Is this scary?

The unexpected is sometimes scary. I don't mean waiting for a bus and now there are two; or getting a letter from someone after years of silence.

I mean situations that burst into our personal mind space dislodging what has become accepted as usual. Suddenly there is something else, and it just shouldn't be there.

At the very least it can be unsettling.

There is a Japanese ghost story which unfolds along these lines. I don't know its author, or whether it has been told and retold through the ages.

It goes like this:

Back in the feudal days a wide avenue skirted the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. One late night a farmer made his way home, alone on this wide, deserted street. Suddenly he noticed a little girl, all by herself hunched on the kerb. He went up to her and said, "Hello, little girl, what are you doing all alone this late at night?" But the girl did not move. So the farmer went closer and asked again, "My child, is there anything wrong?" Then slowly the girl raised her head, and her face was smooth like an egg.

In Melbourne there is a small niche at the end of Degraves Street which is filled with graffiti. It reminded me of that ghost story.

Would the following situations be scary?

Lying alone in bed at night, sticking your foot out and suddenly feeling some touch.

Looking over your shoulder in a dark and lonely street, over and over again (try it!).

Closing your eyes for a moment, opening them again but you can't see.

Closing your eyes for a moment, opening them again and suddenly there is a face staring at you.

Your daily routine involves getting up in the morning and catching a train to work. One day you think the alarm clock is wrong, you get up in a hurry and rush to the station. There you notice the clocks don't work either. At that moment, what is your perception of time? Have you ever experienced this?

We like to believe life is ordered. Yet it doesn't take much to shatter our peace.

The self-strangulating society

Definitions of society abound. In many cases they explain more about the persons offering them than about society.

From a more general perspective this large-scale human activity system we call society can be described in terms of two sets: the rulers and the ruled.

(To forestall any misunderstanding – by ‘rulers’ I mean those members of society who exert an influence over others, however subliminally or accommodating the others, the ruled in this case, may be in their response)

Rulers evoke dynamics that are acting downwards, towards those they influence. The ruled either merely adjust their behaviour or their reaction is more antagonistic. In both cases their dynamics are acting upwards.

These dynamics are generally fluid. At any given time their source can experience a role reversal. For example, a response can be so dramatic it forces the rulers to defend themselves, or an authority might adjust its behaviour because of the feedback it receives.

Since any system needs resources to function at all, a society can be said to represent a human activity system that has the space, the members, and the resources to perform in terms of a given set of dynamics in the form of a mutually interdependent framework. Take any one of those elements away, or diminish their capacity for that matter, and the system will lose its aggregate whole. That is to say, its functional details will have lost their capacity to play their - mutually interdependent – role.

Note that any labeling under the auspices of politics, ideology, religion, any judgmental description that might be applied through some ethics or morals, does not come into it. All those are interpretations by someone, they sit aside the system itself. Just like electricity operates according to Maxwell's equations and something like lightening, or heaters, or a cosy atmosphere are human descriptions of the same phenomenon.

In that sense complex, interdependent systems define themselves according to their respective capacity to realise their potential within their neighbourhood. It is this capacity which can be observed from various positions within the system and as a consequence gives rise to this or that label, sometimes followed by arguments about the ultimate truthfulness of the label. As far as the latter is concerned there is no ultimate truth.

What the members of a society make of themselves, or what others make of them, can be as varied as circumstances or perceptual triggers are able to evoke.

Suppose some divers come across a scene such as the one below:

 

What thoughts would cross their minds? Their assumptions, however realistic or otherwise, become part of the definition. To what extent these survive is a matter for the aggregate ambience and how much room it gives to its imagery.

Human activity systems are first and foremost complex systems. The reality is far more faceted than the dichotomy of ruler and ruled suggests. Such labels are in themselves rather ambiguous. A ruler needs a target; the target requires the awareness of being ruled. The more complex the society, the more variance it possesses, the more types of rules and their respective foci it can entertain.

To rule, and to live under a rule, requires resources. Rich, complex societies have the capacity to furnish the controlling layers - whoever or whatever they may be - with the necessary means to sustain their dynamics. The result is a steady growth of controlling entities.

The society's wealth ensures their survival and the variance of the society guarantees enough opportunities without having to fight for space. As long as the supply routes remain intact the system becomes subject to ever more regulatory frameworks. Indeed, members who are ruled over in one context may well decide the most convenient solution is to become an authority themselves.

Should the resources become jeopardised, the alternative mentioned above becomes less and less viable and the dynamics acquire a competitive aspect.

The strangulating web they altogether weave becomes a prison of convenience. A grotesque version of a mutual admiration society in which the shared mediocrity is used as a seemingly bottomless bag of spoils with something for everyone. And, like ruling classes everywhere, none of them give up their place willingly.

One could say our obsession with economic growth stems from the subconscious fear of having to fight for one’s preferences should the resources dry up.

How then to define society? Take your pick.

Perpetual motion and poverty

Perpetual motion engines are a figment of some people's imagination. The Law of Thermodynamics tells us that. Every now and then one comes across a truly elaborate contraption, as if the builder had intended to push the moment of reckoning as far as possible into the future (examples). No matter; the total energy in a closed system is constant.

Yet the laws of physics are not restricted to mechanical, electrical or chemical devices, they apply to nature in general. It is here one gets the impression the rules about energy-in and energy-out are sometimes quietly forgotten.

Take the phenomenon of poverty. There are some who believe it can be abolished if only the right policies were applied. Others simply don't care. It also means different things to different societies (compare Australia with Nigeria for example), but more of this later.

What follows is a view that brings the principle of finite energy to the issue.

To set the scene, let's consider a simple mechanical device first. Suppose our 'engine', a system, consists of three subsystems which need energy to operate. Let's call them A, B, and C. If each subsystem (a wheel, a lever, or whatever) needs 100 energy units to work, and if A performs its complete function within 1 time unit t, B does it within 2 time units, and C needs 4, the total power for the system can be expressed through the following equation:

This applies to the ideal case where waste (for example, in the form of friction) does not occur. Since P equals energy over time (E/t), the amount of energy this particular system needs is 42.86 energy units:

leading to 

Yet wastage does exist; the technical term is entropy. Let's call it x, and so the new equation is as follows:

and using our previous performance values it becomes

If x = 0.2, so that the performance of each subsystem is now of t - x duration, the result is

Since we expressed the entire system's operation as a ratio of time, then with wastage included the total amount of energy needed has increased if the duration should remain the same as in the first example.

Use anything you like for A, B, and C and the relationships between energy and performance are the same.

We can turn this around and say, if the supply of energy to a given system is fixed, and if one of its modules experiences a shortfall caused by wastage or demand or anything unforeseen, then the performance of the affected module will have decreased.

Society can be seen as a system (one of the advantages of the Otoom model). There are subsystems and sub-subsystems and so on, and they can be identified in terms of energy needed, their respective performance, and also their wastage.

Overall the energy is fixed too, although a complex dynamic system allows temporary measures to be taken so that it may appear to the members as if more energy is there for the taking. Yet, as the Law of Thermodynamics states, the total energy in a closed system is constant and entropy is being produced. In the end, human activity systems are part of a closed system.

While the subsystems etc are mutually interdependent, they are also semi-autonomous because humans entertain choices and act on them. Therefore a shortfall somewhere (which, after all, is inevitable) becomes subject to compensatory measures due to our competitive and assertive nature.

Which module, and so who will be left with the effects of the resultant shortage becomes a function of those members' particular inability to overcome the pressures from the rest.

The end result is poverty - manifest through the lack of means to attract more energy per se. Since most societies use money as a means to express the value of goods and services, in practical terms poverty means less money compared to the rest. What qualities (in the positive as well as the negative sense) play a role during the process of energy and performance distribution depends on the overall values a society has at any given time.

For example (somewhat simplified but not unrealistic), artists become less valued in times of war compared to members of the military. When peace returns the situation can be reversed: soldiers descend the social ladder, artists ascend.

The rather harsh conclusion is that poverty is here to stay; first and foremost not for reasons of ethics, politics or some ideology, but because reality says so.

Political leaders will hardly admit as much but, on the other hand, facing reality usually leads to solutions that may not be ideal but are still better in relative terms. The main issue under the circumstances would be a realistic differentiation of values that are desirable in a modern society. Traditional attitudes formed by religion, their secular ideological counterparts, and temporary fashions are not necessarily the rational arbiters of contributive aspects within a population. Haphazard allocations of finite resources exacerbate the potential failures in a system exposed to the vagaries of nature.

In a general sense the welfare safety net established in the West provides unemployment benefits to those out of work. Regardless of the reasons for the predicament (to precisely identify those would require additional resources anyway) the unemployed are not completely deprived of resources. However, there is a variety of causes for being essentially unemployable, and even a relatively generous welfare system such as Australia’s does not address the incidence of poverty should such a condition eventuate beyond the scope of a particular individual. Although resources would be needed for the system to become fairer, when considering the wider picture they should have a higher priority than many other expenditures entertained today. As it is, the innate potential of that demographic is lost to society.

In any case, whatever path a society takes, the laws of physics will always have the last word.

Next thing you know, they'll invent the screwdriver

This is a screwdriver.

Insert the blade into the screw as hinted in the picture, turn the screw 90 degrees, remove the blade, go back to the original position, turn the tool so you can use the other blade, reinsert it, another 90 degree turn of the screw, and so on. A screw can be tightened or removed in no time. In narrow and tight spaces that's the only tool which works. By the way, the blade is straight (not tapered), which means no extra force is needed to keep the thing engaged as you turn.

I found this tool thirty years ago in Hong Kong when I visited it with the yacht. On board it had a special place and no-one could use it without my personal permission; that's how important it was. Since then, right up to today, I haven't found anyone in Australia who immediately identified it for what it is, let alone had used it. I just checked the internet: hardware stores here, in the UK and the US offer all kinds of screwdrivers but not this one. It's not a comprehensive analysis, but still.

Back in 1981 some department stores in Australia and some stores that sold watches offered the first couple of versions of the emerging digital variety; simple things, just telling the time. That same year there was a street in Mumbai where sellers sat at dozens of tables selling digital watches by the hundreds, if not thousands. They had the functions we have come to expect.

I remembered those times when the 2012 conference on climate change went through its paces in Doha. As usual the representatives of governments argued about who should do what. The outcome was not encouraging. Given that the latest update on climate change promises a 2C rise in global temperature over the next twenty or thirty years as just about inevitable, for some people thoughts might turn to panic.

But then I thought about that screwdriver and those watches. While the rest of the world - well, certainly the developed world - had its established stores and advertising catalogues and consumers who thought they had it all, there were places where you could get things the rest of the world had not even heard of. That's enterprise at street level.

Some big items: while they were arguing in Doha, China has the largest contingent of wind generators in the world. Germany is one of the world’s top solar cell installers. At a recent energy conference in Melbourne about 80% of renewable energy products were from China.

But there is also the everyday detail, the things that tell about the atmosphere besides the official brochures. Business at any time of the day, bustling night markets, a population that generally works in step with each other, school children who sit still in class and who actually have to prove they are ready to advance to the next year, a cultural memory anchored in centuries and millennia, and entertainment which would make our finger-waggers choke on their digits.

I wonder what her audience made of Julia Gillard's revelation last month that Australia has recognised the importance of Asia and yes, we are going to be part of it.

There is no reason to believe among the billions there aren't enterprising souls - possibly as we speak - who put together something which addresses the challenges posed by climate change. Not to stop the effects, that's the job of governments if they ever get around to it, and mostly the battle is lost already. Rather, to create devices and habits which allow us to live with it. There is no guarantee idealists or romantics or moralists will approve, but apart from the rather ossified West there is a world out there where people make things happen anyway. It's the reason they got to where they are today, a productive balance between governments who have their plans but not the means and inclination to enforce every detail.

And so I still have my screwdriver printout and every so often I show it to someone - no? never seen it? And in Queensland there is bound to be yet another marketing campaign to sell The Sandy Beach overseas for a "family holiday" (no smokers please!), in the schools the children boil their brains in 30+C heat but it doesn't matter because next year they'll move to the higher class anyway, and in parliament they sledge each other over who is a misogynist.

Of flowers and people: the EU and Greece

Much has been said about the financial disparities between the member states of the European Union. Right now the willingness - some would call it an obsession - of keeping Greece within the EU has resulted in setting aside another chunk of euro billions to patch over Greece's insolvency. According to the latest reports 31.5 billion euros are waiting to go to Greece which the nation needs to pay its debts. “We need to find creative solutions,” AustrianFinance Minister Maria Fekter said. 

One could phrase the situation as follows.

Someone is so much in debt that he can't even pay the instalments. So he gets more money with further conditions attached. Why yet another loan should suddenly solve the problem is anyone's guess.

So, for the lender the money paid to the borrower is now lost to the account of the former (where it could have done more work), instead it is in the coffers of the latter where it causes things to get worse. The idea is of course that eventually all these sums get repaid, but that is not happening.

What if the additional sum is not paid in full, but minus a percentage which is used to earn interest for the lender (that side of the economy works, remember), the interest thus earned is diverted to the borrower who needs it. The conditions there are less onerous, and the total loan is not growing as it otherwise would. The result - less turmoil on the borrower's side, less angst for the lender, and in overall terms the money has never left the entire bloc anyway.

What of those flowers? Let's say there is a sick flower bed; no amount of watering and fertiliser help. One option is to grow the same flowers somewhere else where they are healthy and introduce some plants gradually into the sick group to slowly take over. In essence the approach is the same.

Perhaps the time has come to be more creative after all.

Those tricky (re)interpretations!

Recently two articles of mine were rejected because their reviewers had certain issues with them. What those are and my responses are described in detail on my website (My Home, The ISAA...).

On a more technical level (in terms of the Otoom mind model) however there are issues that go beyond someone's personal or political opinion.

A preconceived notion represents an already established cognitive template about what is to follow. Even if subsequent paragraphs explain more their mind is already set; so much so that further statements are not accepted because it is not what has been expected. The problem has been recognised in Neuroscience for some time now. Norretranders' "The User Illusion" [1] provides many interesting results from experiments along those lines.

Should the reader - or reviewer in this case - get any further response to a criticism this is constructed as further proof that the criticism has been correct all along. If not responded to (and so this kind of information spreads unchallenged) the preconceived perspective becomes the norm, further strengthening the framework (the template) from which further a priori perspectives and starting points are created.

Anything now not in line with that ambience (the results create indeed an entire ambience) are seen as beyond the standard and hence fair game for attack. This happens within general society and also within groups who tend to isolate themselves from the rest.

If a group has a large enough membership or their perspectives cover many areas, overlaps with other groups are possible through their respective intersections, although whether the entire ambience of a group can be altered via such links would depend on the conceptual scope of the latter.

Which raises certain questions: to what extent is the interplay between a group's composition, its parts, their mutual influence on each other, and the potential of any of them to be an agent for change, being realised? Are some groups more susceptible than others, and so which types make up a certain society at any given time, and if the overall conditions change would the groups change as well?

In other words, do the groups operating within a society determine the effectiveness of its environment, or is it the other way around? More likely it would be a combination of the two, which of course complicates the entire scenario to a large degree. This is an example of how the complexity of such an observation and its analysis can explode in a very short time.

As for the mix of the two possibilities, since we are dealing with complex dynamic systems, it would be virtually impossible to decide for one or the other, especially since by the time an observation yields a result those interdependencies have already come into play. At that point to talk about any particular directional cause-and-effect relationship is meaningless.

Does that mean any further analysis is therefore useless? Actually no, because although the initial direction is indefinable, since the dynamics operate in any case any decision at a given moment will have an effect provided it is followed by some action that involves the existing dynamics; that is to say, if the action occurs within its conceptual space.

In other words, it doesn't matter what the action at that moment produces (ie, a cause-and-effect relationship in this or that direction), some result will be produced. The validity of that result does not depend on the identification of the previous direction but depends on the efficacy of the action itself.

When information has passed back and forth between two entities (individuals, groups at any scale) and a third party injects some further information, then at that point the salient aspect is the affinity of the latter with the existing context.

It doesn't matter how that context was formed, its precise history is neither here nor there. If there is an affinity between the new information and the context, new connections will form between the two. The dynamic continues to evolve. This is the reason new concepts - sometimes called memes - form with their exact source often remaining unclear. 

Nevertheless, in practice accusations and remonstrations can ensue, but both sides are justified in arguing they are not the guilty party. In the immediate sense they are correct, but we are dealing with a type of system in which our understanding of exactitude does not hold - it's the nature of complex, dynamic systems.

All this is another manifestation of progression lock (the ongoing development of a scenario based on what happened previously), and the only way in which such a situation can be resolved - if this is the right word - is by either having an outside force capable of unseating a sufficient number of participating elements, or the system exhausts its reserves on its own (ie, those entities become ineffective). Functionally speaking both outcomes are the same.

A scenario where all parties are arguing to the hilt, and every accusation only making things worse despite no-one really desiring that turn of events, and above all everyone being equally responsible but no-one ever admitting to it ... does this sound familiar?

Reference:

1. T. Norretranders, The User Illusion, Penguin Books, New York, 1998.

Geert Wilders: friend or foe?

Politics is so confusing.

Australia’s Minister for Immigration Chris Bowen seems not to intervene in issuing a visa for Dutch politician GeertWilders. After delaying the decision since August (normally a visa application for Dutch citizens is processed within three days) he appears to allow Mr Wilders to enter the country after all. Mr Bowen described Wilders as a “far right politician”, an “extremist”.

What does “far right” mean?

Well, he gave a speech at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver. That’s right-wing, I guess.

He also criticised the European Union for telling the Dutch to finance cash-strapped nations such as Greece and Spain during a recent election campaign video. That is reminiscent of Austria’s Freedom Party (FPOe) with its own Euro-skeptic platform.

But wait – the FPOe has roots that go back to Nazi Germany. Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party on the other hand is against Islam which Wilders compared to Hitler’s totalitarianism.

So Austria’s FPOe is on the extreme right because it is echoing the Nazis, but Wilders is also on the extreme right because he is against anything that resembles a similar oppression.

But he doesn’t like the EU because it is pouring money into failing economies, does he? Yet the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany is now hearing legal challenges against the country’s role in recent bailouts, and that doesn’t seem to be a right-wing plot. What is at issue there sounds rather close to what Wilders expressed in an open letter to EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem.

Greece’s socialists for that matter don’t like the EU’s austerity measures either, in Spain the Socialist Party lost votes because of the country’s involvement in the Iraq war and the election win of the conservatives there means Spain is now more firmly nestled within the EU.

Going through the speeches by Geert Wilders on his Weblog one gets the impression he is for free speech and the general liberalism Dutch society is renowned for. But of course, he is from the extreme right.

It does seem the label ‘right-wing’ has moved away from the historic-political background it used to be associated with to a generic term for simply ‘bad’. A description that relied on ascertainable detail has been replaced by context and becomes defined, if that is the right word, by the ambiguous moment of this or that experience. In other words, we are talking about post-modernism.

‘Right-wing’ then is a derogatory tag, nothing more.

Comparing contemporary Dutch law – which Mr Wilders supports - with its Islamic counterpart – which he doesn’t - becomes especially poignant when considering the ongoing attempts at abolishing the death penalty around the world. While Islamic countries differ in its application, capital punishment continues to exist in all Islamic jurisdictions and is strongly defended, as William Schabas explains in his article “Islam and the Death Penalty”.

All this leads to an intriguing question: could it be that the venom directed against Geert Wilders by politicians in countries like Australia points to a certain subliminal animosity held by the latter towards a liberalism which includes gay marriage, nude bathing, drug laws, euthanasia etc, all of which are not condoned by them but many are loath to discuss openly?

Could it be that they favour Islam with its rigid conservatism because it allows them to condemn such freedoms by proxy?