Anti-Vaxers, Right-Wing Conservatives, Libertarians

Inspired by this headline in the eGuardian 1/28/2020:

Canada truckers’ vaccine protest spirals into calls to repeal all public health rules

Anti-Vaxers, Right-Wing Conservatives, Libertarians:  The current expression of these ideologies are examples of individualism run amok. 

What is individualism.  It is not simply "man is the measure of all things", rather, it is that "the individual person doing the measuring is the measure of all things".  This perspective is also expressed in the phrase, saying, command, "every man for himself".  This is not exactly Hobbes's description of "a war of all against all" (I suspect that they would just rather be left alone than interact, even through war -- drone war is perfect for them).

Alternately, Canadian truckers, et. al. are so divorced from any feeling of community in relation to the rest of the population -- to other Canadians -- that the interests of other Canadians is perceived as the imposition of unwanted control by a "foreign" entity or government.  

Or related, the truckers feel powerless to influence laws that control their actions, and that these feelings of powerlessness have come to dominate their consciousness so that they will take action based upon these beliefs (does abortion resonate here? To be a pregnant trucker who can't afford to raise a kid on her own yet.)

And yet, can you blame them that they are so afraid?

Cognitively, their ideology, psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology places them exclusively at the center of the universe and are therefore unique and on this aspect, cannot be comprehended and is therefore alone.  

Of course, another problem is that they are so much a part of the machine -- cut to: Charlie Chaplin in *Modern Times* -- they cannot influence the levers of power since they cannot act collectively since they have been following the individualist playbook.  

And while this playbook may have served them, everybody, well for a while, things have changed.  From the 1930's through the 1950's there is labor organized to apply power for the working man.  The McCarthy Era began the war that has been going on against the American worker since. [This is not to say that workers in the rest of the world have been exploited as a weapon to wage a war against the American worker.]  This war continues.

it has been won, so far, because it has been able to deliver at the center of power.  The American worker has been content to support its government and culture because they provide enough. Borders, distance and culture mean that anyone outside those boundaries do not figure into any calculations governing my, the INsider's, behavior or fate -- unless those OUTsiders significantly object. 

To sum up:  Our unhappiness comes from out ability to outrun our wisdom.  We are creating an environment that we are not adapted to in evolutionary terms.  It is not so much the material environment -- though, there too -- as the psychological or informational or complexity of the environment.  But we respond to this environment on the basis [or as programmed] of our evolution so far.  And the environment in which we evolved was the norm for at least nine out of ten humans (90%) less than 300 years ago.  But today, perhaps 90% of humans are exposed to an informational environment that would have been inconceivable 300 years age.

1. Evolution occurs at the species level, not at the individual level.

2. Humans evolved as a social species.  [Language]    

3. Traits evolved to support sociability.

    a. Non-social traits are supported to the extent that they support are supported by society.

    b. Long-term consequences are harder to deal with.

    c. Loners have less of a chance surviving than sociables.

    d. 

America Has No Past

Other countries, even very small ones, have pasts and thus traditions and values that go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Other countries have creation myths that go back thousands of years.  America's creation myth is only a few hundred years old.

 In other countries, their gods once walked the earth, and rewarded or punished those who interacted with them.  In America, our gods still walk the earth:  they are called politicians, celebrities, billionaires. 

Crypto Currency And Others

How has crypto currency made the world better?

It seems as worthless as are gold and diamonds.  Given their market value, gold and diamonds do little for the actual people who extract these things, the miners.

They get produced, then somebody says that they are worth a lot of money, and then other people allow actual things to be bought with these statements.  "This token here is worth a lot of money."  "Great, here's a house."

It seems like war:  we throw tonnes of actual material at people far away to try and kill them, the result being nothing of lasting material value to anyone.  And yet, some people somehow get rich doing this.

Money, as a facilitator of barter, is in itself worth nothing.  Money is only valuable as a means of dealing with distance or barriers to communication.  In a face-to-face barter, money is useless, valueless, an impediment to exchange.  

Yet gold, diamonds, crypto are somehow presented as things valuable in themselves.  They may have symbolic value, yet even in that case, how much more valuable are they than a picture presented lovingly to you by your child?

Numbers Aren't Enough

 Headline on *Salon* 1/25/2022:

Court strikes down Alabama GOP's racist redistricting maps

"The map that the judges deemed discriminatory contained just one majority-Black district in a state where Black people make up roughly 27% of the population."

This immediately struck me as an unintended consequence of an integrated society.  In a perfectly integrated state, the Black population of any sub-district or sub-area of that state should be 27% of that sub-district's total population.  In other words, under conditions of perfect integration, Black people can never have a deciding vote on a measure that affects them.

This also means that any issue that is framed in such a way that the interests of Black people and White people are diametrically opposed and only one exclusive outcome or interest is allowed, this means that Black people will lose.

 I feel that people would feel uneasy at such an inevitable outcome.

But people would be uneasy with the opposite extreme.

 

More on, "We're Doomed"

 Consulting firm McKinsey has written:

“While the immediate tasks ahead may seem daunting, human ingenuity can ultimately solve the net zero equation, just as it has solved other seemingly intractable problems over the past 10,000 years,” the McKinsey report says. “The key issue is whether the world can muster the requisite boldness and resolve.”

First of all, "human ingenuity" has never solved any of the "intractable problems" it has encountered over the past 10,000 years.  It is the earth, Gaia, Mother Nature, if you will, who has "solved" these problems, mostly by culling the human population.

Humans did not "solve" the Black Death, they just died, or the remainder became more resistant to the disease.  Humans did not "solve" hurricanes; they just survived them, or moved to safer places or built slightly stronger houses.  Humans have not "solved" droughts; they simply wait the out, or take water from elsewhere.  

Humans have not "solved" racism, or misogyny, or the exploitation of the weak by the strong.  In fact, these actions are typically the way humans solve their problems

The McKinsey report estimates it will cost about $9,200,000,000 a year for a long time, to achieve sustainability.  The report puts this sum in terms of corporate investment and profits, but if history is any guide to the future, those costs will not be paid by corporations, but rather by people -- mostly by poor and working people.  This is the lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic which saw the fortunes of the richest double in the course of the pandemic.

For thousands of years, the rich and powerful have battled to accumulate and retain wealth and power over everyone else; and they have done this at the expense of everyone else.  Everyone else has, more or less, accepted this state of affairs, so long as what was left was enough.  But this was in a world where human power did not extend around the globe and controlled every resource.

In the past, as they do even now, when the rich would no longer share with the poor, the poor tried to escape their oppressors by migrating, seeking a land of their own.  In the past, when the world was sparsely populated, such migrations were possible.  Recently, Europe colonized a large part of the planet by sending their unwanted poor elsewhere, mostly to Australia and the Americas.

But now, the earth, its land and seas, has been almost completely enclosed, commodified, so that no one can go anywhere with stepping on someone's toes or property rights, and so migration has become a problem rather than a solution.

McKinsey is hoping that $9.2 trillion a year will solve this problem.  This may be so if the $9.2 trillion a year is presented as a gift, with no strings attached, from the developed world to the undeveloped world; in the form of materials, technology, education, infrastructure; rather than money which is too easily manipulated and stolen.

Does this seem likely. No.  Rather, the rich and powerful will hold on to their wealth and power and if someone tries to take it, they will defend it with all the power of Western technology at their disposal.  Most likely, they will prevail, at least in the short run, at great cost.  

For example, if China were to send a 100,000,000 man army to invade the United States, the Chinese would first have to move these people to the Americas, and this can only be done by flying or sailing.  But passenger boats and airplanes are easy targets for missiles, drones, fighter aircraft. And the attempt to launch such an invasion would be obvious from far off and long before any actual launch, so there would be ample time to prepare for such an invasion.

The $9.2 trillion must be the opposite of the kind imposed by the World Bank.  Instead of austerity for the troubled nation, $9.2 trillion must be the amount of austerity embraced by the West.  $9.2 trillion is what must flow from the developed to the undeveloped world, and the developed world must tighten its belt to do this, they must learn to exist on $9.2 trillion a year less than they were used to.