squareONE explorations

A voter’s behavior at the polling place reduces to a decision. Hold that idea.

This is analogous to a shopper’s behavior. How much time does a shopper spend in deciding what tomato in a pile of tomatoes will provide the biggest payoff in return for their investment of “selection” time? Why is it that a given shopper will select several candidate tomatoes And then from this selection decide on a single tomato?

We enter, here, into the realm of behavioral economics. Although it must be true that in a given display of tomatoes one tomato (presumably) is objectively and certainly the best tomato, in fact, given a maximum amount of time to make the choice, a shopper will instead opt to deploy a practiced heuristic so as to dramatically cut their time investment. The shopper does this while, at the same time, they expect this lesser time is the appropriate time to invest toward realizing the ‘great tomato’ payoff. Spending more time is not worth it.

Take this thought problem: you pull fifty people off the street and line them up in front of a display of tomatoes and a display of apples. You then give each an opportunity to select one tomato or apple. Most people will invest very little time in deciding whether they go for a tomato or an apple. Their pick between the two will turn out to simply be a matter of their foregone preference. Given the choice between the two, each person will go for what they already prefer and then employ their favored rule of thumb.

However, for some it will be a hard choice between the two. They will be ambivalent to some degree. The considerable differences between tomato and apple in such cases are not instrumentally decisive differences. In this group, some might ask to check out both before they commit to one or the other.

Returning to voter behavior, what would you guess is the situation given voters who cannot decide between the tomato of Obama and the apple of McCain?

I’d like to offer several hypotheses about this group.

1. Having no strong foregone preference, most members of this group are likely not to spend a lot of time making their decision.

2. Some members of this group approach their decision not as if it is between a tomato and an apple, but rather is between two examples more similar than different.

Is it likely that persons who are willing to spend a lot of time investigating differences between options, nevertheless also more disposed toward a foregone preference?

If 15% of a national electorate are undecided, and this group is given as the portion of the electorate upon which the election will turn, is it then the case that elections turn upon persons who will invest the least amount of time in deciding between two candidates?

Consider what might be involved in a voter’s having to decide between Obama and McCain. Since the policy positions between the two are mostly stark, what other features of the candidates would blur those difference and reinforce a voter’s ambivalence?

There are cases for which substantial policy differences are not instrumentally decisive. If someone can’t decide between Obama and McCain, it is very likely that their ambivalence vectors around something other than policy differentials.

(I spend a lot of time researching various data in the political realm. However, as far as my voting behavior goes, where I feel my time is worth investing in deciding who among the democratic apples is the apple of my eye, it is for me a foregone conclusion that I will vote for a democrat. I rush to the apple display! I will also spend a lot of time researching, as a matter of opposition intelligence, the opposing republican. And, I would suppose that my total time invested puts me in a marginal group, investment-wise; say in the group of people who spend 5+ hours a week investigating political information. One mitigating behavioral factor suggested by this is that the extra time invested after I’ve made my decision does not increase the possibility of a greater return. From this it could be suggested that a much greater ratio of return is gained by the person who invests almost no time in making their decision. However, keep in mind this low time cost is also attachable to a low expectation of return, and so there is the extreme represented by most non-voters, no time cost-expectation of zero return.)

[See: Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron Cass R. Sunstein; Richard H. Thaler

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

review of above: Economics: Which Way for Obama? By John Cassidy; NY Review of Books; June 8, 2008]

Darnit! On the other hand, voting behavior may be largely driven by effects due to implicit (unconscious) processes. In which case, the time sunk by undecided voters may be commensurate with what is necessary to efficiently confirm their bias. If so, such voter’s ambivalence could be termed pseudo-ambivalence.

“Undecided” Voters’ Minds Already Made Up, Study Says

If you don’t know who Harry Smith was it may be too late. This video is titled Boy - Am I in Trouble on youtube. But I would have retitled it, Semiotics to the Rescue.

Mullah Nasruddin went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and on the way he passed through Medina.

“Certainly not!” answered the Mullah, “You’re thinking of a different Alexander the Great. I’m talking about the one named Mohammed.”

hat tip

The Integral Spiritual Center lands a come-on in my email box every week. Yesterday’s gave me a whack on the side of the head.

Modern science has given us a compelling picture of the evolution of our universe, from its first moments: quantum fluctuations—i.e. the “Big Bang”—led to a massive inflation, followed by “the dark ages,” then the formation of the first stars, at about t+400 million years. But science has been largely unable to explain what happened before—indeed, what brought about—the Big Bang. Scientific explanations have tended to end up sounding somewhat like traditional Eastern cosmology: the Earth stands upon the back of an elephant, which stands upon the back of a turtle, and from there, it’s turtles all the way down…. The world’s great spiritual traditions have long sought answers to this question, and have theorized a process reciprocal to the one that science has investigated so thoroughly: prior to evolution, there was involution.

Truth be told, I’m not aware of any spiritual tradition that has pondered what happened before the Big Bang. (This is the case if one discounts secular science enough to make of it not a spiritual tradition.) But the main thing is: the traditions didn’t know of the Big Bang.

Not so curiously, creation myths tend to be very relational and story-like! These stories have a beginning but don’t usually pose a beginning prior to their starting point. But the Big Bang doesn’t begin with the Big Bang. It’s a just-so story in the sense of ‘as far as we know’ and ‘to the degree that we know.’

The turtles all the way down trope certainly aligns with one of Ken Wilber’s oldest (surviving!) propositions, The Great Chain of Being. I’m not sure which scientific explanation was to the ISC’s blurb writer, “sounding somewhat like traditional Eastern cosmology.” (And this was stated after the same writer wrote: “science has been largely unable to explain what happened before.”)

The blurb seems to change the subject and goes on after raising Involution:

Essentially, says Ken, we begin every moment in a state of nondual Suchness. But if we have yet to stabilize that state into a state-stage, that state will be pre-conscious to us, and we will undergo the first contraction, into the causal realm of the Witness and all that is witnessed. If we have yet to stabilize that state, we will contract into the subtle realm of the soul. And if we have yet to stabilize that state, we will contract into the gross realm of the ego and our conventional self. So with every moment, we “fall down the stairs,” cascading down from suchness until the point of our state realization. Here, we recognize ourselves, in a dynamic similar to what the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches about the Bardo and our experience after death. And this world (and with it, all “lower” worlds) arises in our experience.

Reminds me of Ibn al-Arabi, ra, and an encapsulation I wrote in 1991.

Henri Corbin commenting on the fact of ascension
(as described by Ibn’ Arabi, r.a.)

And so the man who knows that is his “soul”,
such a man knows his Lord.

Richard Grossinger, from his superb new book, The Bardo of Waking Life:

The 9.5 years that it will take a spacecraft to bust out of Earth’s gravity well and be slingshot by gas giants to Pluto, out at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, must be measured against an event barely the size of a ball-bearing out of which the entire universe detonated once into a state so protracted and sticky it continues to fulminate and distend.

Involution? This reminds me of quaint and romantic notions from the hydraulic 19th century. Of course we’ve moved through the hyper-hydraulic 20th century. And past the cusp of the 21st century it seems contemporaneously quaint to suppose involution tended to reveal (Wilber’s) suchness is another turtle. We’re all enslaved for hundred thousand story-making years to this mechanical conceit.

“Before,” then, is only a mechanical necessity. What happens before you and your dear one decide to go out and dance? What is caused to morph?

Grossinger:

Our basis is completely mysterious. . .

Completely. It’s not that involution makes clear the origin, it’s that “pure possibles do not demand concrete existence” may require any origin to be essentially not knowable and, perhaps, origin exists beyond mere mechanics, beyond mechanical concretization of (even) original possibility.

Granted, Wilber is moved to try to explain everything. What a romantic!

Alternately:

What we call music in our everyday language is only a miniature, which our intelligence has grasped from that music or harmony of the whole universe which is working behind everything, and which is the source and origin of nature. It is because of this that the wise of all ages have considered music to be a sacred art. For in music the seer can see the picture of the whole universe; and the wise can interpret the secret and the nature of the working of the whole universe in the realm of music. Inayat Khan

Grossinger:

We are only possibility, and God is no one but the background agaisnt which possibility rests.

For me, ‘completely’ and ‘only’ tear involution and sunder suchness. Mystery cannot be the ground of mechanics and also itself mechanical. Before involution and evolution? Only God knows.

These are all scattered excerpts from Jung’s book “The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual In Modern Soceity.” Jung rarely talked about politics in his work. In fact I’m quite sure this was the only time he did, only in reference to his individualism (so for those of you looking for a book centered around politics, this isn’t it). DevilsAdvocate55 (YouTube)

Actually in the collection of essays, Jung Speaks, Dr. Jung is much of the time concerned in various ways with the problem of current events, unconsciousness and group psychology, thus with politics. Similar writings are found in other collections. Then, taking the analytic and main psychologically focused works in total, n those volumes often the problems of the personality are set against the problems of collective psychology, so their import may also be ramified in politics.

An organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. [sic] Organizations keep people busy, occasionally entertain them, give them a variety of experiences, keep them off the streets, provide pretexts for story-telling, and allow socializing. They haven’t anything else to give.

Karl Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing

(”subversief denken!” Hat tip to Thomas Wirtemberg)

EXPERIENTIAL MARTIAL ARTS I.

(originally published in The Lakewood Observer)
“The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.” - Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is the case and sadly so, that the larger portion of child’s play is stripped from the adult over the course of their maturation. We wander through the world as adults and we miss a lot. Fortunately, with a modest commitment of time there are any numbers of awareness softening calisthenics grown-ups may do to recover childlike capabilities.

1. BLOCK WALKING
Pick a block, any block. You’ll have to start as a beginner but your walking chops will be recovered quickly. This exercise requires about 120 seconds every day.
Start from a stop and walk the block slowly. Name what is perceived: “sidewalk slab,” “window,” “futon,” “sign,” person,” “slab,” “smile,” “window,” “door”. You get the idea. Do this once a day for several weeks and soon enough the naming will drop away. Let the block become your train of awareness. The only hard part is extracting the necessary 120 seconds every day. Do this for two minutes every day, do it for 30 days. See what results from giving up sixty minutes to this over the course of a month.

2. BALL BOUNCING
Buy nine rubber balls and be sure to test them. They must be bouncy enough to bounce right back into your hands. This exercise requires five minutes three times a week. Also, you’ll need to find two neighbors to join you. Yes, they can be your roommates if need be!
Pick a time and stand at the end of your front walk and, with your two companions, bounce the balls for five minutes. It is almost a sure bounce that after several weeks of doing this other persons will want to join you. This is what the other balls are for. If you approach this with any discipline at all, over the course of several months, you may find most of your block has joined the bounce. (If you need more balls, go buy ‘em!) Enjoy what results.

via Naomi Klein
University of Chicago Faculty Letter on The Milton Friedman Institute

6 June 2008

President Robert Zimmer
Provost Thomas Rosenbaum
University of Chicago
5801 South Ellis Avenue Suite 502
Chicago IL 60637

Dear President Zimmer and Provost Rosenbaum:

We were interested to read President Zimmer’s recent message announcing the Milton Friedman Institute, with its 200 million dollar plus endowment and prime real estate location on campus. We understand that the University of Chicago’s association with Friedman has been important to its international reputation during the last four decades, and can imagine that the University reasonably sees benefit in cultivating a continued involvement with his school of economic thought.

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[Patriotism] I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power—-to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect of all mankind; a patriotism that puts country ahead of self; a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. These are words that are easy to utter, but this is a mighty assignment. For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them. –Adlai Stevenson

High gas prices threaten to drain small towns’ populations
By DONALD BRADLEY
The Kansas City Star

The expected exodus from small towns, said Don Macke, a widely considered authority on rural economics and head of the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship in Lincoln, Neb., will be far more profound than the gradual erosion that has been going on since World War II. That decline was due to the country’s shift away from an agrarian economy and a choice for convenience: People wanted to be closer to jobs, shopping and entertainment.

The new flight, Macke thinks, will be more out of necessity.

Most commuters from small towns are high school graduates. They are driving 50 miles or more to work as school cooks, hospital aides, office workers, dental assistants and unskilled factory workers.

“The reality is that those jobs don’t pay all that well,” said Macke, who is also a visiting scholar with the Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “They’re spending up to $500 a month on gas. A third to half is already technically working poor.

“And as gas goes higher, they will get poorer and these towns will soon struggle to hold on to these people.”

Reposted. New York Times today: Rethinking the Country Life As Energy Costs Rise

Though Mr. Boyle finds city life unappealing, it is now up for reconsideration.

“Living closer in, in a smaller space, where you don’t have that commute,” he said. “It’s definitely something we talk about. Before it was ‘we spend too much time driving.’ Now, it’s ‘we spend too much time and money driving.’ ”

Posted 6/23 under Urban Dynamics, at the Lakewood Observer Observation Deck. (It waits for the moderator’s approval.)

…return of the inner ring. If you scratch out a calculation of the difference between driving a sixty mile round trip to work in a 15mpg guzzler and a twenty mile round trip in a 30mpg compact car, the difference in monetary overhead is obvious.

Although employment is widely distributed in NEO, living close to work offers a premium as far as overhead goes that over time may begin to amplify the advantages of living closer to the work site.

I’ll be tracking this issue. It may start to become apparent that there might be a ‘critical mass’ point at which time the inner ring becomes the place to live simply as a matter of the cost of commuting. Also, I do not know, (but could find out!) if a 5,000+ sq.ft Mcmansion is cheaper to climate control than a 50+ year old legacy <3,000 sq.ft, but there too is an opportunity to retrofit or otherwise modernize with the purpose of cutting householder overhead.

(I’ve long maintained that communitarian efforts to help people live within their means at all levels is a hidden factor in stabilizing and sustaining [a city and] civic benefits.)

See also
Christopher Williams: The Per Gallon Cost of White Flight (TPM Cafe)

I offer that high fuel costs and other energy dependent costs will have the effect of bringing people –first at the level of the local community–together to do problem solving. This prospect seems apparent when I play out various scenarios. I’m reminded the pioneers circled the wagons and this was a communal act.

It follows from this idea that processes of social isolation, territoriality, suburban status seeking, and what I would term the situation posing everybody in their own lifeboat, are each related and dynamic consequences of cheap energy.

(Of course Ivan Illich pointed this out in different terms a long time ago.)

George Carlin, truth teller.

The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. [video]

From June 10, 2007: US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs. From the always mind boggling strangemaps blog.

C. Otto Scharmer speaks here of Theory U. It’s a terrific book even if it contains too many non-nutritional exhortations. Coming out of the various vectors of constructivism, integralism, and, modern adult learning theory, both Theory U. and the earlier Presence (Senge, Scharmer, et al.,) both demand and deserve attention and study.

Favorite droll turn on cogito ergo sum*: I think therefore I think I am. Possibly better: I think therefore I think I am thinking.

Best:

You are your epistemology. (Gregory Bateson)

I’ve always stuck with John Lilly’s:

My beliefs are unbelievable.

In this context, why not: “My thoughts are unthinkable.”

???

* But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No. If I convinced myself of something [or thought anything at all] then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that the proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. (Rene Descarte)

Alan Watts:Transcending Duality

Reader: Coleman Barks

This ideological approach is needed to legitimate predominant relations of domination (obtaining primarily among a ruling elite of experts, professionals, politicians, etc., and a well-administered citizenry) as being neutral and natural. Not only does this framework require automatic dismissal of all other modes of political organization, but also discrediting ideas perceived to be their ideological foundations. The result is a series of distortions and misinterpretations, which instead of defending and strengthening American institutions as claimed, weaken and undermine them by systematically occluding their real nature, and redefining them in extraneous “republican” terms–terms abstracted from European political realities brought about by the French Revolution. It is paradoxical that a European thinker such as Schmitt, whose entire career was focused primarily on strictly European problems, provides some of the most powerful conceptual tools to make sense of this peculiar predicament–including the idiosyncratic reaction to his ideas by managerial-liberal apologists, who see him as a major threat to the oxymoronic system they describe as liberal-democracy. 

Trapped within the metaphysical parameters of a unidirectional theory of history that can interpret radical differences only as deviations or pathologies, managerial-liberal thought confronts the 20th and now the 21st century through obsolete, historically-specific categories hypostatized to the level of universality. The result is the homogenization of history and the elimination of particularity. When not dismissing it outright, such a de facto Manichean approach can deal with “the other” only as a variation on the same. Thus, whenever otherness appears, it must either be persuaded back into full sameness or else summarily liquidated as evil. Despite all the rhetoric about openness through “undistorted communication” and interminable dialogue, participation in discussions and deliberations is conditional on the prior acceptance of unchallengeable rules concerning a formal rationality and mode of discourse which automatically exclude all but those intellectuals and professionals fully initiated into the predominant jargon. (5) Consequently, confrontation with “the other” cannot result in any Hegelian transcendence, whereby development takes place by internalizing and thus coopting the opponent’s moment of truth, but freezes radically opposing positions into a stalemate that only perpetuates conflict ad infinitum–pending resolution by other means. It is never a matter of reintegrating the radical opponent’s counter-claims, but of either demanding capitulation or proceeding with outright rejection.

Within such a dogmatic scientistic context pretending to be ideologically neutral, history becomes straightjacketed as an ontogenetic reconstruction of the triumphal march of managerial-liberal thought. Particular categories developed within particular contexts to explain particular phenomena are automatically integrated within the predominant universalist framework to apply anywhere, anytime. The same happens with particular political ideologies. Thus, competing systems such as Nazism, fascism and communism–and now even Islamic integralism–are not only systematically misinterpreted, but, like liberalism, also universalized as permanent threats to a managerial liberalism hypostatized as the natural outcome of evolution and, therefore, as normal and natural.

Uses and abuses of Carl Schmitt
Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen

Another excerpt under the fold.

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