We are different from "them" and loyal to "us."

 If you look at the world from the moon, you see too many people competing for too few resources.  If you look at the world from any country, you see the government struggling to maximize that country's share of whatever.  If you look at the world from the kitchen table you see people trying to maximize their family's share of whatever.  If you look at the world from the individual's point of view, you see him or her trying to maximize the quality of their own lives.  Everybody talks a good game, but greed is far too often the principal motivation and "intelligence" is the intellectual cloak that disguises greed as "principal."

Very few individuals anywhere in the world see the whole or anything close to it.  Each of us are the product of the sum of our experiences.  A poor black person living in an urban slum is a different thing than his or her white neighbor living in a wealthy suburb.  An ethnic Russian farmer living in Ukraine is a different thing than his ethnic relative from Siberia that is presently engaged in trying to kill him.  Yet, we all share the same cell structure in every single one of our body parts and we all have the same fundamental needs, desires, and feelings.  The most amazing thing about us is our need to be different from "them" while simultaneously insisting that we are loyal to "us."

I have been on earth longer than you have and I have figured things out, but you won't hear me because I am critical of us.  It has always been so, as long as I can remember.  No one has ever listened to me about anything, unless nobody else wanted the job.  Please don't misunderstand, I am not bitching about life, I am just trying to explain it.  Several times, in my time on earth, I have been asked to do things that nobody else wanted to do.  I had a modicum of success and was rewarded with more authority, but I was never ever listened to when I suggested any actions that were not consistent with the basics as outlined above.  I am sure that others have tried as well and it is obvious that we have all failed miserably.  Greed masked by "intelligence" wins every time.

I ask myself why I am so out of step with my neighbors and conclude that it is because our life experiences have been so radically different.  I have actually tried to feed and care for tens of thousands of people that were uprooted from their homes by my government's actions.  In one such situation they tried to kill me and in another they named their children after me.  Very few of my neighbors have those kinds of experiences in their backgrounds.  Most of my neighbors have never been intellectually outside of their place of birth.  They are good people all, but they have no idea what life is for most of our fellow humans in this world.  Because this situation is not going to change, I conclude that we will continue to destroy ourselves as we are mindlessly doing now.  

It is way too bad because, with all of our flaws, the America that our parents and grandparents created was, hands down, the best society that humans have ever created.  I find it ironic that our good intentions are such a huge part of the failure of our society.  Too many of us feel that we can legislate goodness into our neighbors, failing to understand the limitations of legislation and the inevitability of resistance to it.  My current pessimism stems from the fact that I do not see the needed epiphany on the horizon.  Instead, I see advances in technology making eventual nuclear war more probable and central control of the individual more likely.

People sometimes actually get mad at me for pointing all of this out and ask me what I would do about it.  I explain that I would start by reorienting society away from liberal idealism back toward conservative practicality, but this immediately alienates half of my audience.  I lose the other half when I try to explain that we must, repeat must, help all humans live a better life if we are to continue to live one ourselves.  Back in the day, I was asked to man an outpost in Viet Nam because my bosses knew that they were going to abandon Viet Nam.  It was a backhanded compliment which I saw as duty.  I understand that no one is going to ask me to save humanity from ourselves and, at my age, I have little option but to accept the facts of life, but I confess that it galls me no end and proves to me that humans are a stupid breed of animal.  The irony is that we call all other animals dumb because they are do not possess our brand of stupidity, but ours is the brand that will kill a lot of us and destroy our current societal structure with absolutely no insurance that the next form of society will be any better. 

It very well may be that dictatorship is inevitable and democracy is a luxury that humanity can no longer afford.

 The details don’t matter very much as long as the overarching theory is agreed upon.  My parents generation agreed on an overarching framework of laws and traditions and dealt with “wrong doing” accordingly.  They were definitely not perfect.  Individual citizens did not know very much about the legal system, but they knew “right” from “wrong.”  Today’s generation does not agree on much of anything in the way of overarching theory, even though we mindlessly insist that we must protect democracy even while we do everything in our power to destroy it.  The American constitution served us adequately for over two hundred years, but now we are picking at it relentlessly and are suggesting corrections that will destroy it.  We have changed from a group of likeminded mongrel adventurers trying to conquer the world into an assemblage of quarreling children afraid of our own shadow.  The focus of our ire is our leadership, while the problem that besets us is within our own ranks.  You and I are the problem, not The Donald or Scranton Joe.  They are just two politicians trying to say and do what will get them elected.  Neither one of them will right the ship because you and I have our head in the wrong place.  One of them will “win” the next election and every single one of the people who did not vote for him will do everything in their power to make him fail.  Amazingly, they do not care that they are also ensuring that America fails.  The clue as to how much trouble we are in is that there is not one single voice that can overarch the societal divides that exist, nor can we stop those divides from fracturing further into even more mindlessness.  Political groupings are not based on shared values as much as they are antipathy for the other.  We will vote for Joe because we hate Donald, or vice versa - not because we believe that either one of them will bring us together.

Meanwhile, technology is advancing relentlessly and political groups are incorporating it into their effort to achieve control of society.  Technology permits mass communication to replace individual thought to an extent never seen before in human history.  A logical corollary to advances in technology is improved central control of populations.  Combine this with exploding population and you speed the conversion from democratic governance to dictatorial governance in any society that is not already engaged in open hostilities, which is far too often the end result of authoritarian competition.  Most of humanity is, today, governed by one or another form of authoritarianism.  Although the basics are the same, the form varies dramatically, with the flavor of the month being dressed in cultural regalia consistent with the underlying society.  The details of China’s “dictatorship” is very different than what we find in Russia, or North Korea, or Iran, or Venezuela, but the underlying theme is consistent - dictatorial decision-making.

As population pressure on the earth’s fixed resources mounts, it very well may be that dictatorship is inevitable and democracy is a luxury that humanity can no longer afford.  The joker in the pack being nuclear weapons.  Humanity is cleverly inventing the tools that it will need to dramatically reduce the overpopulation problem.  The part of all of this that continues to fascinate me is the ability of my fellow citizens to ignore it.  We are knowingly walking into the gas chambers pretending that we believe that we are going to take a shower.  Reality is too terrifying to admit its existence.  Better to focus on the wrong doing of one or the other politician and continue to spout our naive protestations of principal.  

Infinity

My biggest intellectual failure is my inability to understand infinity in both space and time.  I have been to school and I definitely understand the meaning of the two concepts, but I can not honestly get my head around either one.  Were I in a classroom, I could repeat the definitions, but out here in real life, I instinctively seek limits that I increasingly believe do not actually exist.  Were I to accept infinity, it would revolutionize the way in which I look at what is happening all around me on this small, spinning rock.  I would see an imbalance between humans and resources that was being "corrected," just as every imbalance before this one has been corrected.  There are too many mouths consuming a finite amount of "resources" and the correction necessary is built into the makeup of the individual human.  Greed and fear being two of the more important elements.  What we call "intelligence" being a close second.  We humans have invented the tools necessary to dramatically correct the planet's overpopulation "problem" and our emotional state is encouraging us to use them.  The chatter that clutters communication is governed by "greed and fear" while the forces that will significantly reduce the overpopulation "problem" are driven by "intelligence."  If "we" do thus and so, "they" will have to accept our wishful thinking and the inevitable failure will, because of our "intelligence," result in a major reduction in the number of mouths.

A two bit Russian KGB colonel is ridiculously facing off with a worn out, rudderless American politician in a corner of Europe, while a constantly changing mix of ethnic hoodlums are disrupting life throughout Africa, an authoritarian Chinese leader is seeking to establish himself as the new arbiter of things international, a fairly large group of religious zealots are trying to win a millennia old conflict in the Middle East and organized crime is taking over ever larger parts of the Americas (to include this one).  The details are infinitely complex and all-absorbing for the eight billion mouths presently eating enough food to keep seven billion people alive.  Our "intelligence" seeks to address the fundamentals of the situation with the thought that the real problem is climate change caused by too much carbon dioxide being released into the air.  Not too many mouths.  Too much carbon.  This approach not only does not address the actual situation, it intensifies the effort to engage in conflict.  Unless we wake up, you and I are going to trigger a significant reduction in the number of mouths eating whatever can be grown on the rock after nuclear war has changed growing conditions.

None of that matters to us because we have to determine the age of the fetus, the proper use of pronouns, the proper price of gasoline, and exact phrasing of the sign on the bathroom door, while, all the while, protecting our individual sensitivities.  If I were not stuck in middle of it all, it would be outrageously hilarious.  My present pessimism derives from the impossibility of changing the course of events, because we are caught up in a process that is infinitely bigger than our minds are capable of managing.  The world will change and it will continue whether we humans manage to keep up adequately to remain a part of it or not.  The next question is who or what is really in charge.  I, of course, do not know if God exists, but I currently suspect that it doesn't make any real difference.  Infinity is enough all by itself to explain whatever happens on this little tiny, insignificant, spinning rock. 

All of this will sail right over the average reader's head and I can't do anything about it right now because I have to go get more milk for my morning coffee.  All eight billion of us are literally too busy with the minutia of daily life to save ourselves.

To be continued when I have a moment in an otherwise busy life...

 There are eight billion people on earth at the present time.  The necessary resources to sustain life, let alone provide a decent existence are not equally distributed among these people.  Poverty is rife throughout the world and massive numbers of people are abandoning their homelands for refuge in one or another wealthier country.  The massive numbers of people involved in these movements puts additional strain on all of the recipient countries.  

There are, today, major conflicts going on in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.  Another major conflict threatens to break out in Asia.  These conflicts magnify every single problem facing every single person on earth.  A coalition of sorts has developed between China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, all of which are declared enemies of the United States.  All of these enemies are nuclear powers.  All of the alliances that include the United States are in decline.  The United States, itself, is questioning all of its’ traditions, history, social structure and the world sees the confusion even more clearly than do the people living in the United States.

Everywhere in the world, technology is replacing human thought in determining the nature of more and more aspects of our interrelationship with one another.  Crime is replacing law and order in more and more of the world to include right here in the United States.

To be continued…  Sorry, not today.  Too busy...  I do, however, have a question that keeps plaguing me.  If two nuclear powers go to war with each other, can that conflict be resolved short of an all out nuclear exchange?

Alcoholism and Politics.

I do not consider myself to be a connoisseur, nor do I think of myself as a lush. I enjoy beer and wine and, over a relatively long lifetime, have consumed my share of both. In a previous incarnation, alcohol was part of my professional life. In Thailand, and Turkey, and Okinawa, and Germany I would go to two or three "events" every evening of every week of the year and the consumption of alcohol was part of the drill. I had to keep my wits about me and had to manage my intake so I would usually select the inevitable martini from one of the early trays that circulated. I vehemently dislike gin and so, no matter how absorbed I was in my conversation, I would avoid over-drinking. Every time I would bring the glass close, I would get a whiff of the evil brew and move it away from my face. I found it a lot easier to sell America to foreigners if I was sober and they were tipsy.

I also believe that "spirits" can be useful in "breaking the ice," and I have, on several occasions, employed them for that purpose. The most theatrical was in Viet Nam, when I broke up a lynching by landing a helicopter on top of the event and taking the would be ring leaders into a bunker and convincing them that I would kill them if anything happened to my colleague. A 45 pistol and a bottler of Hennessy VSOP played important roles in the drama. Unlike gin, I really like cognac, and at the height of my debauchery, I was able to consume large amounts of it without noticeable effect. (My Vietnamese colleague was not killed, but I lost track of him after Saigon collapsed.)

All this as prelude to my belief that both drunkenness and abstinence are harmful to life in the real world. It is but one more example of human stupidity. Some of us think that giving ourselves to the bottle is acceptable and others believe that all will be well if we manage to avoid the evil brew. I see politics exactly the same way. Some of us take conservatism to ridiculous ends while others bask in imaginary liberalism. If I were able, I would grab a bottle of wine, gather all humans and move us to a cave deep in the earth, where I would put an atomic bomb on the table and inform them that I would blow them up if they did not find a way to get along.   (If I were younger it would be cognac, but the message would be exactly the same.)