A Vaccine Against the CDDC Virus (Confuse-Disorient-Divide-&-Conquer Social Virus) .... Coming to a K-12 Curriculum Near You (If We Want To Maintain A Resilient Democracy)

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson.)

Madison, Washington et al warned us against factionalism ... the measles of mankind.

"One way to keep [a voting block of] 50 million [poor people] fractured is through disinformation."

class warfare and how America's poor are held back

Once retired professional athletes are waking up to that fact, maybe there's hope.

It's also a hopeful sign that other citizens are starting to notice that many politicians don't know how fiat currency operations work.

Yet why is it taking so long for all these signs to be noticed, by more people? Is it partly because voters, in their turn, don't understand politics or politicians?

In general, most people in nearly all of our rapidly growing variety of disciplines don't understand much about the other disciplines. The downside is that our electorate understands LESS about its nation's context every year.

To generalize from an old academic joke, "citizens receiving increasingly specialized education and training know more and more about fewer and fewer of themselves, until they end up knowing everything about nobody (and about no aggregate context)."

Here's another old joke. Our nation and it's context have become hidden from our own view, buried beneath a churning mass of blind specialists, like a cloud of mosquitoes obscuring a victim. No wonder we're stumbling around like a drunken policy apparatus. We can't even tell if that's a pink elephant encapsulated by all the blind men!

More fundamentally, not enough citizens formally recognize that over-adaptation to transient context - excess efficiency - is a death knell. Why? Too much specialization, thereby shedding the capacity for resiliency, while also instituting runaway feed-forward loops cementing institutional momentum!

That constitutes growing dissociation rather than growing coordination.

What we have is a blind cultural growth spurt, where growing aggregates have to GET clumsier before they can discriminate the signs of their growing clumsiness (aka, less agile democracy). Recognition is required before an electorate can start taking steps to regain agility, on yet another scale.

Until then, we're all stuck with understanding less about ourselves, about our context and about our options.

We have a name for classes of humans stuck in that limbo, devoid of the talent of discernment.

Homo lemmings - defined as a sub-class of homo sapiens who regularly say that "no one could have expected" reality.

No pain, no urge to adapt. What if there's less capability to recognize looming cultural pain soon enough to take early evasive action? Then there's less willingness to adapt and survive, even if options are clearly presented.

Tell that to our legions of citizens with 30 second attention spans, who have come to accept countless exhortations to not read, not explore and, worst of all, not think - and certainly not outside the boxes - or cubicles - they've been handed.

Give these people an opportunity to think, and they are prone to call you a "lazy writer."

Is there a vaccine for lazy writing? Yes, and we call it extinction, ironically, since provocative writing, which asks readers to actually think, IS a cultural vaccine. A vaccine against a vaccine is therefore an example of self-assisted suicide. Those who don't get enough remedial practice at agile thinking are sometimes termed "literalists" - people who can only see what is, not what can be.

Literalists are people who, when faced with contexts describable ONLY through a seemingly near-infinite polynomial set of interdependent variables, have difficulty imagining more than one variable changing at one time. Agile thinkers, on the other hand, practice the cultural equivalent of combinatorial chemistry - throw everything together, change many variables simultaneously in many, interleaved, experiments, and practice the ability to discriminate novel signals, on the fly, from the expanding mass of noisy data.

Literalists, ironically, often call agile-thinkers lazy. Usually because the literalists won't stoop to asking enough questions to keep up. So who are the lazy ones?

In the end, there is a simple solution to that particular friction - between the literalist and agile ends of the thinking spectrum. How much could it hurt to add many more agile-thinking "games" to all levels of K-12 education, so that a threshold proportion of citizens get adequate practice at our constantly escalating task of coordinating on a larger scale - aka, get them practice at emulating evolution? That's one elegant way to prepare a growing electorate for a better balance between long-term cultural resiliency and instantaneous cultural efficiency.

Is This How The NeoLib "Memirus" Swamps Our Democracy's Adaptive Responses?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Ignorance is our Greatest Public Health threat, social as well as physiological.

Just as HIV hides out in the immune cells concentrating in the gut, a reservoir of the NeoLib "memirus"* hides out among all the IGNORANCE CONCENTRATED IN POLITICS.




* A virus is a stripped down packet of nucleic acid packaged in a protective protein capsule.

  A memirus is a stripped down package of toxic sophism, hidden within a confusing, semantic capsule.

Naming, Discussing and Solving Specific Innocent Frauds, and the Specific Social Catalysts That Will Undo Them

commentary by Roger Erickson

To proceed, we need to specifically name some key hurdles, so they can be more widely discussed. Only then is it clear what catalysts prompt faster adoption of methods driving better results.

Consider: The USAID Virus, or "The International Campaign to Destabilize Bolivia," and then let's jump to MMT & fiscal policy.

Reasoning by Analogy.

An analogy is used, comparing a US Gov agency to a virus, given that both trigger "systemic toxicities" in the afflicted host. At some point, it doesn't matter how true the specific allegations are. There is a better way, for both virus & host.

Anyone observing the intersection of policy & monetary operations knows that the hurdles are very distributed. Therefore, lets consider some distributed background. If we're going to mention hosts & viruses, note that every known species & it's viruses exhibits diverse, competing cultures or variants. For example, each of our nation states, as a variant, has also developed a cloud of significant institutions or practices that define that culture. Also note that each institution itself develops a cloud of "species-specific" protest groups.

Ultimately, however, all institutions & their protest cults develop considerable institutional momentum, and all lack adequate situational awareness of how to adapt to an unpredictable future.  Progress occurs largely through unpredictable, indirect recombinations across or outside existing institutions.

How do we know that past methods always fail? Simply because we've been unable to extract any predictive power by extrapolating from past trends. The result is an accepted rule in all system sciences: "For every intractable problem, there is a solution, and that solution always involves yet another layer of indirection." It is that novel class of new & indirect solutions which cannot be predicted - and hence cannot be supplied by existing institutions or their protest clouds.

Learning not to fear viruses. 

Even initially threatening viruses can eventually be beneficially utilized by a clever recipient, by repurposing either the content or the viral methods. Viruses open up indirect pathways which cannot be accessed by existing hosts or source-institutions sharing existing "paradigm momentum" - nor by the "species-specific" protest groups sharing the same paradigm-momentum, even if in opposition!

Simultaneously, the machinery used by one host to generate & redistribute viruses can also be tuned to benefit both source & recipient. Indirection and indirect options are all around us. Re-purposing them in novel ways is where all the opportunity is - decidedly NOT in joining any aspect of any of them, as is.

There is always an even better way. Finding that better way fast enough to matter, requires situational awareness. Recklessly acting anyway, without at least minimal situational awareness, defines Innocent Fraud.

At their deepest levels, the premise of the USAID-virus articles is that institutional momentum will generate collateral influence, incidentally. We know that, and have options.  Exploring those options is what counts.

Using Viral Methods to Explore Options Faster

Since no subset of actors can wield enough knowledge to adequately predict the consequences of it's own actions, they must fall back on adjustments as reported results rolls in. In that case, the ratio of success vs failure depends entirely upon feedback sampling, and the latency between feedback, adequate analysis and further action.

Throwing caution to the winds and stubbornly proceeding based on ideology alone produces, at best, Innocent Fraud.

Being overly cautious and waiting for certainty before action only cedes discovery and momentum to those generating the range of actions defining success & failure, and is therefore also a failure - by definition - in an adaptive race.

The well known path to success, the very thing that drives evolution, is better/faster/leaner "parsing" of the information cloud incidentally generated by any group in any situation. Simply put, when HP quickly listens to all of HP, it's always clear what to do next. The trick is to find better/faster/cheaper methods allowing HP to listen to all of HP, and then to also parse that information cloud so that all parts of HP can align to accomplish whatever HP needs to do next.

Experience has proven that better/faster/cheaper tuning of input/analysis/response cycles depend largely on "what & how you ask" and "what & how you answer." Asking the precisely right question goes a long way towards getting the shortest, most valuable answer, soonest. Our decision cycle shrinks as all discussants learn how to keep useless information from cluttering & slowing the group decision process.

Making the jump to better/faster/leaner monetary operations - and then going farther.

Viruses, Options and Continuous Development.

If we apply the same cross-discipline analogy to monetary operations, then MMT exposes multiple, well known systemic toxicities affecting policy development. 

We already know where we'd like to be, and we know what constraints are holding us back. That means all attention should be focused on methods for overcoming the constraints, not just publicizing them. 

Methods drive results. If better methods are known but not widely used, then we fall back to catalysts for driving faster adoption of better methods. The best ways to learn are by trial & error, or by example if possible.

Our general problem? We have populations growing faster than their group awareness is growing? You don't say!

That defines a "teratology," i.e., a disorganized system. Teratology was coined to describe mal-development of a recognized system, specifically abnormalities of physiological development. There is even a long standing Teratology Society., dedicated to study of "terata," or abnormalities [Terata-ology, from Greek, = "monster-study"]. A newer term developmental toxicity includes all manifestations of abnormal development, not only obvious terata.

What does this - and similar examples from other fields - imply for all aspects of policy? Quite obviously, that we already have tremendous experience in studying and managing complex development processes, and are simply not applying that knowledge base to the complexity and tempo of group policy development.

New Ideas for Tuning a Continuously Developing System.

A culture is a constantly developing system. It's up to us to notice when our development is proceeding abnormally vs satisfactorily. We know the stakes, for ourselves and our children. How can we best manage our own, incessant cultural development? Hint, we won't get there without discussing key, emerging concepts accurately, widely & frequently enough.

Yet we have not even coined analogous terms for abnormal development of other known developing systems. Why? Obviously because distributed appreciation for those systems is lagging. Study & understanding of scalable, sustainable development methods lags when we do not appreciate a given development process enough to name and adequately discuss it.

What shall we call abnormalities of cultural development? Cultology? (suggestions?)

What shall we call abnormalities of market development? eConology? (suggestions?)

What shall we call abnormalities of ecological development? Stupidology? (suggestions?)

What shall we call abnormalities of political development? Political Parties? (suggestions?)

Once we name more specific examples of abnormal development, we can expand the discussion of identifying better social catalysts (education?) that will accelerate adoption of better methods which exist but are unused (MMT?).