“Three billion years ago, life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them.
Evolution was a communal affair.
But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share.
Big Bad Wolf. (2023, September 15). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bad_Wolf
The plan for October was to do a lot of reading, thinking, and writing. That’s didn’t quite work out. The net result was a bunch of fragments that I’m now trying to build out and publish. This is the second this week. My all-time publishing record:-)
Before we delve into the details of highly speculative doom scenarios, here’s a young adult sf novel about AI and cat videos that will help restore your faith in machine intelligence:-) Catfishing on the Catnet.
Blood Music
Joe Biden’s administration has just announced regulations for Generative Artificial Intelligence. There’s a concern that the widespread use of Large Language Models heralds a new era where general artificial intelligence becomes an “existential threat to humanity.”
Scary artificial intelligence
For this to be true, you would need 1) advanced ‘artificial intelligence,’ whatever that is exactly, but presumably machine intelligence smarter than we are. Also, there would need to be 2) a programmed motivation, i.e., a goal and, more specifically, a goal like achieving total global domination, and 3) agency…some equivalent of fingers and toes.
The fears typically center around number 2) above. Specifically, the fear is AI motivation gone off the rails in a particular process called instrumental convergence.
The classic example is this paper clip maximizer thought experiment (Nick Bostrom, 2003): a system charged with making paper clips ends up converting all matter on earth into paper clips…not because it had anything against the biosphere but because converting it was instrumental to the goal of paper clips.
Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) provides a parallel example. Here, a rouge researcher injects a simple biocomputer into his bloodstream to smuggle it out of the lab rather than destroy it, and ultimately, he becomes an infectious hive mind. The short story version ended with the biosphere converted into a superorganism (see the jacket cover below.) The novel had a happier ending with all of us people re-instantiated as individuals but with a variety of defects fixed. Thanks AI!
The nanotechnology version of this is called ‘grey goo’…the term from K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 nanotech rah-rah book, Engines of Creation. Here, everything gets converted into nano substrate…grey goo…thanks to an insufficiently regulated process.
I like that term the best for instrumental convergence bad juju. (I’ve argued elsewhere that the goal of a lot of political dinformation is to turn all facts into noise–the informational equivalent of ‘grey goo.’
Side note: there’s a parallel speculative thread to all this I find scarier. I’ll add an addendum about that below.
But first, a more immediate type of runaway instrumentality: American hyper-capitalism.
Finance is Coming for Your Grandmother
Again, science fiction leads the way:-). In an essay in BuzzFeed, author Ted Chaing lays it out very concisely. I’m going to quote him at some length. Emphasis mine.
Speaking to Maureen Dowd for a Vanity Fair article published in April, Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. It seems harmless enough, but as the AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields…
This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.
Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.
Chiang’s insight is accurate, and the term grey goo comes in handy: capitalism, or more specifically finance, is well on its way towards reducing most enterprises to a devalorized economic grey goo. People and their little concerns become instrumental to the grand task of consolidating wealth.
image from Adbusters – now and their targeted future
Within capitalism, private equity and investment banking firms are the most voracious in chewing value into grey goo. They operate by purchasing an enterprise and then extracting value for themselves by reducing its value to employees, clients, customers, and often the environment.
A typical process is the one that I’ve seen from the inside.
First, secure debt to purchase a business (often in the form of creating a loan from yourself to yourself); second, transfer the debt to the business; third, pay yourself interest and hefty consulting fees for managing the process; and fourth, discard the desiccated husk. Sears is the poster child for this.
A 20,000-foot view: if you’ve made a billion from a declining business, that money must have been extracted at the cost of something else. As surprising as the thought may be in the current climate, money has to come from somewhere.
What do I find scary? The merger of AI and hyper-capitalism!
In a recent episode of This Week In Google (my sole remaining tech podcast), Leo Laporte and crew report on what they term ‘heartlessness as a service.’
Their source is ProPublica:
On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.
“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?
“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
I consider hyper-capitalism to be a machine that tends, in an interative process, ejects humans that let ethics get in the way of profits in favor of humans with fewer scruples–ultimately leaving only the machine.
AI will sort through options to optimize whatever it’s told to optimize.
The combined result in a particularly vicious combination: a mindless instrumentality that will chew through the economy remorselessly, generating grey goo from actual human value. (Kinda like Elon Musk’s brain.)
Addendum: good and bad singularities
Okay, Elon’s not scary enough:-)?
Warning: I’m going to nerd out a bit. Why? Because I can’t help myself.
The grandmother of all this ‘generative ai’ talk is The Singularity, defined as the point machine intelligence uplifts to sentience–but with expanded networked intelligence that dwarfs our own ‘as humans are compared to flatworms’ as the expression goes.
Vinge is the Sf author who coined the term Singularity. John von Neumann discussed the event in the ’50s, but Vinge’s 1983 short story ‘True Names’ put the term into use.
The discussion immediately jumped track since none of the panelists could imagine that The Singularity wouldn’t happen. So, they started talking about possible positive or negative singularities and the range between them.
Their benchmark for a bad singularity?
Two opposing hyper-paranoid military computers in China and the US ‘uplifting’ each other to sentience during a disastrous global war that lasts only a couple of hours.
TLDR: This is Part 3 in the Emotional Truth / Political Lies series: a loss of meaning can be more deadly than the loss of income when jobs go away for White working-class males. Their immiseration ripples out to affect us all.
(But first, friends links to a couple of new things on Medium: Christianity from the Heart – Reverend Al makes a rare appearance. Kevin Phillips – RIP – a history of today’s out-of-control Them-ing.)
Mervin Jules – Dispossessed [c.1938] – Smithsonian American Art Museum
Our plot so far:
We have a baked-in tendency to split the world into Us and Them. That’s being exploited to pit us against each other. We need to focus on the few Thems behind the Them-ing. In short, we need a Smaller Them.
My thesis: the economic immiseration of a broad section of the American middle and working classes has unmoored them. Identity is up for grabs. The economic crisis creates a crisis of meaning and identity.
Political lies: significant resources are being spent to make sure widespread discontent doesn’t feed back into effective political action.
It’s expensive to make Americans this stupid, but the payoff has been rich.
Part 1 introduced the thesis and looked at who is to blame for our current laws and regulations.
Emotional truth: the feeling that government policy ignores everyday people is accurate.
…analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, whileaverage citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. –Testing Theories of` American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens , Gilens and Page (2014)
Part 2 reviewed Those That Work and Those That Don’t – an early Petri dish example of identity destabilization through job loss.
The author’s finding: identity resets outside economic factors, substituting intangibles such as ‘moral superiority.’
Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive. – Anne Case and Angus Deaton from Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism 2020
Part 3 – Deaths of Despair
The next analytic touchstone after ‘Those That Work’ is the research of Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This takes us from the Petri dish of ‘Golden Valley’ out to the wider impact of job loss. In this section, the pattern of good ‘working class’ jobs disappearing is viewed demographically rather than through a specific case history.
The research
In 2015, life expectancy in the wealthiest country in the world fell for the first time in decades. Then came the nearly unfathomable: Life expectancy in the US fell again in 2016 — and for a third time in a row in 2017. It is hard to communicate just how disquieting that trend is. – Roge Karma, Vox, 4/15/2020
Half a million people are dead who should not be dead. – Case & Deaton 2015
Deaths: Bold Red = US White, Bold Blue = US Hispanic. Deaton & Case.
In 2015 (in a study that they initially had trouble even getting published!) Case & Deaton announced the discovery of what has come to be termed ‘deaths of despair’ among non-college-educated middle-aged Whites…men in particular and women to a lesser extent.
They noticed a spike in death rate first in comparison to other US ethnicities and then in contrast to similar populations in other countries. Digging into the statistics, these additional deaths were a result of suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdose coupled with poor access to healthcare. Deaths of despair.
Groups less dependent on their job for a sense of identity (primarily because of their historical exclusion from ‘good jobs’ and, hence, centering meaning elsewhere, e.g., Latinos and women) did not exhibit the same demographic trends.
Let’s put the numbers in perspective.
Chart by me. Deaths of despair extrapolated to 2019 from Case & Deaton’s 2015 numbers using their methodology. Stopped at 2020 when COVID made that too complex.
What’s going on?
Repeating:
Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive. – Anne Case and Angus Deaton from Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism 2020
If we apply Sherman’s discoveries across this entire demographic, identity was set adrift— decentered —for a broad demographic with dire consequences both for those individuals and for society.
Individuals scrambled to find a new way to play a leading role in their own stories. As Sherman points out, being ‘moral’…being a ‘good guy’…became core.
Many of those who failed the challenge died. Between successful and dead lay degrees of emotional distress, typically a chronic low-grade sense of panic among those on the edge.
Into the breach came a huge billionaire-funded industry aimed at offering wedge ideologies as identity and toxic religion as a comfort.
A core strategic win was the political capture of the Southern Baptist Church during the ‘Conservative Resurgence‘, starting in the late 70s and consolidating gains through the subsequent 15 years and again now in a second cycle. The SBC’s ‘liberals’ were certainly not far left of center, but they and even center-right moderates were purged.
The impact of this can’t be underestimated. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination even after close to 2000 churches broke away to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (the Jimmy Carter Baptists.) Huge monetary and organizational resources were now available. The SBC has six sizeable seminaries training thousands yearly and an annual budget of nearly $200M–all contributed by people in local churches.
Worse, in my opinion, those local churches, critical envelopes of support in the face of death, illness, trials and tribulations, and pillars of identity to many, now became organizing cells in the culture wars.
Add to this Koch-brothers-type think tanks, right-wing talk radio, and Fox News as the Ministry of Truth, and you have the enormous resources devoted to keeping the pot boiling.
Observing people seeming to vote against their self-interest, I hear friends asking how people can be so stupid. If we could calculate a ‘cost per unit of stupid,’ I think we’d find it’s hugely expensive to make people this ‘stupid.’ Obviously, it’s worth the investment to those footing the bill.
Two points:
First, if you combine the decentering of working-class identity and the way that it has been exploited, the result is that ideology has become identity. This is key to understanding what’s going on and looking for strategies to fix it.
An ideology is a narrow and brittle basis for identity. Under these conditions, a challenge to particular ideas is an existential threat!
Much of what seems crazy has to be understood in that light. It’s not at all a matter of ideas and evidence. The challenge is to the person’s sense of self, not some contingent idea that can be easily revised or corrected.
Another way to look at it: if people are acting against their economic interests, there must be something they see as more important.
I believe that dividing the world up into Us and Them is baked in by our evolutionary history. (Evidence on request.) That makes it a leverage point easily exploited.
Starting politics with a common rallying point…say, a commitment to decent jobs, good schools, health care that wasn’t a huge source of misery and personal bankruptcy, and a clean environment…could cut across the most common Us vs Them divides.
It would also mean that the corporate engines of consolidation and profit at any cost and the 1%’s domination of American politics would be imperiled. So, something divisive has to be substituted.
Coming in future installments. Where do we go from here? Republicans and Democrats – heartless exploitation vs. gutless weasels. And more.
For a fascinating interview on the Christians vs. Jesus thing and how ideology becomes identity, listen to this podcast with Russell Moore, ex-head of the SBC’s policy arm and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, in this episode of Talkin’ Religion and Politics without Killin’ Each Other.
Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. – Michael Pollen
Despite the American cult of individualism, I have never believed our identity was our idiosyncrasies and, despite my neophile tendencies, I have never believed that something was of value simply because it was new.
On the other hand, I don’t believe something is of value simply because it’s old—unless it’s really really old. That may be a different story.
Here follows a variant on Michael Pollen’s ‘eat what your great-grandmother ate’ test expressed not in a few generations but in tens or hundreds of millennia.
You are reading part of an intellectual wander aimed at building a framework for understanding the continuity between everyday experiences of awe and wonder and the type of ‘mystical’ experiences that are considered outside regular human experience (in my view mistakenly). And for considering the utility of such experiences.
My starting assumption is that this framework needs to address ego, instinct, and what are often termed nonordinary states. I have some theories about each of those. They will hopefully be modified in dialog with you and with the writing process itself.
Many of you who know me know of my love of grilling oysters and, in particular grilling oysters on the beach. It feels deeply right to me.
Elaine Morgan. 1998. From Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Morgan
Explaining my theory about why requires a digression.
In an undergraduate course in Feminist Literature, I read Elaine Morgan‘s, The Descent of Woman. This was 50 years ago. I have no clue at this point what Shulamith Firestone wrote about. Time has fuzzed that out. Many of Morgan’s points, however, remain vivid.
Her central argument is that we share a few key odd body traits not with our close cousins, the chimps, but with aquatic mammals. Examples include women’s subcutaneous fat and both genders’ minimal body hair…traits that overlap with dolphins, for example, but not most terrestrial mammals. She believes this argues for some interregnum of seashore or riparian evolution. Women, specifically, were at the leading edge of evolution during this period. (Men’s layer of fat is half the thickness of women’s, and men are typically furrier.)
One reason she stayed fresh in my mind was that ‘real’ anthropologists would remind me of her in occasional snide footnotes or asides. You could almost see the eye rolls. Not that they actually disputed her claims. That would be beneath them. So, irritating certain pros, and ideas I liked: two points in her favor:-).
Jump forward to 2015 or so. Wendy, Griffin, and I are at a lecture on human evolution at the California Academy of Science. It’s being given by Zeresenay Alemseged, Curator and Irvine Chair of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences and discoverer of Selam, a remarkably complete Australopithecus fossil skeleton that predates Leakey’s famous Lucy by 120,000 years.
Alemseged is discussing one of the big issues in human evolution: what provided enough calories to allow the step up in brain size between Australopithecus and Homo species. Brains burn a lot of energy. Other primate’s diets could not support a brain of our size. And evolution does not support the sort of look-forward activity that would require some Australopithecus species to decide, “Hey, we need bigger brains, let’s go look for different food.” The calories have to be there already to allow a boot-up mutation to work.
His answer is based on his recent work in what was at one time the coast of South Africa. Shellfish! They’re easy to gather in quantity, can be eaten cooked or raw, and protein is calorie-rich.
Creative Commons license via Wikimedia. Australopithecus species had stone tools. Homo hablis used fire.
Soooo, oysters on the beach, baby! Step aside ‘man the hunter’. Enter proto-people with digging sticks on the shoreline. Elaine Morgan, fuck yeah:-).
(To set a bit of context. Both fire and stone tools predate the appearance of homo sapiens. An ancestor some 2.5M years ago used stone tools and one used fire 1M years ago give or take. All these dates keep getting pushed back. Homo sapiens likely clocks in at a mere .25M years to date.
Connecting it all up, there was an ancestor animal with a brain roughly 2/3rds the size of ours walking erect, using stone tools, cooking on a fire, and consuming shellfish. Likely there were adolescent hominids poking the fire with a stick. Shellfish have remained a high-quality staple for many cultures. The unceded Muwekma Ohlone land in nearby Emeryville contains a shell mound with the remains of millions of shellfish meals consumed over a recent two and half thousand years. )
Instinct?
Okay, evidence-wise, the oyster thing is a bit squishy. My feeling deeply grounded while cooking oysters at the beach…a feeling of ‘being all of one piece’… doesn’t exactly make it at the top of the hard evidence chart. And I’m not even sure how to articulate this within a theory of what’s commonly called instinct.
Let’s try.
I’m starting with a metaphor. In my defense, thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn and George Lakoff have argued that metaphors, despite getting trashed by the likes of Newton and Bacon, can play a central role at the core of the clusters of scientific thinking and evidence that Kuhn termed paradigms. Math and hypothesis testing are key in the mix as well, of course, but both verbal and visual metaphors are important ‘tools to think with’.
My metaphor will be the mouth of a bay.
My friend Martin has warned me that the mouth of bays are particularly dangerous places to boat. You have currents, tides, waves, occasional whirlpools, and abrupt shifts in winds caused by the temperature differential between the waters and the shore. The mouth of Tomales Bay and Drake’s Estero are both good examples. Sometimes they’re relatively placid, and sometimes they’ll kick your ass. Every once in a while, they kill somebody.
You can paddle in a specific direction with knowledge, good equipment, and determination, but sometimes it is much more difficult than others, and if you take your eye off your destination, you can suddenly find yourself somewhere you did not intend to go.
Our typical view of instinct is of something like salmon swimming upstream– a compulsion or drive–which I think limits what we consider when we talk about its impact in humans.
The hormonal/neurotransmitter blend in our internal sea marks the intersection of our bodies and the environment and adds the push of currents and tides to our behavior. We transverse them occasionally wondering how we ended up somewhere.
We can consciously tweak our blood chemistry by, for example, blocking adenosine receptors with caffeine or seeking dopamine hits with a game on our phone. But mostly all this is mostly happening below the surface. Our tide and currents are at play against underwater surfaces that are not typically visible in an easy-to-interpret way. This interacts with built-in and learned schema that helps pattern what might be called raw perception into what we perceive…all that outside consciousness as well.
Something between me, oysters, cooking, and the beach is tweaking how I feel. A hormonal and neural balance is emerging in my inner sea. I contend that this is on a continuum with whatever else human instinct might be.
Side note: other reasons I like the water metaphor are, first, water flows downhill following a natural ‘instinctual’ gradient, and, second, water has depth. Things can be closer or further from consciousness.
More on instinct: positive and negative examples
In order to firm up and challenge this formulation, let’s look at a few more examples. Next post we’ll complicate things further by adding in Jung’s concepts of imago and archetype. Then try and tie it up into a tentative theory of instinct.
Thinking fast and slow
We should at least mention Daniel Kahneman’s fast thinking vs slow thinking. Kahneman describes fast thinking as ‘instinctual and emotive’. That would include knee-jerk responses, but he includes pretty much anything that happens below the surface: perceptual and cognitive biases, the automatic placement of objects in space, and even skills that have achieved automaticity.
Certainly, danger reactions that have to be faster than conscious ‘slow thinking’ can achieve should be termed instinct.
Instinct with a positive impact
Despite a shocking lack of research on grilling oysters, there’s a significant body of evidence for a similar activity: getting out into a natural environment.
As an outdoor nerd, I’ve been collecting citations. Here are just a few from my stash that focus on measurable metrics.
… experiments conducted by Japan’s Chiba University found that forest bathing lowered heart rate and blood pressure and brought down levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that can wreak havoc on every system when large amounts circulate through the body. … These findings underscore that spending time in the forest is a medical intervention as well as an aesthetic and spiritual one, something scientists have long observed but haven’t been able to quantify.
There was an increase in mortality related to cardiovascular and lower-respiratory-tract illness in counties infested with the emerald ash borer. The magnitude of this effect was greater as infestation progressed and in counties with above-average median household income. Across the 15 states in the study area, the borer was associated with an additional 6113 deaths related to illness of the lower respiratory system, and 15,080 cardiovascular-related deaths. [In other words, when the trees went away, health suffered.]
Our results reveal a significant positive association between the coverage of forest and amygdala integrity. We conclude that forests may have salutogenic effects on the integrity of the amygdala.
Brother Francis and Brother Sun, Giovanni Costa, 1878 – if there’s a patron saint of getting outdoors, it would be Francis:-)
Instinct with a negative impact
Regular readers know that I consider our Us vs. Them reaction to be a species of fast thinking with malign impact. (Links here, here, and here; it’s a long story.) Here are a few things more contained.
Newly published research finds fear of the infectious disease, which was widely in the news in the month before the election, increased voters’ intention to vote Republican. This effect was primarily found in red states, which means the outbreak effectively turned them a deeper shade of red.
“Disease outbreaks may influence voter behavior in two psychologically distinct ways: increased inclination to vote for politically conservative candidates, and increased inclination to conform to popular opinion,” writes a research team led by University of British Columbia psychologist Alec Beall.
For those working on a better class of conspiracy theories, note the Ebola panic faded shortly after the election.
A new experimental study found that heightened anxiety makes people more prone to believe in various claims they are exposed to and to share them on social media. This was especially true for Republicans and did not depend on the accuracy or truthfulness of the claim. The study was published in New Media & Society.
Next up
In part #004, I intend to complicate things considerably.
We will explore a Jungian view of ‘instinct’. Here we find an unconscious realm populated by ‘imago’ and archetypes and inhabited by dark gods and talking animals. A realm from whence not just impulse but full-blown narratives arrive. A realm of entities that constantly tweak our felt gradients and that can override our everyday self quite dramatically—but that might also contain an instinct for wholeness and healing.
The driving question that Jung successfully answers: what form did instinct take as hardwired behavior evolved in beings such as ourselves that need room for the huge role of learning and culture?
This is also the counterweight to a theme of mine: the need for a Bigger Us. We have a baked-in tendency to split the world into Us and Them. That’s being exploited to pit us against each other. We need to focus on the few Thems behind the Them-ing. In short, we need a Smaller Them.
Those that Work and Those That Don’t (found below.)
Deaths of Despair (this and below are assumed sections and will follow)
Betrayal
Exploitation
A Smaller Them
Wrap Up
My thesis is that the economic immiseration of a broad section of the American middle and working classes has unmoored them. Identity is up for grabs and significant resources are being spent to make sure their discontent doesn’t feed back into effective political change. It’s expensive to make Americans this stupid, but the payoff has been rich.
Here follows a look at research that I think provides a clear analysis of what happens when the good working class jobs that underpin a community disappear. This was logging but think factory closing, consolidation of farming into corporate hands, or any number of community-level economic disasters.
1) Those That Work and Those That Don’t
My first touchstone is Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t by Jennifer Sherman. Before the widespread loss of good jobs in much of the US, an abrupt economic collapse in an isolated logging town provides us with a sort of petri-dish case history of the pattern that will repeat widely over the next 30 years.
Golden Valley, a once-bustling logging and mill town, is a community on the decline, characterized by unemployment, job instability, and poverty. Its denizens are caught in a struggle to define themselves as successful despite their economic and labor market failures.
Morality is one of the few remaining axes upon which to base this hierarchy. When jobs, incomes, and other sources of identity are stripped away, it is still possible to find ways to define themselves and their entire community as morally upstanding.
–Jennifer Sherman from Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t, 2009
In 1994, the Spotted Owl was listed as an endangered species. As a result, logging in some parts of Northern California was cut by 80%. Forest Service and logging jobs disappeared, and the mills closed one by one.
Sherman’s core finding: when the economic underpinning of everyday life disappears, morality emerges as the critical component of self-definition and social standing. Being ‘moral’ provides dignity, purpose, and a place in the social hierarchy. Working … standing against the tide … is an indicator of moral worth.
Morality. A narrative emerges: We’re good people. We’ve done nothing wrong. Good people fight the good fight for a righteous way of life based on (sometimes imaginary) old-time values. Honesty. Godliness. Self-Sufficiency: being a breadwinner (or, at a minimum, staying off welfare) becomes a significant component of social standing and personal dignity. Self-reliance through hunting and fishing also grants status and meaning. Drug use is a crutch…a sign of moral failing.
The corollary: economic failure is a personal moral failure. Even though the economy has been shot out from under the whole community, it is not merely unfortunate. To succumb by, say, going on welfare is weak and wrong. 80% of the jobs are gone, but you can be a failure because you don’t have a job.
I’d like to note that this narrative is highly useable to our hypothetical controlling economic elite.
Supporting this definition of worth and identity doesn’t come with a cost in, say, higher taxes.
Keeping the focus on the uncoordinated individuals or families, the least effective political actors, as the sole agents of own their success or failure short circuits effective action.
Related, channeling the emotion caused by the suffering into Us vs Them both within the community (Hillbilly Elegy) and toward the exogenous actors that shut down jobs keeps the situation manageable. Keeping the focus on the Them rather than strengthening and organizing the Us is very useful politically. (More on that in subsequent sections.)
(There’s not a lot of room for nuance in this quick summary I’m trying to provide. For a deeper look, I recommend Sherman’s book as a very worthwhile read.)
Next up – maybe: a dive into awe and the outdoors. What is it about showing up in a natural environment with a human nervous system that has a positive impact? (Or, at least, a positive impact on the human:-) – me, part #001
I guess the key word in that was ‘maybe’:-)
There are three interconnected concepts that frame up the story I want to tell. In rough terms, they are ego, instinct, and awe. All feel connected to me as ideas circling around something that might be called access to a bigger self. But, also to potential groundings of identity.
(This is not to be confused with the Bigger Us that connects outward to what ML King calls a ‘blessed community.’)
As per usual, I’m having trouble unbraiding and crisping up my three framing concepts–a great case in point of why it takes me forever to get something written. The issue: crisping up any of these, impacts my understanding and formulation of the others, which in turn, feeds back and alters the starting point. Rinse and repeat. Until I throw in the towel and hit publish.
Well, I’m going to throw in the towel right off the bat. Brother Skip once told me he was convinced all the bolts were there…but that they were only on hand tight. I like that. I’ve vowed to use the blog to write more casually and let the ideas mature as we go. Hopefully, I’ll get the bolts on hand tight. Lord knows how many more passes it will take from there.
We’ll start with Ego.
A good enough theory of ego
Starting with ego means we start with the Freuds, Sigmund then Anna. Ego is pretty much defined by its defenses which are mostly a response to unavoidable childhood sexual trauma. An example of an ego defense is projection, i.e., discomfort in one’s unacknowledged dark traits is projected out as dislike or irritation with someone else who seems to exhibit those traits. The unconscious, of course, is where all the scary stuff lives.
Jung’s unconscious can be much less fraught than Freud’s. It’s the repository of the excluded, the inferior, and the undeveloped– things you are bad at, ashamed of, etc., and not just trauma. Also, sex isn’t the main driver, and trauma isn’t a given.
Jung adds a second big component. The ego creates directable energy and attention by walling off the ebb and flow of unconscious reactions, which can unfocus and distract us. (Look, squirrels!)
Further, the paradigm of classical Jungian thought is that this ability not to be taken over by whatever stray impulse arises has been gained relatively recently, i.e., subsequent to us becoming anatomically homo sapiens. Humans accomplished this by developing a psychic structure that provides a barrier against the unconscious. The classic paradigm further states that the barrier mechanisms have become too rigid, and the task now is reconnecting with the unconscious.*1
Last, I think I should also throw in a concept that I identify with Buddhism: ego’s fear of annihilation: that white-knuckle fear that makes even a little ego loss or loss of control feel like death.
Okay, that was a long way around to a ‘good enough’ theory of ego.
In summary, we have a psychological structure that acts to include things in and exclude other things out (all the things are us, of course); that maintains barriers and defenses to make that happen; and that can too rigid to our detriment.
Expanded self
My thesis here is that awe and wonder are a small ‘pop’ that expands our acknowledged self. Something that was ‘outside’ egoland is now ‘inside.’ Further, this same mechanism leads into the mystic, as it were. Or rather, wonder is a bit of the mystic touching down in everyday life.
We can use Zen koans as an additional example. They pose a problem not solvable with everyday tools and are traditionally solved with a pop that signifies a change in the student, not the correct answer per se.
Even our well-known ability to solve problems by sleeping on them is relevant. The ego is relaxed to a bit player, more of us is brought to bear, something that was outside is now inside, and the self is just a tiny bit bigger.
Containers
It occurs to me now that we need another component if we talking about awe/wonder in the context of the wider sweep of ‘non-ordinary states’*2 and ego. As framed up by our ‘good enough theory of ego’, the core concept is sidestepping the walls ego built. But the ego has a purpose. We need to get past ego without obliterating it or freaking it the fuck out.
The protocol for psychedelic sessions beginning with Grof and Leary and continuing through contemporary John Hopkins mushroom sessions, is to emphasize set (mental state/expectations) and setting (the physical space and guide.)
That’s missing a piece I call ‘container.’ In the above, the container is the assumption that your guide is competent and benign. Container is the wider envelope. Sangha can be the container. Growing up in a culture that gives 15-year-olds monastic experience is a container. For me, movement in nature is itself a container, along with community and music.
Next up (maybe): a good enough theory of instinct.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share this.
Feedback
I had some interesting discussions as a result of the last post in this series…in particular with Paula, my running buddy on much of this whether she’s aware of that or not. Here are some resources as a result.
One more. Here’s a fascinating interview with Katherine May, author of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age.
footnotes
*1 – More: this classical Jungian story holds that ego development arose at the same time as the patriarchies and that the ego is experienced as masculine while the excluded is thus seen as feminine This part is a little sketchy in a Joseph Campbell ‘all heroes are male’ sort of way. Both Jung and Campbell use a pattern of myth called the ‘night sea hero’…Jung as a story of individual maturation, and Campbell as a story of cultural advancement. The use of gender here is highly debatable, but, on the other hand, it is easy to argue that patriarchal thinking is a pathology. Might be worth a future discussion.
*2 – ‘Non-ordinary’ has become the standard description of non-ego-centered mental states. I don’t like it. First, many of these states are more ordinary than assumed…they just don’t have much acknowledgment in our culture. Second, the objective here is to make them ordinary. Third, by most definitions of nonordinary states, there is a very common ordinary one caused by alcohol consumption–which might become less common if a better one came along.
In case you missed the announcement, I’m shifting my base of operation from Medium back to this blog. Rather than working for weeks and kicking out biggish posts there, I’m going to publish small chunks here. Occasionally, the chunks will coalesce into longer articles that will go back out to Medium.
Emotional Truth and Political Lies
What’s below is not part of the new approach in that it’s part of a longer article that’s already in progress. I’ve got the early part written and am only fine-tuning. The last parts are still a word salad. As things get firmed up, I’ll post them here.
This excerpt is a recap of a dozen or so articles written between 2016 and today. It’s also the counterweight to a repeating theme of mine: the need for a Bigger Us! We have a baked-in tendency to split the world into Us and Them. That’s being exploited to pit us against each other. We need to focus on the few Thems behind the Them-ing. In short, we need a Smaller Them.
Here is a draft of the first sections. Please kibitz. First, an overall outline.
Intro (draft included here)
Decentered Identity (draft included here)
Grounding (draft included here)
Emotion Truth / Political Lies Touchstones (this and subsequent sections to follow)
Setting the Stage
Those that Work and Those That Don’t
Deaths of Despair
Betrayal
Exploitation
A Smaller Them
Wrap Up
We Need a Smaller Them
Emotional Truth, Political Lies — Our Plot So Far
There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. –Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021)
The neoliberal project was focused on designing institutions — not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy. -Quinn Slobodian, Globalists (2018)
On November 6th, 2016, I was jolted out of my assumptions about our political landscape. My hijacked attention has been focused on the contradictions of our weird political culture ever since. I’ve been reading and thinking, hoping to internalize the contradictions and write my way out. I’m part way there. This is my interim report.
I have elsewhere presented the case that, to survive, we need a bigger Us. This presents the corollary: we need a smaller, more focused Them.
Decentered Identity
Something odd is going on. Folks on the lower end of the economic spectrum have been consistently acting against their own interests — or so it seems to me. Clearly, they don’t see it that way.
The destruction of working-class jobs unmoored working-class* identities (particularly among older White males) and left a big chunk of the population adrift generating death and pain, some serious craziness, and a lot of cold-hearted political exploitation.
(*The term working class is a bit misleading since the blast zone includes not just warehouse, factory, and service workers but farmers, shopkeepers, tradespeople of various types, and so on…mostly, but not exclusively, the folks working for hourly wages unbuffered by employer-supplied health insurance and retirement benefits. I’m not sure a working-class/middle-class distinction has meaning currently.)
We commonly believe that our identity is something deeply personal, idiosyncratic, and tucked away ‘inside,’ but that isn’t accurate. Identity is how we feel, true, and what we do and think. Critically, it’s also how people respond to us. It’s the stories we hear about who we are and the stories we can tell about who we are. And it’s a lot more generic than we like to believe.
Identity is often significantly based on jobs; catastrophic job losses over the last 60 year has resulted in the widespread destruction of working-class identity. A large segment of the population has been cut adrift, economically for sure, but also in terms of self-respect and a grounded identity — in short, exiled from key pillars of a meaningful life. These concerns have not been adequately addressed by either political party. Exploited, yes. Addressed, no.
The mix of engendered emotions — rage, outrage, despair, feelings of betrayal, ‘paranoia’ — is inherently dangerous to the established power structure and needs to be redirected to prevent effective action…something that might reverse the ongoing shift of income and resources from the lower 80% to the upper 20% of our population. It doesn’t matter whether this shift has been deliberate (oh, no, conspiracy) or enacted through mindless machinations of capitalism’s push toward monopoly and regulatory capture. The results remain.
To restate, folks are miserable as a result of their systematic immiseration. They have done nothing wrong, yet they’re steadily losing ground. That’s genuinely a pisser, and they’re pissed — if not in a spiral of despair — and looking for clues as to who might be responsible.
I’ve found some tools that I think are key to understanding how this is playing out and hopefully pointers to things that might help counter it. They follow in as compressed a form as I can manage. This summarizes a series I call Emotional Truth and Political Lies.
Before We Start, a Bit of Grounding
…analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. –Testing Theories of` American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens , Gilens and Page (2014)
Gilens and Page’s study analyzed the policy preferences of different groups and compared them to actual policy outcomes in 1779 policy cases.
They found that economic elites and business interest groups have a disproportionate amount of influence on policy decisions and argue that this influence can be attributed to a variety of factors: primarily the role of money in politics, the limited access that average citizens have to policymakers, and the influence of the media.
The tax code, regulatory environment, and funded services have been shaped primarily by the economic elite. If that aligns with the needs of everyday people, it’s a happy accident.
What’s the takeaway?
If you want to blame someone for how things are, it might make sense to target the folks actually controlling it! If the ‘Deep State’ is a group of actors controlling the system from the shadows, then big donors are the actual Deep State.
Gilens and Page — a tiny sliver of the US population makes the rules
2. It is important not to conflate the targeted semi-mythical ‘urban elites’ with actual economic elites.
Gilens and Page define the economic elite as the top 1%. The top 1% represents about 1.3 million households who roughly make more than $500,000 a year out of a total of 128 million households in the US. Of the 128M, there are 108M urban households (versus 20M rural) — which gives us 106.7M urban non-elites. (See chart above.) And that assumes that all economic elites should be subtracted from the urban column — clearly not the case.
3. A PS, it’s unlikely that many of the people making things worse for almost everyone else are conscious of that. They might make good neighbors. (There are, of course, a few evil geniuses.) As a result, an ‘are they good people?’ analysis is not up to the task.
Wikipedia: A peak experience is an altered state of consciousness characterized by euphoria, often achieved by self-actualizing individuals. The concept was originally developed by Abraham Maslow in 1964, who describes peak experiences as “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter.” There are several unique characteristics of a peak experience, but each element is perceived together in a holistic manner that creates the moment of reaching one’s full potential.
Peak Experience
Back in the early 70s, inspired by Maslow’s work, I was interviewing almost everyone I knew for a psychology research paper. (Psychology was my college major.) I’d read to my ‘subjects’ Maslow’s description of peak experiences, then ask a series of questions about whether they’d had such experiences, how they viewed them, and whether that had led to any noticeable behavioral changes.
Watch out. Folks will try and convert you at a very vulnerable time: right after you’ve been saved!
The whole thing was tremendous fun. I had fascinating conversations. Best, I became a go-to person for discussions of intense, weird, and/or transformative experiences.
One Monday, I received reports from two friends who both attended weekend events that triggered a ‘classic’ white light experience. Their descriptions were pretty much identical: white light, bliss, doubt being lifted, ‘heart strangely warmed.’
Both had then dedicated themselves to the event organizer’s practice and suggested rather urgently that I check it out!
The kicker: one had gone to an evangelical Christian rally…one of the early Jesus Freaks events… and the other an event with the Guru Maharaj Ji.
My conclusions after all this:
Watch out. Folks will try and convert you at a very vulnerable time: right after you’ve been saved!
Awe and ‘mystical’ experiences are human birthrights whether you view them as biochemistry or the grace of God or both.
But, also, based on reading Maslow and, more so, others like Evelyn Underhill, William James, and Aldous Huxley, there are mystic traditions that can provide some conceptual grounding when the going gets weird. Things often get a bit unhinged otherwise.
I Fart Therefore I Am
Quite honestly, I chose the psychology major because it required no courses that met before 1:15 pm. I was very interested in psychology, but this was the heyday of BF Skinner and various flavors of behaviorism, and that’s a lot of what they were teaching. Not all that engaging.
Luckily the Religion Department was teaching Jung (along with Buddhism and Taoism), and the Philosophy Department included a bit of Freud in the mix along with the opportunity to read folks like Husserl. Both, in other words, studied folks that were asking the type of questions I was asking.
The questions?
All were the result of a bit of an identity crisis. My questions started with ‘What is a meaningful grounding for action despite the risk of unintended negative consequences?’ and progressed to ‘How is meaning generated?’ and ‘What’s at the root of needing meaning, anyway?’
In other words, what is this ‘meaning’ of which you speak:-)?
Quite honestly the Western classic, ‘I think therefore I am’ seemed like a particularly lame place to start building an answer. My counter-example, probably cribbed from somewhere, is why not ‘I fart therefore I am.’ Or any one of a near-endless set of parallel formulations.
Very long story made very short, I ended up with, ‘There is awareness therefore I am’. Thinking has no special privilege. But where does this realization get us?
Awe and ‘mystical’ experiences are human birthrights…
First, if you take awareness instead of thinking as the irreducible root of further philosophy, the project shifts towards something Hindu philosophers and their offspring, followers of the Buddha, have been working on for a few millennia in both abstract and concrete terms. (Husserl ends up starting somewhere similar but lacks the millennia of subsequent development.) There are a whole lot of systems of thought to scaffold up from there…but again, where does that get us?
Second, that is where awe comes in. My answer is that there needs to be something in awareness itself, rather than in some configuration of ideas about awareness, that can make it a ground for meaning. Awe adds an emotional, some would say spiritual component.
This is a good stopping point. These blog posts are intended to be short. There’s a lot more that could be said, but I’ll save that for future articles. I do have a long discussion of what I believe are the underlying dynamics of awe and its bigger sisters on Medium.
Scientific third-party research was sparked by Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ and, in large part, debunked it–particularly as a hierarchy where some needs have to be met in order to enable others. Research on peaks, on the other hand, languished along with research into psychedelics. Both are now undergoing a reboot. A major influence in the study of awe is UC Berkeley’s Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center. (See The Science of Awe, 2018.)
Next up – maybe: a dive into awe and the outdoors. What is it about showing up in a natural environment with a human nervous system that has a positive impact? (Or, at least, a positive impact on the human:-)
To get longer articles every other month or so, Subscribe on Medium.
Short version: wife Wendy took an abrupt fall (the result of an unrecognized Lisfranc injury), and, between acting as a home health aide and dodging storms then making repairs, I spent 3 months with no time to write. Even with much healing and the end to a series of atmospheric rivers, time was tight. Now Wendy is highly mobile again, and it’s a glorious spring. Time to get active.
Pt Reyes Natl Seashore: after months of rain, even deeply rooted trees started blowing over
But hold on a minute.
The interruption gave me yet another opportunity to try and decide what I want to be when I grow up. I’m nearing the end of a series I call Emotional Truth / Political Lies written in order to think things through. (More of that below.) I used Medium as a platform because it makes writing look good and held out the promise of helping find readers/kibitzers.
Spring!
Here’s the problem.
First, it has become clear to me that folks that get read a lot on Medium, write a lot on Medium. Like every week. Some daily! I’m not capable of that. I’m using writing to think; that’s a slow process. I can get something out every month or two if I’m pushing it. So no big rush of new readers.
Second, the wtf demon that’s had me since 2016 is releasing its grip.
I’m finishing up the analysis phase of the Truth/Lies series. There will be a summary of thoughts so far, and I do need to write something about the political capture of the Southern Baptist Church. But I’m nearing a natural transition point.
So here’s what I’m going to do.
A piece on Medium by Cory Doctorow pointed to a way to solve my ‘slow but unsteady’ approach to writing: “…interesting stuff that crosses my path gets turned into a blog post where it rubs up against other interesting stuff and crystallizes into longer, more considered pieces” I’m going to try that. Pieces here will be short, tentative, and likely awkward. Things will appear on Medium as they mature or in the unlikely event that I end up writing something quick and fun (could happen, right?).
If you want to see the long stuff, you could Subscribe on Medium.
The latest piece and the first in 6 months is Drake’s Equation and You. If you think you’ve Subscribed but didn’t see it, then either it went to spam, or you Followed me rather than Subscribed.
(If you want to see all work by a writer on Medium remember: Follow bad; Subscribe good. Their system is confusing.)
Fermi’s question = If there are so many stars where are the aliens? Drake took it from there.
I’ll add a teaser to the current work in progress below. See it here as sections get roughed out.
Thanks for reading, Al
=============== ===============
We Need a Smaller Them
Emotional Truth, Political Lies — Our Plot So Far
There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. –Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021)
The neoliberal project was focused on designing institutions — not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy. -Quinn Slobodian, Globalists (2018)
I have elsewhere presented the case that, to survive, we need a bigger Us. This presents the corollary: we need a smaller, more focused Them.
Intro
On November 6th, 2016, I was jolted out of my assumptions about our political landscape. Now hijacked, my attention has been focused on the contradictions of our weird political culture ever since. I’ve been reading and thinking, hoping to internalize the contradictions and write my way out. I’m part way there. This is my interim report.
Decentered Identity
Something odd is going on. Folks on the lower end of the economic spectrum have been consistently acting against their own interests — or so it seems to me. Clearly, they don’t see it that way.
Here are free links to things I’ve written over the last quarter. I always appreciate your thoughts and getting a critique of mine…best if you leave them on Medium but whatever works.
I’ve sorted them by topic. They are, alas, weighted towards political coverage. That was not my plan when I started writing on Medium but the topics won’t let me go. Things are just two effing weird. Someday we’ll get back to quantum theory, evolutionary biology, Carl Jung, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Lighter stuff, you know.
Thanks for reading, Al
PS, Medium is weird. You can Follow me and it does pretty much nothing. Subscribe to get a note when I publish. That’ll be about once a month averaged out. Also, the Medium Clap button is not like Like. If you Clap, please hold it down and turn it up to 11!
PSS, I add a few folks from my address book whenever I’m about to send a Newsletter out. You might be one of those folks. If you don’t want to receive these, note the Unsubscribe at the bottom or just reply and I’ll remove you.
After noting that he liked to move around, see the shops, and meet people in any neighborhood he lived in, he described going to a house-warming party in New York in the late ’70s.
The taxi delivered him to an address in a bad neighborhood. He suspected he was at the wrong address until, arriving at the top floor, he found himself in a “multi-million dollar palace.” He asked the host if she liked the neighborhood? The reply: “Oh, the neighborhood? Well, that’s outside.”
Hope it’s okay if I’ve added a few of you to my quarterly newsletter. I’ve very much appreciate the feedback you all have been providing. Thanks for reading!
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