The Cuckoo’s Nest

I am somewhat of a social conservative and recognize the effects of globalization, which will leave this country depleted of its natural resources and devoid of its industrial foundation, taking us all the way back to the dark ages. So, I can’t support a “free market” that is completely oblivious to common sense; imminent domain applies to trade too…Whose land is it? Who should control the resources and negotiate the terms? I think that’s conservative too, and seems to be a revolutionary concept today. Today the deterministic market is favoring one massively rich class and a bureaucratic elite making all the decisions, with catastrophic results I might add. Even if you have socialist tendencies your path goes through here. They are nobody’s friend.

I think that for far too long we have been caught in the scent of the wrong "woman" and raising the Cuckoo’s eggs, in the scent of the metaphysical currency and the religious scourge afflicting the world. It's not easy spotting the Cuckoo's nest, but if you don't you pay a high price and the industrious man works himself to death victims of the emotional harvesting. Undoubtedly the transhumanist agenda is a very old one that found nurture in the “private investor" and keeps rehashing and reinventing itself in new liberal forms. Two centuries ago the leading capitalist class was also called progressive.

Having said that I’m a little more “liberal” when it comes to the economic aspect, because the evolution that made us human was fundamentally based on economic flexibility, held together by a more permanent social environment so we could better adapt to the circumstances. I say a little because these two are intertwined, the implication being the learning curve and the necessary social development, which means we had to change the way we do things and become more effective for the benefit of most. In this context we’ve grown to need the private impetus that drives the economy, but we certainly will never need the cultural decadence and moral depravity. That fact also places me on a moral arch today as yesterday, and out of necessity a few minutes to the right, which tends to solve the immediate problem of a glooming moral and economic deficit (without forgetting the long-term goals).

In some ancient cultures the hunt was organized and men would go out on specific days and time, when they came back the prey was shared with the rest of the village. In some other cultures it could be organized but individuals would go hunting by themselves all the time. In others, men would hunt in smaller groups and their families kept a private garden to supplement the diet.

We could find different ways of doing things as part of a learning curve, but we are very late to the social development and stretched beyond any conceivable limits, which is a huge problem. Some people try to cut their losses and some cling for their lives to the speculative reforms in the enriched environment, both very expensive. So, in the middle of nowhere, dazed and confused, we come up with new theories and consume the perversion of reality fed to us every day. Like a spinning wheel population growth alters the rhythm of life and generates a demand, we fix it with technology and new production methods and in the measure we don’t the individual takes on more responsibility. If we place all the responsibility on the individual to beginning with, we won’t feel this effect so much (we are already there on the edge of tomorrow) but we will have displaced a great amount of pressure to the ecosystem and will depend increasingly on private ingenuity. 

One of the challenges of population growth is that some phenomena in the human curve starts showing up very acutely and challenging some notions. Which in the end is also part of the predicament of enrichment. It challenges the human conscience and implies a new way of doing things, that’s the reason we have jails and mental hospitals. Developments in science and technology also require that we change the way we do things. It challenges concepts such as caring and sharing and should promote the right social development, whatever that is. Just like certain diseases and plagues made us think about the way we disposed of our waste and the quality of drinking water for instance. We don’t burn at the stick the guy acting strange at the village because he is “possessed” by demons, he is such an oddity any more.

We could not build the next guy’s house with our own hands anymore for instance, and we would naturally find ourselves conflicted and split in these conditions. New methods and technologies support the growth and readjust the expectations, as well as a system of laws which becomes the necessary evil, the one we need to deal with the downside of growth. But they too mostly work when they reflect the collective wellbeing since they yield a diminishing return that makes us expand vertically. It pulls in both directions and if you add to that cost the trans-idiosyncratic dogmas and some liberal notions about the human condition you have a disaster in your hands, we would just be adding fuel to the fire. Their calling on someone goodness and the extraordinary effort from society to fix these problems becomes delusional; we have not done the right things, we have not promoted the right things and we’ll increasingly fall behind the curve.

What this means is that the diminishing return is greater than the sum of your efforts and the new law or new technology will only demand another one very soon. Another building, another expressway, another technology to offset the very bad effects of the last one, like the automobile…etc. Internal conflicts we sometime call reforms, but we don’t really know any more if they are the result of the legitimate pressures of growth or the result of the inefficiency and ignorance.

Trade looks good and the economy thrives and we are all happy that we have something to do, something to break or destroy to build something new and impressive but we’ve only generated more enrichment. It is worth saying at this point that the territorial expansion and the spaces produced by the production of wealth is not horizontal but vertical inflation. I’ve always said the more we trade the more inefficient we’ve become which is associated with the growing needs of the population and the smarter and more productive we become the less we need to trade which is the opposing vector in those conflating trajectories. It generates the potential but there is a diminishing return too, to the size of the building or the buss that makes them efficient (at which point you make another one and go vertical again).