How would you describe the Republican clique that has stopped Obama cold in his tracks? Tories?
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2011 4:22 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Three disastrous cliques The whole human world operates by means of cliques of no more than a dozen individuals, usually fewer. This applies to governments or businesses, the arts or the sciences, professionals or tradespeople, worthy or less-worthy pressure groups, legal or illegal enterprises, religious or secular cultures, physical or intellectual fashions, ideologies of the left or the right, highly intellectual specialisms or trivial hobbies, democracies or bureaucracies, elite classes or underclasses, teenagers and oldies, and so on. Even in the case of apparently over-powerful individual leaderships, a loyal clique is necessary immediately below them or they don't last long. Even in the case of lone creative intellectuals, their ideas never see the light of day unless they acquire a clique of believers who propagate them. It takes no more than a few minutes of thoughtful scrutiny of any purposeful decision-making activity that we read or see about us to realize this fact. But, other than those in the really powerful cliques at the very top of their particular heaps, most of the motley don't realize this, anymore than they notice the air they breathe, or fish in the water they swim in. This small group-ness has applied to us ever since our ancestors broke away from other primates and struck out (probably forced out!), bewildered, fearful yet ever curious, into the savannahs of Africa six million years ago. There are many more behavioural characteristics -- social certainties and cultural predispositions -- that our genes and epigenes have shaped in us due to the particular exigencies of life on the savannah. But the basic platform is still that of the small hunter-gatherer cliques of mature adults. This has not changed. Civilizations don't succeed others bodily by means of some sort of spontaneous urge but only when they're spearheaded by small groups who've adopted new physical or mental innovations or have moved to new locations and shown that they can do better than before. Historians know this but they're small in number and usually don't come to balanced views about a topic until it lies many generations or even centuries or millennia in the past. Also, they're not usually to be found as advisors to present-day power cliques. If they have any wisdom to offer it is only of an anecdotal sort and may seem unlikely to apply to specific modern circumstances. But evolutionary science is entirely a different matter. Apart from a premature phase of eliciting catastrophic misinterpretations by politicians, Darwin's ideas largely slumbered for about a century after his death until being revived with a whoosh when genes were elucidated beyond doubt 60 years ago. Evolutionary scientists who carry out precise experiments at gene level and upwards, and fellow specialists such as anthropologists who closely observe all sorts of society, all agree to a surprisingly large number of universal characteristics that are found in every society of whatever sort. And the small-group nature of our species is arguably by far and away the most important of these. Because evolutionary scientists are also engaged in research which will have vast medical applications, their future reputation overall will grow and their role as advisors will become a great deal more influential than historians have ever been (or even economists dare I say?). They'll not be advising us to change the principle or practice of clique-ridden cultures because they know that this will never change this side of a million years. But in a future of many more necessary specialist cliques -- with even greater powers than now for good or ill -- they will undoubtedly be able to offer better ways in which cliques can recruit better candidates. Undoubtedly they will be offering demoselection of governance rather than our present 'democracy' which has yielded cliques who don't what they're doing apart from bribing electorates to vote for them at election time. Meanwhile, at least the present generation of children and young people in both the advanced countries and elsewhere will have to get through the consequences of those cliques which have led the Western world into our present parlous condition. My selection of the most disastrous three of these are: 1. The clique at the Geneva Conference of 1922 which overthrew the primacy of non-inflationary gold-backed money and made it subservient to government-manufactured stuff; 2. The cliques of Western central bankers and politicians ever since who have over-printed money to such an extent that almost all their countries are now deep in debt; 3. The cliques of traders at JPMorganChase and other investment banks who invented sophisticated derivatives in the last 20 years beyond all understanding of their consequences even by their own notional bosses. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
