Manifesto - Why I Do This Pt. 2
A manifesto at minimum, is a clear declaration of expressed intentions and motivations. A good manifesto needs a problem statement and an intention. A great manifesto should address a universally acknowledged (not an imagined) problem, outline a noble, not a self-serving intention and should contain something of a roadmap of getting there.
This article unarguably has the noblest intention, motivated by the most pressing and universal concern, and a profoundly simple way to get there.
An Axiom is a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true. This is an axiom:
there is no nobler cause, no more comprehensive philosophy, nor more pressing issue, than Stable Mutual Actualisation.
Stable Mutual Actualisation is a philosophy that addresses all concerns, leaves none behind, asks of us that we lose nothing of our deepest private needs, or the spirit of our most dearly held beliefs. It is the tide that raises all boats, a change that does not result in future regret, a compass by which we may rescue our failing systems, redress the imbalance of power in our society, overcome our mental health crisis, and chart a stable course towards a brighter nobler future, without a morsel of spiritual junk food, but neither compromising on what we hold sacred. It is the pathway to both personal growth and personal healing which consumes so much of our lives. It is the means by which we practice and reap the rich rewards of relationships with others and the only way in which society transcends its own limitations, by which we debug the software, eradicate the viruses, and ensure the steps we take towards our uncertain future, are taken in ways that will not result in more suffering and more deferred regret.
At bottom, psychologically, we all have the same intentions.
After the operating system of culture and personal experience is overlaid, we arrive at the perception of misaligned intentions and clashing intuitions on how best to achieve these intentions. We are hyper-aware of our differences, ignorant of our same-ness. We are caught, and stuck believing that this life is a zero sum game, in terms of wealth, love, opportunity and everything we innately value. It is not. We are infected with a number of mind viruses, our evolutionary biology and cultural operating system have unmitigated bugs. This can be fixed, through Stable Mutual Actualisation.
Problem Statement
The people warning us are not prophets, they are mathematicians; we have stacked the odds against ourselves. They are not crying Wolf. We, are the wolf, and we are the ignorant villagers.
We like to think that Rome fell because the Vandals attacked. Or the Visigoths, or perhaps other barbarians. But Rome never fell because the barbarians developed superior technology or martial prowess which eventually surpassed the greatest empire the world had ever known.
Rome fell because of bandwidth issues.
Systems fail when their inputs exceed their throughput. Systems of governance, justice, plumbing, tax collection, public administration, collaboration are no different.
The conditioning effect of hedonic adaption works also the other way. We don’t only become conditioned and desensitised to levels of pleasure and comfort, we also become conditioned and desensitised to levels of concern and discomfort.
The first time a senator of Rome cried wolf that the Barbarians were coming, they got granted executive power and the means to raise and army.
The second and third time also. The tenth time, the alarm had become commonplace and once something is repeated, it can begin to be ignored.
Our built-in system of parsing and processing new information, fails, when it’s inputs exceed its throughput. When the amount of noise, news cycles, entertainment, threats, public spectacles, games etc. exceed our ability to discern what to pay attention to or even to attach the right valence to what we are paying attention to, our system of effective reasoning is compromised.
Critical thinking has no auto-pilot function and vigilance has no off-switch, and can easily be manipulated to auto-acquire non-valid targets. This is the basis of the creation of false dichotomies and all manipulative persuasion, such as propaganda, marketing and politics.
When economics, politics, propaganda, distraction and rhetoric are deployed on an overstimulated, vigilant, overwhelmed populace, you can easily game them and keep them preoccupied. It is invariably so compelling, and human emotional investment is such an effective fuel source, inevitably even the people playing the game are sucked into the game of false dichotomies.
Once suspicion is cast on opposition political factions and vigilance is stimulated, the state of vigilance does not subside but is redirected in unexpected ways that foments mistrust and social dysfunction. Eventually the apparatus of public discourse is utterly drowned in bad packet headers of information, and the source is generated from within the system, aimless and self perpetuating.
So, when the barbarians do arrive, all available bandwidth for attention capture is subsumed by the runaway mechanics of the game and the relentless drive of human nature: self-concern, fear of other, tribalism, fear of being wrong, all precipitate in a perfect storm.
Then, no matter what calamity arrives at the gates, no matter what scale pandemic breaks out, you now have on your hands a coordination problem, exacerbated by a bandwidth problem.
Once the misinformation, disinformation, obfuscation, rhetoric and propaganda are released out of Pandora’s box, they are like viruses, taking on lives of their own, stirring sentiment and edifying beliefs which utterly override systems of shared value.
There is a solution, a way out. A potential future in which our Rome does not fall, where we do not usher in a new dark age, where we do not become a tragic series of volumes in a work of history, or worse still, a bleaker future, not for the planet, which will invariably recover once humanity is removed from the equation, but one in which all the good things we are creating, all the possible rich experiences of love, connection and meaning, are all snuffed out.
The world outside is sick and troubled; perfect reflections of our inner worlds.
The turbulence we feel, is the last candle of our shared humanity, fluttering in the wind of a growing storm, of pain and suffering, caused by shame, and ignorance.
The cold irony is that if someone arrived with the answers, actual answers, we would not be able to listen; because of all the many things we expect the messenger to look like and how certain we are of how the message should sound.
The time is upon us now when the last true flames are burning low, where the old candles are fluttering their last, where our honest casks of human cheer,
once thought boundless, have been tapped to their sour dregs.
And we have taken the ideas of our time, unchecked to the very edge of what a gentle heart may bear, and we all, we all, look away at the horror we are creating.
It is not too late. It is a bandwidth problem, of course, given that this always was about consciousness. That should start becoming painfully obvious to us all by now. And what we are spending our bandwidth on really is shame. At bottom, we do everything in this life worth recounting, either from love or from fear. And fear, ultimately, is ignorance.
There is also no obvious and easy way out of the present set of circumstances and conditions we have engineered for ourselves. All our greatest innovations and ingenuity, if we are honest with ourselves, were pursued in the interests of making life easier. Our industriousness and busyness even, if we pay close enough attention, is all in the service of sloth. We arrived at running water and google search by wanting life to be easier, by that ceaseless drive of humanity, to overcome our limitations through our cleverness, to master our environments and create technologies, systems and institutions to do what we cannot easily do for ourselves.
Without a careful understanding of causes and effects, both preceding and what will follow, we boldly invest in choices, awed by our own cleverness and a blinded lack of foresight, into a sense that all progress is 'good' and that we lose nothing of value in our march towards what we believe always naively, is progress.
The greatest enablement for and of civilisation, has been specialisation. That is the opportunity window opened by the reality in which one person does not have to fetch their own water, gather their own firewood, procure all their own food, be solely responsible for their safety and their other needs. Through specialisation we get to claw back bandwidth that would be spent merely staying alive, and are able to invest that energy and focus to areas of interest to us, ideally to better exploit our natural talents, and all this with a symbiotic outcome in so far as the group in turn may now benefit from the proceeds of our specialisation.
The challenge we now face is two-fold: firstly not every advancement suits the whole group, or is done in a way that does not come at costs, and once we are dependent on the systems, technologies and institutions, as well as resentful of the negative implications they represent to our wellbeing and sovereignty, we lack the means in all practical terms, to wean ourselves from them.
We cannot individually know or learn enough in a day to effectively be our own doctors, our own midwives, our own scientific experts, our own electrical engineers, ditch diggers, farmers, fishermen or bakers. Furthermore, while people who are wired to value mutual benefit are free to now pursue efforts to enrich their lives for the benefit of others, while people who are wired to exploit others are free to invest their curiosity and energy into ways to more effectively manipulate and control others. This is the world we live in now. Locked into a march of progress, in which there are not only positives, and in which the pros no longer outweigh the cons in as obvious ways as we once imagined, and worse, there are serious incentives for the few, to be dishonest about the cons and it simply is not easy to wind anything back, without jeopardising the benefits we depend on. It is not like removing raisins from a bowl of cereal. It is more like removing sugar from tea. Some people are happily misrepresenting the merits of sugar and then overcharging you for dentist appointments. And adding to the impossibility of the moment, the odds we have stacked against ourselves, are the sheer complexity of the world we have created, the amount of information and understanding and coordination it would take to get to know what exactly is bad about our current predicament, what better without yet further future regrets might look like, and mutual foundation of trust it would take to cooperate in the interests of leaning that way.
Even now, it is not too late, but there does rightly need to be a sense of urgency. We will not run out of time, we will run out of cycles.
Same, Different, Better.
A good value proposition, should address three unwritten questions.
Firstly, what does this proposition have in common with others, that is, what is the common door of need or value by which we might connect with this idea?
Secondly, what is different about this proposition, what are the ways in which this is simply not the same as the alternatives.
And finally, why is this better, that is, in which way do those differences matter?
All our cherished systems, ideologies and 'isms', were ways in which society, or the activities of society and specifically the individuals which make up the society, might be ordered so as to ensure they survive into a tomorrow, with the least amount of regrets. How do I get the things I value, how do I avoid danger and injury and an untimely demise, and how do I sit with the fruits of my choices, not haunted by regret, wishing I had done something else instead.
All our technology, all our regulations, all our ideologies, our religions, moral codes, are in the service of avoiding pain, seeking pleasure, conserving energy and minimising regret.
All our personal, relationship and societal dysfunction is due to the lack of consensus of what good or better looks like, the failure of our perspectives to accommodate for the perspectives of others and the chaos which ensues when we become angry at the wrong things.
Stable Mutual Actualisation is the same as other philosophies in so far as it aims to articulate the optimum way in which we might as individuals, families, groups and societies, ensure optimal pleasure for most people, minimise pain and suffering, and avoid avoidable regret.
Stable Mutual Actualisation differs from other philosophies, ideologies, systems and 'isms' as suggested by two key adjectives Stable and Mutual. Stable because it is by definition adaptive to change, Mutual because it is not predicated on zero-sum economy of power and value inherent in the current crowd favourites, and further Stable because of the non-zero-sum nature, inequality is affectively addressed and there is no distended system of imbalance to challenge.
To be continued. How and Why is Stable Mutual Actualisation Better?