Sharing and the twilight zone
So, this is going to be another of those multifaceted and meandering posts. It will definitely fall at least somewhat under the tinfoil hat heading.
First of all, I was having a conversation with a somewhat right leaning friend and it underlined for me, not for the first time, how scary the situation we’re in is. Numerous people on the right have been trying to stir up fear and anger over a number of things, and they’ve clearly succeeded. The willingness of the right to publish utter fiction and claim it as fact has gotten to be a big problem. No, antifa isn’t starting fires, no, antifa isn’t marxist, no, BLM isn’t marxist, yes, it is possible to be in favor of a increased level of socialism without being marxist.
(I’ve talked about elsewhere how we need a new -ism, since everything we’ve tried so far doesn’t work. Lately I’ve been thinking about how the command and control aspect of any society needs to have a whole lot of active protection against corruption because every human enterprise seems to, entropy-like, move steadily more towards corruption)
Anyway, one thing the right loves to do is conflate the social safety net democracy ideals of Bernie with the authoritarian ideals of i.e. CCP, CCCP, etc. I know it’s incredibly tempting to mix the resource allocation system and command and control axises – after all, most people can’t think about there being several different things going on here – but it is, ultimately, a lie – and part of how the powers that be get away with a lot of the awful they get away with.
It’s funny that so many find the idea of socialism so frightening since at it’s root, all it is is the idea that we share. Of course, there’s a lot of places where earth is dramatically against sharing that it would be a far better place if it was for sharing. Think about how many relationships have ended because of ‘cheating’ – we are wired to fall in love more than once, but the very stupid memetics this place runs on try their hardest to program us to think sharing is bad – and not just in a sexual partner sense. This whole anti-immigrant thing is a dramatic case of us being terrified at the idea of sharing. It’s really rather sad.
I was thinking while I was doing some experimenting with chord progressions earlier today how if I were running a country that had a whole lot of people wanting to move to it, i’d be tryign to come up with the technologies to welcome those people with open arms, and not to have any shortages. However, we seem to love the resource allocation system of idiocy and we’re determined to make sure Earth doesn’t turn into a utopia no matter what – so we skid steadily more dystopic.
Anyway, one of the thoughts I wanted to talk about is that I talk a lot about how we have enough computing power in our minds to render reality out of whole cloth, and I talk about wanting to be able to control this so I can experience specific realities – and I talk about this as being one of the forms of real wealth that is far more valuable than dollars (with the other form being friends) – but, one possible explanation for the steadily more bizarre relations between the left and right is that in fact all of us are always in realities rendered by our minds and just trading data back and forth to appear in each other’s experiences, and the right is dreaming a dramatically different dream than the left. It seems believable to me that there are in fact two different realities, and the people being led by i.e. Rush and Trump etc are living in a different reality than I am. It’s possible that lies *create* new realities, even, especially if enough people believe them.
Anyway, the whole situation is rather scary.. I wonder what my friend would think if he could see the Black Lives Matter flag I fly. Probably he would not be surprised since I have told him I’m to the left of Bernie. (I literally want to create a new resource allocation system – actually i’d probably create several and then have each state vote on which one they’d like to test out, and then let states change as it became clear which one was the winning system)