The difference between transcending human nature and working with human nature is a sorites paradox, and has been since the dawn of civilization. Each step of creating a society that allowed for larger societies, from dozens to thousands to millions, was transcending human nature until we found a system that worked. Yes, every civilization decays and falters, often due to disrupting factors, hence the classic goal of a thousand year reign hasn’t yet been achieved.

Sociological development can be used to facilitate public involvement in civics, or to shield civics from public involvement with a veneer of deception. The problem isn’t that we don’t know the problems or solutions to them, but that those who gain power would rather be powerful than functional or happy, and are glad to exert that power to preserve it even against those who mean them well. It’s a warbler feeding and nurturing a cuckoo chick (at the expense of her own offspring) except in this case the chick never matures and flies off, rather it just keeps growing and sucking up more resources like a cancer.

How do we work with this human nature? Consider also if we fail to curb this tendency, the proverbial chick will also poison our global ecology until it is uninhabitable even to those who mind the industries that feed it. Hopefully, it is a barrier we break much the way we’ve escaped monarchy. But is that transcending human nature or working with it?

Personally, I’m already coming to terms the human species is facing existential risk, and if it doesn’t facilitate its own extinction, may cause so much damage as to limit our future ambitions; no space-faring colonization in our future, and most of our culture as we know it today is not going to survive the next few centuries regardless of whether the species does.

Working forty-plus hours a week plus commute and domestic responsibilities keeps us from civic awareness.

It also keeps us from parenting and has since the start of the industrial age. So the madness (the family dysfunction and mental illness) is intergenerational.

We’re all mad here.

If we go by France starting at 1789, it took over a century for the proverbial shit to work its way through the colon and for things to get better.

So if there’s a civil war, you’re not going to see it, but some of your offspring’s / cousins descendants might when all the power grabs are done and the economy gets back to where most people aren’t starving.

Here in the states, we got suckered by Reagan and Jerry Falwell, who were sore due to the end of segregation and the legalization of interracial marriage. So yeah, they were so into racism that they hacked the system to consolidate power and create a one-party white-power autocracy that neither of them would live to see.

If we get very very lucky, we can put it off long enough for the GOP to backstab itself to death. We might be able to stall the consolidation of power, and the enforcement of authoritarian rule (that’s rule at the gunpoint of law enforcement or garrisons, not by consent) as it worms its way from the federal government to the states.

A lot of damage has been done, and the lumpenproletariat is very, very stupid and wants to regard its political party the way it regards its gridiron football team. And it likes the propaganda that media feeds it. If we’re going to create a cohesive public-driven, public-serving government, we’ll have to invent some sociology that we don’t have yet.

So yeah, civil war is a step like geoengineering, an act of desperation we hope we don’t have to commit to, that has the potential to go very wrong and very badly. And will require decades of clean-up that will suck for everyone, so maybe our kids’ kids will see the benefit.

On the other hand, one-party autocracy is worse, as we will rapidly discover.

Billionaires get so obvious with crap they want, it reminds me of a toddler that really wants his very own formula one racer or artillery piece or nuclear reactor.

And yeah, if it weren’t so critically deleterious to the rest of us to let him have it, we’d let him pull a Stockton Rush and blow himself up with mad science.

But the rest of us really don’t want to have to clean up after his one party autocracy or suffer through the critical scarcity, the civil war and the holocaust that propagandists will deny for centuries.

When you look upon a billionaire, see them as a bird, trying desperately to feed a cuckoo chick at the cost of their own offspring, only this chick never grows up and flies away, but stays, ever eating, ever growing like a cancer, demanding nourishment forever.

Samsung sent me a notification to accept the new terms and conditions. The form was designed in a way to trick you to accept all the terms, including optional marketing ones… took me ages to find out how I can change my answers

I keep closing the pop-up, curious what’s going to happen if I never accept Samsung’s new terms and conditions.

At this point, I suspect there is a critical flaw in the civilization or the species.

And by critical flaw, I mean we are on a proverbial express train careening towards multiple great filters well beyond our navigation skills.

Billionaires hoarding all the wealth seems like a fixed action pattern they cannot resist.

I want to say Vance is Trump’s Himmler, but he isn’t even that. He’s kinda like Trump’s minime.

In for a lamb, in for a sheep.

In for a peaceful protest, in for sabotage

< trying to gaze into it like an autostereogram >

In the late 1970s (I was a kid) the computer is always right was a common sarcastic parody of all the people who actually believed it.

We’d discover in the 1980s it was possible to have missing data, insufficient data or erroneous data.