Something I was mulling over this morning
To what extent were the Jews in WWII the 1% of Germany? I kind of wonder if we’re seeing a repeat of some of the same patterns that led up to that war, and if maybe we shouldn’t back up and consider taking a different path. I mean, granted, you’ve got one set of people hating on the 1%, and another set of people hating on the immigrants, gays, etc, but you certainly have a bunch of people all saying that all our problems are caused by $SOME_OTHER_GROUP, when in fact almost none of them are.
Our problems aren’t caused by the 1%, because there’s as much food, steel, and concrete as there is. They’re caused by how we think about resources and resource allocation – beliefs that lead to food rotting in the field while people go hungry and people being homeless while houses sit empty. But that’s not the fault of the 1%, it’s the fault of the software we’re all running, the things we all believe about property and resources.
I could make similar points about the fatal flaws in the rule of law, in the criminal justice system, in our religions and morals, but what it all adds up to is that we’re running some truly crappy software, memetically distributed, and part of why that’s true is we’re afraid to write something better. And there’s no doubt that writing a new memetic operating system for humanity would involve a fair amount of risk, and would be something that would have to be done carefully and with some consideration, and that most of the people here apparently are not willing to open their eyes far enough to see that the current software we’re running is not that great. (Although, increasingly, there are people who are, and there’s always the hope that if and when we get a working neural network smarter than we are, it could help, or that the current generation, who see a situation where working full time won’t rent you a apartment because of our very stupid beliefs about inflation and the value of time – will rise up and come up with something better. Of course, it’s more likely a bunch of people will get shot and nothing will get better, but one can always hope)
And then, of course, this might all just be my conscious experience. I know there’s something wrong with my mind, and I know it has plenty of crunch, computing wise, so it may be painting me a picture that’s far darker than the real world for reasons of it’s own. If so, I wish it’d stop doing that.
August 15th, 2016 at 12:02 pm
I heard (third hand info, not vetted or researched) that Trump was planning to promote fracking, which made me think about how fracking can poison groundwater, and that Trump’s response would be something like, “Let them drink wine!”, an echo of “let them eat cake” that was said before the French Revolution: the nobility (the 1%) disconnected from what most of us live as reality, somehow both expecting and expected to lead. I fear a bloody revolution as the power and wealth collect in smaller and smaller pools, and the majority begins to lose hope. I fear that a bloody revolution will change nothing, that it just resets the game without changing it. I would much rather have the kind of political revolution the writers of the constitution envisioned in such times: civilized replacement by democratic means… but again that is more of a soft-reboot without really changing the game.
As far as the original question, the Jews were NOT well represented in the 1% of the time. They tended to have a similar spread of jobs as any other immigrant group, and had only fairly recently been legally accepted as citizens in most European states. They were, in Europe 150-100 years ago, as African Blacks are and have been during the last 50 years or so in the US: legally equal, but in reality not really. The stories of “wealthy Jewish families” that were robbed by the nazis… well, in those chaotic times the nazis would use the Jewish label as an excuse to remove political opponents, whether or not there was truth to it. Also, just as in the US with African-Americans now, there were those few that did manage to climb into the 1%, by excellence in a field and/or perseverance and/or persistence.
I agree that the software needs adjustment. The difficulty is that we don’t have the source code, we have to decompile and reverse-engineer it before was can being to find the bugs we need to fix. The tendency to blame and hate $SOME_OTHER_GROUP isn’t a human tendency, it is at least a Primate tendency, and I’d venture possibly a Mammalian tendency. I think such thought structures are very close to ROM, and only a step or two above BIOS. Thankfully, I don’t believe that we are permanently stuck with our ROM sequences, and we can insert new code to run instead. But that part is not the software system you were speaking of.
The societal mimetic software is a distributed parallel system that runs on systems with similar ROM. It is a higher-level program that depends on the lower-level code. Distribution is not clean, and the best methods of distribution are corrupted with politics and advertisements, hindered by “screen-savers” (Hollywood) with old-ROM catering content (give us fake people to hate, other fake people to side with, reinforce ROM through repetition of various us-vs-them-isms, introduce very very little new concepts, and require even less thought).
To adjust or re-write the societal mimetic software, a ROM update will need to be sent out first, and accepted, before the new distributed software will work. The roots of the bugs are in the ROM.
August 15th, 2016 at 1:20 pm
wow… s/was can being/we can begin/
talk about bugs.