Sunday, July 06, 2003

Human Neutrality Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Today human life is not synergic. Most of humanity are ignorant of the natural law of Synergy. Most humans ignore or hurt each other. Most humans ignore or hurt the environment. This is the source of nearly all our current problems. In the free world, we have created a system of human Neutrality as a mechanism to avoid the loss of Adversity. This is the system that brought us capitalism and the great market. ... In the free market of Neutrality, our identities and personal relationships are unimportant. We purchase products anonymously, usually without knowing the seller's name, or he ours. When I enter McDonalds to purchase my lunch, I see only the product, the hamburger stacked in the warmer. I ignore the clerk. I don't know her name or her story. I see the hamburger, that's what I want. The clerk behind the counter ignores me. She doesn't know my name or my story. She sees my five dollars, that's what she wants. The store is clean and I feel safe. I expect the kitchen is clean and I will get a good product for a fair price. We will trade. We will speak the neutral words of the trading ritual. I never knowing her name, she never knowing mine. "May I help you?" "Thank you and have a nice day." We trade. Now our trade is fair. By definition, the lunch McDonalds is selling has a fair market value of $5.00. My five dollars has a fair market value of $5.00. We trade fairly. Economically nothing much has changed for me. I had five dollars in cash when I entered McDonalds, and I left with five dollars worth of lunch. My net worth is the same. While I obviously got some utility from the exchange, I preferred the lunch to my cash. In a strict economic sense, I am little changed by this exchange. In fair exchanges, $5.00 in cash equals $5.00 in food. In fact, McDonalds created the lunch for less than $5.00, the fair market price contains some profit for the seller. But, when I earned my $5.00, I did it by I selling some product or service that cost me a little less. I'm entitled to a profit when I sell products or services. That's the neutral way. If we analyze neutral relationships, we discover that in a neutral exchange (1+1) = 2. Humans institute Neutrality to escape Adversity – to protect themselves from loss. (07/06/03) Pythagoras, Subcultures, and Psycho-Bio-Circuitry Howard Bloom writes: There had been little room for a sensitive, vulnerable, and inward-looking male in a tribal community. Should he be sufficiently determined, he might become a shaman. If he was shy to the point of panic and had the rare luck to be in a tribe which allowed such a thing, he might seek refuge as a berdache, a man/woman who dresses like a female and becomes a wife. However if he was in a tribe like Brazil's Yanomamo, he'd end up shunned for his cowardice, have no wives, and hence no progeny. As a result, his genes would disappear from his group entirely. But there was a new slogan in the urban fifth century b.c.: "know thyself." On the surface, it seemed to imply rugged self-sufficiency. However its subtext preached a hunt for connectivity. "Somewhere," it whispered between the words, "is a subculture into which you fit. Seek it and adopt it as a home for your identity." Fugitives from the normal, driven by off-kilter brain settings and the disdain of others, had what researchers call "low stakes in conformity." They could ferret out a freakish idea, then use it to declare their independence from those who had rejected them. What the folks you'd grown up with had called weirdness could be your entry card to a brotherhood of strangers who shared your "insane" sensibilities. In the interurban web, you could for the first time choose a group which fit the contours of your neurology. But while the culture which had spat you out was probably local, the new form of subculture which sucked you in was probably a vortex of transnationality. To see these psychobiological currents spiralling in the greatest number we'll have to find the right city. And Athens was the rightest one in sight. Foreigners like Zeno - who laid out what would be recognized for thousands of years as the three basic areas of philosophy - logic, ethics, and physics - arrived in Athens from Italy's Elea carrying the seeds of an intellectual sport for thrill-seeking underexcitables, those whose perpetually parched limbic systems thirsted for neural pandemonium. This was the mental rough-and-tumble Aristotle - a century or so later - called the Dialectic. Zeno's gift was later given a local twist as the Socratic method within whose social confines some convention-piercers found abode. Meanwhile other cosmopolites wafted into town from the Italian colonies carrying Pythagoreanism, a refuge for limbically bruisable introverts and others of the contemplative sort. (07/06/03) Reap the Whirlwind The Independent UK -- In an astonishing announcement on global warming and extreme weather, the World Meteorological Organisation signalled last night that the world's weather is going haywire. In a startling report, the WMO, which normally produces detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in recent weeks, from Switzerland's hottest-ever June to a record month for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to climate change. The unprecedented warning takes its force and significance from the fact that it is not coming from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but from an impeccably respected UN organisation that is not given to hyperbole (though environmentalists will seize on it to claim that the direst warnings of climate change are being borne out). The Geneva-based body, to which the weather services of 185 countries contribute, takes the view that events this year in Europe, America and Asia are so remarkable that the world needs to be made aware of it immediately. The extreme weather it documents, such as record high and low temperatures, record rainfall and record storms in different parts of the world, is consistent with predictions of global warming. Supercomputer models show that, as the atmosphere warms, the climate not only becomes hotter but much more unstable. "Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase." (07/06/03) 7:28:12 AM

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