May 24, 2020
Resetting and Redoing Without A Revolution
Hi Everyone,
A year ago yesterday I started writing a story about the decline of rural economics, which affects everyone everywhere, not just in the countryside. The point of the story is to mix some metaphorical/fictional with reality, partly because it’s actually easier to explain that way. It’s also easier to see a remedy, and easier to see why I think the Millennials will bring both economies, and our understanding of economics, to a better place than they’ve every been.
I originally wrote this post on the weekend and sent it, but I revised it due to some unnecessary complexity I’d included too soon in the story. It’s a long post, but I hope you enjoy it and will see where this project is going a little better.
I also hope this past weekend was wonderful and memorable for you, and no just because it was weird with the pandemic. In a way, having the pandemic going on creates a kind of connection to those other strange and thankfully rare times that Memorial Day was founded for. The pandemic is a connection to the abstraction of profound disruption and risk, not the scale of death and sorrow. Hopefully, those confident in a relatively a mild mortal toll will be correct, and hopefully the “yet another” reason to despise either side’s dissenters won’t last long, in spite of advances in the perpetual motion machinery of division and distrust.
Our divisions are to be expected, of course. It’s seems very natural that, with the multi-dimensional high stakes involved in battling a pandemic, there would be division. We know that we don’t know what will happen with or without this or that draconian or dismissive decision. The former creates real pain and disruption and loss of life. The latter might create much more. We don’t know. But if we can find a way to villainize the other side’s guess, it seems like we get an emotional boost, and a double boost if we’re in the right crowd. That’s how our brain’s limbic system works. Tragedy + conundrum + simplification + villainizing = internal resolution, sort of. And there’s a social bonding factor in there, of course. To make things even more difficult, our truly cognitive brain areas are recruited by the limbic system, so yes, we can feel like we’ve “thought about it”. So much of our reasoning is “motivated reasoning” even when we don’t realize it. Complicated but important stuff that we’re coming to understand better than ever now.
But anyway, where will we go from here? Some will go back entirely to business as usual, and that’s fine. It’s good actually. But some have been thinking about changes in their own economic lifestyles and maybe even how the whole thing works. Resilience and localism have been healthy trending themes for around ten years or so. I call them healthy because it’s hard not to think of resilience and diversified supply systems as healthy. And if the pandemic happens to boost even further the interest in those “alternative considerations” in our economics, then yay. And the only villainizing we need to do is toward the corona virus, or entropy, or reality. And not everyone even needs to change their thinking about economics. We need a lot of what we’ve got, so if that’s your thing, great.
Something has been trickling in though, and it’s really picked up lately. It continues to drive our mild back-to-the-land movement. Coincidentally, or not, we’re at the 50th anniversary of the last one. With the vast majority of the population planted firmly in cities, this might not seem real or relevant to many people. That’s okay. It will benefit everyone anyway. I think the Something that has been trickling in is related to innate enjoyment, not just a superiority of virtues in our 2020 Trendies. Some will, and some have, made this Something into a cause. I don’t see it as being cause-y though. It’s more about pondering, and resetting, and maybe redoing some things, but without a revolution.
A Non-Revolutionary, Villain Free, Partial Remedy
You might know that the origin of Memorial Day is not exact in time or location, but it is connected to our Civil War, and then later wars and fallen soldiers, then all those who have died. It’s more complicated than that, but this piece is just about the broadest phenomenon of avoidable, widespread pain, suffering, and tragedy. Some instances are intense and acute — like war. Some are a more chronic human-made malfunction, like economic dysfunction. And some are more clearly a mix of biology, natural occurrences, and human-made systematic response.
I know I might have already sort of triggered many of the readers somewhere in here in a few different ways, depending on their age and whether their political philosophy is strongly Left or strongly Right, because everyone’s pretty sure I’m finally going to make a point, and it might be opposed to something they identify with. I probably haven’t offended anyone, and I don’t think I’m going to, but this is the kind of topic that can put our internal mental sentries on alert.
My writing is mostly to those I’ve called the political and philosophical Middlers. It’s not because I’m a middle kid, in the Midwest, of middle income, in my middle age. It’s because I think we’re in the middle of a realization about the middles. And I think the Millennials are gonna bring this in. . .imminently. And I guess subconsciously I think m’s are in as I read that. I actually called Millennials M’s for a while, to save time –so maybe some mystical machinery is in motion. Maybe that’s why I think my meandering is actually on mission. (Okay, Em, I’ll stop.) (I’ve become used to using a lot of eye-rolls and other emoji’s when I write to Em behind the scenes of this empire, to acknowledge divergent tastes in “humor”, and I miss that here. It might get annoying anyway I guess, but lol.)
I’ll actually be leaving middle age in a few years, and my former students will be entering it. Neither of us like this, but anyway I say we’re living in a great era and that the collective Middles need to recognize, embrace, and exercise their power and insight. Great (and trending!) systems thinkers like Nassim Taleb and others use mathematics to illustrate the phenomenon of tails wagging the dog. The dog is the middle, and the middle has many tails. I know, that’s weird, but it fits. It just means that a small group can have an unexpectedly and maybe irrationally large effect on the huge middle.
From an attention-getting point of view, political and media marketers depend on this social and psychological phenomenon. A villain is usually created in the process. As a result, an army of defenders is assembled through enhanced organic volunteer enlisting. For the truly parasitic elements in our society, this social-psychological process is mostly a profit opportunity. For others there are truly principles involved. But a killable villain figure is created either way, and that is the key element. Heroes are hoped for, then imagined, then followed, then maligned, then memorialized. It’s the parasites that benefit the most, in terms of money. It’s the parasites that try to drive the idea into the middle. But the middle knows things are murky. The truth is murky, and we never get it all, let alone see it all at the same time. (Now I can’t stop seeing m’s.)
It was with all that murkiness in mind last year on Memorial Day weekend that I realized something. It was one of those brain forest discoveries I’ve talked about. You know, that brain forest in our heads that we usually only get to while driving or looking at the sky or nothing at all really. Anyway, my discovery was related to the problem of never getting the whole story, and how that makes the story we get sort of. . .fictitious.
Okay then, I thought to myself, if it’s sort of fictitious, and the villains and heroes are sort of fictitious, then maybe there’s a better way to look at our situation, especially for us Middlers that the parasites on the tails try to mess with. And since villainizing seems to get the biggest reactions these days, maybe someone should create a villain that can’t actually raise an army. Hmmmm. So I did. Well, Stu did. Some of you know about this and you might notice a slight tweak in the name. (Details provided upon request.)
Like I said, it was Memorial Day weekend last year. It was a Saturday, and I was headed to Lafayette, Indiana, to go to their pretty great farmers market that’s been there for almost 200 years. I don’t think of much going on in Indiana that long ago, but there was. And I like to point out that Indiana was part of what I call the First American Reset and Redo. It’s better known as the Northwest Territory established in the late 1780’s.
I call it the First American Reset and Redo because it was supposed to right some wrongs with regard to slavery, women’s rights, and other issues in the original states. It was also meant by some to be a peaceful integration with native tribes. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way with the native tribes. Lafayette is somewhat of a memorial and acknowledgment of that tragic outcome. You might want to look up Tecumseh and The Prophet for more on that sometime. Better yet, get The Pioneers by David McCullough.
Anyway, on my way there, Bug Stu shows up on the dashboard. We had talked on the porch about my plans for that day, which included the trip not only to Lafayette but also over to Pence, a tiny speck on the west edge of the state. Stu was extremely interested in both, and you’ll understand why after I explain a little more about the sights we took in that day.
Lafayette also has the Round the Fountain Art Fair on Memorial Day weekends, when there’s not a global pandemic. That’s what Stu was especially interested in. He’d heard there was likely to be an artifact there that would help to confirm a theory he had about us humies and our plight, especially in the former Northwest Territory, but really everywhere.
If you’ve been reading my recent posts, and you haven’t been too confused or distracted by our interviews with Stu about Oasis’ Champagne Supernova from 1995, then you know how Stu feels about us humans. He’s always been enamored with our big brains and enthralled with our music and our tendency to “just think” and look out at the stars. But he’s also been perplexed by our troubles. He’s perplexed by the tragedies, pain, and misery that we cause for ourselves in spite of having such amazing brains. He’s had a theory about this though, and he’d been examining clues that seem to support it, along with the rumors he’d heard in his world — the world of the Big Smalls. (The Big Smalls are insects and every life form smaller than them. They’re big in number and impact. This was created before the pandemic so I was thinking more about the positive functions.)
So Stu had crawled into the car to go with me, even though I’ve warned him of the dangers. Closing doors, windows, moving seats, and even opening windows all have a tinge of anxiety when Stu’s there. And I remind him that the birds outside of Newton County don’t know him, and he’s knows what that means. Still, it was apparently worth the drive to him.
On the way down, after some chit chat about Newton County and the old days of Beaver Lake and the Indian trails, he asked if I’d ever read Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. I had actually, recently, because it was the 50th anniversary of the book, and I loved it. It had struck me as funny that Vonnegut’s style, being a city guy, reminded me so much of the men I’d grown up around, who were farmers mostly. I liked the casual mix of the abstract and metaphorical with the real — all in the same sentence or two. I hadn’t heard that since I was a kid. I enjoyed that book on so many different levels, as I have other Vonnegut books.
Stu went on to explain that the most likely cause of our recent dysfunctions seemed similar to what the Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse 5 might have done. He wondered if Kurt Vonnegut might have known something more. You don’t have to know the book to understand Stu’s musings. Keep in mind, as I’ve touched on before, Stu takes in all of our literature and expressions in prose, poetry, and lyrics as “real” in the sense that they came from our minds, and are therefore “real” concepts that affect our perspectives, for better and worse.
Stu knows that our simply believing something doesn’t make it actually real, but he also knows the ideas affect our thinking. So, when he analyzes the causes of things in our society, he doesn’t see a need to distinguish the really real from the conceptually real, or you could say the concrete real from the abstract real. The concepts and the abstract ideas we use to understand human nature, human events, and philosophical explorations, don’t really depend on concrete information or facts, they depend on narratives and stories in our minds, and these are not concrete understandings no matter what we think about them.
Certain supposedly factual stories in our culture, understandings really, are such simplified versions of what really happened that they’re sort of fictional. An advantage of the myths of old was that everyone knew that the concept being conveyed didn’t depend on facts or complete understanding of related events. We missed the importance of that, but I think it will come back. (I’ll need to work on that explanation a little more.)
Stu lives in the world of the Big Smalls, bug size on down, which we don’t understand very well, and he has abilities of perception which we don’t have. For that reason, I don’t distinguish between the two kinds of real either as I’m listening to him, because I might be missing something he can sense. Also, there’s usually a form of truth in his stories, which is all we get from the concrete real world anyway.
“OK, the rumor among the Big Smalls is that something started really affecting certain humie brains a while back, at least by the late 1800’s. It was just certain people, but it was like they started making decisions that made things more worse here than normal. It’s like their bonie nature was overtaking their humie abilities.”
(Stu refers to humans as humies, which of course are vertebrates, which Stu calls bonies. Insects are not bonies, they are baggies, because they don’t have bones but exoskeletons. Both bonies and baggies are mobies, because they are mobile. We both use the same word for plants.)
Stralfs
The theory goes something like this, if I understood Stu right. Aliens from somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy have been using up resources on their own planet, so they’ve been exploring for other planets that have carbon-based “life”, essentially powered by a star, like ours. They think their best bet is to bring back a bunch of intelligent beings from another planet. They plan to use them to solve their own planet’s problems and to be expendable in experimentation, and maybe for food. We don’t know exactly why they think they need humans. I’m just summarizing this part from Stu, but here’s what else he said.
“The Stralfs, from planet Stralf, they know that they’re not likely to get very far by coming down and trying to scoop you up. Too much loss. Too much death. They can’t knock you out with a gas or something because they don’t know what to use, and there’d be too much material handling expense in picking you all up anyway. So instead they started trying to get you to make your planet worse. Sounds crazy but listen. They had two goals in this. And remember, this is all kind of fuzzy right now, so I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.” Then Stu noticed something and just looked out the windshield for a long time.
Stu was looking at the big wind turbines on U.S. 52 by Fowler. “I think I just realized something.” He didn’t say anything else for a while, but since he wasn’t talking I knew he was thinking, and I didn’t want to interrupt. We finally passed the last of the wind turbines, and he flew to the back of the car so he could keep looking at them behind us. Then he flew back to the dashboard.
“I don’t think all of those wind turbines are for you. I think they’re for the Stralfs. I’ll show you what I mean on the way back.”
I reminded him about explaining the two goals he thinks the Stralfs have in their plans.
“Right, the two goals. One goal was to get you to mess up this place worse so that you learn more about fixing problems. They need you to make it nearly as bad as theirs. I think maybe they’re just too lazy to figure out their own problems, but I don’t know. Okay, that’s one part of it. The other part is that they need you to want to leave, since they know they can’t force you, like I said. So, it’s clever. You make it worse and are forced to learn more about how to fix things, but during that it gets so bad that a lot of people will want to leave.”
I knew what the most intriguing part was for Stu. He’s always been a brain guy. He’s always been fascinated by how our minds work. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the reasons for his optimism lately is that we ourselves are learning how they work, instead of just “making up more Fauxlosophies” as he puts it. So I asked him to tell me more about how they could actually get us to make our own place worse so we’d want to leave.
“Oh yeah, this is also clever. They don’t talk, and they know better than to let you see them. They don’t talk to each other on their planet either. They don’t communicate that way. They don’t have mouths. What they do is they get each other to focus on a certain thing, then they somehow sync up their brains. They can do it to some of you guys, too. Not everyone. It’s actually a small percentage of humies that this works on. Kind of like hypnotism maybe. But they don’t need many people to sync with. There aren’t very many Stralfs here anyway, so their best bet is to get to certain people and then those people influence others. It’s never everybody, and it doesn’t need to be everybody. That’s actually got to do with one of the things I’m looking for on this trip.”
We arrived at the farmers market and met my bug-loving friend Stephanie. With Stu in my shirt pocket, the three of us toured through the market and ran into a few Lafayette friends. Stephanie knows about Stu. Amanda was there from the Matchbox co-working space. It was kind of funny to see her right after Stu had been telling me all of this. It was funny because I know that she wonders what I really do at the co-working space. She actually knows a little about Bug Stu and all, but she doesn’t realize how real it is. She’s even one of the few people that know the FiDdLers Paw Paw, which is a greeting that we members of the Fellowship of the Dimly Lit use. More on that later. She has an imagination and a sense of humor though, and I knew that she wouldn’t think I was crazy for talking the way I talk there, which is about this, as if it’s real, as if it’s not, but now people are gonna know that it is. This is all part of the Resetting, and it’s time for it to begin, so we can get on with the Redoing.
I love the Round the Fountain Art Fair. Some of the art is bizarre, some is quaint, some is comical, and some is beautiful. It reminds me of when Jeanne and I were maybe thirty and we went to the Broad Ripple Art Fair in Indianapolis. I remember crazily painted old kitchen chairs, whimsical fish-like things mounted like real fish, and a denim jacket with a weird skinny beagle painted on it. The skinny beagle was breathing fire. All those things at the art fair, and that’s what I remember. Some might say that’s “my reality” of that art fair. But I always remember how Stu says, “The real Reality is true — with or without you.” He’s a fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observations on language and reality, just like I am. But let’s not digress.
As we’re walking, I notice that Stu is looking over the edge of my shirt pocket, scanning all of the booths and tents. As he expected, we’d walk into every booth and spend more than enough time there for him to look for a particular artifact. He was actually getting a little impatient, scratching my chest through the thin material of my shirt. He worried that we’d get rained out, and that we were spending too much time looking at little things that weren’t interesting to him. What he was hoping for was about two or three feet tall, he’d been told. Then he poked me hard, almost like a sting. I looked down at him, and he pointed straight ahead. “Chk chk” he said. That meant take a picture, which is the noise he makes in public settings when he needs a picture taken. He knows I can’t hear his voice in a crowd.
He had told me that he was looking for some kind of image of a “Star Gazer”, but we hadn’t talked about the details. He’d heard that the Stralfs sometimes left props for training other Stralfs about influencing humans , and that one prop had been seen at an art fair recently. This prop was a Stralf’s depiction of the type of human not to bother with. It’s apparently been said that a Stralf has to be within ten feet of a human in order to affect thinking. And although Stralfs can hide very well, since they’re kind of like gelatin and can change shape temporarily, there’s always a risk of getting spotted when they’re that close. On the other hand, Stralfs know it’s unlikely that a human would ever report seeing them, since they’d be taken as insane or as impaired with an illegal drug. Still, the apprehended Stralf could be killed and just never reported. Risk-taking varies from Stralf to Stralf, Stu says, but the training was meant to minimize unnecessary risk.
Stu wanted me to publish the photo to maybe convince more humans of the Stralfian presence and plans. Here’s the “Star Gazer” model, presumedly from early Stralf training days, based on the corrosion. I’ve seen a similar image somewhere before. I wish I knew the artist’s name that had this. It was too expensive for me to buy. Anyway, I’m thinking Stu might be right, especially if there are similar images, kinda like the similar alien images we see. Keep in mind though, this is not the depiction of an alien. This is what Bug Stu and other Big Smalls believes is a depiction of a human, done by a Stralf, and the large head is typically exaggerated is in this image. It represents the type of human that is being true to his star gazing nature, and therefore not susceptible to Stralfian thought influence. Like I said, it is believed to be a “Do Not Bother With” warning in early Stralf training here.
With that, we said goodbye to Stephanie and that Star City, which was a well-known boastful slogan for Lafayette from about when the farmers market started over 160 years ago. Stu said, “OK, let’s drive straight to Pence!” and then did his little bug laugh, which is a funny high-pitched ha-ha. That was his joke, because he knew that there was no “straight to Pence” by road, only by air, which I could not do but he could. He rode with me though so that we could talk and he could avoid being eaten by a bird.
Stu had heard that Pence, Indiana, was a great example of the Stralfian scheme, because it’s hardly a town anymore, even though it’s in a beautiful setting. It’s said to be the smallest town in the country with a municipal water system. That’s an indication that, at one time, people really thought it was a place worth building. But something changed, and according to Bug Stu and the Big Smalls it’s the same something that caused the tragic over-reliance on cities, at a great cost to all kinds of people everyone. But it’s just what the Stralfs were going for, and Stu explained more of their strategy on the way.
“Remember, they didn’t, and don’t, want you to want to live on Earth. And they’re so sneaky.”
With that, we were off in the little Chevy. I was already starting to see the ruins differently. And the wind turbines looked even more ominous now, but I would wait for Stu to explain things at his pace and in his way.
To Be Continued
