anti-Causality


Saturday, December 15, 2012

Defective Dominance: De-evolution and the spread of greed




Defective dominance, a phrase I use often (but never wrote about) to describe the ugliness we see in "our" human society is "defective dominance." This is to say that, because it is easy to profit using cruelty, and difficult to prevent cruelty through kindness (or profit from generosity), cruelty, and especially cruelty-causing genes, win out in "our" synthetic world.

In the political context, psych-types would describe this defective dominance in terms of personality disorders, the most dangerous of which is malignant narcissism, what Adolf Hitler had. I assume Dawkins would agree; I believe he speaks from experience, as he, as academic oligarch, probably self-describes in his best-selling books about "selfish genes."

Surprisingly to me, I found "defective dominance" to be important evolutionary and genetic term, though not necessarily widespread. (I was expecting to find more paranoid conspiracy-type stuff.)

Like most genuine genetic-evolutionary material, references to defective dominance are exceedingly difficult to fathom, but very easy to observe in everyday life. By adding up all the "ugliness" that we see, and then adding to it all the "ugliness" elsewhere that we don't see (which requires multiplication), and then "factoring in growth" which means raising it to an exponential (such as "squaring" it), any of us can comprehend that we, as a Human race and a planet Earth, are in deep trouble. The result will be mega-genocidal disaster in coming decades.

The question is "how will we reverse the control of the defective dominant?"

The humanitarian approach is to attempt to create awareness of the problem, but I believe that effort will be ineffectual; I use the Vietnam war as an example: it was the military action by Vietnam that ended the war, not the active opposition to the war by the US population.

Blocking possibilities of a popular "information-based" solutions is the academic use empiricist science--which is very much what it sounds like. Empiricism has, for 23-2500 years, focused on developing empire-building technologies for the economic growth of the aristocracy (with a short communist experiment): roads, weapons, ships, towers, medicine. Academia, for its educational effort, has been rewarded with its own "ivory" tower in it has metacognitive control over nearly every one of us for big parts of our lives as students.


Economics as a symptom of defective dominance
Most importantly, economics is not constructive nor a whole systems model. It is a connected sequence of causal conclusions designed to resemble a model.

This should be a major concern to every one of us, because it is an alternative to the system that we evolved in (or God granted us); it is a synthesis -- a fiction. The terminology and math used are complicated lies designed to show that as a market-based synthetic system it benefits all through growth. In reality, it declines financially because of inflation, erodes the meanings of our lives, and will ultimately consume all the planet's resources --as a result of uncontrolled growth.

Specific fictions within the terminology and math of economics could be, for instance, the use of retail consumption as a positive asset (or growth) when in actual business, it is a debit (or decline). House building, as a product is an asset, but in its present context it is consumption, not production, as retail is.

Production has, of course, been largely shipped to other countries, and market values --the actual measurement of a market-based economy-- are out-paced by inflation.

Economists see growth in empiricist math, but the wealthy can only grow by absorbing the resources of others and undercutting their salaries. Even the wealth of the wealthy is eroded by inflation necessitating increasing "greed" to maintain lifestyles.

Technical Reference

Crutchfield, J. P. and Schuster, P. (2003). Evolutionary dynamics: Exploring the interplay of selection, accident, neutrality, and function. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Responses 

From the highy-supporting György Stiffel


  • Wonderful, John! Very well said (written)! And it is very simple to understand.
  • John Bessa wow, thanks -- I was going to post it on your wall, so glad you found it  I also got interesting comments from other venues (websites)

  • György Stiffel I´m very glad to know you because you are one of the "thinking" members of our society. But we have to recognize, that we can not change the world and its way into the final collaps[e].


From OpEdNews posting

Gentry L Rowsey



This is fascinating, John.
And I wonder if you saw the same TV program I saw, maybe a year ago, about a pure mathematician who had worked out a theory of how self-sacrificing genes could  prevail over selfish genes, and then went crazy because he tried to give away everything he owned including his shelter and clothes, and thereafter, committed suicide. Left unexplained (at least to me) was whether his suicide was evidence for or against his theoretical explanation of how altruism can genetically displace selfishness. And needless to add, the math was eons beyond what I could comprehend in my lifetime.




Reply to Gentry L Rowsey: 10,000 generations ?!
Thanks for the positive feedback, I have heard of your forest employees organization -- I have heard of a lot of suicide by heavy-thinkers who go too heavily involved these deep topics. My view is that DNA is pretty tough stuff, and to f* it up you have to really abuse it, which is apparently what is happening. What should only be about 1% is from 10% (DSM) to 30% if you included high-functioning psychos, but still a minority, so there is reason for hope and not to kill yourself. According to the technical reference, there will have to be 100,000 generations of this madness before it peters out... (heh)

Ned Lud


 
Reply to Gentry L Rowsey: the river styx
This reminds me of a story about a man who claimed to know 'what it was like' after death. He said it was exactly the same there as here. There was no difference at all!

  • There are places where the rational (or mathematical or scientific) mind cannot go and cannot explain because when it does, or attempts to, it looks stupid.
  • This is why true sages are often regarded as idiots.
  • And why parables and allegories are also important.
  • Science is essentially a dead end.

 



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