think that way is the major new cultural idea that we find in free-market economies.)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><u><em>Reciprocal gifting</em></u></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">is the closest we usually are able to come to thinking in the old way. . . . Bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party, or party favors . . . if there is no normative expectation of return . . . is perhaps even closer. I guess that potluck dinners are really a survival, though, of the older non-market economic behavior! (When you go down to your local</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><em>Occupy Wall Street demonstration,</em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">be sure to bring a food item or something else to share! That's a start at setting up an alternative economy.)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; line-height: 13px;">Get it? . . . Sharing without trading. Sharing!</span>Jerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16927969616023407189noreply@blogger.com0