Jochen -
A little less, tongue-in-cheek:
Thanks for the positive thoughts... and I think you can add to your list
of "isms" we need to understand 'more better' to avoid giving them more
power over us are other abstractions like "democracy" and
"capitalism". I grew up worshiping the latter two unquestioningly and
climbing the ladders they offered as fast as I could, even though I am
pretty sure I "heard" the muffled cries of those whose heads I was
stepping on to "climb" and the "feel" of their fingers under my feet as
they tried to climb the very same rungs I was clambering up.
_Democracy_ was summarized well for me (it is only a point-indicator,
but a significant one) as "Democracy is the tyranny of the majority over
the minority". It became most poignant to me in 2000 when the
Republican's used their outsized lung-capacity to "blow the flipped coin
of a hung-election over" and then claimed a "mandate". The Donald and
the very same Republican Machine did it again (if differently in detail)
in 2016, shouting MANDATE! even louder. Had the Dems been able to blow
the coin over the other way in 2000 or if they had been better at
gerrymandering and social engineering in 2016 (I claim they were good
enough at the latter to put Hillary in front of Bernie for the
"finals"), THEY would have claimed a mandate, although probably with
less overt belligerence, but perhaps to the same effect... a significant
tyranny of a pseudo-majority over a pseudo-minority.
_Capitalism_ isn't entirely synonymous with _Consumerism_ but they seem
very deeply entwined... and the most obvious hazard of Capitalism is the
truism that we love to hate of "the rich get richer" (and in complement,
"poor get poorer"). In a time when Bush-II could declare in the wake of
9/11 "just go out and buy something!" (backed up by a small tax-rebate
to get the spending pump primed?) as a presumed remedy to keep the
Terrorist's attack on Wall Street from rippling into the
consumer-confidence (extravagance?) economy, and now with Trump
imagining that tearing down any regulatory feedback (legal and social)
on our exploitative economy is the same as "creating wealth" and that
hold interest rates near zero (effectively subsidizing big-Capital) is
the same as having "healthy growth". It might also be noted that we
don't have a phrase for "healthy steady-state" or "healthy pull-back".
We only know how to stimulate growth/expansion/usery/exploitation every
way we can until the resulting bubble collapses under it's own
weight/thinness.
A decade or two ago *I* might have responded to this kind of talk with a
confrontational "so you would rather have totalitarian/fascism???!!!!"
without thinking far enough to realize that a truly healthy way of being
(locally and globally) might be something fundamentally different than
what we've discovered in our myriad experiments in economics and
politics. At the same time, paradoxically, while *fundamentally*
different, that difference may be in subtle qualities, not in
quantity. It might not require us to deny the fact of human (animal
appetites) for material comforts and social relevance... and in fact, it
may depend on doing exactly that without extreme over-indulgences in
either. The Trump family is a pretty good example of how we fetishize
extreme indulgences in both material wealth and social significance.
May 2019 unfold as it will! I for one, feel lucky to be living in these
"interesting times", no matter how "inconvenient" many of the details
seem to be for me, mine, and those much less fortunate than "we".
- Steve
I prefer the model of Twain's "history doesn't repeat itself, it
rhymes"...
It appears that the great poem of life has lapsed into a riff of
thug-rap (taking names and popping caps)... which could go on for
quite a while... apparently there are a lot of folks who want/need
that kind of angry/negative me-first energy?
And a slap-happy new year to you too!
Dear Pollyanna,
It will end and we’ll all learn an important lesson?
Whew, I was worried there for a minute!
Thanks,
Marcus
*From: *Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Jochen Fromm
<j...@cas-group.net>
*Reply-To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
*Date: *Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 6:53 AM
*To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
*Subject: *[FRIAM] 2019 - The end of Trumpism
Merry christmas and a happy new year 2019! I hope Mueller will finish
his report in 2019 and I assume president Trump will either resign or
be impeached like Nixon, since the House belongs now to the democrats
(Did you know "Mueller" is the German version of "Miller" btw? As you
know a miller is someone who creates the flour we need for life) Then
Donald will spend the rest of his life in prison or seek asylum in
Russia. This would be the end of "Trumpism". But who knows, it's a
complex world. In hindsight we will learn more about "Trumpism" as
well. At the moment it seems to be a mixture of the original Italian
fascism and post-soviet authoritarianism, i.e. the rule of an
authoritarian leader who demands absolute loyalty and trusts only his
family. I believe we can only decode social systems if we really
understand the various forms of *-isms like fascism, nazism or
communism, and how they are related.
-Jochen
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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