The New Economics: Blessed are the Poor

Today, as in ancient times, it was believed that the opposite was true: that the wealthy were happy and blessed. Little has changed over thousands of years and almost all economic wisdom is based on this belief.

Yet paradoxically Jesus says the complete opposite. This more than anything probably would be reason for many to ignore him. How can he make any sense?

In Greek Luke 6:20 : Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοί (translated as : blessed are the poor) and in Matthew 5:3 the same Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι (blessed are the poor in spirit). Μακάριοι means roughly happy, and πτωχοί destitute and opposite of wealthy. Definitely an apparent and deliberate oxymoron.

When Adam Smith writes his "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" he is looking not just into the wealth, but also the assumed happiness as well. One and the other are linked in Western thinking.

Large chunks of this blog devoted to smashing that connection and arguing that wealth is relative. The blessed in New Guinean tribes may have a colourful headdress of rare bird feathers. Turn up to work in New York with that and you will be laughed at. Wealth is contextual and social.

But surely there are unconditional needs and necessities without which all people feel poor. In Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" he argues that even within the depths of the depravity that was the Nazi Holocaust the victims could still discover wealth. He describes a young woman who is near death:

“This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.”

Is this the "poor" that Jesus is speaking of? In our wealthy and luxurious lives we actually obscure the true wealth that lies throughout this world. The destitute have access to a wealth that the rich have actually obliterated with all the lazy comfort and dazzlingly full lives.

What do the ascetics and Cynics find in their self imposed solitude and poverty? Buddha famously tackled this problem at the outset of his enquiry into happiness. He took on an ultimately ascetic life driven by the Hindu belief that Tapas and spiritual wealth was gained through self mortification and torment. This is an old idea as well. It comes down to the West as Jesus hanging on a cross and later Odin hanging on Yggdrasil. Jesus won eternal life, and Odin amongst other things was given the Runes.

After almost killing himself with starvation Buddha realised that such extreme torment was not progressing him toward Enlightenment and he broke his self torture. The story goes that resting under a tree he was given a bowl of rice pudding by a girl believing him to be the spirit of that tree. In that simple act of giving Buddha realised that accepting nourishment and kindness were necessary parts of the spiritual life. There was indeed a Middle Way between absolute mortification and indulgence. His period of asceticism did provide him with progress, but to teach him it was wrong rather than the correct way.

I have argued before in the blog that regardless of Middle Path there is no absolute level of wealth. It may indeed turn out that we are, like the girl in Auschwitz, so impoverished that we will die from our deprivation but this does not exclude us from true wealth. However Buddha is saying that such deprivation does nothing for our spiritual growth. Being so deprived can upset our strength and peace so that we have little energy and resolve to progress our spiritual growth. But having too much physical wealth can have the same effect also, and obscure our path with more base activities.

I am resistant to draw a bell curve here and say that there is an optimal level of wealth. It is I maintain relative. Where the optimal falls for one person and another, and one culture and another will be different. In a society of great wealth it may well be higher than in a society of great simplicity. Seeing a branch of a tree outside your window may be wealth enough in a community of people with so little.

But I hope this post has thrown a spanner in the works of the Economic view of Wealth and Happiness. The pursuit of Happiness and Wealth are really quite separate and disconnected. It is sufficient for a society to supply only enough wealth that people may be able to find the right level of poverty.

The goal of true economics is not riches, but simply the give people the opportunity to find the right level of poverty.

==Addition
Buddha gives us a very simple manifesto on happiness that covers much of the above (printed in full below)

With special significance to Economics are lines 3,4

Contented and easily satisfied,
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm and wise and skilful,
Not proud or demanding in nature.

Also translated as:

May they be content and easily supported,
unburdened with their senses calmed.
May they be wise, 
not arrogant and without desire for the possessions of others.

There is a Chinese saying that it is easier for a poor man to live in a rich man's house than vice versa. Returning to the relative nature of wealth, for a poor man being given an apple is a great treat and something they will appreciate. But for a rich man such an identical act may have much less meaning. In this way the poor man lives in a richer world than the rich man. This is very much the irony of wealth. The Metta Sutra is saying that a peaceful and calm mind is much more open to the world and finds greater and deeper satisfaction in its existence. While the wealthy mind may become distracted and be always running in search of new experiences and "hits" each needing to be greater than the last to break through the noise and insensitivity of the mind. Such a mind is poor because it needs so much to even be normal. We all know the deep satisfaction that comes from appreciating something simple, but fully. We may not be able to attain it very easily if our lives are busy and distracted, but we know that this is true happiness. I requires discipline and frugality to slow down the running machine of expectations and wants so that we can step off and be at peace.

Not also that in the second translation we are asked to not be have desire for the possessions of others. Not quite the 10th Commandment of the Jews, but a gentle reminder that happiness lies in appreciating what you have got, and not always wishing you had what other people have. You will always meet people with things you want, and uncontrolled you may feel that your life is then less worthwhile. But a moments self-reproach will reveal that one minute you are happy with what you have, and now compared with another you are no longer happy without anything actually changing except your mind! It is our minds that make us wealth or impoverished. And if it is our minds that make us feel wealthy or impoverished then why should what another has make any difference? Quickly we see the error in such thinking, and how basing our happiness on what we have is a recipe for unhappiness. We do not account what we have to be happy, we simply appreciate what we have. This is especially true of our families. Often I imagine (I am not married) we may find reason to be unhappy with our partner. And sometimes we may trip into thinking they are flawed and a bad partner, someone we should separate from. Yet a moments reflection may reveal that it is our mind that is changing more than our partner. Indeed they may have changed, but it is much more likely that our mind has changed. If we remember to appreciate what we have, even if it is just a branch in our window, we are on the path to happiness. And when we are happy, our partner is much more likely to be happy too, so it is not just selfish to be content but a benefit to all.

How that passage flies in the face of Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand. For Adam Smith each person striving for what they want in a perfectly free market leads to everything falling into the rights hands at the right price. I have proven this to myself with computer models. There is a better system however which Smith never looks at. His is a system of exchange, where you buy and sell things. In a system where you give what you think people need, and what you can spare it actually arrives at the Smith equilibrium only much faster. The reason is that for an exchange to occur in Smiths economics both parties have to be able to exchange. In the Giving system it does not require exchange, so goods can change hands immediately without waiting for payment. I will explore the mathematics of the giving system in detail at some stage. Both systems suffer from cheats. Smith is very careful to point out that Invisible Hand only works in a legal system. Likewise the Giving system can lead to generous individuals being exploited by selfish individuals (who from the analysis here are also unhappy - one flaw of the view that wealth is happiness is that cheats are seen as winners which means that people think that we need the Smith system, but actually cheats become unhappy and no human legal system is needed to ensure this! It is called Karma in the East and Wrath of God in the West).

A quick addendum on frugality and middle path. All economics does require the flow of good from producers to consumers. If people become misers then economics grinds to a halt. Frugality does not mean "miser". Excellent example of the poverty of being a miser at the start of this video: Why Frugal Living May Not Make You Happy. Frugality simple means being enjoying the happiness of being peaceful and content, not expecting continual happiness from material possessions, not endlessly striving for new things, but rather turning down the volume and the contrast, re balancing and appreciating what you have. Perhaps having a conversation with the branch that you can see from your window.


.oO= Metta Sutra =Oo.

This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech,
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied,
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm and wise and skilful,
Not proud or demanding in nature.
Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born —
May all beings be at ease!

Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world:
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.
This is said to be the sublime abiding.
By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.

Addition: just to summarise the practical economic parts of this. There are 2 laws (1) That wealth is relative and (2) that wealth has an optimum. Combined we have the following relationship between happiness and wealth.

Even to me this graph seems wrong. Surely the extremely wealthy are more happy than the extremely poor. But this is relative so we are saying the extremely wealthy and extremely poor relative to their community. We will have to ask the tyrants and Emperors of the world how happy they are. The problem is that they may well be able to distract themselves with wealth to disguise unhappiness. This after all is the diagnosis that the wealth fill their lives so much that there is left little room for what we might call God or Authentic Wealth.

What is Enlightenment?

Famously the mind is often likened to a cup. The point of this metaphor is many fold but in particular a cup works because it is not the same as its contents. A cup can hold many drinks again and again over the course of its lifetime, and the Mind similarly will hold many experiences again and again over its lifetime.

The unenlightened mind confuses the experiences with itself. So when that mind experiences sadness or happiness it thinks it really is happiness or sadness. This is typified by liking and disliking experiences and then grasping for what it likes and rejecting what it does not like.

In contrast the enlightened Mind never confuses itself with its contents and regardless whether it likes the drink it currently holds or not, it lets it be drunk, allows itself to empty and be ready for the next drink.

We know we lose awareness of our true nature when we start to linger in experiences, or start to fear them arising. In Buddhism Causation is a central idea, and the enlightened Mind starts to accept the coming and going of mental states as simply waves on an ocean, things stirred up by the winds of the world acting upon us. No wave is too big for the Mind as it is in fact infinite. The only finite thing is our weakness and attachment to particular states.

Cup is a good metaphor because it also captures the idea that the mind is only able to experience because it is itself empty of experience. Like a full cup we know the cup is empty because it has drink within it. This is why the Heart Sutra begins: Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form. The Mind is never actually empty, a drink leaves as another comes so unless we meditate extremely deeply we will never experience its emptiness. But we know from the changing drinks that the cup is not the same as the drinks. The presence of each drink, reminds us that we are actually empty.

Cup is a good metaphor because we need to pick up a cup to drink. But when we have drunk we put the cup down again. If we keep holding onto the cup after the drink has gone in memory of something we enjoyed, or grip the cup in expectation of the same drink then we start to experience Tanha. This is the source of suffering, it is when things start to stick and cause suffering. After we confuse mind with its experiences, we start to grasp at mind in the hope of getting those experiences again, or we start to reject mind in the hope of avoiding experiences. We turn against our self. Mind is always unaffected by what happens, and when enlightened we let what happens simply come and go, picking up what we need, and setting it down again afterwards.

It is such a common mistake to think that Enlightenment is some kind of positive experience. Ironically this is what unenlightenment is. It is often said that it is not what happens to you that matters, but how you handle it. The enlightened mind does not care what happens to it, because it knows how to be filled and emptied.

However I have made the mistake of thinking, that in which case we do not care what happens to us. We can be lazy in our spiritual affairs and know that nothing matters. This is nihilism, one of the extremes that Buddha warns us against. Enlightened Mind does not deliberately ignore its contents. Being free to receive experiences and let them go does not mean we are dulled to them. Such a mind is no-mind. We may as well be dead with this mind. Enlightenment mind does not dull itself in order to tolerate unpleasant experiences. It is more profound than that. How can it be empty if it refuses to be filled? An enlightened mind is able to accept all experiences as they are, and see its empty nature in so doing.

Another mistake is to take Enlightened Mind to mean some impartial, aloof, cool and unemotional mind that does not engage deeply with the world. We think I am not emotionally affected by that, therefore I must be indifferent from it, therefore I am unattached and therefore I have attained liberation. How wrong this is! As in the previous paragraph the Enlightened Mind is a large cup that wishes to be filled. The difference is that the cup always sees itself in the drink that it holds. Like the mirror of the Shenxiu or better the Huineng's no-mirror we see the mind in the world around us. When we feel, we also see the world around us. Dulling our emotions to attain some fake indifference is simply developing no-mind. If we allow the cup to fill and empty with freedom, we will begin to see ourselves more clearly. What is the problem with anger anyway? It is either not wanting to fill our cup with anger, or getting stuck with anger in our cup. The unenlightened mind panics when it sees anger arise because it doesn't like it. It starts all kinds of activities to avoid the anger, like throwing the hurt out in aggressive behaviour to other people. It may become violent in a desperate attempt to dissipate this unpleasant energy in the world around it. Conversely it may be passive and hold onto the pain feeling it burn over a long period of time. Enlightened mind can just let the anger come, feel the burn and pour it out again as it subsides. And enlightened mind can even see itself in the anger as it fills and empties. Unenlightened Mind does not see itself as a condition of the arising of the anger, it rather see the anger as a part of it. Unenlightened mind believes it is of the same type as anger. "You have made me angry" the Unenlightened Mind says to another, and this fuels even more anger as the Mind feels the pain of this anger burn. Unenlightened Mind is the stage upon which anger can come and strut around. The Enlightened Person is no more angry than a theatre is Macbeth. "I have become angry" means no more than "I am staging Macbeth tonight." Tomorrow we have a new show. This is enlightenment.

The New Economics: Property and Soul

Much of the 10 years of this blog have been ruminating on the fallacy of soul. I will be concluding eventually (I expect) that the idea of "property" is made of the same nonsense as "soul." The New Economics will be based on ideas that do not invoke fantasy metaphysics.

But to be sure of the problem what is the current dogma? To expand on the last post: souls are the things which have "real" desires, and whose desires should be taken into account in transactions. Only souls can have property.

This is a development because not very long ago non-white races and women could not have property. So the idea of property is fluid and has been becoming more inclusive over the last century. The current state of the idea I'm linking with soul, in that I can't see animals getting property rights with the current economy. Altho this is very probably at the point of changing.

The New Economics: Apple Trees

In John Locke's Second Treatise of Government Chapter 5 he looks for a justification of property:

28. Someone who eats the acorns he picked up under an
oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the forest,
has certainly appropriated them to himself! Nobody can deny
that the nourishment is his. Well, then, when did they begin
to be his?
when he digested them?
when he cooked them?
when he brought them home?
when he picked them up ·under the tree·?
It is obvious that if his first gathering didn’t make them his,
nothing else could do so. That labour marked those things
off from the rest of the world’s contents; it added something
to them beyond what they had been given by nature, the
common mother of all; and so they became his private right.

Suppose we denied this, and said instead:
He had no right to the acorns or apples that he thus
appropriated, because he didn’t have the consent of
all mankind to make them his. It was robbery on his
part to take for himself something that belonged to all
men in common.

If such a consent as that was necessary, men in general
would have starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had
provided them with.

It appears to me that Locke is appealing to a "common reason" here, assuming that people will be able to see the truth in his arguments. So he is already assuming a far greater commonality of human intention and purpose and only then bestowing this on property. Without such commonality then his arguments for property would just be ignored. If people are equipped with the ability to perceive the truth in Locke's arguments, then in fact they don't need his arguments. When they pick the apple from the tree they are at liberty to decide what it means and why they did it without resorting to arguments like "property."

Creating arguments about what "individuals" do is fundamentally flawed. Arguing an "individual" has a right is pointless. If we are individuals let us decide for ourselves. In fact all arguments, all interactions like this blog are social. There is, before we even begin to think, a society. So we can't base "individual property" upon individuals like Locke does, because individuals are not the root entity. And such an argument is circular anyway. Locke starts with a world of individuals, who then own themselves and then argues that they own other things according to the actions of those bodies is pointless. A castle in the sky.

If anything it is the other way around and the existence of property in our society is the foundation of individuality! For perspective lets look at some other societies.

In ancient Greece society was organised according to the Polis. While Greeks felt some shared identity, especially after the defeat of the Persians, each Polis was independent with its own laws and customs. I believe, but have no evidence yet, that the Poleis were roughly equally divided between those with private property and those with more shared ownership. Obviously Athens was property based, and the enduring battle in Athens was between the democratic people and the ruling aristocrats who owned everything. Two and a half millennia later we still struggle with that exact same unresolved problem.

Historically property is not essential and for all Locke and his contemporary writers arguments, it is not absolutely defensible. I believe it is no more than a dominant feature of a particular society.

In animals there are two types of property (1) the type Locke was arguing for (2) territory. When squirrels come to my bird feeding station there is no Lockean property or "Lockean proviso" they simply take what they want, and where there is conflict the larger or the most hungry fights for control of the resource, and that is even individuals from the same family. If they could squirrels would happily open the stomachs of their fellows and take part digested food. This is not a "political system" it is sheer mechanical reality, no more intelligent than rain drops finding the easiest way down a window pane. There is no "reason" here just an observation of mechanics. (2) territory is similar to 1, but is not so ad hoc. It is the development of a strategy to secure "rights" to a resource. It can lead to the evolution of special characteristics like antlers in deer used to engage in often quite specialised rituals and contests. Such behaviour is usually for breeding rights, most commonly males competing for rights to the resource of females.

1 & 2 above are only loosely separated. When squirrels come to the feeding station we do not see the continual battles that occur between them so that they each know who is dominant. Even the birds do the same, creating a literal "pecking order" although it is much harder to notice and has only recently been studied properly.

In this sense all animals have always battled for rights to access to resources. Mostly ad hoc but sometimes creating distinct territories and often using very stylised and ritualised contents. We can hardly call this property though as Property suggests some kind of reasonable, legal agreement. But I'm actually going to argue that property IS territory. I wrote about this before. Human systems based on property are the least developed and inherit the system of territory so widespread in nature.

Post getting long and as usual I have not addressed the main point yet: Apple Trees other than to rubbish Locke.

Locke is right that God presents us with almost everything we need, from sunlight to air to rain to apple trees. But we are not stones passively accepting the action of the world - the tortoise while like a stone must actively breathe and eat. Even at rest I too must breathe and actively take the air into my lungs. The tree may grow a wonderful crop of apples all by itself, but at some point I need to move those apples to my mouth and digestion in order to live. There is a necessary process of sustaining ourselves that Locke quite rightly identifies. In the post about Destiny this is very much the issue:

How much is given and how much do we take

That is the most basic question of Economics.

It is interesting that "take" and "make" are so similar in English. In my Lockean analysis here they are the same. If I was to "make" a lunch from apples I would "take" them from the tree and lay them out. My work and my craft is essentially "taking" from "nature". If I was to plough a field and sow apple seeds to grow the orchard I would be taking the land over to my wishes. Perhaps it is harder for the watch maker: but he is taking the metals and the components, and the training of his mentors, and the history of watch making and all its inventions (the shoulders on which he stands). He is taking all that to produce a new watch.

Quite different from Locke's analysis there is no focus on property here, there is rather the void left when we take materials and change them into something else. Even the apple we eat will end up as carbon dioxide, energy and waste materials we will excrete. Using Newton's second Law all our taking is matched with giving. The watch maker takes things, and gives a watch.

If there is property here it is in the action of taking and giving. Locke might argue we cannot give what is not ours, and we can't take what is not ours.

I wanted to explore this situation first though. My main issue with all the existing discourse is it misses all the details. Suppose we are walking and we see a hungry deer trying to reach an apple. We reach up take the apple and give it to the deer. Nothing wrong in my language there. But is Locke suggesting that I took ownership of the apple when I plucked it and the gave ownership to the deer? Did the apple tree itself have ownership before I took the apple? What nonsense. I saw a hungry deer and simply offered myself as the means by which it could reach the apple. Some might say I developed a "desire" to help the deer and that desire involved taking the apple, so I did desire the apple for myself which I then desired to give to the deer. So Locke likes to say I took ownership for a while in order to fulfil my wishes. But we could also just say that I gave myself to be a tool for the deer to eat. In fact that latter is very much the power of humans, and the freedom that we have. There seems an insistence in Western thinking to add some much extraneous metaphysics that simply isn't there. We in the West must feel weighed down by the burden of metaphysics we must carry with us just to live in this society! I think of a Jew I met once who seemed to live every moment of his life carrying the burden of being a Jew. No less Westerners: it is no less a burden!

So yes we can be channels through which things flow. I can be a helpful member of the team, own nothing, and let the activities and processes of the team be what I am.

So when I am hungry and I see the apple on the tree I do not need to own it in order to take it. I do not need to enter into any contract with the world to take it. But -- and this is where my initial observation about Locke comes in -- I am already part of a society and world. When I take it I am most probably not just thinking of myself but probably others. Perhaps I may take 2 apples: 1 for myself and one for my friend. Or perhaps I may throw one to the timid deer with her fawn in the under growth. Who knows what I will do and why. That is the freedom of being a living thing. Why do we need ownership here?

Taking this thought experiment even further. Perhaps if I sit under the tree long enough a passing crow may peck down an apple for me. It unknowingly becomes the channel through which the apple passes from the tree to myself. Do we say that the crow took possession?

It seems to me we need go into the messy Western philosophy of soul. The tree and the crow and the deer cannot take possession because they do not have a soul. Possession is taken by things that have a soul. This is an important realisation because this is the root problem at the heart of current economics. We know there is no soul, and yet the whole edifice of Western society is based upon it. Nature because it is soulless is outside Western consciousness.

And now we know we are dealing with things that have a soul what when two things with a soul want one commodity? In Western society "property" is the idea that resolves such "conflict". In our society the owner of the land on which the apple tree grows gets to decide. Even if you pick the apple, you do not own it in the West. You may not even know that the land was owned: such information is hidden away in scrolls in legal document store houses. In times not so long ago you would be put into hard labour if you took such an apple! And if you took it from Royal land you could be killed. So much for Locke's arguments about possession and ownership! Until very recently at sea there was no punishment for not helping people, but there was for not saving property! In the West property is more important than people. What a ridiculous joke that Locke should try to underpin
property with arguments involving common people! So much for "The Enlightenment"!!

The problem we face is never-the-less conflict. When two people find an apple there is a good chance they may start to fight if it is worth it and the stronger will take control of the resource. Scale this up and you have all the wars in history where one alliance tries to crush another alliance of people. We have that right now as the West seeks to reestablish their control of the Middle East and destroy ISIS. Where we drew the borders of the Middle East a century ago we will not allow other people to do the same.

If we are to have a successful new economics its main challenge is to find a system where conflict can be resolved better than what we have at the moment (which is rich elites controlling the masses).

And to do that we need resolve what power will enforce the system.

Locke was appealing to Reason to justify property that already existed. Property that was already protected by a powerful army and legal system. And he used educated argument and writing that would have been only available to the very landed gentry that owned everything significant anyway. This is what property is usually taken to be: the system by which the powerful maintain theft from the poor. That would be essentially my analysis of it too. That is what Capitalism at root is.

Similar to Locke we could argue, like in this blog, for people to gain faith in some system. A change in culture that like an eddy in the river once begun might maintain itself. Children learning from their parents how it works, and possibly (though this is least important with culture) why it is good to do things like this.

Alternatively we could have a democratic force that would use power to remove elitists and threats to the system. But as has been seen in Communism such a revolutionary council can quickly become the problem.

Perhaps the New Economics cannot emerge like an alternative to Vertebrates and Arthropods over night. Revolutions start fast, and end fast. Any thing lasting must evolve from what we have, and potentially that will limit what we can achieve. But for the sake of understanding and "what if" i'll explore what options exist to what we currently have even if no practical path can be plotted between what we have and what we would like.

Something to understand about Defence and Force

It has always been rather obvious to me, but seemingly not other people that America is a land of dreamers. People are asleep and the government works with lies. Well all ruling powers do, but most countries have a wise population to laugh at the pretensions of their rulers. The USA however is not old enough to have this perspective and the people swing from blind faith to outright distrust.

I learned the other day that in the 1950s while the US was amassing a vast nuclear arsenal of hundreds of nuclear warheads to "defend" itself from the Soviet threat, in reality the Soviets had 4 nuclear war heads. It was lies by the military to get money. We had seen it before in the Tonkin Incident, Pearl Harbour and would see it again in 9/11. The military needs to have a threat to justify its existence, and the US (very obviously to me since I was a child) always has a threat of some type.

But Britian is not much smarted. Churchill struggled very hard to convince people that Nazi Germany was a threat. In reality, like the Soviets, it never was. The phoney war was the embarrassing period where Churchill was being mocked for starting war with a country that appeared to have no tyrannical aspirations. It took a lot of trickery to force the Germans in attacking Britain.

I also discovered that the Japanese surrendered in WW2 because the Russians invaded. It appears that the US forced through live weapons testing on civilians in Japan in order to get in before the Soviet invasion. As argued in this blog before no valid justification of the atomic bombs was ever given. They were never justified beyond US military supremacy.***

Cuban Missile Crisis was another myth where the US pretended that it was in mortal danger from a threat. Of course the reverse was true. The year before the US had tried to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. In response Cuba asked for military defence from Russia. What was portrayed as a threat to the US, was in fact the US being a threat.

It appears that the general rule is that those who wish to use force to gain power but disguise that force. And they do that but first pretending that they are under threat. Once this is established then the force appears to be justified.

But as I have argued in the blog before: force is never ever justified. So we know that the powerful are lying when they speak of force.

*** The justification we learn by rote is that the dropping the bombs ended the war much more quickly and so saved lives. Standard US logic that ends justify the means (this is a fallacy anyway). But it is an obviously false argument because it means that had the Japanese had the bomb the US would have accepted them dropping in US to end the war quickly. And if ending the war quickly and saving lives is what mattered then why didn't the US just withdraw their troops? Japan was never an actual threat to US. The obvious truth is not that the bombs ended the war quickly, but that they secured a US victory quickly. The Japanese civilians were killed so that the US could win. Which makes the bombs the same as any terrorist atrocity in history. 9/11 (we are told) was only carried out by terrorists who wanted the US to end occupation of Afghanistan and the Middle East. Even more justified that Hiroshima in fact which was against a country that had only attacked military targets on one occasion!

Insect Apocalypse & The Problem

Emerging in the papers this week is news that hits directly at the real basis of this blog. Life.

A recent meta study adds to alarm about the state of life on earth.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320718313636

Obvious problems with the study as its biased towards papers showing decline, and most data is far from significant. But I don't think there are many who doubt the decline of wildlife across the planet. You only need to take a walk these days to observe the reduced insect numbers.

Like so many complex systems e.g. weather and stock market finding definitive proof of trends is almost impossible. Trends belong to the class of thinking called linear systems. Dynamic systems are scale independent and what you see depends upon the time frame. What today looks like a decline could be part of a larger increase could be part of a larger decrease and so on. People are still able to argue about climate change based on such uncertainties and the same will be true for the die hard believers that mankind is having no impact on the planet.

But in my view life is a limited thing, and the planet only so large and while climate change and population change and extinctions are part of the dynamics of the planet there is a New Problem in town caused by mankind.

But The Problem seems to me to be far deeper than simply waking up to a few things. It is a fundamental problem at the heart of the Western Project. That is why this blog steers such a wide course. This is not a problem that can be solved within the framework we have of Western Civilisation. It requires a paradigm shift that will change everything.

Who cares that insects are going extinct?

Its a question that is almost impossible to evaluate using Plato or Newton or Einstein or Kant. There is nothing in the whole of Western Civilisation that answer the question. Who cares if everything goes extinct?

Humans are sacred, although that has been a long journey and some are more sacred than others. 2 million Armenians can be slaughtered and its not that important. 6 million Jews and its the end of the world. But broadly we accept that humans going extinct would be bad. But the natural world going extinct does not have an answer.

So the problem is best approached by removing some artificial boundaries. Humans don't exist. Consciousness is not Human. Matter is not different from Mind. The world is not made from Atoms. Animals are no different from Humans. Insects belong to the exact same world as Humans: there is no part of the world that is exclusively human and no part that is exclusively insect.

OK that is a lot to process and justify.

Perhaps best to start with an interlude here:

Starting at 6:16. “The hunter pays tribute to his quarry’s courage and strength. With ceremonial gestures that ensure that its spirit returns to the desert sands from which it came. While it was alive, he lived and breathed with it and felt its every movement in his own body, and at the moment of its death, he shared its pain. He rubs its saliva into his own legs to relieve the agony of his own burning muscles, and he gives thanks for the life he has taken so that he may sustain the lives of his family waiting for him back in their settlement.”

In this small passage exists everything that is missing from the whole Western Project and in fact everything that was over shadowed when the Farming Revolution occurred at the start of the Neolithic. The last 6000 years have been just been a diversion from the main evolution of mankind.

The San people of the Kalahari do not hunt with great technology but simply by pursuit until their faster prey is so exhausted that they can over power it. What is to be noticed is what Attenborough calls "With ceremonial gestures." What are these? What part to they play in getting food into the mouths of hungry hunters who have been working all day? Where in Plato, Newton, Einstein or Kant is there a foundation theory for "ceremonial gestures."

The answer lies in the list of statements I made. In reality there is no difference between the hunter and the hunted. Attenborough says "While it was alive, he lived and breathed with it and felt its every movement in his own body, and at the moment of its death, he shared its pain." The hunter has a relationship with the hunted that is completely mutual. You track an animal for a whole day, you understand its every thought and movement: you know that animal as well as yourself. And you see intimately when you take that animal's life that it must lose so you can gain. There is a balance. What you take, is balanced by a loss in the world. Here in fact is Newton's Second Law. So the bushmen take very cautiously, knowing there is an equal and opposite cost. And they pay respect to that cost. They do not wish to anger the world from which the Kudu came from. When the world is angry and the Kudu go then the people suffer. Perhaps also there is a deeper level also of simple respect and empathy for the world around them. An appreciation of the world they live in, along side their fellow people and animals. One great interconnected cosmos.

Now some of these ideas have been given full voice in the last century or so. Writers like David Thoreau have been driven to explore the anti-industrial world. The Romantic artists have gone outside the city walls to marvel at the sublime wilderness and be terrified at nature's fury. There is a soul still present in humans that identifies with the San people. But that soul is trapped inside house arrest and deprived of action by several thousand years of civilisation. Economics, technology, science and academia does not have a theory that can form a foundation of human soul. And comfort does make cowards of us all!

So returning to my list of artificial boundaries. How has our soul been trapped in house arrest?

Firstly most notably there is the boundary created by specialisation and industry. There is probably only a fraction of children today who have ever been to a working farm. I was lucky enough to live on a farm for a few weeks during my childhood when my parents stayed at B&B's. I have milked cows and have a vague idea of some of the processes that underlie my nutrition state. I became vegetarian to overcome the industrial barrier. Unlike the San people I will never be able to have a relationship with my food, so I must take more crude life style choices and just avoid the slaughter house all together. But then you learn about milk and realise you must be vegan to escape the slaughter house. The barrier between us and the natural world is almost total. We are left with just the crude choice of an "organic vegan" life style that seeks to at least restore some respect for what we eat. How pitiful compared with the rich diet and relationships the San people have with  the world.

But this still does not ask why we care about insects and the natural world?

The artificial barriers listed work to isolate humans as special in a non-special world. In its crudest form there is inanimate matter and animate humans. Animals are usually not viewed as conscious and animate, but with pets even the staunchest such dualist will acknowledge that their pet dog has some feelings and value before a stone. It is a hopeless way of thinking, and obviously nonsense. Humans are made of the same stuff as a stone! How can materialism prove any difference?

So it turns out there is no difference. Hard-core Materialists like Daniel Dennett accepting that everything is matter and so the same, try to overcome the question of human consciousness by arguing that it must be an illusion. Well he is part correct, but he makes the mistake of assuming that the world is matter. That is the dogma. The truth is the world is nothing! It is neither inanimate matter, nor animate consciousness. Such deliberations are unhelpful dogmas and at root just ideas. I hope I can ignore this line of enquiry - I've already pursues it at length in this blog.

So we can ignore the idea that the world is made of atoms. There are atoms there, but also a lot of other things. Atoms are made of sub-atomic particles (SAPs). Do we now say that the world is made of SAPs. All these are made from Energy too. If there is a fundamental unit it is energy. But its not nice to think of everything made of energy, the goal was to think of nice building blocks. That's the point we must let go of that desire for building blocks. The world is not built like a house. Its like a super hi-resolution screen. Long, long before you get to plank length pixels you give up zooming in, and long, long before you get to the edge of the known universe you stop zooming out. And then anyway we encounter the problem of Paramenides and Democritus. Is the world like a cake that we divide up into parts like ataoms, or is it like a house that is built from atoms. What is the entity here: the universe or a collection of atoms. We live in the centre. That is the building block. Materialism is wrong.

Having smashed up the lego pile and got away from materialism and reductivism. The next most important question is how do animals and humans occupy the same world? Cutting a long blog post short the point is that they are interconnected. All things are interconnected. This is core Buddhist theory. Well described in this blog. To understand where something came from you must look at the world around it. This is as true for humans as it is insects. Its extraordinary looking at a human to think that they were made by the small fertilised egg of their parents nurtured by the surrounding world. All that "human" came from the inanimate world around them. We won't get hung on silly ideas like animate/inanimate we have already smashed up the lego pile in the previous paragraphs and aren't looking at types of substance any more. The truth is that insects and humans both arise from exactly the same universe. While they are completely different, they belong to the same extraordinary creation. You impact one and you impact the other. That is not a statement of practicality like in the papers concerned at what the impact of losing insects on mankind will be, but an appreciation that they belong and arose from the same mysterious world.

And so I can continue. Eventually when the edifice of Western Civilisation has been dismantled we return to the San people and the simple knowledge that we belong in this world alongside all of creation that we see around us. No greater or simple a realisation than that. What was the point of the last 6000 years? It seems to have been a long circular journey so that in the end we would return home and know that we belonged there. The oldest story of them all captured in Paul Cohelo's The Alchemist and also most skilfully and brilliantly in a recent vlog post by Exurb1a

So in conclusion times are a changing, and mankind is undertaking a huge return journey back to 

its origins. In Zen they say that at the outset mountains are mountain, then mountains stop being mountains and at the end mountains become mountains again. Mankind is at the point where life is no longer life anymore. We are surrounded by the products of our miraculous labours and it seems almost anything is possible. But over the last century the cracks have been showing from physics to logic and things are no longer certain. The orbit has swung and mankind sees that mountains have stopped being mountains and knows that something is wrong. We yearn once again for Home, and as we return so will the insects and the World that gave rise to mankind in the first place will welcome us back. Its a (deliberate?) irony that Exurb1a chose the snake. In Jewish mythology it was the snake that tricked us out of the garden of Eden. The quest for knowledge that the snake tricked us with has led us far from where we started. But in our heart we only ever just wanted to return.

== Addition
So the question that remains and which must be the focused target of this blog (apart from spirituality) is the new economics. Its a great irony that the word "economics" comes from the Greek for home management. Yet economics has single handed destroyed the world. Perhaps that is harsh. Looked at one way it has brought immense material wealth to the world. The average person in the West is now more materially spoiled than the most powerful Kings of old. But economics is a new science, and like everything new it is unfinished and naive. We have begun the journey of economics but it has taken us far away from home. The new economics will be the return to home, and the truth at the heart of economics itself.

Destiny & Silence

Returning to "my muse" for the first time in a while. One of the abiding memories of that "relationship" was telling people I couldn't talk about it. Silence was the essence of the relationship. That silence is very much what broke the relationship also. Faith is only so strong and we like to get spoken reassurances to signpost relationships, or proofs that the partner is still in the relationship. This is a problem experienced by Christians where no word has come from Jesus for a very long time, and the relationship exists in total silence at the moment.

What struck me so strong about her was that from the moment we met I knew she was "the one". I can't remember all the details but perhaps that means "I decided she was the one" but in whatever sense it is meant it meant that December 5th 1997 is a milestone for me because from that day on I knew who "the one" was. And the most striking feature of this is that I was sure. Not because she said anything, not because anyone said anything, but I knew. That certainty came from no where and was supported by nothing. I knew nothing of what she felt or thought, other than we appeared to hit it off during that encounter. But before I knew anything I knew. Two days before when I first saw her I thought she seemed other worldly, she seemed somehow not of the earth. As mentioned before Shakespeare in Sonnet 130 may say "My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground" but without irony "my muse" actually appeared not to. Indeed my vision of her was always the most unironic and stereotypical. Perhaps the machinery of my mind is not so sophisticated that it can only generate forms in cliche, but there are reasons why cliches exist, and they are only cliche because they are so well worn. We may become weary and jaded of eating apples, but in reality each apple is as remarkable as the next, it is only us who grows tired of our mental machinery. With "my muse" she was the first, and remains the only cliche for me. She remains in silence.

Of course the silence become rather more profound after she died. But we lived in silence anyway, so the change was very little. The connection I felt was there whether we spoke or not, whether we met or not, and it remains after she has died. This is why I could never speak of it, and still cannot speak of it. It existed regardless of words, and so words can not construct it. If we were ever to build something so perfectly with words, then it would be no more than words. The value of silence is that it cannot be built from words. The artist may struggle to paint the sunflower, but we know that the painting will never be a sunflower. The essence of painting, the reason artists never stop painting, and art history never ceases, is because artists will never be able to capture the sunflower in paint. I was profoundly aware that i could not capture what transpired on 5th December in words so I never tried.

I have never tried to discover the real meaning of Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol:

Each man kills the thing he loves
    By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
    Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
    The brave man with a sword!

But in my mind it means the love has a life of its own. It is when we try to capture it, fix it or present it to the world that it dies. Even the flattering word will kill it.

Like the sunflower I wonder if I can really say exactly what I mean in this blog. But it is a very simple point. That love just is. It is a thing which happens in time and space. Yet it is so profound that the memory of it echoes forward and back in time. Like Carly Rae Jepsen says in that famous song "before you came into my life I missed you so bad." We know love perfectly well all our life, long before it happens. I was listening to her a fair bit some time back, she certainly knows the experience. In another song "And your eyes are lock and key" perhaps she refers also to the binding, locking quality of love here (from which I for one run), but for me it captures the experience of a lost lock not knowing of its key until such time as they meet and then in an instant it all makes sense. They both understand what they were made for. This is all in Plato's Symposium.

I'm thinking out loud on paper here. Perhaps the experience of love is partly this. Biologically we inherit from all life a tremendously ancient DNA and behaviour that evolved in rock pool billions of years ago to reproduce. When that lock and key finally meet they are literally as old as the rocks, as predestined as the blueness of the sky (oxygen was created around the same time). Only the diamond in her ring is older (unless it comes from a Russian factory). For me it felt like reincarnation however. Another idea probably as old if not older than evolution (Darwin did not think evolution he thought the mechanism of evolution called natural selection). I knew she would die soon. If I knew how it ended, this is why I wonder if there was more than just evolution creating a lock that sort a key that happened to be her.

We also don't think of pairing in the natural world being so exclusive. True many animals are monogamous keeping one partner their whole life, and I believe some not even repairing if their partner is lost (is this really true?). But do animal really have the experience of Lisa Stansfield "been around the world and i can't find my baby." In the past when populations were low and mixing was limited the world was not filled of locks unable to find their keys. It seems the lock and key may be made at the moment of meeting, or perhaps many keys will do, but when a roughly correct key fits a lock more or less it changes to fit the key exactly. Indeed this does fit my experience: I remember looking at "my muse" for the first time when we met. I asked her some question and she started talking and in that second I did a very quick calculation: the maths was "how is she?" the answer was "She is not what you are looking for". In fact she was not the key I was expecting! But then and this was the moment I binned the lock!! and asked again. "how is she?" and the answer was "over 95%." In other words there was a deeper lock and she did not fit exactly but the key made a "more than enough" match. And this was all done with data from the "eyes."

Yet there is no single story here. I already saw that she did not walk on the earth when I saw her across the shop floor two days before. She was already unusual. Perhaps this was factored into the "more than enough." Decisions presumably had been made based on chemistry and pheromones and lots of unconscious signals. It is interesting that the key conscious signal was how she looked (as if that's a secret!).

So supposing all this amounts to the body gearing up for breeding. The mind changes its lock to match what it has found, so that we experience the "I've waited my whole life to find you" moment. The experience of "destiny" then is possibly then much more generic. The destiny lies in the fact that will under take reproduction and breeding, but who with is much more flexible. That destiny is ancient. The lightening that flashes within us is an actual echo of the primordial lighting that created life in ancient seas. Who it is with however is much more conditioned and flexible.

And yet for me the lighting flashing from the mists of time was so powerful as to eclipse the contemporary, conditioned. I felt it so strongly and certainly that I did not need to speak of it, did not wish to speak of it. It would be like someone talking through a film, you don't so that you just watch it silently. It also reflects that this experience was quite unlike normal daily existence which does not share this spark of destiny to it. There is nothing destined in my life except this and possibly some progress in Buddhist or Christian enlightenment.

Now perhaps once we make this profound inner orientation to someone then the psychic stuff starts quite naturally. Knowing she was going to die and developing a connection to her so that I knew when she was in danger even after not seeing her for many years. The latter is a common thing I hear about all the time. Perhaps this is just normal when you take the time to deeply connect with someone. The fact she was the only published poet I have ever met, and I was just at the critical moment in my own life where poetry was central to my writing development we can put down to coincidence. Unfortunately losing her killed off my writing, perhaps this is the other destiny i should reengage with. And then there was the fact she is the only person I have ever met who can speak with ghosts. A few can see, but her psychic strength was extraordinary. It does suggest she was an extraordinary person and my lock chose well/badly depending how you look at it. Not the person for a simple straightforward life for sure, but the person you might know if you wish to develop spiritually. But then she told me she was still as school and my inner voice said in simple terms "you are doomed." And indeed I was. 17 going on 18 is not catastrophic, but it is if you wish to embark on the spiritual journey I was engaged with. So perhaps then it was not supposed to be. My lock took me exactly where i needed to be: an experience of poetry, love and a psychic awakening... but of breeding this part I still struggle with. Did the lightening flash in silence to bring forth life again as it did 4 billions years ago, or did it flash to open the soul to the greater spiritual reality?

Last weekend I spoke to a monk about my problem with Buddha's insistence of either monk or lay person. It appears if you have no family then the committed path is monastic. I consider this, but am not good enough yet to do that. I am a layperson, yet I don't like possessions or material existence. No chance of breeding with that mentality - women like nothing better than to nest it appears to me. But just because we don't wish to take up a domestic material place is the world does not automatically mean we are ready for the monastery. "My muse" was somewhat on the fence also, but she was young and I don't doubt she would have accepted the domestic path eventually. So have I cut myself free to pursue the monastic path? I don't know yet. Right now the silence isn't telling me anything.

== addition

Its funny how words have a mind of their own. In all that I didn't make the point I wanted to make. Silence is the best state for Truth because what is destined will happen, and what is meant to be will be. Therefore if one is destined to love then one will love, and if one is not then one will not love. There is nothing to do and nothing to say. And so it seemed to me.

However I have wondered since in the conditional, biological state of affairs whether women in particular need men to do things, and loving is not enough. Sexual love is after all part of the process of breeding. Much has been said in social analysis about sex and gender in recent decades and it is all wrong. What one is born with, the preconditions are what we might call sex. Why in social circles do we even bother with sex? If I had a choice I would not give it any thought at all. It is a demanding and time consuming activity that if it leads to breeding becomes even more demanding and time consuming. I believe if anyone had a choice they would not chose sex. But we are born with sex, and we are born with a destiny to be sexual. The reason that a 2 year old does not go around trying to get into relationships is because they do not yet have the sexual. When they are 20 that will have changed. One needs only spend a year looking at the natural world to see this writ large. This is a misunderstanding of the social.

The social is what rules we adopt to express our sexuality. What customs and learned behaviours come down to us within which we interpret our sexuality. You know the social because it changes from society to society. You know the sexual because it does not. It is true the dancer and dance can be hard to separate, but no one ever said they were the same. Sex and gender are quite separate. Male and Female is sex, masculine and feminine is gender. Sex is binary and confusion in this is a growth industry. Gender is choice.. well actually not really since what do we chose but what is available to us?

But perhaps I digress. If what is meant to be is meant to be then we may as well stay silent and let it happen. Yet as someone said to me: you cannot win the lottery if you do not buy a ticket. In which case we have choice over even that which is destined. In which case it isn't destined. And if it is not destined then we may also just as well stay silent since it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen.

It remains a personal quest to discover the destined. And one that must always be conducted in silence.