- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2759
The evolution and aggregation of power is a curious thing.
One can imagine our earliest ancestors - primates, monkeys-ish, ape-ish, power would have belonged to the strongest member of the troop or tribe.
We don't have to imagine too hard, we have plenty of living cousins to examine.
And in the earlier days of our evolution, if you chose to challenge power, you won or you lost. If you won, well, you were now power. And if you lost you were banished from the tribe, or you bowed before it's rules.
Power could never be too abused, if it were then two, three, a dozen members of the tribe together could overthrow it. We figured that out pretty early I'm guessing, shortly into the development of language.
Now power in the troop organized to prevent power from other troops and tribes usurping, The strong united to protect the tribe against the threat of other animals and tribes and troops of monkeys, and so it goes, perhaps for a million years, until we evolved into the first proto-humans.
Intelligence became a part of power, and the powerful could be overthrown by the clever, think of ambushes, weapons, traps, plots...
The clever will always win out over the strong. It's how we are evolving, not bigger, but smarter. This is the proof, this is why.
And so we built weapons, atl-atl's, bows and arrows, slings, and the powerful discovered they could easily be overthrown, and so they befriended the clever, a sort of symbiosis, and together they were the new power. And perhaps now it took a hundred ape-men to overthrow power...
Power is now concentrated in the hands of kings, warlords, and it came to be represented through the abstraction of money - gold, gems, those rare and coveted items, to own these things symbolized power, not only in the ownership, but in the resources required to protect these things from others interested in them. Power is transferred to objects, the objects, status symbols that exhibit the power of the owner. We now have the birth of Status Symbols, an entire subculture that fetishizes the accouterments of power, it began with the possession of rare and precious things, then became the ability to buy the labors and skills of others (think of the clothing worn in the 16th, 17th centuries, even now), it has evolved since them to reflect itself in things like luxury handbags, ostentatious housing and expensive cars, all designed to display to potential mates and rivals the "power" of the owner.
In times of revolution, when the abuses of power have become so intolerable, it's wielder could be overthrown and the wealth - gold, money, gems - redistributed amongst the populace.
Kings grow ever more powerful. There are other contenders for power as well, there is now religion, which aggregates power beyond state borders and country lines, it allies itself with some states, alienates others, and exempts itself from the the local laws and taxation. In return it grants "legitimacy" to Kings beyond what is theirs through force or inheritance - The Divine Right of Kings. And while religions (thinking especially of Catholicism and Christianity) advertise and promote charity and missions for the unfortunate and unsaved, a surprising amount of wealth and power seem to stick with them - think of the Vatican and the Pope.
This sets the precedence for what will become the new religion: Corporations.
The aggregation of power has resulted now in Nations, where no longer can a single citizen, or hundreds, or thousands even, hope to overthrow the state, it take the will of other nations, or the combined will of an entire populace to stage a revolution.
Until now, money, wealth, merely coagulated in banks, debts were written against the concrete security of vaulted gold, gems and other valuables. But a couple of curious fictions take place. The first, banks begin to print and lend money against what they have in "reserve". As time continues this practice grows unchecked until - as of this moment - there is at least 100 times more money in circulation than there exist in reserves. The explanation of this is rather long and convoluted, but check the facts, please, don't take my word for it.
The second fiction is that of the corporation, that a group of people can unite to form a fictitious "person" whose sole interest lies in making money.
From the combination of these two fictions we see the rise of corporate Juggernauts, whose wealth outstrips that of nations and moves fluidly between countries, hidden bank accounts, and quiet stockholders and CEO's, fictional personas that yet can actively lobby, write and even enforce laws to their own end. We write mythologies of their deeds and adventures, write of their adherents, disciples, their chosen priests, we immortalize them in film and devote countless pages in books and newspapers to their exploits. They represent the final consolidation of power, Gods, imaginary beings in control of vast quantities of imaginary wealth, yet with real world impacts and consequence. They - the corporations - are the final aggregation of power, devouring one another, spawning children, and when finally we defeat them all their inflated buffoonery, wealth and power will vanish into a sea of bits and bytes, illusory, fleeting, forever lost, and we will wonder that ever we believed in them at all...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 3212
The idea of the Psychopomp, that spirit/animal guide that leads us to the underworld, to death, or mediates the conscious/unconscious world.
A rich pasture indeed. Graze at your leisure...
Link: Psychopomp on Wikipedia
And search google, there will be plenty more ideas. Not all will be good, or even close to correct, but that's a chance you take....
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2661
I'm agnostic. Which means that I don't know if there's a God or an Afterlife or what-have-you. To qualify it further, if you decide to bore me by telling me that you know, I'll opine that you're either a lunatic or a liar. You pick.
What I do, however, speculate upon (and I use the word speculate as opposed to belief, as "belief" always implies those crazed members of right-wing religions who are willing to die for their beliefs, however ludicrous, and I prefer to keep mine a little more open and amenable to change and revision...), is that there seems to be an orderly, scalar property to the universe, that suggests to me, well, that it might be "intelligent".
Allow me to explain.
The physicist sees the universe as subatomic particles, quarks, muons, higgs-boson, etc. Then again as atoms, then molecules, then as immutable principles and algorithms, laws that govern both the microscopic and macroscopic universe.
The biologist, as far as they've looked, bacteria, or viruses (although by definition they are not strictly speaking alive) finds life. From bacteria, through to cells, then organisms (simple cellular blobs, algae, plants, jellyfish, etc), organs, animals and beings, and from here some have gone further, we now have things like anthropologists, sociologists, ecologists, all of them find some and even all of the traits we use to define life in the larger organisms we refer to as cities, states, countries, ecosystems, societies, wherever you choose to draw the line...
We live at the scale of people and animals, it's easy for us to draw the imaginary line and say that we can see the properties of life in another individual, in an animal, some will even generously concede that while we disagree that a "group" of people are alive (society), or a "herd of animals" is possessed of the qualities of life, maybe it is...
And there are those extremists that suggest Gaia.
We do, however, seem to favor the notion that "big=better", insofar as life is concerned, that people are smarter than dogs, that dogs are smarter than cells, that cells are smarter than bacterium, it's our anthropomorphic egoism, but if we accept this, then...
I suspect that the qualities to satisfy the criterion for life, vague as they are, are more than answered in the life-cycle of a city, or a state, or a country, or a herd of animals, or an ecosystem, but to take it even further I'd suggest that as far as we can see there are the proofs of life, the farthest nebula and galaxies are the merest synapses of thoughts, that as we pan out from the universe we'll see that more and more of the criterion for life are satisfied...
Which raises some questions. Is this life intelligent? Do you feel that any cell, bacterium, organ in your body is qualified to identify you as intelligent? If you trusted your brain when you said "yes" you might be wrong...that's ego, not intelligence. Imagine, now, that we're judging the universe, from as far below it as the smallest bacterium is beneath us, no more able to understand what it's "purpose" or "reason" is than a fingernail is able to understand yours, why, then you've taken the first step of the way...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2605
Somewhat musing, and clarifying my thoughts on the Illusion of Mind.
By which I mean, of course, that necessary delusion that we all suffer that somehow we are "I" - unique, continuous, congruent people.
The Ego, constructed from birth forward, pejorative, it's social convention to disregard the ego, we use the terms "egomaniac", "egotistical", "egocentric" to describe someone who's ego is unacceptably developed - the ego, that combination of individual experience, that separation from others, we manifest it a hundred ways, through consumerism, fashion and clothing, brands, our identifying with various causes, corporations and lifestyles, religion, art, we are anchored to our experiences, opinions and beliefs, all of which serve to make us "unique". But this ego is the frail, uppermost, "conscious" realm of thought, it's the day-to-day quest for identity and belief in ourselves that defines us, and I would argue that it's largely, if not entirely, an illusion.
There are in fact a hundred, maybe even thousands of smaller mental and psychic cogs that work to create this illusion, largely hidden (but not entirely), our conscious self is perhaps a bit like an optical illusion where we see lines against dot backgrounds and our mind fills in and imagines a square , or any of a hundred other corollaries, the square does not exist, certainly, but it is suggested, and the suggestion is enough for our minds to imagine a whole...
Imagine, extend feelings of hunger, of pain, of withdrawal from your chosen addiction, there comes a point with each of them where you break, you're mind no longer able to grasp the wholeness of you, the smaller mind that preoccupies itself with food, survival, pleasure is now in control. Homunculus has taken over. But these are extreme states you argue, but then think of emotional states - be they pleasure, anger, heartbreak, loneliness, etcetera, and you'll find they as well can consume you - and everyone, at some time, has fallen prey to these. Again, extreme states. Think about your autonomic responses - breathing, heartbeat, kidneys, a thousand parts that work efficiently in the background until it's time to make their demands known - and when they do, there's an urgency that cannot be resisted. Relating, on a curious and personal note, while trekking in Nepal, above 15000 feet my breathing was no longer autonomic, it became very much a labored, conscious process - each breath required both diligent effort and concentration, curious, indeed, for this was a process that my entire life had looked after itself.
And curious, too, or not so, if you please, but consider meditation - various practitioners are able to alter any number of their autonomic responses, reducing heartrate, breathing, raising or lowering core body temperature and adjusting metabolic rates. And curious or not, meditation is generally the process of refuting ego, descending beneath the realm of self, enlightenment (a popular aim in meditation) is generally described as a liberation from ego and worldly desires, a oneness - an intellectual as well as an emotional realization - of the connectedness of all things.
In mind - or the grasping of mind - it as well helps to survey the external landscape of external stimuli - always a part of mind, the backdrop of thought, the countless super and subliminal cues and subconscious responses, the manipulation of which suggests that a great proportion of which we consider to be free will is nothing but a conditioned response to the environment around us. Consider the illusion of what we perceive to be the world about us, generally shared, but represented to each of us independently in our own heads, we agree - often - as to the size and shape of an item, but disagree as to it's meaning, it's subjective value (a piece of music might simultaneously inspire and/or revolt 2 different members of an audience), our every sensation is first filtered through our senses and a hundred hidden prejudices, opinions, interpretations, understandings, emotions, creating an internal representation that bears little objective relation to the external world.
And finally there's memory - the lingering experience as recalled through all the processes above - seldom accurate or objective to begin with, memories are overwritten every time we revisit them, destroying all continuity, we continue our lives from places we think we have been...from false memories and interpretations of events, memories of books, films, third party narratives told to us at cocktail parties and by our parents, siblings, teachers, all woven into our own, we know that it's unreliable, tested and proven, but our own recollections are somehow not to be doubted, and every memory is a false starting point from which we begin again...
These are just a few random thoughts, poorly organized, but for more coherent and inspiring reading that might challenge or enlighten you on theories of self and mind, try some of the links below...
Link: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome
Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness?language=en
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/partial-recall
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2544
Prime Minister of Canada Salary $157,731.00 + Expenses, Living residence.
President of the United States $400,000.00 + $50,000 annual expense account, $100,000 nontaxable travel account, and $19,000 for entertainment.
President of the University of Calgary $480, 000.00 + $130, 500 for sitting on Enbridge Board.
There are some serious flaws in the way we reward competence, ethics and leadership. Serious. The first, and most obvious of which, is that while it's fashionable to overpay University Presidents at the moment (and wrong, the correlation between quality of leadership and understanding of core issues and values central to Academia is clearly disproven in her need to top up her salary with outside contracts), there is no necessary correlation between money paid and quality of direction and leadership. Find someone that shares your institutions values, pay them well (and at $480,000 ++ is too much more than well in my books) and you may be surprised at what value you get. Given the University of Calgary's reputation, this seems not a trifle high but insane.
Meanwhile, half-a-million dollars exhausted my sympathy, that extra hundred plus grand just looks like greed...