I do not support the libertarian notion that complete freedom of choice results in the best possible outcome. In fact, I look back at the policies of Ronald Reagan and that British hag he worked with as much revulsion as I do the Bush/Blair atrocities. That said, the Libertarian philosophy does have some merit regarding tyranny. An interviewer recently asked Stefan Molyneux if he will continue to promote libertarian ideas of freedom from state tyranny in the event that it threatens his own liberty. He replied with the analogy of a mountain climber who has always dreamed of climbing to the peak of Mt. Everest and eventually, after training and planning his entire life, finds himself almost at the peak, then realizes he won’t have enough oxygen to get back down. He starts the decent with little hope of making it—but he can’t give up. To give up would mean to die. This kind of inflexibility tends toward more of the same but flexibility, by definition, requires that we not discard what good lies within the premise.

-

Of the many ideas and stories that surface in my researching for the classes I teach, two persistent and wrong aspects of our cherished belief systems emerge; separation and control. If enough people come to an understanding of how we have turned these two problems into the false notions of effective solutions (rugged individualism and safety through social order) and not only realize but advance the logic of why and how these ideas not only do not work but threaten civilization we might achieve the moral and principled world society that exists as potential in our children. This would take a great deal of care, energy and sacrifice. I do not feel optimistic. Of these two, I have a sense that the problem of control presents the most easily brought to light. Charles Eisenstein has recently presented it clearly.

-

“The evident futility of the responses that we are capable of imagining also points to this deep ideological breakdown. The responses are all about more control. Yet control, as we may or may not realize, is a key thread of the old story of humanity rising above nature, imposing technology and reason on the wild world and the uncivilized human. All around us, we see our efforts at control backfiring: wars to fight terrorism breed terrorism, herbicides breed superweeds, antibiotics breed superbugs, psychiatric medications lead to explosive outbursts of violence.”    – Charles Eisenstein.  http://charleseisenstein.net/2013-the-space-between-stories/

-

Humans did not come here from some supernatural paradise to which we will return once we’ve destroyed ourselves. Humans, like everything else on the planet, emerged from it. We emerged and evolved as social animals that perish without connection to the other humans in our group. At this point in our history, our group includes all of humanity. The notion that anyone has ever lived a full life soley on the merit of his or her own effort is perposterous. This isn’t to say that we should bear another’s burden at our own expense, but that we need one another to properly share the travails and joys of life. This cannot happen while we cling to false notions of superiority and separation. We cannot test a better idea until we stop beating up on children.

-

The idea that we can bully our children into compliance without preclusive negative consequences does not hold up under scrutiny. Over-control, of children or of our environment, has proven itself an arrogant idea forged in antiquity by events that took us away from wisdom on a fool’s errend to own the earth. We either turn towards unity and give up the notion that the universe centers on us or more quickly go the way of 99.9% of all species that preceded us.

I ate a lot of spam in the Marine Corps. I think that’s because I stood a lot of guard duty in the Marine Corps. I think that’s because everywhere was a combat zone in one way or another. Anyway, if you had a lot of guard duty you ate a lot of  ”midrats” (midnight rations) and that meal famously consists largely of spam sandwiches. The possibility exists that I just have a more vivid memory of the spam because of how awful it tastes. I have a similar taste today in that the spam of the modern day media clogs more than just my intestines–I have to somehow erase 210,000 + and constantly growing comments from my site here because some genius assholes (tens of thousands of them by the looks of it) have found a way to profit by posting to my blog. I think the reason can be found here.

I recorded a couple of guitar lesson videos last night and they each take an hour or so to upload to YouTube. While that happens I have to occupy myself away from the compulsion to check on and (more importantly) tinker with or I’ll surely click on the wrong tab, button, hyperlink or something and have to start the whole process over. I’m good at that. It can happen real fast, too. I can move through three wrong clicks to disaster in the blink of an eye. It’s like I practiced making the wrong decisions quickly. I have the occasional thought that I live alone so fewer people will know that I really shouldn’t be trusted with matches or sharp pointy instruments. It’s only through some blessed grace that I’ve lived this long and haven’t slapped a mosquito while holding a screw driver and put out my own eye.

So last night I got into the Jewish Kabbalah (which, by the way, you can do yourself here: http://www.arionline.info/index.php ) and some interesting things came up. You’ll never guess. The Jewish Kabbalah is yet another record of, and door into, the same mysteries as the Bhagavad Gita, New Testament, I Ching etc.  I don’t know why we think of them as mysteries since they are completely available to anyone who wants to know them—except, according to Tony Kosinek, the PHD teaching it in this online course, who says that these insights have remained “hidden” and “secret” for about a gazillion years and that the Kabbalahists have recently decided to unveil them–These mysterious secretes unveil the secret that only one thing exists. Wowy zowy. I don’t see what’s so mysterious about non-duality. Non-duality immediately corrects the insanity we all suffer from. Basically the message is that this idea that there are separate things from which the universe is “comprised” gives us an upside down and backwards idea of it—totally. The Kabbalah says that the creator has a plan and that plan is to make a creature and “bring that creature to unbounded enjoyment, pleasure and delight.” Hey, hey hey!. I’m here to tell you that I’m all for the Kabbalah. So what the heck happened to the Jews with their Old Testament? Well, never mind, they made up for all that with that Kabbalah—but they kept it secret for long enough, don’t you think? As always, things jumped out at me but the general ideas have become pretty familiar. Here’s one:

In the language of the Kabbalah, the problem of good vs. evil is a problem for man because he makes it a problem. “Man cannot understand the events in his life because man rejects half of everything that happens”

I was just reading in Hubert Benoit’s book, The Supreme Doctrine, how enlightened Zen masters no longer see something that looks unfortunate, say, the tsunami that killed 400,000 people as necessarily a bad thing—it’s just a thing. If you could read minds and you were on the trading floor of Wall Street that day you’d come away confused. Trying to make sense of the world is like trying to see light by looking deeply into darkness (ACIM text). There is no sense to be made here if you ask me. So what am I doing, then? Well, heck, Hoss, I’m trying to get out of here. What are you doing?

Many books and many articles, and many psychology classes have passed since I first came to suspect that I have no idea who or what I might be. The older I get the better I see how this crucial information, were it available to everyone, would, more than any other development, any other discovery, invention, law, pill, alien visitation or religious swoon, align humanity more closely with everything. Sometimes stating something in a negative can better express an idea like this; so let’s do it. Our nature, our essential character, our core essence, cannot be described because it does not have a structure, it has no characteristics but one, it has no elements or attributes but one, it is not like anything because it is all there is. Science hasn’t really discovered anything so much as it has corroborated what was already known to individuals throughout history, a few of whom for whatever reason tried to tell others.

Words poorly serve the purpose of helping us regard our true self because words belong to the world of dualism. They need comparison and contrast to work. Words are like everything else in the world of form in that they only arbitrate between opposing forces, they only work one phenomenon against another. If we lean too heavily on them and regard them as the measure of validity we will discard anything that transcends them or the reality to which they belong. If that to which they belong only presents a reflection of truth we disregard truth in favor of a reflection of it. This observation about words would, by itself stand as an introduction to the problems we face in knowing ourselves, but if we decide to search for our nature, that is, if we decide we want to know ourselves directly, the complexity of that task grows exponentially in that we realize eventually that complexity itself represents that which most effectively conceals us from ourselves. Truth, efficiency, effectiveness, peace, calm, what we would recognize as love, lies in simplicity and simplicity always lies beneath, buried by, complexity. Progress proceeds only downward. Movement only moves away from truth. What we think of as evolution only evolves toward catastrophe. No final pinnacle exists other than disaster which eventually reverses a downward spiral. This does not happen in time because there is no time in eternity; it does not happen in space because space only exists in relation. I guess I find it interesting that the Kabbalah seems to contain this same idea. I had no clue what the Kabbalah was all about except that I once saw a TV show wherein a woman made a mud copy of her dead husband and brought it to life with Kabbalah magic. It didn’t turn out well, as I recall.

I don’t want to argue with anyone’s experience. If the world you make up satisfies you yay for you. I don’t have a stake in changing anyone in any way. That seems to me what religions want to do (desperately, by some appearances). I think about how I’ve come to see why this persona I present to the world as myself feels fraudulent. But what can we do? I cannot unring the bell of the me I live in the world through. I have to go on.

My mother hated Ronald Reagan with a ferocity that seemed almost pathological at the time. She spent a lot of energy railing against “Reaganomics”, a term she would spit out as though she’d taken a bite out of a sandwich made with spoiled meat. As I more and more frequently encounter statistics and graphs representing the economic trends of the past few decades the correctness of her resentment seems irrevocable; indisputable. But, like so many truths related to the conservative view, the absolute worst results possible seem to occupy positions of the highest esteem in that ideology. Why do they love this guy who started this downward spiral into social immobility and inequity, the obliteration of the middle class, this suicidal corporate governmental control that seems unstoppable in its drive to force us back to a feudalistic slave-based culture? What, exactly is the appeal? It seems to me that, to think like these people, one thing to avoid at all costs is frank honesty–truth–facts. Apparently I’m supposed to somehow overlook everything I see and blindly think of them as decent citizens of a benevolent society, caring and principled. Just how I’m supposed to do that eludes me completely. This country has gone to shit. There’s nothing promising about our opportunity, there’s nothing just about our justice, and there’s nothing magnanimous about our magnanimity, there’s nothing free about our freedom and there’s nothing peaceful about our peace. How can we expect to be considered a decent society while abandoning decency? This question is entirely rhetorical–I’m feeling intolerant.

‎”Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem”. – Howard Zinn

Also addicts and alcoholics account for at least half of our jail population. I’ve never listened to so many sad stories as I have since starting my job as Corrections Counselor. The dumbest come from outside the jail, from the people who think they know why people go to jail–e.g. one I heard yesterday while getting a haircut; “They go there to get out of the cold weather for the winter.” The saddest come from the jailed addicts (incarcerated is a euphemism). Most of them don’t realize just how horrible a childhood they had. This may hold particularly true for the 40 – 50 women, most of whom are serving sentences for “possessing” a “controlled substance,” of fraudulently acquiring prescription drugs, of fraudulent use of a credit card (always to buy drugs) or of some other related crime like shoplifting or involvement in something like receiving stolen goods or “obstruction” (lying to a cop) or (my personal favorite) offering a nice blow job to the wrong man–horrors! So, at the end of the day, most of them are there because they suffer from addiction. They get little or no sympathy–most of them are mothers–all of them are trying admirably to hide their anguish.

Much or most (or possibly all) addiction is the result of childhood trauma or neglect that manifests as the addict’s need to sooth or aviod fear, pain and rage. War on drugs? Are you kidding me? There is more than one way to think about a woman who tries to kill herself and winds up in jail for six months because the gun she used wasn’t registered or because some cop at the scene of her attempted suicide found illegal drugs. Now there’s one for both sides of the aisle, don’t you think? We are conducting a war on sick people. We are punishing people for having been abused as children. Yeah–the truth is never popular.

Disagree? Well . . . the way to disagree is to do so on evidence. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine (I’m anxious to see yours — Happy Mother’s Day

You might have wondered recently why so many people, perfectly good, hardworking, intelligent people, consistently act like paranoid schizophrenics; distorting, rejecting and opposing science, promoting disproven belief systems against their own self-interest.  A lot of research has been done on this question. The compelling results indicate that the brains of strictly conservative people work in decidedly different ways than the brains of those not so strictly conservative–ways that, however unfairly, do not seem flattering in an evolving society. Part of these “different ways” includes a weak ability to deal with cognitive dissonance, which means they handle challenges to their beliefs more by denying the veracity of the challenges than by questioning the beliefs. In times of immediate threat, times that demand quick decisions, we want and need brains in charge of things that function in precisely this way. Unfortunately, once the threat has been answered, this type of brain will tend to react to any change as a threat. Another field of study I’ve been reading about has to do with brain function on another level even more specific to biological processes. This research has turned up significant, even compelling, evidence that much more of the processes dealing with our reactions to perceptions takes place subconsciously than ever before imagined; so much more that the very idea of consciousness as a ruling authority over behavior might be incorrect. That is to say, researchers are seeing strong evidence (very strong) that decisions are made in the unconscious and appear to our conscious awareness afterward. In other words, it only seems like you, the idea you have of yourself as an individual, a personality, make decisions. These scientists suspect (and some, like Sam Harris, propose that decisions get made according to genetic make-up informed by the schema in your brain of all the successes and failures that have happened to you–and all the dangers, pain, pleasures, modeling from parents and the whole of your experience. This information puts a whole new face on the importance of parenting, for one thing, and challenges much of what we have thought true concerning matters of accountability as it relates to our justice system. The problem here, of course, is that what they’re finding as much as neutralizes itself because so many people will simply reject it. Ain’t that wild?  I have a theory that the people outside social norms (in prison, for example) may, in some ways, help comprise those naturally disposed to more adeptly deal with change and challenges to their present belief systems–if I can manage to help them see their dilemma I might wind up sending people out into the community more aware of their situation and how to deal with it. This may also help them respond to the world with better understanding and in a more forgiving way. They might, in a sense, leave jail better people than the people who put them there; smarter, not in IQ, the measure used in school which ignores at least 12 areas of intelligence (and probably more like twenty), but in emotional intelligence, a measure of intelligence by which many people with a high IQ come up  idiots.

Harris, S. Free Will: Simon and Schuster (2012)

Sowell, T.  A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles: Basic Books (2007) New York, NY

Tavris, C.  Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful   Acts:  Harcourt, Inc. (2008),  New York, NY

Mooney, C. The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality: John Wiley and Sons (2012) Hoboken, NJ

Here in the United States we have a sub culture of poor kids who grow up knowing that school won’t offer them their best hope for the big kahuna. Their best hope is to play on the NFL or NBA — and in a way, they’re right; less right, maybe, than they were before the civil rights movement when they didn’t have even that chance. So they put all their energy into something only available to an insignificant portion of them. But this doesn’t just describe the plight of the poor. The plight of the poor is the plight of everybody.  People who whine about having to take care of others just don’t get it. You’re going to take care of people whether you like it or not so stop crying about it. You can provide the necessities of life for people at a level that enables them to rise above their ignorance but you can’t stop there. You have to follow through by providing a model worth aspiring towards — or you can suffer the consequences of a miserable, dangerous, decadent society in which nobody feels good. I don’t see it happening because that model would require real, ground level change. Too many people here want to take us back to a time that never existed or, more accurately, a time that never existed that they think still exists and that they can restore and maintain. That’s why so many of us think they’re crazy–detached from reality–because they are. We can’t return to the days when the sun went around the earth because that was never the case except in our mistaken beliefs based on our perception that the sun came up and the sun went down. We only had it a little bit right. That was a kind of myth, like the American dream. The American dream isn’t the little house with two and a half kids, a car and a white picket fence because in order to work, that American dream has to be everybody’s American dream and it isn’t. That’s the one we’re told we want, not the one we’re conditioned to actually want. If the American dream were simply the “better life” that the immigrants came here seeking we’d all have it. The American dream we’re conditioned to want is to become filthy rich–Robin Leech rich–with a full tennis court and swimming pool, a fleet of cars and a mansion in each of the loveliest parts of the world staffed with servants we call by ringing a bell. That’s the American dream free market capitalism needs us to have in order for it to keep on churning out poor people in sufficient numbers to keep the rich people rich.  My grandfather (Needels) used to say, “you can make everybody poor but you can’t make everybody rich.” OK, but that whold idea seems to me . . . insane. For the life of me I have never understood why the idea of making everybody reasonably comfortable seems so terrible, so downright unthinkable.  Many seem to just not care–but they don’t care because they have no interest in education, in educating themselves. That’s how it works, you know. You can only educate yourself. You can’t “give” someone an education, that is, you can’t “educate” someone in the same way that you can’t “make” someone happy;  because education is a personal journey. If everybody had a real education nobody would want a system like ours. But we don’t raise children to want an education–in fact; we practically beat their natural curiosity out of them. It is hard and unusual for anyone here to actually acquire an education because if you want an education you have to be taught the skills needed to give yourself one and then you have to want to use them to learn–for the sake of learning. Too few people think like this because thinking like this requires the education we don’t receive in a public system designed to train and condition — not to provide children with the tools they need to educate themselves. That isn’t us. We go for the dog biscuit–we don’t like to expend energy unless we get the “reward” — that’s what keeps the laboratory rat pulling the lever. So we have a predominately semi-literate populace — so we get the Bush administration–so we get wars, jails, WalMart, foul tasting water, asthmatic kids, ADD kids, cancer . . . do I have to go on? We send all the children off to be conditioned–trained–”schooled” instead of educated–because the robber barons designed it that way and then added the brilliant move, the final touch. They made it compulsory. End of morning rant.

I recently posted a video of Bob Costas explaining that he would like football better if it could be non-violent, more like baseball. I don’t care about football one way or another and I never heard of Bob Costas. What got my attention is the rationality of his argument and wondering whether people who love football will hear it. I find  defense mechanisms interesting, even important. Costas’ doesn’t say he doesn’t like football. He likes football. He simply made the point that the violence, as much or more than any other aspect of it, makes the game popular, and he doesn’t like that about it. I agree with him.

After a lifetime of believing in the necessity, ubiquity, heroic opportunity and decisiveness of it, I’ve come to think there’s something to be said for imagining how things might be different. My curiosity arises not only about what we find in violence that so appeals to us but also about how we react when something we love comes under serious scrutiny. Why we like violence in sports seems pretty easy to figure out. The excitement arouses our nervous system and we find pleasure in that. The rest, the pageantry, the competition, the sexuality, the safe, vicarious challenge all play a part but seem to me kind of  window dressing on the violence. Like anyone, I have my own reasons for my changed perspective.

A decade of living and working with a lot of Amish people challenged my beliefs in odd ways. I had to examine the notion that character traits inescapably exist in human nature. I once asked an Amish neighbor why her little boys were so quiet and she replied, “Have you ever known a boisterous Amish man?” I never had. This implies something about how much our environment shapes our personality. Try to imagine an Amish football team.

When I got back from Nam I happened to watch a documentary titled Hearts and Minds that depicted football as a game used to prepare young men for war. That documentary struck something in me. I’m trying to figure out why so many people love violence, particularly when it involves teams. We love it less overtly when it involves murder or domestic violence, but the fascination still dominates. In fact, we love violence so much that we make it a disgrace to challenge whether it has value enough to justify keeping it around for our enjoyment. We resist imagining a world without it. What fun is that? We can try to parse it out, defend it by qualifying it but at the end of the day, when you examine it closely, violence is violence. We like to think we can fight violence with violence and that will keep us safe. We cling to the belief that punishment works in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The ritual Costas describes in this video is the same ritual we solemnly perform at the funeral of soldiers who die in combat. I find it fascinating that we do not perform that ritual for civilians who also die, often along with soldiers—because, in our imaginations, they do not go down fighting; they’re not on the team. Soldiers don’t always go down fighting; some of them die the same way the civilians die.

I think science, that destroyer of mistaken assumptions, has has brought us evidence that will force us  to examine a related holy grail, freedom of choice. Freedom of choice seems to me an interestingly dubious idea from the very start. It becomes so when you try to explain and define it. I don’t think we have all that much freedom of choice and I have reason to suspect that this is true literally, that is, historically, biologically, politically, economically and culturally. My old friend, Mr. Stephen Fink, argues that we live in a violent world, that society is violent and within that real contexct he would not interfere with a son’s decision to play football or join the the Marine Corps because that would impinge upon his right to make his own decisions. This sounds worthy and I would not step on my friends personal belief, but I would think otherwise.  I would absolutely do everything in my power to dissuade my child from joining the Marine Corps. In fact, if I’d had a son to raise I can pretty much guarantee that he would not ever consider joining the Marine Corps because I would, hopefully, not have allowed the media, the school system or the environment and culture around him to condition him into believing he should want to go to another part of the world and risk being maimed or killed in order to maim and kill people who have done nothing to him because some group of old, white, ignorant, power-hungry, idiotic, perverted dickheads like Robert McNamara, William Westmoreland, Lyndon Johnson, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, George Bush, Dick Cheney, (the list is very, very long), who would never, under any circumstances, allow the military to send their own sons to needlessly risk their lives, want something they have or, as in the case of Viet Nam, just want to prove they’re not losers. But I somewhat digress. Costas, to my ear, isn’t talking about the game, football. He’s talking about the violence within it. After all this yada yada yada I still agree with Mr. Fink’s valid point. Violence has always served a purpose in nature and always will as far as I can see. But I don’t think we serve progress toward a better world by trivializing it or holding it up as a sacred cow.  I think we do better to allow challenges to all our strongly held beliefs.

I just posted an article from my daughter Sarah’s  Facebook page about a little girl who died in the Texas Department of Human Services office in the Rio Grande city of Laredoa. If you didn’t hear about it, please read the following very short news story. And notice your reaction to it.

Did you think the mother had to have a mental illness? Did the context of a Human Services Office influence how you reacted? Did you wonder whether she was black? Mexican? Did you, in any way, think something along the lines of “Oh, well. Three less freeloaders mooching off the government titty?” Did you read the whole article to find out more about the circumstances? Do you feel like I’m trying to attack you? I’m not. I’m only writing this to sort out my own reactions to this horrible story, one of probably hundreds if not more that probably happened on the same day. I might post this . . . might not but I’ve been in a slump and decided to write about something I think might interest others that I’ve discovered recently and how I’ve been thinking this morning — while I have some time. This will go out completely unedited-probably a dumb thing to do? Well there you have it.

Recent brain research indicates a strong possibility that your unconscious brain knows and decides what you will do well before you do; that is, well in advance of your awareness that you will decide to do something. At least two leading researchers have postulated that the brain does this by comparing past life experiences, particularly those that molded it during developmental stages of life. When I come across something like the above news article, I enter it into a collection of information, a compilation of data from past experiences, sensations and knowledge where I compare it to other experiences to find similarities which I use to understand life, like the wall on the police detective’s office where the investigative team has tacked pictures of various evidence which the hero stares at until he or she or they make connections that point toward a conclusion of some sort. I have made some progress in learning to suspect my own emotional reactions in that, just as in the scientist’s laboratory, the act of observing changes the nature of what is observed, which further complicates my ability to accurately assess the truth of a matter. I also add to this what I have learned about our capacity to project onto others (convincingly) our less attractive traits or to deny or repress them so effectively that they remain below our perceptions, to eventually emerge in some secondary, more culturally acceptable form; e.g. men in most societies learn to hide fear or sensitivity until they no longer feel them consciously. All this (and some other stuff) leaves me increasingly uncertain that what think I perceive in relation to how other’s feel, act and behave has much validity. I have worked with the mentally ill enough to observe first hand and over a considerable span of time that our mind/brain is fully capable of creating realities not in line with the realities experienced by consensus of others sharing the same experience and have studied overwhelming evidence that supports the possibility that this disassociation can occur between groups.  Sometimes this data, this information stored in my memory and cataloged according to this or that puzzle reaches a tipping point and an insight appears in my conscious mind; very often, maybe always, at the conclusion of what seems like a synchronistic series of experiences, events and exposures to curious bits of information that seem to follow a distinct path toward conclusion, a denouement, that, once in a while, changes how I perceive the world, or, more accurately, denies me my previous assumptions. I cannot un-ring the bell. Several of these serendipities have lately offered an answer to the crazy differences of belief behind much of the bickering that our problems have churned up into the very air we breathe. I’ve come to suspect that values or altruism or morality or empathy or ethics or a lack of these qualities (I have acquired a great deal of uncertainty about the word, virtue) has anything at all to do with our exasperation and sense that people fail to see what appears blatantly obvious, even things startlingly and frighteningly important; things that increasingly often manifest as matters of life and death. It has begun to seem to me that a fundamental, biological distinction exists between people who perceive the phenomenal world as integrated and people who do not. This fact, alone, is not new, of course, but the possibility that biological changes in brain structure affected by life experience and genetic make-up during developmental periods of life determine how a person perceives reality in context is , and it explains a lot about why we have such difficulty reaching consensus about matters of great emotional and moral consequence.   I resent people, groups, or advertisers who try to manipulate my behavior by appeals to sentiment. For example, I don’t like the “Footsteps” poster or the little parable about the man tossing starfish back into the ocean but I find myself easily moved to tears by certain depictions of selfless acts, say in movies such as Saving Private Ryan or The Green Mile.

In my working life I encounter and deal with devastating human tragedy and sometimes huge injustices without much of an emotional response at all. My job description maps out the level of help required of me and allows me almost complete discretion as to how far beyond those duties I go. If I can, I help. If I don’t have time, authority or capacity enough, I don’t help. At work, I have little or no opinion about how far anyone else chooses to go in addition to the parameters of the job. When I am tasked to tell an inmate that his mother or infant child has died, I don’t respond according to what his offense is and I don’t ask to see his green card. What has come to light seems to indicate that I probably feel this way because of happenstance; a combination of my genetic make-up, the accident of my birth (white, working class, historical era, parents, networks, school, culture, family, environment, health etc) in other words, , more than for any other reason . . . luck. If this holds true, and it looks like it will, I can no more take credit for what I do than I can take credit for the color of my eyes, and equally, I cannot justifiably hold another’s feelings or opinions against him personally no matter how odd or wrong I consider them. I can’t tell you how I long to add, “with the exception of Rush Limbaugh”.

I know that I don’t always live up to my own standards. I don’t know how many of us really manage that, but I do try to work at it, at least it seems that way to me.  I also don’t believe in God. Somebody recently told me, “I do believe in God. Sorry about you.” That aside, I do I feel that a society that declares itself worthy, fair, good, generous, free, right, superior, benevolent, evolved, rich or morally legitimate has a responsibility to care for people who need care on the basis of that need alone, regardless of how they have come to need it and whether or not they qualify as members of that society. I believe that. If you don’t — sorry about you. I mean that.  I don’t think I’d hold it against you personally before. Now I know I can’t.

Sometime during 1996, an anthropology professor named Chuck Hulse explained the law of diminishing returns to me. It occurred to me that if I had not heard of the law of diminishing returns till age forty-six, others might find a basic understanding of it useful in these times of transition since it lies at the bottom of the upheaval and decline we see in the news every day. Two or three times a week, to augment a textbook written by Marvin Harris, Hulse delivered an hour-long polymathic word salad that gradually developed into a diatribe of why the younger students in the room very well might not live a full and satisfying life. They didn’t seem interested. Maybe they had not yet acquired enough life experience to deduce the implications of the information this guy provided. I, however, felt no need to interrupt for clarification. I had no trouble whatsoever connecting what Chuck said with impending disaster.

He described how hunter gatherer tribes occupy a large (very large) geographical space that forms a circle and move about it as food sources dwindle. He divided food into two categories, protein and carbohydrates, with protein less available in that jungle animals tend toward small, nocturnal and generally hard to catch. Bananas can’t scramble away into dark underbrush. This constant movement of the tribe allows the game animals, fruit, roots, nuts and berries, leaves, trees, bugs etc. time to repopulate, replenish and return to the original state the group occupies each time they move to a new location. The population of a given tribe remained constant (around thirty) for oh, a gazillion years, because women who must carry babies around the jungle don’t feel like having a lot of sex. Anyway, it seems certain that something had to force these people into another way of getting enough to eat. Off the top of his head, Chuck guided us through the progression from this basic lifestyle through the development of slash and burn agriculture, which provided carbohydrates but even less protein and which eventually eliminated the ranging lifestyle, and pastoral herding culture for others that provided protein but no carbohydrates, required migration from summer to winter grazing which meant territorial over-lap and consequent trade which caused some tension, conflicts; the protein vs. carbohydrates problem. The necessity/ability of the agriculturalists to store food brought about leadership in the form of management of distribution; big man, chief, and eventually, government but there I begin to lose track of my point. Underlying all these changes in culture and organization we have the basic quest, sustenance, in the form of food. Food supplies bodies with energy, specifically the energy to metabolize food. Putting aside an almost unfathomable amount of details, let’s concentrate on source of energy, food.

With not too much effort we can boil the whole idea of food down to one thing,  energy; energy as stuff comprised of varying densities of quivering molecules comprised of electrons, all in varying degrees of motion, which I see as energy. We know that at some level energy and light appear synonymous and we have problems understanding the nature of it; waves? particles? both? we don’t know. It seems to depend on how we look at it. But the significant thing, energy, has always driven the process of life in every respect. Some of this energy/matter animates and we say this kind of energy lives, has life. Energy that lives does so by metabolizing other energy that lives, procreates, evolves, and collectively, this creates a biosphere. The balance that keeps everything going depends on one rule; that the energy expended to acquire and use the energy needed for life does not exceed the available energy. We can’t use more than we have to get what we need and not upset the apple cart. It does not really matter that some energy remains if the effort required to access, retrieve, then use it equals more energy than results from that effort. So what did Chuck Hulse mean when, for example, he explained that the depletion of topsoil in the Midwest from 16 feet to about 16 inches reflects the law of diminishing returns? He meant that the fact that we can still manage to coax energy out of depleted topsoil by introducing energy taken from another source doesn’t change the law of diminishing returns. The scientists who try to tell us about peak oil do not seem to get through to a majority of people in western industrial culture. Peak oil means the party has already ended. The earth might sustain as many as 12 billion humans if they all live at the standard of, say, the average sub-Saharan African. At industrial civilization standards, the earth will provide energy enough for fewer than 2 billion souls; and there you have it. We maxed out the limit somewhere around 1950, the year I arrived on the planet,  so in my lifetime we’ve exceeded that limit by about 4 ½ billion people. The law of diminishing returns applies to everything, food, clothes, air, water, land, oil, the earths ability to absorb toxins, and most of all, because we have monetized everything, to money . Since we have reduced everything we are and need, even our time, our allotted span of space with which to live and breath, since we have done that we can track the decline of available energy by watching the money disappear. And the money/energy will disappear. We have already used up the low hanging energy/money and now have to expend more energy to acquire energy than we can realize by our efforts. Law of diminishing returns. 

So what does this mean? In a way, as I see it, it means we might as well relax and watch it all go down the drain. I don’t mean to say that no solution exists. Many solutions exist. I mean to say that, although ways to avoid over-all catastrophe abound, none of them will provide solutions in front of catastrophe not because, were they implemented, they would not help humanity to avoid collapse, but because they will not be implemented. We humans have not evolved far enough ahead of primitive brain functions to permit us to act rationally; not even to avoid our own annihilation. I have clung to the idea that the few who understand, innately understand, that no difference exists between concern for others and concern for self, either individual or group, would enlighten the rest. I no longer believe that possible. Given the magnitude and ubiquity of clear examples that a competitive approach to survival ends in mutual destruction, given that most humans choose to deny, ignore or not appreciate overwhelming scientific evidence that societies based upon unbridled consumption of finite resources eventually perish and especially, given that the ready availability of  means to re-educate ourselves towards societal changes that promote peaceful co-existence and sharing rather than competition does not seem to carry much importance to us I see little reason for optimism. It could happen that we make a better world but I don’t think enough of us have what it takes–full knowledge of self; appreciation of our own limitations as regards how our brains work. Chuck Hulse, in my estimation, is a genius. He’s one of those guys who could earn two graduate degrees simultaneously at a prestigious institution. Even at universities, guys like him get marginalized by the administrators and puffed up, published pin-heads who too often have the stage because they like attention.  I had lunch with him at the student union a couple of times and once asked him if he thought the human race would succeed. I expected him to lay out a couple of scenarios–Chuck said, “We’ll see, won’t we.”