Category: Politics

Are we better than the Inquisition?

Watched the movie “The Fountain” last night, which contains horrific scenes from the Spanish Inquisition. What makes our modern world different than the “Dark Ages”?

  1. Technology
  2. Freedom of thought and respect for human rights

While these may seem connected (freedom of thought –> science –> technology), they can be separated. The Nazi’s used advanced technology to do rather cruel things, which shows that #1 does not necessarily lead to #2. Furthermore, documented hunter-gatherer societies were strongly egalitarian, showing that #2 does not necessarily lead to #1.

I fear our civilization slipping back into barbarity, not because we could lose technology, but because we could lose sight of our values. There’s a lot of fear going around that some “other” is out to destroy your way of life. I see fear –> anger –> hate –> irrationality, which feeds more fear. I see it right here on FB, in the way some people speak to others, or in how they describe political opponents.

People who do atrocities are no different than us. Really. Having flush toilets, electric lights and cell phones don’t make us any better than the Spanish in the 1400s. The monster is right here, waiting to get out. That’s what I fear more than any political persuasion, brand of idea, religion, race or whatever.

Tame the monster inside yourself … while you still have time.

Propaganda

I have a number of friends on social media who share political posters. They vary from extreme liberal to extreme conservative. I find all propaganda, regardless of political persuasion, to be irrational. And I hate irrationality more than any specific political view.

It doesn’t matter if it’s something you agree with or not. Propaganda is any material that is designed to bypass your reason by activating your passions. If it calls out some group or political party and speaks of them in stark absolute terms, it’s almost certainly propaganda: “The world is going straight to Hell because of the Hated Party” or “Everything went wrong in Absurdistan due to the deliberate evil of the Other Guys.”

The term comes from Italian and literally means to propagate (replicate) an idea. When you yield to propaganda, you become a pawn in someone else’s political game. You are turning yourself into a component of their information machine, just one more link in a chain of thought influence. (There’s another great term from Italian: influenza.) Resist! Stand up against this manipulation. Start by not re-posting propaganda.

I just don’t care about who did bad to whom, or who’s character was scraped off the slime-pits of Hell. We have more important things to discuss. Yes, seriously, we do. Politics are important because they are how we enact our bigger ideas, but I think right now we are distracted by a lot of trivia.

So what should we be discussing? The bigger ideas themselves. Not gun control and taxation, but what civilization as whole should try to accomplish, or avoid.

Here’s what I care about: The world is in a odd state now. We have the technology to give everyone a comfortable life with practically no effort on their part. However, we don’t have the resources to do this for everyone at our current population level. So there are haves and have-nots, and we argue about who is worthy.

Malthus argued that we always grow population to the point of misery. One solution over most of human history has been to expand into new territory, but practically speaking there aren’t any of those left on Earth. Another solution is new technologies (the “Green Revolution”) which enable us to feed more people. At this point, new technology is our only option, but we still need to prove Malthus wrong. When the next big technology comes along and relieves poverty, swear to me that we won’t grow population until they are starving again.

Gun control

I’ve heard arguments for and against gun control, and I feel confused about which approach is best. The Constitution protects our right to defend ourselves, which implies that we have access to as much deadly force as anyone else. OTOH, easy access to military grade weapons seems to enable mass shootings.

I think there are two issues in these mass shootings that deserve more attention. One is the creation of crazy people. We should have a very long discussion about why an organically normal teenager would decide to rob his peers of life. What kind of process leads to that state of mind?

The other is the creation of soft targets. These are places where all or most of the people do not possess deadly force. It makes sense not to arm children, as they are not yet ready to control themselves. However, as long as the possibility of an armed attack exists, there should be enough force in someone’s hands to raise the price too high to consider.

One idea (gun control) is that we convert the entire country into a soft target, and have a professional military deal with defense. As long as everyone has equal right to participate in the military, that satisfies our right to self defense.

The other is that we have enough armed non-crazy people around that there are no soft targets.

I honestly don’t know how to answer this question. It may be unsolvable. However, as a cognitive scientist, I’m curious about what we could do to solve the crazy-people side of the equation.

The Value of Life

“Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
“But who is my neighbor?”

Doesn’t that capture the heart of it? We don’t truly value life, certainly not the lives of others.

I dream of a world in which everyone has enough, and they are free to grow into the fullest potential of their minds and bodies. The population of each region is the right size for its long-term carrying capacity, so even in a bad year they can grow (or hunt/gather) enough to feed themselves, and there is plenty of room for pristine nature to function. Technology is so advanced that it is imperceptible. Global communication and access to human knowledge is universal. Healthcare is effective against every condition, such that humans live for hundreds of years with the strength and mental ability of their prime.

Is that world possible? If you’re holding out of Heaven, you might say no, and that would be a shame because it gives you an excuse not to try. I say a good world is possible, but it requires a radical change of attitude. The place to start is to value every life deeply, no exceptions.

Torture

One meaning of “litmus test” is a single issue on which you judge a candidate. Someone who says the right thing on, for example abortion, gets your vote regardless of any other moral failings they have.

A candidate’s position on torture should be a litmus test. Of course, this would never be adopted by the Evangelical community because it teaches that God tortures people for all eternity after they die.

1984 belongs to all of us

I recently took the plunge and decided to read George Orwell’s 1984.

Turns out that because I am a US citizen, I cannot have free access to 1984 until 2044! But that is only if Congress does not pass another law, extending copyright length yet again.

I paid to read the book. Along with the privilege of viewing it only on Kindle devices that Amazon controls, my $5.74 bought me the moral high-ground to complain about it.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: We have the inalienable right to experience the expressions of fellow human beings. We have the right not only to speak freely, but also to hear freely. Anyone who proposes to control this proposes to control our minds. This is what 1984 is all about.

I agree with the notion of temporarily granting an author control over the dissemination of their work, so they can gain some material benefit from their act of service to the rest of us. This is not the only way, and probably not the best way, but it is the way we have chosen.

However, some works of art are so deep, so important, that they are greater than their creator. The needs of all our souls far outweigh the material needs of the artist. Such works should pass immediately into the public domain (and to be fair, we should reward the artist generously by some other means than copyright control).

1984 is one of those works.

Google owns my soul

There’s an old superstition that if someone can create an image of you, they have power over you, even to the extent of imprisoning your soul.

In order to make this blog visible, I am taking the easy path. I let WordPress tie into my installation. And this morning I linked my G+ account, allowing WordPress to “manage” it, whatever that means.

Any chance of escaping the system, staying below the radar, preserving my digital independence, is gone. As the music group Kansas put it, it’s a fair exchange. If you want to be seen, you must abandon all hope of privacy.

Social media is an incredibly powerful information collection device, capturing much more than your image. I wonder if one day we will regret handing over such power to these enormous organizations.