“The survival of the fittest”. The fittest to what? This theory cannot make a prediction unless one is able to pre-define “to what”. It’s in most cases only a non-committing account of what happened. The non-commitment part is the healthiest part of it, leaves you the freedom of making a rational choice for the future at the price of justifying the past in a specific way.

So, again, fittest to what? Fittest to an eat-or-be eaten environment or to a humanist environment? Let a tiger and a physics professor in a university classroom. Who’s the fittest and who will survive? Well, here, the irony is that both of them will die if they’re isolated for a week in that classroom, does the order matter?

My point is, don’t jump in justifying any unscrupulous capitalist maneuver as an example of darwinism confirmation, and don’t jump to the conclusion that socialism failed just because some unscrupulous bureaucrats behaving like a capitalist corporation failed. If a crazy guy passes by on the sidewalk and stabs you to death, who’s the fittest? The fittest to what? To what do we want to be the fittest? We are free to choose. What do you choose? Based on what kind of experience? Based on what kind of reasoning?

If you let somebody else define the “reality” for you, then, most probably, that one’s the fittest to the “reality” he’s defining for you. The only attitudes which can fix this imbalance are social awareness, verification and critique. No criminal will try to do his work in public without the assistance of some “reality” builders.

The most complete paragraph I’ve ever read is (technically, the quote below is just a part of a paragraph):

But the general movement of isolation, which is the reality of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of workers depending on the needs of production and consumption that can be planned. Integration into the system requires that isolated individuals be recaptured and isolated together: factories and halls of culture, tourist resorts and housing developments are expressly organized to serve this pseudo-community that follows the isolated individual right into the family cell. The widespread use of receivers of the spectacular message enables the individual to fill his isolation with the dominant images–images which derive their power precisely from this isolation.

And, while I am at the “the most” chapter:

The most complete book I’ve ever read was : The Neverending story by Michael Ende.

The most insightful literature author I’ve ever read: Aldous Huxley (I’m not talking just about the Brave new world which is the package served to you by the commodity-culture stores and the only mentioned by the commodity-culture people).

The most noble book on homo religiosus: A History of Religious Ideas (3 volumes) by Mircea Eliade.

The lamest attempt at cheating people: institutionalized religion.

The most helpful philosophy I encountered: buddhism.

The most insightful way of living I’ve ever known: yoga.

The most insightful contemporary music artist: Pete Namlook.

The best rock album I’ve ever listened: 666, commited in 1972 by Aphrodite’s Child.

The most insidious type of society organization I’ve ever encountered: unregulated or opaque capitalism.

The most insidious and ill-defined economic concepts I learned about: private property and money.

The shows which were the most worthy of my time: The meaning of life by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Life is worth losing by George Carlin, and Idiocracy by Mike Judge et al.

Ever above means about 4 decades of contemporary mechanical time.

Perhaps you’re wondering why there are no links to commercial sites selling the stuff above: it’s because these resources should have been public domain in a humanist society. They were available to me because of the classical library. They should be available at no further cost to anybody, now, on the Internet.

“Oil is too important to leave to market forces”, this is the title of an article published yesterday in Timesonline. Its writer suggests that the governments should get involved to fix the problem of high oil prices.

It brings me to the “free market” moral: it should be free as long as the greedy can make a profit, if the creepers can’t, then tell the state to put the public money in the hole just left. I also learn the Northern Rock bank has been nationalized because it began to show it’s going down, never knew there were red commies lurking in the UK government.

The logic of this is beyond me: if an enterprise has a profit, let it be private because private property is more efficiently etc. If it has losses so large that the owners can’t pay, then make the public pay (nationalize it), and then, when it’s back on wheels again, “sell” it into some private hands so that they can reap the profits, because bureaucracy is relatively slow. Nice. Am I the only one puzzled by this mechanism?

I had no specific idea where do the stupid grow, but reading the comments to that article helped me a lot.

Who walks behind you, from Octane (1998), by ARC. Wish you were there.

Some north-American economist or senator was telling a tale some time ago, that he was driving and had stopped at some place to buy some apples from a guy who was selling them on a side of the street. The economist/senator extracted the following moral from the exchange of money for apples: “there was a fundamental economic agreement between the apple-seller and me, we both agreed how much money the apples were worth”.

Now, that “agreement” is, in my view, an agreement between someone who accepts slavery and someone who pretends to be the master, a fundamental sham: the one who grew the apples should have calculated the percentage of his wealth spent on producing them, then he should require, in exchange for his apples, the same percentage of the economist’s wealth; this is the correct agreement on exchange, I would call it “the percentage economy”. I’m pretty sure that the apple seller had a mortgage, and the mortgage payment is done in percentages. The loans are in percentages. Let then every exchange be run in percentages: when somebody goes to a store to buy milk, the milk container should have a percentage stamped on it (namely the percentage of the total wealth of the producer spent for producing it), then the buyer has to come with a card that declares his total wealth and pays the same percentage at the cashier.

I wish I could see the face of a globalization advocate after this economy model is implemented.

This exchange model might be an even better solution to “all the evils” than the one I previously proposed, that the total wealth of a person should be, at any moment, limited to a lifetime, say 120 years, of average wages.

The problem is that many of those who do real work, for example, the apple growers, are tricked into thinking that an apple costs just 0.5USD for everybody. We are not equal, right? We are individuals of different worths, right? Hold your thought.
Ok, then, somebody who can afford to buy, say, the government of a random country, should pay proportionally, according to one’s status in the society, according to his wealth rank, that one only deserves the appropriate respect, right?
If the total wealth of the apple grower is 100,000 USD, and he is glad to recover now his expenses for producing an apple with 0.5 USD, then the apple’s price would be 0.0005% out of the seller’s total wealth and out of the buyer’s total wealth.
If your total wealth is 10,000 USD, you should pay 5 cents for the apple, but if you’re such a genius to have a total wealth of 1 million USD, then you should pay proportionally, the same 0.0005% of your wealth, that is 5USD for an apple.

A commercial exchange is only fair if the exchange partners spent the same effort to produce and to buy the exchangeable goods, and whatever that effort is, the ultimate fair calculation is in direct relationship to the total wealth of each of them at the moment of closing the transaction. Any other variation seems to be the equivalent of aggression or, at best, thievery.

Or, maybe we should call this the relative economy model, or, better, the humanist economy.

The fake in the current economy resides, I believe, in the concept of “utility”: if you believe this object would be very useful to you, you would pay more. But you are bombarded all the time with well-meaning advertisements ending up in hypnotizing you that this object has an utility for you. So you end up paying proportional to how deep you were brainwashed, which has no link with the producer’s expenses to create that object. You pay the sociologists and the media puppets behind it and their masters. There is an incentive for the producer to lie about the value, and for the buyer to lie about his willing to buy, we end up as liars, beside the exchange.

To eliminate the possibility of this manipulation, an economy has to establish an objective unit for exchange, and that is, obviously, not money, but the effort to produce and the effort to buy. These efforts, in a correct exchange, by definition, should be equal.

To those skeptics who think science has done no good to humanity because we most visibly conserved our lack of wisdom over the ages, here’s my reply:
Science has helped humanity so much that today most of the parasites can live on the lives of others, even rule and manipulate them (that, presumably, was harder in older times, only rich people could afford a buffoon once in a while).
Science is doing its job so good, that we still can afford to stay (exploited by the) stupid till we die. Growing, supporting or tolerating parasites has become dirt cheap. Science helped us afford to live in the free T-shirt society and get enchanted by it.

This is an undeniable achievement.

It is, perhaps, still true that our lack of wisdom has been almost conserved but science protected us from getting killed in our 20’s because of that.
The skeptic, then, should become an optimist, because this salvation is in the process of getting extinguished itself: science has become a ritual, a fetish, a job; it will end up mechanically feeding only the parasites, so, although the parasites will outlive their hosts, the skeptics now have a well-founded hope that these creepers will inevitably press the wrong button soon enough to leave the earth pristine.

Those skeptics who are not yet convinced should check Idiocracy (2006) by Mike Judge et. all.

A city should be a place with a high density of people that can hear, two-three times per day, something like the (probably well-known) Islamic habit of call to prayer, sung from the highest sky-scraper downtown by a human voice.

The song should remind us that we are humans in no hurry to anywhere and we should take our time to do our little best with our passing through this world. No God-related bullshit. It should interrupt what we are doing, for 5 minutes, that’s when we should make a personal ritual gesture towards the quality of human life: it should be our rhythmic recollection of what we are and what we’re doing.

The city should be covered by a network of sidewalks, an underground public transportation network based on some renewable resource like electricity, and plenty of natural meeting places with tables and chairs where you can sit among trees or on grass and chat with your random neighbor about life and its derivatives. The personal cars should be parked at the outskirts of the city, only industrial/food transportation-related cars should be allowed to pass through it, along with firefighters and emergency-related transportation.

The main purposes of a humanist urban settlement are to fine-tune social administrative issues, to efficiently produce things that are needed, to improve systematically the human knowledge, to train the youth in critical thinking. Cultural acts fill the blanks.

That’s the humanist city.

My preferred definition of socialism/humanism sounds like this: it is recognized the fact that any human being is immersed in a society of human beings and that the society is part of, and completes, the human being’s definition, it is also recognized that any human society is immersed in nature and that the nature is part of, and completes, the human society’s definition.

Socialism/humanism is the given natural context of humans, it’s not a matter of adherence to it, it is a matter of choosing to be aware of it or not.

The State is the practical form of this awareness at the scale of the society. It is the minimal administrative agreement between the humans in a society; the State is designed and delegated by all of us to administer our agreements and settle our disagreements on this common agreement background, the public property.

The administration of the society is a rational attempt at problem solving, there should be nothing emotional about it. Socialism/humanism is not a special sort of abstract social passion, but a collaborative, continuously sustained, personal drive to get along or brush with each other; no romantic heroism necessary, but an authentic human life. You get there not through revolution but through evolution: a cultivated and well-tempered (non-hysterical) personal awareness (check, for a critical preparation, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy-Ernest Debord).

If you don’t obey the law and you come with the excuse you did not know it, that excuse doesn’t hold, right? It’s your obligation as a citizen to know the law. Then the law should be published on the Net and should be freely accessible to any citizen.
The responsibility of publishing the law online stays with those who create and use it in lawsuits: the juridical and legislative branches of the state; the responsibility for the practical implementation should stay with the public libraries.

This would come as a second priority, the first one would be to mandate the freely accessible online publishing of the research which has been funded, partially or fully, with public money.

These priorities come naturally from the following principle: the public property deserves at least the same strength of protection as the private property does, because the first belongs to a large group of persons who commonly agreed to call that property public or shared. The current public administrations seem to be focusing mostly toward protecting the private property and this emphasis has to change now, many in a position to administer the public property not only fail in doing so but actively misappropriate it: public libraries buying proprietary software to handle their internal tasks while free-software alternatives are available, public research libraries pouring public money in private pockets by paying access fees to private publishers of public research, government or UN or non-profit agencies pouring public money in private pockets because some trusted public administrators use proprietary software instead of free-software alternatives, technologies or knowledge created with public funds are transferred into private hands so that any member of the general public has to pay again to access them.

Moreover, transferring technologies and knowledge to private hands is a sure way to have them lost for the public at the moment when they cease to create profit for the private group in question. Publicly accessible archives should keep us protected from paying and repaying the wheel’s reinvention.

The (now old) idea is to make a law that puts in place the transparency of handling public money or property: who is responsible for allocating funds for this or that task, the amount of money, the receiver, the date/time and the reasoning behind the choice. This is an archive record: it should appear as a line in a public agency’s blog for any taxpayer/voter to keep an eye on and preserved for historical reference. This is practically feasible because keeping a public point of information access is relatively cheap nowadays with the Net and all.

This law (or another) has to also protect the public property from the abusive use of copyright: for example, a professor/researcher who writes a book about the research he is doing using public funding should be compelled to give up the copyright to the public agency who paid for the research. If a private agency paid for the research, it’s between that agency and the researcher to decide to whom the copyright belongs, it’s a negotiable private matter. However, if the researcher did use infrastructure paid with public money, or performed his work on public premises, the public is entitled to recover the expenses, and this should be stated by restricting the copyright in a precise way.

What’s the meaning of accountability otherwise? It is independent of what the political color your government has, so the transparency/accountability procedures should be specified in a public standard. This public standard is important: there are, today, parliament websites where specific information is extremely hard to find precisely because these information points don’t follow a standard.

Briefly, the subtitle of this law should be: let’s make the bloodsuckers’ lives at least as hard as our own or, in the positive reading, let’s make our lives at least as easy as the bloodsuckers’ lives.

Mr. Dvorak complains about the dying of newspapers, which supposedly should give you a skillfully baked world view. In this article, although he’s right in a few details on the education, he’s utterly wrong with the main theme, that a world view should be served at breakfast. There is no world view one can grasp from a classical newspaper, that’s the world view of those paid by the newspaper, it always was. Want an authentic world view? Check those personal blogs which have no ads, no “free registration” and no access fee. That’s a service somebody offers to you by telling you about the part of the world he’s living in; it’s the true social part of what a human is supposed to be. He’s getting explicit feedback in the best cases. You don’t have to give that explicit feedback, I understand, you’re in a hurry to make money to build your identical dream house, but have the minimal decency to not complain the blog is happening. In fact, I read the article linked-to above as a kind of blog entry; that’s feedback enough for me; ignored all the ads around there.

This way, by reading on the Net, you check those parts of the worlds you’re interested in, and you don’t have to drive 1 hour and pay for a beer in a non-smoking place to hear somebody’s opinion or conclusion, you just click and read. You need the news you did not know you’re interested in? Check the web again, and if this is too time consuming for you then pay a tax for the city council to keep a blog of what’s happening in your city, to the senate to keep a blog on what’s happening there, and so on; or just ask them to do that for the tax you pay already. While you are at it, ask the universities to make publicly accessible the research you paid for.

Mr. Dvorak believes the Net is transforming the North-Americans into “a nation of narrow thinkers”, that’s old news: a nation of people who have to drive a car to buy food is already a nation of narrow thinkers, a nation who believed that Iraq, or Afganisthan, has been invaded for ethical reasons is already a nation of narrow thinkers, a nation which believes that Iran or any other country for that matter doesn’t have the right to nuclear power while that nation itself does, is already a nation of narrow thinkers. That narrowness of thinking came from the pre-cooked world view served by a few well-paid narrow thinkers. Hopefully, through the Net, various questions and choices will be accessible and informative to you, things you haven’t thought of because somebody else was designated to do that for you while you were driving.

Debt-based thinking (mortgage thinking) and acting should have been dead for a long time, but now thanks to the Net, a new culture is rising, although in an implicit or underground way, at some point it will become a critical mass. Just sit and watch, Mr. Dvorak (ok, maybe those days will not find us alive), this is not just another wave of marijuana smokers daydreaming about sharing something they never had with everybody else. These Net people don’t have to be on some special social networking site, the Net is the social network, anything less is just a temporary enterprise for the quick-money.

Due to the Net I don’t have to do anything special to keep up with the world, neither the world , but we just started growing together.