Written for ExterminatingAngel;

http://www.exterminatingangel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=203&Itemid=118



Revolution Happens

by John Merryman


Humanity is rapidly approaching a crossroads, where we will begin cooperating on a scale that we never have before, or we will descend into a state of warring tribes like we have never seen before. Appeals to the conscience only work on those willing to listen, while it is the less altruistic who need to pay the most attention. If there is one thing that does get people's attention, it's the money.

In 1996, Bob Dole had a campaign slogan, "We want you to keep more of your money in your pocket." The first thought to cross my mind was, 'Thank God it's not my money, or it would be worthless.' The logic of this is that the actual currency doesn't belong to the holder, only its value. The monetary system is a function of government, which in a democracy is the people. Therefore money is actually a form of public commons, similar to a public road system. Instead of transportation, it's a system of economic exchange. While you are in total possession of the section of road you're driving on, its value is due to it being connected to those everyone else is on. So is the value of the money in your pocket due to its broad interchangeability. It is not an issue of socializing wealth, but of understanding what money is to begin with. Your home, business, car, etc. are private property, but the roads linking them are not. Money is more like the public road system, than private property. It provides a broad economic connectivity, without which the economy could not function.

Money has always been a form of public utility (Render unto Caesar...), but because it evolved out of barter and for much of history was minted out of precious metals to gave it inherent value, the issue of function has been confused with the issue of possession. Now all monetary value is a matter of public trust in government accountability and this is being abused to the breaking point. It was only a generation ago that the wealth of governments were still symbolized, if not based on the gold in the treasury. For many countries, it's now how much US dollars and debt they are holding. This is not a stable situation. When the liquidity bubble does burst, faith in the concept of printed money will be shaken to its core. In order to restore faith in an invaluable economic tool, it would be useful to emphasize this public function. There is no longer a gold standard and it is the taxpayer who bears ultimate responsibility for government obligations.

Here is a little history to consider in understanding why we are where we are.

The money supply has to grow along with the economy. Inflation is caused by the supply of money growing too fast, so the law of supply and demand makes it worth less. Interest rates are raised to slow the growth of the money supply, when the economy is reaching peak potential, since the amount of money might expand faster then the economy is able to grow. During the late sixties and seventies, the money supply was allowed to grow faster then the economy in order to pay for Great Society programs, the Vietnam War and the oil crises. By the end of the seventies, inflation was spiraling out of control and Paul Volcker was given the job of taming it by raising interest rates as much as it would take to do the job. This led to a serious recession, but by 1982 inflation had peaked and he could take the pressure off.

There is a minor logical hitch to this scenario, though. By raising interest rates to the point of causing actual economic harm, he was reducing the growth of the economy and therefore the need for money. How do you reduce an oversupply, if you also reduce demand?

The Federal Reserve fine tunes the size of the money supply by buying and selling government debt. To put money into circulation, they buy government debt with fresh money and to take money out, they sell debt they are holding.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected on a platform of what his primary opponent, George Bush, referred to as "Voodoo Economics," i.e. increased spending and tax cuts. The result was a serious increase in deficit spending. Now ask yourself, if the Federal Reserve sells debt to reduce the money supply, wouldn't the Treasury issuing fresh debt have the same effect? By 1982, the deficit was getting close to 200 billion and that was real money in those days. The dramatic growth in deficit spending by the US government was a significant factor in bringing inflation under control.

The borrower/producer/spender is the engine of the economy, with the saver/lender as the fuel tank. While it seems inflation is propelled by those who want to be paid more, both producers and labor, taking it out on borrowers doesn't bring supply in line with demand. Inflation is caused by the government putting too much money into circulation and the reservoir of surplus money in the economy is what is held by the saver. Earnings are taxed more then savings, so tax cuts put money into production, rather than savings. Government borrowing draws money out of savings and spends it in ways that increase and support private sector investment, through increases in services, infrastructure, security, etc. This compounds the demand for money.

At the time, economists were concerned government borrowing would crowd out the private sector, but the government issues whatever people are willing to borrow at the short term rate it sets, by buying back government debt. The problem is long term rates are set by the market and with inflation, people are more inclined to buy assets, than lend money, so the supply of money to borrow is limited and the cost , interest rates, goes up. If there is a lot of money around, but inflation isn't a concern, people lend it for whatever the market pays and long term rates go down. So the secret of our unstoppable prosperity is to have lots of money running through the system, to keep rates down and production up, but not have any start to clog the arteries and cause inflation to rise. The question is finding ever more places to invest and spend it, but the long term productivity of all this growth tends to decline. The result is fewer small business cycles in exchange for a large one.

Normally only as much money can be saved, as can be effectively invested, otherwise it causes inflation of asset prices. So where would all the money the government borrows be going, if the government didn't borrow it? The stock market? Real estate? Inflate the derivatives balloon a little more? The economy is flooded with about as much money as it can hold. If the government wasn't borrowing lots of money and recycling it through the public sector, there would be a lot less money needed all the way around and this would be inflationary. Government debt serves to support the value of the money, as well as the economy.

What will be the long term effect of this borrowing and how will it get paid down? Recently some mid-western states have sold public highways to private investors and they have been turned into toll roads. How soon until Yellowstone goes on the block? Private armies buying surplus warships? It would make sense to tax more savings from those most able to afford it, but this usually causes such people to find other ways of storing wealth. If we were to understand money as a public utility, it might better define how to manage wealth to help the larger community and environment.

In the seventies, the national economy was mostly based in the US and inflation percolated through it, with prices and wages increasing together. Today the global economy keeps prices and wages in check, so consumer inflation is moderate, but low interest rates are creating an enormous speculative bubble among investors. Eventually it will pop and send a tidal wave of surplus money back into the regular economy, driving up prices far more then wages. Until then the gap between the rich and everyone else will continue to expand at ever increasing increasing rates, as inflated asset prices turn investment capital ever more rapidly into play money and more is needed.

In some third world countries, the politicians skim off enormous wealth and we can see it is economically unproductive and socially destructive, yet those running our financial and industrial institutions to do the same and claim it is simply a cost of doing business. Only as much total money can be saved as can be effectively invested, otherwise it is inflationary. So these oceans of private money reduce the ability of the average person to save and invest. Endless wealth accruing to those in positions of power will eventually come to be understood as economically barbaric and we will climb one more step up the evolutionary ladder.

Everyone needs some amount of wealth in order to both be secure and to have a commitment to the larger system. Some need more then others, like a truck needs more road then a car. Those with none have less consideration for society and are governed more by fear then respect. Those at the top need to remember that a stable society is as important to them as to everyone else. If money were thought of as a public utility, it would have definite psychological effects. People might be less inclined to define their personal ego in terms of the size of their bank account and start leaving natural wealth undisturbed, while investing more effort in their communities and environment. A healthy economy, a healthy society and a healthy environment do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Growth is bottom up, not top down, so capitalism is at its most vibrant when wealth is most evenly distributed. The problem with treating the economy like a game of Monopoly is that when one person controls everything, the game is over and you start again. In real life this stage is called revolution.

Money is a public utility, not private property. Pass it on.

This is the most recent incarnation of this attempt to describe reality and the conceptual effects it has;

One of my earliest memories of questioning more than just the dictates of family was sitting in church at about ten years old and vaguely wondering what purpose all that ritual really served. At that age the idea of God seemed so transcendent and religion only seemed to obscure and trivialize it. After several decades of trying to make sense of this world, it seems to me as though life is like an onion. You peel away every layer and finally there is nothing left. We distill away everything that seems transitory about life, searching for some hard little nugget of meaning and when we are done, have so little to show for it. The problem isn't life, the problem is the idea of meaning. Life is dynamic and holistic. Meaning is static and reductionistic. Thought is linear, reality is not. As an organ, the brain evolved for navigation and survival, so it tends to concentrate on the problems. How do we escape the obsessions of our mortality and see through the walls of our own bubble?

To begin with, the four dimensional map of spacetime does not accurately describe the territory. Points, lines and planes supposedly have a zero dimension. Well, 1x0=0. What they really have is a virtual dimension, not zero dimension. While a point can presumably be dimensionless, it is still a specific point of reference. The real zero for geometry would be empty space. It is the potential for any point, not a specific one. Also, three dimensions are the coordinate system of the point these lines cross, not space itself. Any number of coordinate systems, starting from any point, can be used to define the same space. You might say the Israelis and the Arabs use different coordinate systems to define the same land.

Time has two directions. The observer goes from past events to future events. On the other hand, these events go from being in the future to being in the past. To the hands of the clock, the face is going counterclockwise. The three dimensional frame of reference is not moving along an additional dimension. This subjective coordinate system is interacting with other such frames. To quote Newton, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

If we were to build a clock-like device to characterize non-linear motion, say of molecules in water, or people in a crowd, it would have many hands, going in both directions and the cumulative action would cancel out in a general equilibrium. With the concept of time, most of these hands are combined into the face, with a few going in one direction as coordinates for the reference point. Time is a linear measure of motion, not the basis for it.

The unit of time goes from beginning to end, but the process of time is going toward the beginning of the next, leaving the old. The hour on the clock starts in the future and the hand passes from its beginning to its end and then moves on to the next, leaving the previous hour in the past. Days go from dawn to dusk, as the sun moves from east to west, but it is the earth that is rotating west to east and the sunlight is moving through the time zones. Consider a factory. The product moves from start to finish, but the production line is facing the other way, consuming raw material and expelling finished product. This relationship of the process and the unit is one of perspective. A unit at one level is a process at another and vice versa. What matters to the process isn't so much the end product, as it is the energy produced, in wages and profits, calories burned, etc, that propels the process forward, consuming more material.

Our individual lives are units of time going from birth to death, while the process of living goes on to the next generation, shedding the old like dead skin. As life has purpose, rather then meaning, the relationship of the individual life to the larger organism is like that of a sentence to the story. The end is punctuation, rather then destination, as we are connected at both ends and the middle.

The reason time seems like a series of instants is because most motion is effectively at the speed of light and our mind is a process of consuming information and creating conceptual units, called thoughts, otherwise everything would be a blur.

Reality consists of energy recording information. As the amount of energy remains the same, old information is erased as new is recorded. Objective reality is the energy. Time is a function of the subjective information, as past and future do not physically exist because the energy to manifest them is currently tied up in the present. To the photon, there is no time. It contains no record of its past and only has physical direction. It is energy that exists as now. It doesn't exist in the past, or in the future. The concept of time only starts to arise when you attempt to record what these particles do and where they have been. Time cannot be reversed, but it exists as a function of the information being recorded, not of the energy doing the recording.

Time is not so much a projection out from the present event, as it is a coming together of factors to define what is present. The past being those influences which define current order and the future is determined by the energy to motivate that order. Evolution is when order is an open set and absorbs fresh energy, defining it and adapting to it, so that the future is a continuation of the past. Revolution is when order is a closed set, so the energy accumulates elsewhere and the future becomes a reaction to the past. While the past informs us, it also recedes at a rapid rate.

One definition of the arrow of time is that of decreasing usable energy and increasing entropy in a closed system. Keep in mind that a "closed system" is a unit and these processes are the aging of this unit. This relationship of the unit and the process is the basic model that the field of Complexity Theory(www.santafe.edu) has examined in great detail, with top down ordering in a bottom up chaotic environment. Such as the corporate unit in the context of capitalism. It is the individual and the ecosystem. The reason the bottom up context is logically chaotic is that its parameters cannot be defined, or it would become a unit in the next level of context.

Even though we have come to understand there is no preferred frame of reference, when we define space as a three dimensional coordinate system, with a linear graph of motion as a fourth dimension, we are using the perspective of the generic point as the basis for explaining reality, but a more objective description requires understanding how many such points interact. How should we go about considering objective reality, when the very concept of perspective implies a point of reference? Our fundamental process of thought is inherently reductionistic and linear, so how do we reconcile it with a reality that is neither? Temperature is how we conceive of non-linear motion. It is a statistical measure that begins to lose meaning at the molecular level, as individual molecules are moving along particular trajectories and at specific velocities. At the human level, government statistics are a form of temperature reading of economic activity. To the individual, motion is experienced as the linear procession of events, thus our assumption that time is the basis of motion, but to the larger group there is no preferred frame of reference. It is the concept of temperature, the level of activity and energy, that describes non-linear motion.

As politics is the process of organizing and refereeing competing perspectives, it has more in common with the mass motion of temperature then the linear motion of time. While particular movements have their own historical perspective, consideration of the past and concern for the future don't resonate across a fractured and fractious political landscape.

Most of human evolution was as members of a group and this, more then the individual, provided the frame of perspective. As people became ever more aware of their own individuality, the group perspective became the basis for the concept of God, to which the evolution of language embellished and attached narrative structure. As groups intermingled and otherwise interacted with the environment, this mythological structure grew and evolved, while the basic sense of being part of some larger entity remained. The result being these convoluted religious institutions, which people then focus on the aspects of that have particular resonance, be they basic icons or complex texts.

While the religious institution is ordered from the top(God) down, it has evolved from the bottom up, much like the human psyche is based on those elementary childhood experiences, no matter how subjective and particular they might be. The reason that even religion has evolved from the bottom up is that the absolute, that universal state of equilibrium, is basis, not apex. It is the element out of which structure rises, not the plan by which it is formed. The principles which define form are as much compilations of more basic principles as the matter they shape is complex interactions of more basic elements. So the spiritual absolute is not a model of perfection from which we have fallen, but the essence of being and awareness out of which we rise. If we are to view life as a bottom up emergent phenomena, rather then top down ordered intellect, all of life on this planet might be considered as one large organism, ultimately motivated by the most basic sense of being, shining through the varied lenses of diverse individual organisms, with ever folding layers of complexity, both in terms of biological diversity and intellectual ability.

That the institutional description of God focuses on the quality of intelligence, rather then of basic awareness, has an important political consequence because it validates the top down structure. We have developed any number of such structures. They have an organizing purpose and principle to maintain their viability in the chaos of the larger environment, be it the external defense of territory, or the internal provision for the needs of those within it, whether families or nations. In the process of developing this unitary structure, it is easy to overlook the dualistic nature of the forces at work, between the top down order and bottom up process, so that frequently those governing this entity abrogate all rights but their own. Much of human history has been the story of reconciling this top down authority with the organic society it seeks to control. These forces are reconciled within our own civil organization by the fact that the republic is a top down structure, while democracy is a bottom up process. One conservative civil structure, the other, dynamic social organism.

Atheism tends to have the same top down bias, with the assumption that awareness is a property of mental processes and only really emergent in humanity. This prejudice doesn't explain the motivational instincts of all biological organisms. There are two mysteries, life and consciousness. It seems logical that the roots of awareness extend to the very base of biology and these two are one mystery. Awareness is the organizing principle of the central nervous system, rather then a property of it. Knowledge is the subjective ordering system, which we project, like four dimensional spacetime, on reality. Good and bad are not a dual between the forces of light and darkness, but the biological binary code. The intellect rises out of emotion when good/bad becomes yes/no. For the process, they are relative. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken. For the individual, they could well be absolute, at least to the chicken.

While we are possessed of and motivated by this singular sense of being, the world which we are conscious of is one of contrasts, good/bad, yes/no, positive/negative, light/dark, up/down, left/right, inside/outside, male/female, past/future, unit/process, individual/group, absolute/infinite, order/chaos, expanding energy/collapsing mass, cats/dogs, etcetcetc... Even the absolute, as universal equilibrium, is both everything and nothing, as in absolute zero. Then there are the connections, the colors of the spectrum, the complexities of nature and life and society, the neurons of the brain, observer and observation, attraction as well as repulsion and all the other forces holding it together, but not too together. This is because it is all those contrasts and conflicts that give weight and shape to reality. Without all these natural tensions, it would be just a flat line on the heart monitor. Sometimes they do tear everything apart, but often they mesh together in some larger whole.

Our current moral codes evolved as humanity struggled to survive. Now we need to adopt a belief system which respects the environment as much as members of our own species, or else. There is a time in one's life when the father goes from being the model one follows, to the foundation one rises from and humanity is at that stage.

John Brodix Merryman Jr.
Sparks, Maryland
brodix@earthlink.net

As I am more a general theorist, rather then commentator, most of what I have to say is aready contained here.

Not that I don't have quite a number of other ideas, but, it's discussing the basics which interests me most.

Reality is energy recording information. The amount of energy remains the same, so old information is erased as new information is recorded. The thread of time is therefore being woven out of strands pulled from what was previously woven. Time is not a line, but cycles within cycles.

Now is not a point, but what exists. What exists is the energy. The reason we see it as a point is because this energy is traveling at the speed of light and we must quanitize it into packets of logic, called thoughts. As our logical basis increases, it takes less energy to produce each thought. This is one reason time speeds up as we grow older. Now is this quanitization of thought.

Time is a measure of motion, specifically that of an entity relative to its context. As the context is not absolute, it constitutes an opposite direction of time.

The context of any entity is all other entities affected by and affecting the particular object. Whether attraction or repulsion, any two such objects are moving in opposite directions. Therefore the direction of the context, as a whole, is opposite the entity.

As individuals, we think of time as proceeding from beginning to end, but our context is going in the opposite direction. For the individual, birth is in the past and death is in the future, but for the process of life, the future is in the next generation and what is past dies.

Consider a factory. The product moves from intiatation to completion, while the future of the factory isn't in the completed product, but what is to be built.

Past and future are a product of subjective perspective. Objectively there is only what exists.

The past is the closed set of what is ordered(completed). Subject to entropy it loses energy. The present is the open set, that which is ordered, but still absorbing energy. The future is the chaos of random energy.

This is essentially complexity theory applied to the function of time, as a whole. The essential phase transition between order and chaos is that of the present as the transition from the chaos of the future into the order of the past and the order of the past giving definition to the potential of the future.

This all may seem obvious from the perspective of modern theory, but a linear, one dimensional view of time prevails in the popular culture and frankly in much of science, as well, from the linear, beginning to end assumptions inherent in Big Bang theory on down.

(Einstein thought gravity would collapse space to a point, but the gravitational process is constantly radiating energy. If gravity is the collapse of spacetime, than radiation would seem to be a factor in its expansion. If they are balanced and space is ultimately euclidian, as evidence seems to suggest, than might a convective process be at work here? The black hole at the center of our galaxy takes in little matter, could it be the eye of the storm, rather than a physical object? While the smooth nature of the background radiation could be the result of vital processes, such as the transition point that this radiation condenses out hydrogen, rather then the result of a distant event. If space expands, but the universe does not, then this expansion would be exerted back onto gravitational systems and provide the energy currently attributed to missing mass.)

When we understand reality primarily as a process which is constantly creating and consuming units, rather then simply in terms of the units themselves, life will begin to make much more sense, from our own mortality and our part in the community on through our political and economic assumptions.