The Wall

 Suffice to say, I think it's obvious that it has been a hot moment since the last time any real inspiration struck me.  I've touched on why in at least one previous post from many years ago--that thinking of the world and of existence requires a higher level of thought than is often available to us during the daily grind.  If you must hunt and gather continuously to find food for subsistence, physical tangible food or else intellectual or emotional sustenance, you do not have the structure in place that allows you the time to delve into the higher levels of existence.  If memory serves me, and I'm not entirely certain it does, I had basically surmised that those who have to struggle for air rarely can oxygenate the intellect enough to stimulate new understandings of ideas.  It has been such a very long time for me between said events.  Inspiration has found a way to strike however, and it is this.

 

Humankind, and indeed all of nature as we know it, is in a constant struggle.  We've labelled this "survival of the fittest", though this is not entirely accurate.  It's rather more like survival of the lucky, or perhaps the opportune.  The idea of fittest and what we on the surface believe it to mean are different things.  It has nothing to do with the most intelligent or most athletic or most--in one way or another--equipped to pass on your genes.  Fittest is simply a catch all.  It is a label of the amalgamation of all survivals to happen.  Nothing more and nothing less.  For whatever the reason may have been that survival occurred, it did occur and thereby makes that entity the "fittest" in that situation, at that time.

I sense I'm splitting hairs however.  It will be more clear as I progress.  Life as we know it is in a constant state of competition.  From humans to yeast cells in your next sourdough.  Each wants the best possible outcome in any and all situations.  "Survival of the 'fittest'" as I mentioned.  Remember, too, that in life the best possible outcome rarely happens as the culmination of all possibilities weighs heavily against the possibility of one specific outcome occurring as opposed to any number of a possibly infinite other outcomes occurring.  That is to say, it's far easier to pull hay out of a haystack than the needle.  That said, statistically it does happen from time to time.

Unlike yeast cells, at least so far as we know, we humans have the ability to comprehend our own existence.  We can "see" the rules.  That is, we can see cause and surmise effect. We may be clouded in our judgement of effect (or result if you'd rather) by our emotional attachment to a different outcome, our past experiences, simple error, a lack of a full understanding of the circumstances, or frankly any number of other reasons.  Yet, we can perceive our existence.  Whether that perception is more or less flawed is up for debate on any given day, but it is certainly ever elusive in my opinion.

Nothing I've said so far is all that revolutionary.  Perhaps it is better understood as a result of your reading it.  Perhaps my ability with words and my ability to convey meaning with them has increased your understanding of the aforementioned concept--survival of the fittest.  Maybe it hasn't.  Maybe you have a better understanding of it than I do.  Or maybe you think you do.  At any rate, it doesn't matter.  You'll take from what I say that which you, though your lens--tinted by your experience--, suggests you should.  This leads me to wonder further about the concept of free will, but that is a discussion for another time.  How indeed can your will be free if it is dictated by your desire to survive and simultaneously your tinted perception of what choices would be best for survival?  But, I must digress.  There are other observations to be made tonight...

Social media is in effect a means of control.  In the past fifteen years or so we have seen the growth of what we can broadly describe as "Web 2.0", which was in essence the creation of the internet consciousness of humankind.  It is different though similar to the worlds described in any number of science fiction works of the past generation , though each inaccurate in the eventual design of the system, they are remarkably able to see the intent of it.  I am not being clear.  Ready Player One, Ender's Game, The Matrix...  These are examples of world building in which a human consciousness becomes prevalent online.  There are many more, but you get the point I hope.  Rather, you understand the beginning of my premise, now several paragraphs deep.  

We have become a world of social media consciousnesses.  We live a great deal of our lives online.  From Instagram to TikTok to this forum and that, our existence has broken beyond the barrier of the digital world.  A part of who we are is melted into the social media consciousness.  And, these platforms that we use daily encourage that behavior.  They encourage use.  Even something like TikTok that offers you suggestions to put it down and come back later, is in essence encouraging you to continue in the long term at the cost of the short term.

This point brings me to the crux of this essay.  Where are the creators of these platforms?  Does Jeff Bezos spend his day writing Amazon reviews?  Does Mark Zuckerberg spend his day arguing politics in the comments of a linked article on his Wall that has little to no genuine impact on himself?  Do the creators of Google spend their days clicking on ads on a Geocities page with 8-bit flashing animations?  That that latter statement mixes Google and Yahoo isn't relevant, I just find the thought amusing.  The point is, that they don't.  They've already survived.  They've gotten their best possible outcome of a situation in years past and have moved onto the next battle.  

But what do I mean "they've survived".  What struggle?  Survival of the fittest.  Like serfs to manor lords, like employees to employers, like followers to messiahs, they have won.  They have won because they were able to profit from your time, time which you have given them willingly in fact.  The more time you spend on social media, the more they can monetize that time.  The more they monetize your time, the more they profit.  And profit they do.  At the expense of everyone else

Remember, your time is finite.  That is what gives it value.  Scarcity creates value.  They only have so much time to themselves, but long ago, at the dawn of civilization or even before, we in our ability to understand our own existence have learned that we can manipulate others to give us a share of their time too.  If we didn't give our time to Facebook or Snapchat or whatever social media, it, like Sears or the telgraph or AIM, would cease to have any value whatsoever. Just as corporations take some of our time in exchange for less than it's worth (so that they profit off of it), so too do social media companies.  Walmart makes money because the conditions are tipped in their favor to do so.  The same is true for Fox News.  The same is true for Disney.  The same is true for anyone and everyone to a similar, albeit lesser degree.  

Life is a peacock strutting to a peahen.  We hock our wares to the interested buyer to make a profit, to survive.  A great many of us will only inevitably have our time to bargain with and nothing or little else.  And as mentioned, the cards are stacked against us in this deal.  We receive back from that exchange for our time, to varying degrees less of what we want than what that time is worth.  Sometimes we are able to make something that appeals to the masses more effectively than our time.  Sometimes our strut is grand enough to excite others to give us their time.  That hype is what social media creators feed on.  Indeed it is how they feed themselves.  Yet, they are confined to the social media of their own choosing and the can only draw from that well to feed themselves.  The Youtuber profits based on the proliferation of their content on Youtube.  Their presence in the mutual fund market would be, if at all, tangentially affected by this.  Why is this important?  They receive profit based on how much time they receive from others.  But they are not in charge either.  In reality, they receive a cut of the profit of that time.  Youtube's parent company, Alphabet, actually is the one that profits.  You simply give them your time and they give you back a lesser portion of remuneration and pocket the rest.  

None of this is groundbreaking.  It's been happening since humankind first began to comprehend existence.  The forms have changed over the years, but the same basic model continues to pervade.  The fittest is the person or persons at the end of the day whom the collective efforts of all the others trickle up to.  In the Internet Age you have your Jeff Bezos' and Mark Zuckerberg's just the same as Industrial Age had Andrew Carnegie's and John Rockefeller's.  These people are, by an large, simply the highest person on the mountain, the one who stands on everyone else.  They are, by definition, the fittest.  

 

Yet, this isn't some age old conspiracy of a collective group of wealthy individuals.  The players do change, yet as a whole, the fittest evolve.  One may depart as an industry or poor decisions or happenstance occurs and another may be admitted to that "club", to that criteria that defines the "fittest".  Many mistakenly assume that this means that there is an overarching group that seeks to control everything.  There isn't.  There is however an overarching desire to be the fittest.  They will band together to keep their collective positions, and have done so throughout history.  Look at the number of American presidents that are related in one way or another.  Or movie stars.  Or the crowned heads of Europe.  Or any number of other groups that represent the "fittest" currently or in years past.  The powerful will band together to suppress others from dislodging them from below.  At the same time, they will in the same breath seek to dislodge those around them.  Survival of the fittest requires one to come out on top.  This general observation explains the sum total of all of politics ever anywhere in the world.  

The takeaway here isn't that you need to upset the system or upend it, though given the chance we all would.  Survival of the fittest after all.  My point is simply to suggest that you are but a brick in someone else's wall.  Yet, if happenstance or luck should have it and your best possible outcome should present itself, take it.  And don't forget where you come from.  Yet it seems you will forget, if history has shown us anything, the powerful always choose to forget that they were once a brick in someone else's wall.  Or, perhaps, they choose even more firmly to squeeze those bricks down on their own wall, so as to maintain their position for fear of returning to their previous position.  But  I digress, this isn't relevant to my point.

Your time is valuable.  More so than you think.  Keep this in mind as the next age is dawning... the "metaverse".

Rantings of a Mad Man Part XXII

The lower you are, the lower your mental state of mind, the higher the likelihood you seek out instant gratification.  It's a self-feeding cycle.

You do nothing intrinsically different now than we did 10,000 years ago.  We wake up, go to work to provide for ourselves and our families, return home, eat, relax and socialize, and continue again the next day.  It is no different in action than walking up, going out hunting or foraging, coming home, eating, and relaxing and socializing before going to bed to do it again the next day.  The basic needs of mankind haven't changed, just the conditions it is undertaken within and the methods we use to do so.

Uniqueness is a product of past experience.

Companies reward executives with more money for more successfully paying workers less money.

The only difference between a social bath with friends and a hot tub party is the appearance of alcohol at the event and of bubbles in the water.

Cheese is essentially rotten and moldy milk.

The ejaculation led to your birth involved a race of 100 million contestants of which you were the winner.  And you only won the race because your parents both individually won their own races.  Therefore, all other factors aside, the odds of you existing as you do today are about 1.0x10^24.  For reference that's about 100,000 times bigger than the number of grains of sand on Earth.  It's also about the same number of stars estimated to exist in the universe.  And that only takes into account yours and your parents' coming to existence and does not account for the hundreds of generations previous, or anything pre-human that evolved into us, or the fact that the Earth existing at all is an extremely unlikely set of odds into and of itself.

Gravity, Absence, and the Formation and Continuation of the Universe

There are two forces at play in the universe that impact and shape mass.  They are gravity, the attracting force, and it's counter, repelling force, absence.  

Remove absence from the equation for a moment.  Picture the universe as different sized marbles placed on a trampoline.  If the quantities of mass in the universe in any one area break beyond a certain level of density, or in the sake of our trampoline, are heavy enough to impact the surface tension of the trampoline... ie are heavy enough to indent it, the mass will pool together in a central point.  Eventually, if not for a few potential equilibriums being met, whereby a balance is achieved in the mass being equally dispersed so that all symmetrically attract all others, the entirety of the mass will eventually pool together.

In this model on a universal scale, if gravity is the only attracting or repelling force, eventually everything would pool back together into a Big Crunch.

Remove gravity from the equation instead, leaving only absence, and a universe would simply, eventually coalesce in a state of equilibrium whereby a finite space in the universe is filled equally with mass or an infinite universe spreads mass so thin so as to make it's existence approach zero.  In either of these situations, finite universe, or infinite universe mass would no coalesce so much as it would homogenize.  

The observable universe, however, is neither of these examples.  It is not a place where matter all coalesces into a big crunch nor is it a universe where matter homogenizes into a certain symmetrical density or a density tending to zero.  By simple observation, we can see that none of these are true currently.

There are therefore two possibilities.  

(1) The balance between gravity and absence is in equilibrium.  This means that a constant ebb and flow of the two forces determines what occurs to mass in the universe.  You'll find a universe with these rules will have many things in common with our actual observable universe.  Matter does coalesce, but it also breaks up, often (cosmologically-speaking) in large explosions.  Matter never leaves the cycle.  By definition, the universe encompasses all.  In a system that is in equilibrium, the conversion of matter to energy... primarily through the life cycle of stars... energy must then also convert back into matter at the same effective rate.  

Effective rate suggests that the process from energy to matter may be over a much longer term, but encompass much more mass whereas the process of transformation from matter to energy can be relatively quick or even instantaneous (eg. stars forming versus supernovae exploding).  The net result of the equation must be zero, however, if equilibrium is kept.  The system can be a function of both time and mass but together must cancel each other out.

In this system, mass bounces over time between matter and energy in a closed system.  It is perpetual and completely self-contained.  There does exist a logical concern to this, seemingly possible scenario.  Equilibrium is hard.  VERY hard.  The idea that a billion billion billion stars in the universe could all be in equilibrium, while at the same time not being symmetrical is exceedingly difficult, if not functionally impossible.  It is certainly statistically improbable.  In an infinite universe, the possibility of this occurring would tend toward zero as the number of variables (quantities of mass) tends to infinity.  There is another possibility.

(2)  There is near-balance between gravity and absence that tends towards equilibrium but never gets there.  In this system, much the same as the previous system is true, but the system isn't perfect.  The balance is slightly off, and eventually, one side wins.  Look back to our examples of removing gravity and removing absence to see what would occur.  If gravity has the upper hand, eventually matter wins over energy and the universe ends in a big crunch.  If absence has the upper hand, eventually the universe if infinite, will suffer a heat death if finite will suffer homogeneous symmetry--everything would be the same everywhere.  Our model can also suffer heat death, if the universe is itself large enough to spread out its mass far enough, though technically it doesn't have to be infinite, although technically that would itself be defining infinite as a quantity by the definition of what the universe is-- i.e "everything".

From what we can see currently, there is at least a lot of interplay between gravity and absence or we wouldn't be here.  The longer the universe continues the more we can define the universe as approaching equilibrium.  In which way, in fact, we can chart over time any apparent heat loss in the universe as a whole to determine the interplay of gravity and absence, and theoretically could test how close to equilibrium gravity and absence indeed are in our universe.  

Be careful however as there is a potential flaw in this logic.  If we can prove and define absolute zero as a point at which all motion stops without exception, then we can indeed possibly find a universe that reaches heat death.  However, if absolute zero does not, in fact, stop the forces of gravity from attracting mass together, then perhaps even if the universe is large enough for heat death to occur, it may not be possible for it to occur at all.  Additionally, it may be possible for it to occur for a period of time or in specific locations, but not actually end the system at all, if absolute zero does not end all motion in practice as it does in theory.  This in itself is highly likely.  Absolute zero may tend toward being motionless, but the motion may occasionally occur, which means that in that scenario, regardless of the interplay of gravity and absence, the universe wouldn't ever truly end.  However unlikely, it would merely tend toward ending--which much data today actually may support.

Observation is key.  We must observe with greater clarity exactly what occurs before we can make determinations.

Analyzing the Trump Voter

There is a core belief that sits in the hearts of all Trump voters. And that isn't racism or misogyny or hatred of the working poor necessarily. Hear me though on this. Many of those beliefs are for sure A reason why some people support Trump. But they aren't THE reason. 

The reason people voted for Trump is an inherent belief that there just isn't enough to go around. 

Enough what? 

Everything. Anything really. 

There isn't enough food to feed everyone. There isn't enough space to house everyone. There isn't enough wealth to enrich everyone. 

These people believe that they need to get theirs and defend theirs before helping others. This is why people vote against their own best interests. They aren't looking to feed the poor. They're looking to ensure that they are fed themselves and they are going to TAKE what they need to TAKE to ensure that this occurs. They aren't looking to protect women's rights, they're looking to preserve a society from the past that catered to them. 

They simply don't care about others. They don't care about refugees from another country. To them they are competition for resources. They will use and justify using any and all physical and psychological differences that make you different from them to compartmentalize in their minds the belief that they are not more important than you--to dehumanize you. 

The same is true in reference to Black people. 

Gay people. 

Women. 

There is an entire generation of poor white men in this country that actually believe that there isn't enough to go around. They've been shown the evidence their entire lives by those in power, those manipulating them to gain more power. They have been shown a scapegoat for all of their own problems, for all of the difficulties they've had in their lives--the Black person, the gay person, women, immigrants, refugees, "foreigners", "illegals", atheists, communists, socialists, and so on. Those who don't have can easily be manipulated by those who do. Waive a little chunk of what they want in front of their faces and point to the Black person, suggest that they somehow are the reason they don't "have". 

Keep this in mind when talking with Trump voters. Ask them for yourself if they feel they should get theirs first before helping others or if by helping others they can get theirs. 

The answer will surprise you. 

Or not, if you've been reading the signs.