On the Necessity for a New World Order

It probably was a mistake, but I just finished reading “The World Set Free” by H. G. Wells. It is about the nuclear war in the mid 1950’s and the aftermath of the war. The book was written a hundred years ago, before anyone actually knew what a runaway nuclear reaction would be like. He got that wrong, thinking that the chain reaction would continue for years, rather than creating a real explosion of large size. The novel was about the results, rather than the action. He pointed out a few things that we usually forget but that are still important.

Humans are designed to be hunters and gathers. Our social systems and institutions are designed for people who survive by hunting and gathering. While some economic activities are like hunting, there are differences. But the economic system is predicated on human life as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago, and things have changed a little. Social institutions are for a species that numbers in the millions, not the billions. Humans aren’t meant to see other humans in great numbers. The millions of years of evolution led to a species that lived in groups of fewer than three hundred, people who wandered much of the time, animals who perpetuated the works, words, and superstitions of their forebears, people who didn’t change much from millennium to millennium. Until recently things didn’t change much over the millennia, but in the last few thousand years the surroundings in which people found themselves started becoming more and more different over time, and the social situations also changed. As population increased there became more opportunities for exogamy. Until recently the overwhelming majority of people married first or second cousins, and there were people who didn’t look like each other, and some of those strange people were in the habit of doing things that were different from what other people were accustomed. Most social institutions, including governmental institutions are based on the assumption that most people will be similar. It is fairly easy for humans to get along with other humans who seem like them, but humans who are different are potential targets.

As society became different in its constitution, the prior institutions were retained, even though they might not have been ideal. The question is: Do we need a new order? If we do, then what should it be? People have suggested various alterations to social institutions, but those are mostly still based on the same assumptions. I don’t think that the human spirit has changed for thousands of years, and I base that on literature that was written in the past and recently. But that spirit is not appropriate to the situations in which most people live now.

I can see two possibilities. Either humans will change their social institutions, or the human population will decrease dramatically. Both of those possibilities have been explored in non-fiction and in fiction, but I don’t think that anyone has figured out what will actually happen, and I think that the highest probability is for something other than what has been predicted to be the actual result.

I happen to like humans pretty much as they are (at least I am accustomed to them as they are, whether I like them is an individual matter). That doesn’t mean that I am not a misanthrope, but as an observer I think that the human species is interesting, and it is adaptable. Unfortunately, there are a great many humans who are not well suited for humanity as it operates now, and that may include me. I think that the greatest hope for humanity is for its numbers to greatly decrease. In the last one hundred years many people have lived and reproduced who could not have survived without intervention, and humanity has not developed the intellectual strength that is required for a change in the society. Business is still carried on in ways that are largely unchanged. Running a society with the degree of specialization that is required now is different from what was needed just fifty years ago, and the nature of the population has not changed to fill those needs. As technology changes there is more and more need for people with greater intellectual capacity, but humans are still born with an average IQ of 100, which means that half of the population is not even that intelligent. That level of intelligence was fine when most people farmed, fished, mined, or worked in manufacturing plants, but tie often takes more than training for someone to move from physical labor into intellectual labor.

The idea of a population crash has been brought up, and it would be likely, if humans weren’t as aware of their surroundings as they are. It is not unusual for excess population to cause a crash in deer population, squirrel population, and so on, and such a crash in human population is possible, and it would eliminate a great many problems.

Things often work out in ways that were not foreseen. As with the works of H.G. Wells, prediction s become out dated quickly. Looking at history we can see that there usually is one part from one side of the argument, another part from the other side, and yet another part that is different. With that I will make my suggestion.

Regardless of what we might like, there will be a new order of things, but that isn’t on the immediate horizon, and the nature of the changes can’t be determined, but the population of humans will decrease significantly during the next few decades. Lastly, something else will happen, but I don’t know what that will be; although the list is topped with an unexpected scientific breakthrough and contact with intelligent life from another star system.

There are several possibilities of what will cause a decrease in population, but the old standbys top that list: disease and catastrophe. For a catastrophe to be big enough to be effective it would have to be an asteroid strike or something similar. As far as diseases go, Plagues, especially if a new strain evolves, is at the top of the list, but there are many other diseases that could also change only slightly and become world killers.

There are plenty of people who think that society should be perfectly social; that people should abandoned their individual desires and urges, but animals in which the individuals act for the generality lose the ability to be creative outside of a limited set of situations. Humans who could not be freely creative would not be humans. I admit that most people have few creative thoughts and do very little that is outside the norm, but the outliers are necessary for any social, intellectual, political, scientific, or other change. We need outliers, and that implies that we need a wide variety of people from those who require constant care to those who can imagine what couldn’t be. But having that breadth of intellectual capacity does not require seven billion people. It doesn’t even require one billion.

Perhaps there should be stringent requirements for becoming an adult such as walking across the Sahara Desert from Timbuktu to Oran, or maybe camping out near the South Pole for a few months (either Winter or Summer), or something else along those lines.

So reader, what do you think?  Must it begin here and now, or can we put things off forever? Do we need a new world order, or should we crawl along as we have for these past millions of years?

Grammar, Ignorance, Logic, and the Illuminati

Formal logic was developed from natural language and reasoning, but not all people understand language in the same way, and many people are careless in their use of natural language. For example, there are people who only use the present tense, even though there was a past, and there will be a future.  And there are a few deficiencies in natural language. For example, there is nothing that directly shows whether something is intended as an opinion or as fact, and this can lead to significant problems.

There is nothing in the verbiage, or in the language, that differentiates between fact and fantasy and marketing campaigns. If I were to tell you that Calvados is the healthiest type of alcoholic beverage, then you could either believe me or not, but there is nothing in the statement (or assertion) to show you whether it is true. Determination of truth requires knowledge and understanding on the part of the hearer or reader. Unfortunately, many people do not have the knowledge and logical ability to be able to determine whether a given statement is true, and they often do not understand enough to hold off believing something until they look into the matter.  Even worse, they may look to an unreliable source for validation of facts.

One example of that relates to the old foolishness about cholesterol. We have known for decades that while the plaque that causes coronary blockage is made up of cholesterol, there are mechanisms by which the plaque is deposited, and those mechanisms do not relate to serum cholesterol levels. But there are people who still follow the old, and disproven, idea that the more cholesterol there is in the blood, the higher the chance that a person will have a heart attack.

There are even people who think that eating things that are high in cholesterol will lead to heart failure. In fact, cholesterol is an easily digested, highly nutritious food that should be regarded as a compact source of energy. 

Little matters like correlation not showing causation and unfalsifiable statements not being logically valid are common in marketing, whether one is selling cholesterol lowering medicines or religions. I only used the example above, because it came up in conversation recently. Good marketers love people who have no training in logic. I am sure that they shudder whenever they hear any suggestion that students be trained in logic from the earliest grades. I earlier wrote blogs about the urban myths of a half gallon of water a day and the fallacy of serum cholesterol causing coronary thrombosis, so I won’t go into greater detail.

At least as bad as those are the matters that are claimed by purveyors of conspiracy theories. A few days ago I watched some videos by David Icke, and I was amazed that anyone had the nerve to claim that any of them are evidence of anything other than being strong evidence that Mr. Icke was trying to fool people and not doing a good job, but there are enough who think otherwise that Mr. Icke eats well, and I won’t begrudge a man his living.

With that said, I will assert that the primary reason why conspiracy theories are as successful as they are is that few people learn grammar well, and even fewer learn much logic, and even fewer develop the critical judgment necessary to determine whether something makes sense. All that makes life easy for snake oil merchants and makes elementary school teachers jobs easier than it would be if they had to teach logic.

I don’t see any significant difference among proponents of bogus religions (such as Mormonism and Scientology), creators of conspiracies (such as Mr. Icke and Erich von Däniken), and marketers who spin lies to gain sales (such as whoever ran the bottled water marketing campaign). They are all telling lies for their own good and to the detriment of their audiences. There are many people who will say “It was on TV or on the History Channel,” as if that validates a statement. People can say anything that they want to on TV, and it is legal, and it need not be accurate. The courts have long held that “puffery” in marketing is legal, even if it is not accurate. “The world’s best coffee” probably was made by someone who didn’t even claim that the coffee was the best in town, much less the world, but Dunkin Donuts has filed a trademark on that phrase.  

The link below is to a free, online, textbook in Logic. There are many other free online books, webpages, and courses in logic. Most people, myself included, could use a better knowledge of logic.

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/velleman/blogic/Logic/frameset.html

Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo-science – How-to

There is big business in creating and maintaining conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and similar things, but it isn’t hard to start such things off. The first thing is a single item that is factual or generally regarded as fact. If you decide to use something traditional, then there need not be as much of a relationship with the real world. From that item you spin a yarn. Make it bigger and bigger; the more that you include the better. Don’t tell penny lies when you can tell thousand dollar lies. When you have some people believing in your idea let them spread it far and wide. As with any work of fiction, there has to be a “hook”, something to initially catch and hold attention. If you look at a list of conspiracy theories you probably will notice many that you never heard of or thought they were something else. You never heard of most, because they are supremely uninteresting. The Illuminati are interesting, because they control the world, but the conspiracy to make people drink bottled water is boring, and many people think that they really should drink 64 ounces of water a day. That was a good one, and most people don’t realize that it is a real conspiracy by bottled water companies. Some people have written and sold books about the Illuminati, but that’s pretty much the only way that any money was made from it, and the Illuminati are an issue in some conversations. There probably are people who think that they are a real threat. But the bottle water companies have a larger and more reliable stream of income.

The Illuminati became a conspiracy theory quite a while ago, and it has developed further through ignorance and a steady diet of lies. There really was an organization named the Illuminati, several in fact, but none of those sought world power. The origin al group was set up in the late 18th century in Bavaria, and it espoused Enlightenment views: freedom of thought, speech, and so on. That group was dissolved a few years later, but people kept claiming that it was still in business. And others blamed it for a variety of things that it couldn’t have done, because it didn’t exist anymore. That process continued up to the present time, and some of the organizations that have been alleged to be operated by the Illuminati include Skull and Bones, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Conference, Council on International Relations, and others. Some people assert that the Illuminati are associated with the Masons or with some religious organization. Sometimes the Catholic group Opus Dei is mentioned and some people put the Opus Dei as a separate conspiracy to control the world. All of these developments have been done without a single report from the Illuminati, and there have been no organized investigations; the conspiracy just snowballed. This might be the best way to make a conspiracy theory, because there is no body of facts that can to falsified, and the believers wouldn’t it believe it, if they were shown to be wrong. At this point it appears that one can say anything they want to about the Illuminati and someone will believe it. Perhaps the most farfetched extension of the theory involves the Reptilians, and David Icke is making a decent living from that.

A closely related matter involves dreaming up pseudo-science and claiming that it is true. The process is almost identical. One starts with an actual fact and spins a yarn about it. There can be nothing at all to the year, but it is built from something that people might know, so they are willing to accept that it is true. One such thing is the matter of Ancient Aliens. Those start from any of several things. One of the most common is the collection of ideas about the Egyptian pyramids.

The Pyramids are large, and they were built a long time ago. Those are facts, but from there some people go on to say that humans couldn’t possibly have built them, even though there are contemporary accounts of the construction. The Egyptians slid the blocks on mud or used cradles to easily move blocks of stone that weigh tons.


There is more than enough information about conspiracies. This site has the 25 most popular:
http://list25.com/top-25-most-popula...racy-theories/
Aee which one you want to madden sane people by following.
The truly important thing is to select something that will catch the attention of people, and then spin an interesting yarn. But there has to be a kernel of truth to it, but more than the smallest kernel will just give people more to attack. An excellent of the small kernel of truth was the matter of some people being more tolerant of heat and cold than are other people that I mentioned in a blog post a few weeks ago. That is something that can easily be confirmed in the real world; it doesn’t even require playing with video images, as Mr. Icke does with his Reptilians. I took that and expanded to some people being endotherms and others being ectotherms; (In fact, humans are mammals, and all mammals are endothermic.) From the matter of some humans being ectothermic it is a small leap to the ectothermic humans being reptiles, because reptiles are ectothermic. David Icke made a similar conclusion from a different starting point, and he is making money from it by selling books, videos, and making speeches, but there is no more validity to Mr. Icke’s assertions about the New World Order being led by Reptinians than there is to my false conclusion that I made above. Mr. Icke has simply made assertions that have only been backed up with faked evidence and assertions. His greatest skill seems to be able to tell so many lies with a completely straight face. He certainly is smiling when he looks at his bank statement, and I congratulate him for his success.

Mr. Icke’s success is one of the best examples of profiting from lies that has occurred since L. Ron Hubbard started Scientology. There is more to come, so stay tuned.

The Illuminati and Christian End Times

Organized religion seeks to include everyone in the same organization, but the degree to which they try to inflict their beliefs on people who are not their co-religionists varies tremendously from Unitarians and Universal Life Church people who would just as soon you followed your own spirit to fundamentalists of various types, from Christian to Islam, who believe it is their responsibility to make you live their kind of proper life, or they will torture you until you change (or they think about that at least). The fundamentalists are major supporters of the Illuminati, and Christian fundamentalists, Muslim fundamentalists, and the Illuminati all are trying to impose the New World Order on you.

They have slightly different terms of what they are seeking to impose, but it involves making you do what they want, regardless of your wishes. 

The Christian fundamentalists think that the “end times” will bring in an era of world unification, when everyone will live in harmony, after their enemies have been silenced. Apparently the Christians don’t realize that the Second Coming of Jesus happened in the second century CE.

The Islamic fundamentalists are more insistent about being right, but they don’t have as much scriptural authority. The Koran doesn’t include a book about end times, as the Christian Bible does, and the Muslims try to enforce their beliefs on others, which is specifically forbidden in the Koran, but they stopped following the Koran; they are following the Illuminati. And the Illuminati want to impose their will of all humans, and make them into sheep.

It is ironic that institutions that opposed the Soviet attempt to impose the centralization of power led by the Illuminati are now the chief proponents of the Illuminati doctrines, right there with the United Nations and the International Jewish Bankers’ Conspiracy. Now the sides have changed, but the struggle remains the same.

In fact, it is ironic that religions that profess to follow the god of Abraham with all of the morality and spirituality that entails are involved in any way with the godless and immoral Illuminati, but they are. And the two opposing views of religion have been allies for thousands of years since the first religions emerged.

Organized religion in some forms has openly supported and even fought for the goals of the Illuminati. The Catholic Church tried to establish itself over the world in the Crusades, which were against Muslims who had eschewed the Koran to try to force people to follow their version of the same god. It’s almost enough to get one to ask whether that god is the heart and soul of the godless and soulless Illuminati. Is it possible that the god who inspired the Book of Revelations also inspired international corporations and banks?

It makes me wonder whether the directors of the Illuminati meet in the Vatican.

It also makes me wonder about the end times. Science indicates that the Sun will last for another ten to twenty billion years, and there are no signs that a war of annihilation will break out, and there are no international disputes that would cause a serious war, and so on, and we know that the events predicted in the Book of revelations happened before 200 CE, so what do the people who think that the world will end are thinking about? There have been plenty of candidates for the Antichrist; although it was originally meant to indicate the Roman Emperor. Can life be so bad for those people that they dream that the final times will be better, or what? It also makes me wonder whether it is valid to classify religion as a mental illness. Religion certainly encourages people to believe things that are not true, but are those delusions?

This question brings up many other questions about the nature of organized religion and what it does to people, but I will not go into that now.