Superstition

It is common in conservative circles to long for a return to the "golden days".  It is also common among progressives to put great faith in a future where the arch of history trends towards justice (that is if evil conservatives don't destroy everything before we get there).  Now, even in Socrates' time there were those who envisioned a return to the good old days, just as there were iconoclasts preaching faith in humanity and a coming age of peace on earth if only they were in charge.

The same strains keep coming up throughout history. However, perhaps the most insidious one, and especially so because it crosses ideologies, is the concept, conscious or otherwise, that we are somehow different, and superior now than before. Of course with the passage of time the civilization has accumulated great knowledge and achievements. We have an infinity of information at arm's reach through whatever you are reading this on. We live longer, go more places, have more experiences than at any other time in human history. However, the hubris of modernity has blinded us to the reality that as the island of our knowledge expands, so too does the coastline of the unknown.

We are drunk on information, and yet malnourished of understanding, and even surrounded with greater security and opportunity than ever before, we are fearful.  And so we prove we are not in fact much more advanced than nomadic ancestors by doing what humans have always done, which is to fall for superstition. 

We laugh at the idea of thinking we have to sacrifice woodland creatures to appease some maleficent deity, and we cringe at the thought of sacrificing a child to the same, and yet with superficial cosmetic changes, many still do both. 

Superstition is the dark side of pattern matching, the process of identifying cause and effect relationships. The problem arises when we deceive ourselves into such a relationship were there never was one, and yet so fearful of the unknown, do everything we can to manipulate a system that never existed in the first place. It used to look like the above example of the sacrificial woodland creature, or virgin, first born, etc. Now it looks like aborting a child because a test shows a possibility for genetic defects. The rationalization is that your are saving a unborn fetes from a life of suffering. When considering the fact, that, a) everyone suffers, and b) a "defect" has been the catalyst for some of the most transformational characters in history, and c) that the child doesn't have a context for viewing their life as suffering to begin with, it becomes obvious the original motive is nothing but a superstitious rationalization for the real motive, which that the parent doesn't want to suffer the unknown of caring for a disabled child.

This is a dramatic example, but this is found in banal forms everywhere. The self esteem craze I grew up with posited that high self esteem lead to high achievement. Many of us grew up being told we could do anything, be anything, deserved everything. Predictably, when we found out this wasn't true, many simple blamed everyone but themselves for being in a predicament as old as the species. You often have to earn your way to something you desire. In essence, the self esteem obsession was a superstitious belief that put the effect ahead of the cause, and trained a lot of people to be entitled asshats, a condition that is going to take some time and possibly a major drop in the standard of living, to give voice and action to the valorous ideals we, so many of us, hold deep in our hearts and minds. 

Take political correctness for example. We like to think we have moved beyond the Inquisition because we aren't heretics at the stake, and this is certainly an improvement. However, when something you said a decade plus before it was considered offensive can still destroy your reputation, we have an unbalanced morality.  Look close enough and we have all failed to a degree in the ways we most punish others. When group identity, which never takes into account actual complexity, like that the group itself is a construct, is more important than the choices and character of the individual, we are simply returning to the spiritual trailer park of codependency and group solidarity being more important than right or wrong.  

The only way out of this cave of shadows into the daylight of reality is honesty. Brutal self examination. Actually telling it like it is. Honesty is a blunt force weapon. And it is pain that will enlighten us. 

How Abusive Relationships, Growing Up, Easter, And Red Dragons Are All Connected.

We in the modern world tend to have a hard time establishing boundaries. This manifests itself in several gradients of deviant behavior, ranging from not being able to take the keys away from your friend who is about to get a DUI, to staying in an abusive relationship way past the time when the significant other stopped caring whether it was your fault, or not, and just started taking advantage to no end.

Learning to make the distinction of where you end and another person begins is the foundation of all life giving human relationships. It's what happens when we can go our own ways from our parents. It's what happens when we don't give in to peer pressure and instead pursue what we want in life. It's what happens when we experience the best in committed relationships, both romantic and otherwise when we love people for who they are rather than what they do for us, and it's what happens when we are able to watch our descendants grow into their own independent selves.

The reason this is such a hard thing to determine and that it is such a source of friction in our lives is because it brings into question issues of core identity and insecurity that the modern social order does not at all help. Because we have been raised with a wholly western idea of moral relativism, we do not know what is up or down, what is right or left, or what is good or bad. We do not question that which we deeply want to, and only challenge those who do not conform to this ideal. Tolerance is only good to the degree that it makes people safe. Beyond this, it has resulted in a deep fear of questioning and conflicting over anything more substantial than those who are seen to be intolerant. Thus, in the absence of challenge, which, in this case, is the same thing as boundaries, we are left defenseless against the more malignants elements of, not only society, but our own personalities. 

One of these malignant elements is the need to belong. Like all perversions, it is nothing more than something that was, it its proper state, good. Finding your place in the world, and finding your place with other humans is good. However, doing so at the expense of your own humanity, and making sacrifices of your own identity to conform is not, and as has been mentioned before is the source of a vast spectrum of deviant behaviors. 

However, as with many things, there are second and third order effects to this deviant behavior. Deep within ourselves, we try to compensate for the violation of our spiritual immune systems because of our lack of boundaries by setting them up in other places. In essence, we triangulate our brokenness away because we cannot confront the root cause. 

The most profound and yet least obvious place we place boundaries is with any notion of something greater than ourselves, anything.......Divine. Believe or don't believe. The existence of God is something that cannot be proven, no matter how much the right wing types try, and cannot be disprove, no matter how ignorant the the Richard Dawkens followers' arguments get. It is not something that is debated intellect to intellect. It is something that bypasses the red dragons guarding our minds and snatches the perches right out from under their claws as it goes strait to the heart. Of course their is a God, and of course we all know this at some level of our psyches. And yet it is with the Divine that we establish the strongest boundaries, whether we believe or do not believe. We assume there is no God, or that we have killed God, or that we have to be good enough to be accepted by God, or that some are destined to Paradise and others to eternal damnation, whatever that is. 

If indeed there is a God, would the Divine not be anything other than the height of perfection beyond all that we heretofore see and the ultimate embodiment of all our deepest suspicions of what true love and beauty and good in fact are? Would God not in fact be the height of our greatest human ideals of good and compassion and acceptance and love and the ultimate expression of what we only grasp at when we admire great acts of selflessness? Would God not also be the ultimate expression of even the most natural love of a mother for her child or a father slaving to support his family? Could the truth in fact be better than we have ever imagined, even though our deepest psyches have supposed it for so long and driven us in search of it for as long as we have been who we are? At the same time, does not the suspicion of this at the same time cause apprehension, almost as if you don't want to look because you don't want to be disappointed? 

Today, many throughout the world remembered the destruction of the boundary between the Divine and the rest of reality, not that any such barrier ever existed, but the point had to be made clear. This is the essence of the Resurrection. The deepest longing of us all are there for a reason. They are there to be satisfied. Come into the great house where street dwellers, prostitutes, politicians, even pop stars, end even you and me become equals. This is the essence of salvation. 

Come home. The door is always open. 

The War On Poverty 50 Years Later

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson declaring war on poverty. Over those 50 years the percentage of people living in poverty in the US has declined from 19 to 15 percent. At the same time the actual population of people living in poverty has risen from 36 million to 47 million today because of the population increase over the last 50 years.

Now, it is a simple thing to declare this something of a success with the perennial qualification of "but there is still much work to be done". At the same time, those on the other side of the political spectrum can just as easily claim it to be a Pyrrhic victory  because, for all the financial, political and emotional resources that have been expended in this "war", a 4 percent decrease is indicative of a waste of time.

It has already been shown from all that has gone before that neither side will win an argument as to the validity or even the existence of victory in the eyes of the other. However, this has as much to do with how the problem of poverty has been framed and it's supposed solutions derived as it does with partisan opinions. 

Poverty is and has always been a serious problem and a stain on the honor and conduct of any nation that has willfully allowed practices that dispose people to it. Although it is also true that poverty in much of the rest of the world is relatively and actually far worse, it is none the less the case that to the degree to which it exists here, it is unacceptable.  These are high ideals and high ideals are required if a society wishes to aspire to something greater than it is now. However, as always, what goes unseen is more important than what lies on the surface. 

Poverty, and the so called war on it has become nothing more than a convenient rallying point for differing political positions to gain legitimacy by seeming to do something without doing anything at all. This is not an indictment of any politician or political position in specific, but simply a description of what has been the case as long as people have appealed to mass society in order to gain favor. A four percent decrease over 50 years is not indicative of a dysfunctional government hampered by partisanship, but rather that the programs in place have maintained the status quo at best and kept people in poverty at worst. 

It is far easier to appear to be doing something when the measures of success are unclear or non-existent than it is to actually do something meaningful that lasts. As has been said before though, even those with the best intentions in the current system are and will be restricted by the nature of the system itself. In a world of finite resources in which a zero sum game is the regime, zero will always be the sum. No amount of policy and legislation will solve something as deep as human suffering. Thus it is better to stop waiting for such to come about and campaigning for it as if it were a life and death struggle. It is better to actually act on supposed personal ideals and do something. 

Doing something does not require quitting your day job. It does not so much even require going out of one's way. What it does require is putting words to action. The poor are closer than you think. Many of us avoid their neighborhoods on our way home every day. Many of us ignore them when we pass them on the street corner. Many of us claim we are too busy to pay attention, or too broke to contribute to legitimate organizations dedicated to providing for those in need. 

Until we start fighting the war on poverty one individual at a time, why should we expect something as systematic and machine like as the government to do a human's job? Some may complain about freedoms being limited. The freedom to have compassion is not, and it benefits all who take advantage of it.  

LBJ did because he experienced it first hand

Too Big Not To Fail

It has been said a few times before how what goes unseen often matters far more than what is on the surface, and how what you don't know can actually kill you. This becomes increasingly the case the larger a system becomes. The larger as system is, the more difficult it becomes to track what is going on in it. Regardless of our many abilities, the human mind is only able to process so many things at once. It's why we have a parasympathetic nervous system. There is too much going on to be conscious of it all at all times. This does not seem to stop us from deluding ourselves into thinking we are though, and in that fantasy, much risk goes unseen.

The real trouble comes when that risk is hidden in the form of things that seem externally to be good. For example social programs to alleviate poverty that leave poor people more dependent and more poor than they were to begin with. On the other side of the political spectrum, strong pro-life positions that leave the movement looking like a group of bigoted, and completely out of touch hate mongers. the road to collapse and irrelevance is paved with good intentions poorly thought out and atrociously executed. 

At the same time, we continue to make the same mistakes. The reason is, with so much going on beyond the scope of human ability to accurately track, we substitute good feelings about a course of action for measured and accurate judgements. In the current modern world in which it is possible to aggregate so much noise and distraction, emotion speaks the loudest. It always does. However, in times passed, Babylon was a quitter place. One in which thoughts could be collected and judgements more thoroughly measured. None the less, hoping for a return to some passed golden age is as futile as predicting the next one. 

The long range trend of a complex system, which our political/social system is, is to grow more inwardly focused and thus more chaotic in the same way a feedback loop builds to ear piercing shrillness before you move the mike away. Counter intuitively, the larger the system is, the more assured you are of this entropy building. The reason is because large systems become stable and do not need to compete in the same way smaller ones do thus quickening the trend to inward focus and ultimately chaos.

The system becomes too big not to fail. Then again, chaos leads to destruction and recreation. To use the modern term, it breeds innovation.  It is incumbent upon the individual to recognize this and take advantage in such a way that leads to the betterment of that outside him or her self. We cannot keep track of everything, but we can recognize that which is close to us and we can influence it. This is a far more balanced approach than being swayed by the wind of whatever is trending right now, and influencing that close to you is simpler than it may seem.