I find it amazing that we live in a world where it is so easy to directly hear what people are saying, to directly see places that are far away from you, and to get first-hand accounts from numerous individuals of what is happening, and yet people still choose to get filtered, edited information second-hand from organizations whose first responsibility is provide entertainment and serve their advertisers and stockholders—businesses that believe the only way to make money is by following a writing formula of shock and conflict.

As a side note to this, it still amazes me that people think there are only two sides to any question or situation, and that if one side is right the other must be wrong. No, they can both be wrong. They can be talking about something irrelevant. They could be asking the wrong questions. You can put two liars in a room and have them accuse each other of lying–neither of them have to be telling the truth just because one accuses the other of lying.

To an honest person, it is hard to imagine that somebody would form an organization that claims to be providing information but is actually focused on entertainment. But to the formers of these organizations, it is hard for them to imagine that anybody really believes them fully.

In short, I think there is a lot less conflict in the world than there is portrayed to be, but a LOT of conflict reported. That is, a lot of the conflict and things that you are angry at are actually the media channels giving you the information, even though you might have believed you were actually angry about the thing being reported. Usually if you go directly to the source, you’ll find things are a lot less dramatic than than they are represented to be.

If you are angry now after the 2016 election, it is because there was a year-long news cycle that prepared one half of the country to be violently angry NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED. If you don’t think this is true, you don’t have enough friends who were on the other side of the election or have been very carefully feeding yourself only the news stories that agree with your ideas. Think about it—half the country was going to be FURIOUS no matter what. That seems odd, doesn’t it?

Who in the world would want to make SURE that half the country was violently angry about its government, no matter what? What would anybody stand to gain from that? Whatever it is, I have no interest in being manipulated in such a fashion.

If you want to attack something, figure out why somebody would want you to be so mad and attack that—not your own government. I have some ideas of what it might be, but nothing really concrete enough.

Now, as a side note, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everybody that SEDITION IS ILLEGAL.

Here’s the definition of “sedition” from the Oxford American Dictionary:

sedition, n., conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.

It is NOT protected by the First Amendment and you CAN go to jail for it. Peaceful protest, the right of assembly, all of these are fine. You are welcome to disagree with the government as much as you want, which is one of the great things about the USA. However, since you’re my friend and I care about you, I’d like to remind you that no matter how angry you are, you don’t want to call down the full force of the government on you by actually doing something illegal.

Most of the time, things happen for a reason. Once in a while there are accidents, but when we have something of the scale and scope of something like a national election and how the media reports on it, it’s very unlikely that what you are looking at is a coincidence. In fact, usually thing things that happen are in fact _intended_ to happen. So the thing to look at is–what is happening? Well, what it looks like is happening, to me, is a lot of people becoming unhappy and dissatisfied about presidential candidates–people who are likely to be highly dissatisfied when EITHER of them win.

So rather than argue about the candidates or what we know about them through the media channels, perhaps it would be more worthwhile to do a few other things:

1. Consider: what groups or individuals would benefit from Americans being hateful or dissatisfied about their government? Do any of those groups have influence over the media, political parties, or other groups?

2. What can we do to make our lives and the world a better place? Is the government going to do that? I don’t think that there are too many governments in all of history where you would look back and say that they were as effective as various historical individuals have been who intended to do something about the society. There are certainly exceptional individuals within governments from time to time. And certainly people like Gandhi went on to be in government. But why would you look to a government as a whole and actually EXPECT the group to be making the world a better place? That’s something we expect of Greenpeace, or the Volunteer Ministers, or the Red Cross. So why are we so worried about the government making the world a better place? It usually doesn’t. It does some good things here and there. But the world does not belong to it. The world belongs to you, and me, and anybody else who chooses to make a difference. Vote, please. But maybe the time that any of us are spending being outraged about the government would be better spent making the world a better place by helping ourselves, our families, our friends, our groups, even random strangers. I’d rather make one person smile than spend a SECOND thinking about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I’m not saying they are totally unimportant, or that we shouldn’t spend time on politics. It is important that we care about our group and its future. But we have a choice about where we spend our physical and emotional energy, and I think it’s better to spend _more_ of it on looking at how we can make the world a better place by the simple things we can do every day than spend hours or days worrying about what is so terrible about one politician or another and posting it all over Facebook. That is not making the world a better place to live.

Hi hi. So, wow, politics! Apparently that’s a thing. But really, here’s what’s up:

In the USA, there is only one major political party. It is called the Money And War Party. It has two faces: the Angry Party and the Sympathy Party. Both of these are really just ways of making the Money And War Party appeal to different sorts of people.

These parties both have some good people in them. They have some bad people in them. Very little of this gets communicated, though, because the USA also has two other things: The Angry People News Companies and the Smiles and Lies News Companies.

The Angry People News Companies are angry! They are so angry that the Sympathy Party is being sympathetic! How pathetic and ineffective those sympathy people are! Everybody and everything sucks and everything about the government is bad! Grrr, anger!

The Smiles and Lies News Companies are so upset that everybody else is lying! They’re liars! Look at what terrible people everybody else are! The world is a dangerous place! It’s really scary and we should feel bad for how terrible everything is for people. Isn’t it so sad and weird that the Angry Party is angry? And that they are lying? Probably we should feel nervous about the world. The Sympathy Party is all right, though, because they feel bad for people who are in bad situations! And the world is full of people in bad situations! Here are some pictures of people from the Sympathy Party smiling. Doesn’t that make you feel less nervous now?

And then you pit those two factions against each other, and it really looks like there’s a wide choice! Wow, such difference! Do I want to be Angry About The Government or do I want to Help People In Need? Weirdly, those emotional messages seem to reach a pretty good number of the voting population (though I don’t think they really have mass appeal, given usual voter turnout).

But then what really happens is that you elect them and they spend money and wage war. But even that is hard to see because the Angry People News tells you that they are waging war and NOT spending money and the news companies that support the Sympathy Party tell you that they are NOT waging war but that they are spending money. In addition to telling you lots of other irrelevant information.

So, since we’re all talking politics ANYWAY, apparently, and no matter how many times I click “Hide” on the total BS that the Angry People News and Smiles And Lies News writes, the articles keep popping up here and there in my news feed, I figured I might as well start talking about politics too!

So, I have some problems with our political process (wow, big surprise, I bet you didn’t know that!). Here’s my take on what’s essentially wrong with the process of getting elected in any large democratic country today:

The essential problem of a politician is to get the majority of people who vote to vote for them. These voters rarely have any idea what happens with a politician after they elect him or her. The post-election political process is too complex and frankly too mundane for most voters to pay attention to. Even saying “that politician did or did not vote for this bill” doesn’t really cover the whole picture, because the bill is often some 80-page monster with six amendments that don’t even have anything to do with the bill. We are a “government of laws not a government of men,” but the system that we have for creating laws, as practically implemented, is pretty screwed and far too complex to comprehend. So, the public generally has no real understanding of the political process.

So let’s rephrase the politician’s problem: You have a vast number of people. You have to get these people to agree that you should be in charge. They actually have no idea what you’re going to be in charge of, or how your job will work. If you tried to explain it, they wouldn’t be interested. And on top of all this, you have to get your message through a medium over which you have no control (the news media)–a medium which is primarily in the business of entertainment.

So the trick is to get an understandable and entertaining message through that will cause people to vote for you.

So what’s understandable? The problems that people encounter every day in their regular lives. What’s entertaining? Anecdotes, theatricality, fights. And what gets votes? Getting people to agree with you.

Voila, it’s election season. The competition is who can put on the best performance and most convincingly state a case to solve everyday problems–whether or not they have anything to do with government–in a way that people agree with. (This is why Communism was so successful–its proponents were great performers who convincingly promised to solve the biggest problem facing the majority of people in the soon-to-be-Communist country–a problem that everybody agreed was there.)

Then there’s other things to put into play. What words can you use that will cause people to empathize with you? What image should you build of yourself that people will admire?

And then the counterattack comes. If you’ve built an image, the opposition has to give evidence that it’s invalid. If you’re using certain words, the opposition should make fun of them, and not use those words. Pretty simple.

That is “getting elected.” Nowhere in there is anything about your provable validity as a leader. You only have to get others to agree that you should be in charge. You don’t have to prove anything. Proof is not entertainment, and so won’t make it through the news media. Claims, promises, grand speeches, slander, stories about your life–these things are agreeable, understandable entertainment, and are the only effective items in a successful political campaign.

-Max

P.S. And for all you intellectuals out there, unless you read every bill they voted on and researched all the campaign funding of every candidate, what you’re getting is just another “more refined” form of agreeable, understandable entertainment–the kind that the campaign managers know will resonate with you.

This was originally part a message I wrote to somebody, but I thought that some other people might appreciate it, so I’m re-posting it here with some minor edits.

When people make decisions, they do so mostly based on their experience and education. If we grew up in a society that taught us violence as the primary solution, then most people would be using that as their primary solution unless their experience strongly dictated otherwise. If a friend said something that you thought was true, that could be something that helped you make decisions in the future, just like if somebody read the Bible and thought that was true. Those are both education.

A large number of the people I know from the Western Hemisphere rant against the evils of what they call “organized religion.” Their cultural background is all Catholic, Christian, or Muslim, for the most part. They grew up in a society whose history is riddled with things like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, areas where men misused the great power of faith for their own selfish ends–something that people have been doing since time immemorial, not limited in any way to organized bodies of religion, even though those are the most prominent instances taught in our average history classes. A shaman, tribal leader, king, or peasant is equally as likely to misuse power as a Pope is. (A great example is the misplaced sense of faith many people have in the false “patriotism” of aggression being practiced by our government currently, or the misplaced “faith” that some battered women will have in their abusive husbands.)

It’s all well to say that “people developed” and “History evolved” as the explanations for historical improvements in the world, but that negates any type of causation. If you read something, and it changes your mind or makes you think, somebody had to write that first, before it could be read. Often when we study history it’s all too easy to just look back and say, “Oh, look, there’s a nice, orderly progression of ideas. Sure is nice that they just happened to be there.” But a closer look will show that, in fact, societies advanced when specific great thinkers (or groups of thinkers) came along and made those advances. The Golden Age of Greece was not a coincidence, it was generated by a specific procession of philosophers and artists, many of whom are probably lost to us.

If indeed history had just been an orderly evolution, there would have been no Dark Ages. There would not have been such continuous reversion to methods of violence, or so many collapsed and failed societies. Things live or die for some reason, and that reason is people.

At the time immediately before Christianity was introduced, the common form of entertainment was gladatorial pits and other forms of public death. The Roman virtue was “might makes right.” The average person relied on superstition to determine whether or not they would be happy, and over 70% of the population of Rome was in abject poverty.

So then this Jesus guy is born, probably goes and studies in India, and comes back having been influenced by Buddhism (which at that time is 500 years old, in the East, but hasn’t penetrated Westward much at all), which teaches that reason and kindness may be the path to happiness. He comes back, and he sees the injustices of Roman society, and also the misuse of faith that was happening in the Jewish temples, where material wealth was overpowering spiritual values. He starts talking about it with people, and the power of these ideas–largely unknown to the masses of common Romans, though some bit of Greek philosophy would have been known by the aristocratic classes–is such that they spread and people want to make him King of Judea. Cue history.

Now, granted, that is not the only influence that made a difference in the world at that time. But off the top of my head, the only Roman philosopher that I can think of is…Jesus of Nazareth. That’s out of almost a thousand years of Roman history. This one man saying, “Hey, guys, have you ever considered that maybe being nice to each other is better than killing each other?” And just like the things said by other students in a philosophy class, it makes you think. 🙂

Have various organizations done terrible things in the name of God? Yes. Do those things really have anything to do with the fundamental philosophies of Christianity? For the most part, no. You can certainly twist the words of the Bible to justify terrible violations of human rights or strange notions–such as the Monastic disgust of women–but just like Jesus wasn’t the only influence in Rome, these twistings of faith were not the only influence in the injustices of later societies.

By the way, I’m not Christian in the least. But I do have a great respect for the power of ideas. Even imperfect ideas can change the world, and if they make it even a little better, that’s good by me.

-Max

I’m guessing that in an insane asylum, the inmates can tell that the other inmates are crazy, because they’re not all crazy in the same way. But I bet if they all had the exact same (or similar enough) problems, they would be unable to tell that anybody was crazy–their problems would be so common that the problems themselves would define “normal”. They might notice a few things wrong (most likely with themselves), but if they all had the major aspects of the insanity in common, they probably wouldn’t notice it in each other.

It’s kind of like being in a gigantic prison (one so big most people can’t see the walls), and then the prison’s inside of a big box, and the big box is surrounded by an illusion, and then outside the illusion there’s a glass cage. (That’s not an analogy for something real, I’m just making stuff up to demonstrate a point.) You could convince somebody that they were in a prison–if you could show them the walls–and they might have some idea about the big box (they might have to take it on faith, if they couldn’t get out of the prison to see), but trying to convince them about the illusion or the glass cage would be nearly impossible. And honestly, to somebody in a huge prison, the idea of the illusion or the glass cage would probably be overwhelming–they’d be like, “So even if I get out of here, there’s all THAT? Wow, I don’t want to think about that.”

What would get really crazy is if you had seen the big box, the illusion, and the glass cage for yourself, and then you went back to the prison and had to chat it up with everybody about prison life. You know, who was at the top of the social ladder that day in prison, how many packs of cigarettes Joe was planning to get tomorrow, Bill’s plans for building a shack in the yard. Wouldn’t that just seem so stupid after a while?

But you couldn’t go around saying to everybody, “Hey, you’re in prison! And there’s a big box out there! And then if you keep going, there’s really amazing, beautiful stuff outside this glass cage!” What would people think of you? They’d think that you were crazy. Of course, you’d probably think that they were crazy, running around building up their social status in this little prison, but hey, the majority rules.

Still, if nobody was outside the prison, you’d hang out in it, because it’d be pretty lonely out in the big box, and even worse if you were outside the illusion. And you’d go on, day after day, talking about Joe’s cigarettes and Bill’s shack, but at least you’d have friends! And friends are really important. So important that people will stay in a gigantic prison just to have them, sometimes.

Anyhow, I just thought that was an interesting viewpoint to think about. Kind of makes me wonder what gigantic prisons surrounded by big boxes that we’re in–mentally, in life, or in society.

-Max

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a while, and I mentioned some of my thoughts on it to my mom, who encouraged me to put them down in a blog.

So, here we go. What is a government?

Well, basically, when a large enough group of people get together, they need to agree on certain things, and there are certain administrative functions that need to be agreed upon as a group. They need to agree on the rules for the group (laws), what will happen if somebody is harmful to the group (law enforcement), creation and maintenance of roads, what object represents money, and how to defend the group from nature or other groups. And on top of that, there needs to be some organization that coordinates these various different functions so that they work together and any conflicts between them can be handled.

Essentially, this is what a government is–it is a collection of administrative organizations, coordinated by an executive organization. It’s not “the people in charge of us.” There’s no such thing as “the people in charge of us.” This isn’t a slave state–nobody’s telling me what to do with my life, every day. That’s what would be happening if the government was “the people in charge of us.” No, the government is a very boring, loosely organized series of administrative organizations.

The reason it all has to be one organization is that “The Money Organization” and “The Defense Organization”, if set up separately, would overpower the other organizations. So “The Law-Making Organization” has to be a part of it to keep those in check.

Politicians promising people personal prosperity is like running for class president and promising everybody good grades. The class president isn’t responsible for your grades, so it’s all just pie in the sky. He could certainly make rules that would make it difficult for you to make good grades, but the grades themselves are a matter of your personal motivation and work, not something magical which you will be gifted from on high.

Similarly, a politician could certainly hinder personal prosperity with laws, or remove past hinderances to prosperity, but improving personal prosperity has nothing to do with the government, which manages laws, enforcement, roads, printing money, and defense. The government will never eliminate poverty, because the government has nothing to do with poverty.

A government structure that did attempt to control the entire economy and thus “eliminate poverty”–communism–instead created poverty for everybody. Essentially they added “The Economy Organization” to the list of organizations, and that was a bad idea, since obviously people do better when self-motivated, not when commanded from on high. (Witness the low productivity of slavery.)

Anyhow, this model of government (a bunch of separate organizations coordinated by an executive organization) seems to simplify and resolve all of the problems of government that I have been thinking about for many years, so it seems like a good model to me. The various political methodologies then become merely methods of ensuring continued sane leaders in The Executive Organization and sane people in the other organizations (such as sane law-makers).

-Max