Sunday, July 25, 2010

Ranto! Part 3 : Modern Bullshit and the Bullshit of The Future

PICKING UP IN MID-RANT

It's been 4 months since I last wrote this blog, during which time I've taken a long trip, gotten engaged, bought a cat, and had time to think about what I'm trying to get at with this long-winded diatribe. I'm happy to say that I'm no closer to a definitive answer, and it's shaping up to be a lifetime obsession. There are worse ways to spend a life.

I think all of this is a response to a question that's been burning inside me since I first opened my eyes. That question is....what?

"What" has always been more important to me than who, when and why. Specifically, "What's going on", and the implications of that question. If your first enquiry is who, then perhaps you're too worried about other people: their rank, value to you and what they're up to. Go be a priest, or a politician, or I dunno...someone else who seems really interested in what others are up to.

If your first question is When, then I guess it's tempting to suggest you should be a historian. But I dunno. "When" seems like such a weak question to me. It lacks context. "When did you get here?" seems pointless if you first don't know "What" that person's function is. "When" is for the clueless. I hate "When".

"Why" is a little more up my personal alley. But again, it's the context that matters. Why negates itself with the totally-not-useless axiom of "Why ask Why?". Why is too easily subdued with basic semantic jiu-jitsu (and possibly real jiu-jitsu).

But WHAT demands attention. Just by itself, it's a call for explanation without pleading. When paired with "going on here", it leads to a contextualization, which can be further expanded on with a "what was before that?".

So I'm asking what. What is going on here, into the western society into which I was born, which is rapidly becoming world society. Now that I have a basic grasp of that, I might ask why, but that seems too soon: better to ask "what happened before that". Eventually, you can keep going back, til you finally reach a why proposition: Why did humans start engaging in competition in the first place. I attempted to actually pre-suppose that with my previous rants: essentially, we started to compete when we started to grow food for ourselves.

Back to the current state of affairs. The "West", conceived as North America, most of Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, the UK and a handful of branch offices (Israel, Hong Kong, some degree of Russia) are the "free" world. In this world, the people with the physical might (ie. the state) are subject to scrutiny by the people without (the public). Growth and innovation come from individuals, who are free to associate as they see fit. The only judge of what's good and bad is the market, wherein the masses get to decide what's "good" and "bad". People of more refined taste are sometimes asked to challenge the initial assertions of the masses, leading to occassional reversals in general opinion, allowing a chance for real innovation and evolution, rather than just moneymaking. The state is granted a certain license to exert it's violence in cases when it is called for, by the people. Trust flows upward, so that individuals place trust in juries, who place trust in judges, who place trust in law enforcement, who place trust in legislators, who are spurred to action by an executive, who is spurred to action in turn, by the masses. You might recognize a pattern- group to individual to group to individual to group to individual to group.

This world represents under a billion people, or about 15-20% of the world's population. Tellingly, it also represents about $35 trillion dollars in wealth (measured in western money, natch), equivalent to about 65-70% of the world's wealth.

The next world would be the "Emerging" world. This is a term that works in the west only: it suggests that they are emerging from another world, into the world that the west lives in. Indeed, that's pretty much how it looks: the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are all countries that are, on the surface, living in the western world, but are in the process of shaking off some old-world traits: tribalism, corruption, central control of power, the unchecked state, factionalism, corruption again (because there's quite a bit of that) and violent religious warfare. More on that last item later.

Beyond the emerging world is the developing world. Vietnam, Thailand, many ex-soviet states, some of Africa...countries that are working hard to overthrow thousands of years of complex civilization, shaking off old habits that have no place in the modern world. To a certain degree, the developing world has a better chance of success than the BRICs. Emerging world countries have a certain amount of power and sway already- they're muscular enough that they see no problem sticking with their current systems, whereas the developing countries are still open to anything and everything.

And beyond that even, there's the failed world- Somalia, and...um...well, Somalia is the best example that comes to mind. No government, no infrastructure- utter mayhem.

Ok, so that's What we have now. What came before that?

World War Two. Forget the cold war, we're still living very much in the rubble of that loud motherfucker. Aside from the wholesale destruction of the physical old world, we destroyed something else- ambiguity about our own destruction.

Human beings have been fighting ever since there was something to fight over. But metaphorically, we were fighting on a big open playing field with no borders. We couldn't conceptualize wholesale destruction, where everything- our physical worlds AND the people inside it- would be vaporized. The proof is in the failure- when we tried to picture it, the best we could stretch our minds to was theological armageddon- the twilight of the gods, where a hammer-man fights a fire-man and they're both swallowed by a snake, or angels fight demons on a field of skulls and- bullshit! Big time bullshit. Monsters that no-one (sane) has ever seen, fighting against each other with super-powers that don't exist.

But World War Two demonstrated that utter destruction was very real, and very much within the grasp of ordinary humans- farty, flabby, nose-picking humans, with back-aches and sexual urges and no superpowers at all. We live in a world where we can easily conceive the end of our species.

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

I could easily look up the Heisenberg uncertainty principle on Wikipedia and give a somewhat accurate synthesis of it here, but instead I'm going to go with what I think it's all about.

Ok, so the idea is, A exists. I'm X. X observes A, and now A is A + X's observation. It can never be A again.

Let's put this into a tangible example. There's a bug, with all it's bug behavior. I observe said bug. Now that bug is the bug, with all it's bug behavior, and my observation of it. I can never be certain that what I'm observing now is exactly what the bug was doing before I observed it- I can only extrapolate.

So you might say- well yes, we could be smartasses about it and not believe in anything. Maybe the world disappears every time I'm not looking at it, and it's a massive leap of faith to assume anything happens without me looking at it, because I can never be certain that it is, right? So we may as well make that leap of faith, and live on, because the chance that our uncertainty has any meaning on the real world is slim enough that we're better off not getting caught up in such shenanigans.

But I think this uncertainty has some real world applications. Maybe the aphorism that "ignorance is bliss" has some real-world meaning- without certain knowledge, we can continue on in a way that we simply couldn't if we had that knowledge. Without knowing that we had the tools to destroy one another, maybe we'd be in less of a panic about the world- why bother dwelling on armageddon if we can't actually conceive of it? If the twilight of the gods is about the gods, we can compartmentalize it and get on with the human task of living and being.

But no, no. We've observed it, we've done it. You can't go back to having unobserved it. So what tool do we have to help us get by in the face of this awful knowledge?????

BULLSHIT

I'm not going to suggest that bullshit is a recent innovation. If I wanted to be parochial about it, I could take some well-worn examples from the religious world. The Christians had the inconvenient knowledge that their religion was an offshoot of older, more cohesive faiths- mainly Judaism and European pagan faiths. So, let's create some bullshit! The pagans were in need of being saved, and the Jews gave up their covenant with Yahweh when they betrayed Jesus! But that bullshit becomes tired. So it needs refreshing. Now we have all sorts of Christian bullshit- the Romans didn't kill Jesus, the Jews did. But now the Christians are largely ok with Jews, so instead, it was just his will that he be sacrificed. Then there's some old fringe bullshit, like The British Israel theory, that the 'white' man is the true descendant of the ancient Israelite, and not the jew- because it was inconvenient to associate the old testament heroes with the miserable enemy in their midst. And nowadays, we have some more uncomfortable truths- the Catholic Church, the oldest extant Christian institution, is both infallible and guilty of heinous crimes. So we need some bullshit! I'm not even sure I can get a grasp of what bullshit the church uses to get around this one- except to point to the wonderful examples of the lives of individual Catholics as proof of the theory. Which avoids the accusation entirely. Few rational folk have an issue with catholics or Catholocism- their anger usually goes towards the institution of the church. This includes the anger of many catholics. But whatevs.
Lest we blame the Christians for all the bullshit in the world, let's look at some others. Islam in the newest religion on the Western monotheistic block. It borrows heavily from Christianity, Judaism, and even pre-Islamic, Arab paganism. Awk-ward!!! So let's just say that Islam is actually the oldest, that even Adam practiced it, and up until Mahammed, everyone was a little off the mark.

The Jews! They belong in Israel because it was promised to them, right? Of course, that requires a belief in an unknowable god in the first place, and a bullshitting of one's-self that other people's sovereign rights are immaterial against the wishes of AN INVISIBLE MAN. But to clarify, I'm a zionist- I believe the modern state of Israel has it's legitimacy in having won a war with another sovereign power, and taken land won in that war. No bullshit necessary, just facts. But let's not go down that road.

Back to the point- Bullshit is a mighty handy tool. Even when the facts are well-known to us and make a certain path seem illegitimate, bullshit is right on hand to patch over inconvenient inconsistencies and allow us to move forward. I'm not suggesting this is bad- like with the uncertainty principle, we can get tangled up so badly that we become static. Sometimes we just need to forge ahead , even in the face of cold, inconvenient fact.

Just so long as we all know the score.

And that takes us to...

BULLSHIT OF THE FUTURE

This rant began with the concept that trade is a wonderful thing, a tool to allow for human interaction without the need to fight over resources. It then dovetailed into a lament over the role of marketing- cheating around the reality of trade by creating a conception in the mind of your trading partner, allowing for unfair advantage- in simpler terms, rather than trading value for value, we seek to trade lesser value for greater value. The reason I hate this concept so much is that it works against the concept of trade in the first place- we use trade to get around the problem of violence. But then we abuse it, cheating people out of their money- and then those people call on good ol' violence to settle scores. Why bother?

From there, with a few twists and turns, I tried to establish the world we live in now- where we readily engage in lies, and have maybe forgotten the point of telling the truth in the first place. Maybe what I'm getting at is that no matter how well we bullshit ourselves, the truth is going to still be there, causing problems for us. The biggest problem? We know how it could all end. We can see the boundaries of the playing field, and we're uncomfortable with it. So we engage in all sorts of enchantments to push that away to the ends of our brains, where we can deal with it after death.

But it's the current trend in bullshit that has me worried. I'm going to start with a personal example.

In my past, I worked for a large organization. This company has a monopoly over it's industry, inherited from a public legacy - ie. it owned infrastructure that few private companies would ever be allowed to control, because in the past it had been a public company.

The products this company sells were inferior to their competitors for a lot of reasons. But it retained a significant market share because of it's position.

As a salesperson for this company, I was trained to sell on benefit and not on feature, which is old school salesmanship- sell them on how the product will make them feel, and based on their emotional state at the time of sale, rather than on the actual quality of the product.

But because I dealt with after-sales support, I knew firsthand just how bad the products were. After a while, I had to quit- I couldn't reconcile the fact that I was lying on a very basic level.

But when I went head to head with management on a few occasions, I noticed something eerie- these were people who knew full well that we didn't play fair, selling products that some people had to buy, because we blocked any competition with our control over infrastructure. Also, these were people who knew that some of the rhetoric we used, about quality, innovation, and having the best products at a price that was well above the competition- was bullshit. We made money from our weight and strength, and nothing else. Management knew that, and they knew that we knew that they knew!

Except they kinda didn't.

In other words, despite the fact that we were all in on a racket, earning money with well-placed lies, the management would stubbornly refuse to officially acknowledge the fact. Even when the evidence was right there.

I figured this was just professional posturing. But no. I'd sometimes speak to these people outside of work, and they'd stick to their guns. There was no frankness, no acknowledgment.

Ok, I thought, this is just sticking to bullshit to make the uncomfortable part of their day easier. Breaking it, observing the bullshit, would reduce it's effectiveness. I can feature that.

But no that wasn't it either.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE ME!

One of my biggest fears is being right about something with no-one to verify that I'm right. Like, what if I went undercover, so deep that only one other person alive could verify that I was undercover- and that person was killed and left no records? I'd be adrift. Like a time traveller who arrived in the past, and then had his time machine broken. I'd be taken as a crazy person. I'd be dismissed out of hand, left to wonder whether everything I knew was right could be wrong. Left to question my own sanity.

Ugh. Just writing about it makes me queasy.

I worry sometimes that bullshit has taken on a life of it's own. It's one thing to engage in a lie. It's quite another to forget that it's a lie. That's where I feel the real problem is- we keep building castles made of sand, and then we FORCE ourselves to forget it's sand and move pianos into it. Then we're left confused and angry when those pianos fall right through the floor.

Like the financial crisis. For a while, financiers give loans to people who can't afford it, knowing full well it could backfire. But after a while it doesn't. New financiers walk into an accepted truth- people who can't afford loans can afford loans. Duh. It's right there. Forget the reality, or common sense- LOOKIT WHAT'S HAPPENING! Then people can't pay their loans, and financiers are left scratching their heads. I keep watching the news and wondering if it's all an act- this dumbfoundedness, a way to look innocent while taking taxpayer money- or maybe they really didn't know. It's meta-bullshit, bullshit that isn't bullshit by virtue of the fact that we've built bullshit safeguards around the bullshit.

Doesn't anyone get tired of it?

Here's another aphorism, like "sell the sizzle, not the steak", that I feel many people have purposefully missed the boat on- "Fake it til you make it".

Ok, this could mean- you have talent, but no-one will give you a chance based on faith alone. So fake being a success, so someone can give you a shot- and then show them what you've REALLY got.

Or, it could mean this- by dressing the part, you will become the part WITH NO FUCKING ACTUAL WORK INVOLVED.

This person is interesting! Their individual personality leads them to make aesthetic choices that are a true manifestation of their inherent uniqueness! If I dress just like them, I WILL BE AS UNIQUE AND INTERESTING AS THEY ARE.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but is everyone aware that these people aren't aware?

CONCLUSION

I don't have an elegant way to synthesize this entire ill-feeling into a simple statement. But here's a go.

Lying isn't bad. Sometimes it's necessary. But don't forget which parts are lies.

Moving on, all I can hope for is that the current state of meta-bullshit will pass, as people will get bored with it. Perpetrators of bizarre anti-truths, whom actually aren't aware that they're lying, will eventually die out, and hopefully leave a bad enough taste in the next generation that we can get back to the real world- where lying serves only a temporary purpose, a bridge that we can look back on once we're on safer ground, without feeling the need to burn it down.

But let's not forget that we live in a world where we know how to end the world. I think maybe we're still in a state of panic, and we'll only calm down once we're able to reconcile that we can't go back to paradise, where destruction was an outside possibility.

And if we don't...well, we're adaptable. Maybe we'll just absorb the meta-bullshit, and when that gets tired, we'll build ever thicker layers, in perpetuity until there's no truth left at all, and we'll be easier to sell to than ever. No-one will be able to make any choices, and only the most ruthless bullshitters will have any power.

Uh...ok, I feel naive just saying that.

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