The following is a discussion between two trusted and esteemed colleagues
PARTICIPANTS
Meshed Gears • Eric Arnow
- Eric ArnowMeshed Gears That's an excellent summary. My only hesitation is that some leftist elements in Russia don't like Putin's relationship with Oligarchs, and his failure to stop the coup in Ukraine, and his frequent equivocation. Eg, his willingness to meet Biden in a public meeting, which he backtracked on, and his acquiescence to continued seizure of Russian diplomatic properties on the US. Please look up the Essence of Time movement. Also, most Russians consider Gorbachev to be a traitor as well, willing dupe of the US/NATO.
- Meshed GearsEric Arnow I know how Gorbachev is perceived. Having studied the period and met him, and discussed the era with Shevardnadze, I strongly disagree. While Gorbachev was naïve and over trusting of promises from the West, he was dealing with chaos instigated by the US and the inept and self-damaging responses by the previous leadership. Gorbachev almost managed to recreate the Soviet Union along the democratic and cooperative lines intended by Stalin and opposed by the successors of Khrushchev and Malenkov. The new constitution was agreed and awaiting ratification when the economy and political structures came under attack, rendering everything Gorbachev had achieved moot.I know and sympathize with Kurginyan's Essence of Time's primary raison d'être, but I think we are on the cusp of either total destruction or a very different, and very much better future (See my http://bit.ly/Evaluism “Evaluism”), and such times of transition are fraught with extreme peril, as the flailing death-struggle of the old order threatens our very survival, rather than merely the outcome of the transition.While I loathe Putin's reintroduction of the church, and adherence to private capitalism (as opposed to democratically controlled state bank capitalism as practiced in China), and the disastrous effect that this has had on Russian society, the reality is that he has eliminated most of the original семибанкирщина (Semibankirschina) responsible for looting the assets of the USSR, modernized and rebuilt the economy and production capacity of the CIS, and managed Western intervention rather well. Russia is far stronger than it has been for almost half a century as a result of Putin's leadership and the remaining oligarchs are extremely aware that Putin is able to topple them should they step out of line.I don't think I can remember a single instance where Putin has ever acted differently from what he has committed to, let alone deceptively. That does not mean that he doesn't change his mind, any successful organism does that, adapting to changes, responding to challenges, and grasping opportunities. I see such criticism as invalid, attacking what is the highest and best strategy while retaining honor. It seems to me that anyone objecting to Putin on these grounds is either very foolish or acting with malice.Hard as it is to reconcile, Putin is simultaneously a brilliant detail-oriented, bottom-up strategist and a pragmatic top-down realist. As far as global political leadership goes, he is undoubtedly the most intelligent and educated by far. Putin appears to be fully aware that should the CIS oppose the USA directly, the costs will be carried by both regions, and if it came to thermonuclear war, humankind. Instead he works with the contradictions inherent in his opponents' public and private positions, and their internal tensions, to weaken their resolve and undo their schemes, while benefiting from the huge difference in purchasing parity. For example, the USA wants Europe as an ally and bulwark against the CIS and PRC, but expects Europe to carry the vast costs of ever-increasing sanctions on Russia, soaring defense spending, as well as the enormous burden of supporting the shattered remnants of the Ukraine. Putin does not need to do anything other than maintain his position, which costs little, as he would be making the same investments to be ready if the US were stupid enough to ignite a regional war, while benefiting from the development of indigenous capacity without competition due to sanctions. Speaking of regional wars, modelling since 2018 reflects that the CIS (or PRC) would dominate any regional conflict with the USA, due partly to the extreme wastefulness inherent in the USA's monopolistic defense industry, partly to the USA's abandonment of technological superiority and engineering competence in favor of profiteering and value engineering, and partly to the USA's perceived need to maintain a ruinously expensive global presence.The CIS continues to benefit from the fixed price agreements on oil and gas sales to the PRC which Putin negotiated near the peak price in 2015, and is taking payment in industrial goods to build the GDP of the CIS while eliminating most dollar denominated debt (and investments). By building ties with, and working with the PRC, Putin has ensured that the CIS will remain a significant member of the coming multi-polar order. The reality is that, on its current trajectory, the USA will not. That is not because of anything Putin wants or has done, but because the USA has consistently acted against the interests of everyone else, without ever counting the costs to itself.The leftists who don't like Putin have missed all of this. The world is in transition. This increases dangers and opportunities. Putin is a competent leader, able to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of external and internal forces, while making the CIS as a whole stronger, and gaining it friends who know that, unlike the USA which is only able to inspire fear, but not respect, that the CIS can be trusted to be consist and supportive. This has great value in and of its own right.In the unlikely event that any humans survive the ongoing destruction of the ecosphere and we somehow avoid extinction due to thermonuclear war, once the turmoil settles the people of the CIS will be in a prime position to build on the solid foundation established under Putin's leadership.Eric ArnowMeshed Gears Thanks MG, that's a brilliant well thought out reply. You might want to submit it as an article on the GVP website.
- Meshed GearsEric Arnow Patrice has a standing invitation to use any of my writings as he sees fit.
Patrice Greanville And so we have, and are the richer for it. Thank you, Meshed Gears, thank you Eric Arnow.
Addendum
The following material, by Meshed Gears (aka Hermit) is of obvious interest to us all.
Evaluism
Canonical URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L4P6oMbTCjyf69WJFKPx9mEyoemGbguUGFAZczKdk-U
Short URL: http://bit.ly/Evaluism “Evaluism”
© Hermit 2020 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International LicenseEvaluism is the conscious adoption of an adaptive process that seeks to recursively optimize the value to the environment, ecology, future societies, current society, and individuals (in that order) of any action taken by society or individuals within that society based on a combination of the “platinum rule” and Marxian distribution.
On the one hand, morality is based on our ability to empathize, and is an entirely situational rule of thumb on how to behave normatively in that society without wasting too much time thinking about it, taught to infants by society. Morality is reflexive.
Ethics are considered and so vastly superior but also more expensive than morality. Ethics have developed over time but still lag our technological capacity, largely because of the idiocy of people affirming personal projections of primitive morality in the guise of religion.
Medicine has arguably contributed more to the development of ethics than all the priests and philosophers of all the societies that have ever existed*, but medical ethics alone (Which might be summarized in evaluation priority order 1 Do no harm that can be avoided 2 Do as much good as you can 3 Confidentiality first but the public must be protected as well 4 Explicit consent and respect autonomy but assume implied consent if not contraindicated by prior instructions when patient is not able to communicate 5 Justice for patients and for society in that order.) are not sufficient to care for humans within a framework of societies that are mathematically provably dependent for their very existence on equality and sustainability for their continued existence. Refer Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas, Eugenia Kalnay (2014-05). "Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies". Ecological Economics. Volume 101, Pages 90-102, Elsevier, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.02.014 accessed 2017-08-19). The HANDY Model is supported by recent analyses of other cultures not included as the basis for the model, most recently, the peer-reviewed studies of inequality and unsustainability in the Bronze Age, which confirms the model's powerful predictive capacity (e.g. Mittnik, Alissa, Ken Massy, Corina Knipper, Fabian Wittenborn, Ronny Friedrich, Saskia Pfrengle, Marta Burri et al. "Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe." Science 366, no. 6466 (2019): 731-734. Accessed https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6466/731.full 2019-12-11). If it is not already too late, and it probably is, the HANDY model shows that we need to embed this awareness into our ethical systems if humanity is to have any future at all.
When evaluating actions on an ethical basis, we need to consider the right of all things to be what they are, sharing in what there is, in order to optimize their existence to the fullest extent possible while not impinging on the rights of other things. In a universe like ours, where constraints exist, this is always going to create conflicts. Interacting well in such a universe requires one to take steps to minimize those conflicts to the greatest extent possible.It is tautological that each entity of whatever nature should be recognized to possess an inherent entitlement to a share of the things needed for it to survive (whether a bacteria needing space, temperature, humidity, nutrients, and atmosphere or a human with more complex requirements), and anything which conflicts with this has to be ethically evaluated and prioritized if such claims are to be ethically justifiable. This is a concept that has been absent from most human systems to date, which has tended to justify existing distributions obtained by force or guile, neither of which can be ethically justified. From this, it follows that any system purporting to an ethical basis needs to be grounded in the intersection of "the greatest good for the greatest number" moderated by the strict application of "the platinum rule" (treat others as they would prefer to be treated, so long as this does not require you to do things you consider personally ethically unacceptable, and if they cannot tell you how they would wish to be treated, treat others by your best assessment of how they would seek to be treated), and based on the genetic reality that when prioritizing conflicting interests that we need to consider those most like ourselves to those least like ourselves.
Something not recognized by most current ethical systems is that future entities are always going to outnumber the present generation. This applies even to humans, once we have reduced our population to the sustainable 600 million or so (which is an urgent prerequisite to survival), at least if we don't kill ourselves off first. This is why, in addition to a transition to the Marxian ethical approach based on "to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities" [Marx, Karl (1875). Critique of the Gotha Program], we have to place conservation of the biosphere above current interests. What the Hermits refer to as "Evaluism".
The most successful system for achieving progress to date is “the scientific method” which might best be described as an anarchic and incremental process of applying rigorous criticism and feedback by competent actors to predictive models in order to minimize error over time. If we hope to deliberately benefit from such methods on a human scale, and given the complexity of modern society and our current precarious existence in the midst of a human-caused (anthropic) extinction event, it is probably a prerequisite to our survival as a civilization and a species, we need to develop methods that are able to apply such criticism and feedback to human institutions.
Digital communication platforms embedding identity, reputation, direct voting, revocable proxies within a framework applying weighting for proximity (the voices of those closest to an issue should count more), involvement (the voices of those most affected by an issue should count more) and testable expertise (or perhaps educational or experience equivalents) (the voices of those most expert in dealing with a particular type of issue should count more) provide a suitable methodology. When implementing a government based on such principles, representatives and rulers are no longer required. Where functionaries are required, they can be hired through a consultative process, and serve at the public pleasure.
Coupling such governance with a Universal Much Better than Basic Income, guaranteed to satisfy everyone’s’ Maslow’s Pyramid to the fullest extent possible with money, and supplementing this with an agency with a broad remit to identify and eliminate unnecessary hardship to the fullest extent possible with money, will rapidly eliminate need and hardship. Coupling this with an APT (Automated Payment Tax) and EAT (Exponential Asset Tax) and converting existing organizations to publicly owned cooperatives will rapidly diversify the benefits of ownership, eliminate inequalities, and optimize sustainability, while massively increasing the wealth of humans as a whole.*Religion stands squarely opposed to this noble effort. As Joseph Cambell put it, "Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modem men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modem life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk. " Joseph Cambell (1960), "The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology", Secker Warburg, London Accessed https://archive.org/stream/PaleolithicGods/paleolithic%20gods_djvu.txt 2017-08-19.
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