Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Baboon Economics
San Diego was beautiful. I feel happy and buoyant there.
I'm back "home" now.
I'm still in a positive mood. But there have been some darker things on my mind of late that I've been meaning to write about.
This has a theme: "Let's Get Cynical." You can imagine it being played to the tune of that Olivia Newton-John masterpiece from the early 1980s, "Let's Get Physical."
It starts here: I once saw, on PBS I imagine, a documentary on primate behavior. It was observed that, among one of the lower primates (I'm pretty sure it was baboons) females tend to be more sexually attracted to males who show some capacity for nurturing their baboon kids. Fair enough.
So here's one pattern of male baboon behavior that sometimes arises from that female baboon preference: A male baboon hangs out with a female and her offspring. He waits until the female's back is turned, and her attention is elsewhere. He takes that opportunity to intentionally hurt the baby baboon in order to make it cry. Then he immediately starts comforting it, so that by the time the mother has turned back around, she only sees the comforting, and not the original stimulus that created the crying. The male baboon is now more likely to get laid.
Does this seem like corrupt, sad, and kind of sick behavior to you? Yeah, it seems that way to me too.
But for a baboon, I guess optimal behavior is "whatever works." It seems like it wouldn't take much intelligence at all to see through such a cheap trick... but baboons, while obviously sometimes crafty in their way, are not known for having much intuitive intelligence -- the kind of mental processing that allows you to speculate about and model someone else's potentially duplicitous behavior in your head, seeing "through" them when some of their motives or behaviors are veiled.
Who is responsible here? Look at it from the baby's perspective. Who are you disappointed with? Well, obviously the male baboon in this scenario is the perpetrator, the abuser. But your mom isn't seeing the big picture, and in fact is essentially encouraging and reinforcing this perpetrator's behavior by rewarding it. So maybe you're a little disappointed in her too, for the part she plays in this cycle. It takes two to tango, as they say. She should've stood up for you, or at least given the abusive male the cold shoulder. But she didn't. She bought that old "I'm really a nurturer" song and dance. So short sighted!
Unfortunately, as a victim of this abuse, there is no Adult Offspring of Abusive Baboons 12-step group for you to go to. And soon your brain's limited circuitry will be awash in the same adult baboon hormones, and chances are good that you will take up the same dance. Why not? That's what you know. That's the way it's always been done around here. Why would you be any different, unless some miraculous mutation has occurred to give your baboon brain some extra new modeling capacity that might give you a fleeting hint of a Better Way?
I see our national government playing the baboon trick on us with this Hurricane Katrina business. The smart people, the engineers, the ones with the technical knowlege and foresight, saw it all coming, and sounded the alarm. But they are not politicians, and they don't have the power to appropriate money or give themselves marching orders. The politicians had higher priorities than spending money on levees in New Orleans and other disaster preparedness, things like taking over other countries under trumped-up, sensationalized, false pretences. The Bush administration was busy and extended with its war effort, and meanwhile funds were diverted from disaster preparedness and top positions in agencies like FEMA were filled with political cronies who had no relevant experience.
Now people have died or have been displaced, and everyone is up in arms, and some people are angry at the government. So the politicians will do whatever works. They will say their heart goes out to the victims, and they pledge to make it right. Astronomical sums of money will be spent, twenty or thirty times what it would have cost to properly prepare for this storm in the first place. But where do they get the money? It certainly isn't theirs. It comes from taxes and borrowing. So it's your money and your future that the government will now allocate to salve the wounds that the government itself had a hand in creating in the first place. In that sense it's worse than the old baboon trick.
But wait, we're not done yet. Let's watch how those huge sums of money flow. Lots of things will get fixed and rebuilt, but who will do that work and at what price? Since it's the people's money being spent in the hundreds of billions and the people's future being mortgaged to fund the rebuilding, one would hope that there's a guardian, a treasurer somewhere who can keep an eye on things, get competitive prices, and make sure we don't spend more than is necessary, that our nation's treasury doesn't get looted. You'd hope so, but guess what? The government is already giving out fat, no-bid contracts to Halliburton subsidiaries and others with close ties to the current administration who have already been caught stealing in their obscenely lucrative, no-bid contracts in Iraq.
Let's look at it from their point of view, while at the same time considering the possibility that Bush and his cronies make up a sort of a power elite whose primary motivations may be fairly basic, selfish and baboon-like, despite whatever altruistic language they may offer us. Let's entertain the possibility that they really are more motivated to accumulate wealth and power for themselves than to nurture us, their constituents. Why should they do the "smart" thing and prepare for these disasters when they make such obscenely huge sums of money by NOT preparing?
And why should they pursue peace when they can make obscenely huge profits from war?
If you take a look at human history, examples of greed, ruthless conquest, and brutality (generally justified using lies, propaganda and political manipulation) are plentiful. Persia did it, and so did Sparta, Athens, Rome, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Conquistadors, Napoleon, Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, on and on.
We, the American Masses, have access to plentiful evidence that the current administration is falling into some similar patterns. But somehow we want to believe that, because of our fine and superior system of government, It Just Can't Happen Here. And we all have a steady supply of TV shows, material gizmos, and Ho-Hos to keep us placated. We don't have time to read the fine print on every single multi-billion-dollar government appropriation, and we don't have the technical training to make any sense at all of the language of it if we tried.
Ironically, the rational and somewhat cynical men we call our "Founding Fathers," who drew up the blueprints for this presumedly fine and superior system of government, talked a lot about those pervasive historical patterns of corruption and power madness, and they tried to build in some checks and balances to mitigate the selfish human drives which they believed would always threaten fair and rational government. They thought they had this science of government figured out to some degree, and that was the basis of their sense that they had built something better.
Today, the checks and balances that the founders devised have been systematically undermined and neutralized. Yet we, the American Masses, are still left wanting to think that everything is OK, and clinging to the lingering dream that our system of government and our culture itself is somehow stronger, cleaner or purer, and immune to some degree to the worst excesses of the past. The alternative is almost too horrible to recognize: a corrupted, cagey, greedy, troublemaking, and seemingly invincible bully of a superpower, armed to the teeth with doomsday weapons, controlled by a cadre of neo-Napoleons, and rigged for the further enrichment of the super-wealthy at the expense not only of the underclasses but of almost everything we should value -- the global political system, the principles of human dignity and liberty and fairness upon which our nation was founded, the sustainability of the energy supply upon which our technologies and production depend, and the life-sustaining capacity of the planet itself. So we hold our leaders innocent until proven guilty, and for some of us, innocent after proven guilty.
This is blindness and distraction. We are the mama baboon. By not seeing the pattern, and opposing it -- or at least cutting off the rewards for corrupt behavior -- we allow and encourage corruption to flourish. We may not be getting our money's worth, but we are getting what we pay for.
If you study neo-conservative thinking, most publicly articulated and exemplified by the Project for a New American Century website, it is clear that the Bush administration's warmaking is largely motivated by pure power considerations; The WMD justifications were just a matter of political manipulation and expediency. It looks like the neo-cons just thought the US should have more presence, power and influence in that region, and of course the reason that region matters is oil.
But even many cynics sometimes overlook the even more baboon-like and myopically selfish reasons why some groups would want to agitate and manipulate the country to go to war, and that is simple war profiteering itself. I'm talking about the kind of selfish greed that may offer justifications and rationales based on the national interest in order to mobilize a nation, but which in reality doesn't care if it destroys the nation it is manipulating, as long as there are countless billions in profits to be made. With that kind of money, the rats can swim away from the sinking ship when the time comes, retrieve their bullion out of their Swiss bank vaults, and buy their own countries somewhere else.
I don't know about you, but I've always seen the idea of a nation-state as a tenuous human construct. If you ask a rock or a deer or a tree or a patch of earth or a body of water or a section of sky whether it is American or Chinese or Ethiopian, it will offer no answer at all. Nations have only whatever reality and meaning we ascribe to them and collectively create. It is a socially shared idea... or it could just as easily be called a mass hallucination. When the "hallucination" is backed up by traditions, legal systems, and weapons, it certainly seems more real. But the rock and the tree and the deer still have not endorsed it. I'm keeping my own counsel on this question, the real meaning of the nation state. It is a construct that has a certain reality, but that reality has been been rapidly and dramatically altered and undermined by technology, communications, nuclear weapons, covert operations, jet travel, and globalization. Yet we're still using the same names, singing the same songs, and waving the same flags as if things haven't really changed all that much.
Maybe it is this cultivated independence from the nation-state idea that colors (or perhaps allows) my perception of some of the people in positions of power in the last 100 years, and in the current administration in particular. But what I see are the outlines of a power elite that has developed that same independence of thought with respect to the nation-state concept that I have cultivated for myself. I think there are some key players in the national governments who don't really believe in the traditional idea of the nation state anymore. However, they expect you to believe in it, and they will encourage you to believe in it, so that they can more easily press your buttons and manipulate you. They will profess their patriotism, offer arguments about the national interest, wave a flag, and sing you an anthem in order to manipulate you to patriotically fall into line, play your part, pay your taxes, sign away your liberties, or join the military. But I think maybe it's all in the service of a more covert agenda which is about something else entirely-- their own greed or extra-national political aims.
A friend of mine in Madison has told me that he has met a couple of Catholic priests who are members of a sort of underground network of atheist preists. These are men who may have once believed in the in the tenets of the church, but who have reached a place where they no longer do. And yet they go on fulfilling their roles and functions as preists, often (though probably not always) with a paternalistic feeling that the masses are better off having something to believe in and some guidelines to live by, until such time that they are ready to handle the truth, which is that it's all just tradition, ritual, and hocus-pocus. And I know that there are many people, including many conservatives, who see religion in just that same way. My grandfather was one of those conservatives. He was a Republican, and he wasn't bothered by the religious leanings of his party, because he thought religion was just fine for the common people. He just didn't see himself as one of those people.
Is it so far-fetched to think that, just as there are some atheistic preists, there will also be some people in positions of power in national governments who don't really believe in the validity of the nation-state construct anymore? And if they don't believe in the nation they are sworn to serve, what do they believe in, and who or what are they serving? If they are paternalistically manipulating us "for our own good," that is undemocratic, duplicitous and dubious, but at least it's kinda sorta well-intentioned. If they do it purely for their own self interest, it's just plain greedy and evil in my book. But there will always be such characters ready to step up and play that role, as long as we keep paying them handsomely to do it.
Baboon economics.
I'm back "home" now.
I'm still in a positive mood. But there have been some darker things on my mind of late that I've been meaning to write about.
This has a theme: "Let's Get Cynical." You can imagine it being played to the tune of that Olivia Newton-John masterpiece from the early 1980s, "Let's Get Physical."
It starts here: I once saw, on PBS I imagine, a documentary on primate behavior. It was observed that, among one of the lower primates (I'm pretty sure it was baboons) females tend to be more sexually attracted to males who show some capacity for nurturing their baboon kids. Fair enough.
So here's one pattern of male baboon behavior that sometimes arises from that female baboon preference: A male baboon hangs out with a female and her offspring. He waits until the female's back is turned, and her attention is elsewhere. He takes that opportunity to intentionally hurt the baby baboon in order to make it cry. Then he immediately starts comforting it, so that by the time the mother has turned back around, she only sees the comforting, and not the original stimulus that created the crying. The male baboon is now more likely to get laid.
Does this seem like corrupt, sad, and kind of sick behavior to you? Yeah, it seems that way to me too.
But for a baboon, I guess optimal behavior is "whatever works." It seems like it wouldn't take much intelligence at all to see through such a cheap trick... but baboons, while obviously sometimes crafty in their way, are not known for having much intuitive intelligence -- the kind of mental processing that allows you to speculate about and model someone else's potentially duplicitous behavior in your head, seeing "through" them when some of their motives or behaviors are veiled.
Who is responsible here? Look at it from the baby's perspective. Who are you disappointed with? Well, obviously the male baboon in this scenario is the perpetrator, the abuser. But your mom isn't seeing the big picture, and in fact is essentially encouraging and reinforcing this perpetrator's behavior by rewarding it. So maybe you're a little disappointed in her too, for the part she plays in this cycle. It takes two to tango, as they say. She should've stood up for you, or at least given the abusive male the cold shoulder. But she didn't. She bought that old "I'm really a nurturer" song and dance. So short sighted!
Unfortunately, as a victim of this abuse, there is no Adult Offspring of Abusive Baboons 12-step group for you to go to. And soon your brain's limited circuitry will be awash in the same adult baboon hormones, and chances are good that you will take up the same dance. Why not? That's what you know. That's the way it's always been done around here. Why would you be any different, unless some miraculous mutation has occurred to give your baboon brain some extra new modeling capacity that might give you a fleeting hint of a Better Way?
I see our national government playing the baboon trick on us with this Hurricane Katrina business. The smart people, the engineers, the ones with the technical knowlege and foresight, saw it all coming, and sounded the alarm. But they are not politicians, and they don't have the power to appropriate money or give themselves marching orders. The politicians had higher priorities than spending money on levees in New Orleans and other disaster preparedness, things like taking over other countries under trumped-up, sensationalized, false pretences. The Bush administration was busy and extended with its war effort, and meanwhile funds were diverted from disaster preparedness and top positions in agencies like FEMA were filled with political cronies who had no relevant experience.
Now people have died or have been displaced, and everyone is up in arms, and some people are angry at the government. So the politicians will do whatever works. They will say their heart goes out to the victims, and they pledge to make it right. Astronomical sums of money will be spent, twenty or thirty times what it would have cost to properly prepare for this storm in the first place. But where do they get the money? It certainly isn't theirs. It comes from taxes and borrowing. So it's your money and your future that the government will now allocate to salve the wounds that the government itself had a hand in creating in the first place. In that sense it's worse than the old baboon trick.
But wait, we're not done yet. Let's watch how those huge sums of money flow. Lots of things will get fixed and rebuilt, but who will do that work and at what price? Since it's the people's money being spent in the hundreds of billions and the people's future being mortgaged to fund the rebuilding, one would hope that there's a guardian, a treasurer somewhere who can keep an eye on things, get competitive prices, and make sure we don't spend more than is necessary, that our nation's treasury doesn't get looted. You'd hope so, but guess what? The government is already giving out fat, no-bid contracts to Halliburton subsidiaries and others with close ties to the current administration who have already been caught stealing in their obscenely lucrative, no-bid contracts in Iraq.
Let's look at it from their point of view, while at the same time considering the possibility that Bush and his cronies make up a sort of a power elite whose primary motivations may be fairly basic, selfish and baboon-like, despite whatever altruistic language they may offer us. Let's entertain the possibility that they really are more motivated to accumulate wealth and power for themselves than to nurture us, their constituents. Why should they do the "smart" thing and prepare for these disasters when they make such obscenely huge sums of money by NOT preparing?
And why should they pursue peace when they can make obscenely huge profits from war?
If you take a look at human history, examples of greed, ruthless conquest, and brutality (generally justified using lies, propaganda and political manipulation) are plentiful. Persia did it, and so did Sparta, Athens, Rome, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Conquistadors, Napoleon, Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, on and on.
We, the American Masses, have access to plentiful evidence that the current administration is falling into some similar patterns. But somehow we want to believe that, because of our fine and superior system of government, It Just Can't Happen Here. And we all have a steady supply of TV shows, material gizmos, and Ho-Hos to keep us placated. We don't have time to read the fine print on every single multi-billion-dollar government appropriation, and we don't have the technical training to make any sense at all of the language of it if we tried.
Ironically, the rational and somewhat cynical men we call our "Founding Fathers," who drew up the blueprints for this presumedly fine and superior system of government, talked a lot about those pervasive historical patterns of corruption and power madness, and they tried to build in some checks and balances to mitigate the selfish human drives which they believed would always threaten fair and rational government. They thought they had this science of government figured out to some degree, and that was the basis of their sense that they had built something better.
Today, the checks and balances that the founders devised have been systematically undermined and neutralized. Yet we, the American Masses, are still left wanting to think that everything is OK, and clinging to the lingering dream that our system of government and our culture itself is somehow stronger, cleaner or purer, and immune to some degree to the worst excesses of the past. The alternative is almost too horrible to recognize: a corrupted, cagey, greedy, troublemaking, and seemingly invincible bully of a superpower, armed to the teeth with doomsday weapons, controlled by a cadre of neo-Napoleons, and rigged for the further enrichment of the super-wealthy at the expense not only of the underclasses but of almost everything we should value -- the global political system, the principles of human dignity and liberty and fairness upon which our nation was founded, the sustainability of the energy supply upon which our technologies and production depend, and the life-sustaining capacity of the planet itself. So we hold our leaders innocent until proven guilty, and for some of us, innocent after proven guilty.
This is blindness and distraction. We are the mama baboon. By not seeing the pattern, and opposing it -- or at least cutting off the rewards for corrupt behavior -- we allow and encourage corruption to flourish. We may not be getting our money's worth, but we are getting what we pay for.
If you study neo-conservative thinking, most publicly articulated and exemplified by the Project for a New American Century website, it is clear that the Bush administration's warmaking is largely motivated by pure power considerations; The WMD justifications were just a matter of political manipulation and expediency. It looks like the neo-cons just thought the US should have more presence, power and influence in that region, and of course the reason that region matters is oil.
But even many cynics sometimes overlook the even more baboon-like and myopically selfish reasons why some groups would want to agitate and manipulate the country to go to war, and that is simple war profiteering itself. I'm talking about the kind of selfish greed that may offer justifications and rationales based on the national interest in order to mobilize a nation, but which in reality doesn't care if it destroys the nation it is manipulating, as long as there are countless billions in profits to be made. With that kind of money, the rats can swim away from the sinking ship when the time comes, retrieve their bullion out of their Swiss bank vaults, and buy their own countries somewhere else.
I don't know about you, but I've always seen the idea of a nation-state as a tenuous human construct. If you ask a rock or a deer or a tree or a patch of earth or a body of water or a section of sky whether it is American or Chinese or Ethiopian, it will offer no answer at all. Nations have only whatever reality and meaning we ascribe to them and collectively create. It is a socially shared idea... or it could just as easily be called a mass hallucination. When the "hallucination" is backed up by traditions, legal systems, and weapons, it certainly seems more real. But the rock and the tree and the deer still have not endorsed it. I'm keeping my own counsel on this question, the real meaning of the nation state. It is a construct that has a certain reality, but that reality has been been rapidly and dramatically altered and undermined by technology, communications, nuclear weapons, covert operations, jet travel, and globalization. Yet we're still using the same names, singing the same songs, and waving the same flags as if things haven't really changed all that much.
Maybe it is this cultivated independence from the nation-state idea that colors (or perhaps allows) my perception of some of the people in positions of power in the last 100 years, and in the current administration in particular. But what I see are the outlines of a power elite that has developed that same independence of thought with respect to the nation-state concept that I have cultivated for myself. I think there are some key players in the national governments who don't really believe in the traditional idea of the nation state anymore. However, they expect you to believe in it, and they will encourage you to believe in it, so that they can more easily press your buttons and manipulate you. They will profess their patriotism, offer arguments about the national interest, wave a flag, and sing you an anthem in order to manipulate you to patriotically fall into line, play your part, pay your taxes, sign away your liberties, or join the military. But I think maybe it's all in the service of a more covert agenda which is about something else entirely-- their own greed or extra-national political aims.
A friend of mine in Madison has told me that he has met a couple of Catholic priests who are members of a sort of underground network of atheist preists. These are men who may have once believed in the in the tenets of the church, but who have reached a place where they no longer do. And yet they go on fulfilling their roles and functions as preists, often (though probably not always) with a paternalistic feeling that the masses are better off having something to believe in and some guidelines to live by, until such time that they are ready to handle the truth, which is that it's all just tradition, ritual, and hocus-pocus. And I know that there are many people, including many conservatives, who see religion in just that same way. My grandfather was one of those conservatives. He was a Republican, and he wasn't bothered by the religious leanings of his party, because he thought religion was just fine for the common people. He just didn't see himself as one of those people.
Is it so far-fetched to think that, just as there are some atheistic preists, there will also be some people in positions of power in national governments who don't really believe in the validity of the nation-state construct anymore? And if they don't believe in the nation they are sworn to serve, what do they believe in, and who or what are they serving? If they are paternalistically manipulating us "for our own good," that is undemocratic, duplicitous and dubious, but at least it's kinda sorta well-intentioned. If they do it purely for their own self interest, it's just plain greedy and evil in my book. But there will always be such characters ready to step up and play that role, as long as we keep paying them handsomely to do it.
Baboon economics.
