Futile Hope in the Age of Desperation
Unreasonable hope won’t correct our problems.
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 18, 2020
We have a huge and widening gap between where we are and where we want to be. There are a diverse plethora of causes for this gap, but those causes are another discussion. This discussion is about bridging the gap and what resources are needed and available to accomplish it.
This is a nasty problem with high complexity and nonlinearity. It is yet another hyperobject that may be the death of us.
Logically we need to address the problem at the planetary level first and then move down to specific instances. The problem is the hyperobjectivity of the problem. There is no linear path from great to small or small to great in these situations. This problem falls into the universe of quantum mechanics controlled by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Just as quantum mechanics broke the classical physics model of exact simultaneous valuations being assigned to the same physical quantities, the exact components of hyperobjects cannot be determined simultaneously. We can know one or two but not all, and in the internal relationships, only potentialities may be identified.
This analogy only describes these problems as unavailable for divide and conquer solutions. Unlike fractal examples of chaos, these problems do not seem to scale in replication. As a result, there may be no broad generalized model of these problems that can be scaled up or down. We are stuck with a similar hairball at whatever scale we approach these problems to start at any level.
Since one of the biggest disasters in the 21st century is the collapse of the US economic, political, and cultural model, we can start there. This does have some structural similarity to failures in Great Britain, India, Poland, Turkey, and other older examples of 18th-century representative government republics. There is a close similarity with Russia as the descendent of the USSR failure that was initially perceived as a US success, but that has proven to be a timing difference in failure.
But this requires an inventory of both working and failed components of the US model. That is already problematic as the criteria for judging functional or failed has lost an objective standard culturally. If it ain’t broke, the old rule of don’t fix it is an example of a working standard.
A significant minority of the US and other Western model states’ populations have accepted the fascist denial of all knowledge except power and oppression. Power is sought only to be able to oppress.
States that succumb to this do so in reaction to an extreme and growing disparity in asset distribution and opportunity. The fatal flaw in this is the inevitable increase in asset disparity requiring harsher police state oppression. The limited opportunities for power become tighter and tighter with race and ethnic origin as the broad filters walling off as many as possible.
A secondary failing is that the simplistic focus on greed and power attracts those who could not meet normal standards for positions in the power hierarchy but become emotionally outraged at their exclusion. The resulting hierarchy becomes one of incompetence focused on greed and social revenge.
The system becomes a magnet for sociopaths whose goals are anything but general wellbeing. The constant official acting out of social revenge against competence, expertise, minorities, and targeted ethnicities reinforces the population with the same anger by allowing them to partake vicariously as supporters and voters. That this is obviously self-destructive for those people is ignored in the thrill of vicarious power. These are irrational but intensely emotional alliances.
Once this becomes endemic in a culture or state, there is no easy correction. The inevitability of violence in cycles of reaction means the nation-state must collapse internally into aggressive disorder or be overthrown by external forces. The rise of the fascist regime has already destroyed a representative authority's ability to reform the system peacefully.
The US is at the point of realization of this. While the popular will removed Trump as the head of a fascist regime greatly aided by his growing insanity and massive pandemic failures, the economic and political disintegration continues. The seething mass of those whose perceived right to privilege is threatened now leaderless, but not for long.
The complete take over of one of the two allowed US parties by sociopaths, fascists, and racists destroyed the 18th-century political system. It was never designed to manage a huge and increasingly diverse nation-state in a planetary crisis. That system assumed racial homogeneity at the top and minimal representation. The original components dedicated to maintaining slavery cannot be removed without complete deconstruction of American societies.
The fear of another civil war illustrates this daily. The first one was never ended, and the structural causes are inherent in the Consitution and the founders' assumptions. This is what makes the hope being layered on Biden so tenuous. Biden is a patch being applied to a collapsing nation as part of a collapsing planetary civilization, and the majority of the population knows this. A teetering tower is not a firm foundation.
The US federal political system is a failed component. The grossly distorted economy that has led to the social and political failures needs to go with it to the trash.
But the administrative and mildly representative local government systems work in many places where the criminal national party has not taken them over. Simultaneously, the federal civil service, where it has not been corrupted politically, works reasonably well in delivering diverse social, health, and educational services.
The result will be another terrible year and, almost certainly, a terrible decade as we sort this out or fail to sort it out. At this point, our success rate is not good.
As everyone is aware, Biden has maintained that he would change little or nothing in his administration. He is afraid to expand the Supreme Court to correct the politicization of that body. He is afraid of the Green New Deal because it is a broad set of guidelines based on what people need, want, and can depend on scientifically.
We need a planet of local administrative units custom to each local and cultural group in regional alliances and joined in a planetary alliance. Politicians dedicated to making fortunes and wielding power at the nation-state levels are not interested in that.
Obviously, there is no way to achieve this without a major restructuring of human governments first. Biden isn’t going to do that, or much of anything else other than trying to get the pandemic under control, and that will probably exhaust him and everyone else over the next year.
There seems to be growing talk of how to deal with the US problem so that Biden can handle it indirectly. I won’t link to any of these. Still, the general theme is to start with the mess of the Trump regime’s criminality by appointing a special prosecutor to handle investigating and then prosecuting all in the Trump regime. This will, of course, take years, but that is fine.
The important step is to use special prosecutors and blue-ribbon panels to review and make recommendations for reforming the federal political system. This should include a panel to evaluate and implement a biometric digital ID utilizing emerging international systems. These are being designed to prevent abuse by governments while ensuring individual privacy of information.
The goal is to give every person identity on the planet with everyone in control of their information. The purpose is to give everyone a voice and equal access to services. The usual fascists and criminal opportunists are already howling in fear and threatening horrors. Not much to be done about that as these people neatly place themselves in the problem population.
There will probably need to be a status for people who refuse their ID, although most will accept it after struggling with losing rights and access to community services. It is a ubiquitous science fiction model to have lawless communities for the people who want to live that way. Probably an orbital city would be good, and they could manage their own environment. But what would happen to that is another problem.
Removing the electoral college, replacing census with a fully independent planetary service, AI-based, identifying all populations, and delivering automatic voter registration for local communities. This works very well when a planetary services biometric ID provides electronic voting traceable to each person. This is the kind of rigidly protecting tracking we need to maintain the human population through coming mass migrations to cooler climates and more habitable regions.
A series of panels and, where needed, special prosecutors can begin the redesign of human administration. If we can’t begin to figure this out, we are dead.
