Why would it behoove a system of government to care for the entire society?
Because as states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, as money and banking are analogous to blood and the circulation system.
We have come to understand government works best as a public utility, because it has to stay reasonably connected to the entire organism.
While the upper classes might not care for the well-being of everyone, their greatest tool is the fact this circulation mechanism remains private "enterprise."
Though when the medium enabling markets is a player in those markets and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers to the banks. So rather than a mechanism to allocate value where it would be most productive for the entire society, much is siphoned off to feed large egos.
Not that this even serves any greater purpose than a game of oneupmanship among this cohort. They simply do it because they can. It's like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it is keeping the blood for itself.
Making banking a public utility would serve as a check on the rest of the oligarchy, as they would have to store assets far more in tangibles, than accounting devices and public debt.
It should be noted that the federal debt began to grow with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well.
"The real money is in bonds."
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
China's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" keeps money and banking as public utilities. One reason Chinese communism has succeeded so well is that the communists got rid of the rent-seeking landlords and money lenders, considering them parasites. But not only money is a public utility, but education, healthcare, housing, energy, communications as well, all the 'commanding heights' of the economy.
Tedder, your comment reminded of David Graeber's observation in Debt: The First 5,000 Years that Chinese society traditionally treated moneylenders as other societies treat soldiers.
That is, they're shady characters who are yet necessary to the maintenance of civilization. Soldiers and moneylenders alike must be carefully supervised and never allowed to run the show.
I once read a theory (in a book about the Titanic, oddly enough) that the human digestive system evolved separately from the rest of the human body. The notion was that—after eons of symbiosis—our digestive tracts and our bodies became integrated into a single, cohesive individual.
We like to think of our individual selves as basic units of consciousness. But if our persons are really comprised of formerly individual organisms cobbled together by evolution, then it stands to reason that those evolutionary process are still molding us.
Perhaps someday in the distant future, we'll consider the basic unit of consciousness to be collectives of people. The question of how to distribute decision-making power amongst formerly disparate individuals becomes an economic one as biology advances over evolutionary time scales. That dilemma seems to be the very one preoccupying all of human political history.
This thought experiment binds together major Christian themes of ego transcendence and economic justice. Biology and economics are mirror images of each other, and both are reflected in a great historical drama driving us upwards to loftier new heights of consciousness.
In the Heart Sutra (Prajña Paramita Hridaya Sutra), the doctrine of 'no-fixed self' is explicitly laid out and consciousness is just one of several 'heaps' that make up ego (Zen monks chant that sutra every day, and I even learned
Classical Chinese to be able to read it). However, those people who believe in the 'self' (ego), are condemned to all sorts of strange behaviors, and we are punished by living in a society that exalts ego and allows those behaviors.
I was an English major at Stanford and had begun sitting at the Haiku Zendo in Los Altos. Like the others, I just chanted the sutra's English transliteration during morning service, while wondering at the Chinese characters (the zendo was in the Japanese Soto tradition, but for a thousand years, Zen monks had chanted the Chinese in probably how it was pronounced in the Song dynasty.
Postmodern English studies made me despair. WE would not write about the books we read, but about the commentary about the books and even commentary on the commentary. I was going to quit school, but just as I passed the Asian Studies Department, it was almost as if I heard a voice saying, "One more chance." I entered the building and climbed the stairs. At the landing, the Japanese Department was on the right and the Chinese Department was on the left. Without hesitation, even though most American Zen students studied Japanese, I went left and changed my major to Chinese.
The third year of Chinese studies was Classical Chinese. We read Confucian and Taoist texts and Tang Dynasty poetry, and slowly I began to understand all the characters in the Heart Sutra!
Then again that our consciousness is composed of different factions. Think in terms of the daytime, when the sun is out and we can't see the stars, but they are still there.
The point I keep making about time, that as mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is the present flowing past to future, but the reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
So there is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, as it is more a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.
Energy being conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, as the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As the digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, there is this cognitive focus on the patterns, the information, "It from bit," then assuming consciousness must be effect, than cause.
So then how does this conscious energy express itself, when it is the mind that insists on categorizing everything? Is it a Quantum, or is that one more categorization and even Quantum Mechanics, as a model, is unwilling to look deeper than what can be measured and thus defined? Maybe why it has been spinning its wheels for the last fifty years.
Maybe the mind is more referee, than source. Point of decision.
Temperature and pressure are as foundational to emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought. In fact, ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, much as General Relativity correlates distance with duration, yet we don't confuse them with space.
Nathan,
Why would it behoove a system of government to care for the entire society?
Because as states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, as money and banking are analogous to blood and the circulation system.
We have come to understand government works best as a public utility, because it has to stay reasonably connected to the entire organism.
While the upper classes might not care for the well-being of everyone, their greatest tool is the fact this circulation mechanism remains private "enterprise."
Though when the medium enabling markets is a player in those markets and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers to the banks. So rather than a mechanism to allocate value where it would be most productive for the entire society, much is siphoned off to feed large egos.
Not that this even serves any greater purpose than a game of oneupmanship among this cohort. They simply do it because they can. It's like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it is keeping the blood for itself.
Making banking a public utility would serve as a check on the rest of the oligarchy, as they would have to store assets far more in tangibles, than accounting devices and public debt.
It should be noted that the federal debt began to grow with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well.
"The real money is in bonds."
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
China's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" keeps money and banking as public utilities. One reason Chinese communism has succeeded so well is that the communists got rid of the rent-seeking landlords and money lenders, considering them parasites. But not only money is a public utility, but education, healthcare, housing, energy, communications as well, all the 'commanding heights' of the economy.
Tedder, your comment reminded of David Graeber's observation in Debt: The First 5,000 Years that Chinese society traditionally treated moneylenders as other societies treat soldiers.
That is, they're shady characters who are yet necessary to the maintenance of civilization. Soldiers and moneylenders alike must be carefully supervised and never allowed to run the show.
It's politics all the way down, but it's economics all the way up.
Society as an organism, with people as the cells.
Not allowed to attach links, but I’ve written various essays covering the dynamics.
I once read a theory (in a book about the Titanic, oddly enough) that the human digestive system evolved separately from the rest of the human body. The notion was that—after eons of symbiosis—our digestive tracts and our bodies became integrated into a single, cohesive individual.
We like to think of our individual selves as basic units of consciousness. But if our persons are really comprised of formerly individual organisms cobbled together by evolution, then it stands to reason that those evolutionary process are still molding us.
Perhaps someday in the distant future, we'll consider the basic unit of consciousness to be collectives of people. The question of how to distribute decision-making power amongst formerly disparate individuals becomes an economic one as biology advances over evolutionary time scales. That dilemma seems to be the very one preoccupying all of human political history.
This thought experiment binds together major Christian themes of ego transcendence and economic justice. Biology and economics are mirror images of each other, and both are reflected in a great historical drama driving us upwards to loftier new heights of consciousness.
In the Heart Sutra (Prajña Paramita Hridaya Sutra), the doctrine of 'no-fixed self' is explicitly laid out and consciousness is just one of several 'heaps' that make up ego (Zen monks chant that sutra every day, and I even learned
Classical Chinese to be able to read it). However, those people who believe in the 'self' (ego), are condemned to all sorts of strange behaviors, and we are punished by living in a society that exalts ego and allows those behaviors.
You learned CLASSICAL CHINESE, Tedder? Now that's impressive!
I was an English major at Stanford and had begun sitting at the Haiku Zendo in Los Altos. Like the others, I just chanted the sutra's English transliteration during morning service, while wondering at the Chinese characters (the zendo was in the Japanese Soto tradition, but for a thousand years, Zen monks had chanted the Chinese in probably how it was pronounced in the Song dynasty.
Postmodern English studies made me despair. WE would not write about the books we read, but about the commentary about the books and even commentary on the commentary. I was going to quit school, but just as I passed the Asian Studies Department, it was almost as if I heard a voice saying, "One more chance." I entered the building and climbed the stairs. At the landing, the Japanese Department was on the right and the Chinese Department was on the left. Without hesitation, even though most American Zen students studied Japanese, I went left and changed my major to Chinese.
The third year of Chinese studies was Classical Chinese. We read Confucian and Taoist texts and Tang Dynasty poetry, and slowly I began to understand all the characters in the Heart Sutra!
Then again that our consciousness is composed of different factions. Think in terms of the daytime, when the sun is out and we can't see the stars, but they are still there.
The point I keep making about time, that as mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is the present flowing past to future, but the reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
So there is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, as it is more a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.
Energy being conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, as the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As the digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, there is this cognitive focus on the patterns, the information, "It from bit," then assuming consciousness must be effect, than cause.
So then how does this conscious energy express itself, when it is the mind that insists on categorizing everything? Is it a Quantum, or is that one more categorization and even Quantum Mechanics, as a model, is unwilling to look deeper than what can be measured and thus defined? Maybe why it has been spinning its wheels for the last fifty years.
Maybe the mind is more referee, than source. Point of decision.
Temperature and pressure are as foundational to emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought. In fact, ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, much as General Relativity correlates distance with duration, yet we don't confuse them with space.