Understanding Governments and The Establishment for Dummies

OK, many folks will be totally turned off by the post title here having already been turned off from politics by the shinanigens of politicians and the apparent complexity of politics. Obviously you havent quite reached that point otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. The good news is that politics is far simpler than most folks realize, though you wouldnt naturally pick that up from the white noise that is the mainstream media. The not so good news is that politics is far more sinister than most folks realise, but don't despair, I have some great remedies for that enraging sense of powerlessness. I'm not going to bog you down with confusing political jargon, rather I intend to cut through the crap and give you the big picture by reminding you about things that you probably already know, but have faded in the glare of the information barrage coming from your TV/Internet/newspapers etc.

The first thing to remember is that you live in a class structured society. The structure of modern society has not changed much since the dawn of human civilization and it is teered or stratified, broadly speaking, as lower, middle and upper. There are variations on these terms which maybe more or less familiar too; the establishment, the 1%, the ruling class, the wealth of the nation. These are all variations of the upper class. Management and political class are variations on the middle class. Working class, proletariate and steerage are variations of the lower class.

The distribution of political power amongst the classes is roughly speaking inversly proportional to the numbers of people in each class, during in 'peace time' at least, and is illustrated:

Class population distribution and order

These figures are taken from an article published on the BBC website for Britain called 'What is working class?'. The accuracy of the figures isn't terribly important for the point of this article. The magnitude of distribution is enough to make the relevant points. Power, wealth and attitudes maybe further stratified and compartmentalised within each class, but that is not terribly important for this article either, we just need the class oriented overview.

The first thing we should notice about the above figure is the order i.e. upper, middle and lower. What do these actually mean. Well, the most common way of viewing this order is in terms of wealth and power, with the upper having the most of both and the lower having the least. However, what I want to bring to your attention is the distribution of attitudes, particularly with regard to how these classes view each other. A typically held view by each class is that of 'we are the good guys'. Empathy of the upper towards the lower is low as is the lower towards the upper, the latter being commonly referred to as 'inverted snobbery'. Interestingly the middle class has a higher degree of empathy for the upper and lower classes than those classes have for each other. The middle class broadly speaking aspire to the wealth and style of the upper class but also sympathise to some extent with the lower class's hardships. Of course you will find plenty of exceptions to the these views within each class. I am speaking here in terms of general attitudes. Another aspect of attitude we might want to think about is the sense of superiority. Self superiority is nowhere near as abundant in the lower class, whereas it is dominant in the upper class.

'Order' is a word that you will come across frequently in politics, as in 'law and order' or as spoken in courts and parliament as a command 'Order!'. What does it mean. Well, look at the illustration and it should become obvious. The term means 'deference' or 'defer' i.e. the expectation that one should defer to their 'superiors'. It's not a term I am fond of, as like most I do not think of myself as being inferior to anyone. Of course we maybe inferior on specific skills and so forth e.g. I'm no carpenter, so a professional carpenter is obviously superior to me in wood working skills, but as a person I am much more egalitarian of thought. That is to say that I believe that all people are equal even if different. This is not a view widely held in the upper class I'm sorry to say.

There are many sources, particularly auto-biographies of national leaders, from which we can find candid revelations of supremacist attitudes amongst the upper class. I have picked one, which I have shamelessly lifted from Noam Chomsky in a talk he gave in Belfast 1993 titled 'Creating a New World Order', that should give some sense of attitudes amongst the ruling class:

The actual reality was expressed a bit more accurately by Winston Churchill, with his customary lucidity, when he was describing the new world order of the day, in 1945, and he wrote as follows; "The government of the world must be entrusted to the satisfied nations, who wish nothing more for themselves than what they have. Not to the hungry nations who only cause trouble. The government of the world must be entrusted to rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations. Our power placed us above the rest and it is our right to rule."

These kinds of utterances are generally kept out of the mainstream media, so for the casual observer it is quite hard today to pick up the degree of supremacist thinking amongst the ruling class, in fact many of the real power wielding ruling class do not appear in the mainstream media whatsoever. For example you might want want to browse the website 'Who Owns Britain' and see how many of the major land owners' names you recognise.

So what causes these social groups to become distinguished in their attitudes? We only need look at the evolution of species of plant or animal to find the answer. Geographically isolated groups of the same species will diverge into different species given time. Likewise, intellectually or geographically isolated groups of people will evolve different cultures over time. Just think about the evolution of Islam versus that of Christianity. Once an administrative group is formed to govern a people, and even though that administrative group is of those people, they immediately have a common interest; governing people. Government will always face resistance from some sections of the population on each issue, and so become desensitised to the concerns of such sub-groups believing that their own actions are for the 'greater good'. Given enough time the administrative group will be concerned with governing only and care nothing for the concerns of the people it governs, which is pretty much what we see today. A class of governors has evolved who serve the interests of governors only, relenting in its course only when discontent amongst the governed starts to frighten them. Even then they will use forceful means to try to stay their course, until of course it becomes untenable. The result is that at least 2 classes will evolve who exist in varying states of opposition to each other, the governors making laws to suit their ideals and the governed breaking those laws to suit their ideals. So now we have upper and lower classes.

So where does the middle class come from? Well, the upper class is a minority, and given that it's largely self-serving policies will benefit it most, it is naturally a minority of the privileged. So, based on the ratio of governors to the governed, many of its policies will be concerned with its own security. At the very least it requires a police force between it and the governed. If the police were to share the same views of the governed then the police force would be of no use to the governors, in fact a capable police force would be a threat to the governors. As a result the police force are given preferential treatment over the lower class, in the way of pay at the very least. Today the treatment of police goes much further, including indoctrination of the police against the lower class. The lower class must be treated with suspicion at all times. These are just 2 of the ways in which the police are set apart from the lower class. There are many others. This is quite probably one of the roots of the middle class, though we can go back to the Romans or further to see other middle class groups such as slave traders and so forth. Each middle class group serving the interests of the upper class whilst benefiting from exploitation of the lower class, or even other members of the middle class.

This stratification of the people has been around for a long time. The earliest civilisation I know of that doesn't appear to have had a middle class is that of the people of Caral in Peru. This was very likely a civilisation transitioning from a flat society to a structured society in which no middle class had yet developed.

There are many more aspects to this topic to be discussed, including the extremes that the ruling class regard as norms, which I shall do in future posts, but in short, countries are ruled by the ruling class for the ruling class, not by the people for the people.

Examining Climate Change Data for Yourself

Like a lot of people I have felt like I haven't really seen for myself what the facts are concerning the claim of human made climate change (ACC or anthropogenic climate change), only what others want me to see. Within the context of the corporate controlled media system, those points of view are heavily biased by pro-ACC and anti-ACC business influences. There is a lot of money being spent by oil companies such as Koch Oil Industries and their owners on persuading the public that ACC is a liberal hoax, and likewise 'green' businesses do very nicely out of public fear of ACC. I figure the only way to make in-roads to the truth of the matter is to look at available data for myself.

Now, I'm no scientist, though I am fairly scientifically literate, so sifting through research papers and trying to figure out the reality from studies of bacteria in cloud formations complete with complex calculus was too time consuming for me as a start point, so I thought I would look for the kind of data from which the reality ought to climb out of the screen waving a reality flag at me. Given the central proposition that humanity is causing global temperature rises I thought I would compare global population data with global temperature data, and yes I am aware of the phenomenon of 'heat islands' i.e. the distribution of temperature sensors being biased towards more densely populated areas, though I understand that studies have been done that exclude these 'heat islands' and that the average data is much the same. In fairness to critics, I haven't yet looked at that data for myself, but I thought the exercise I did which is laid out below was valid nonetheless, not withstanding discovering that the 'exclusion' studies are in fact being lied about.

A few years back I discovered an cool online tool called Wolfram-Alpha (free) which is a sort of information systems/science project to make easy use of avail science data. With the tool you can do all sorts of cool English based calcs like 'Norway GDP compared to UK GDP'. The following vid gives you a good idea of what I'm talking about:

 

I called up global temperature data using the terms 'Global Temperatures since 1850' since it covers most of the human population growth through the industrial revolution. The results include the following science datasets: 

Study	Description	Date
HadCRUT3vGL	Instrumental HadCRUT3v data from the Hadley Center and the Climate Research Unit	2006
Mann2003a	Historical records, ice cores, lake sediments, shells, tree rings; global mean surface reconstruction based on multi-proxy data	2003
Mann2008f	Corals, historical records, ice cores, lake sediments, speleothem, tree rings; 2000 year hemispheric and global surface temperature reconstructions	2008
NCDCGL	Instrumental global surface temperature anomalies from the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Climatic Data Center	2006

Whether you regard these datasets as factual is down to you to determine, but I don't know of better sources of data so please write me if you do.

The combined graph looks like this:

As you can see the datasets roughly track each other so I picked the Mann2008f dataset as the temperature reconstruction from natural data implicitly smooths the data since those sources provide average temperatures, that had a smooth curve to simplify matters (though if you zoom in using Wolfram-Alpha you'll see it's not quite as smooth as it looks here). The advantage of the Mann data is that it doesn't suffer from the phenomenon of heat islands :

Interestingly you can see the 11 year solar cycle (I have drawn on the image for you to see) which we will just have to normalise (iron out) in our heads to see the trend without the solar influence.

In addition to this we need the global population data since 1850:

Overlaying the datasets (I had to stretch the population graph because of the different times scales) we get the following:

To me this paints a clear picture. Assuming the data is correct, this is not just correlation, as the correlation is too good. There is an obvious link between the two curves and it tracks the industrialisation of humanity extremely well. 

If you have better data please let me know.

Examining Sam Harris's moral assertions

Sam Harris has often referred us to a specific hypothetical moral dilema which forms what appears to be a cornerstone in his philosophy concerning the practice of religion, and in all likelihood one of the key foundations in what appears to be his tacit, if not explicit, endorsement of certain aggressive aspects of US foreign policy. The dilema proposes a scenario in which a runaway train cart is on course to wipe out a group of workers plying their trade on the track. According to the rules of the dilema only one of 2 possible courses of action may be taken. One is to do nothing whilst the other is to kill an otherwise uninvolved individual, the result of which will be that the cart does not go on to kill the group of rail workers. Sam comes down in favour of killing the innocent bystander on the basis of the lower resultant body count. This Sam does without equivocation, as though it were an obvious a conclusion to reach, just as choosing not to open fire on a crowd of shoppers simply because you have a gun. Sam does not explore the ethics of the other option in our raiload dilema, and that is to take no action, though he gently urges us to except his conclusion on the basis that truths may in fact be less than obvious to us, citing the Double Jeapardy 3 door dilema as another such case. In fairness to Sam he does explore the alternative in a different scenario, in which we consider the possibility of sacrificing a hospital patient suffering say only a minor injury in order to save the lives of several other patients who are in need of critical organs which our patient happens to have. In this scenario Sam comes down on the side of not sacrificing the individual for the sake of the body count. Is Sam suffering from a case of what Orwell called double think? I.e the ability of the human mind to simultaneously accept two mutually incompatible statements or beliefs. In fairness to Sam I should say that I don't know what Sam's reasoning is though he does seem to expect us to find it obvious, and it maybe the case that Sam pictures different conditions to that which he appears to me to present. That said, I would like to go back to the railway scenario and examine the option of taking no action.

The principle view point in the philosophy of ethics, to me at least, is of the actors or catalysts in a given scenario. That is to say that what the rest world is doing is irrelevant, what matters is the action or inaction of the actor. This, on the face of it, might appear to lend favour to Sam's argument in the case of the runaway train cart. However if we start to adjust some of the criteria of the scenario we may unveil a broader picture that is not obvious from simply taking the train cart scenario in isolation. For example let's suppose that the innocent bystander is Sam's own child, assuming Sam has a child for the sake of the argument. Sam doesn't know any of the track workers in peril, but according to Sam's moral reasoning we should assume that he would be at least in favour of killing his child to save the track workers, whomever they may be. I think it would be hard for anyone to believe that Sam would actually support the notion of killing his child and thus hold any respect for statements by Sam to the effect that he would kill his child if presented with the scenario for real. Could you support the notion of killing your own child in this scenario? Your answer to that question is what we would call a moral value. So what has changed? We have substituted his child for an anonymous individual, but the moral dilemma itself has not changed. Now, I don't want to be seen to be putting words into Sam's mouth so I shall just remind you that Sam, as far as I know has not made his position in our altered scenario known, and for all I know he may not have even thought about it. We do however appear to have a conflict of morality here to resolve, as I suspect most people fall strongly in favour of not killing their children, which I believe to be a good thing, and that is also a moral value. So, what is at the heart of the conflict? Well, it would seem to me to be down to the question of action or inaction, physically at least.

On the matter of action versus inaction I believe it to be valuable to explore the ethics of inaction as the complexity of real life may reveal more about the reality of outcomes versus hypothetical scenarios in which other considerations are excluded for the purpose of building an ethical argument. First off, in our railway crisis, we are urged to ignore external actors, be they natural or intelligent. So we are encouraged not to consider that we do not know that everything will turn out as we are led to believe. For example, let's suppose our group of rail workers are in fact Nazi sympathisers trying to dislodge a rail so as to kill the Jewish occupants of a later train. This fact we add to the scenario, but we do not allow the principle actor and would be saviour to know this information. If we sacrifice our innocent bystander, the Nazi plot remains uncovered by virtue of them having been saved from a grisly meeting with a fast moving and very heavy machine. The Nazi conspirators are then free to go on and successfully derail and kill a train load of people. OK, it's a fairly unlikely real world scenario today if we are thinking of the context of Nazis, however it may not be such an unlikely scenario if we change the actors and props to a more contemporary context.

Let's now consider another alternative to the railway scenario. Supposing instead that the rail points between the train and the unaware workers are set to divert the train cart down a different line thus averting disaster. Again our saviour is unaware of this fact or worse still is of the belief that the points are set such that the workers will meet their destiny when in fact they are set such that the workers would be saved. In the latter case, our would-be saviour would be compelled to switch the points based on his belief, but in doing so would seal the fate of our rail workers. In the former case he may have in fact killed his son or an innocent bystander when in fact the workers are in no danger. Now we start to see that with every moral dilemma, in the real world at least, we can't know all of the factors that are critical to the outcomes. It is also reality that all too often intervention i.e. action, in fact turns out to be a moral travesty. The would-be saviour is not in control of everything in the scenario nor are they aware of everything and thus they cannot be held responsible for a situation not of their making, in my opinion. A passive observer has no impact upon a system thus the system remains the product of the histories of the actors in the system and thus if any responsibility maybe apportioned it must be to them. Does this make a case for not acting to intervene ever? I don't believe so. What I have done here is to show that complex situations that for which we cannot be fully aware of we should not simply jump aboard the action wagon but watch peacefully and passively and learn. In war and conflict actors following the action course are almost always the ones doing the killing or at least supporting it. These scenarios are vastly more complex than in our railroad scenarios yet the moral actors are always those with guns that choose not to use them, inaction. It is the same principle in peaceful non-cooperative protest. Protesters pursue their peaceful course of action and in doing so expose the immorality of their opponents who choose the course of physical intervention. Another example is the role of international obervers in conflict zones.

Many people try to persuade us that inaction is a form of complicity. I reject this notion on the grounds that I think it is willful ignorance of the factors of a situation that is tantamount to complicty and in order not to engage in such ignorance we must observe and learn.