Cyreenik Says
It's summer time, an election year, and food and fuel prices are soaring. Yup... sounds like Panic and Blunder time in the US.
(The only thing disqualifying this from being a Panic and Blunder situation is that these are familiar problems. This scenario is an awful lot like the Oil Crisis and Stagflation times of the mid-70's... which many of America's older current leaders lived through... so we may see some sport thinking here rather than panic thinking... and that would be very good.)
The politicians are jumping in to the floating ideas pool with both feet, and there are dozens and dozens of spooky ideas being proposed.
Keep in mind that proposing spooky ideas is a good thing... because in every thousand spooky ideas thought up, there are some real gems that make long lasting good contributions to our welfare. (the rest are best forgotten quickly and quietly) Proposing spooky ideas goes on all the time, that's what a community's cranks and wacko's exist for. So, proposing spooky ideas is a good thing.
What makes a Panic and Blunder situation is when one or two of the spooky ideas that are really spooky, not great-gems-waiting-to-be-discovered, get acted upon, not laughed away as ridiculous. This happens when the community gets scared, gets panicked, listens to the spooky idea and says, "Hey... nowadays, that doesn't sound so bad!"
Here are some thoughts on spooky ideas being tossed around in the merry month of June.
Ever since petroleum oil replaced whale and vegetable oil as premium lamp oil, the oil industry has lived under the Curse of Being Important. (This Premium Lamp Oil Time was just before the start of the auto era, which only made the curse worse.)
Since the 1880's and the rise of the Standard Oil company, the American community has cultivated a mythology of evil oil companies, and any time gasoline prices rise quickly, that hoary mythology gets raised up by the media and scrubbed off for a new round of playing bogeyman.
The problem with bringing up the evil oil company mythology at every price rise is that it distracts from looking at the real world causes of oil price rises, and this promotes a Blunder response. For instance, this time the root cause of the dramatic price rise is inflation... since the sub-prime mortgage crisis put a deep chill on loaning money, the demand for money is down, and that means there are now more dollars chasing fewer goods... which is the textbook definition of inflation. For other current event reasons, such as crop failures and India and China industrializing, this inflation has shown up mostly as rising food and fuel costs.
But, the mythology concentrates community attention on oil companies as the root of the problem, not other issues. In this environment, if action is taken, and it's taken against oil companies, it's sure to be a Blunder.
George Carlin died this month, and I've been watching clips of his comedy routines on Google video.
He was insightful in picking out places where American society was having significant problems. For instance, he did a routine on airport security, one of my pet peeves.
I watched that routine... my feeling was that he analyzed the problem well: that the TSA was there mostly to make passengers feel better, not to find dangerous stuff.
But I felt his choices for solutions to the problems he talked about were not great. He tended to pull his solutions from socialist mythology. In that routine, for instance, he said that big bad government was the root of the problem. That I now disagree with. (Ten years ago, I would have agreed with him.) These days I feel that governments support the sentiments of their communities... even ruthless dictatorial governments.
These days I feel that if a government kicks ass and takes names, it's because important parts of the community want it to kick ass and take names, and this makes me different from the George Carlins of the world. I feel that big, bad government is a symptom of a community sickness, not a cause of it. In the case of the TSA, I blame ignorant, emotional passengers who want the government doing something they can see.
The other feeling I got from watching the clips was that George got more and more whiny as the years went by, which made him less funny, less entertaining, and less effective as an idea mover. In his most recent clips, he was sounding too much like just another old despairing liberalist with an ax to grind, not like someone adding insight to deep, knotty social problems.
I think he was good, and he talked well about important things, but I think in the end, he "lost it" by becoming too bitter.
The Glouchester Pregnancy Pact was a curious bit of news for June. Apparently... perhaps... perhaps not... a group of teenage girls in Glouchester, Massachusetts decided to become pregnant and support each other as they raised their children. I put it in such hesitant terms because the media reports of this story have become confused as the story has evolved. The one clear fact is that Glouchester High School did have a spike in pregnant students this year.
The media are calling the pact bizarre, and the local authorities are now calling it nonexistent. Now... if it existed, if it was a pact to get pregnant and raise the children... I will try to explain it in terms of human instincts. In so doing, I will be trying to explain why it may be an unusual event, but not bizarre.
Recall that the human brain we live with today is well-suited for living in Neolithic Age villages, not in modern civilization. Well-suited means that it has a combination of instincts and thinking ability which allows the humans it inhabits to survive well in the wide range of climates and conditions that humans adapted to around the world... but adapted to using just Stone Age (Neolithic) technologies.
Instincts tell a person how to act in "usual situations", learning tells a person how to act in unusual situations. Keep in mind that civilized living as we experience it today is an unusual situation, it is not an average situation in the Neolithic Village lifestyle repertoire, so an awful lot of what we do in civilized living is based on learning. Today we learn a lot, but the instincts are ready to serve when they are called upon.
Instincts act by making a person feel "warm and fuzzy" about doing something. As an example, most children watching romantic scenes in movies squirm and say, "Ewww... mushy stuff." When they get older, an instinct will unfold, and as adults watching the same scene, many will instead think, "How romantic." This is a famous example of an instinct unfolding.
We humans have many, many instincts. The two that may have powered the Glouchester Incident concern: a) matriarchy making and b) the right time to have children.
Humans have an instinct to form matriarchal communities. These are communities in which women form the cultural center. The women control the day-to-day activities, even when men control "the big stuff" of the community. Some examples of modern day matriarchies are:
In matriarchal communities, the women gather and control the day-to-day activities of the women and children. Matriarchy was also common in Neolithic Village lifestyle, so it's not surprising that being part of a matriarchy can bring on "warm and fuzzy" feelings in human thinking. If the girls of Glouchester were forming a matriarchy, that could have been creating lots of warm fuzzies for them.
Looking at Neolithic village lifestyle again, when times were good, women started having their children young -- young meaning, in their late teens. If times were hard, then child raising was delayed into the early-to-mid twenties. So, once again, if these girls feel they are experiencing good times, and forming a satisfying matriarchy could do that, then thinking about having children will bring on even more warm fuzzy feelings.
So, these two Neolithic Village instincts working together could explain why this Glouchester pact happened... if it did.
I see it as an odd event, but not bizarre.
That's what I have for June in Cyreenik Says.
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