Random thoughts

I'm not writing this for you. I'm writing for me. All of it. I'm making it publicly accessible out of a sense of responsibility to humanity. It's an impulse so it's something ingrained in me either through experience and unaware practice or perhaps it's in the genes. Or it's something else entirely, maybe my "sense of responsibility" is just the worst form of selfishness.

But what would the worst form of selfishness be? Can any human act be described as an act of selflessness? I can't see how that could happen. Even altruistic, sacrificing acts are based on reasons, purposes, and those purposes are meaningful for the person choosing to act on those impulses or values.

What I'm getting at is that making judgments based on the "selfishness" of particular behaviors is a pointless endeavor. A better question is "what is the impact of this particular act of selfishness" or, to eliminate redundancy, "what is the impact of this particular act." An act cannot be selfless in much the same way that an individual cannot live without breathing. Identity is the same way. An identity develops for every person over time (many identities, really). Every particular relationship between act and identity is based on a selfish pursuit in some respect.

The form of one's identity fluctuates based on the fulfillment or denial of physical, emotional, and cognitive needs. Thus, actions fluctuate as well within this triangulation of identity, needs, and actions. Decision making is an ingredient in the mixture as well. As is ...

It goes on and on, the levels of complexity determining who you are, why you act, what you feel, how you think. Selfishness, though? A distracting concept. That's morality in a nutshell. Distraction. If there was an actual impetus to solve problems and improve the quality of life globally then morality would be thrown in an incinerator. What is useful in trying to figure out how to solve problems is understanding reality. Instead of making the judgment, "My God, he just did x on a y with a z! Someone call the police!" why not focus on understanding why it happened?

Granted, that is the supposed purpose of academic disciplines such as sociology. The idea being that findings could be useful for creating public policy, legislation, and redesigning institutional structures and processes. You know, to improve the quality of life for all of humanity.

*cough* *cough* ... *bullshit*

There is an overwhelming abundance of scientific knowledge indicating that the foundational bases for contemporary governments and economies are ass backward. The evidence is overwhelming if you consider the findings of the various academic disciplines through an interdisciplinary "holistic" lens related to the state of each human being. The technology that exists now is actually sufficient to be able to account for each individual in the world. We don't need statistics in order to guess how I am doing on a given day. There's no reason not to have an interactive, participative exchange with institutions about one's own well-being in any capacity. Well, there is a reason. Will. The will of those with power.

But this is all very new to the world. The implications are just beginning to show. I see it in far-flung writings and interviews and research papers from all different fields, from different walks of life, from different countries. But it makes sense. Human beings have beliefs and tell themselves stories, but "fundamentalism" is an overblown bugaboo scare word. No one is really fundamentalist about anything. Everyone adapts to their circumstances. In different ways. Creatively. There wouldn't be such a diversity of identity, decision making, and behavior if each person's circumstances were the same as everyone else's circumstances. At the same time.

Viewed through that lens, standardization is unnatural. And, if I were to reintroduce morals to the debate, standardization could be said to be immoral. And unethical. Just plain wrong. Think about the purpose of standardization for a second: measures for evaluators to make judgments about the skills and abilities of students. The process is "get good grades in high school to be allowed entry into a good college then get good grades again to be allowed a position at a job that pays x amount of dollars and a chance for advancement or to be allowed entry into a graduate program (and then maybe a doctoral program beyond that)." So, standardization is not in the interests of students at all. It exists for the benefit of institutions. It's about money, status, and power.

How are you going to transform society into a better place by using standard measurements? What could possibly be gleaned from such a thing but the ability to predict the past in the form of a new student coming along capable of replacing the worker in the system now who will eventually wither and die. What is that old saying about governments and tyranny? I just expand it from governments to all institutional bodies. What's the difference between a city government, a university, a publicly traded corporation, or any other institutional body? Just the particulars of their created structures and created needs (yes, institutions have needs. The language of the law describes what those needs are. Artificial life forms, these institutions).

So, how do you think institutions fulfill their needs? I mean, they are created in our own image, so they are selfish entities, interested in perpetuating their existence indefinitely, wanting the best for themselves, trying to get ahead and remain competitive. And so they act like an individual would act if an individual was in such a situation. Okay, I need this and that to survive and to acquire this and accomplish that I need human bodies performing various tasks for me on a daily basis ... forever.

So, basically, one of an institution's needs is human labor. Institutions need a supply of human labor in order to survive.Labor can be technological, though. Certain types of labor. But there has to be humans playing roles in an institution for it to function. You could challenge that, I suppose, but to what end?

What I am wondering is why humans have it in their heads that we exist to serve institutions rather than the other way around? I mean, we created them! Well, I didn't create them. You probably didn't either. But a few humans created them. Throughout history. And are still doing so now.

Institutions are weird. For some they are vehicles for accomplishing specific goals while for others they are merciless overlords. For most people, institutions are both. Just depends on one's position in relation to them. As with one's position in relation to anything external or internal.

My thinking is that humans should be more selfish in relation to institutions. I'll tell you why. I mentioned morality earlier and the reason I did was because selfishness is perceived as immoral (or at least distasteful). This negative conception of self-interest is ... strange. To me. Why would we not want to have the best of life? I believe selfishness (which is all human activity, by the way) is only problematic when it harms individuals who do not want to be harmed. Ah, but what defines "harms"? Well, I break it down to basics: whatever denies the development and well-being of an individual.

"Oh, but how could we account for everything? Well, corporations and governments have been at it for awhile now and they're getting better at it. If those institutions were actually serving our interests rather than their own? If we actually wrote the laws and implemented policies in such a way as to make institutions slaves to humans rather than the other way around? Hey, we'd all be living a much higher quality of life.

But people have weird beliefs. I say institutions are strange, but they're only strange because humans designed them to be strange. Is that right? Is that fair? Is that just? Is that ethical? All of the answers to those questions are stories we tell ourselves. But the only story that matters is the story that's true. Well, if we want our minds to be as closely aligned to reality as possible (and who's to say we do?). But, for the sake of argument...

Justice is a form of social biology. Norms are things we biologically adapt to, make part of our routines, and, thus, a part of ourselves. To disrupt norms is an "injustice" to individual human beings in the same way a foreign object is perceived as an "injustice" by individual white blood cells. Collectively, a social organism acts as a biological organism acts. Of course there have been studies of social insects, ants especially. There are parallels between ants and humans.

Morality seems to be nothing more (or less) than a social biological regulating mechanism. The social body is created, developed, maintained, and reproduced by individuals just as an individual's body is created, developed, maintained, and reproduced by cells. How great could the extrapolations of organism complexity be? If a cell is a building block for an individual body and an individual body is a building block for a social body then what is the next level of complexity beyond the social body? An ecosystem? And beyond an ecosystem? A planetary ecosystem? And beyond that? Solar systems? Galaxies? The Universe? Universes?

Is that the limit? Are we attempting to colonize space, to impose life on the endless lifelessness of all inorganic existence (whether particles or waves or both or neither or ... whatever)? I've read of plague species, but what if the organic is simply a plague spreading through the overwhelmingly inorganic universe. Perhaps physical laws, on all levels, are simply protective mechanisms that "developed" to prevent outbreaks of life from infecting the inorganism of the universe. Or, maybe over hundreds of billions of years, the natural process of the universe's development will be to become a living organism. Maybe humanity is the latest incarnation arising from an apical stem on the tree of life, seeking higher and higher, branching further and further, methodically attempting to impose the existence of life on a space that is not currently living, the inorganic rearranging itself into the organic (rather than perceiving the organic as rearranging the inorganic--perhaps they are working together. Whatever comes in contact with the living is in danger of becoming a resource used to sustain life. However, whatever comes in contact with the living also has an opportunity to snuff out life and to "reunite" the living with the lifeless.). Imagining the entirety of the universe transforming from inorganic to organic, though? What could follow such a transition? Further developments of complexities in and between the organic and the inorganic? An endless cycle of lifelessness into life into lifelessness into...?

And what of time in this morass? It's the necessary ingredient, the component that creates differentiation and transformation. Subject/object relations are dependent on time. Everything that exists is dependent on time. Is it a co-dependent relationship, though? Space clearly needs time, but does time need space to exist? Unanswerable question.

If time is of this level of importance then isn't that the measure to judge the quality of life? How is your time spent? What are you choosing to think and do? What are you allowed to do and, thus, to think? Do you push the boundaries of what is allowed? Do you exercise your right to choose? Do you judge the quality of your time through the lens of whether or not you are making decisions about how your time is spent or if others are making those decisions for you (even in the situation where you are "voluntarily" submitting to teachers or employers for grades or paychecks--both are commodities to be traded for careers, wealth, influence, or control)? Is it "selfish" to expect "justice" in relation to control over your time? If it is selfish, is it because it's a viewpoint inspired by the notion that healthy food, clean air and water, shelter, utilities, health care, clothing, transportation, communications technology, and all other manner of human rights and civil liberties, from the freedom of speech to the right to assemble, are absolute NECESSITIES for each and every human being?

A few random random thoughts floating around in my brain today.