How did we evolve into this ambivalence? We spent 200,000 to 300,000 years trying to avoid risk only to find ourselves seeking it.


Apparently, civilized people are remnants of pre-civilized people. By that I mean you, I, and all other humans are connected to the minds, as well as to the bodies of those 100-plus billion humans who preceded us. How else explain risk-taking when risk is avoidable, you know, like climbing the 14 highest peaks? Why do “civilized” humans take risks when they could live in relative safety? It’s not as though they have to hunt mastodons with handmade wooden spears tipped with flaked flint.


I suppose evolutionary psychologists could link our risk-taking to our hunter-gatherer days or maybe to our reptilian heritage in the brain stem. For most of Earth’s eight billion living humans, the need for risking life just to eat has diminished considerably. Except in rare times of hurricanes, earthquakes, wars, and Buttigieg port backups, food is plentiful. I hunt, for example, at the local Giant Eagle grocery store, and I rarely return home without the exact food I set out to catch: “Honey, the store was out of sourdough, so I bought the Tuscany loaf.” I even fish there.  Believe me, I have a most risk-free outing every time I go “hunting” and “fishing” there, and only during those rare shortages do I tell the tale of “the one that got away.” I’ve even caught food and drink on Amazon, but never in the Amazon.


So, how do I account for modern risk-taking, for modern risk-takers? Rodeo cowboys riding freehand on bucking broncos and bulldogging steers, cliff divers, and mountain climbers—not to mention those who pose on slippery precipices just to take a selfie.


Two Women United in Risk and Death


Is it fame we seek? Eternal life? Is risk-taking our way to become immortalized, say like Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay? Then the risk is very big because those who try to repeat the success of others but fail are rarely remembered, are rarely immortalized. Who remembers the Silver Medalist save a coach or family member?


Take as examples of voluntary risk-takers the two women who recently died during their attempt to climb Mount Shishapangma in Tibet. * They had set out to climb the 14 tallest peaks, and Shishapangma was their last challenge. Avalanches ended both lives. Risky business, mountain climbing, far more risky than going to the local Giant Eagle in search of food—unless one considers negotiating traffic peopled with drivers drunk, high, or distracted by texting.


Gina Rzucidlo and Anna Gutu and their Nepalese sherpas died on the mountain, and chances are you never heard of them, lost in the many names of failed risk-takers. The rival climbers wanted to be the first to scale those peaks. I know those peaks are dangerous places because I’ve been vicariously up several of them myself,  thanks to National Geographic, TV, and leisure time—risk free, unless one counts the inactive time on the couch a risk for heart disease and atrophied muscles.


I’ll go back to my question: How did we get here, to a point of taking unnecessary risks? How did we get to a point of simultaneously reducing risk and seeking it? Does risk-taking lie deep in our brain? Is it a product of the limbic system? Or the reptilian stem?


Another Kind of Voluntary Risk: Fraud for Fame and Fortune


Consider a different kind of risk, one generated on the Web or on social media. Australian Dalya Karezi pleaded guilty to fraud for her self-portrayal as a medical expert. She had given advice on various ailments over TikTok and Instagram. Her followers thought she was a qualified doctor. And some of her advice centered on very serious diseases.


Dalya assumed the risk of fraud and has been sentenced to a two-year community corrections order at Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court and fined $8,400. This is what she said about her behavior in an apology letter: “As I write this letter I am crying and still struggling to see how I got to this position because this is very out of character and I never thought I would be in this position.” Woah! What position: having been caught—as was inevitable with all the access everyone has to backgrounds—or having committed fraud that might have harmed some of her 200,000+ followers? If she is referring to the latter, then she, like so many other impersonators, had to have taken a conscious action to declare herself a physician; she even wore scrubs—a sure sign of being in the medical profession, if not unversed in fashion. If the former, then being astute enough to start a website or social media chain, means that she ignored a risk she certainly knew, that of being discovered and punished.


In a similar case of fraud, Onelio Hipolit-Gonzalez, 73, impersonated a doctor on his website and claimed he treated many patients. Hipolit-Gonzalez gave advice on conditions as serious as leukemia. One might think that a guy 73 years old would realize his fraud would eventually catch up to him. Anyone hearing the story would ask why taking such a risk seemed worth the effort, since the consequences of fraud are often much worse than the rewards. Onelio was caught in a sting operation.


Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny


Is self-imposed risk buried deep in our brains?


Maybe it is. Why, for example, do we like riding roller coasters, sliding down water slides that send us tens of meters into a plunge pool—in Atlantis in the Bahamas, in a tube through shark-infested water—or jumping off a bridge with only a bungee cord for protection.


We might understand a group of teens whose brains still have a few more years to mature doing something risky. From lack of experience and a dissociation between frontal cortex and emotional centers, teens have taken risks that became fatal fails, if not for them, then for others. But how do we understand an individual adult or group of adults that take on risk voluntarily: Burglers, for example, Hamas terrorists, or illegal immigrants? And what of druggies or drug dealers? Both risk “big time,” one risking death by overdose, and the other risking capture by authorities if not death by drug rivals.


Somewhere in the human background there lies an affinity for risk. Did start because we live on a risky planet with many dangerous natural phenomena? Because of competition among life-forms, both intra-species and interspecies?


If an affinity for risk-taking harks back to the initial struggles life had as it first emerged from fundamental elemental structures made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous, then the penchant for risk has an abiotic origin. If it harks back to predator-prey relationships, then it originated in those first neurons seeking to deal with a hostile environment. And it appears through numerous examples to be part of human nature.


This Is Not You Know What


This is not your practice life. That you might take unnecessary risks is ultimately up to you, but you might not be wholly conscious in so doing. There appears to be a drive toward risk deeply embedded in our brains. It’s something we all seem to know because we mock those who are hypochondriacs or who have anxiety over every potential danger big and small.


Gina Rzucidlo and Anna Gutu tried to turn risk into fame and maybe fortune—not doubt a book deal was a potential source of money. Dalya Karezi and Onelio Hipolit-Gonzalez tried to turn fraud into both fame and fortune. All four suffered the consequences of their risky ventures, the first two more so than the latter two. On a risky planet, taking additional risk seems in my view to be foolish. Yet, I probably have on occasion done something unnecessarily risky, scuba diving for example, driving distracted by a coffee cup and going through an intersection on a yellow light, or even going down that slide at Atlantis. I’ve stood on precipices just a few feet from the edge simply to get a good look, and I’ve used a chain saw to fell large trees. So, I have to say that like many before me and contemporary to me, I need to be reminded daily that this is not my practice life.


Say this in the morning: “This is not my practice life.” It might be the thought that gets you to the next morning. It might be the thought that drives you to do well at what you do—carefully. It might be the thought that keeps you from overdosing or driving impaired. Or it might be the thought that keeps you out of dangerous places you don’t need to enter.


But I understand that deep-seated need lest you think I’m all for withdrawing into Miss Havisham’s mansion or of becoming a hermit. Precaution is one thing; anxiety is another. One can know risk and even take it without foolishness because risk comes in degrees as well as kinds. Anticipation is the best guide because it involves rational assessments based on sound probability. Remember that what you anticipate is rarely a problem—and yes, I know that as in being hit by a bolide or by a random bullet, random risk is part of living on Earth. In randomness you have no real choice. This planet is in practical terms all you have, and it poses risks that occur by chance. Just don’t go out of your way to increase your jeopardy.


How did we get here? Why are we what we are? How did our ancestors ancient and recent get through the filters of risk and death? How will we get through those filters?




*Alyssa Guzman. 11 Oct 2023. Rival mountaineers who died in Tibet were scaling last remaining mountain on list of 14 tallest peaks.  https://nypost.com/2023/10/11/2-rival-mountaineers-die-in-tibet-as-they-competed-to-be-first-us-woman-to-scale-14-tallest-peaks/


**Joshua Lynch. 13 Oct 2023. TikTok ‘doctor’ revealed as total fraud who gave people health advice on cancer, HIV while donning scrubs https://nypost.com/2023/10/13/fake-doctor-dalya-karezi-revealed-as-total-fraud-who-gave-people-health-advice-on-cancer-hiv/

Rear Admiral John Kirby affirmed it. Yes, planet Earth’s days are numbered if the average global temperature rises more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Climate change threatens “all life” on Earth. Hmmnnn…


He made the remark to Fox News and said that the President still believes climate change is an existential threat. “More than nuclear weapons?” asked the Fox anchor. Yeah, nods Kirby. "Climate change is an existential threat. It actually threatens and is capable of wiping out all human life on earth over time,” he said with a little smile that indicated he knew more than the rest of us.


What are you thinking? I know I’m saying to myself, “Are these the fools running the country? A slight temperature rise is more of a threat than a nuclear holocaust? Did they ever take a course, even an eighth grade course, in earth science? Have they never seen a documentary on the history of life from, or during any period since, its origin? We’re talking about 3.8 billion years, give or take a week.” Did they ever see pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were bombed?


3,800,000,000 Years


Let’s put that Biden-Kirby view in the context of a dynamic Earth: Over the course of 4.56 billion years the planet’s surface has undergone multiple and enormous changes. It wasn’t until about 2.3 billion years ago that the atmosphere underwent the Great Oxidation Event that altered its composition from a mix of noxious gases to something resembling our nitrogen-oxygen-water vapor atmosphere with its minor components argon, carbon dioxide, and a few other gases.  And if suspected evidence of early life’s first birth is correct, organisms have weathered some 3.8 billion years of those atmospheric and climate changes, first as unicellular critters and later as multicellular ones. Over the past 300 million years Pennsylvania, now lying at about 40 degrees north, moved from equatorial and tropical latitudes, and today’s hot South Africa moved northward from the Antarctic Circle, where it had lain for tens of millions of years. During a period called Snowball Earth, the planet was cold, very very very cold from poles to Equator, maybe so cold that only a few areas near the Equator were ice or slush free. That Snowball Earth, or cryogenic period, occurred prior to a warming during which unicellular life evolved to become multicellular life—the evolutionary path to us began to snowball itself toward you, Kirby, and Biden during a period of warming. That climatic change back about 650 million years ago, dwarfs the 1.5 degrees Celsius change that Kirby and Biden say is “existential” in nature. And yet, life survived—and thrived.


I’ll repeat. Life not only survived rapid and large temperature changes, but it thrived. It survived and thrived through numerous temperature changes—up and down.


And during the past three to seven or more million years, climate change, aka local warming, probably facilitated random evolution in turning primates into bipedal critters. If droughty conditions eliminate trees, then living in them is impossible. And such aridity appears to have occurred during and prior to Australopithecenes leaving footprints in volcanic ash. We left the trees for life on the savanna. We might be upright walkers because of climate change in eastern Africa. When he isn’t falling, Biden owes his upright stance to climate change. Amazing that Little Lucy mastered walking more than three million years ago while the most powerful man on the planet in the twenty-first century can’t handle a flight of stairs into Air Force One.


Two Kinds of Winter


Does Rear Admiral Kirby, who must have been privy to all the nuclear capabilities of the nuclear powers, think that relatively gradual climate change is a greater threat than nuclear war? He says so.


How did he miss the projections by Carl Sagan and others that “nuclear winter” would be more devastating a change than those three volcanic eruptons were in the ninetenth century, eruptions that led to the “Year without a Summer” in 1816? But nuclear war brings more than just a change in temperature as its dust blankets the planet and blocks sunlight; it brings radiation, long-lasting radiation. By the way, those projections of a nuclear winter are far more believable than those many failed projections of people like Al Gore and the ride-the-grant-money-as-long-as-it-pays-for-confrences-IPCC-scientists who have yet to devise a model that does anyting more than exaggerate and frighten; the predicted results of “climate change,” such as an ice-free Arctic Ocean, the widespread deaths of corals, the hurricane numbers, and a rapidly rising sea, have never materialized. The seas, which have been rising since the end of the last great ice advance, are rising at less than 3 mm per year—if that measurement is accurate. They might continue to rise as they have for the last 10,000 years; we might have to wait, however, for a millennium to see a one meter rise.


Existential Threat to All Life, John Kirby?


And, by the way, Earth underwent a large warming at the beginning of the Cenozoic, sometimes known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Since then, the planet has been cooling, and its atmospheric carbon has been declining with spikes in both temperature and carbon dioxide content—which, again by the way, can’t be shown to have a direct relationship or direct cause and effect relationship.


But Biden and Kirby will get their earth science knowledge from popular press reports and from anecdotal evidence like a couple of hot weeks in summer or an occasional hurricane that hits a population center. Every storm, every weather event in their minds amounts to proof that climate is changing—which, by yet another way, it has throughout those last 3.8 billion years. There’s no winning the argument with them: Every weather event is an indicator in their minds, even cold Arctic air spilling from Canada into the US.


Biological Warfare


Physical dangers like nuclear blasts and radiation are serious threats to human life. But what of biological threats? Have Kirby and Biden forgotten the recent pandemic? Biden has received about a thousand vaccinations, so I assume he knows that a biological weapon is an existential threat. Yet, Biden and Kirby are sticking with “climate change is an existential threat” greater than nuclear war, and I assume, greater than a pandemic.


They can pump tax dollars into all the solar panels the Chinese can make, all the EVs that Tesla can produce, and all the bird-killing and unreliable windmills that fail during cold and calm weather, and none of it will prepare a population for a biological weapon. But then, Biden and Kirby know that a 1.5 degree temperature rise is the threat to life, ALL LIFE, as Kirby says. Stop using fossil fuels. Save the cockroaches! Save the rodents!


Put Them back in School


While American resources funnel into the abyss of green energy projects that are designed to stave off that dreaded 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise, those with nuclear, bioligical, and chemical weapons of mass effect will continue to pose real threats. Biden and Kirby will continue to focus on the weather, ignorant as they are that some droughts have lasted centuries, some warming periods the same, and some cooling periods even longer. Whole cultures have been affected by long-lasting droughts that occurred long before humans burned their first lump of coal.


Kirby and Biden need a lesson in earth history. They need to learn atmospheric chemistry. They need to learn Milankovitch Cycles. They need to learn how climates are defined and how they have changed. They need lessons in the solar constant, proxy data, physical oceanography, atmospheric cycles, weather controls like orographic barriers, and…


In short, Kirby and Biden need lessons in reality, not lessons derived from popular press and failed IPCC models. And they need to pay attention to real threats to American life in particular.

Humans, as William Golding subtly argued through his allegorical Lord of the Flies, are savages deep down. The only reason they are not savages at times is that on occasion they have established mechanisms that maintain order: Culture, for example, society’s rules of behavior, systems of justice that can be reduced to one commonality, punishment. Without its threat, humans revert to savagery; heck, they revert to it even with that threat.


You don’t have to look hard to find examples: The war crimes of Russians during the Ukrainian invasion, the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on Israelis that engendered casualties among Palestinians in return, and, well, just look around the planet. At any time and in almost any place humans embody Golding’s assessment of the species: Brutal savages only temporarily held in check by some overriding order.


Peace, in Golding’s view, is not just tenuous; it’s rare because the restrictions on savagey require constant vigilance. You let your guard down, you invite savagery. Think 9-11 and the recent incursion of Hamas into Israel; think “mean girls” in high schools spread across the planet; think bloodlust in boxing audiences.


Of course, there’s that other view, the one that says humans express their compassion in times of trouble Mother-Teresa-like. That means humans are good deep down. This view doesn’t have much support, however, because it reveals that the better side of humanity only shows itself in reactions to circumstances dire and monstrous. You might think “medics” in armies could be an ameliorating behavior in the savage business of war. That even in the worst circumstances, we reveal the best in humanity. But do we have medics because we are compassionate or because we need soldiers back in action? I think of the sophisticated, multilingual Civil War leader of the 20th Maine, Joshua Chamberlain, Medal of Honor recipient and later governor of his state. At Petersburg, Chamberlain was so severely wounded that he received a “death-bed” promotion. During the war he was wounded multiple times but returned to action after each wounding.


The “Battle” for Peace


It seems that we spend most of our energy just trying to keep the peace by warding off savagery. And as the recent attacks by Russian and Hamas forces indicate, savagery breeds savagery. The innocent suffer. But what are we humans to do? “Turning the other cheek”encourages savagery. If the Israelis did not respond militarily, the Hamas fighters would have continued to massacre the innocent. Savagery begets savagery, and when it begets compassion, it simply devolves into more savage savagery. The recent history of ISIS fighters torturing people stands as an example. Ukrainians were minding their own business when Russia attacked, massacred people, kidnapped and raped them. Istraelis were minding their own business when Hamas attacked.


It’s a battle. And it’s ongoing because those blinded by hate cannot see themselves as savages. In Manhattan, a group of people standing in support of Israel during the war with Hamas were countered by a group standing in support of Hamas on the opposite side of the street. Those supporting Hamas proclaimed the invaders “heroes.” And it didn’t matter that Hamas just murdered hundreds, including children. The savagery runs deep.


We don’t seem to have much choice in circumstances like the recent Hamas invasion: Those who would meet Hamas fighters in peace and reconciliation are summarily slaughtered. There is no negotiation with savages.


That Third View I mentioned in the Title, or Reductio ad Absurdum at Harvard


The savage human is a myth. People respond savagely only when provoked.


As in every instance of such savage attacks, once the savages have been savaged by those they attacked, they and their supporters will “sue for peace.” And those who fail to understand that bullies and savages only respond to savagery in kind, will continue to blame those who were attacked. Israelis have tried appeasement: in an attempt to solve their differences with Palestinians, Israel has attempted peaceful solutions, as they did in turning over Gaza to their sworn enemy. And the world has thrown money at the Palestinians who remain impoverished while their leader Abbas accumulated a net worth of $100 million. How did that happen? Was it the product of apartheid policies or corruption? Is Israel’s supposed apartheid policy the cause of Palestinian impoverishment? How is it that Israeli Arab citizens fare better than Palestinian Arabs in charge of their own destiny in Gaza? Have Palestinian leaders used all the aid they have received—including aid from the USA—into developing industry or weaponry?


Thirty-one Harvard groups believe that Israel is to blame for being attacked and for having its citizens murdered and tortured. It’s Israel’s supposed apartheid policies that warrant a barrage of rockets fired indiscriminately into its cities. Let’s answer their reductive thinking with reductive thinking: Those Harvard groups live in a secure society of elites protected by an army and police force with no threat from rockets. Do they keep their own peace?   


As in almost every circumstance, humans removed from the consequences of savagery fail to see its potential threat. Out of sight, out of mind, in a sense: Evil doesn’t really exist. Would, as many have asked, those people at Harvard blame themselves if the people of Rhode Island launched rockets onto the campus? Would they so readily defend the Palestinian terrorists if they had the opportunity to walk among some 40 or more dead babies, some beheaded by the Palestinians the Harvard groups so happily support? Recall my repeated saying: That which is not personal is meaningless.   


If the Harvard libs want to reduce the problem to apartheid policy, should they not look to see whether or not they could be similarly reduced to a people out of touch with the reality of human savagery? It’s easy to reduce the problems of others from afar, not so easy to reduce it up close, as the libs in NYC, Chicago, and other sanctuary cities across America have discovered in the midst of an illegal immigration crisis. It took the welcoming libs of Martha’s Vineyard less than a day to banish a small group of immigrants. That which is not personal is meaningless.


And the evil perpetrated on Israelis? Not personal to those at Harvard. Rockets fired into Harvard Yard? I certainly hope that never happens. Children of professors and graduate students beheaded by savages? I hope that never happens. But short of those atrocities, what will it take for libs to know that evil exists, that only by constant vigilance does a civilization remain civil? And only by recognition that evil perpetrated by a group committed to genocide will the people at Harvard come to understand that the savagery in a faroff land can appear at any time in Harvard Yard. Note, dear libs of Harvard, that faulting the victims of evildoers and not the evildoers only makes you vulnerable and, if I might be allowed a reduction, foolish.


In Sum


Three views: Humans are basically savage; humans are noble savages at times; savagery is the fault of the savaged. Should I add a fourth view? Coddled humans living in safety are incapable of recognizing evil unless they are its victims.

​Ever watch sports on TV? Ever do it with the sound muted?


There was that experiment years ago, 1980 to be exact. NBC broadcast a Dolphins-Jets game without announcers. A one-off experiment. Sports fans are used to hearing announcers comment on the games they watch at the time they watch them. It seems that people don’t want TV coverage of sports without knowledgeable announcers telling them, for example, “Brady found him open in the end zone and threw a perfect pass.” And just in case the first comment doesn’t register, additional comments accompany the two or three replays, now enhanced with multiple perspectives and probability data.


I saw that 1980 game, by the way, and I confess to being a bit discombobulated because I had become accustomed to announcers yapping about the game, the players, and some bit of NFL history. Incessant chatter of others suddenly became a matter of observing and concluding. The players were real, but the experience was a little surreal. I was watching reality while simulaneously trying to make sense of it—on my own.


Apparently, our need to see and hear some confirmation of what we saw and heard applies to political debates, also. Can’t just watch debates without watching the post debate commentary by pundits. “Candidate So-n-So said she was against funding housing projects for grey squirrels.”


And it doesn’t require words. Pictures help when they are selectively edited. And expressions have their effect. I remember being a preteen when my mother pointed out the raised eyebrow of a longtime local Pittsburgh anchor she watched at noon during weekdays. That raised eyebrow indicated that he did not favor the news he was reporting. It was his nonverbal commentary. Subtle. Right? Just that movement of the eyebrow made the comment. A little muscle twitch was a message, an interpretation. Her indicating the significance of that small act led to my watching for nonverbal commentary by the expressions of all TV commentators whose faces betray a supposedly hidden bias and reveal that the ostensible isn’t necessarily the real.


Or take the stories that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation and the fiction of Trump’s Russian Collusion: Both unrealities became realities for CNN’s, MSNBC’s, ABC’s, NBC’s, and CBS’s reluctant viewers, millions of them taking the simulacrum for reality, the manipulation for raw information for several years. Some, dare I say, still take the simulation for reality.


Simulation


In the words of Jean Baudrillard, “TV manipulates us” (30).* Every network and every station from local to national level has the power to manipulate. Baudrillard made that statement in the context of simulation.Reality isn’t always real; in fact, it might be more fequently unreal as video editors choose what they wish us to see. Baudrillard died in 2007. I wish he could have seen last Sunday’s broadcast of London-hosted game between the Jacksonville Jauguars and Atlanta Falcons: Total simulation with commentary in real time thanks to sensor chips in players’ shoulder pads and overhead camera work. The entire game was presented as computer-generated Toy Story reality.


It wasn’t real; and yet, it was real. And those who watched, including yours truly, listened to commentary on the game. The simulated players ran—more or less—the same vectors that the actual players ran. Sure, there were some computer glitches that frustrated the mind; the passes went to the general vicinity of the CGI player, but not quite right onto the receiver. But look at what I’m now writing about: Passes of CGI footballs to CGI caricatures playing a simulated version of an ongoing game. If I make a comment about the simulated game’s reality, do I show like so many gamers that my immersion into a pretend world is now complete? Have I, a non-gamer, entered a Tron-like world that confuses simulation with the real world?


In Fact, the World Lives on an Incline


Slanted news coverage isn’t new, and numerous editions of Madden Football reveal that even simulated sports events are part of the common consciousness. Simulation is almost impossible to avoid; but maybe we’ve been inclined to take simulacra for reality since our origin. Statues going back to Karahan Tepe and probably long before that suggest we treasure simulation and simulacra. We have museums devoted to sculpures. We have public sculptures depicting both historical and fictional characters. And in every representation from ancient Greek sculpture to Madden CGI football player, we allow some fiction to prevail, some slant on the news ancient or modern.


What about Those Subtle Indicators?


Be it a facial expression, body language, or outright commentary, news casters and sports casters all exhibit their biases. Sometimes open mikes reveal what lies beneath the masks of neutrality; sometimes slips of the tongue reveal the bias. I recall Troy Aikman and Joe Buck commenting on the overflight of jets before a game and their agreeing that such flights were superfluous and a waste of resources and would cease if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were elected (Wonder how they voted?). That open mike comment revealed that hidden agendas exist even when the topic, like the opening ceremony at a football game, is a separate topic, a separate reality. And I recall Michelle Obama’s derisive comment and the affirming nod in agreement from her husband during the tri-folding of the flag, “All this just for a flag.” Yes, reality does show its ugly head above the smooth waters of simulated realism. Simulation does reveal itself for what it is eventually, just as those Toy Story passes not quite meeting the CGI wide receiver at the exact spot on the screen reveal the nature of the simulation and remind the viewer that what is on that screen isn’t really real.


The Perspective That Reveals


The best laid schemes, as Robert Burns wrote, can be revealed for what they are: Schemes designed to control the audience, schemes that are self-revealing for what they are. At some point some members of the audience will come to understand that what they are seeing is a manipulated simulation designed to control minds. Again, in the words of the poet,


“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley …” **


If Burns is correct, we will eventually be able to distinguish between deceitful simulation and reality. If the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, then the plans of those who wish to control us will most likely also go astray. The deceit of simulacra will out itself; the manipulators will reveal themselves for what they are: Toy Story characters putting on a show that, though it is like reality, is not truly reality.


The simulators’ hope, in contrast, is that there will always be those who take the simulation as a reality: The Hunter Biden laptop, the Russian Collusion, the low intelligence of conservative—all this and more in spite of evidence to the contrary. They will, for example, claim that conservatives are Nazis all the while they push socialism and actively censor speech just like the real Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s. They will use a single incident, as they did in the George Floyd tragedy, to simulate a pervasive evil among police. They will continue to see their simulacra as reality as they did when rioters disrupted cities, committed violent crimes and destroyed properties during, as one government official put it, the “Summer of Love”—that was later revealed to be a summer of destruction, rape, and even murder.

-
But no simulation, no matter how well planned, is flawless. You can see that in the Toy Story version of an NFL game, the local or national news, or the political agendas pushed in the name of “a simulated truth.” ***


Advice


Look and listen on your own. Look for that raised eysbrow, that completed pass that just doesn’t quite hit the receiver, or the perfection in a statue that idealizes the flawed nature that exists in all humans. And listen. Those open-mike remarks, those slips of the tongue, those diatribes all point to an alternate reality. It’s that alternate reality, the real reality and not the simulated reality that frees the mind and leads to truth.




*Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. Of Michigan Press. 1994.
ase

**Robert Burns. “To a Mouse.”

***Americans have been subjected to simulations for a very long time: In the 1930s, Ronald Reagan broadcast baseball games from a studio  "He would call Chicago Cubs games, but rather than being at the game, he would recreate the action from nothing but a slip of paper typed by a telegraph operator who was transcribing plays sent by Morse code."--Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Museum 

Quick question for Democrats: Who is currently doing more to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States, Joe Biden or El Chapo’s sons?


Answer: El Chapo’s sons. *


Not for Aural Consumption


Of course, you’ll never hear this from the President’s press secretary. Some things are best left unsaid. Or, between press question, press secretary brain, and answer to the press, “Blame the Republicans. Blame Trump. The border has never been more secure.” Or worse, “What fentanyl crisis?”


“The Big Guy” as he seems to be known in international circles centered on buying favors, just doesn’t seem to care much about the more than 100,000 overdose deaths, tens of thousands of Americans per year since he decided that border walls don’t work, Trump was a xenophobe, and open borders define a country—Did I mentioned a throng of potential Democrat voters racing across the border forged in the promise of free stuff like cell phones, hotel stays, transportation on buses, planes, and trains, health care, education, and work permits? Anyway, the Big Guy’s way of addressing the issue was to make Kamala Harris the Border Czar (How’s that workin’ out for you?). How’s she doing? Let me count the ways. Or should I say, “Let me count the overdose deaths and the millions of illegals who have crossed the southern border, including, by the way, people on the terrorist watch list and gang members with emblazoned tattoos on their foreheads as a mark that they murdered someone”? 


The Bad Guys’ Utilitarianism


Seems that El Chapo’s boys decided that fentanyl is really bad stuff, probably because it’s killing clients. Can’t have your customers die. If that happens, who would buy your drugs?


Anyway, El Chapo’s sons have issued an edict, a prohibiition against using fentanyl in their drug trade. And who could blame them? They’re saving lives! They’ve even ordered the execution of their own dealers who have disobeyed that edict. It might be the first instance in the history of business in which cavet emptor reverses to caveat venditor. Imagine that principle applied to used car salesmen.


I would love to ascribe to the boys a reform and a turn toward virtue. But utility seems a better explanation. Business without clients is not very profitable, and though America’s 330,000,000 people seem to be an inexhaustible supply of customers driven by addiction, drug culture, and lax enforcement, it’s that utility in not killing off one’s clients that makes sense of the boys’ recent edict.


Besides, if sleepy Joe should awaken to the current tragic state of more than 100,000 deaths from overdoses, he might decide to go to war against the denizens of Sinaloa. Wouldn’t that also be bad for the boys’ business? And although I don’t believe either the President or the Secretary of Homeland Security will in the short term close the border or stop the trade in fentanyl or that they even care to do so, there is still a remote possibility that they, like El Chapo’s sons, will understand that overdose deaths are bad for business all around.



*https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/el-chapos-sons-executing-dealers-31111695

​For the first time, the US House of Representatives voted out of office its Speaker, a conservative. And the vote came during a conservative majority. How’s so?


Core Values?


Conservatism prides itself on defense of the individual. In contrast, current liberalism ostensibly prides itself on defense of the group. In reality both sides fail as their logic runs up against their own extremes and the need to identify as one or the other.


Outliers


On the Far Right lie the outliers of civilization who believe that authority impinges on their rights to do whatever they wish on any land they wish and with whom they wish; for them the government is or can be tyrannical. This is individualism unimpeded by society’s rules and cultural norms. And that Rightist outlier imposes a bit of irony on our perceptions, for it is with the Leftists that we often associate, for examples, Bohemian, Hippie, and avant-garde artists, all representative of countercultures, all representatives of individualism deemed extreme by mainstream society. And yet, Far Rightists also reject mainstream society, its laws, and its culture.


On the Far Left and in addition to the Bohemians, Hippies, and artists searching for some shock value, are those outliers who believe in chaos and censorship of all opposition not just by suppression of speech, but also by accusations and labeling. These Leftist ad hominem tactics, such as declaring conservatives “Nazis” center on generalities more often false than true.


In Practice


In fact, censorship of some kind arises from both Left and Right.


Recently, the Left censored conservative voices trying to express themselves on social media platforms, and Rightists sought to remove books they found objectionable from school and public libraries. In spite of their similarities, their differences still lie in the emphasis by conservatives on individualism and the emphasis by liberals on groupism that is sometimes disguised as individualism but is just adherence to a perspective that says anything conservative is either backward or bad and always worth condemnation or ridicule. Thus, late night comedians can find fault with anything any conservative does but can find no fault in anything any liberal does. And in the spirit of believing that groupism prevails in humanity, Leftists lump conservatives into units labeled “rednecks,” “deplorables,” and uneducated, Bible-thumping, xenophobic supremecists. And even though conservatives, by virtue of their emphasis on individualism, stress independence of thought and action, such Leftists in the media uniformly deride them for “belonging” to a group.


That historic vote to oust the Republican leader exhibits the difference between individualism on the Right and groupism on the Left. The Democrat members of the House voted as a block. Among the Republicans eight members voted to oust the Speaker. It seems that over the past 23 years, getting all Republican members to vote as a block has been as difficult as herding cats. I am no expert in congressional matters, and I’m sure someone can cite a similar Democrat separatist movement; but generally, as in the vote on Obamacare or on debt-driving “stimulus bills,” Democrats not only run together, but they also stampede.


What If I’m Wrong?


Yeah. So?


Regardless of their policies’ cost, Democrats run the Republic as they wish and as a block of unified representatives. Republicans who object to a burgeoning debt can’t get their colleagues to act in unison. In fact, more of the top ten “big earmark spenders” on the Hill are Republicans than are Democrats. Conservatives can speak about an issue like reigning in the spending, but they cannot seem to act in unison on any effective legislation as evidenced by those billions of dollars earmarked for interests among Republican constituencies. Herding cats, that’s what it is.


I’m arguing an inability of conservatives to govern consistently because individualism lies in their core. On major issues, they have bucked and not backed their leadership and goals that conservatives across the nation generally supported: An effective closing of the border, for example, a rule of law in cities now run amok by crime under Democratic leadership for another example, and, for a third example, the uncontrolled spending on redundant social programs.


Conservatives trip over their individualism in their attempt to govern well and to control spending. Democrats are more lemming-like. Yes, they govern by spending excessively, but no one can say they don’t govern in unison.

No civilization exists in a permanent Age of Pericles or in a continuous Disney “ever after.” In fact, not even Athens during the Age of Pericles had a continuous “Age of Pericles” existence.  Heck, Disney has not had a continuous Disney existence as numerous disgruntled employees, customers, and shareholders can attest. Oh! The controversies, among the most recent being the “wokeness” that pervades the parks and the movies.


From Ancient Athens to modern Disney, ups and downs have been a pendulum of good times and bad times in every human organization. And whereas good times might not cause bad times, they are always the circumstance from which the bad times emanate; we know both in contrast with the other. When people have few concerns about food, shelter, and safety, they attend to the personal, the entertaining, and the frivolous as matters of importance, as consequential matters.


Fashion is an example. So is pop psych. Matters that seem insignificant in harsher times rise to “matters that matter,” such as the current brouhaha over gender. In the midst of a “down” like war, plague, or natural catastrophe, fashion, gender, pronouns, and athletic events diminish in public discourse. In those harsher times, people focus on food, shelter, and safety, not on events like ComicCon, COP27 and atmospheric carbon, or the Academy Awards. Gender? Survival supercedes identification in the public mind.


Contra


You are free to disagree, of course. Even I can find arguments against what I just wrote. For example, consider that during WWII when more than 50,000,000 people were killed, Hollywood still produced its movies, academics still did research on language and literature, painters still painted, and museum curators still curated. Peruse older newspaper society pages: Fashion designers still designed clothes; VIPs stepping out for a night on the town still drew paparrazi.


The world, as big and populated as it is, always has outliers not associated with harshness. Because it is so populous, the world experiences ups simultaneously with downs. I suppose, given that argument, that focus on real tragedy as opposed to focus on any behavior or state of mind is just a matter of degree. Ancient Athenians and modern New Yorkers live in a constant duality, the best of times always in a tenuous equilibrium with the bad times, lottery winners stubbing their toes on the way to collect their winnings. Fifth Avenue differing from Times Square. People in $5 million apartments as opposed to street vendors, homeless vagrants, and con artists (and now an illegal migrant population).


Shouldn’t we argue with Dickens that these are the “best of times…the worst of times”? Could Pericles have benefitted from reading Dickens to know the very citizens he elevated to the pinnacle of ancient civilization and to a status emulated for more than two millennia in his future, that those citizens would eventually depose him? Was he a model for the life of Winston Churchill, savior during war and then deposed PM.


Matters That Now Matter


It’s in the context of the above musing that I came upon political science research by Joni Lovenduski under the title “Gendering Research in Political Science.” * It is this article that I believe supports my contention that during Disney or Pericles Haydays, those times when physical safety, plentiful food, and ample shelter are not a major concern, civilization turns its attention to otherwise frivolous matters, such as “identity,”both group and individual.
  
I’ve taken the libery to paraphrase the abstract of Lovenduski’s article: The author writes that there is a transition in “feminist research on political representation, public policy, and political institutions” from two sexes to the “concept of gender.” According to Lovenduski, political scientists write mostly in a context of two sexes, but not from a context of many “genders.” In the concept of gender lies another way to examine political life.


So What?


There’s no denying that what is important to people IS important to them. If you are a hobbyist, you probably at least slightly obsess over the hobby—maybe to the dismay of a spouse who thinks “there are more important things” like carrying out the garbage, painting the bathroom, or keeping the house in pristine condition because “we might get visitors.” Whatever the level of your obsession and disinterest, it is one you choose in times that permit you to choose. In tough times, the hobby lessens in importance; the questions arising over what is optional and required are moot.


Right now in America, there are many who have no concerns more pressing than a special agenda based on matters that were not important when the ground shook, the floodwaters raged, the wind blew hurricane force, or a foreign adversary attacked. But as we all know from history, such bad times are on that pendulum swinging between the Age of Pericles and Disney to the Age of Dire Concerns. Right now, America can obsess over concerns it will dismiss as frivolous sometime in the near future. The pendulum between good times and bad never stops swinging.


Plato


Maybe for Plato political human didn’t mean much more than political “male.” Maybe the Age of Pericles was a patriarchal age. As in many civilizations, patriarchy dominated politics, and even under the rule of queens men usually played more officlal roles than women, especially in Europe. Given that history, political humans have been divided into male and female. With the rise of modern civilization and women’s suffrage, females took on more governmental responsiblity. Add to the work of suffragettes the work of feminists, and one sees a shift, a transition away from a longstanding male polity. And now, we have entered a new phase, one that declares a suffrage for those who wish to identify as a previously undefined “gender,” which could mean anything. The current good times have engendered “realities” based on “opinions” and “feelings.” When women seeking apointments to high office say in answer to the question “ What is a woman?” that they are not “biologists,” we know that little semblance of life under harsher conditions remains. These are the same human beings who for all their lives have peed sitting down, the same who have monthly periods, and the same who have given births. Now, the frivolity of the times, the intellectual fashion, dominates thought and confuses it. Common sense gives way to special interests. If I have a Roman nose, should I declare myself a proboscian gender, an elephantine gender, a tapir-ist? If sexual body parts, reproductive function, and physiological processes and gametes are now inconclusive gender indicators, then what other than personal pronouncements indicates gender, which now seems to be dissociated from sex.


Should “gender” be considered in political life? Sure. Why not? But to what purpose? Is making a “trans” person a political leader simply because of the “trans” status a significant matter? Or is choosing a “trans” as leader significant  because that “human being” is best suited to lead the nation? Does gender matter if it is merely an obligatory decision based on passing “correctness” that plays no role when people have to worry about food, shelter, and safety?


Point of Departure


Here’s your springboard; you determine the kind of dive you wish to make and the depth of water you wish to enter.  Whatever you decide, however, it should not be the product of political correctness because such a decision is based more on censorship than on free thinking. Is “gender,” which even gender enthusiasts are hard pressed to define, anything that advances a civilization more than a sexual duality that has dominated since Ur and maybe as far back as Gobekli Tepe? Is there anything in the civil polity that currently prevents any human from rising to a position of dominance other than the biases derived from culture? Does culture drive polity or polity, culture? Both? Then where do we currently lie on the arc of that pendulum?


Sorry if the questions are openended. Here are two more: If "gender enthusiasts" demand you accept their vague definition of gender as based on opinion and feeling, shouldn't they be dismissed as hypocritical if they do not accept your definition of gender that is based on physiology, gametes, and body parts that underlies your "opinion"? Why should one opinion in a world where every opinion has equal value be superior to another opinion? 








*Lovenduski, Joni. In Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 1:333-356, June 1998. Online at https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.333 

Have you ever had some delicious, but tiny morsel that made you want more, say an hors d'oeuvres at a party in a polite society of gourmets? As a gourmand, you wanted more, but hesitated lest someone see you devour a trayful as big as a large pizza? I’ll admit to the experience if you won’t, though I admit so with some compunction.


In contrast, the US government, mostly driven by Democrat gourmands, appears to feast without guilt on the nation’s tax revenue. It’s a party Party; the food seems never ending in a buffet many orders of magnitude larger than that of Cassar’s Palace, the Wynn, and… maybe all the world’s buffets combined. The seemingly unending buffet of tax dollars will eventually end, of course, but not before the national debt accrues an interest payment that exceeds revenue.


Right now (and these are approximate amounts) the US expenditure is about $5.5 trillion. It’s revenue from taxes is about $3.97 trillion. And THE INTEREST has either reached or is about to reach the ENTIRE DEFENSE BUDGET. It seems that Democrat  gourmands have been joined by Republican gourmands all of who just can’t get enough and most of who lack the will to push away from the table or walk away from the buffet.


With the current debt exceeding $33 trillion, the DOD-size interest payment will be the American government’s legacy payable by the chidren for generations to come. And at the same time that they will devote more of their money to interest payments, the need to spend on evermore sophisticated defense systems will weaken the country’s aibllity to protect itself against some very bad guys with cheap weapons of mass destruction.


But future defense needs are as far from the minds of the big spenders as the consequences of those extra calories are on the minds of buffet gourmands. “Hey, how’d we get this fat? Is THIS the bill? Why didn’t someone tell me?”


Every fiscal year is a trial at the buffet. In no such time period over the twenty-first century has the US government stopped feeding in excess. Stimulus bills that are more “give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day” than “teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime” have led to the current ballooning debt and interest payment. And there appears to be no end to eating more. The folly of the “Green New Deal” will add trillions more to the table while limiting the gourmands’ demands for cheap food (read “fuel”). The result will be shortages. With respect to that buffet, disruptions in the growth and transport of food will increase. Imagine the difficulty of transporting the quantities of food now tranported in a fossil-fuel based system to moving the same amount on an inadequate electric grid. Imagine having enough electricity to power not only dry goods and imperishable foodstuffs, but also refrigerated perishable foods on electric trucks and trains. Just transporting the batteries for those trucks will occupy volumes that are now devoted to cargo. Just running the wires over rails, will require costs not now incurred, even if maglev becomes a reality.


Currently, we provide for both gourmets and gourmands. That’s going to change. Prepare yourself for some famine or rationing. The buffet, the trays of hors d'oeuvres, are about to end. Go ahead, gobble up what you can; everyone else is feasting, including noncitizens who contributed nothing to the budget. You don’t mind paying the interest on someone else’s credit card, do you?