Freedom Placebo

The political and religious rhetoric by those who claim to support "freedom" seems to be effective in the same manner as a placebo effect; the power is in the belief of the claim, not in its truth.

Separate Illusions

While recognizing selected elements of any grouping or system are helpful, they often mask the aggregated reality from where they were plucked, damaging an appropriate and unharmed binding view of existence.

Misplaced Power of Names

When contemplating things like souls, mermaids and phlogiston, it's always important to remember that naming a mirage doesn't make it real.

Complementary Dependence

Added insight into the placebo effect might come from seeing it as just a single example of the improvement one experiences when given any kind of positive attention by others, including things like respect, encouragement, compassion, love, gifts--and anything else perceived as a positive gesture from another.

Incidental Weather

It's interesting how inclement is used almost exclusively to describe weather and clement is never used at all--in any context.

Pretend Timelessness

When it comes to creations as diverse as dictionaries, religions, philosophies, and rules of law, we too often fail to remember that legitimacy dissolves if they are not regularly updated. We create these things to meet temporary perceived needs and, therefore, they must be updated regularly as conditions change and information improves. We should never see ourselves as beholden to anything we create.

Dirty Money

It is a tidy truism that no one deserves to be dirt poor or filthy rich.

Erroneous Equine Ingenuity

Some people use their impression of "horse sense" to measure veracity, vastly embellishing their ingenuity.

"The mind of a horse is a very limited concern relying almost entirely upon memory. He rivals our politicians in that he has little real intellect." -Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Peace Out of Water

How we approach things like money, education, business, legal processes, religion, literature, science, and more have at their cores the idea that conflict is to be celebrated as the crowning achievement of human behavior. It is a bitter paradox that so many also claim peace can be produced by these adversarial systems driven by dispute.

Clearly Wrong

Astrology: Taking as valid the conclusions reached when using a clear night sky as a Rorschach test.

The Genius of Insanity

Genius is sometimes described as the ability to make connections where others can't, but so is insanity.

Physical Exemption

To assert free will as valid, there must also be a companion claim asserted as true that molecules and atoms become exempt from the laws of physics when they come together to form a human.

We're Doing It Wrong

It should be no surprise that we are such a mess when we are allowed to be in love with only one person while praised when hating many.

Quality of Information

Those who claim the past is better than the present --"wisdom of the ages," in this case--are mistaken. The quality of information we have *improves* with time and the best information is what we should always use when making decisions.

Plus, making the case that any people from any point in time should be given the ability to control what happens to future generations should be dismissed outright. No one should be beholden to people who have been long dead. 

 

Loyalty Unearned

Why do so many insist on loyalty to a country when no such assertion is made in regard to other human constructions like churches, schools, corporations and social clubs? It seems to me that loyalty needs to be constantly sought, not demanded, for any of the elements of society we create for ourselves. To me, countries shouldn't get a pass. To demand loyalty is, at least partially, to admit it's not warranted based on merit.

The Problem of Scope

There is an concept about how we humans misconstrue contrasting measurements of all kinds that I've often tossed around in my head without coming up with a really good way to express it concisely. Part of the problem is the limitation of language that fails to provide me the words I need. But, here it is as best as I can describe at the moment...

The idea centers on how we see things much "closer" to us than is actually the case (opposite to the familiar warning on car door mirrors). I think it's true for things that are very small and very large. The distance (or space or interval or scope or other similar term) between the "I" we perceive of ourselves and the sun, for example, is foreshortened by our brains by default. Similarly, the "distance" between the perception of oneself and something really tiny like an atom is also foreshortened, for lack of a better term. In both cases, I think we comprehend these things as much "closer" to the more commonplace scale of things that describe each of us than they really are.

This problem of comprehension tends to make us mis-perceive anything more than a short "distance" from us. Look at the sun. It seems so close, yet it is 93 million miles away. That distance is so massive that if someone traveled a mile per minute through space, it would take over 176 years to get there. How can something that far away produce so much heat that we can feel it here? I think it's literally incomprehensible, forcing us to perceive it as closer in order to comprehend it at all. (And this problem gets even worse when we think of galaxies and the universe.)

I think we have a similar problem with objects that are really small, causing us to think of them as larger than they really are in order to get any sense at all of them, skewing them like a flat map of the earth make Greenland and Iceland look huge (but not for the same reason). 

The same is true for other items as diverse and money and time. Once numbers get too small or too large--and that threshold is really low, I think--we automatically "squeeze" the scale to bring the numbers closer to us, and by "us" I mean the commonplace sense of the size and scope of oneself. What we perceive as the space between 1 and 2, for example, is not proportional to the space we perceive between 2 and +/- 10 million--or any other really large or small number. We tend to falsify those very small/very large figures as "closer" than they really are.

While we can do math that will take care of this problem when working with raw numbers, our perception issues plays a big role in the decisions we make about how we run our lives and our societies. The time it takes to do something or the differences in wealth between rich and poor, noting just two examples, are areas where this mis-perception problem causes us to make faulty decisions about all kinds of things ranging from how much interest and tax rates matter to levels of deforestation and climate change.

I'm not sure if there is a solution, but I do think we need to acknowledge the problem in order to work on one.

Pushing Fear

This whole idea that fear is somehow a good thing has always bothered me. I can think of nothing I've ever read or heard from anyone reputable that fear is a state of mind from which to make good decisions. Anyone in a state of fear is in a degraded mental state, not an enhanced one. For the religious folks among us to push fear as a virtue is incorrect on its face.

No Regulations For Carriages

Pretend for a moment that when the automobile was invented we retained the word "carriage" for it. After all, it was just a non-horse-drawn carriage. Then pretend that the U.S. Constitution had within it a declaration that the right for anyone to own a "carriage" would "not be infringed."

Character and Hate

How we treat people who are easy to hate is a test of our character.

Dictating To Our Descendants

Why do we think it's a good idea for our lives to be dictated by people who died two centuries ago? What about 1,000 years ago, or 2,000 years ago? Do we think we should have the right to do the same to our descendants?