The "Tragedy of the Commons", Culture, and Information

Most mornings about a half hour after sunrise, some wild turkeys wander through our back yard. They're pretty impressive birds. The tom turkey (shown left) is the size of a medium dog. They come fairly close to the house to browse the seeds that drop off our bird feeders.

Wild turkeys were hunted to local extinction within only 20-30 years of European settlers moving to northeast Ohio. Diaries and accounts of the time record the total wanton disregard the settlers had for nature. Entire primeval forests were razed to the ground and burned to make pot ash to be shipped back to the east coast and to clear space for farming. The settlers hunted every single animal for food or for sport, and basically transformed a thriving forest into a big grassland in only a few decades.

The turkeys that are around today were reintroduced by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The populations are maintained by restricting hunting through laws, and also through education, and culture, and also, importantly through a mass shift in farming practices, so large portions of the landscape have returned to forest over time, and the habitat of the animals has been restored.

It's a good question whether animals like turkeys would survive without hunting restrictions, or if the cultural, educational and economic changes are actually the driving force in their survival today. It's also a good question if the settlers of the 1800's really knew what they were doing, that is, their collective impact, would they have behaved the same way? If each individual person making selfish, short sighted choices had more complete information, would they moderate their actions? Or, put a sharper way, would a community of people abide cheaters in their midst, that is, those who exploit the commons to the detriment of all?

In the Beginning Wasn't the Word

The Greek idea of logos features prominently in western civilization. "In the beginning was the word" and all--that is, the idea that reality is symbolic--that is, human words, letters, paintings capture the essence of nature and the universe. That consciousness is symbolic.

This line of thinking leads to solipsism and it's evil little buddy nihilism and countless mind prisons of ideology and religion.

The world's not symbolic; your brain doesn't even run on symbols. You're not going to capture reality with your poetry, your paintings, even your HD camera, nor will you capture reality with your math or your physics or your computers.

Ladder of Radicalization

Goldman and Berkman, Anarchists

How many people in the world will actually pursue ideological violence completely unprovoked?

I have no idea at the actual numbers, but my guess is they are staggeringly small. It's probably similar to the people who engage in violent religious rituals like "eye plucking festival" or religious self mutilation.

After the September 11 attacks in the US, the public was constantly reminded at the possibility of being randomly murdered in public by disgruntled Muslims. However, almost every subsequent terrorist 'threat' that was thwarted by the FBI was actually arranged, sometimes financed, by the FBI itself.

At the end of the 19th century, and in the early 20th century, anarchists assassinated political figures, including William McKinley, and attempted assassination of business leaders like Henry Clay Frick. Some were "lone gunmen", others were bombers. The people who eventually pull the trigger get there after a process of indoctrination. I've often wondered if any element of it is spontaneous or organic. Is it entirely planned and coordinated by secret societies, mafias or intelligence agencies? At this point, I'm pretty sure "anarchism" is a product of the ideology/religion factory that also spawned the neocons. My gut feeling is such ideologies serve to create a feeder system--to find the handful of individuals out of billions who will kill and die for fictions.

Today in the US, the 2016 presidential race is particularly contentious. It's a major departure from the stage managed selections of prior years where two establishment figures danced around the stage in kabuki theater fashion. Regardless of what or who Trump actually represents, he's a divisive figure, and seems to really rile up the NWO and globalists as do other supposed "nationalist" politicians in Europe.

The rhetoric from his opponents keeps evoking nazis, gas chambers, and ovens. I wonder, does that establish a bottom rung on a ladder of radicalization?

Experiencing the World

I've been meditating on a handful of topics for many years and I think I'm finally able to reduce a diverse set of ideas, observations, and gut feelings to a sentence or two that explains what I'm after.

I'm interested in the paradox that nature does not run on formal language, that is, mathematics does not govern the world, nor do our brains speak a formal language (which is why I don't think present day Turing Machine style computers will ever be intelligent) yet human beings were able to devise formal symbolic languages to create an algorithmic model for the natural world--physics for example.

How can a formal language be created within a universe that runs on poetry?

For many, many people, various formal language models of the world completely supplant the real world. (think The Matrix) For most, the formal language that obsesses them isn't physics, or mathematical models of gravity, waves, or particles, but financial ledgers and commercial transactions. The signs and symbols of money and imaginary numerical attributes of things in a marketplace dominate their mind. (Think There Will Be Blood)

From the mythmademan perspective, the computer is the DISEMBODIED MATH GOD MADE REAL. The architects of the modern computer brought their god into the world, they opened a portal to the other side for their egregore master to cross. And now, perhaps, they strive diligently to make themselves more like him, that is, to become creatures of the formal language themselves by shedding their analog, messy skins.

I've been instinctively moving the opposite way in my personal life, trying to shed the formal language skin of physics and the ledgers. To that end, we recently moved to a house with a relatively large parcel of land (15+ acres). Most of the property is wooded and there is a lot of variation in the landscape in the woods. There are streams, bogs, ravines, meadows, and ponds. A fairly fit person can walk the perimeter of the property, navigating all kinds of obstacles, and doing about 400 feet of climbing in about 30-40 minutes, or walk end to end along paths in just a few minutes. It would probably take a lifetime, though, to get to know every single corner of the place. There's practically infinite variation there, plus it changes all the time. Wildlife cycles through the property through the days, different birds are active through the seasons, and the vegetation ebbs and flows with the sun.

If one were to "manage" the property for a solely commercial purpose, e.g. agriculture, or in our case a tree farm, that is a finance-economic purpose, a fairly standard method for doing that would be to simplify the place, render it uniform--cut down all the competing trees for example so that nature would conform more closely to a ledger book.

I'm currently trying to figure out my role as a human steward of nature when I've rejected the disembodied math god.

Divinity of Stuff Part Two

In a couple of previous posts, I started to elaborate an idea of stuff being divine, that is, being suffused with the essence of the gods, rather than merely dead, because, well, why wouldn't it be? It seems that way to me.

Stuff, even the human body, gets a really bad rap in Christianity. Some of the gnostic christians thought the created world was fallen, evil, just a trap for souls. For pious men, women and sexual relations in general were like toxic waste--things to be handled only when proper precautions are exercised. The god of the monotheist cults like Christianity is hidden, or missing, or maybe, in a generous interpretation, extra-dimensional so present everywhere but nowhere to be seen or interacted with by the faithful.

Imagine, instead, a world that is alive with gods so you're among them all the time and that everywhere you look is a sign from the gods, or a sign of the divinity of creation, of matter, and by extension, you, your body are divine and need no redemption or judgement.

Rather than body and soul dualism and seeing matter as a trap, imagine a dance of consciousness and matter, symbiotic and very fond of each other rather than hostile adversaries. Imagine the body as an the bow for the soul, and the tension of the string as life. That's way better.

Really Bad Neighbors

A few centuries after Machiavelli the notion of moral or spiritual fetters on rulers, especially with respect to international politics, has come to be viewed by ostensibly sophisticated commentators as absurd. It's broadly accepted that statecraft takes place beyond good and evil and is the work of an antinomian sect of cold, calculating sociopathic lizard people. The only political reality is realpolitik and its only rule is there are no rules.

Let's set aside the ideas, for now, that doing evil actually erodes and destroys the soul of the evil doers, and that we have an internal moral compass, and repeatedly violating it is actually painful and self-destructive. Instead, let's think about how repeated cheating, lying, theft, and violence destroys reputation and relationships.

Think of the difference between a bad neighbor and a good neighbor simply from a utilitarian point-of-view. A good neighbor is a resource, like good water, or good weather. A bad neighbor, a violent drunk for example, is the opposite--a curse upon all.

A violent gang of sociopaths can cheat, lie, and steal for awhile maybe even decades, but in the process they burn all their goodwill with the neighborhood and are eventually isolated and destroyed not by any moral force on its own, but because moral and good men won't abide a tyrant or a cheat.

Divine Stuff

When you work for hours on a hands on project--a garden, woodworking, renovating a house, art, whatever--you realize, eventually, the stuff starts speaking (for lack of a better word) and telling you what it wants to be, or how it works, and that it's a full participant in creation. It's not passive at all.

The age old systems of poetic understanding cast the Earth--stuff--in a female role. In the creative process of agriculture the Earth, the goddess, gave birth to the crops when activated by the sun--which took the male role. The Hermes/Mercury character is, perhaps, the spirit of fertilization.

The monotheist cults didn't see the divinity in stuff, which is possibly appropriate for cults for city dwellers, accountants and bureaucrats. Their god is hidden and remote, maybe only accessible through a professional in a building, and quite possibly gone. The world of trees, fields, soil, and water doesn't even exist in their imagination. It's deleted from their scriptures. Stuff is just there for production, conversion to money tokens. Animals are just animated meat.