Why Nothing Can Ever Change
===========================
Craig Hubley, 2007-02-02 (Groundhog Day)

Many activists spend their lives pursuing change in
the institutions, structures, cliques and groups that
govern and manage whatever they can control. Most
seem to prevent serious change in society by sheer
inertia. But inertia is a concept in physics that is
only inexactly applied in biology, sociology, ethics
or politics, and becomes quite metaphorical in civics,
where revolutions have been common enough in history.

Revolutionary theories were the currency of the 19th
century and played out in every way in the 20th. In
the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Warsaw Pact from
1989 through the 1990s, many people saw hope that it
was not necessarily violence that defined a
revolution. Until that time, it wouild have been hard
to name more than a very few examples of deep changes
that occurred without violent resistance by the
rulers.

Today, however, the revolutions required are social,
cultural, and economic, and not explicitly political
or military. Developed nations must consume less and
rebuild community infrastructure despite their lack of
actual community, while the less developed ones must
invest more in each child even as they die of pandemic
diseases and lack any support mechanisms for the aged.

It is difficult enough to actually find practical and
equitable answers to such problems. Once discovered,
however, it becomes relatively easy to ratify them as
treaties or laws, though this might take some decades.

What, then, prevents the change from actually,
finally, happening? What are the deep sources of
inertia in both the developed and developing world
that prevent change to institutions, and continue to
propagate status quo relationships unto our dooms?

When the heritor species look back on Easter Planet[1]
or the New Permian[2] from the future, what will they
see as the fundamental barriers that prevented
adaptation? Why didn't we change in time? Why did we
resort to revolutions that went wrong? Let's ask that
same question now, and review Why Nothing Can Ever
Change:

1. fulltime staff: the employment model defeats any
attempt to actually achieve the goal of an institution
since if it succeeded, the staff would lose their jobs

2. social services: the basic process of keeping less
and less fit people alive just to show off as pious or
rich or medical geniuses, which eventually overloads
the society and defeats itself due to genetic damage

3. celebrity: the inbuilt preference to pay far more
attention to young pretty females and aggressive or
funny or powerful males than their wisdom deserves,
due to the sexual opportunities or threats they
represent; marginalization of introverts and thinkers
as a result, impossibility of digesting anything more
than a sound bite at a time from anyone not on "A"
list

4. imagery: humans, especially males, are inherently
visual and easily fooled by graphs, charts, PDFs, porn
and PowerPoint; none of these things present anything
real but we believe in them because they are pretty,
or at least do not challenge them because they seem
too slick and finished to be safe to argue against

5. bunkers: whether it's cronyism, nepotism, facing a
common threat in the past, groupthink, xenophobia of a
religious or ethnic nature, or just private ownership,
a clique becomes a bunker when it believes its members
more than empirical reality checks, e.g. Bush denying
climate change, the Catholic Church denying pedophilia

6. human rights: the list of rights cannot decrease
only increase, even if some of them prove extremely
problematic to non-humans (like the right to hunt or
keep animals) or overload ecosystems (like the right
to travel or play golf) or even to other humans (like
the right to bear arms); each right comes with some
obligation to uphold it and prevent others depriving
you of it; but the energy and patience and ability to
take on risks to uphold rights is limited so we have
to drop some once in a while in order to add others...
but we have extraordinary difficulty in a culture
built on writing in actually dropping stupid rights...
a "rights" model must fail on a global scale but the
societies that are committed to it will all fail first

7. human body: if it's made in God's image, then, God
must have cravings for transfat, steroids and botox...
or maybe never saw a fast food ad or magazine cover...
We are unable to even discuss changing our bodies by
deliberate breeding or genetic choices, yet we are
quite happy to eradicate even close human relatives
(who are probably closer to God's image than we are by
now...) for being too hairy or using sign language to
speak instead of lying on TV. The human body in its
present form is (on average) too big, too clumsy, too
prone to chill or overheat, unable to store water, too
able to store fat, unable to consume grasses or leaves
or sunlight or deuterium or fossil fuels directly...
it needs improvement. We also age inelegantly, would
it not be better to live healthy to 80 and then drop
stone dead rather than start to slow down at 60 and
slowly get decrepit until we are on expensive life
support at 90 while meanwhile kids die of
malnutrition?

8. human brain: the brain is too prone to crave fat
and sugar and drugs, and to get addicted or anxious;
meditation should be built into the brain especially
in a crowded society but it isn't - yet; reciprocity
expectations, calm and serene happiness, even
addiction urges themselves, can be directly turned on
and off by stimulating parts of the brain; without
the power for the average person to do this, we have
no hope of changing any of the nasty trends in society

9. hierarchy: the two stupidest ways to do anything
are to have a committee do it by talking to itself (5)
or by trying to follow a single leader on several
issues; people tend to be good at only one thing, and
even if it's not just being famous already (3) it will
not be enough justification to continue listening to
them as the group tends to other problems; this may
have made sense in neolithic tribes with only one big
person who was smart enough to kill their challengers
reliably, but it makes no sense in the Internet era...
we need to recruit the best minds very quickly and get
them collaborating, predicting, betting, voting... and
to replace hierarchy with markets. But our languages
and ranks and power structure are all based on simple
hierarchy, and there's no chance of changing that
soon.

10. institutions: how ridiculous is it that unliving
organizations get to pretend they have rights like
free expression? so ridiculous that it can undo any
advances on everything else, because the best thing
for a living thing is not to rely on an institution
(see 1 above) and not to let itself become dependent
on one (see 1 and 2 and 6 above). But imagine no
possessions... I wonder if you can...

11. possessions: the most obsolete institution of
all. While there are good reasons to hold someone
responsible for what happens to or with every
artificial object, in a high communication society
there is no reason someone can't insure themselves
against stupid errors and then just use what's there.
This would work out fine in a society of reasonable
people where no one got too attached to any particular
way of providing the service, but as long as we think
in terms of products and objects, they'll be fetish
objects; just go look at eBay and see how attached
people are to their junk and how much the story on an
object is accorded value that just isn't really there
from a utility ("use value") view

12. language: Shakespeare was the first to write down
possibly as many as 1/3 of the words he used; today
we revere him as the greatest poet and human observer
but we forbid anyone else to propose and propagate new
words other than by trying to own them as
trademarks... admittedly English has too many words,
but some of them also need to be eliminated as useless
and we have no way to do it; meanwhile in French
there is at least a group of people trying to figure
out if French accurately reflects reality or not (the
academie francaise) and to propose changes if it does
not; China had this too when Maoists were in charge,
and Russia under Lenin and Stalin and their
successors. Spanish and other Latin languages were
influenced heavily by Catholic doctrine, Sanskrit by
Buddhism, Arabic by Islam; But so many inabilities to
communicate are caused by the different way each of
these carve up the world that we can't undo it all;

As long as we speak these languages we will fight and
invade each other just as the previous users of these
languages did. Why should we carve up the world the
same way and expect to come to different conclusions?

Voting is a subset of the language problem. See
"ballot box question"...

13. money: it's how we decide who gets to decide...
the single most obsolete technology there is, and not
the paper money part (that part works!), the creation
of it by banks (more) and governments (less) to
confuse a standard of deferred payment (how you repay
debts) with a medium of exchange (how you pay bills)
with a unit of account (how you can tell how much you
have) with a store of value (how you can more or less
safely put aside wealth to use later). These have
nothing to do with each other inherently, there are
plenty of instruments that do two or three of those
jobs but not all four (you can buy paintings for
instance as a store of value but it doesn't do the
other jobs, and gold is a store of value and is used
often as a unit of account, and you could conceivably
use it as coins to trade in, but forget denominating
debts in it these days...). We have good reasons to
modify stored value or debt value without changing our
account or exchange system, but money as a technology
makes that impossible, forcing for instance the poor
to worry about their wages going down just because the
assets of the rich have to be devalued. The delicate
balances that make a money system work aren't easy to
change except by massive wars, and then more wars are
likely to break out due to the failures of the system.

Given how much we rely on it to settle our disputes,
money is now the main source of inertia. It's the
main reason Why Nothing Can Ever Change. It's not
religion, it's not technology, it's not law nor even
political ideology, it's the obsolete technology of
money creation and destruction, which is poisoning us
by encouraging a buildup of GHGs, toxins, biocides,
mutagens, tetragens, food for competing organisms like
algae and anaerobic bacteria, and monocultures easily
invaded by insects and diseases that then turn on us.

Nothing can ever change because money exists. It has
to not exist for a while, or be at least drastically
devalued and chaotically challenged as an institution,
on every level from bank robbery to bank buildings
falling down to the ground to bank networks failing
and bank machines dumping cash out to the homeless, to
convince us that the numbers really are meaningless
and unreliable and we need a new system to decide who
gets to decide... now.


[1] Easter Island was deforested and then depopulated
in a disastrous war that followed immediately on the
loss of the last trees. One archaeological finding on
the island is particularly compelling evidence that
there was no feedback whatosever from reality back to
the rituals that defined the daily life of the people:
there were partly-carved stone heads in the quarries
that could not possibly have ever been rolled into
place on the hillsides, as there were not enough trees
to provide the logs required to do that rolling. This
would have been obvious to the stone carvers, had they
actually been looking at the trees at all before
beginning their head carving. It is not difficult to
imagine that, on Easter Planet, the last scraps of
steel and last fuel would be used to make a very large
gas tank for a new model of GMC Hummer...

[2] The Permian Extinction, which cleared the way for
the rise of dinosaurs, destroyed over 99 per cent of
all species on Earth including all large mammals.
While this may have been due to an asteroid impact,
other such impacts did not cause such widespread
extinctions. The dominant theory of this extinction
is that global warming, similar to today's, was caused
by runaway growth of certain organisms, leading to the
proliferation of anaerobic bacteria in the seas that,
for at least a while, turned them putrid and reeking
of sulphur dioxide, a gas deadly to any large mammals.
The world ocean would have become a toxic swamp.
It's unclear how this situation was reversed but it
may have involved salt buildup in the oceans, an
evolution in blue-green algae to compete better, or
some other geological or basic biological or
atmosphere change. In any case, it was not something
the mammals could anticipate, prevent or reverse. The
only difference between the original Permian and now
is that humans can anticipate, if not prevent or
reverse, the change they are making to the atmosphere
and the corresponding dangerous changes to the oceans.







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