September 2018 – Page 3 – Random Thoughts

Single Housing

A greater proportion of the population is single today than has been the case in the past. In addition there is also a significant number of people who are stuck in relationships they would leave if not for the fact that they cannot afford to live alone. Yet there is very little housing specifically designed for single people, and the commercial world in general does not accommodate them. For instance restaurants frequently offer two for one deals, which is of little use to a single person. Restaurants, with the exception of fast food places are not particularly welcoming to lone diners. Two people sharing expenses can live on less than two individual single people.

Part of the problem is our tendency to try to fit everyone into some version of the standard American lifestyle. We have a very limited choice of types of community (city, small town, country) and within those we are expected to occupy one of a limited number of kinds of dwelling and have a more or less “normal” social life. When we design schemes for housing the homeless the aim is to integrate them into this system, as though it represented not only the very best way of life that has ever been invented but one that must be preserved at all costs, and furthermore should be followed by everyone. Any proposed way of organizing a community that departs radically from this model is considered threatening to the system, and can only be allowed to exist as a separate, usually despised “cult” somewhere out sight. Even such relatively common and benign institutions such as worker owned cooperatives are viewed with suspicion.

This tendency presents significant challenges to anyone wishing to explore new approaches to the problem. New approaches almost always require reconsideration of rules and regulation, particularly with regard to zoning and building codes. In such a litigious society as we inhabit, if the neighbors decide that what you are doing looks just too peculiar, there are a thousand ways they can stop a project dead in its tracks.

Nonetheless we have a homeless situation that demands change, and that cannot be ameliorated without the willingness to consider new ideas. We will not successfully house the homeless unless we are willing to come up with a way of living that is attractive to them. They do not “choose” to live on the street because they prefer it, or because it is the best way of life they can imagine, but rather because none of the options offered to them look any better. We offer the kind of help we think they should have, laden with conditions and expectations that we impose unilaterally upon them. This might possibly be effective if we first thoroughly researched the matter and involved the homeless themselves in the design of programs, but we do not. This will never work. You cannot force people into slots they are unwilling to occupy.

We need new models of community based on the idea of cooperation rather than competition, and fully integrated with the community at large. These communities need to be designed to fill the needs of people who do not necessarily subscribe to the values of society at large. They should be made as much as possible self-governing. One could imagine living spaces comprising multiple small suites, each with a bedroom and a small living room suitable for entertaining three or four people, with a private bathroom and a minimal kitchenette, all sharing a larger communal room with a well equipped kitchen.

Two or three such units could share laundry facilities and other shared resources. In this way many people could be comfortably and efficiently housed in a relatively small space compared with conventional housing which is extremely inefficient and duplicative in its use of space and resources. Increased density will of course impact sewage disposal, but this can be alleviated by the use of composting toilets, which are readily available in several practical designs and only need the political will to allow them. Such communities, though geared mainly for single people, need not exclude couples and families too, which would simply require a different configuration of living spaces, and could also benefit from the sharing of resources.

The “Undeserving” Poor

Homelessness is a “hot topic” right now, and opinions on the subject appear daily in the papers, online discussion groups and in the coffee shop. In any given conversation the two (or more) sides are often really addressing different aspects of a complex problem. To arrive at any agreement we must first know whether we are trying to end homelessness itself, for instance, or to help those currently homeless, or to clean up the streets and feel safer. Each of these problems will suggest a different kind of solution.

We also have to acknowledge that poverty is a positive feedback loop. In this case positive is not a good thing. It means that the poorer a person gets, the harder it becomes for them to pull themselves out of poverty. Once you are homeless, life becomes increasingly difficult, and the slope is slippery. In this respect our society is unique among organisms (for society is in fact an organism). All other organisms are self-healing. When an organism detects that some part is ailing, it sends more resources to that part to help it get better. If we injure our bodies, blood flow is increased to the injured area. Our society, on the other hand, reacts to ailing members by withholding resources from them.

The aspect I would like to address here is the issue of what are sometimes called the undeserving poor. There are very few people who would deny that a great many poor people got that way through no fault of their own, and most have no problem with helping these people. Where the disagreement comes is when people see what they see as “their” money being used to help people who, in their estimation, are poor either through some personal failing or through criminal behavior. They even claim that homelessness is a lifestyle choice for some, and that they do not even want to be helped.

Let us deal with this last contention first, as it is relatively simple. First the homeless population has a higher than average incidence of mental illness, which can cause people to express views and preferences that are not in their own self-interest. It is sometimes said that if being crazy didn’t make you homeless, being homeless would make you crazy. These people need a special kind of help, and their views should not be taken as representative of the majority of homeless people.

Others may refuse the kind of help that is offered for a number of quite valid reasons. It may not be the kind of help that is in fact helpful. For instance, food that needs preparation or must be consumed on the spot may not be useful to them at the time it is offered. Shelters have very restrictive rules about when you have to be out in the morning and what time you can get there in the evening, which may not be practicable for them. They may be hard for them to get to and from. There are countless reasons why someone might not be able to accept the particular form of help offered. This does not mean that there is no possible form of help that would be genuinely useful to them, or that they would reject it if offered.

It is well nigh impossible to truly understand someone’s situation if you have not experienced it. There is a French expression that translates to “to understand all is to forgive all.” If you could truly know what is was to be that person, you would understand why they were where they are. All of us are the products of our genetics and our environment, neither of which was under our control. We talk of people making bad choices, but what does this really mean? We make choices based on our assessment of what will benefit us. If our assessment tools or our concept of what is in fact beneficial to us are faulty, it is because we are basing them on faulty information. Conversely people who have succeeded have almost universally had someone in their life who has given them good guidance.

Furthermore, what are these bad choices, anyway? Often this turns out to be code for drug taking. This carries several questionable assumptions. First of all poor people cannot afford to buy enough drugs to cause them much harm. A truly debilitating drug habit is very expensive. Homeless people take drugs, certainly, but usually only enough to take the edge off their misery.

So maybe it was a drug habit that impoverished them in the first place. Using this as a reason to blame them for their situation and refuse help is to say that drug habituation is a moral defect that deserves punishment (in this case the punishment of being deprived of shelter and rejected by society.) Yet if drug habituation is a moral defect this would condemn a large percentage of the population, most of whom are habituated to some drug or more than one. We have not been able to identify any society in history that did not use mind altering substances.

If we are to rationalize refusal to help someone who has fallen on hard times, surely the only acceptable reason is that it was some moral defect that brought them to this state. If some force outside their control impoverished them, we can hardly in good conscience refuse help. Neither can we reasonably condemn them for making stupid decisions. Intelligence, or the ability to make wise decisions, is not evenly distributed in the population. Certainly we can learn to make the best of what we are given, but some are just dealt a weak hand in life. Can we therefore blame them for failing in the system?

So, you might ask, is there no such thing as personal responsibility? Are we to forgive everybody any kind of behavior on the grounds that it was just the way they were brought up? I am not making that argument here; it is a complex topic that deserves its own treatment. What I am saying is that first it is not a helpful standard to apply to the choice of whether or not to help the indigent. People qualify for help because they are in need of it; it is that simple. There are no undeserving poor.

Money as a Dynamic System

Economic analysis is almost always presented in the form of words and static pictures (graphs). Like all verbal descriptions it is limited to the extent that it presents a metaphor that does not fully describe the phenomenon. We attempt to derive some kind of meaning from countless graphs representing various aspects of the economic condition at various times. We track the gross national product, the unemployment rate, housing starts, pork belly prices, the interest rate and thousands of other metrics, many of which we have only the haziest idea of even what they represent. If the prices of stocks rise on the stock exchange or if the GNP increases we think these are good things, if they fall we become concerned. We tend to evaluate each set of numbers as a separate phenomenon only loosely related to the others.

We tend to see money spent as being “lost”, so that it is no longer available as a resource. So public expenditures, for instance, are seen as a dead loss to the public in general. This stems from the false notion that money is itself a commodity. A commodity that has been used is no longer available for any other use, and we see money that has been spent as no longer being available for other use. This is a misleading view. Money that is spent is paid to someone, and the social benefit in the transaction depends greatly on where the money goes. Say the city council spends some money to fix potholes. Some of that money goes to pay workers, and will immediately be spent on their needs. Much of this money will be spent locally, and some of it will remain in the local economy through several subsequent transactions. The worker buys vegetables at the Famer’s Market, the farmer pays to have his boots repaired, the cobbler eats at a local restaurant, and so on. The same initial transaction turns into countless other instances of economic activity, each benefitting a new recipient. Money in this system is not a finite resource that is exhausted once used, but rather a catalyst that enables multiple transactions without itself undergoing any depletion in value. As long as it does not leave this system, it an continue to work its magic indefinitely.

The important part, the part that makes it all work for the local economy, is that each recipient spends the money quickly. Money that is simply held in an account and not used, ceases to enable fresh transactions.

Some portion of the money will inevitably leave the local economy. Anything bought from a chain store, for instance, will contribute to the profits of the owning corporation. In this and countless other ways money passes up the chain to people who already have more than they need. This money will no longer pass from hand to hand and permit multiple transactions like the money spent locally. Instead it will join a vast pile of money that is used in a quite different way. When money passes to someone who already has more than is needed to fill his personal needs and desires, it is not used to buy something from someone, or pay someone to do something. Instead it is invested.

If this investment is in a new business that fills a hitherto unmet need or replaces something already in use with a better version, then this can be beneficial to society. Whether it is beneficial or not depends on how it is run.

If the money is invested in government bonds of some kind, this can also beneficial to society. Whether or not it is beneficial depends on what the bonds finance. (These evaluations refer to the effects of the transactions themselves, not the resulting enrichment (or sometimes impoverishment) of the investor, which has its own effect on the health of society that will be examined elsewhere).

Investments in stocks that yield dividends, and are held for their income value rather than their potential increase in capital value, are fairly neutral in their effect on society. Investment in the stock market for the purposes of speculation is gambling pure and simple, and adds no value to the economy, while sucking value out. It is entirely harmful to the health of society. Furthermore it seems like a form of pathology. A person has more money than he needs, so he gambles with it to gather to himself even more money. What will he do with the even more money? Why he will gamble with that to gather yet more money. This is like eating for the purpose of becoming as fat as possible.

The economy is a continuously functioning organism all of whose parts affect all the others. By observing the behaviors of those parts, and seeing clearly how those behaviors support or hinder the health of society as a whole, we can see which activities should be encouraged and which should be discouraged.

Darwin’s Error

If the Golden Rule could be said to be the encapsulation of the fundamental meaning of both Judaism and Christianity, then perhaps we could say that the fundamental meaning of evolution is summed up in Darwin’s phrase “the survival of the fittest.” Over the years it has been trotted out by the perpetrators to explain/excuse such things as colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust, and the modern tendency of large businesses to cannibalize smaller ones, among countless other evils. Parenthetically it has always seemed curious to me that we are apparently helpless in the face of a law of nature when we wish to excuse behavior that would otherwise be morally repugnant, while we will bend every effort to successfully overcome equally intractable laws such as the law of gravity when it is more profitable to do so.

The problem is that survival of the fittest is a misstatement (or rather an overstatement) which when corrected does not in fact support any of the evils mentioned. It is ironic in our test-obsessed world that it is the removal of a “test” that reveals the true meaning. All of the requirements of the theory of evolution are fulfilled in the expression “the survival of the fit.” What a difference this simple modification makes. Now it is no longer necessary for you to die in order to ensure my survival. As long as we are both “fit” then we can both survive. We must also consider the proper meaning of the word “fit.” We tend to think of the modern dominant meaning, which is roughly equivalent to strong or robust. This gives even greater force to the misunderstanding, as it would seem to rationalize the tyranny of the strong over the weak. In Darwin’s time, however, the dominant meaning of the word fit was “appropriate”, as in “a meal fit for a king.”

So now we have a natural law that promises survival of the appropriate, which in no way conflicts with the theory of evolution. How does this change our outlook? For one thing it puts a very big hole in the idea that unfettered competition is the most desirable business model, on the grounds that it gives natural selection the opportunity to determine which businesses survive. If we remove the requirement that the survivors be the fittest, and only require that they be appropriate, then a strong case can be made for cooperation rather than competition as being the most appropriate behavior.

Minimum Basic Income

A commonly heard argument against the idea of a basic minimum income is that if everyone were given their living without having to work for it, nobody would work and civilization would collapse. Those advancing this argument tend to be members of the ownership class, and no doubt to them it seems reasonable. Why would anyone work if they did not have to for the sake of survival? Fortunately we do not have to speculate. We have a convenient study population who have in fact been given their living (and, in fact, considerably in excess of a basic living, which if the concept were harmful might be presumed to increase the harm.) Moreover we have data going back centuries and across a wide variety of cultures. I am referring to the children of the wealthy classes.

Do we find that these people tend to sit around and do nothing useful, or pursue lives of dissipation? Some of them, even many, do indeed. Yet virtually all of the discoveries and philosophical theories that led to the Enlightenment, the age of science and the Industrial Revolution were made by people from this class. They were the ones with time and leisure to pursue studies without having to give consideration to earning a living from them. Very few indeed of those who gave their names to systems of measurement (Volt, Ampere, Pascal) or scientific theories (Darwin, Freud) came from the poorer classes.

The situation is similar with respect to music and the arts. It is much easier to pursue success in these fields when you do not have to work a job after school, and when your parents can afford private lessons and top of the line equipment. My point, though, is not (here at least) to bemoan the unfair advantage the affluent have over everyone else, but rather to illustrate that people in the fortunate position of not having to earn a living do not have a general tendency to sit around and do nothing, and, to the contrary, such people are responsible for most of the advances that have given us, for better or for worse, the world we live in.

A defender of aristocracies might say that all of this simply indicates the inherent superiority of the upper classes. They made all the great discoveries because they are smarter then the rest of the population. However there is no correlation between wealth and intelligence, and geniuses of all kinds seem to be distributed evenly across the whole population. The plain fact is that enhanced opportunity yields better outcomes.

If some mad experimenter were to secretly take 100 random newborn infants from African refugee camps, and exchange them for 100 random upper middle class American infants, other than perhaps standing out by their skin color each would grow up a more or less typical product of the environment on which they were raised. If even race is not determinative of talent or the ability to lead a useful life, social class or a wealthy background certainly is not.

Neither are natural talent or hard work and application sure roads to success. They certainly help, but the world is full of starving geniuses. The single talent that does enormously enhance the probability of success is the talent for handling money, or what we call business sense. Someone with this particular skill can succeed even without any other skills, but someone lacking it will seldom succeed even if they are otherwise highly skilled.

The most important factor in determining success in life is opportunity. That opportunity might be the result of having a wealthy family, or it may be some stroke of good fortune, a chance meeting with someone in a position to give a hand up or any of a thousand possible scenarios that might make the difference between success and failure. Someone who does not get such a boost has a much harder time rising up the social scale.

There is every reason to suppose that among the poor and dispossessed of the world are countless Mozarts, Einsteins, Aristotles that will never have the chance even to know their talents, much less use them in the world, and there is every reason to suppose that if everyone in the world had a chance to shine we could usher in a new golden age.

Answers to Frequently Encountered Objections

I have often proposed radical social changes, and I have met with several kinds of objection that do not address the actual proposal and its benefits and shortcomings, but rather give general reasons why such reforms are impractical or undesirable. These kinds of arguments are not confined to the socio-political sphere. Any new and unfamiliar idea, including revolutionary inventions, are liable to be met with the same kinds of argument. I will use as an example the notion that we should abandon the practice of personal inheritance. Please be clear that in this particular essay I am not arguing the case for this point of view, but rather attempting to show how certain kinds of objection are invalid as a response to the proposal.

It does not solve all the problems. Theodore Roosevelt in 1886 denounced men who mistakenly believed that “at this stage of the world’s progress it is possible to make everyone happy by an immense social revolution.” This is what is known as a straw man argument. He is mischaracterizing the views of his opponents. Of course those interested in social reforms realize that even if they were successful it would not make everyone in the world happy, but that is not a reason to oppose improving the situation. All that the proponents of reform need to show is that sufficient good will come of it to more than counterbalance whatever harm may do, and to make it worth the cost.

Another common objection we often hear is “well, you can devise all the social systems you want but you cannot overcome human nature.” What is usually meant by this is that greed and laziness will always ruin whatever system we come up with, and the implication is that for this reason it is not even worth putting much time into the issue unless we can come up with a way of changing human nature.

First, the idea that greed is an uncontrollable force is wrong. It is no more uncontrollable that lust and violence, and we have done quite a good job that of corralling those immutable forces by our laws and social structures. That is really the whole point of those institutions in fact. As we settled down into societies we found that certain kinds of behavior cannot be condoned in a civilized society, so we made rules to control those kinds of behaviors. To claim the preeminence of personal freedom to oppose the making of laws, to say “I should be free to make my own choices with being told what to do” is to miss the point. All behaviors forbidden by laws are things people would like to be free to do; if people did not have any desire to do something, there would be no need to forbid it. Greed is socially harmful, just as is violence, and we need to take step to make it socially unacceptable.

Laziness is another matter. We are told that if you gave people their basic living needs the would not bother to work at all. It is implied that people (especially poor people) are fundamentally lazy. I do not believe this to be true. I believe that people are fundamentally curious, and have a strong desire to better themselves, and make a contribution. In fact one of the most basic human needs is to feel useful. This, in my opinion, is at the root of much that is wrong with our society: young people growing up in poor neighborhoods see no prospect of improvement. They see, correctly, that the game is overwhelmingly stacked against them. The only people like them who seem to have any kind of success are those who make it in show business, sports or crime. Since most do not have the talent for the first two, many fall into the third path. The remainder live lives of low level hopelessness.

Imagine a world in which everyone had a chance at starting a business. Suppose at a certain age, and having fulfilled certain conditions, we were given a workspace and tools and materials and whatever resources were needed to carry out whatever occupation we decided to pursue. When we started to become profitable, a portion of the profit would go to repay what we had been given. If we were unsuccessful, the tools and materials remaining would go back into the common stock of resources, and the space given to someone else. Under such a system the young would take a very different attitude towards their education. They would see that there was a very real and valid reason to acquire knowledge and skills.

Human beings are curiosity machines. Observe an infant at play: you will see a study in experimentation and learning. If older students are lackadaisical in school, it can only be because we have somehow managed to eradicate their drive to learn. The only force that can achieve this is a sense of hopelessness. Give children hope and the confidence that their work will be rewarded, and see them blossom.

And finally, even if the theory of laziness were in some cases true, so what? Suppose a percentage of people are in fact lazy and would prefer to just stay home and play video games. At least they would not need to cheat and steal in order to do so. Right now these same people cost us a fortune in police and the justice system and mass incarceration and emergency health care. It would be far cheaper and less socially destructive to just pay them to stay home.

Science vs Intuitive Understanding

From an online discussion on waccobb.net

claire ossenbeck wrote:

Every time there is a major earthquake, they come out with some statement that says their clues to understanding have been tossed on the heap and they pretty much have to start anew. Before the North Ridge quake they believed that the faults were not connected to each other. I read this in a science mag. Then after the quake they find that omg, they are connected, quite! Ok, now here am I for years now, an absolute nobody, thinking to myself (purely intuitively) I think that they are connected because it’s just common sense to me and it feels right. It may not have been based on the science of the day, but if science does not understand that which it cannot measure or prove, and is needing to continuously upgrade itself, then where’s the proof that I’m wrong?

Among the many non-experts who thought about earthquakes, and had an intuitive understanding about some aspect of the subject, a certain number thought as you did, and were eventually proved to have been right. However I am sure that there were many who had some other intuitive insight that did not turn out to be right. Which one should we have followed? Back then, when they had it wrong and you had it right, what would you have had them do?

Should they have said to themselves (and to us) “Claire is quite sure that it is this way, and we should change our views to conform with hers!”? Clearly not, since there are myriad Claires, and they do not all have the same intuitive understanding, yet they are all equally certain.

What they did was what science does: continue to study the matter with as open a mind as they could manage (they are, after all, human, and prone to human weaknesses) and when they accumulated evidence that they were wrong, they changed their views and told us that they had been wrong, and now understood things to work differently than they had thought. Do you ever stop to consider how rare and courageous an act that is, to admit that you have been wrong? Yet that is what science does regularly, as better tests are devised and new theories tested and knowledge is more widely disseminated by communications technology improvements.

I think that perhaps you are under a false impression of what “science” is saying. If you had had the opportunity to talk to a reputable earthquake specialist at the time when the accepted view disagreed with your intuitive sense of what was the truth, he or she would probably have said something like “Well, that is a possibility, and may indeed be true, however the information we have right now seems to indicate otherwise.” Under appropriate circumstances the response might be “Well, what you propose is not impossible, but it has been studied so much with so much agreement that we consider the likelihood very low.” Even then they may turn out to have been mistaken; in almost no case will a reputable and honest scientist claim to know for certain that anything is either definitely right or definitely wrong. However, it is not up to science to prove that you are wrong; if they had to do that for every theory that came along, they would not have time for anything else. If you want to have your theory adopted it is up to you to provide the evidence, not just the assertion, that you are right.

As in all pursuits, there are individual scientists who care more about their ego or reputation than about the truth, but this is not true of science or scientists in general, any more than it is true of doctors or engineers in general, or of medicine or engineering as professions. You are of course quite free to believe that your theory is true and the accepted one false, just as I am sure there were earthquake scientists who also disagreed. Nobody was or is trying to stop you believing that. The difference is that the views of “science” (as opposed to the views of individual scientists) represents the distilled knowledge, tested and verified, of many people who have studied the matter. Even then as we have seen, they can be wrong. However, unlike people whose views rest solely on faith (and are therefore not really interested in evidence), when presented with new information that checks out, science will change its views.

So if occasionally science comes around to a point of view you already held, you are allowed a smile of satisfaction, and even a modest boast, but at the same time it is always salutary to remember the ideas you had that did not turn out to be supported by the evidence after all.

Refuting Libertarianism

Rather than a left-right scale the political spectrum should be seen as an up-down scale. The Republican Party represent the interests of those at the top of the scale, and the Democrats those at the bottom. It is often said that both parties are equally corrupt and beholden to money interests, but I do not believe this to be true. As I see it, each party has an agenda it wishes to promote, and also things it does reluctantly in order to continue to get elected. For the Republican Party what it wishes to do is serve the interests of their wealthy sponsors. What it does reluctantly in order to gain votes is the bare minimum of social programs it can get away with. For the Democrats it is the opposite. What they want to do is the social programs, and what they have to do reluctantly in order to find their campaigns is some of the bidding of the wealthy. So even in the present deplorable system there is a difference that matters between the parties.

Libertarians, often seen as being on the far right (or on my scale the top) actually do not really fit there. The reason they find common cause with Republicans is because both favor smaller government, but for quite different reasons. Libertarians believe in small government as a central principle, seeing the natural state of people as being rugged individualist as unfettered as possible by the law. Republicans just want to get the law off the backs of their sponsors, so they defund those parts of the government that have oversight over the big money interests.

The fundamental fallacy of libertarianism is easily demonstrated. One of the universal behaviors common to all of our species is the forming of groups. We are a highly social species, and the idea of a single individual living completely independently without any dependence upon others is almost unheard of. Even in the “wild west” days, the heyday of rugged individualism, they could not have survived, let alone thrived, without the railroads and the Sears Roebuck catalog. We are each a member of countless groups simultaneously: family, congregation, team, work environment, town, county, state, country each claim us as members. Some groups we choose to join, others we are members of willy nilly. Among the latter groups are the various levels of society that we inhabit.

So what does it mean to be a member of a group? What is the nature of our relationship to the group, and to other members of the group? The first and most important thing to understand about all groups is that by their very nature they limit the freedom of action of their members. This is a universal rule of groups of all kinds. In order to gain the benefits of belonging to the group, its members agree to accept limitations on their personal freedom of action. One might even say that the expression ” a free society” is an oxymoron, as the whole point of society is to limit the freedom of its members.

In the case of society, the limits on the freedom of action of its members are codified as systems of laws. The more organized and complex a society becomes, and the larger the populations being governed, the more restrictions are needed for society to continue to function. It makes no sense to say, as the Libertarians do, that personal freedom is the ultimate good, and the closer you can get to that the better. Instead we should accept the fact that society is not just useful but necessary, and that we need to seek the optimal balance between the desires of the individual members and the quite legitimate needs of the society.

Why Government?

Government is the process by which we decide how we are going to operate as a community. It is very instructive to watch the TV series Deadwood, which is the story of an outlaw town, outside the limits of what was then the US, that was a haven for people who wanted to live outside the legal system. For any number of reasons they felt too constricted by laws and rules and regulations (frequently the particular laws against such entrepreneurial enterprise as robbing banks and killing people,) and wanted to live somewhere they could be free of such restrictions. Of course a couple of out of control fires soon convinces the more reflective members of the population that if the town is to survive at all, there have to be some rules. A Fire Marshall is appointed, and so it begins. Before you know it, there are rules and regulations and laws, and they are discussing which State they should seek to become part of. As soon as you have people living in proximity to each other, you need some kind of organization to define and enforce the duties we each have towards everyone else.

The astonishing claim has been made by people at the extreme right of the political scale, that there is no such thing as society; only freely acting individuals. Would they claim that there is no such thing as a team, only individual players? No congregation, no association, no assembly or crowd? Of course these things exist separate and distinct from the individuals who make up each of them. One might as well say there is no such thing as a liver; only an aggregation of freely acting liver cells. Each of these aggregations has a nature and behavior in and of itself, regardless of the individuals that comprise it. Of course the particulars of the individuals will affect the nature and behavior of the group, but each individual has two distinct roles: one role is as an independent individual with individual needs and desires, the other is as a member of the group, desiring the welfare and continued existence of the group, which may well dictate behavior that is different from what one would do acting purely as an individual In other words a member of a group may well sacrifice some portion of his own best interest for the sake of the group.

So to say, as Ronald Reagan said, that Government is not the solution but rather the problem, is clearly nonsense. We have to have government. The question is what kind of government? This is the subject of an ongoing sociopolitical discourse that has been written about since the invention of writing, and was undoubtedly hotly debated before that. The majority of this debate has been purely theoretical. The true deciding factor that determined the kinds of government we had was the power to make it so. What that has meant through the ages is the rule of the strongest. The particular ways that this system has been arranged, and the rationales offered for it hardly matter. Sometimes a single figure such as a king or emperor is the titular head, but always the power has been wielded by a small number of people, and that power has been enforced ultimately at the point of a gun. Even in today’s democracies we are scarcely better off. We are still subject to rule by the strongest; only the nature of that strength has changed. Before the Industrial Revolution power derived from the control of land. In today’s world money is the instrument of power.

What is Science?

Science is not a profession, it is a method, an algorithm. An orderly set of instructions which when correctly applied yield the best possible approximation to a reliable and repeatable truth. It will also yield the degree of certitude of that truth as well as the degree of likely variance.

Science does not answer the question “What course should we take?” Science answers the question “If we take thus and such a course, what is the range of possible outcomes, and what is the probability of any given outcome?” There are many areas that science has no tools to tackle, which means that it is not the right method of approaching that problem. This is not a weakness of science any more than it is a weakness of a hammer that it cannot cut a straight line.

The process goes something like this. You have a flash of inspiration. You figure out ways of testing it by trying to disprove it. You try to eliminate all the other possible causes that could account for your results. You try it under as many different conditions as you can think of.

Only when you have thoroughly tested the limits of your hypothesis can you justify any confidence in it. Then comes the real test. In order to pass scientific muster you must show how you arrived at your conclusion in sufficient detail to allow others to replicate your findings. If a significant proportion of them succeed in doing so, then and only then can you claim to have arrived at a verifiable truth.

You can be an inventor without being a scientist; as long as what you invent works well enough to be beneficial in the world you can even get rich that way. You can make scientific discoveries with out being a scientist, but someone will have to do the science to prove it, it does not have to be the discoverer. The vast majority of scientists never discover anything new or propose an original hypothesis, they dedicate their lives to testing the ideas of others. Sometimes they are motivated by the desire to find mistakes in accepted hypotheses. No matter, they are all valuable to the project of Science itself, which is the search for ever more reliable truth.

Pure science barely exists in the world today. So much is known about the nature of the physical world at such a deep level, that advancing the frontiers of knowledge involves prolonged immersion on the subject even to understand the remaining problems, and then very expensive gadgets like CERN to test their theories. The days of hobbyist scientists discovering new materials are long gone, and such research is now done by corporations for their own use and profit. They are not specifically interested in advancing knowledge, but in making money. If they can make more money by suppressing knowledge, they will happily do so.

Science has among its practitioners a certain number of liars, a certain number of fools, honestly deluded people and some outright criminals. This statement could be said equally truthfully of lawyers, bankers, mechanics, wealthy people and pretty much anyone else. These are categories that people in general fall into in similar proportions throughout the population regardless of what station in life they occupy. The vast majority of people are honest and well intentioned. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that scientists have a greater propensity for dishonesty than the general public.