Sane People Can Always Take Back Their Own Fiat

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Aligning situational awareness. It's all we need.

Everything else constitutes details, which context outcomes will always tell us how to use - IF we simply listen to our increasingly distributed selves.

Here are links to some great ways to express a point widely felt but not coherently appreciated by all. We're only a short step from recruiting the electorate to full alignment.

The message logic is clear. Cutting through the wall of propaganda noise is the bigger hurdle.

Yet once an intention arises, there's always a way to achieve whatever signal-to-noise ratio is required - because we have something worth fighting for. A goal provides focus that all can be recruited to align to. Any effort to prevent ourselves from reaching a goal can never recruit the same focus - except in our small fraction of sociopaths.

Yes, WHEN WE'RE NOT USING IT, we tend to cede most of our fiat to the squeaky wheel sociopaths called the 1%, or the Pareto Curve upper crust. Keep in mind, however, that sane people can always take back their own fiat .... whenever they wake up and finally notice a use for it. When that happens, even most of the sociopaths can themselves finally see the obvious. They're usually just the last to do so. So no need to cull sociopaths, just auto-regulate them with our own, distributed initiative.

The biology of humans seems to include sociopaths as a useful "honeypot" mechanism for scavenging static assets through times of general complacency or somnalence.

That does NOT mean that honeypots can't be drained at will, whenever a worthwhile goal triggering general mobilization arises. It's not like the 1% sociopaths ever come up with adequate goals for electorates to follow. Consider them as playing the same roles in culture as adipose cells do in physiology. Simply an auto-stocking buffer to be drained at will. They only get out of hand and cause systemic heart-attacks if and when the system as a whole sits on it's ass to the point of decay and death.

America, just get off the couch and find something to do with yourself. Use your kids imagination, if you've gotten out of the habit yourself.

Here are some links providing useful analogies for our predicament.

"A man threatened by burglary having to sell his valuables to buy protection against the burglar ... ." Bernard Porter, see comments here. In the real world, sane communities eventually decide on the need for cheaper prevention, form a posse, and hunt down the burglers. Same principle as draining swamps vs swatting mosquitoes.

".. the decision at some point is always made to sacrifice industrial might for military and financial might, or to put it more bluntly, for decadence."

That may LOOK like a policy decision, but it's really a distributed INABILITY to execute a quality decision.

It's called losing focus -i.e., losing Situational Awareness - expressed by hoarding static assets locally instead of using optimally distributed asset allocation to build NATIONAL RESILIENCY. The focus necessary to build national resiliency drives the discipline necessary to coordinate agile exploration of growing degrees of freedom. Without that resilient discipline and focus, a group, tribe or nation squanders it's net future. That's how to go back and be LESS than the sum of our parts, rather than more.

Of course the USA isn't the first to illustrate this! What's amazing is that, despite our incredible capabilities, we ARE doing it too, and exactly BECAUSE we've let the bulk of our electorate slide into such a state that they just don't see it coming.  You might call that cultural gangrene.  It's appalling mostly because it's self inflicted - simply for lack of distributed self-intiative! I'd bet some economists PhD that historic cultural decline correlates with electorate obesity, or at least some form of cultural complacency leading to "cultural adiposity" syndrome.

An national electorate is a vast, analog computing system, much like a CNS or a computer. Group intelligence is a function of how many components actively participate in distributed decision-making. If you let less than 1% of ANY group intelligence make all the policy decisions, of course there's a catastrophic decline in both quality and tempo of group intelligence.

Folks, this is NOT rocket science!

We must hang together, or we'll all hang separately. And we're simply not sticking together, finding better vs worse things to have fun doing together.  How about some Insanely Great National Goals?