(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)
How about an electorate learning how to lead it's own culture? Can that group-quality be developed by studious group-reflection and group-practice? The answer is obviously a resounding yes, if evolving
cultural history is any guide.
How do we the people, as an aggregate, go about DOING that, in a pragmatic, objective way?
There's too much to possibly discuss in just one beginning, so I'll only touch on one facet, indirectly brought to light by a
review of the rather forgotten Korean Civil War of
1873-to-today (
if not older).
*
Rather than getting sidetracked in the wealth of details, please consider what this EXAMPLE means to us, and it's implications for what has and is happening to our own culture.
First off, there are SO many insightful observations on our own, multi-faceted context floating around - from political operations to fiat currency operations, and beyond ... but all of them are under-distributed, under-utilized & hence under-leveraged by we the people, as an aggregate.
When inundated by indicators, the classic solution is to summarize, and discriminate KEY indicators to coalesce around, while letting all others float within local tolerance limits. Yet that presumes that there is always some reference to orient group behavior to. Is it cultural survival? If we are what we-the-people practice, as a whole, then surely we should practice being more systemically aware of what we are, as a group, practicing, so that we can monitor, assess, judge and actively shape what we are becoming, rather than just finding out, after the fact.
Is the answer always more information? How many people will EVER read ANY scholarly bestseller - soon enough to matter? Enough to be statistically significant for real-time policy formation OR for continuous pursuit of an adequately "informed" electorate? Obviously not, since available data always scales faster than the data generators.
Walter Shewhart's words are prophetic.
* Data have no meaning apart from their context.
* Data contain both signal and noise. To be able to extract information, one must separate the signal from the noise within the data.
Obviously, we can't keep all people fully informed. That would reduce to a failed attempt to have clones, and it would destroy the very diversity which we depend upon. Plus, as Shewhart and others showed, the endeavor would be meaningless. We have to keep our diversity and use it too.
To keep evolving our own culture, it seems that we continuously need new cultural models, which must be preceded by new methods, appearing at a faster rate.
What kind of cultural models?
1) Constantly changing models for consciously managing the adaptive rate of our culture, and electorate.
2) Does that mean objective models and metrics for assessing the group-context-awareness of our electorate? Yes?
3) Does that mean setting national-context-awareness as a Desired National Outcome - and then usefully defining "National Context"? At a minimum? As one necessary but not sufficient aspect of an "adequately informed" electorate? Surely? Isn't that what Democracy does - when we let it work?
4) Does that also mean defining National Adaptive Rate as a necessary correlate of rate of change for an ongoing polynomial?
a) Rate of usefully re-defining National Context.
b) Rate of setting new Desired Outcomes worthy of our evolving culture;
c) Rate of adjusting milestone goals accurately defining successful pursuit of those Desired Outcomes.
d) Rate of adjusting our entire, cascading spectrum of policies, strategies, tactics, methods and tools ... in agile pursuit of our constantly evolving goals and summary outcomes.
So when can we see a, b & c spelled out throughout both our cultural outlook AND our K-12 curricula, so that it becomes incorporated into our growing list of guiding principles for all of our subsequent endeavors?
***
*Some of the fascinating insights that this book offers are rarely heard details about the fateful steps circa 1950 that led us to abruptly turn a de-militarized US economy into the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) which still defines us - and how that sudden reversal also aided the backlash to the 1930s pragmatism and the return to archaic Monetarism and excessively simplistic forms of Conservatism, bordering on Ludditism. It's a sobering reminder that our chosen actions dictate who we become. As we tried to police the world, the world changed us. It's not at all clear who is the victor in that exchange. It doesn't seem to be us.
This book is by Bruce Cumings. Those familiar with the Chicago school of NeoCon, NeoLiberal & Monetarist economics will be surprised that Cumings is on the faculty of that same school, in the History department. Go figure. Maybe there's still hope for the USA, right in the NeoCons front yard!
Cumings' data reveals a long history of Koreans bitterly divided between factions that profitably collaborated with the occupying Japanese between 1910-1945, and those of many stripes who obstinately insisted on either liberty or death. The actions & words of the opposition should have been familiar to Americans, but they weren't recognized, and hence weren't respected.
The paperback version I read is a bit chopped up, since it is condensed from his much larger 2-volume set, but it is still a fascinating read, since it largely details how fundamentally misguided our Korean policy has been, from start to finish, and most of our entire Asian policy too, after 1950.
Aside from the MICC, the book's other parallel to America today is the description of growing alienation and polarization between an Upper Looting Class and a comparatively destitute lower class, with no Middle. Are we listening?
