Initial Rebuttal

Working in the Netherworld between the Transcendental and the Mundane

Or

Shit Mike: I still work for a living, I can't stay up all night pondering stuff like this (or maybe I can)

Anyway, I have two dozen of the recreational cookies available for consumption at my place anytime anyone shows up.  However, considering the vagaries of the region between our current enlightened attitude here on the left coast and Jeff Seesions, and not discounting my lack of desire to be raped in a federal prison, I believe that I will allow any and all to to come and fetch them.

I guess that I am looking at this in a different way.  I think that A.S. is trying to tell us that our minds are structured around the mundane necessities of the world that we live in.  The categories that we use in analyzing the mundane are survival characteristics, hardwired somewhere in the regions between the basal ganglia and the neocortex. To be a human is to engage in pattern recognition, it is both a gift and a trap.

The mundane world requires this ability as the price that one pays for survival. We need the ability to recognize pattern and extrapolate from them is to be able to survive in a changing world. But that ability too colors our ability to analyze that of the transcendent, we keep wanting to use our patterns of this world to analyze that which is not.

Here is where the problem lies, that is why I wonder (but have in no way accepted) the roles of magic in the world. Our minds tend toward the appreciation and cataloging of phenomenon. In order to know “how we are to solve the riddle of this dream of life” something more is required. What that something consists of has been the source of heated discussions for millennia.

Religion and some flavors of philosophy have taken up the challenge and came up with some remarkably awful (at least in my mind) explanations of the origin and meaning of the world. Most of them posit mankind serving as a central, and perhaps dominant role in this worldview and explanation of the riddle. But these century-old explanations, built upon a western worldview and a Judeo-Christian mythology are looking shopworn. Other religions seem to dance around the problem and have equal problems.

Science and the general populace have taken an easy way out. With the insistence on experimental proof and “common sense” they have slyly taken religion and faith out of the game. They insist that the patterns that define the mundane are the only patterns that can be proved and that “matter”. But non-spaciotemporal “things” are difficult, if not impossible to understand in a way that is consistent with the patterns that our minds use to make sense of the mundane.

But Philosophy keeps trying to push past the constraints draped on it by these patterns. But to use language itself is to fall into the trap. To understand the transcendent, and to explain such to another meat-unit requires words. And words themselves come preloaded with meaning. To say things like bench and glass brings in a density of meaning and patterns. To say infinite opens up the universe for discussion. To say non-spaciotemporal merely brings sullen silence.

What I think A.S. is saying is; that we need to develop a set of tools to recognize a different class of patterns. The tools we have just aren’t up to the job.

Cicero: The Root of the Problem

Another Discussion by Cicero

I am not blaming the non-elite working people for anything, nor am I defending the so-called elite; I am only looking logically.

What will happen in the consumer culture of the USA in the future is not what citizen Mr. Smith (or his representative in congress) decides is best for the USA, it is what consumer Mr. Smith believes will provide the highest quality of living for Mr. Smith. Each generation must be “better off” than the last and to support this goal the economy, like a tumor, must grow no matter what. These are the fundamentals of our capitalism.

It does not matter whether that which is good for Mr. Smith is good for others or the country as a whole; Mr. Smith will not vote for a candidate who does not promise to improve his standard of living and support the idea that any problem Mr. Smith has in obtaining a better lifestyle is no fault of Mr. Smith himself. If Smith is a coal miner, he will vote for the politician who denies global warning and changes the energy policy of the entire country accordingly - to give Mr. Smith the lifestyle he deserves. 

American factory workers who lose their job to the effects of globalism want to blame the elite for making greedy business decisions, but all the business decisions made by the elite are based on the actions of the factory worker him/herself - as a consumer, not a worker, not on the actions of the elite. Other than trying to determine what blue-collar/typical consumers will buy when given free choice, the elite have no interest whatsoever in the economy cars, or cheap food, or cheap anything else that will be assembled or grown in Mexico or China versus in the USA. The only people who care about products built/grown in Mexico and China, etc., is the blue-collar consumer. Thus, the people who determine the result of this despised globalism are the workers/common people themselves, not the elite. Before they can be labeled workers or any other classification of human being, workers are now, first and foremost, consumers - this is the victory won by our capitalism.

H L Mencken said the central belief of every moron is that they are the victim of a vast conspiracy against their common rights and just deserts. This is the belief that supports Trumpism and it is pure bullshit with regards to the loss of American jobs.

The real issue of import in this tremendously wealthy country of ours, is how the vast wealth is distributed; obviously - and since money is for spending, the issue is how do people spend their money. When factory workers spend their hard-earned money, they universally support globalism and the forces that will ultimately eliminate their job. When the elite spend their money, they are not motivated to support the forces of globalism because, for the most part, they do not care what the products they buy cost. If the theory is that the elite are causing the move toward globalism, then the complaint must be that the elite are too cheap - not willing enough to spend more than they need to spend. I do not think this is the problem. It is the working-class consumer that will never pay a premium to save an American job in the future. People may say that they will pay more for American-made products when a phone bank caller asks, but they will never follow through in real life - zero percent will and this defines the relevant characteristic of our culture; does it not?

-