Time's Fool

 posted originally on Apr 21, 2017, 2:27 PM       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" 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.

       For years, I have limited my considerations of Foucault to his archaeology, studying almost exclusively The Order of Things . 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 The Essential Foucault ) 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.     I understand (perhaps prematurely) that Foucault focussed on the  self-consciously intended and arranged aspects and cases of apparatuses. ... I have also begun to read in his lectures on The Hermeneutics of The Subject .

There's a history to this. I'll be brief.   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...

 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.

      “Millions who should be ranged against the American oligarchy are distracted and divided – just as their leaders want.      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.      Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent  Rand study , 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.      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...

Economic Epicycles (from 6/10) 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 astro...

Reconciliation, recognition, openness: I and Thou Reconciliation; Hegel-Gadamer recognition p.339, openness p. 355   "In that this kind of reconciliation is the historical work of the mind,   the historical activity of the mind is   neither self-reflection   nor the merely formal dialectical supersession of the self-alienation that it has undergone, but an experience that experiences reality and is itself real.” (G, 341)

This is from March, 2007: A student wrote: I am not sure what you mean by "this country was built on slave labor."   Are you telling me that this country would not have existed had it not been for slaves?   I do not know where you are getting your information.   I replied: 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.) 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.) However, it is in fact highly probable that, had it not been for the availability of slave labor, this country would neither have quite started nor developed as it did . (It probably would have been built very differently. And be very different now.) To an important extent, the development of the industrial North...

I think this may be a (the?) key failing in the US system of governance. (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. 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...

Climate Change & The Meaning of History: Mandlebrodt Sets 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? 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? 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 ...

What is really the source, the basis, for economic value? How is wealth created? Why does our society locate the "ownership" of wealth in individuals? 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. 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. It is socially organized labor that is the basis of economic value. 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. Toward the end of achieving this investment, society establishes roles (and the corresponding statuses, positions in social organization) that bear the respons...

Mass killings in America and mass killing abroad are not two separate things. The one cannot be stopped without stopping the other. 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.  School shootings are “the war brought home.” Stop the war. Here and there.

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. 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." Donald Trump represents us all. Truly. We need to own it. "Us and them" masks the group reality. P...

President Trump: the fall of Rome and the collapse of industrial society. My Psychohistory maillist said: " The "id candidate" has won.” America’s unconscious, the return of the repressed. Psychoanalytic models for understanding collective behavior. 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. 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. 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 ...

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? 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?) 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: "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...

The 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 a priori , while modernist knowledge is anti-authoritarian and empirical. Authoritarian knowledge tends to be extremely prejudiced, rigidly unchanging, an...

There is an unacknowledged diversity of sexual reproduction in nature: " 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." From:  Bipolar Disorder ,  by Gretel Erhlich a review of  Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land,  James McClintock,  Palgrave Macmillan. onearth, winter 2013    http://www.onearth.org/article/bipolar-disorder

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. ...

The Occupy movement receded because the crisis receded. The Occupy movement is a reactive social movement ; 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. 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/participat...

A Monetary Policy for the 99%: Twelve-Year-Old Reformer Goes Viral