Verily, the margins of selection are tight, impersonal and brutally enforced.

*   *   *

“This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our European culture has been moving towards a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.” Friedrich Nietzsche – Will to Power 1901

*   *   *

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must all be lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this steam of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.” Erich Remarque – All Quiet on the Western Front  1929

*   *   *

“The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died.” …

“Countless parents killed and ate their children and then died of starvation anyway.”

Timothy Snyder -- Bloodlands; writing about Millions who starved in Ukraine in the 1930s via Stalin. (Stalin's wife was a good person. Ms. Alliluyeva learned of the horrors; she shot herself in the heart.)

*   *   *

“And I’m talking to myself at night

Because I can’t forget

Back and forth through my mind

Behind a cigarette”  The White Stripes -- Seven Nation Army

*   *   *

“Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom. I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.” Albert Hoffman 1906 - 2008

*   *   *

1965? "Once I was appalled… now I’m galled… at the lack of lucidity… and the depth of stupidity… And I’ve shed my tears… And quenched my fears… and vowed my life and force of will… and I’m willing to kill… to cease the Spoilers’ pitiless plunders of the last leaving wonders of our wounded world…" Wulf Zendik – The Money Changers

1970 "The oceans are in danger of dying.” Jacques Cousteau

1980 We live in a "death culture." Russell Means

1983 "We're in a war for survival and it's everybody's duty to get involved. If they don't, they'll be drafted into it anyway, by circumstance." Paul Watson -- Sea Shepherd

1983 “Our system for the selection of leaders who are suited to the time in which we live is no longer appropriate, useful, or effective.” Jonas Salk -- Anatomy of Reality

*   *   *

“You want insanity? You want an indictment against that culture? That culture says it is not economically expedient at this time to clean up the air, the water, and preserve the soils... YOU JACK-OFF BASTARDS!!" Wulf Zendik -- Die Clapton rap, 1986

*   *   *

Sky’s being hacked to death, bringing The Horror to our kids and 19% of the 2014 GDP was advertising … jack-off bastards jacking off.

*   *   *

“Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied”  Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows  1988

*   *   *

“‘From 1957 onward, there is no doubt that Humble Oil, which is now Exxon, was clearly on notice’ about rising CO2 in the atmosphere and the prospect that it was likely to cause global warming…” — Environmental Law Center’s Director Carroll Muffett -- NYT John Schwartz

*   *   *

Looking at the multitude of human bodies to feast upon, the bacterium asked a friend, “What the hell happened here?”

"They tried to do natural selection with monetary code."

*   *   *

Dreaded Acknowledgement of Thee, thy Servile Serfs of the Status Quo … I speak of and to, you, the ever-dismembering members of Biz, Gov’t, Media and Academia, Left, Right, & Upside Down … Philosophic dinosaurs slinging catastrophic culture code from out the malignancy of your myriad conceits.

Verily, you’ve succeeded … converting sky and ocean into omnipotent terrorists, arming them with weapons of mass extinction, bringing “premature and perverted death” to nearly all that we call life save a few hardy species of bacteria.

To all ye trailer-parked and ivy-leagued superheroes of self-deception forever incanting a fecality of mind as unwitting devotees of Jonestown, I write of your selection infection...

*   *   *

*   *   *

“The very constitution of the human mind makes us massively inconsistent.” Robert Kurzban -- why everyone (else) is a hypocrite

*   *   *

“As we have seen, great earthquakes, forest fires and mass extinctions are all merely the expected large fluctuations that arise universally in nonequilibrium systems. To avoid them, one would have to alter the laws of nature.” Physicist Mark Buchanan – Ubiquity – 2000

*   *   *

Large Fluctuations Arise Universally

merely the expected

*   *   *

"No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate, perhaps. A nation has no honor; it has no word to keep. ...

Don’t you know that if you choose one hundred of the most intelligent people in the world and get them all together, they are a stupid mob? Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence of an alligator. Haven’t you noticed that at a dinner party the more people you invite the more stupid the conversation?

In a crowd, the qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the dominant characteristics of the whole crowd. Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts, the basic primitive caveman suggestibility, the suspicions and vicious traits of the savage. The result is that when you get a nation of many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a crocodile or a wolf. Its statesmen cannot have a higher morality than the animal like mass morality of the nation, although individual statesmen of the democratic states may attempt to behave a little better." Carl Jung -- 1938

*   *   *

"My recommended approach would be this: you can bet everything will come to an end. It's going to be ugly and it's going to be a mess, and it's going to be something that somebody did in the name of God, okay? Whether it's us saying that God's on our side because we're tremendous Christians and we're protecting our religion and our flag, or whether it's a Muslim saying that the infidels must die or whether it's a communist saying that there is no God and we're doing this for the people.

The point is that they're going to do it in the name of something greater than themselves but you can bet your ass they're going to do it. There's no way around it. That is, I'm sure mathematics would bear me out on that. The statistics are staggering. That is what is going to happen. So the question is, what do you do with your spare time until you're a cinder? And the answer is, you do whatever you can that makes your particular life more beautiful and you get involved in art. 'Cause that's what makes things beautiful." Frank Zappa 1984

*   *   *

"I've seen the future, brother: It is murder.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions

Won't be nothing

Nothing you can measure anymore." Leonard Cohen – The Future 1992

*   *   *

“Under pressure, any group of us can be as brutal as any of those we deplore: genocide by tribal animals is as natural as breathing...” James Lovelock

*   *   *

“Blood on the leaves and blood at the root”  Billie Holiday -- Strange Fruit

*   *   *

“Evolution is quite clear, it’s fitness and not truth that gives you the points you need to win in the evolutionary game.”  Donald Hoffman

*   *   *

Fitness App: Bold Action

"In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies, on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains." – Thucydides -- 460–395 BCE

*   *   *

Fitness App: Deception

“Deception is a very deep feature of life. It occurs at all levels—from gene to cell to individual to group—and it seems, by any and all means, necessary.” 

“When I say that deception occurs at all levels of life, I mean that viruses practice it, as do bacteria, plants, insects, and a wide range of other animals. It is everywhere. Even within our genomes, deception flourishes as selfish genetic elements use deceptive molecular techniques to over-reproduce at the expense of other genes. Deception infects all the fundamental relationships in life: parasite and host, predator and prey, plant and animal, male and female, neighbor and neighbor, parent and offspring, and even the relationship of an organism to itself.” Robert Trivers -- The Folly of Fools -- 2011

*   *   *

“Endurance is more important than truth.” Charles Bukowski -- Barfly

*   *   *

"Perception is not about seeing truth; it's about having kids."  Donald Hoffman

*   *   * *   *   * *   *   *

Witched Up Switch Up …

Tried to think outside the mass grave that one time.

"Before you connect the dots, you gotta collect the dots.”  Homicide Detective

*   *   *

“We need scarcely add that the contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual.” Sir Arthur Eddington

 *   *   * 

*   *   *

Big Pic Dots re Complexity, Code & Governance

The New Natural Selection Tests

Natural selection tests have become more complex for many species. Genetic codes remain on the exam; human culture codes have been added. For example, elephant and dolphin survival are no longer merely a function of their biological genomes, but also a function of the human cultural genome, that is, of moral, legal, monetary and other coding structures.

 

Dominant Dot

I contend that the likely dominant phenomenon of our era is: Exponentially Accelerating Complexity, which includes, and to a significant degree, is driven by exponentially accruing knowledge.

 

Add roughly 5.5 billion humans in the last 100 years, many who wield exponentially more powerful technology.

These wholly novel phenomena extend our species’ reach in-and-across geo eco bio cultural & tech networks, and across time.

Human reach is unprecedented; it continues to expand.

 

Our vast gains in number and power have generated trillions of new relationships, i.e., unprecedented environs.

 

New Environs; One Measure

“There were 5 exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003; now that same amount is created every two days.” Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO

~~~~~

 

Switch Up

Code Is: Relationship Infrastructure

“The most fundamental phenomenon of the universe is relationship.” -- Jonas Salk – Anatomy of Reality

“The story of human intelligence starts with a universe that is capable of encoding information.” -- Ray Kurzweil – How To Create A Mind

 

Code is fundamental, physics efficacious, relationship infrastructure in bio, cultural & tech networks: genetic, language, math, moral, religious, legal, monetary, etiquette, software, etc.

 

Complexity increases -- additions of both novelty and quantity to a network -- generate myriad new relationships and emergent properties … e.g., the sky becomes increasingly lethal.

 

The new relationships weaken the efficacy of code attuned to older variations of network relationships, variations that were often much less complex.

Human cultural coding structures, especially monetary and legal codes (religious too), have not kept pace with reality, with the countless new complex relationships they attempt to code for; e.g. the unprecedented relationships – historically and evolutionarily – we now have with the sky and ocean.

The increasing disparity between our archaic culture codes and our newly complex environs renders our attempts at governance fatally inept. Like an overwhelmed immune system, there are too many ignored relationships; too many wholly new and newly complex relationships that yield far too much information for governments to process with sufficient reach, speed, accuracy and power.

Dis-ease accrues … across the networks.

Our system of governance, our system’s relationship infrastructure, its code, doesn’t match our strange, alien, ever-complexifying environs.

 

Verily, if your culture's relationships with the sky and ocean are deadly, your cultural genome sucks.

 

Our environs-inadequate cultural genome is somewhat analogous to dropping 5000 penguins on a summer dune in the Sahara. Mismatch. Code isn't gonna work; ain’t gonna be selected.

 

Passing natural selection tests …

is primarily a function of processing complex relationship information with sufficient reach, speed, accuracy and power. 

 

Exponentially accelerating complexity has crushed the efficacy of world culture’s dominant information processing mechanism for the computation of relationship-value information: humans using monetary code.

 

Complexity has rendered that information processing mechanism, that thousands-of-years-old culture app, ineffective. The information processing of humans using monetary code is far too weak, slow and inaccurate, far too limited in reach for interface with these levels of complexity.

Silly; Stupid; Suicidal; Understandable.

 

Monetary code, and increasing portions of legal code are dysfunctional -- vitiated, corrupted, debased, diminished, weakened by exponentially accelerating complexity.

“The rule of thumb is that the complexity of the organism has to match the complexity of the environment at all scales in order to increase the likelihood of survival.”  Physicist, complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam -- Making Things Work

The complexity of our cultural genome does not match the complexity of our environs, and hence we can't generate selectable relationship hierarchies across the networks and across time.

 

In addition, we have a portion of terminally myopic billionaires who refuse to acknowledge our new relationships with the sky and ocean. These particular billionaires order (select) vast numbers of relationships for culture’s internal structure, and for its manner of interface with geo eco bio & tech networks. To expand and retain their power and wealth they manipulate culture, in part, via political machinations, not only in government, but also by way of media. They block the transition to new culture code.

Conscious or not, intentional or not, they are bio-terrorists, accelerating the conversion of sky and ocean into lethal gas chambers of commerce.

They need to be arrested, taken off the street for public safety.

 

In our brave new environs, these “Money Monarchs” – now archetypal aliens of natural selection -- wield power from a thousands-of-years-old culture code that isn’t working, and ain’t gonna work. They are philosophic fossils cutting on our children’s throats every day … living examples of just how lethally wrong, how non-selectable our current culture code is with respect to long-term survival.

Postscript:

“The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance  . . . And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.” Walter Lippman – Public Opinion 1922

“Man’s population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity.” Douglas Engelbart  -- Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework 1962

With regard to the dominant culture code we deploy to pass natural selection tests, that is, to process complex relationship information with sufficient reach, speed, accuracy and power:

Software code is monetary code as alphabet code was to pictograph code.

*   *   *

*   *   *

*   *   *

"But the nature of social change never allows us the clean slate that makes sweeping statements for radical change attractive." Donald Hoffman

That one time … is over, gone. Look-see, comes the reckoning …

And my righteous, blaming, rage-engage manner of interface?

More selected and coded self-camo ammo, hubriciously summoned by another suburban chosen one … angry with a rock for being a rock.

Silly; Stupid; Understandable.

Collapse is part of what species and systems periodically d0

Genocide is an app

Dinner a fresh kill

Half the day is dark

More than half the species parasitic

Large fluctuations arise universally

Self-organized criticality

Emergent emergencies

Be all like

All the days

And all the nights

Big rocks fly the sky

Merely the expected

When-not-if physics

Sometimes big rocks find a home … and look-see, there’s a new moon.

*   *   *

“And I’m bleeding, and I’m bleeding, and I’m bleeding

Right before the lord

All the words are gonna bleed from me

And I will think no more”  -- Seven Nation Army