Debris From Millenium

Sunday, October 25, 2009, 9:26am EDT
William Wise assets to be sold at Raleigh auction

The assets of William Wise, a Raleigh man accused of operating a $68 million Ponzi scheme, will be auctioned off Nov. 18 at the North Raleigh Hilton.

Iron Horse Auction Company, Inc. of Rockingham and Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales Ltd. of Hillsborough are handling the auction, which Iron Horse says in a news release “will feature 2luxury Mercedes-Benz automobiles and a Cadillac Escalade, a high-end wine collection, women's designer accessories, custom high-end designer diamond jewelry and watches, original art and collectibles.

Bidders can participate in the auction at 1 p.m. Nov. 18 in person or via the Internet.
The proceeds from the auction will be used to pay back investors who lost money in the alleged Ponzi scheme.

The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission filed suit earlier this year
against Millennium Bank, a Raleigh-based entity that allegedly collected at least $68 million from investors who believed they were buying high-yield certificates of deposits sold by a bank based in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The suit accused Millennium of diverting the funds to a bank account from which Wise and his wife allegedly withdrew more than $13 million for personal use.

Millennium and a number of associated companies never bought any CDs, the suit alleges. Wise, who is accused of spearheading the operation, was one of several defendants i

Preface: Keep on Keeping On

In the late 1940s I started wondering why we acted the way we did. In the 1950s I put in my time in the Army and then in the Civil service and wasn't reassured by either. By the 1960s, after I got a Ph.D. and worked in industry again, I was sure that we had collectively lost our sanity.
Ever since then I have been figuring out why we evolved the way we did, and what we are evolving into.

By the early 21st century I had gotten far enough that I was sure we were approaching the "Decline and Fall of Western Civilization" so I wasn't too surprised when the economy of Western Civilization crashed in 2008 and Barack Hussein Obama was elected President of the United States.

Obama's inaugural address restored my hope that we would continue to evolve, and that we would reach a global society that was egalitarian and ecologically responsible. More specifically, I revived my hope that the future would be something like the Utopia I had described in a novel that I published on the web. I had put some of the arguments for that expectation on a blog .

Obama is so charismatic a speaker that I had even hoped, for a while, that we could reach that Utopia without first going through the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization. I am beginning to suspect, however, that we will not be that lucky.

The right-wing elite (i.e, the most senior corporate bureaucrats) have come to realize that the equality Obama believes in would not just be a matter of fancy rhetoric they could tolerate, but it might actually happen. That would eliminate the basis of their elite status, which is having more money than they need to survive, and essentially destroy their identity.

This is because they can only get significant amounts of money by defrauding each other; because the industrial activity that provided wealth to the previous generation has relocated to other countries. The only thing the right-wing has left is fraud, and they are defending that desperately.

The senior government bureaucrats (the left-wing elite) have the titles and functions of government for their status symbols; and if they can drag out the economic crisis long enough they will outlast the right-wing elite and be the only game in town.

The right-wing elite perceives Obama's charisma as the left's primary weapon, so they are focused on doing everything in their power to destroy him. They are so convinced that he will destroy them that they are willing to risk the destruction of Western Civilization. If I were Obama I would be careful to avoid assasins.

At the same time Obama has alienated the left-wing establishment elite by not being enthusiastic enough about their special interests. During recent years, while the left has been out of power, it has survived by becoming attached to special issues like environmentalism or anti-imperialism. Unlike past generations of the left, the contemporary left does not favor a general upward-mobility of the non-elite (Toynbee's "proletariat") because that would cause the elite government bureaucrats to be relatively downwardly-mobile. This is why contemporary left-wing intellectuals identify with the government bureaucratic elite and their power to regulate, rather than with the upward mobility of the non-elite lower-middle and working classes.

The Left supports Obama's ideals with their rhetoric, but their active political support will be weak unless it coincides with their more specific interests. The only positive feature is that those specific interests, like environmentalism, are at least directed toward species survival.

However, the Utopia I envisioned requires both egalitarianism and environmental responsibility.

The net result may well be that there is little incentive to create a significant change in the way we think about the things we do. Even Obama thinks that we do not need to change the basis of our economic infrastructure, only make minor regulatory reforms. But that does not take sufficient consideration of our recent evolutionary history. Without significant change the following will happen:

The financial industry will resume the risky behavior that resulted in the financial crash of 2008 because there is no more effective way to make a fast profit when it works, and it will work for a while before it collapses again. When it does they expect to be able to walk away from the wreckage whole by blaming the result on the regulators.

The military-industrial complex will promote military action against the Moslem Jihadists and the Bolivarian populist movements because other kinds of manufacturing have gone overseas and the majority of Americans will have stopped consuming as many "tchotchkes" or status symbols. The only kind of consumption the military-industrial complex can create by itself is the consumption of military supplies.

Worst of all the Chinese will have to stop buying our bonds because the American proletariat won't have the spare money to buy the tchotchkes that are made in China. The corporate bureaucrats will have dissipated it in gambling on derivatives because that gambling will be the "fast money" they need to maintain their status.

This will result in an economic system that remains out of control, and a collapse leading to a Decline and Fall will be inevitable. There is little we can do to make the structural changes that would prevent these things from happening.

The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization is not necessarily bad for our species if you look at it on an evolutionary timescale.
While it will produce a global anarchy which might last a few decades, it will not be fatal to our species. We will eventually reorganize ourselves and, following the Toynbee sequence, resume our evolution toward some kind of Utopia.
The austerity required by the decades of economic collapse will encourage environmental responsibility. We may make or remake evolutionary errors, but I have faith in the ability of our species to recover from them. After all, we almost recovered from the Neolithic transition this time, and we are even more likely to succeed next time.

But while we can have some confidence in the long-term evolution of our species, the immediate future is never certain. We can understand that a Utopia must be egalitarian and ecologically responsible without being creative enough to figure out what kind of infrastructure will allow a global population to manage itself that way.

We can see, by watching our politicians respond to the contemporary crisis, how little they are motivated by the common good. The people who run our infrastructure, corporate and government alike, operate on the basis of: "I'm all right Jack, f..k you".

So there is not much hope in just passively waiting for evolution to drag us into the future, willy-nilly. We may get to a Utopia whether or not we know what we are doing, but the more we ignore reality the longer and more painful it will be for most of us.

There is a way that an individual can mitigate the pain.

In the research I did to find out what we were doing as a species I also found out what certain individuals were doing that made them have a significant, and significantly positive, effect on the evolutionary history of our species.
There were individuals like Jesus and Mohammed and Gautama Buddha who expressed themselves in terms of religion. There were individuals like Mozart, and Bernard Shaw, and Steve Jobs who expressed themselves in terms of art or technology. In effect, they were accidentally taking the next evolutionary step that was too difficult for the rest of us.

I looked for the thing that happened that made them behave the way they did, and discovered that it involved getting close to death. I used a familiar phrase to characterize the process: "Death and Transfiguration".

With that in mind, I looked carefully at the way our species had been behaving in the last few millenia and found that we have been consistently, if not always efficiently, evolving in the direction of Utopia. When I added in the idea of a "death and transfiguration" process, I found I could create a model that explained not only our past evolution, but reasonable expectations for the future.

I even found a way of evolving that didn't involve death.

What we now have the choice of doing, and what those of us who can should be doing, is evolving individually; both to make it more likely that we can survive the post-crash anarchy and that we can be part of the "creative minority" (in Toynbee's sense) that creates the post-industrial civilization that will characterize the next era of human social evolution.

The trick is in the title of the old gospel song: "Keep On Keeping On".

The point of the rest of this discussion will be to provide a scientific way of explaining (1) how we evolved into the present state of affairs and (2) how individuals can evolve such that they are not constrained by the beliefs of the people surrounding them. In order to do this we will also have to explain the errors in the contemporary theories of physics and evolution that seem to produce paradoxes.

This may be difficult for some people to accept, but the future will be difficult for those people to accept anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Working On It

I'm working on a version of the evolving Utopia essay that will take into account the desperate efforts of the Republicans to stop anything that Obama proposes. That means that I might not put up any interesting entries for a while.

Sorry about that.

Evolving Utopia -- Afternote 2

I checked it, and the novel can be found on the web at http://utopia.karleklund.net

A long essay with more detail about how the P-matrix works is also still on the web at:
http://we.karleklund.net

Both could probably use some updating, but I don't have the ambition. I would suggest that if you are seriously interested in reading them that you download them now. There is the swine flu epidemic running around and I've just had my 80th birthday. If I don't keep paying the annual fees they'll vanish off the internet.

Evolving Utopia -- Afternote

I mention the novel "Utopia" and a non-fiction essay that has more details. If you are interested in reading them send me an email and we'll discuss it. I may have to charge you for postage.

karlek@mac.com or karlek76@gmail.com

Evolving Utopia Part 25

Part 25: Conclusions


The conclusion of this analysis is that it is possible to eventually evolve into a global civilization that is egalitarian, ecologically responsible and creative. In addition, Barack Hussein Obama has already contributed to that result and is likely to do more.
But it is not clear that we are going to achieve a Utopia in my lifetime, nor Barack Hussein Obama's term of office because we are not yet ready to stop basing our economy on tchotchkes, things which display the unnecessary or wasteful use of resources.


We have been doing that since the neolithic when we invented agriculture and the hierarchical society we thought was necessary to make agriculture function. We invented tchotchkes as devices to identify those who were in charge. That caused us to spend several thousand years maiming and killing each other to allow someone to get to the top of the pile, and wasted a lot of our resources to demonstrate that they were there.
The big difference in the last few centuries is the number of people who can accumulate tchotchkes and claim to sit at the top of the pile; now groups of people, currently bureaucrats, occupy that position rather than a handful of kings and emperors.

That's more democratic, but it is the step before everyone sits at the top of the pile because we are all equal. In the tradition of the Industrial Revolution we do that by having everyone waste resources by accumulating tchotchkes, and there aren't enough resources to do that. We have to do something to break that tradition, and we have little experience in doing that.


We've also wasted a lot of intellectual resources spent to justify oneupmanship, to make it "natural". If anything is natural it is the mutually conformist system we lived in during the Paleolithic, but there are too many of us now to use that.
Even if post-neolithic stratification is ingrained in our traditions There is a way to change. We can bring Western Civilization to a complete collapse, so we have to start again from scratch. Then we might realize we ought to be cooperating rather than making things difficult for one another.


If Western Civilization does collapse there will be a general chaotic anarchy, because Westerners have organized the world for their convenience. However that will be traumatic only for those who depend on civilization and the exploitation of the external proletariat. The external proletariat themselves will probably not be much worse off than they are now and will probably survive to follow the creative minority who set the example [Toynbee's "mimesis"] by building the next global civilization.
Even the lower strata of the Western establishment who can no longer survive by serving the elite, can minimize the trauma by avoiding the conventions of their stratum, reducing the symbolic waste in their lives, and keeping their transactions ethical. If they take the opportunity and make an effort to be autonomous their expectations will be more realistic and their personal solutions more creative.


And there is just the faint chance that the leadership of Barack Hussein Obama may cause Western Civilization to try to avoid a complete collapse by finding a way to reach a stable civilization in a gradual way. That is extremely unlikely, but not totally impossible. To the extent that the populist governments look to global rather than parochial values they can move in the right direction.
The main objection to that process will be that it defies "tradition". However, we have shown that hierarchical systems are so unstable that they have to be regarded as "make do" solutions. Few are so stable that they last more than decades or centuries at best. The real human "tradition" is the way we organized in the paleolithic, which was stable for 50 to 100 millenia. All we have to do is use modern technology to make global consensus possible.

In any case we can feel good that our descendants will probably live in a Utopia that is egalitarian, ecologically responsible and creative. If we have to suffer the destruction of our present civilization and a period of anarchy afterward, it is merely the price we pay for using the shortcut of autocratic religion and politics to solve the problem of coping with agriculture and technology.

And we always have the opportunity to make better choices.

Evolving Utopia Part 24

Part 24: An Alternative Way


A lot of what passes for science is done in fancy laboratory buildings with expensive equipment, and the average person is in no position to challenge it. But we don't have to take it as seriously as the so-called scientists do. What ordinary people can do is use common sense. If some kind of study promises a golden age of technology, then just be patient and that golden age will either come or it won't.
If it just fades away because nobody else gets excited about it, the odds are that it was simply a mistake rather than that the establishment is suppressing it.


The science that seems radical in this essay is not unfamiliar because it was suppressed, it is because it is running against the tide. No scientist wants to oppose Spencerian evolution because the noisy opposition comes from religious fundamentalists, and most scientists would rather not be noticed than be tagged with that lable. Most scientists earn their living in big institutions and they have to go along with the mainstream for fear of losing their jobs. Even tenured academics are reluctant to be unconventional.

I'm retired, so I won't lose my job for what I say. I'll just be ignored. And I do have a Ph. D. in Nuclear Physics from a prestigious institution, so I can use mathematical arguments that are fairly exotic; but that doesn't help much because those who are likely to know enough to be critical aren't interested and those who make their living at evolution don't understand the argument.


Religion is a different matter. It seems strange to me, for instance, that religious experts feel free to tell God what God can and cannot do. But the profession of theological expert is 10,- 12,000 years old, and the tradition is that the professionals can boss God around. Science is a more modern profession so, for all its faults, scientists seldom try to boss nature around. The tradition is that you are supposed to observe things and figure out an explanation that fits the facts.

And the facts that religion has to fit are those of ordinary life, so anybody has the right to play that game. If your religion makes you feel comfortable with life, and there isn't anything about it that contradicts your experiences of ordinary life, then it works for you and you might as well stick with it. It probably wouldn't work for me, but there's no point in your bothering about that.

Now if your religion makes you go around bowed down with guilt, or if you aren't comfortable in its rituals or dogmata, you might as well either change it or become autonomous. The odds are that if the experts in your brand of theology haven't convinced everyone in the world to go along with them (and I mean everyone, not just 80%) then their idea of God isn't God's idea of God. Don't take their expertise seriously.

If my ideas about God make you uncomfortable, then don't take them seriously either.


Now it may well be that unless you are autonomous, deliberately or by accident, you can't consider my ideas about God (or the universe, for that matter) without being uncomfortable. If so you may want to consider becoming autonomous.


The last page described Steve Job's experience. Robert Graves was nearly killed in WW1. Shaw was secretive about his first "death and transfiguration" experience, but more public about the one just before writing Ceasar. Jesus was crucified and Gautama nearly starved to death.

But there may have been lots of people who didn't "almost" die, but actually died, and there may have been lots more who weren't ready to take advantage of the experience. So we have no idea how effective the "death and transfiguration" process is. A handful of examples in 10,000 years doesn't sound encouraging to me.


Also, as far as we know, none of these people deliberately had a "death and transfiguration" experience for the purpose of becoming autonomous. For all we know that may not even work. The superego may have to be surprised or it will defend against the experience. It would be embarrassing to go to the trouble of nearly dying and have it be a waste of time.

But there is another approach.


What the superego does to keep us conformist is to use the Oedipal Trauma to let us experience a sense of fear when it thinks we are going to be nonconformist. That kind of fear is often called "free floating anxiety" or, more poetically, "existential dread". It is quite unpleasant and, if you don't understand what it is about, your normal reaction is to avoid it at all costs.

The superego is very ingenious, so it doesn't only use free floating anxiety. If you have any fear, practical or neurotic, the superego will amplify the fear so that it makes your ego easier to control.


The trick, and it is pretty simple, is to simply experience the specific fear, free floating anxiety or existential dread until you get used to it and learn that there aren't any practical consequences of not doing what the fear is directing you to do. Eventually you get so that you can experience the fear without reacting to it, and then the fear doesn't control you.

One thing to watch out for: the superego will amplify real fears with real consequences. You ignore them at your peril. Just because you are no longer paralyzed by the idea of crossing the street doesn't mean you should walk out into heavy traffic. Becoming inured to experienced fear should give you the opportunity to use common sense, not ignore it.


Another thing to watch out for is to avoid building your own barriers that will alienate you from reality and yourself. Try to make all of your interactions Ethical and try to avoid being in an elite or non-elite position. Being "one up" or "one down" makes it easier for the superego to create an ideology that will provide a basis for anxiety.


Once you have reduced your sensitivity to existential dread you can learn about its sources. If you sense a twinge of fear associated with a thought or action you can push on it until it becomes clear what the superego wants you to avoid.

This is a very useful technique in research on behavior. Most of the radical ideas in this essay, although they may look like common sense the way I explain them, involved a considerable amount of anxiety before they were clarified. They may even allow you the opportunity of experiencing existential dread just by reading them!

Once you have reached the point where you can use your existential dread, rather than having it use you, you can feel free to explore aspects of these ideas that haven't occurred to me. You certainly won't need me to tell you whether you are autonomous or not.