On the heels of any number of threads in the past few months, I spent some of yesterday reflecting on what seems like another distillation.
In the early decades, the U.S. had a motto; never official, but one of the better reflections of the country: e pluribus unum. It was good in two ways that can be itemized: — It reflected a country situating itself in a larger context (of history, of humanity, of governance) — It presumed as the starting point a populace capable of following such concepts and the existence of languages from other places and times At some point (which I once looked up), the one good motto got replaced (officially?) with the recent-past motto: in god we trust. A motto that is by every measure worse, though one could say it has the virtue of still being English, and a little composed. But the motto has been, I think, replaced again. Now it would be lolnothingmatters. I have been thinking about other compressions, too, over some extended time, some of it driven by trying to read a little from historians, and wondering which features of the present are canonical and which are idiosyncratic to this place and time. If I had to list the two problems (this is, to some degree, to Nick’s concern about why the rationalist-public aspiration didn’t work out so well, though there are many dimensions in which to answer that) that we must deal with, I would say we need to correct these two widespread now-premises: — that cruelty is entertainment (that one is canonical, and I raised it long ago in my characterization of fascism as using performances of cruelty to promise an identity to the masses, to keep them organized in the mob); and — that entertainment is a substitute for living (or that one cannot be really distinguished from the other, so why do we bother with two words?) The nihilist motto above is somehow closely tied to the second problem, and that one I think is somewhat idiosyncratic. The modern industrial era is so _big_ and so complex in its institutional and social order, that the connection of a person’s moment-to-moment choices and acts, to their full suite of consequences is cryptic-to-impenetrable most of the time. Then there is the dimension-lowering of communication in the remote and electronic-network age. And Glen’s very nice materials on AI now as the offboarding of attention. These three, together with saturation-level submersion in “entertainment” as a whole field of social order, enable a level of disconnection and irresponsibility from _everything_ that probably was not available to any era of humanity before. People still have moral responsibility for having lost the ability to distinguish between entertainment and living, but I think I would stop short of “blaming” them for it, as the whole system structure is like a whirlpool that it is hard for most people to escape being sucked down into. It is hard for me to see using “arguments” or other fairly fragile and low-dimensional tools to deal with problems until we have found ways to address these previous two big context-aspects. Eric .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
