The Wisdom of Human Ritual; Don't Leave Home Without It

The ritualistic inclination is built into our species, as you can learn from the profound but simple experiment described below.

Imagine you are a five-year-old being led into a small office. A woman with a warm smile shows you an assortment of strange objects. Some of them are shiny. You feel like playing with them. That’s OK, that’s allowed. Soon the friendly lady takes the objects away and says she wants to show you a video. On the screen is another woman. She has an identical set of objects lined up neatly in a row and she’s doing odd things with them — she lifts one and taps it on another, then puts it back and takes something else, twirling it in a peculiar fashion before replacing it. This goes on for some time. Then the strange objects are pushed back towards you and the lady says: ‘It’s your turn.’ What would you do?

If you were a five-year-old, you would imitate at least some of the actions you observed in the video. No instruction would be necessary. And yet, the behaviour doesn’t appear to achieve anything. The psychologist Cristine Legare and I have been working together for several years trying to understand why young test subjects bother to copy it. Our starting point is that they treat it as a convention of some kind. That is to say, they adopt what we call ‘the ritual stance’, imitating without questioning the purpose of the actions.

In our experiment, however, the behaviour of the woman in the video is ambiguous. Children can't be sure it if is oriented to a goal or not. A surprisingly simple shift helps them to decide: we just alter the last move in the sequence. If the woman puts the last object into a box, it looks like the whole procedure was just a ‘funny’ way of putting an object away. We call this the ‘instrumental condition’. On the other hand, if the objects all end up back where they were originally placed, the whole action sequence appears not to have any tangible purpose. We call this the ‘ritual condition’. When the start and end states are identical, children are more confident that the demonstration on the video should be interpreted as a kind of ritual. And guess what? They copy it much more faithfully, and are less inclined to try out variations on their own initiative. _Harvey Whitehouse

Ritual Mosaic Humans value ritual from their earliest years. The need for human ritual only grows with the years. It seems to have always been that way.

Whether we consider the aborigines of Australia, the Native Americans, the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, or our own European ancestors, we find a world-wide preoccupation with ritual action that cuts across all races, religions, and cultures. We could even say that human culture is primarily a culture of ritual. _Culture of Ritual

Yet in our modern scientific world, the human need for ritual is typically denied and scoffed at, as an unnecessary residual of a more superstitious age.

But only a little thought and reflection should tell us that the further from religious belief and culture that we travel, the more necessary our grounding and passage of time rituals become.

Each culture, society, community, and family will have its own rituals based upon a unique history. Depending upon the ritual one is observing, one is either connecting with his family, community, society, culture, nation, or all mankind.

Rituals were once an unthinking part of daily life for every human living within a society or culture. In the modern scientific age, however, rituals must be consciously employed for their underlying purposes, or they become neglected and forgotten. The loss of grounding that occurs with the withering away of ritual is tragic -- for all that it is rarely noticed.

In The Dangerous Child Method of Education and Child-Raising, ritual is given a prominent role -- particularly in the toddler years, and in the years prior to puberty. Puberty itself is a passage, and deserves its own rite. And so on, through the years of passages that constitute human existence.

Daily rituals should also be utilised, from the earliest years. Here is a brief look at some "mindfulness rituals," meant to ground and vitalise one's daily existence.

1. Sit in the morning. When you wake up, in the quiet of the morning, perhaps as your coffee is brewing, get a small cushion and sit on the floor... I’ll ... just sit, and focus on my breathing going in and out. I’m an absolute beginner when it comes to meditation, but this always starts my day right.
2. Brush your teeth... Try fully concentrating on the action of brushing, on each stroke of each tooth, going from one side of the mouth to the other. You end up doing a better job, and it helps you realize how much we do on autopilot.
3. Eat mindfully. Turn off the TV, put away the computer and mobile devices, even put away the book or newspaper... unless you do this, you are not truly appreciating your food. I like eating... mindfully, paying attention to each bite. It makes the food taste better, and I eat slowly and with gratefulness.
4. Wash your bowl. When you’re done eating, wash your dish immediately. Do it while paying full attention to your washing, to the water and suds.
5. Drink tea... Make your own tea ceremony — prepare the tea carefully and mindfully, pour it slowly, sip it with thoughtfulness. See if you can set aside one time each day to do this, and it will transform your day.
6. Walk slowly. I like to take breaks from work, and go outside for a little walk. Walk slowly, each step a practice in awareness. Pay attention to your breathing, to everything around you, to the sounds and light and texture of objects.
7. Read in silence... Have no television or computers on nearby, and just immerse yourself in the world of the novel. It might seem contradictory to let your mind move from the present into the time of the novel, but it’s a great practice in focus...
8. Look at someone gratefully. Each day, find someone you care about. Instead of just seeing what you always see, really look at the person. Try not to do it creepily. See this person for the miracle that she is, and be grateful for her existence. If you’re feeling generous, tell that person how thankful you are for her.
9. Work with focus. Start your workday by choosing one task that will make a big difference in your work, and clearing everything else away. Just do that one task, and don’t switch to other tasks. _Leo Baubata

These particular "rituals" are based upon the practise of "mindfulness," which is usually associated with zen. But in Dangerous Child training, we incorporate mindfulness rituals without any particular trappings, other than those which might be particularly salient to the child.

There is something trance-like in the observation of many rituals. But rituals can just as easily liberate one from a default state -- a "spinning of the wheels" trance which the brain can easily fall into. Mindfulness rituals in particular tend to help break us out of the many unthinking default trances into which our minds can easily sink.

If meaningful rituals are incorporated into our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly lives, we are more likely to have a subtextual "soundtrack", mapping system, or system of life indexing, which helps us to better understand where we have been and where we may be going.

Most of us are somewhat familiar with religious ritualism. But many forms of pagan ritual preceded all forms of organised religious ritual as far back in time as we can go. And it is interesting to observe the return of much of this pagan ritual across various parts of modern societies.

As humans try to make sense of an increasingly secular existence, it is crucial for us to understand the importance of our underlying need for ritual -- both on a daily basis, and to mark critical events and transitions in our lives.

To make the most sense of this need, we must go back and understand how rituals naturally came about, and how these native rituals were modified and adapted to meet the needs of different cultures, civilisations, religions, and societies.

Obama Makes All American Blacks Look Bad

Humans tend to be "purposeful systems," who sub-consciously (and sometimes consciously) adopt goals and formulate plans toward a goal or an ideal.

Any human-created systems can be characterized as "purposeful system" when it's "members are also purposeful individuals who intentionally and collectively formulate objectives and are parts of larger purposeful systems".^[5] Other characteristics are:

• "A purposeful system or individual is ideal-seeking if... it chooses another objective that more closely approximates its ideal".^[6]
• "An ideal-seeking system or individual is necessarily one that is purposeful, but not all purposeful entities seek ideals",^[6] and
• "The capability of seeking ideals may well be a characteristic that distinguishes man from anything he can make, including computers".^[7]

_Purposeful Systems and Ideal Seeking

We cannot become better than our own image of the ideal. If our picture of the perfect is distorted and corrupted, so will our own paths through life be distorted and corrupted.



Obama makes blacks look bad in the same way that Mohammed makes Muslims look bad, Hitler made Nazis look bad, and Mao made Maoists look bad.

When Russians set Putin as their ideal, they cannot become better Russians than Putin. When American blacks set Obama as their ideal, it will be most difficult for them grow beyond the narcissistic and otherwise limited dimensions of their ideal.

But for most American blacks, the problem is much worse than being limited by a corrupted ideal. American blacks not only see Obama as an ideal, they also see him as a saviour and redeemer. Specifically, they tend to believe in a "salvation by faith," rather than a "salvation by works." In other words, most American blacks believe that Obama will save them just by his existence as president -- without any significant effort on their own part to improve themselves. Most humans prefer to receive benefits for little effort on their own part, of course.

Such a dysfunctional belief in an effortless salvation would be bad enough if it were held by a more competent, intelligent, less impulsive, and less violent group. But in the case of African descended blacks, such a blind belief in a saviour figure is disastrous. And if that saviour figure happens to be a narcissist ideologue such as Obama -- with many strong notions but few skills or competencies -- blacks are in a serious pickle.

Goal-setting and intentionality are important ways in which humans can improve their lot in life. If the mechanisms of goal-setting, purposefulness, and intentionality, are diverted and corrupted by dysfunctional ideals and and false premises and beliefs, the entire life's trajectory becomes dysfunctional and malfunctional.

Dangerous Children are brought up to understand that they themselves are responsible for who they are to become. They are not likely to look to others to save them from themselves and their poorly set life trajectories.

It is never too late to have a dangerous childhood.

Promise of Early Retirement: from J Storrs Hall

When Josh Hall talks about early retirement, he is referring to the retirement of all humans from work. Why should all humans retire? Because cheap human-equivalent machines will do all the work humans once did, for the price of kilowatt hours of electricity -- pennies. Josh is a very bright man, a creative man who is able to dream great dreams, and also crunch the numbers: a rare combination. Here is what he says about the retirement of the race:

If you have a human-level AI based on computer technology, the cost to do what it can do will begin to decline at Moore’s Law rates. Even if an AI costs a million dollars in, say, 2020, it’ll be a thousand in 2030 and one dollar in 2040 (give or take a decade). Why hire a human when you can buy the equivalent for a dollar? To put it as simply as possible, you aren’t going to be able to make a living by working. You’re going to need to have some capital. Everybody’s going to need some capital.

...One way or the other, the human race is going to take an early retirement in the next few decades. I find this a much better way of thinking about what’s coming up than “singularity”. The term “singularity” was specifically created to reflect a notion that there was an event horizon associated with advancing AI. But whether or not this is true of the far future, some distinct profiles of the near future are clearly visible. And from what we can see of it, it is going to make a huge difference what we do now.

So, I think, we need a better term than “singularity” to describe what’s coming up. It should reflect the fact that there are indeed some things we can tell about what will be happening. It should, if possible, reflect the fact that this will be a major liberating event for the human race — no longer need we spend our lives in forced drudgery, since we have built machines to do the necessary work. But it should also reflect the fact that we need to be planning for it. _JSHall

Josh is trying to explain how things will change in the near future. It is an optimistic vision, overall, which fits well with "The Europe Syndrome" described by Charles Murray. Thousands of extropians, transhumanists, and singularitarians have described similar technological "quasi-utopias" for well over 50 years. It is a vision suited for lulling the masses to sleep.

Machines have certainly removed much drudgery from the lives of women and men. Our dozens of energy slaves have given us more leisure, income, and choices than pre-industrial humans possessed. It is only natural to extrapolate this trend into the future, to the expectation of early retirement for the race of men. Natural, but wrong.

Western culture no longer speaks for the entire world -- if it ever did. The economic and demographic problems of the west are show stoppers for the "inevitable march of the singularity." But the greater underlying problem for the western world besides the fact that its people are dying without replacement, and its over-consumptive lifestyle is destroying the wealth of future generations -- is the spiritual vacuity. NOT IN A RELIGIOUS SENSE. Religion does not truly signify, once one probes the depths of the human brain, and understands what human spirituality actually is. The human spirit is what makes humans strive against insurmountable obstacles, and prevail.

While western man may have lost his "soul" in a poker game, or used it as collateral for a loan spent on mere consumption, the rest of the world -- most of the world -- has not done the same. Most of the world is still driven to strive, to reproduce, to survive at all costs. To that end, ancient myths of religion and spirit are called upon to guide and motivate the masses to follow traditional paths.

Affluence has stopped the population growth of western populations. But affluence is not a sure thing. Not for the west, and certainly not for the rest. Differential birth rates of east and west, north and south, favour the ever-burgeoning masses of third world people and the traditional tribal peoples of myth and Islam.

Westerners are certainly dying off -- the victims of their own affluence and lack of depth. At the same time, a few scientists and engineers working within mainly western research institutions and corporate labs are creating incredible new technologies that would certainly change any world into which they were introduced.

Third worlders are not dying off, and are instead procreating at 1.5, 2, 3, 4 times replacement, depending upon the country. Population IQ is inversely proportional to fertility rates, roughly speaking. But even low IQ people can watch satellite TV and covet the powerful toys and energy slaves that the rich westerners possess.

These toys and slaves do not maintain, repair, and manufacture themselves -- not yet. But what happens when the small cadres of scientists and engineers, working within institutions inside the dying lands, create the machines that Josh Hall talks about above? Machines that can create, maintain, repair, and improve upon other machines without the help of moderately intelligent and skilled humans? At that point, even after the west dies off, some parts of the low IQ third world can still have high tech societies. And within the sea of low IQ societies, we find islands of higher IQ sub-populations that can step in to profit from the high tech : low IQ dynamic.

Of course, in the style of a true Idiocracy, such inherited toys, slaves, and intelligent mind surrogates will be largely neglected, frittered, fought over, and intentionally destroyed as "evil." Human nature does not disappear, and history does not end -- regardless of how many Fukuyamas or other well intentioned intellectuals proclaim it. Instead, the Fukuyamas meet the end predicted by JM Keynes, "in the long run ..."

Predicting the future is much harder than most people understand. Everything you think you know . . . . just ain't so.

What Is Really Important In Life, And What Does That Have to do With Europe?

The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening. What explains Europe’s military impotence? I am surely simplifying, but this has to be part of it: If the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible, what can be worth dying for? Murray

In a recent American.com article, Charles Murray talks about "The Europe Syndrome", and how European public policy (and the current batch of Euro-copycats in American government) affects the things that he sees as truly important for a well-lived life.

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don’t get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché “nothing worth having comes easily”). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren’t many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent? That qualifies. A good marriage? That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours? That qualifies. And having been really good at something—good at something that drew the most from your abilities? That qualifies.

...The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality—it drains some of the life from them. It’s inevitable....If we knew that leaving these functions in the hands of families and communities led to legions of neglected children and neglected neighbors, and taking them away from families and communities led to happy children and happy neighbors, then it would be possible to say that the cost is worth it. But that’s not what happened when the U.S. welfare state expanded. We have seen growing legions of children raised in unimaginably awful circumstances, not because of material poverty but because of dysfunctional families, and the collapse of functioning neighborhoods into Hobbesian all-against-all free-fire zones.

...Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their “child-friendly” policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

...

If that’s the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that’s the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble—and, after all, what good are they, really? If that’s the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that’s the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion [AF: or moral theory] that says otherwise?

....We are seeing that infiltration appear most obviously among those who are most openly attached to the European model—namely, America’s social democrats, heavily represented in university faculties and the most fashionable neighborhoods of our great cities. We know from databases such as the General Social Survey that among those who self-identify as liberal or extremely liberal, secularism is close to European levels. Birth rates are close to European levels. Charitable giving is close to European levels. There is every reason to believe that when Americans embrace the European model, they begin to behave like Europeans.

_______________

This is all pretty depressing for people who do not embrace the European model, because it looks like the train has left the station. The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the triumphant Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians.

...Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn’t gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There’s nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.

But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America. _American.com

Murray seems to believe that America's elites will somehow wake up to the fact that the foundations of their most deeply held beliefs are without substance. That will never happen. The existence of echo chambers such as the JournoList is a sign that leftist elites will never admit error or misunderstanding publicly.

And America can never be like Europe. Even Europe is finding it harder and harder to be like Europe these days, thanks to a suicidal drop in birth rates and a masochistic immigration policy. Europe's days are numbered by its own "Europe Syndrome" of being about essentially nothing -- like Seinfeld.

America will go broke and experience a painful re-construction along more sustainable lines, before it will approach the lack of relevance of today's Europe. Leftist elites have been wagging the dog for so long they believe it is their right to continue doing so indefinitely. But America cannot afford it much longer. Obama is the dream president for the elitist tail end of America, and he will be the instrument of its demise, as he continues to act out the script (however telepromptered).

Most Americans have not yet discovered how they have been "had" by the pompous idiots who have been telling them how to live, what to think, and who to vote for. When enough Americans finally discover the sad truth, there is no telling what they may do.

Plastic Brains--Shaping Your Future Self

The human brain retains some capacity to learn and change throughout its life. Cortical neurons can not only change their wiring based upon inputs, but new neurons can be grown to reinforce (and replace?) existing networks. Neuroscientists are hot on the trail of brain plasticity, and the story is far from being told entire.

Focal hand dystonia (FHD) is a fascinating disorder of brain plasticity that particularly affects musicians. FHD involves plastic changes in the somatosensory cortex that receives inputs from the involved hand. The brain actually loses its ability to distinguish sensory input from the different fingers, leading to the inability of the musician to synchronize and sequence the intricate fingerings of difficult pieces for piano, violin, and other instruments. The reason for this brain confusion is that long practise sessions playing rapid, difficult pieces confuse the brain into thinking that input from different fingers is actually coming from the same finger. Input from one finger grows into the somatosensory map of a different finger as the brain adapts to this new input, until the brain can no longer distinguish one finger from another when attempting to play music. Here is more on focal dystonia.

We have only so much cortex to work with. The intricate folding of the neocortex provides us with more gray matter than we would have with smooth-surfaced brains, but there is a limit. If we lose an eye or a limb, the cortex serving that part of the body is freed up for other uses. Inputs from other sensory organs or other units of the same sense will typically grow into the unused area of cortex in those cases. Thus someone who goes blind may develop keener hearing and much better discrimination with his Braille reading hand.

Similar plastic remapping of motor cortex can occur, for example after a stroke (CVA). You should not be surprised that many scientists and mental health professionals believe that the associative cortex is capable of similar plastic remapping. In other words, it appears that you truly are shaped by the things you most commonly think about. Your brain accomodates your choices of thought and action by changing as you think, act, cogitate, and daydream.

Jeffrey Schwartz has gone beyond thinking about brain plasticity, to incorporating it into a therapy for his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients. His results are promising.

While most educated persons may consider themselves too modern to fall for the admonitions of religious teachers and self-help gurus, who constantly drone that "you are what you think," perhaps it is time to go back to the underlying idea--without all the religious and other extraneous matter.

Humans are at a major turning point. They can either choose the path of accelerating change, or the path of stagnation--with its inherent vulnerability to more primitive, more vital ways of thinking and living. Al Fin frequently points out the stagnant and self-defeating ways of education and child-raising in the modern west. Here at Al Fin, the best alternative put forward to mainstream stagnation, is the next level. But the next level will require smarter humans--humans who can direct their own evolution.

The curve of forward development and accelerating change will not be a smooth, continuously upward curve. It will develop in fits and starts, with occasional relapses and reversals. We are missing much of the data we will need for many of our forward leaps, but more than that, we are missing the conceptual power we will need. If we--through our commitment to stagnant ideologies and customs--neglect basic advances we could be making, we will pay for our lapses dearly, in time.

Adult brains are not nearly as plastic as childhood and teenage brains. The one advantage that adult brains possess, is their life experience and possibly their fuller use of the prefrontal pathways of the brain. These advantages may be used exclusively for one's own benefit, or in addition, used to assist younger generations.

We will eventually utilise gene therapy to bring about higher intelligence in humans. This will be done first in neurodegenerative conditions of old age and childhood. As the methods improve, the benefits of better intelligence-conferring genes (and other augments) will be made available to everyone who can pay--even if the person must travel to Brasil or India to obtain the treatments. But I suspect that we are capable of significant improvement in our ability to learn and conceptualize simply by using the natural plasticity of our own brains. Certainly methods for teaching our children can result in much more capable and confident children if they work with the natural plasticity and the natural hunger for competence of the young brain.

The positive lessons of brain plasticity in Schwartz's treatments for OCD and the negative lessons of brain plasticity in FHD, should give a thoughtful person much to think about.

Previous posts at Al Fin discussed the importance of "purpose" in providing motivation for development and positive change. Learning the lessons of neuroplasticity provides a deeper rationale for discovering purpose in life, and using that purpose to motivate, and to set personal goals.

Religious and ideological zealots and terrorists have no lack of purpose or motivation. They simply want to destroy all competing ideologies and religions. Those of us with more constructive goals may need to focus a bit more.

On Society's Need for Heretics

In a world where much of society--and even much of science--is increasingly giving in to groupthink, it is refreshing to see a distinguished scientist who recognises the vital role of heretics in both science and society.

As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies.

...Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, but there are violently diverging opinions about the causes of change, about the consequences of change, and about possible remedies. I am promoting a heretical opinion, the first of three heresies that I will discuss in this piece.

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

...To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land.

...

Edge.org Freeman Dyson

Go to edge.org and read the full article, a refreshingly intelligent look at the world, in comparison to what is typically available in the media.

Al Fin blog has devoted a great deal of time to the conformity--the groupthink--that pervades academia, the media, and society at large. I use terms such as "academic lobotomy", "psychological neoteny", and "malignant narcissism" to describe how a generally healthy society might allow itself to sink into brain killing conformity.

The good news is the people such as Freeman Dyson are alive and communicating their ideas. The bad news is that academia and the media are doing their utmost to reduce the number of intelligent and heretical replacements that western society needs.

Most people will never reach the next level. The wisdom, intelligence, and originality--the overall comptence needed--is not being shaped by a vacuous and incompetent pseudo-intelligentsia, that has taken over the intellectual landscape. Young people of promise are being wasted by in large number by a system that does not want heretics and challengers.

Visionaries, Inventors, Engineers, and the People Who Actually Get Things Done

Nanotechnology theorist and visionary Eric Drexler has played a vital part in bringing the promise and danger of molecular assembly to the public's attention. But he has never actually built a molecular assembler. This is the nature of today's important advances in "nanotechnology:"

A new high-resolution positioning & scanning system providing 25 picometers resolution is available.
The minute P-363 PicoCubeÆ, together with its low noise E-536 driver / controller, provide significantly higher resolution and positional stability than previous multi-axis scanning stages.

How Do PicoCubeÆ Scanners Differ from Traditional Scanner Tubes?
PicoCube systems were designed to overcome the limitations of open-loop piezo-tube based scanners which provide high resolution motion but poor linearity and trajectory guidance.
The compact PicoCube is based on exceptionally robust, high-stiffness piezo drives rather than tubes and employs non-contact, direct-measuring, parallel-metrology capacitive sensors for position feedback. The low-inertia drives allow for a resonant frequency of 10 kHz, important for high speed scanning applications

Source

Such devices are useful for atomic force microscopy and nano-manipulation. Of course, such devices are nothing like a molecular assembler, and can certainly not make copies of themselves. Nevertheless, they are useful in the slow and incremental study of molecular/atomic scale forces and structures. They are designed by engineers, and manufactured by machines and human assemblers.

Drexler's books help to stimulate the imaginations of the people who will actually make the breakthroughs leading to molecular assembly. Drexler is a visionary.

Dean Kamen and Ray Kurzweil function as both visionaries and inventors. They conceive new ideas, and work with their teams to actually develop working devices and machines. Of course, all successful modern inventors work with teams of engineers, craftsmen, attorneys, accountants, financiers, and other vital members of a modern enterprise.

Steve Wozniak served as visionary, inventor, and engineer. But Steve Jobs provided other useful skills that helped the company get off the ground. Other less well known members of the team likewise played vital roles.

In every research lab there are technicians and craftsmen who fabricate tools, software, and equipment that are necessary for testing ideas, and for refining ideas that show promise. Visionaries and inventors cannot do without them.

In reality, visionaries are a dime a dozen. Anyone can think of ideas, as long as the ideas do not have to work or be important. It is the visionaries who think of important ideas that could actually work, who are in demand--or they should be. Positioning is also important, as is who they know and how well they can stick to their purpose. Because a good visionary needs a good team, if anything is ever going to get done.

One of the major problems with a society improving itself, is the setting of priorities in the financing of innovations. In a socialist society, priority-setting occurs at fairly high levels in government committees, and nationalised industries. That is why nations such as North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela see little if any innovation. China saw very little innovation while the Communist Party held its rigid grip on economic planning and enterprise. Russia's neo-nationalisation of oil, gas, and other profitable industries is certain to reduce innovation in that unfortunate country. Theocracies such as Iran demonstrate the same lack of innovation as socialist and other centrally controlled societies.

The more free-wheeling a society's economy, the more innovation that will be seen from the bottom up. It is no accident that revolutionary scale innovations in western nations are more rare, as the nations' economies grow more centralised.

But revolutionary innovations are what prevents economic stagnation. The evolution toward nanny states and greater nationalisation and centralisation of enterprise and innovation suggests that stagnation is coming. Certainly if a person is cared for from the cradle to the grave, regardless of his productive contribution to society, the incentive of that person to innovate will be reduced.

Many idle visionaries dream of a society where machines do all the work, and well-entitled humans sit around composing music, poetry, or producing great art. It may happen that the humans will be well cared for materially, but it is unlikely that most such persons would bother creating anything meaningful. What would be the point? More likely such persons would crave entertainment, amusement, and all manner of pleasure. If most people do not have to work at anything, they will not.

There are ways of educating children to actually want to create, innovate, and produce remarkable things. Those are not ways that most children are educated--and there is no conceivable way that today's education system could evolve into the other educational methods I allude to.

Sadly, today's education creates psychological neotenates--grown children with no experience of meaningful life responsibility or practical skills. University faculties are populated by psychological neotenates, as are civil service jobs, welfare roles, and prison cells.

Purpose

One of the reasons that there are so many religions in the world, is that most people feel compelled to look outside themselves for a purpose to their lives. Religions claim to reveal a person's "true purpose in life." But why do people feel the need for a "purpose" in the first place?

The University of Minnesota sponsors a "Purpose Project." It is oriented toward helping people deal with the phenomenon of prolonged longevity. According to the Project:

Purpose is that deepest belief within us where we have a profound sense of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. It is the quality or thread we choose to shape our lives around. It is a source of deep meaning and vitality.

According to author and speaker Richard Leider:

There are three hungers that people are trying to feed throughout their lives. The first is to connect deeply with the creative spirit of life. Sooner or later, most people come to recognize that there is some sort of creative energy that infuses all of life. They feel a hunger to touch that energy and to be touched by it. That doesn't mean that you have to be a creative person in a classic sense-to make your living as a painter, a dancer, a writer, or an actor. It could mean an experience as universal as bringing a child into the world, or helping to nurture and shape a life. It could mean finding ways to infuse the workplace with more creativity and more playfulness.

The second hunger is to know and express your gifts and talents. The people I have met in my 30 years as a career counselor are always absolutely sure that they have some unique talent. They may not know what it is yet. They may not know how to express it. It may have nothing to do with how they earn a living or what they do at work. But they know that they have something within them that they have to contribute. And this feeling lasts throughout your lifetime: The healthiest seniors I've met continue to explore their gifts and abilities, long after they've left the workplace.

The third hunger is to know that our lives matter. Everyone wants to leave behind some kind of legacy, some kind of personal mark. It doesn't have to be great or magnificent. But human beings know that at one level, we each have a own unique thumbprint, and we all want to leave that print behind for others to see that we've been here. We can be successful, make a lot of money, reach a certain status, but it will be success without fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from feeding these three hungers.

The last hunger--wanting to know that our lives matter--appears to be the motivator for many young people who undergo religious conversion, or who perform acts of seeming desperation. Muslim suicide bombers and religious cult members who abruptly cut themselves off from their former lives, are examples of people driven to do something that "makes a difference."

Here is an interesting exercise from Steve Pavlina, to find your "purpose:"

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it’s faster).
2. Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
3. Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
4. Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.

That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a counselor or an engineer or a bodybuilder. To some people this exercise will make perfect sense. To others it will seem utterly stupid. Usually it takes 15-20 minutes to clear your head of all the clutter and the social conditioning about what you think your purpose in life is. The false answers will come from your mind and your memories. But when the true answer finally arrives, it will feel like it’s coming to you from a different source entirely.

For those who are very entrenched in low-awareness living, it will take a lot longer to get all the false answers out, possibly more than an hour. But if you persist, after 100 or 200 or maybe even 500 answers, you’ll be struck by the answer that causes you to surge with emotion, the answer that breaks you. If you’ve never done this, it may very well sound silly to you. So let it seem silly, and do it anyway.

We are driven so strongly toward a purpose--if not consciously, then sub-consciously--that even the most jaded and cynical individual is susceptible to "the pitch," if presented correctly for that person.

If you are religious, your purpose is decided to a certain degree by others--founders and shapers of your religion. If you are not religious, but are compelled to find purpose, consider this idea from the Purpose Wikibook:

Given that there is no detectable purpose pre-designed into life or the universe, then, if we must have one, we must adopt a surrogate.

To my mind, the only viable option is to support life’s continual evolution and focus upon helping it to achieve an omnipotent ability. Such a purpose is universal and rational; it is a purpose that will last as long as life itself lasts. It accommodates the whole of life, and shows that we care about more than just our own well-being. It declares that we value life for its own sake and think little about the death that must follow, taking it simply as the price to be paid for living.

It should be obvious that such a purpose--like all stated "purposes"--is susceptible to manipulation, distortion, and abuse. Yet, as humans, we are stuck with the need for a purpose, but are given no completely trustworthy formulation of what that purpose should be.

Steve Pavlina's method above reminds me of an interesting exercise utilised by the late John David Garcia, which he called "autopoiesis." To summarise the method, a person will ask for a solution to an important question. The person will then discard the first, automatic thought that comes into the mind, and wait for other answers. The person will most eventually recognise which answers are relevant and useful. It is important to find a quiet place, and have plenty of time available. Garcia taught autopoiesis as a group exercise, which does add an element of expectation that a solo exercise may lack.

The salient feature of mainstream western existence--within academia, as portrayed in the media, and as experienced around the many coffee machines and water coolers of my life--is a lack of meaningful purpose for most westerners. That may be a partial explanation for the merely feeble correlation between affluence and happiness.

Young westerners are fixated on wealth, comfort, and fame. If their lives do not provide these things, it is easy to turn to mind altering chemicals. The trend toward an increase in narcissism, combined with an increase in binge drinking, and extreme drug use, suggests that rather than seeking a deep and meaningful purpose in life, young westerners are looking for escape from unpleasantness.

A later post will discuss the relationship between political activism, religious activism (including terrorism), and the youthful need to "make a difference."



Image Courtesy of Journeys With Purpose

Brainwashing, Consciousness-Raising, and Cult Indoctrination

"Brainwashing" came to be recognized as a term around 1950, in Mao's attempts to transform revolutionary China. The term came into use in the western world in the USA during the Korean War of the 1950s, when it became known that the Chinese communists were using brainwashing techniques on western prisoners of war.

What is brainwashing?

In the late 1950s, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton studied former prisoners of Korean and Chinese war camps. He determined that they'd undergone a multistep process that began with attacks on the prisoner's sense of self and ended with what appeared to be a change in beliefs. Lifton ultimately defined a set of steps involved in the brainwashing cases he studied:

1. Assault on identity
2. Guilt
3. Self-betrayal
4. Breaking point
5. Leniency
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling of guilt
8. Releasing of guilt
9. Progress and harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth

Each of these stages takes place in an environment of isolation, meaning all "normal" social reference points are unavailable, and mind-clouding techniques like sleep deprivation and malnutrition are typically part of the process. There is often the presence or constant threat of physical harm, which adds to the target's difficulty in thinking critically and independently.

Source.

These methods should be familiar to anyone who has experienced indoctrination into a cult, or the political indoctrination known as "consciousness raising." Consciousness raising is a method of "programming" a person into an extremist philosophy--and is common practise in many leftist and nazi-type organisations. In fact the original method of programming for radical feminists was consciousness raising. It is important to separate the individual from her previous "program", in order to program her into the new ideology.

Our study groups were radicalizing our own consciousness and it suddenly became apparent that women could be doing on a mass scale what we were doing in our own group, that the next logical radical action would be to get the word out about what we were doing. This kind of study would be part of what was necessary to achieve the liberation of women on a mass scale. Source.

Cult indoctrination and indoctrination in muslim extremism follows much the same form as the other types of brainwashing.

* Breaking sessions: that pressure a person until they crack.
* Changing values: to change what is right and wrong.
* Confession: to leave behind the undesirable past.
* Entrancement: open the mind and limit rational reflection.
* Engagement: that draws a person in.
* Exhaustion: so they are less able to resist persuasion.
* Guilt: about the past that they can leave behind.
* Higher purpose: associate desirability with a higher purpose.
* Identity destruction: to make space for the new identity.
* Information control: that blocks out dissuading thoughts.
* Incremental conversion: shifting the person one step at a time.
* Isolation: separating people from dissuasive messages.
* Love Bomb: to hook in the lonely and vulnerable.
* Persistence: never giving up, wearing you down.
* Special language: that offers the allure of power and new meaning.
* Thought-stopping: block out distracting or dissuading thoughts.

Source.
Anyone reading the above list of characteristics of "conversion techniques" will notice similarities between cult techniques, political ideological techniques, and techniques used against prisoners of war in the Korean and Vietnamese wars.
The sad truth is, in leftist dominated universities in the western world, as in muslim and extreme fundamentalist religious schools, such "consciousness raising" types of brainwashing are routinely used in many classes given by women's studies, ethnic studies, political science, and many other departments where political and religious indoctrination is considered more important than preparing the students to be fit to meet the future.