A Marvelous Thing

Jonathan came to tell me of a marvelous thing. "I burped at one end and farted at the other."

Alright, I said, being intrigued, for Jonathan thinks he is a passionate person, when he is in fact a rationalist dweeb. I am always fascinated by the mental penumbras that pass for an emotional life with him. So... Jonathan, my man, what is so fascinating by burping at one end and farting at the other. This is what I was able to pile out of that fevered mind.

The first law of thermodynamics-for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Check-

Symmetry of action-the alpha point of an action joined with the omega point.

'Kay-

Digestive and excretory processes at once.

Go on-

And it sounded real cool-a 'G' and a high 'A' at once.

Wow!-

I love Jonathan.

Willow Glen

So there I was, at Willow Glen Coffee Roasting, pontificating on the nature of economics. "A market is an adaptive phenomena. It exists by serving the needs and wants that the government either can't or won't provide."

Mike and Susan had finished a delightful set and were exchanging the guitars for laptops. The early noon light filtered briskly through the windows and mingled with the aroma of countless coffee beans. Ken posited the question, his chair creaking as he turned to me, "So why are utopians so dead set against it? It would seem to cover the bases for the weaknesses in their systems."

"Precisely because of that." I retort back. "Because it persists, and in doing so, undercuts both their desire to rationalize the world under one viewpoint-their own-and their notion that that viewpoint is complete and total in and of itself. They cannot accept that their supposed power of reasoning has limitations."

"My belief in the power of markets has an odd existential base. Remember North Korea? The Kim family's failed utopia? In the Nineties, from winter '93 to winter '96 specifically, a perfect confluence of bad weather and bad policy gutted that society. A tenth of the population died, another tenth probably left and what was left was destitute.

Starting in winter '06, the circumstances looked set to repeat and the world braced itself for the final collapse-it didn't happen. Why?

Were the North Koreans tougher and more self-reliant than they were before? Was the government response more effective, this time?

In time, observers went into the North and what did they find-market stalls. Huge, open-air markets had opened even in Pyongyang itself. Crude and limited in selection as they were, they provided the distribution source that had saved their country from a second cataclysm. What better illustration of the power of the markets could there be?"

Boltzmann Brains

Boltzmann brains are said to be quantum fluctuations. Named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, these take on the form of sentient awareness for the relatively brief amount of time they exist, at least in this dimensional plain. Things of John Keel's 'haunted planet' thesis seem to exist not just for a specific space but also for a specific time, and would seem to fit this conjecture. Such would include UFO's, ghosts and crypto-zoological fare such as Mothman and Owlman. Could something animating in range of, for want of a better term, an already existing field of sentience-a human imagination for instance-be formed into a dark item of the imagination and become manifest in this physical realm?

Between Marx and Rand

In 'Nicomachean Ethics', Aristotle tries to address the finding of that legendary middle ground, the 'Golden Mean' that supposedly exists amongst all points of extreme contention. He acknowledges that it is harder work than it seems, not because it may or may not be there, but because it is easy to be drawn to either of the contending viewpoints. He quotes directly from Homer when Calypso advises Odysseus:

"Hold fast from surf and spray..."

In a practical sense, I wish a certain Italian ship captain had taken that insight to heart, but that aside...

One technique I have found useful is citing similarities. Take, for instance, the Scylla and Charybdis of modern political debate, Ayn Rand and Karl Marx. Both Rand and Marx are materialists, consequently both reject any sort of metaphysical or extra-empirical analysis. Both hold utopian viewpoints, in the sense of causality: if the circumstances they envisage are produced, the society that they wish to be manifested will emerge. Both saw reality from a dynamic perspective, that we mortals were playing a part in a historical drama, not simply plodding along as we have always done through this age and other ages recorded or lost to the sands; probably why the two of them have always attracted the kind of pent-up adolescent energy that always is drawn to so-called revolutionary culture.

Where the many-headed Scylla of Rand is focused on the individual. In the Randian vision, the particular vision is paramount. The individual is intended to live for the individual. Any reference to a 'moral universe' where the influence all people have on each other is paramount is ludicrous, the pathetic legacy of superstition and weak minds relying on emotion instead of reason.

Marx's Charybdis cares not at all for the individual swallowed into its vortex. On the contrary, the Marxian vision regards the individual as the legacy of superstition and selfishness. It is that very moral universe, supposedly redeemed of its theological heritage and re-interpreted by Marx, that is paramount. The individual exists to serve a hyper-extended version of that good world that re-forms its unique nature to the point of orthodoxy. The cog is good-long live the cog.

A middle ground that retains the secular character of both viewpoints would be to me the classical vision of rights coming with responsibilities. Passion and purpose do not have to exclude one another-on the contrary, they can make each other possible. But to develop such a viewpoint would require a sense of historicity, of broad and tenacious understanding of societal formation that neither has.