Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, while there’s much shouting back and forth and wrending of garments on the subject of whether collectivism is good or bad, whether the time has come for socialism, and how much damage being a member of the 1% does, I’m curious – we all have strong opinions, and obviously we’ve all got reasons for them, but has anyone done any software modeling on this?

It should be possible to, by looking at recorded data for the many hundreds of countries and thousands of industries and the like, create software models for various types of collectivism and capitalism and any other systems we’ve got records for, and determine what the best answer is. While right-wingers may feel firmly convinced that collectivist attempts are doomed, and certain aspects of the left that socialism will cure all our woes, I’m not really all that convinced that anyone who has never modelled the problem actually has any idea at all what will and won’t work.

Clearly capitalism comes with some advantages re: competition, but also clearly as we move into the age of automation we’re going to have to do UBI or *something* or we’ll have no jobs left and people will be forced to starve to death because they’re more expensive than machines. I guess one question that we should probably start with is, can we agree why we’re here? Can we at least agree it’s not to starve to death?

If we can, could we perhaps model some of these things? Maybe try to determine how much collectivism hurts initiative and innovation, figure out whether we could even successfully run as a collectivist system at all when measuring in real resource costs rather than in stupid-fiat-dollars?

I grant you that modelling this problem would not be a insignificant challenge – after all we’re not talking about the Glooper here – but I imagine we’d have a lot better luck with it than we would with modelling the weather, especially if we look at it as a problem in probabilistic behavior and determine based on pre-existing data what likely probabilities are.

Then again, it may be that some members on both sides are so firmly programmed that they couldn’t accept the output of a software modelling problem in the area of collectivism if it were run. I do often wonder, if we weren’t all being programmed by the left & right medias and our peer groups / bubbles in what exactly we’re supposed to think, what *would* we think? There have got to be *some* people who recognize the sheer folly of the idea that the other side must be completely and totally wrong. Yes, I’ve chosen my side, but I like to think the people on the other side are not idiots and I also like to think that one of these days we will stop shouting at each other and start devising some scientific methods to ascertain what the truth really is.

Of course the problem with this is there’s a chunk of people out there convinced that some God who has made no attempt in recent memory to get in touch with us and is quite possibly a work of fiction comprised by various unsavory elements of our past culture in a attempt to achieve some form of social control is actually completely in control and if science says something other than what they expect to see from God, then science must be wrong. Have faith even in the face of hard data, or you’re a bad $RELIGIOUS_NUT.

Ah, the human condition. Full of so many interesting miseries and contradictions.

So, as we sit in the middle of a house divided – to put it mildly – I’ve been doing some thinking. To the right, things that to us on the left sound purely insane are absolute truth. Of course Mexican immigrants are a major source of terrorism, and we should be afraid of them crossing our borders bringing Sarin gas (even if the person writing the post couldn’t actually spell Sarin). Of course Trump is innocent of all he’s accused of, and the left wing media is being unfairly cruel to him. Of course God intends to torture us for all eternity unless we believe in Jesus.

The thing is, I have a intermittent mental illness. I’ve more or less mastered – or at least achieved a high degree of proficiency in – fighting it with a mix of drugs and being sure to get involved in some really big project whenever I reach one of the peaks, which occur every six months. However, I’ve experienced delusions, and let me tell you, they do seem absolutely real when they are happening. Also, most of the major world events that the left and the right are fighting about – cops shooting citizens, Iran building nuclear weapons, etc – are things that most of us never see except via media sources. And, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, the media isn’t perfect – I know far more people who have been misquoted in the paper than who have been quoted correctly, and I largely put this down to the fact that there’s a whole lot of neurons between person A’s conscious experience and person B’s. You’ve seen me talk about this before – the hope of experiencing some kind of reality that is absolute and monolithic truth is not very good.

That said, there are clearly many players at this point who are willing to inject lies into the media stream if it serves their purpose. I suspect, based on the amount of screaming about how much the people on the left are doing this, that the majority of people doing this are the ones on the right, although I’ve found examples of both. [I have figured out that the interesting fact that we see most the flaws in other people that also exist in ourselves is far amplified in political theater]

Without speculating too much on what the ultimate outcome of all this might be, I think it is safe to say we’ve found a survive-or-don’t situation here. The frustrating part for me is of course that people on the other side have no problem with making stuff up – and of course, they’d accuse my side of the same. Suffice it to say places like snopes and politifact are being kept very busy – and of course the people in question also accuse them of bias.

I have to assume that everyone is aware of the fact that something has gone badly wrong here. Of course, half the country blames it on Obama and the other half on Trump – but nonetheless, we are living in two parallel but not particularly congruent realities. I am sure that the delusional thinking is on the other side – but then, I would think that, wouldn’t I? I’m sure they are equally sure of the same thing. My hope is all of this is the prerequisite to some kind of enlightenment leading to a even more impressive age of reason than the one we’ve just had, but my fear is that this is the barbarians causing Rome to crumble.

So far, there’s not a lot of violence on the streets, although I do keep reading about the police arresting people for no reason and shooting people for even less and getting away with it. It feels like we’re deteriorating into a police state similar to Nazi Germany (let’s get dragged through WWII this time with our eyes open? Heil Trump?) but at the same time when I turn off the net and wander outside, everything seems fine. I live just down the street from a police station and I don’t see them dragging large numbers of people to jail, nor do I hear very many sirens. Walking the streets of Seattle it looks like everything is fine. The grocery store has plenty of food. I do see a lot of homeless people, which I take to be a indicator that the economy is not doing so well, but they don’t look like they’re starving.

And, in the political theater POV, I have to remind myself that it’s possible that the right-wing whackos have awakened a sleeping giant and we will be shortly seeing a massive wave of blue. Unfortunately I can’t feel that great about that because even the Democrats are so far to the right from me that they feel like the republicans felt in 1980. (And the republicans feel like the twilight zone.. I can’t believe that they’re okay with giving trillions of dollars of tax cuts to the rich while they cut money for children’s health care, public schools, and other services I would have thought we would have thought essential)

Anyway, it’s possible that this is going to play out with a ‘it seems the species has amused itself to death’. Or it may be that all this political theater is a cover story for something much, much larger happening behind the scenes. Or maybe we’re just near the endgame of the simulation we’re in?