New World + Old Ways = Danger

As we stumble towards the gradual realisation what climate change has in store for us, as energy resources become more and more expensive, as political violence on any scale has us in thrall, the calls emerge for radical solutions. In tandem commentators judge the state of the world according to their predilections, pressure groups add their shouts, and the media grab the chance to sell their wares through juicy headlines.

So how about an objective assessment based on how the mind works. Let’s skip the technical details for once and list the features how they present themselves. Feel free to interpret the order any way you like.

During the past few decades the West underwent a considerable shift. From a state of assertion and confidence the emphasis is on a navel-gazing self-recrimination regardless of the actual content. In a reverse of the original phrase, the splinter in one’s own eye is wailed about as the beam in someone other’s is disregarded.

Our so-called materialism is seen as one cause of the world’s ills. We, materialists? If you want to see real materialism in action go to Mumbai, to Shanghai, to Dubai. Which other demographic has as many libraries per head of population, as many museums, as many opera houses, as many art galleries? Who has the most philanthropists?

Slavery is used as an example of our belligerent arrogance. True, in geographical terms Europe brought slavery to the Americas. But from the very beginning the Portuguese availed themselves of the services offered at the time by Arab traders as they visited the western coasts of Africa. And who abolished it in the end? It started as early as the 12th century in London and by the 19th century it was in full swing throughout Europe and its dominions. Can anyone else claim the same?

The inward-looking contraction results in artistic expertise chased down as graffiti in our cities while standing in awe before primitive flecks of mud on some bark.

It results in youngsters lauded for their ability to swear (no doubt derived from their adults’ genuflection before violent music made untouchable due to their ethnic origin) while society bemoans their increasing inability to string together a few words in a comprehensible manner.

The ideological side of feminism forced our entire society to embrace the fundamental attitude of the female in changing one’s environment in favour of the vulnerable infant. Can’t negotiate a curve in the road? Blame the council. Can’t handle your alcohol? Impose a blanket restriction on the industry.

Oh yes, those drugs. So what if a few individuals end up burying themselves in their own haze; does this mean we spend hundreds of millions on police, the courts, feed black markets world-wide and fight the latest weapons of militias which they bought with the proceeds of our matron-state idealism?

That well-worn phrase “If only one child ... then ... has been worthwhile” has led to a downward-spiral towards ineptitude. A child falls of a swing and that swing is made safer. After a while another falls off and it’s made safer still. The ongoing education - if that’s the right word - into more and more cosseted scenarios produces a population of dysfunctional simpletons.

The same goes for the human eros. Out goes the cry “sexualisation of children!” and up rise the psychotics who superimpose their own fear and loathing upon the rest of us. Naturally the media follow suit because they know what sells. Human beings are sexualised in the uterus as soon as genitals form and the rest of the body is built around them. Later on the psychosis manifests when bloated bodies, shot-up people, and torture pose no problem on the evening news but a naked body brings on the hysteria.

Any state of affairs poses its own problems. Today’s high-level complexity disenfranchises many because they can’t keep up. Yet it is those left behind who are often allowed to call the tune. Rather than gathering our will and confront the challenge with our face to the wind the answer is sought in defeatist retreat.

Sure there are issues, dangers even. Want to know about a real problem? Revisit, if you can, the time of the Hundred Years War in Europe, the sweeps of the plague, the potato famine. Those generations may have had no more than a hammer and a hoe, but they made it.

Humans can be dirty and wild, sometimes downright stupid. But they also have a will.

In these times of pressures yet again, let’s not forget that.

Once again: everything has a cost

Everything.

When an activity that has settled into a custom needs to be changed the inevitable costs already incurred are posited against what it takes to build the new. Not all of those are visible.

Just as a current scenario can suggest the expenditure to those directly involved but will only become noteworthy to the rest once the link between the activity and its effects throughout the system has been made, so does the change hide its wider influence in the initial stages. It is difficult enough to stretch one's awareness towards the unfamiliar, much harder still to define something that has not yet substantiated itself.

A process has settled in when its host system acquired a general balance as a consequence. A modification upsets that balance. At that point the question becomes: in whose favour will decisions be made?

In favour of the status quo and its adherents, or in favour of those who would benefit from the new?

Resetting the equation costs. Take childcare.

Traditionally the costs were born by the mother, the wife, added to the efforts required of the father, the husband, to maintain his family. Under feminism women moved into the workforce and despite the added income the sumtotal of resources (which includes time) proved insufficient to fulfill the equation.

Outsiders emerged and now childcare centres dot the urban landscape. They cost, and since most people are not happy with a perfect balance of their ledgers they want to see some profit. If in the home the credit and debit sides are neutralised because husband and wife do not profit against each other, the same cannot be said for outsourced activities. Each activity unit - in this case each child - represents another profit margin for the childcare centre. Hence the more children per mother, the greater the imbalance per household.

The indirect effects on a society's balance sheet have not yet been expressed in actual numbers, although their sheer existence is recognised readily enough.

Increasingly disparate family ledgers demand actions from the government and when given result in common debit. When the money has to be recouped somehow up go the taxes. A bigger tax burden triggers more demands for relief, and when governments respond in comes the new debit. And so on.

Sooner or later a solution must be found and again, in the end in whose favour will the decision be made? Whatever the perception may be, whatever ideology drives this or that side, there will be costs.

If we make home-centred child rearing our initial reference, and if the costs of reverting to the traditional standard are considered too high, the spiraling aspects of outsourcing need addressing.

Within our reference the ledgers were balanced inside the family, but the additional burden on the father was shared by all the fathers. Indirectly the costs were thus spread across the whole of society. Such a system worked for millennia.

The salient point here is not the home - after all, 'home' means a lot of different things across the variety of cultures - but the aspect of commonality.

State-run, in other words, public child care absorbs these costs in effectively the same way the obligations of traditional fathers were diffused across society.

Free-marketeers may not like this, but in the absence of any plausible solution from their side they should reconsider.

Sooner or later the decision will have to be made. Childcare is one example, but any activity that is as essential as it is potentially inflationary falls under the same heading.

The communal aspect of communism took second place to its dictatorial ideology. But replace the party hacks with math-literate technocrats and who knows, we just might have equality for once.

Would you like an extra $173 in your pocket?

By the end of the 2007 financial year the war in Iraq has cost Australia $2.94 billion (that's nothing compared to the United States which would have spent as much as $938 billion in our currency).

For Afghanistan the Australian Government's budget was $290 million in the year 2006-7 and for 2007-8 an additional $703 million was allocated to be spent over the next four years. Therefore at the end of the 2008 financial year the amount poured into that enterprise would have been around $466 million.

By the middle of 2008 Australia's population has reached 21 million. If the government had not engaged in those two wars and today suddenly decided to hand over the money to every Australian man, woman and child they all would have received $173 in their pockets. (Given the cross-over of timelines you might say that's playing with figures, but the fact is the money, as it turns out, has been used after all)

If $173 doesn't sound like much take the overall view: the government would have had an extra $3.6 billion at its disposal to be spent on its people.

Let's say someone approached the prime minister with a proposal that required almost $4 billion to be implemented. There must be pretty good reasons to prevent being shown out the door there and then.

But marketers know this is not how it's done. You don't tell a customer, "Come and spend a thousand bucks!". You lure them into the shop on the premise of buying an item worth a fraction, and hope they spend enough time to get enticed into filling their trolley as they walk through the aisles.

It's a form of progression lock, the phenomenon of an event continuing through its paces because the preliminaries have been set. It happens with shopping, with urban planning, with large-scale contracts. Start at a convenient point and progress from there, because eventually the costs of retracing your steps outweigh the expenses piling up.

Nevertheless, some consideration must have been given to the ultimate viability of implementing an idea that involved moving into a place like Iraq or Afghanistan in order to remodel those nations. Had the initial evaluation involved the Otoom model the data gleaned would have painted a critical picture. In the case of Iraq see the notes on a US report and its British equivalent.

As for Afghanistan, its history alone would have given pause for thought. Here is a region that for centuries was beset by tribal warfare and conflict. Every now and then a strong-man regime was able to subdue the factions but it never lasted more than a few decades. Apart from Asian expansions the British tried during their Anglo-Afghan wars in the 18/19th century, more recently it was the Russians, and now the US and its allies are at it once again. None of them succeeded since firstly, although an army may achieve a military victory that does not translate into societal assimilation in the long run (even the ancient Romans learnt their lessons in this regard, and they too build a lot of infrastructure throughout their colonies). Secondly, the demographics of this world differentiate themselves through their respective customs and their rigidity, their religion and its pervasiveness, and their degree of intransigence when it comes to side-stepping the traditional links between family and tribe. If those factors were negligible an invasion would not have been necessary in the first place. And if they are not what is the point of invading unless the reasons are only temporary and sufficiently pressing?

Yet Iraq did happen, and then Afghanistan. The conventional approach would have entailed military-style reasoning, the spectre of terrorism, and, in the absence of a comprehensive means to analyse the cognitive/societal conditions on the ground, a considerable amount of optimism stemming from good old-fashioned projection: we are happy with our Western democracy, so why can't they be?

The information based on the Otoom model had been around since late 2003. Why it struggles to be taken seriously here and there is a topic in itself. Quite apart from any personal frustration the damage covers more than useless and damaging wars (as if that wasn't enough!) - there is also the question of diminishing oil resources.

If the issue of peak oil would really be taken seriously the huge amount of fuel necessary for the Iraq and Afghanistan adventure alone should ring the alarm bells.

One can argue about the precise figures marking the gradual disappearance of that resource. One could even question the original premise, the Hubbert peak theory, even though it proved itself correct already.

What cannot be argued with is the stark difference between the rates of creation and consumption of oil. In addition the onset of scarcity gives rise to speculation and perception which in some cases can evolve towards panic. Against these latter factors the amount of oil still in the ground somewhere recedes into the background.

Long before the actual volume of remaining oil reserves will appear in the media, long before the number of countries struggling with supplying their own population has risen to double-digit figures, the perception-induced panic will have surpassed a few demonstrations here or there. At that point we can either retreat into 19th century novels or wake up to the inevitable consequences of disregarding the realistic analysis of demographic mindsets under precarious conditions.

World crisis: food and oil

In his opening remarks at a press briefing after the UN conference in Rome on the international food crisis Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world to adopt a series of reform measures. According to him the initiatives will cost as much as US$15 to $20 billion a year once the process gathers momentum.

Also at the conference the use of biofuels had come under fire. Once heralded as one answer to dwindling oil supplies it now emerges as a major concern for countries which see the issue from a different perspective.

On the previous Wednesday the UN World Food Program announced it is providing an additional US$1.2 billion in food assistance to help the tens of millions of people in more than 60 nations who are most affected by the crisis.

Take Ethiopia as an example. As the figures from the International Food Policy Research Institute show, agriculture makes up about half of the country's total goods and services, and at least eight out of every ten workers in Ethiopia are involved in agricultural activities. Only 24 percent of the population have access to safe drinking water, 47 percent of children under the age of five are malnourished, and for every 1000 children born there 174 will die before their fifth birthday. At the same time Ethiopia's population is expected to increase from 67 million to 100 million in less than 20 years.

Now shift the focus to Madagascar. In a paper studying the link between agricultural performance and rural poverty Bart Mintena and Christopher Barrett point out that higher rates of adoption of improved agricultural technologies and therefore higher crop yields also make for lower food prices. Improved agricultural production is seen as an important aspect in reducing the high poverty and food insecurity currently suffered by that nation's rural population.

On to Australia. In this first-world country the rises in the price of food and oil are causing the spending habits of people to change [1]. Suddenly many goods are seen as luxuries one can do without. In Queensland retail clothing sales are down by 20 percent, domestic appliances and recorded music sales are down by 7 percent, and watch and jewellery sales decreased by 20 percent. As the chief executive officer of the Queensland Hotels Association is quoted as saying, "the mood of the nation has changed".

Whenever overall conditions change significantly the response comes firstly from the general population; the ruling class follows later. To what extent it responds (if at all) depends on the force of the mindset pushing for change as well as the severity of the conditions themselves. Be they issues such as relating to sustainability, climate change, or civil rights, governments are beset with inertia.

On the other hand, if the new conditions are sufficiently stark that their effects are impossible to hide behind the official curtains, even governments begin to act. Hence the increasing number of conferences dealing with the world's dwindling food and oil resources. It will only be a matter of time when in the West the initial reluctance by individuals to spend will have moved across to official policy.

Over the last decades various pressure groups have managed to persuade their governments to formulate laws which address their specific concerns. From the readiness to provide compensation for the results of irresponsible acts, to upholding the morals of self-appointed guardians, to throwing cocoons around dysfunctional demographics, they all found their way into the public environment implicitly approved by and resourced through Mr. and Ms. Citizen.

The effects can be seen on an almost daily basis. They could manifest in needing to finance an additional 255 paramedics by the Queensland government to take care of the expected increase in calls for help, where over 100 nuisance and hoax calls are made to the 000 number every week [2].

They could further exacerbate the pressure on the federal government trying to deal with the escalating costs of child care, with carers caught between the need to provide an income and the obligation to rear their children [3], a situation induced by feminist idealism and national wealth.

They can also be seen in the activation of the New South Wales police and court system in response to complaints about a Bill Henson exhibition showing photographs of naked boys and girls (that's nothing - wait until Caravaggio's works hit a local gallery).

For every law that exists society bears the costs of the executive and judiciary. The final ledger entry comes from the prison system. In New South Wales for instance the yearly costs of its prisons amount to over A$530 million, in addition to another $90 million for building and upkeep. Such numbers are not insubstantial, and when they represent a steady increase over the years it becomes obvious something has to give sooner or later.

Or take sport. A holy cow in Australia conducted under auspices which reflect more the ideological side behind rather than a serious attempt at elevating the fitness levels in young and old. According to figures provided by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for the year 2004-05 hospitalisations for all the football codes alone numbered 14,147. The costs for the same category during the same period amounted to $43,931,202.

Over the coming years a realistic and objective re-assessment of how and why we spend our money will become paramount. Even years ago people at a rally in Berlin protesting against the moralistic selectivity by the Catholic Church carried placards that read, "Kondome nicht Dome" ("Condoms not cathedrals"). Now the scope has widened considerably.

As the tables of the top and bottom 20 countries selected according to general living standards show, the single common denominator deciding a nation's place is its adherence or otherwise to ideological mindsets. It matters whether a general population insists on what it regards as traditional customs or whether it is capable of stepping outside those bounds for the greater good. The analysis of agricultural practices in Madagascar mentioned above demonstrates the point in one area. Regarding East Timor the focus was on that country's birth rate, now one of the world's highest, when the idea had been raised in a Senate Estimates hearing to provide aid money for abortions [4]. Only 1 percent of men there use condoms and the reproductive health of women is very poor.

Such an issue acquires further poignancy when considering that the suggestion was made under the umbrella of improving the treatment of women in developing countries, but would also encompass the strict rule sets by which these women are forced to exist in their societies. If implemented these kind of policies have consequences at the local level. Nevertheless, could this be one of the future relationships between developed and under-developed nations?

On a larger scale still it is yet possible for the US presidential candidate John McCain to suggest that US troops could be left in Iraq for 100 years [5]. To even articulate such a number speaks volumes about the man's general perception. (On that note, if the Otoom model had been known to certain decision makers the necessary analysis ahead of the invasion would have taken no more than two days, with the result that the plan would have been abandoned there and then)

The ballooning constraints imposed by the scarcity of food and oil and its resultant upheavals around the planet confront the social unrests on one side with the very real prospect of being unable to follow through with the intended aid programs on the other.

For a prediction of the future in another 40 years see "2050: Age of the Silverback", but the beginnings of global reorientations are already with us. The coming years will demonstrate how well they are being managed around the world.

Further references:

1. Courier Mail, 5 Jun 08, "Luxuries off radar as spending wanes".

2. Courier Mail, 5 Jun 08, "Hoax callers face triple-0 crackdown".

3. Courier Mail, 4 Jun 08, "Daycare worries hit Swan".

4. Courier Mail, 4 Jun 08, "Abortion aid plan".

5. Courier Mail, 5 Jun 08, "Now for the real economy - Iraq".

Bullying - the untold story

What makes bullying so different from other coercive interactions between people is its one-sided character, and that goes for both parties.

Contrary to the old joke bullies may be sadists, but their victims are not masochists. And anyway, sadists and masochists are not the perfect match.

What's so insidious about the bully and their victim is the expectation they generate within the group.

Bullies do not present instantly. They feel their way forward, slowly but surely absorbing the characters surrounding them. An initial assessment period if you will, and when they got the picture they pounce.

That absorption takes place in tandem with those by everyone else. Those first hours of getting to know everyone, of subconsciously creating an inner imagery of who is who.

From then on the expectations take over. Once the picture has settled people will respond according to what their mind tells them, any further assessment is hardly considered.

Bullies play their game and everyone knows it. The victims play the role in line with the commonly held script.

Now comes the really bad part. Once a victim, the experience a game shared by all, the group expects that scene to be repeated over and over again. That includes authority figures such as teachers and bosses.

The perpetrators could not ply their craft were it not for their wily skill understanding cause and effect to a fine degree. They know when to begin, when to stop, and how to remain within the bounds of convenience accepted by the rest. As long as the respective roles are adhered to, the situation will continue unabated.

But let the victim take charge, let them step outside the assigned territory, and retribution sets in. When a child can't stand it anymore and hits back, hits back so hard that the bully melts away, the space is suddenly in the glare of everyone's attention. It's an empty space, except for the victim who has nowhere to go. The bully is gone, but the victim is left standing there ready to cop it.

Scale up the scenario to the adult world and the same happens. Does the boss look kindly upon retribution, an act that brings in the unfamiliar and thus unseats the harmony? Hardly. Would the courts give the green light to those standing up for themselves? I don't think so.

You are victim, don't you understand?? How dare you upset the natural balance!

And so it goes. Unctuous sermons are held about the phenomenon of bullying, reports are written, statistics compiled, but they don't mean a thing for those on the ground.

Gimbal animation

No real reason for this video except there has been some talk about gimbals lately, with the usual problem how to visualise the rotating parts.

It reminded me of the little animation I did some time ago for my grandchildren. So here it is.

The innermost part is something like a chair with two of its edges corresponding to an axis. It helps to observe how the mutual relationship among the objects changes.

One play covers a 360 degree rotation.

Free Will? Yes and No

The question has been around for centuries. Thomas Aquinas fought with it, so did John Locke, Nietzsche, and may others in between and beyond.

From the technical perspective there is an answer but it is, well, technical. We're talking about neuronal dynamics, and how they lead to the phenomenon of mind. Too big a topic for this blog.

But there is one scale at which the problem becomes easier to handle. When looking at the relationship between the individual and society the issue is more transparent.

Let's assume the individual has free will (whatever this means to you), and even if you deny that it has no bearing on what comes next, as you'll see.

All of us make decisions on any given day, and they have an effect. Sometimes the decisions are unique, sometimes they are common to many: I may decide to climb Mt Everest, or I may decide to see a movie. One is more common than the other, and the difference lies in the facilities my society has provided for me.

And that's the point. For a movie to be shown in a cinema many people have to have come together for a common purpose (if I want to watch the film "XYZ" I can't because nobody has made it, and so I won't).

If I want to start a political party that in itself may be new, but in order to attract others they need to have some affinity with the cause and so again I am tapping into something which is already there.

So a society may sway this way or that, but the ability to sway in the first place depends on individuals who have provided it with the possibility to do so.

Society therefore, in other words the sumtotal of many people bound together by commonly perceived elements (values, priorities, infrastructure, art, education, transport, technology, etc etc), cannot escape the precepts determined by its members.

The members may or may not possess free will; but even if they do, their society doesn't.

Sounds trivial? Perhaps, but it means that the group, small or large, only ever acts according to its own content. If 'free will' means making the conscious decision to step outside one's boundaries, a group will never do that.

No use complaining, or weeping, or protesting on the streets. Unless some individuals see a reason for change (and act on it!), nothing will happen.

Affecting change becomes a matter of efficiency. Who or what needs to be targeted, how or where are resources to be employed?

And once the new has become part of society, this sumtotal will play itself out - it cannot do otherwise.

Whether the result is wonderful or scary depends on your personal disposition.