Firing Up Superposition Liberal And Conservative Reptile Brains.
Chaos and random events are occurring all the time at various levels, and is required for order to reorder effectively into another, unavoidable stage. Conservatives want to prevent all chaos and randomness, and therefore the next stage of unavoidable change, similar to a region that continually suppresses forest fires to prevent damage to the human made structures, and the injury or death of its residents.
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The Analogy Expression.
Yet after awhile, practicing suppression becomes dangerous, and all suppression efforts are overwhelmed, causing massive damage and calamitous results much worse than if suppression would not have been the main part of the plan. The inelasticity of the conservative, reptile-brain function, in either party depending on the issue, makes likely an implosion or explosion once suppression fails.
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Unfortunately, those are the results residents demand, through their lack of desire for long term housing development planning and zoning, lax building codes, and to pay the front-loaded taxes required. The belief that government cannot do anything right generates these stopgap solutions. Of course, the whiplashing of government failing to stop the firebombing of their future lives engenders more distrust in government, and so on. Conservatives make our hypocrisy about government the winner.
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If homes, businesses, and communities were planned and constructed to survive fires and shelter humans, such accounted-for chaotic eruptions could be merely a part of our life experiences rather than a catastrophic disruption. This type of preventive setup is much more difficult and expensive than fire suppression, but fire-outbreak randomness is absorbed with metastasizing chaos greatly reduced. In addition, readjusting and reordering in the future is made easier, and much more seamless.
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Yes, society is exponentially more multifaceted, tangential, and tentacled than any region where there is wildfire potential. However, rather than reacting with full-on suppression as we always have, including inhibiting the majority consensus, our focus as an advanced society should be redirected towards locating areas where chaos, randomness, and diversity absorption, and its benefits, are possible, and societally advantageous.
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The Superposition Position Paper.
This essay is a superposition –– dead and not dead, randomness and orderliness, riff of a Schrödinger’s Cat –– thought experiment. The liberal observer sees randomness, and the conservative observer sees orderliness. As the quantum superposition requires a particle’s electron and positron to be observed separately, every particle is required to form the matter we see, and for that matter seen, and not seen to function coherently.
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But what happens when there is no observer? The positron and electron are still interacting, a.k.a. entangled, and cannot be disentangled without ending their existence as that particle. Just as conservative and liberal perspectives are both required. The challenge is in creating an environment for both to work their spookiness at a distance while working together as well: individualism and collectivism, socialism and capitalism (viewed generically or non-dogmatically).
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The difficulty is understanding how (particles and) our politics can be unimaginably far apart, and still positively effect the other. Superposition particles are understood to effect each other when separated, potentially by infinite space. Since chaos cannot be happening at every level and stage, all the time, to create at least a partially ordered universe, some form of controlling factors are necessary to achieve stability and livability.
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But like fire suppression, there is a limit to this type of control effectiveness, particularly in the long term. Humans who appreciate order, and strive to create it, tend to see those who seem to thrive on chaos in specific instances or more globally as an annoyance, imperfect, or even hostile.
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While we understand that allowing chaos to occur unheeded causes harm, we also know that establishing order has caused significant harm. Think CIA torture sites after 9–11, Muslim Uyghur mass detention centers in China, or concentration camps and the Holocaust. That is the direction an authoritarian leader can lead a nation without effective checks and balances. Each generation must determine its sweet spot of order and control, freedoms and liberties, not an easy call.
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The Human Variable.
The human condition presents difficult challenges about deciding whether to constantly suppress, or fully address our political forest structure, and when fire should be allowed to refresh and re-flower our democracy. In our current political reality, the authoritarian reptile brain usually takes over, and uses suppression because formatting a long term plan is seen as collectivism, and a societal structure that expands beyond self interested economics must be totalitarian socialism. It is confusing to realize that those who espouse liberty and freedom as their highest ideals are ready to give their politics over to an authoritarian and plutocrat combination.
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Their vacuuming of power means… Individualistic freedoms are limited. Collectivist civic action is constrained, or eliminated. Capitalism is reduced to the few. Socialistic safety net programs are ridiculed and ransacked. In no place is the freedom or liberty of the conservative enhanced under that cabal of power and plunder. Both the right winger Augusto Pinochet, and the leftist Hugo Chavez made the 90 to 99% suffer for their blundering and plundering.
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To grow into a real advanced society, we must constantly develop better structures to more quickly restrain orderliness transgressions, and more competently channel the learning curves required to manage randomness and prevent damaging chaos. With the Chavez example, we know that even leaders who are seemingly devoted to helping the poor and disadvantaged can still be corrupted by power. Conversely, Pinochet ignored the poor, and murdered his political opponents. That is why a better democracy must be the focus not presidents, politicians, or political parties.
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Chaos will occur, no matter our preparedness, and randomness will always be a challenge to our slow evolving DNA, and the remaining remnants of our reptile brains. Authoritarian leaning brains will never be thoroughly eradicated, anymore than the utopian hippie brain. Consider that the authoritarian is always fighting the old ghosts of the savannah, and the utopian hippie keeps thinking flight back to Eden is a realistic solution.
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We all have elements of the authoritarian, and hippie in our reptile brain remnants; it is just a matter of degree. The problem is that in an advanced society, with a world population of eight billion, we cannot be under the illusion that there are no limits to how we live. Authoritarian leaning brains push back with their freedom yell; the hippie-leaning brain believes we can become a Kumbaya nation.
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While these are very simplified personas, we should not dismiss their aggregate influence. Societal clashes will metastasize if we stay oblivious to our reptile-brain remnant tendencies, especially as the stakes grow higher and larger in a more crowded and diverse world that increasingly interacts. This interaction transcends communication and markets, and includes human migration, potable water, and climatic effects of CO2 plus other types of cross-border pollution.
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The Empire Perspective.
The trick is to develop a structure that manages the reality of our slowness to take on randomness, which begets dangerous levels of chaos when randomness is ignored for too long. The fall of the Roman Empire happened less because of any declining military power, and more to do with a lack of societal energy to continue their empire project.
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They needed a proportional and solid plutocrat coterie with grand visions to keep the empire dream alive. Once enough such plutocrats were pushed out and/or reduced in power in their democratic/republic, there was nothing to back it up. Their thin layer of civic participants could not sustain the dream, and it moved towards an imperial presidency.
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The tree of liberty not only needs to be refreshed regularly, it also requires enough new blood to keep it vibrant. Limiting a democratic republic to a thin layer of plutocrats, representing a larger and larger populous, guarantees a future downfall because it will run out of dream steam at some point. Mega wealth creates disinterest in the lesser population, vis-a-vis the 90 to 99%.
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The Roman plutocrat society got bored with itself. The strong voices that held its empire together settled in for taking advantage of their wealth rather than building up its empire, which allowed society obsolescence to filter in. However, building a Roman type empire is obsolete today, and greater and greater lopsided wealth eats away at advanced societies. Once you have that size of a wealth gap, inferior citizens have less and less value to you.
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Consolidation at the top suffocates striving, and defeats the purpose of the people; civic involvement becomes dysfunctional. We may still dream about our wealth prospects, but are stymied to achieve them in many ways because the math no longer works in the aggregate. If a few people have most of the wealth, the odds for others gaining any piece of any pie, growing or not, shrinks. Economic sluggishness increases. Job satisfaction decreases.
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The Predation Unequaled.
Inequality damages perceptions only after it damages peoples’ lives. Aggregate envy, and plutocratic greed are equally correlated because society’s envy is fully catalyzed when greed without end is corrosively legitimized. My concept of aggregate envy is a valid moral response to society harming greed; the desire for a more uniting, and universally livable economy not one structured on an in-it-for-yourself-only, and winner-take-all ethos.
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With such an exploitive ethos, progressive taxes cannot be collected on the mega-wealthy, and the 90 to 99% are asked to carry more weight, but can never do enough to overcome the one percent’s abdication of societal responsibilities. The safety net is reduced, and other societal supports like public education are undermined.
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Notice how government became so bad that the top 1% could reduce their taxes almost below 16th Amendment levels? That is, before the federal income tax was deployed. Some might call this occurrence a self-fulfilling prophecy. Huh.
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Good government and good education in an unequal society require higher taxes on the top 1%. But they simply call everything they do not have complete, private control over bad, then prove it by defunding everything except the police and military. And there we have it; the wealthy rewarded for proving the government is bad by making it that way. So they pay lower wages as well as pay lower taxes with higher levels of police presence, funding, and riot gear to keep us controlled, and compliant.
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Interesting how that also does not work out very well for conservatives who are not in the top 10 to 1%. Shitty education. Shitty job prospects. Shitty health. Shitty retirement, if they make it there. Just a shitty short life overall.
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Chaos ensues, and that makes many hunker down further, especially the authoritarian reptile mind inclined, rather than raise their heads up to see what is going on. The conservatives in the 90 to 99% become demoralized, and no longer think We The People can run our own country. So why not give the nation over to an authoritarian? When the majority is not thinking about, and striving for, a better democracy, that is an authoritarian’s whetted dream.
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The Democracy Revived.
Ironically, reptile brained, authoritarian-minded voters worship freedom and liberty, yet are followers of, and believers in, even worse authoritarian types. They believe the reptile utopian-hippie brained citizens will be the target of all the control. Unfortunately, such governments are never as clear cut as that. The spillover will mean more control over everyone, with fewer and fewer outlets for expressing liberty. As being part of the Communist Party in China does not make your life more free, or give you more liberties.
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The authoritarian government will suppress the fires everywhere, leaving even the conservatives who vote for authoritarians in danger of wildfires. Rather than leaning towards authoritarian controls, the American majority, a.k.a. We The People, should make control contingent on our wishes.
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There will always be a tradeoff when it comes to freedom and liberty, signal lights, speed limits, and CAFE mileage standards, versus invasion of privacy, voter suppression, and political opposition retaliation. Therefore, We The People should be the ones deciding these controls not the few.
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As the chaos reigns, that the authoritarians and its 1% benefactors are creating, and before complete societal suppression takes over, we must make our move towards giving more power to the people. Create a new system to flip the power dynamic. Not a political party, but a We The People system that reels in the power of politicians, corporations, and the monopoly moneyed oligarchs.
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The oligarchs fear mob democracy not because of its danger to democracy, but because it endangers their power to make us the pawns and puppets that produce their plutocratic excess. Rather than fear our mob, they must feel the real power of its political and economic justice. WE THE PEOPLE must gain the superposition, or it will be taken from us.
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Either we do, or we will get mostly shit from the plutocratic, political double slit undemocratic experiment they are doing to us right now. That is what I am observing.
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By Richard The Chwalek
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To get a much more complete explanation of why I believe a better democratic structure must be pursued, and to learn about an actual, full-on solution, get my ebook: Our Democracy Requires An Update: A Transformational We The People System.
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