We love patterns. We think in them; we act in them. We feel lost when we can’t recognize them. We impose them on a seemingly chaotic world. And by hard work and good luck we discover those patterns that make up the fabric of the universe.
Take your driving or walking home. You’ve mentally mapped the directions. You know where to go, but you do so by following a pattern of streets and sidewalks, all of them marked by something familiar, a tree, a building, an ever-present porch occupant. You even associate time with your homing pattern: Go this way, ten minutes; that way,13 minutes. And you go home, or to the store or work, in a temporal pattern, going and leaving during or not during “rush hour,” that citywide pattern of humans pouring into or out of offices, many of them having a pattern of eating when you eat, and judging by the lines at Starbucks, of drinking coffee when you drink. We are a predictable lot because we live patterned lives. So many hours asleep; so many awake—unless the rhythm, the pattern of our biological clock, is syncopated.
Patterns Discovered and Patterns Imposed
At the end of my previous blog, I wrote about discovered and imposed patterns. The Periodic Table of the Elements is a good example of the former, and constellations are a good example of the latter. We seem to have an affinity for patterns of all kinds, both tangible, like tiles, and intangible, like syllogisms. Throw chess strategy and counter-strategy into the intangibles.
Patterns of thought enable us to communicate and anticipate the thoughts and actions of others; patterns of streets enable us to navigate. And, as I wrote in that last blog, patterns emerge in political and social systems. Equity and socialism demand adherence to patterns imposed by some select group.
Want to avoid patterned life? Go “off the grid.” Grids are patterns. But then if you do go “off the grid,” you’ll discover Nature’s patterns. No more artificial daytime; no more strawberries out of season: Dark nights and fruitless days, my friend, dark nights and fruitless days. If you don’t want that alternative, then welcome to the world of patterns imposed. The street lights turn on every night, across the city, across the world.
And now ritualistic patterns are also in the news. Ritual, the patterned actions in religion, sports, and even your daily life, has been usurped by robots in Southeast Asia. According to StudyFinds online, now a robotic arm performs “Aarti,” replacing a human in offering an oil lamp to the deity “to symbolize the removal of darkness.” * Robots also replace humans in other rituals: “Robotic rituals even now include an animatronic temple elephant in Kerala on India’s southern coast.”
What’s this world coming to when something as ancient as religious ritual, the culmination of human patternizing, is in the artificial arms of AI? Take the ritual of the Mass, for example. As priest shortages occur, does the Pope authorize not women, but robots wearing chasubles? Does Communion become an unleavened version of a Kura Revolving Sushi Bar? Will choirs of synthesizers replace organs and human voices singing praises?
That Equity Pattern
Happy with your patterns? Some you have because of inculcation, and some you established as a product of your individual makeup. Some are beneficial; some, not so much. Among the latter are vices and addictions. Among the former…well, you’re the only one who knows that. Patterns might even be neutral, causing neither gain nor pain.
But when equity is finally imposed on all, you can kiss most of those personal patterns—good, bad, and neutral— goodbye. You will be thrown into the governmental cafeteria, a version of a Kura Rotating Sushi Bar, precise amounts appearing at a given rate in a pattern decided by…who knows? No one gets more; no one gets less. And what if in the name of a perfect pattern of permissions and restrictions that safeguard equity, an AI eventually decides? Will some former Twitter censor, now out of a job, decide which algorithm to run at the Sushi Bar?
These Are Dangerous Times, My Friend
If you accept the premise that patterns lie behind most human actions, you might understand why I consider the current movement to impose social and political patterns a danger to all individuals. Most people live a life of layered patterns, one superimposed on another, or several patterns related by superpositions. What happens to individuality when patterns are imposed? Not that that is anything new: Think the courtiers and courtesans of Versailles.
Like Sediments, Regulations Pile Up
Among principles of sedimentology is the Principle of Superposition, the truth that older layers lie beneath younger layers of sediments unless the beds (layers) are disturbed by tectonic activity. It makes sense, given the logic that the first particles of rock debris to arrive on a scene by water or wind settle out of the fluid first. Subsequently arriving sediments lie on those that got there before them. Geologists use this principle to read the history of an area. Among the greatest exposures of this principle at work is the Grand Canyon, where hundreds of millions of years of sedimentation and burial have produced rock layers thousands of feet thick, the top 538.8 million years’ worth containing fossils, and those beneath them revealing the desolation and, except for bacteria and other soft-bodied critters, a lifeless Pre-Cambrian world.
I suppose we could argue that the first layer of imposed patterns or regulations adopted by the United States was the document we call the Articles of Confederation that was superseded eventually by The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In 1887 the government decided to regulate the railroads. The “sediments” then began to pile up. Tens of thousands of pages later, the regulations of the United States seem to dwarf the layers of the Grand Canyon.
According to BallotPedia online, ** “From November 2 to November 6, the Federal Register grew by 2,104 pages for a year-to-date total of 71,222 pages.” The sediments of regulation keep building up, layer upon layer, sometimes adding some thin details, sometimes massive accumulations. And all of these regulations determine the patterns of our lives, patterns with which you must comply under federal penalties that can include both fines and imprisonment. Remember Andy Johnson? Under the authority of their regulations, the EPA fined Andy $20 million for having a stock pond on his private Wyoming farm. *** I suppose the EPA wanted Andy to run city water into drinking fountains for the livestock. Who knows? The point is that in the rational pattern of farming and raising livestock, farmers and ranchers have for millennia impounded water for their animals and irrigation. Maybe the EPA is attempting to have Andy sell dehydrated beef.
Then there’s the recent and ongoing tale of the poor Dutch farmers. The stikstofcrisis — or nitrogen crisis — has incited a rebellion. Dutch farms have been the most productive in Europe, but because of their excess “nitrogen production,” they have come under regulatory attack. Seems the Dutch authorities would rather starve than produce too much nitrogen—along with food the country needs to survive—and they are willing to close down farms through regulation; that’s how concerned they are about the world. They are willing to close down farms and create a food shortage while depriving farmers of their livelihood.
Dutch farmers had spent centuries developing the processes and patterns that made them productive. Now, a few who owe their adulthood to the plenty produced by those farmers have imposed a regulation that threatens the economic health and the food supply. And for what purpose? Surely, there is some concern over pollutants in a land that lies at and even below sea level, but can those pollutants be handled in a way that doesn’t force farmers out of businesses run by generations of families? ****
Those who obtain the power of regulation cannot abstain from regulating, even from regulating the food-producers out of food-production. Some patterns are worth keeping; productive farming is one of them.
Think You’re Exempt?
The massive stack of federal regulations are mirrored by massive stacks of state and local regulations, all aimed to make us live according to, in most instances, arbitrary patterns. The government isn’t free from the whims of individuals. And as we all know in this Age of Wokeness, the loudest individuals control the narrative, and in many instances, the regulations that dictate the kinds of actions we are allowed. Are you happy peeing next to a stranger of the opposite sex? Remember that old pattern of restrooms marked “Women” and “Men”?
Regulation and Deregulation: Will the Pendulum Ever Stop Swinging?
The special agendists (my word) and career bureaucrats have one thing in common: Regulating in ever more tightly defined details. They have given us among other rules, the Clean Water Act, the very act used to threaten Andy Johnson for simply putting an environmentally friendly pond on his spacious property. The Clean Water Act did not originally apply to stock ponds on ranches and farms. It had a wider purpose: To protect the nation’s water resources from overuse and pollution. But with time and bureaucratic busybodies eager to prove their power to redefine legislation, Andy became a victim of over-regulation that carried an unreasonable penalty while ignoring that his pond actually created a little wetland, which that Clean Water Act seeks to protect.
As the history of America reveals, since those early days of regulating railroads in the nineteenth century, presidents have directed their appointees in the now 438 agencies and sub-agencies to “take care of things” by regulating. 438. All those agencies regulate. All those agencies add to their regulations through detailed refinements not voted into law by Congress. But the pendulum does swing. As control of the government shifts between parties, some presidents have ordered agencies to perform some deregulating.
The back-and-forth also applies to state agencies. I recall being in a meeting during the
Ridge Administration in which Pennsylvania’s head of the Department of Environmental Protection said something akin to “If I ripped out every other page of Pennsylvania’s environmental regulations, I don’t think anyone would notice.” The same could probably be said of the other states’ regulations and especially of California, the nation’s most heavily regulated state.
So, we bounce between over-patternizing and limiting the imposition of patterns. But the process is one of two steps forward and one back. The regulations pile up faster than the deregulation efforts can reduce them. Once regulators regulate, deregulators have difficulty eliminating. We march on toward an Age of Superregulation. Your life becomes ever more planned by entities and persons over which you have no control.
But Aren’t Some Patterns Bad and Deserving of Regulation?
In a world of almost eight billion humans, patterns bump into patterns. People do whatever in foolish, detrimental, and even evil ways. Not everyone is altruistic, thoughtful, or wise. Take the process of farming. Regulating water supplies for the general good has led to circular and drip irrigation, saving water while providing what is necessary to crop growth. The farming practices of the period before the Dust Bowl years were detrimental to the long-term retention of soils. The pattern of cut-and-burn in the Amazon rainforest and on Madagascar has decimated forests, exposed soils to erosion, and degraded crop production, even eliminating it. Fly over an area undergoing deforestation: See the pattern of devastation.
Some regulation makes sense, and I believe you have some ideas on which patterns of living you would like to regulate. Just know that where you wish to impose a regulation that alters someone else’s patterned lifestyle, you will run into opposition.
Ask yourself how the patterns of your inherited culture have been interrupted or changed by regulation. Ask how your personal patterns have been affected.
*https://studyfinds.org/robots-hindu-rituals/
**https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_Register_tops_70,000_pages_(2020)
***https://legalnewsline.com/stories/510643529-epa-threatens-20-million-fine-on-wyoming-man-who-built-a-pond-on-his-farm
****https://www.politico.eu/article/johan-vollenbroek-netherlands-nitrogen-pollution-climate-change-farming/
Take your driving or walking home. You’ve mentally mapped the directions. You know where to go, but you do so by following a pattern of streets and sidewalks, all of them marked by something familiar, a tree, a building, an ever-present porch occupant. You even associate time with your homing pattern: Go this way, ten minutes; that way,13 minutes. And you go home, or to the store or work, in a temporal pattern, going and leaving during or not during “rush hour,” that citywide pattern of humans pouring into or out of offices, many of them having a pattern of eating when you eat, and judging by the lines at Starbucks, of drinking coffee when you drink. We are a predictable lot because we live patterned lives. So many hours asleep; so many awake—unless the rhythm, the pattern of our biological clock, is syncopated.
Patterns Discovered and Patterns Imposed
At the end of my previous blog, I wrote about discovered and imposed patterns. The Periodic Table of the Elements is a good example of the former, and constellations are a good example of the latter. We seem to have an affinity for patterns of all kinds, both tangible, like tiles, and intangible, like syllogisms. Throw chess strategy and counter-strategy into the intangibles.
Patterns of thought enable us to communicate and anticipate the thoughts and actions of others; patterns of streets enable us to navigate. And, as I wrote in that last blog, patterns emerge in political and social systems. Equity and socialism demand adherence to patterns imposed by some select group.
Want to avoid patterned life? Go “off the grid.” Grids are patterns. But then if you do go “off the grid,” you’ll discover Nature’s patterns. No more artificial daytime; no more strawberries out of season: Dark nights and fruitless days, my friend, dark nights and fruitless days. If you don’t want that alternative, then welcome to the world of patterns imposed. The street lights turn on every night, across the city, across the world.
And now ritualistic patterns are also in the news. Ritual, the patterned actions in religion, sports, and even your daily life, has been usurped by robots in Southeast Asia. According to StudyFinds online, now a robotic arm performs “Aarti,” replacing a human in offering an oil lamp to the deity “to symbolize the removal of darkness.” * Robots also replace humans in other rituals: “Robotic rituals even now include an animatronic temple elephant in Kerala on India’s southern coast.”
What’s this world coming to when something as ancient as religious ritual, the culmination of human patternizing, is in the artificial arms of AI? Take the ritual of the Mass, for example. As priest shortages occur, does the Pope authorize not women, but robots wearing chasubles? Does Communion become an unleavened version of a Kura Revolving Sushi Bar? Will choirs of synthesizers replace organs and human voices singing praises?
That Equity Pattern
Happy with your patterns? Some you have because of inculcation, and some you established as a product of your individual makeup. Some are beneficial; some, not so much. Among the latter are vices and addictions. Among the former…well, you’re the only one who knows that. Patterns might even be neutral, causing neither gain nor pain.
But when equity is finally imposed on all, you can kiss most of those personal patterns—good, bad, and neutral— goodbye. You will be thrown into the governmental cafeteria, a version of a Kura Rotating Sushi Bar, precise amounts appearing at a given rate in a pattern decided by…who knows? No one gets more; no one gets less. And what if in the name of a perfect pattern of permissions and restrictions that safeguard equity, an AI eventually decides? Will some former Twitter censor, now out of a job, decide which algorithm to run at the Sushi Bar?
These Are Dangerous Times, My Friend
If you accept the premise that patterns lie behind most human actions, you might understand why I consider the current movement to impose social and political patterns a danger to all individuals. Most people live a life of layered patterns, one superimposed on another, or several patterns related by superpositions. What happens to individuality when patterns are imposed? Not that that is anything new: Think the courtiers and courtesans of Versailles.
Like Sediments, Regulations Pile Up
Among principles of sedimentology is the Principle of Superposition, the truth that older layers lie beneath younger layers of sediments unless the beds (layers) are disturbed by tectonic activity. It makes sense, given the logic that the first particles of rock debris to arrive on a scene by water or wind settle out of the fluid first. Subsequently arriving sediments lie on those that got there before them. Geologists use this principle to read the history of an area. Among the greatest exposures of this principle at work is the Grand Canyon, where hundreds of millions of years of sedimentation and burial have produced rock layers thousands of feet thick, the top 538.8 million years’ worth containing fossils, and those beneath them revealing the desolation and, except for bacteria and other soft-bodied critters, a lifeless Pre-Cambrian world.
I suppose we could argue that the first layer of imposed patterns or regulations adopted by the United States was the document we call the Articles of Confederation that was superseded eventually by The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In 1887 the government decided to regulate the railroads. The “sediments” then began to pile up. Tens of thousands of pages later, the regulations of the United States seem to dwarf the layers of the Grand Canyon.
According to BallotPedia online, ** “From November 2 to November 6, the Federal Register grew by 2,104 pages for a year-to-date total of 71,222 pages.” The sediments of regulation keep building up, layer upon layer, sometimes adding some thin details, sometimes massive accumulations. And all of these regulations determine the patterns of our lives, patterns with which you must comply under federal penalties that can include both fines and imprisonment. Remember Andy Johnson? Under the authority of their regulations, the EPA fined Andy $20 million for having a stock pond on his private Wyoming farm. *** I suppose the EPA wanted Andy to run city water into drinking fountains for the livestock. Who knows? The point is that in the rational pattern of farming and raising livestock, farmers and ranchers have for millennia impounded water for their animals and irrigation. Maybe the EPA is attempting to have Andy sell dehydrated beef.
Then there’s the recent and ongoing tale of the poor Dutch farmers. The stikstofcrisis — or nitrogen crisis — has incited a rebellion. Dutch farms have been the most productive in Europe, but because of their excess “nitrogen production,” they have come under regulatory attack. Seems the Dutch authorities would rather starve than produce too much nitrogen—along with food the country needs to survive—and they are willing to close down farms through regulation; that’s how concerned they are about the world. They are willing to close down farms and create a food shortage while depriving farmers of their livelihood.
Dutch farmers had spent centuries developing the processes and patterns that made them productive. Now, a few who owe their adulthood to the plenty produced by those farmers have imposed a regulation that threatens the economic health and the food supply. And for what purpose? Surely, there is some concern over pollutants in a land that lies at and even below sea level, but can those pollutants be handled in a way that doesn’t force farmers out of businesses run by generations of families? ****
Those who obtain the power of regulation cannot abstain from regulating, even from regulating the food-producers out of food-production. Some patterns are worth keeping; productive farming is one of them.
Think You’re Exempt?
The massive stack of federal regulations are mirrored by massive stacks of state and local regulations, all aimed to make us live according to, in most instances, arbitrary patterns. The government isn’t free from the whims of individuals. And as we all know in this Age of Wokeness, the loudest individuals control the narrative, and in many instances, the regulations that dictate the kinds of actions we are allowed. Are you happy peeing next to a stranger of the opposite sex? Remember that old pattern of restrooms marked “Women” and “Men”?
Regulation and Deregulation: Will the Pendulum Ever Stop Swinging?
The special agendists (my word) and career bureaucrats have one thing in common: Regulating in ever more tightly defined details. They have given us among other rules, the Clean Water Act, the very act used to threaten Andy Johnson for simply putting an environmentally friendly pond on his spacious property. The Clean Water Act did not originally apply to stock ponds on ranches and farms. It had a wider purpose: To protect the nation’s water resources from overuse and pollution. But with time and bureaucratic busybodies eager to prove their power to redefine legislation, Andy became a victim of over-regulation that carried an unreasonable penalty while ignoring that his pond actually created a little wetland, which that Clean Water Act seeks to protect.
As the history of America reveals, since those early days of regulating railroads in the nineteenth century, presidents have directed their appointees in the now 438 agencies and sub-agencies to “take care of things” by regulating. 438. All those agencies regulate. All those agencies add to their regulations through detailed refinements not voted into law by Congress. But the pendulum does swing. As control of the government shifts between parties, some presidents have ordered agencies to perform some deregulating.
The back-and-forth also applies to state agencies. I recall being in a meeting during the
Ridge Administration in which Pennsylvania’s head of the Department of Environmental Protection said something akin to “If I ripped out every other page of Pennsylvania’s environmental regulations, I don’t think anyone would notice.” The same could probably be said of the other states’ regulations and especially of California, the nation’s most heavily regulated state.
So, we bounce between over-patternizing and limiting the imposition of patterns. But the process is one of two steps forward and one back. The regulations pile up faster than the deregulation efforts can reduce them. Once regulators regulate, deregulators have difficulty eliminating. We march on toward an Age of Superregulation. Your life becomes ever more planned by entities and persons over which you have no control.
But Aren’t Some Patterns Bad and Deserving of Regulation?
In a world of almost eight billion humans, patterns bump into patterns. People do whatever in foolish, detrimental, and even evil ways. Not everyone is altruistic, thoughtful, or wise. Take the process of farming. Regulating water supplies for the general good has led to circular and drip irrigation, saving water while providing what is necessary to crop growth. The farming practices of the period before the Dust Bowl years were detrimental to the long-term retention of soils. The pattern of cut-and-burn in the Amazon rainforest and on Madagascar has decimated forests, exposed soils to erosion, and degraded crop production, even eliminating it. Fly over an area undergoing deforestation: See the pattern of devastation.
Some regulation makes sense, and I believe you have some ideas on which patterns of living you would like to regulate. Just know that where you wish to impose a regulation that alters someone else’s patterned lifestyle, you will run into opposition.
Ask yourself how the patterns of your inherited culture have been interrupted or changed by regulation. Ask how your personal patterns have been affected.
*https://studyfinds.org/robots-hindu-rituals/
**https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_Register_tops_70,000_pages_(2020)
***https://legalnewsline.com/stories/510643529-epa-threatens-20-million-fine-on-wyoming-man-who-built-a-pond-on-his-farm
****https://www.politico.eu/article/johan-vollenbroek-netherlands-nitrogen-pollution-climate-change-farming/
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