The goal of the Wedge is to separate stimulus from response.
When an ecosystem functions well, it’s homeostasis; if it’s in decline or in the midst of unsustainable growth (as with cancer), then it’s heading into trouble. The system could end up in a state of constant vigilance and, to use [Justin] Feinstein’s term, become allostatic [attempting to return to a prior state of homeostasis] and never return to normal.
"The economy" (that most dangerous of abstractions) can be seen as a sub-ecosystem. But then like all such systems, it's never static, completely "in balance." And for the last ~200 years or so it's behaved much like a cancer, has it not?
So if the immune system uses the same chemical hardware that creates feelings in our brains and influences our behavior in the world, then how much of a stretch is it to say that our immune system is conscious? What if instead of assuming that the immune system is just a machine, we give it a chance to have a semblance of cognition? Obviously the immune system can’t have the sort of complex emotions or thoughts that you or I experience, but even a shard of that subjectivity is powerful.
Alas, in 2020, one story about our collective future that’s becoming increasingly ubiquitous— and maybe even appealing to those inclined to resignation— starts with the opening line “we’re doomed” (or, in the vernacular, that we’re “fucked” or “screwed”). I hear this kind of declaration from a substantial and rapidly growing proportion of the students I teach. I respond to these young people by saying, as I say to Ben and Kate, that humanity is in fact doomed only if we collectively choose to be doomed. [My italics.]
Society therefore needs ingenuity to get ingenuity, which means it is both an input to and output of the economic system. (Surprisingly, this claim often perplexes people. But a moment’s reflection shows that many economic factors are both input and output—for example, physical and human capital.
Might humans, or intelligent life in whatever form, play that same role in the cosmological, universal evolutionary scheme of development? Might we in some way represent this feedback loop for the universe itself? Could our reflection on the evolutionary process itself be an essential element not only in fulfilling the next stage of our own development but in creating the next novel stage of cosmogenesis? [James N.] Gardner’s hypothesis is one of the most original—and compelling—evolutionary speculations that I have come across in some time.
Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.
And this was written before January 6. The "angry mob," encouraged by ambitious politicians and special interests, remains in waiting. The outcome--whether democracy and the rule of law will survive in the U.S.--remains open.
Ian Kershaw, has said, “Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. Though he never attained majority support in free elections, he was legally appointed to power as Reich Chancellor just like his predecessors had been, and became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world.” The historian John Lukacs shares this view: Hitler “may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history of the modern world. The emphasis is on the word popular because Hitler belongs to the democratic, not the aristocratic, age of history.”
A reminder: Germany went from a democratic state with a model (in many ways) constitution to one of the worst political regimes in history, all without a coup or violent revolution, as Kershaw notes.
In 1949 the average life expectancy [in China] was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012, life expectancy (2 words) was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.
These figures go a long way in explaining why China is feeling its oats these days.
It is a key sign of danger when we expect that others should change in response to our change. This signals a lapse on our part, back into self-absorption. Why so? Because the moment we begin to feel that we need others to change before we can be free of our troubled, afflicting thoughts and feelings, we have either lost the joy we felt when we experienced our change of heart or else we never experienced that change at all. We’re back in our self-absorbed condition or we never got out of it. Anyone free of that condition enjoys an emotional freedom that no external circumstance can destroy—including the reactions of other people.
Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.
