Again a Game... Again

Take my hand
Colors seem so black inside your head
Does everything reflect the time you spend?

So tired of thinking
You hide your face
Don't ask me to excuse

...

Save your words
They're never there for those who try
A stranger in a world, no longer mine

Sometimes I'm feeling used
I'll change my place
I'd sooner be excused

...

There are times, I confess, I'm not easy to accept
So come find, I'll react
I'm a reason to be there

I'm only laughing...

-- Mark Hollis (Talk Talk) 1984

Political correctness effects

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

-- Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It  (2005)

self-righteous left

I never thought I’d live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment, and the left wing becoming the sniveling self-righteous twatty ones going around shaming everyone.  

-- John Lydon

resist now

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? ... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

The Power of the Powerless

The citizen has to put a slogan in his window, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of.  This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning: it reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don’t want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.

Whether the slogan is true or not is beside the point. The point is signaling compliance out of fear, not an honest discussion of the evidence, or persuasion, or any mechanism respecting the informed and open consent of the governed. In postings signs of affirmation of the regime, citizens have adapted to the conditions in which they live; but in doing so, they also help to create those conditions. Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient. Both are objects in a system of control; but at the same time, they are its subjects as well. They are both victims of the system and its instruments.

Citizens’ assistance to a lying and oppressive regime changes those who corrupt themselves. They may learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable and ultimately come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society.  In other words, falsifying reality brings about more of that falsified reality.

Once people have compromised themselves, they are more likely to identify with their compromise, because it’s embarrassing to admit you were wrong. So instead, people double down. They heap onto their initial cowardice the additional cowardice of refusing to admit they could have been wrong.  This also helps account for the viciousness with which people often treat dissenters. Dissenters are living proof that everyone does not have to comply, that it is possible to live in the truth. This shames those who have chosen temporary comfort over noble sacrifice.

Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments, themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a "secularized religion." Power relations are therefore best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear, and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified, and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful.

-- Vaclav Havel (summarized / paraphrased) 1978

Working Class Hero

As soon as you're born, they make you feel small
By giving you no time, instead of it all
'Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

They hurt you at home, and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever, and they despise a fool
'Til you're so f*cking crazy you can't follow their rules

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function, you're so full of fear

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still f*cking peasants as far as I can see

There's room at the top, they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

A working class hero is something to be

-- John Lennon (1970)

Goodhart's Law

"Once a social or economic indicator is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
-- Charles Goodhart, 1975



Humans naturally optimize what is being measured and identified as important.  This is the result of humanity’s highly refined skill in assessing risk and return. The problem with choosing what to measure is that the selection can generate counterproductive or even destructive incentives.  The process of selecting which data is measured and recorded carries implicit assumptions with far-reaching consequences. 

If we accept that growth as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) is the measure of prosperity, politicians will pursue the goal of GDP expansion.  If rising consumption is the key component of GDP, we will be encouraged to go buy a new truck when the economy weakens, whether we need a new truck or not.  If profits are identified as the key driver of managers’ bonuses, managers will endeavor to increase net profits by whatever means are available.

There is a growing dissatisfaction in the economics field with the current measures of economic activity: GDP, unemployment, and so on. This dissatisfaction reflects a growing awareness that these legacy metrics do a poor job of capturing what is actually important in fostering sustainable, broad-based prosperity, what many call well-being.  If we choose counterproductive metrics, we build perverse incentives into the system, incentives that guide the goals, strategies and behaviors of participants.

Rather than measure consumption and metrics that incentivize debt, what if we measure well-being and opportunities offered in our communities? What if we measured doing more with less rather than consuming more? What if our primary measure of economic well-being was the reduction of inputs (resources, labor, capital, etc.) that resulted in higher output (increased well-being)?  Systemic success or failure arises from our choices of what to measure and what thresholds we set as meaningful.

-- Charles Hugh Smith (The Daily Reckoning)

shock the monkey

fox the fox.  rat on the rat
you can ape the ape -- i know about that
there is one thing you must be sure of -- i can't take any more
don't you monkey with the monkey
-- peter gabriel (1982)

risk and fragility

The more you try to de-risk a system, the more accident-prone it becomes, and the more damaging the accidents are....   By using interest rates and monetary policy to try to prevent recessions, central bankers are making the world less safe and more likely to have a horrible accident. They are making the financial system more fragile....

You might not believe that the world becomes more dangerous precisely because you're trying to make it safer. But studies show that after the introduction of seat belts, the number of car accidents went up. Why? Well, people must have felt that because the belts made them safer, and made accidents more survivable, it was OK to take more risks, drive faster and otherwise abdicate responsibility for their own actions....

[I]t's a psychological phenomenon we're talking about. If people are led to believe they are safer, they will quite naturally be less vigilant about risk. [A] sense of risk is a highly useful advantage in evolutionary terms. Risk tells you when something big is at stake and the quality of your actions and decisions matter. If you try to systematically eliminate risk from society -- even if it's out of good intentions -- you aren't helping people at all. You're robbing them of a basic instinct that promotes their ability to look after themselves....

--Dan Denning, The Daily Reckoning (May 8, 2013)

american face dust

Change is the thing; that is what we do.
Change is the change that's changing you.

The day that you melt will shine; we'll have a good time.
-- The Seven Fields of Aphelion / Tobacco (Black Moth Super Rainbow) 2009

For the Love of Ivy

Gonna buy me a graveyard of my own
Kill everyone who ever done me wrong
Gonna buy me a gun just as long as my arm
Kill everyone who ever done me harm
-- Jeffrey Lee Pierce / Kid Congo Powers (The Gun Club) 1981

subhuman

So ladies, fish and gentlemen,
Here's my angled dream.
See me in the blue sky bag,
And meet me by the sea.
-- Eric Bloom / Sandy Pearlman (BÖC) 1974

palo alto

In a city of the future, it is difficult to concentrate
Meet the boss, meet the wife
Everybody's happy, everyone is made for life.

In a city of the future, it is difficult to find a space
I'm too busy to see you; you're too busy to wait

But I'm okay, how are you?
Thanks for asking, thanks for asking
I'm okay, how are you? I hope you're okay too.

Every one of those days when the sky is California blue
With a beautiful bombshell, I throw myself into my work
I'm too lazy, I've been kidding myself for so long

But I’m okay, how are you?
Thanks for asking, thanks for asking
I’m okay, how are you? I hope you’re okay too.

-- Thom Yorke (Radiohead) 1998

keep walking

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill.... If one keeps on walking, everything will be alright.
– Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)

war and patriotism

"Of course, the people do not want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to the farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war . . . that is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along -- whether it is a democracy or a fascist dicatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

-- Hermann Goering (Luftwaffe commander, German Third Reich) 1946

myth vs. truth

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
-- John F. Kennedy (1962)

just think

"Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
-- Thomas A. Edison

fight club

"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet."

"The things you own end up owning you.... It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.... Only after disaster can we be resurrected."

-- Tyler Durden (Chuck Palahniuk / Jim Uhls / David Fincher)

vital signs

Unstable condition -- a symptom of life
in mental and environmental change.
Atmospheric disturbance -- the feverish flux
of human interface and interchange.
The impulse is pure -- sometimes our circuits get shorted
by external interference.
Signals get crossed and the balance distorted
by internal incoherence.

An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure --
process information at half speed.
Pause, rewind, replay -- warm memory chip --
random sample holds the one you need.
Leave out the fiction --
the fact is this friction will only be worn by persistence.
Leave out conditions --
courageous convictions will drag the dream into existence.

Everybody got mixed feelings about the function and the form.
Everybody got to elevate from the norm.

-- Neal Peart (Rush) 1981

losing it

Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we'd like to be

Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you, the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee....

-- Neil Peart (Rush) 1982