Being a disquisition upon The Human Condition, with a view toward those characters thereof that tend to Make Things Worse All Around. (We'll get to The Good Stuff later, okay?)
(25 April, 2001, et seq.)
Let me set some preconditions or notes on this discussion. First, I want to be abundantly clear that I miss at least one key parameter on my first pass through any analysis. (All too frequently I continue to miss one or more key parameters on subsequent passes, but we won't go there just now.) Second, I want to stress that this is just one perspective on The Human Condition. There are indefinitely many such perspectives, any of which can be valuable in its own happy way; no one view can cover all of the territory (remember maps, which cannot be identical to the territory they represent; any view or model can be thought of as a map). This seems grossly overobvious to me, but I've discovered that there are times when belaboring the obvious is A Good Thing, especially if you can do it rapidly and get it out of the way.
That said, let me list a few Big Problems as I see them right now.
(10 May, 2001)
This model is a pet bugaboo of mine; I have, over the years, concluded that it is, from a certain perspective, the root cause of a great many horrors. I'm going to try to look at it in a couple different ways; please bear with me.
On a superficial level, if you operate in the scarcity mode you can't get enough. It doesn't matter what the scarce "commodity" is, and it doesn't even matter if you get all of it. You still don't have enough, because this model is built upon an underlying axiom that there just isn't enough to go around.
I want to stress my use of the word "axiom" there: an axiom can neither be proven nor disproven, which means that (at least under most circumstances) no rational argument will cause someone to move out of this model. You can only get people to abandon this one by nonrational means.
Some people can compartmentalize better than others, and manage to restrict their use of this model; but if I may take a fairly pejorative view, I must restate Gresham's Law from a larger viewpoint than mere monetary economics: anything crappy, even lousy ideas (in Gresham's original statement, "cheap currency") will tend to drive "the expensive spread" off the market.
This is, of course, not invariable; but it is pervasive and general.
What I am specifically referring to right now is that if there is any area where a person operates in an economy of scarcity (and there are always such areas, as far as I know, for all reasonably real humans), that area tends to expand and to threaten other models.
Yes, I know, that's grossly oversimplistic. There are lots of folks out there who (just for example) can't get enough money but who manage to have lives filled with loving kindness. If that were not the case, I think we wouldn't be here. I am merely pointing up the fact that there are also people who cannot get enough money, cannot get enough affection, cannot get enough... (...And how many people do you know who actually have enough time to do the things they want and/or need to do?)
This looks, superficially, like greed or avarice, and perhaps those words are, from this perspective, descriptions of the results of operating in the scarcity model. This brings up the subject of what my father used to call "levels of integration", which many people have talked about with more savvy and insight than I can, but which I'll probably append to this discussion anyway because it is important and because it fits in as an adjunct.
I have a feeling that I'm diluting my point here with too many digressions and examples, so I think I'll move to other items for a while; I am likely to edit this section, perhaps fairly extensively, as I get it more carefully thought out and articulated.
It is clear that in many cases, these things are at least partly under voluntary control; and I wish we all (including myself) would exercise more of that control.
(10 May, 2001)
As usual, I'm having trouble articulating, so please take a "first draft" caution with this. (That's actually shameful -- I think I've even written about this concept elsewhere on this Web site, and I've thought about it for quite a while. Argh.)
A spark plug, an internal combustion engine, a car, and the concept of transportation are all different levels that connect to each other in a fairly simple hierarchy. On each level, the objects or concepts on adjacent levels have some meaning, but as you move further out the concepts become less relevant and less meaningful; in some cases they become entirely incomprehensible.
If I may put that another way, even though chemistry is largely a way of understanding the behavior of electrons, atoms, and other things that you can learn about in physics, it has its own flavor; and no matter how much physics you learn, you are unlikely to come up with the idea of a Diels-Alder condensation.
Taking that same thing one step further, even though molecular biology and biochemistry arise rather directly from organic chemistry, and even though biology itself has these things shot through it, no amount of chemistry education is going to allow you to predict the mating behavior of the praying mantis.
From the standpoint of physics, politics is totally incomprehensible rubbish, and though various academic physicists have been obliged to learn how to "do" politics, I am fairly certain that it involves adopting entirely new intellectual models and ways of understanding the world (by which I mostly mean the local world of discourse, not The World).
More about this when I get a chance -- I have to go help someone move a bunch of concrete blocks right now. (Hey, it's a lot easier than helping someone move a bunch of abstract blocks, believe me! I have to do that, too, and it's going to take considerable figuring out.)
Oops. Again, I will have to fill this one in
later. Sorry about the gap.
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Last modified: Sat Sep 1 06:30:43 PDT 2001