The Value of Influence

Laws are only as powerful as our willingness to follow them. The influence of a law is more important than the law itself, in fact influence from any source can be more important. People make decisions based on the information they have, and the feelings that information evokes. Some of the socialist tendency to ban everything comes from this fact. The belief being that by attaching a legal risk to something which is relative to the real risk the public will be influenced to understand it better. It doesn’t really work, for the obvious reason that the public must respect the authority that enacted the law, and the small numbers of individuals who cause the problems often don’t.

The political left versus right is a war of influence. Not just in who’s elected, but what gets to influence the public in the future. The left wants the political side of our system to influence it. The right supports businesses influencing people.

The problem with the left is that you run the risk of subduing people into a population that doesn’t think for themselves, because they don’t need to, allowing anyone with some degree of willpower to come along and take control. All of a sudden, a social democracy becomes a communist state.

The problem with the right is one of intent. Obviously, all businesses want to make money, not necessarily a bad thing. Unless their product happens to be bad for their consumers, and their consumers are unaware of this. Influencing people to believe that something bad for them is actually good isn’t all that difficult, just bombard them with enough pseudo information, how would people tell the difference? It isn’t reasonable to assume that people have some supernatural ability to tell a lie from the truth. Karl Marx (The Communist) said one very accurate thing about capitalism, “The enemy of capitalism is capitalism itself”. Free speech is essential to capitalism, after all people need information on which to base their decisions on what to buy, what businesses and people to support and give power to. However, if 99 people tell you a lie, and 1 person tells you the truth, who are you going to believe? What if they tell you that you need to give up that free speech, for your own good? Capitalism needs more than free speech, it needs a degree of honesty that I don’t see happening in society any time soon.

Now you may dismiss this, and say that whatever moral imperatives society is founded on, whatever laws were meant to stop that kind of cultish takeover couldn’t happen. Well, just take a look at the US right now. They had a constitution, once, to protect individuals and free speech. Bit by bit, it’s being dismantled so that people with money can make more of it. These people didn’t need laws to get what they wanted; all they needed was the influence to get the law changed to suit them.

There are two trains of thought when it comes to the war in Iraq.

A. It was immoral and stupid.
B. It was necessary, and the deposition of other dictators in the area is also necessary.

Well, I don’t know which side I like better. The problems in the Middle East are partially caused by the west. But then, these leaders aren’t exactly nice people either. Either way, it’s irrelevant; because it’s pretty obvious the leaders of the US didn’t set out with a moral basis, they set out to make money. George Bush v2 got into power based on his ability to suck up to big business; we really don’t want the same thing happening here.

Marx said that problems would occur in a capitalist nation when businesses that offer supply gain the ability to create the demand for that supply. In this day in age, with our level of media, it is possible to create demand for wars, constitutional change, and dictatorships.

“Fascism is Capitalism in decline” (Mussolini said that... I think?)

So,

Extreme Right=bad
Extreme Left=bad

…Kinda makes the middle ground look like the best place to be ATM.

The thing about both approaches is that they’re both collectivist outlooks, neither one amplifies the ability of individuals to reason. Reason is what’s needed to govern, but that is a trait only found in individuals, not in a collective. Humans reason differently, we can arrive at completely different conclusions given the same information. Sometimes they’re different because one is wrong, sometimes both are wrong, and sometimes both are correct but simply offer a different, or partial solution. So with any collective decision, reason will effectively be cancelled out by our different approaches to logical argument, leaving the result up to the other side of our decision making process; Our emotions, which generally give the same kind of responses to external stimulus.

“Fear rules the masses” - Stalin

So we end up with two systems, both of which eventually lead to individuals controlling the masses at any rate, can’t we find a third way? One that makes sure those individuals aren’t complete wankers?

Stating the obvious.

Capitalism, or rather our current incarnation of capitalism, is out dated. It has become a bottleneck for change, sociological and technologically. Every time a person has their job replaced by a machine what happens? Society creates another job for them to do, or they go to the government for money. But how many of these new jobs that are created are actually benefiting society? I guarantee a large portion are not, a lot of them are just there to propagate the economy, a man-made construct.

I don’t know what the current exact figure is, but more than 40c out of the dollar is spent on advertising (don’t quote me on that – it’s a lot whatever it is), and that number goes up all the time. The thing about advertising is that it’s a constant state of one up-man-ship. In order to capture the public’s attention you have to spend (or spend smarter) more than the other guy. Does society really need the level of advertising it has now? No, not really... we’d get the information we need with far less, but those products are in competition with each other. The quality of the product has become almost secondary to the marketability of the product. We don’t need the advertising, but the economy would fall apart if those jobs did not exist.

As time goes on, the increasing level of advertising is having a negative affect on our society as a whole. New businesses, even ones with good product, have a hard time getting started. Good ideas get lost in a barrage of spam. Bad ideas are made to look good, and people buy into them because they’re too busy to look past the surface. Human beings have a limited attention span. We can’t digest every bit of information that’s sent our way. The level of spam floating around is intimidating, it’s no wonder most people end up going along with whatever trend is being pimped the best at any given time.

Advertising works. You can sell almost anything if you market it well. Even elections. Our “democracy” is nothing more than a popularity contest for the most part. But it does not have to be that way. With our current level of technological development non-partisan democratic systems, whereby every issue is considered on it’s own merits, and not as part of a party package, where every issue gets the attention it deserves are entirely possible. But that can’t happen until someone figures out a way cut the crap out of our “free" market system.

Twenty hour working weeks anyone? Find a way to distribute the work that's needed evenly, and that's what we might end up with.

One Tree Hill

One tree hill represented a real turning point in my personal opinions regarding our society. I didn't understand the implications of it then, I didn't understand the motivation. I thought that Maori activism was represented by a bunch of idiots who simply didn't understand how the world works. Years later, my understanding of Maori culture hasn't changed that much overall, but I now realise that the demonstrations and protests by Maori have lead my understanding far from where it was when that tree was destroyed. Quite possibly that was the whole point.

I once heard from an activist the claim that, "Race is a racist concept". I don't know what he meant by that, but I've adapted my own interpretation. A person is made up of their DNA, and both the physical, emotional, and intellectual environment they've been exposed to. The variation exhibited by human beings is too large to be calculated, any attempt to classify individuals is a statistical nightmare. However, this is not what the population at large believes. The actions exhibited by people generally fall into two categories. Those who believe we are all the same; and those who believe we are not, but choose to classify people into groups.

The blank slate theory is wrong. That theory being that we are all born the same, that DNA makes no difference in how we turn out. Environment plays a part, but who our parents are also plays a part, regardless of whether we know who they are or not. Our society evolved for Europeans. Imposing a system that evolved for Europeans on a population that is not entirely made up of stereotypical Europeans does not work; it will not ever work. The backlash to the failed attempts to integrate these facts into society has been one of mostly denial, and the formation of hate groups who advocate the idealology's of those failed attempts.

The activist who cut that tree down said, "Pakeha in this country are racist, they're not just racist, they're stupid". Years later I find myself agreeing with this statement, despite the fact that once again I do not know what the exact intent of his statement were. Once again I've adapted it. I don't classify myself as belonging to any race. The classification of people is inherently stupid, therefore racism is stupid, and if you classify yourself as Pakeha, GUESS WHAT? You're being racist. Race is a racist concept.

One tree hill was New Zealand’s September 11th. A destructive protest against a very real issue within our society, that barely anyone really understood. I didn't understand it then, I may still not understand it; but my understanding has been brought forward into something that at least resembles reality instead of the dogma that my views use to represent. It is a testament to the intelligence of the individual that acted that they accomplished this by cutting down a tree instead of killing a few thousand people.

One day I would like to live in a society that has no race based laws, but that can't happen until we evolve our society to suit its multicultural population. This will not happen with the compromises of a collectivist approach, but by the elevation of individuals through intelligent means.

Redefining Liberalism

The term liberalism is used extensively in politics, to define the degree of personal freedom allowed in society. However, the textbook definition of liberalism, and freedom, fails to take into account the emotional nature of human beings. In effect, by sticking to the literal definition the term is misused.

Are you free to commit murder? Are you free to steal? If you take liberalism to it’s extreme you would have absolute anarchy, absolute liberalism is inherently flawed. To make it easier, and to direct this discussion to the point I’m trying to make, here’s another question. Are you free to sprout wings from your back and fly around the room? Of course not, because freedom, and in my view, liberalism, is not necessarily about the specifics of what you can, and cannot do.

Freedom is an emotion, it happens when a person takes themselves from a position of safety to a position of perceived danger. Yeah yeah, it sounds a little like hippy logic, but it’s True. If you go and do something that you always wanted to do, but never had the courage to do it, if you push yourself and go outside your comfort zone, I guarantee you you’ll get a buzz out of it.

Now you can’t make people do this, it has to be their choice, obviously. But we can make sure that people have that position of safety from which to start. Covering the world in cotton wool isn’t the best way to do this, as some people think. After all, the most dangerous things in society are human beings. Therefore, the best approach would be to teach everyone to consider his or her actions before doing something that could be potentially dangerous.

In my view, the basis of philosophy is critical thinking, the ability to create reasonable arguments, and to separate a reasonable argument from a false one. Why this, one of the cornerstones of civilisation is not taught in school alongside maths and language from a young age is quite abhorrent. We are disregarding one of the founding principles of a free society. Changing this oversight would be like killing more than two birds with one stone. This change must however, occur before removing the socialist laws that are currently in place to protect people. When we have the knowledge to protect each other, the law can stop doing it for us.

The real world.

It's quite a daunting thing, planning a revolution. Quite a lot has to be done, and you have to start somewhere. So, instead of launching this blog head first into the beckoning grasp of mother anarchy, I've decided to start out with some current events; Or rather, a statement that relates to current events.

Don Brash's policy reguarding Maori are racist.

Now, they don't sound racist, perhaps aside from that little slip about blood quota. In fact they sound the exact opposite of racist, "One law for all", "Policies based on need not race". Some of the liberal right seem to have claimed Don Brash as one of their own for making these kinds of statements. But does he really think he can remedy all treaty claims so quickly? I mean, I hate to sound like a pessimist, or even, a defeatist, but this issue has been going on for a very long time.

Maori are disproportionally represented in most of what we call "negative" statistics, crime'n all that other shizbang. When the Crown took Maori land away, many were forced to move to the cities. The ties they had to their culture were severed, the pain experienced passed down through generations, translating into a distrust of the authority that had once wronged them so badly. In my opinion (I'm not Maori, so I may be wrong) Maori most likely signed the Treaty of Waitangi because they thought that their culture would be protected by it, and it may have, if the Crown had not broken it. It is my beleif that culture does not evolve for absolutly no reason at all. There are most likely important reasons for it. Nations that have had a system forced upon them, as opposed to developing their own system, have a tendancy to fall apart. Our system took centuries to evolve into what it is now, and for most of that it was evolving only for europeans, so of course it's not going to be all that great at handling a multiculural population.

There's the crux of the issue, why are Don Brash's policies reguarding Maori racist? The answer is simple : The system is racist, and Don Brash wants that system to be the overriding factor for everybody. What motivation is there for Maori to rediscover their roots? With so little respect shown for Maori culture? With no real benefit shown in being Maori? Don Brash does not want to make things better for Maori he wants to Assimilate them. Removing the Maori seats in government is nothing short of telling Maori to, "sit down and shut up", it removes a real objection from government, a voice that says, "Hey, you guys are racist".

I advocate a system that can tell the difference between laws that are there to protect individuals, and the organisational systems that evolved to suit stereotypical cultural guidelines.