Multiple things to discuss, some “yang”, some “yin”:
(1) a group really serious about economics has been trying
to decipher what real content there might be about the two candidates (my reply
to them item (1) below);
(2) Trump’s spiritual advisor shows up on TV, and he
mentions he is worried he will not get into heaven if he is not elected;
(3) for me, it was the second day this month of “frustration/withdrawal’,
enough minor frustration that I skipped some action on cybersecurity;
(4) an astral dream, moderately instructive. I will focus on (1) and (2)...
=========================================
To the economics group:
I have been
amazed at how thin the economics has been in all the election discussions in
the US this year.
I
really enjoyed it in 2009, when a friend working for the staff of the Joint
Economic Committee, got me invited to speak at a meeting in the SVC (attended
by the head of CBO) on "green jobs" -- on a serious technical
analysis of WHICH green jobs programs result in more and better jobs, and which
just throw away money. BUt even in that year, I remember folks who would
evaluate programs based on HOW MANY jobs are directly funded, per environmental
objective. I remember people who were truly puzzled when I asked: "Which
is better, a program which issues one person to screw in a lightbulb or one
which uses 1000 people to screw in that same light bulb?" It was
really scary to me that people with an influence on economic policy or budget
decisions should have any troubles with that one.
Three
moments were especially striking to me on CNN on these issues this year:
(1)
The positive moment when Kaine explained how his objections to TPP in its
present form involved mechanisms on enforcement rather than standards as such.
The biggest damage of the past few years has been related to implementation and
administration as such, and it was great to see someone showing signs of having
visited planet earth.
(2)
When Trump presented his "uncle economic plan, his "most expert"
advisor said "Ah, duh, they should know that a $15/hour minimum wage is
not good for them. It's not good, because if it goes that high, we will simply
automate them out of having any jobs at all. We probably will anyway, that's
our plan." This reinforced my impression that today's entropy in IT
development and deployment is one of the pillars of rising inequality both of
wages and of power, a trend which threats our very existence if we see far
enough ahead.
(3)
Today, I was also a bit put off when Clinton started her economic speech
glorifying a plant in Michigan exemplifying what may be the most egregious
makework pork barrel waste in US history, "brown jobs" dreamt of by
folks like Shelby and Lamar Smith, as part of new policies which have already
destroyed much more of America's technology base than most imagine.
Would
EITHER Trump OR Clinton have the optical resolution needed to reverse the huge
losses which have already occurred? IN my view, it is Cheney who planted the
weeds, at least in the government sector, but they have been allowed to
spread... and my instinct now is to ask questions about diversifying
portfolios.
The
discussion of jobs versus debt has been very shallow in Europe, and polarizing
in a very destructive way, but here ... as one of you just noted... it has
hardly even been discussed!!
I have
certainly seen "a hundred people screwing in a lightbulb" in the
medical sector, one of the keys to balancing jobs and growth versus debt...
along with the nonproductive variety of tax break. At least we know that
Hillary Clinton has made serious efforts in the past addressing the first-order
inefficiencies in those sectors, inefficiencies which, among other things,
result a low ratio of total jobs created per dollar of government debt. (Or
just waste of scarce resources needed elsewhere.)
By the
way, the most intelligent high-level discussion of jobs versus debt I have seen
was from the White House" of
Japan, where they actually measured jobs per dollar of debt in a serious way, and
noted how some programs ("three pillars of ecoeconomy") were crafted
in a way which delivered three times as many jobs per debt as all the usual
stuff (like truly middle class tax breaks or infrastructure construction,
though multipliers actually vary as a function of current conditions). But for
the EU, I believe that a combination of certain types of R&D WITH
streamlining of electricity market design (as summarized at nss.org/EU,
not a balanced summary but still viable) could solve the near-term jobs
problems with virtually ZERO additional government debt. I really worry about
the risk of wasteful "brown jobs" due to insufficient filtering of
how government money gets spent (as in the SLS work).
Best
of luck,
-------------
I have gone into a lot more detail on all these issues
before, so will not elaborate here. Have not given up on mainstream
possibilities for renewable energy breakthroughs, but the bottom line remains
death by iron triangle and such.
=========================
======================
And so, what about Trump making it to heaven?
Hope for afterlife has never been one of the things driving
me to explore spiritual reality. Until 1967, I basically accepted that there is
no such thing as a personal afterlife, and that our natural desire to have
enduring positive impact should rationally focus on what happens to other folks
(humanity, family, folks we respect, life on earth, some weighted sums of
variables) as a result of our actions, added up over all the times when our actions
do have consequences. In 1967, I started wondering what is really going on
here, and I was driven for years more by curiosity, by the drive to understand,
than anything like personal immortality. But gradually, I did look twice at “afterlife,”
to try to figure out what the implications are of new things I learned.
Very early on, I resonated with folks who argued: “As a
first approximation, expect your new life after death to be like your life now.
If you are full of pain and fear and death now, you will be surrounded by the
same in your new life; the only thing different is that all the ‘world’ around
you will reflect those emotions.” As my mother became older, I once even sent
her the video “What Dreams May Come,” which portrayed this idea very vividly,
based on the book of the same name by Matheson. (The book was a little more sophisticated than
the movie, and may have reflected some of the thoughts of Swedenborg.) In that
viewpoint, one would say to Trump: “Unless you die this year, where you go
depends on what kind of world you create around you in your immediate
surroundings, your personal relations especially, whether you win or not.” Also: “It is not
really a binary choice of heaven versus hell. That idea was just a typical
political PR outcome, based on how excited people were by something Dante
wrote. Jesus himself said ‘My father’s house has many mansions.’” One of the
things I was entertained by in my first years of exploration was a book “In My
Soul I am Free,” full of entertaining stories like that.
But how true is that picture?
That picture sure did seem to fit my transition from Harvard
to Maryland in 1975, when I moved from a graduate school dorm to become an
assistant professor. My room in graduate school was an incredible disorganized
mess, which really scandalized the few folks (just my sister?) who visited that
room. Piles and piles all over the floor. I would have pay checks from MIT, much
larger than I had had except in special summer jobs before, in envelopes lying
unopened as part of big piles on the floor. It wasn’t that I was naturally
messy; it was that I had so many categories of activities that the room and the
small desk simply couldn’t handle them, and that my time was oversubscribed.
Here is the “afterlife” dimension: when in Maryland I
started looking for a new place to live, somehow the luck of the draw
systematically sent me to places like Hyattsville where the same spirit of mess
continued. There was a lot of sheer inertia, somehow very powerful. But I then
decided to exercise real consciousness, which I was active with by then, to try
to break the pattern and create a new one. This involved the subject of visualization,
a tricky subject I will not elaborate on here and now. (Though I might add that
I did buy a copy of “Seeing with the Mind’s Eye”, by Samuels and Samuels, which
I treasured and gave to friends years later... even though it was just one more
step on the way.) One bottom line: Trump might well consider visualizing more
forcibly, clearly and analytically just how he WANTS his life to be,
remembering that folks around him will treat him as he treats others, sooner or
later. That applies to all of us of
course; Putin is still in orbit about how he felt he was treated by Hillary
Clinton. (I just hope his cyberattacks will not include our election machines
in November. I have passed on some quiet technical suggestions for urgent
action to a few people, but there are reasons not to make it a mass media kind
of thing. I just hope Hayden’s network does not quietly enjoy the possibilities
for near-term chaos, just as entertainment, even though we all could suffer.)
I was entertained by that viewpoint, even though I never
believed it could be the whole truth. I also listened to some Buddhists who
said: “Of course Buddha believed in reincarnatuion and in life after death. We
all know that from his famous saying that a drop of water does not disappear,
but merely changes form and returns to the ocean.” Hmm. What kind of people,
hearing that, forget that the drop of water totally loses its identity and individuality
when it evaporates or goes into the ocean? Logic and experience pushed me more
and more towards my own understanding of noosphere, which is a kind of ocean of
mind or soul embracing at least the entire earth – which does not at all tell
us that our individual personality continues! In fact, I did not pay attention
to whether my individuality would continue after death in the noosphere because
“WHO CARES?” My understanding of ethics and sanity was clear enough by then
that I realized that this issue is not of first order importance. Life here and
life in the noosphere continue in any case, and still it is our impact in that
larger sphere, weighed as is natural to our inner selves, which matters to us.
In fact, another group I had close contact with at Harvard
until I left Cambridge in 1975 was the Gurdjieff group. (I never joined, though
I did go as far as attending one small “sample meeting.”) I was puzzled why
Gurdjieff seemed to work so hard to make his most famous writings so repulsive,
but getting past that, he did have a few interesting thoughts. I also had
friends who helped digest the key ideas, and pointed me to books by Ouspensky
and Bennett which made more sense. How I lost touch with those friends is a mix
of wild stories I only halfway know, the most vivid of which involved the
Tibetan Mask of the Dead and lights going on and off at the house of Stuart
Carey Welch (an easy google)...
One of the key points: if in the end, we human individuals
are a kind of symbiotic organism, part “body/brain” and part “soul/spirit/noosphere”,
then of course both sides of the symbiosis are part of “us” as we experience “us.”
Ouspensky talked a lot about our “essence,” and about experiments designed to
bring forth the part of us which would survive after death of the body part.
Part of us would survive; part of us wouldn’t. I once summarized Gurdjieff’s
solid core message as: “If the data is important to you, don’t just store it on
RAM. Make sure you transfer it to hard disk where it will survive longer.” The
core of Gurdjieff’s approach to human potential was to build up more consciousness
or intelligence on the “hard disk” part of ourselves, the part housed in the
noosphere. Gurdjieff also went on to quietly
note that our spiritual side itself is not exactly immortal and faces
challenges of its own.
There is a nice, easy-to-read science fiction trilogy by
Jane Roberts which makes part of this image vivid: she depicts people who have
out of body experience all the time, but simply do not remember it because the
level of consciousness in their other half is so limited. This supports
Ouspensky’s position that we need to work on our consciousness if we want to
remember and direct such out of body experience more than we do; simply having
the experience is not so important in itself. It also suggests that LaBerge’s
very credible book Lucid Dreaming is a correct way to think about that stream
of development. There is a lot more experience which also fits.
But again, that was all just a stage. Maybe I will write
more later about the details of later stages. A key point is that we as
individuals are more or less like cells within the noosphere, and that the fate
of an individual cell seems to depend on well it connects to other cells in the
noosphere. Like neurons. Running for President, Trump has begun to engage with
other people and other souls to a degree he has never even begun to experience
before. But will those connections endure and prosper, or will the connections
he has all wither so much that his very soul withers away like an old Buddhist
nun I once saw, like old paper dissolving into sad powder? (Or like the souls
of jihadis, whose fate is very much as described in the Book of Esdras, one of
the Apocrypha found in some Bibles.) Well, I doubt he will wither that much,
unless he dissolves himself completely into mindless drunkenness and herd
psychology. One does not have to be President to endure that way?
In truth, I have been worried much more about the following
question: if by abusing nuclear technology, or failing to stop the progression
pointing to large future emissions of H2S of the ocean, we end up destroying
our entire noosphere, will the afterlives of ALL humans on earth, past and
future, be erased?
====================================================
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As for minor personal frustrations yesterday – weird behavior
by radio, by google drive, and issues in sorting laundry... you don’t need to
hear it.
The dream was illustrative, but maybe I should just cut this
short now. I should note that the earlier “brexit” dream included lots of names
of places, bus stops and trains in France. In past years, I would write those
things diligently upon waking up, and checked to verify that they are real
places I had never known before. This time I did not bother.
Best of luck. We need it.
