Sometimes, I do not fit in with ‘the crowd’. And even though I understand my misfitted social standing better than most, it is a problem in my life as untamed as the very seas that surround me. Its a truth that perpetuates simply because I will not offer up my will to those almost automatic processes in my brain that say ‘just rely on altruistic fairness’.

What in the holy hell does that mean? Well, allow me to explain.

Other people seem to talk about their life as if like some shape, they have always been made just so, and managed to fit into some designated place. These people consider that they have always been right where they belonged. Sadly they are unaware, that this constant is a trick played by the mind. Implemented to keep people (most of them anyway) emotionally stable. This emotional counter-balance can only be described with two words: altruistic fairness.

Altruistic fairness as a measure, is exactly how the mind makes you accept whatever it is you end up with, and it is also what keeps you from trying to set the world on fire, if what you end up with substantially less than desired. The mind does this and other things through a complex process which has been re-enforced your entire life; activities learned all too soon become behavior.

For instance, If you were shooting for a $500,000 house, and end up with a house worth $250,000, almost immediately, neurological activity takes place that quite literally re-writes your preferences. You will now consider the $250,000 option to have been not only just as well, but better (and why not? its YOUR house — that too is part of the trick, just because this particular house is YOURS its better, it now shares all your ‘goodness’). You’ll ponder on how much closer it is to places you like to go. Maybe its near relatives. Its certainty much better than a house worth $100,000, you’ll reason. Besides, you had fallen in love with this particular house’s in-ground pool…

Did you really though? The answer was an obvious ‘no.’ But now, its, ‘of course’. Altruistic fairness provides guidance in this way and would act to make you feel great with whatever you ended up. The mind protects itself from being overwhelmed from any sort of consistently negative observation (as part of the survival instinct), it is achieved in the simplest and most economic way — through the measure of things under the scopes of altruistic fairness, we change what we fundamentally believe was best; we change our mind.  The facts however remain unchanged.

When I see this, I tend to immediately denounce it. Only because I hate to see someone allow such a simple mechanism stop them from the greater goal. For all the good it does, this leverage of altruistic fairness perhaps, is the greatest of human flaws. And as I sit there watching, writhing in unutterable anger at these people, I wonder: How few are we — those of us being weird — that look beyond our own sorted programming, and try to find the world hidden under our cheated senses, conceived within a mind full of lies?

Huxley, Friedman and Roosevelt

Perhaps the deepest truth I know of, is an utterance that comes to us long lost from an English novelist of the 19th Century by the name of Aldous Huxley, who said “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.” Today we live in a literal proof of a society misunderstanding of the profound nature of this observation, at least economically speaking. In 1929, on the day the stock market crashed, the headline of Variety read, Wall Street Lays an Egg. Thats timid compared to whats already been said about today’s circumstances. The fact is though, Variety like today’s media, has it all wrong.

It was the economist Milton Friedman who best summed up the cause of our present-day economic woes with his thoughts on what caused the Great Depression, saying “The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy,” Change came from an usher as desperate as were the times. Just four short years later, in his 1933 campaign speech, Roosevelt said, “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” And try they did.

Day in the Life

Such brute force as proposed there, howsoever, will serve ill the very different America of today. How different is it? In some ways very different, in others respects not at all.

- Food Shortages: The Tri-State Observer reports that the US has no remaining grain reserves…

According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are only 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be only 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned Matlack. “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief. Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. The o°©nly thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat which is about enough wheat to make 1?2 of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.”

Here is a direct link to that report.

- Energy Crisis: Fox News asks, “Are We at Risk of a Global Recession Because of Oil?”

- Environmental and Natural Disasters: Some of these Oil spills, Ozone depletion, Earthquake related Tsunamis, a European heatwave that killed over 37,000 in 2003, and Hurricane Katrina just to name a few.

It sounds as if I’m describing doomsday but I’m not. I’m describing today, the 1930s, the 1970s, and I might as well be describing any day at random. The fact is these things happened before and will again. And Huxley’s lesson will continue to escape most of us just as it has done and will continue to do.

Not everyone comes as late to History class fortunately, some realize this and try and find new, more useful ways to look at the past. And some manage to apply what they learn. Current Macroeconomic theory suggests consumers and businesses of Great Depression era relied on cheap credit. Consumers did so purchasing goods, while businesses did so investing in production. This economic behavior fueled rapid, short-term economic growth, creating swells of debt. When prices deflated, growth essentially collapsed. As the corporations and consumers both defaulted on loans, unclaimed, full inventories further deflated prices. The corporations laid off workers reducing consumer spending, eventually creating a kind of self-sustaining cycle, and later the wave of defaults shook banks. Confidence plummeted in corporations, the markets, and finally the banks themselves, creating a ‘run on the bank.’ This suggests a way to look at today.

Today, we face very alike conditions. A systemic networked banking system creates investment banks such as Bear Stearns, called “too big to fail”, that require 30 billion dollar rescues when the same debt-fueled growth cycle causes just their collapse. And while that may have plugged one very apparent hole, the overall cycle will continue.

Starting in 2003 until sometime in 2007, the economy saw the same sort of rapid, short-term growth across a majority of markets, favoring housing, equities and derivatives, relying on the same kind of cheap, plentiful credit used prior to the Great Depression. Today different from the 1930s, that cheap credit has been delivered by sharing the debt amongst banks and further wrapped up as derivatives securities — this, and inter-bank lending creates the systemic connection between banks potentially making them too big to fail.

Before long though, debt-fueled growth causes confidence scares; loans come to term and defaults drive the flow of money out of lenders and spenders and into things like commodities, where the cycle enters the next phase. The new and higher commodity prices push down the equities and other securities and raise costs. The whole tree begins to poison, spreading one branch at a time.

Back to the Future

The future cannot be known but the past is not as limited. Thus, I feel confident in the future I see ahead, so mindful of the past. I say next, we’ll begin to hear about other lenders, spenders and connected investment vehicles; as CNN has only just put it, there are more perils ahead. Problems will crop up with automobile loans and students loans as well the securities that are related. The government may step in or reduced auto sales might help ease certain energy prices; the oil bubble might burst, leaving just food and other inflation to deal with. The student loan market is already drying up though and the government is already getting involved.

Despite the panic in the markets and all the volatility, I’m confident, though I realize quite sadly, to know our future, we needn’t look into any sort of crystal ball, but instead right where Huxley would suggest, using eyes focused backward in time.

“There are many unattractive aspects to prison too. But one aspect most advocates won’t realize is, a prison is just a domain like any other. Except prisons are by very definition domains which aggregate criminal social activity. Thus, one undeniable aspect is, they operate as super-nodes of criminal behavior; hubs for knowledge-transfer and viral information exchange like universities, hospitals or military bases — only in this case its all of the criminal sort and subversive to society. This of course benefits the criminals as you can imagine, so while you put the worst minds together, they communicate, now in consort, to nodes that freely redistribute within the whole system, in the form of visitors.”

As any writer worth his salt might reflect, we each are characters in a plot-line too big to comprehend. Or, put another way, we are each unique snowflakes thrown across the stormy sky. However you put it, this reality can sometimes make seeing change difficult. This aspect of human life while enjoyable, dynamic and mysterious also means, the actions we take are what make our environment; a place that might be as different without us as that storm without snowflakes.

Voltaire spoke in these exact terms only about people, noticing one way that the impossibly tiny connected with the impossibly massive. For people especially, and maybe with all things, this specific domain where an intersection of scale seems to take place ought to be referred to as the Scale of Truth. When Voltaire pinned down this Scale he did so saying, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

There is a hidden truth revealed in personifying snowflakes this way — perhaps only about people and societies, perhaps about all of nature. It is this: small things make big things; small things happening make big things happening; at least one very small event (like a molecule of air interacting with a molecule of water of a snowflake) must occur as the “responsible” cause of much more massive events (like a whole snowflake moving and causing an avalanche) or else no such larger events are ever able to take place. We call this logical ordering of things, causal thought — for humans it seems it has to due mostly with frame of reference and blame.

Remarkably unlike most, Voltaire, was not pointing out frame of reference, nor looking to blame. That’s probably because Voltaire possessed different knowledge, having realized much earlier than most, how rarely it is about who done it in nature’s court, instead how it was done. This idea of the responsible snowflake in an avalanche, points out how people do not view their own impact when that impact involves big, landscape-changing events. Voltaire observed how human beings over-quantify the fairness of their own assessment — I sense therefore must be correct, as it were; how we inflate ourselves as individuals, yet underestimate ourselves, dismissing the impact we have as groups. In short, on the Scale of Truth, what Voltaire found was, humans have a kind of blind-spot. They are only so considerate or aware (?) of those other people and things happening around them. As Al Gore pointed out, we have all the sense of a frog slowly set to boil.

Using this view of our individual impact, I can provide some realization about technologies or changes which already exists that have solved nearly impossible problems: a) Change must always occur first on the smallest of scales to ever be evident on larger ones and there it may look different (a realizaion that lead to Quantum Mechanics) b) Every change no matter how seemingly insignificant in any particular frame of reference resonates throughout all scales and all frames of reference (a realization called the Butterfly Effect). This suggests we need even newer forms of technology though. Technology not unlike the Internet which capitalizes on this problem within human design to create new ways to communicate on larger scales, decreasing the blind-spot.

If we go on though, each a little at a time, unable, unaware or simply discounting each other as we go, than we are that thing, that avalanche of change, and we are responsible for its consequences. In fact, if we continue to treat the world as we have, all the generations that come to follow us will have no such thing and not understand a snowflake in order to relate such ideas. Imagine, Voltaire’s wisdom will, along with all other wisdom, fall back into the abyss.