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We have successfully struggled against Mother Nature to gain great material wealth only to discover that, as Pogo might say, “we have met the enemy and it is us”. The enemy is our great material play-form itself; it is our own profit-and-loss economy, our money-over-the-counter game that is defeating us. We have lost all relationship with our nature. Our created fiction has crippled our ability to rationally adapt to our world we have created. We run as fast as we can from school to shopping center to the bank and back home in our new SUV only to discover that the gods have already made us mad. Our own fictions are killing us. One technique used to maintain the slave economy in the Antebellum South was to outlaw any form of behavior that allowed the slave to become learned. It was necessary that the slave not only be illiterate but that s/he be isolated as much as possible from the world around them; if they knew little of the outside world they were more easily confined, constrained, and controlled. Ignorance in the free white community and the black slave community in Antebellum South was no accident. I suspect the depth of ignorance within the American population today is, likewise, no accident. Potlatch was a common characteristic of primitive cultural practice and ritual. Potlatch ceremonies were a common practice in the winter months because the summer months were busy times for gathering wealth for the family and community. Quickie from wiki: “Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called "coppers", and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. To give a potlatch enhanced one’s reputation and validated social rank, the rank and requisite potlatch being proportional, both for the host and for the recipients by the gifts exchanged. Prestige increased with the lavishness of the potlatch, the value of the goods given away in it…The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.” In primitive communities social life was a continuous dialogue of gift giving and reciprocation. When there was food there was food for all when there was scarcity all shared in this scarcity. The successful hunter kept the least desirable parts of the kill for himself and gave the most desirable to the community. “This was the core truth in the myth of primitive communism.” Primitive man was judged not by the magnitude of his accumulated wealth but by the magnitude of his shared wealth. Greed is historically a new happening. Primitive humans were not greedy; sharing the wealth, not the accumulation of wealth, was the key to success in early human history. Present day economic theories are of a self-regulating system of markets. Such a social theory did not come from history. We are taught that this practice of private property and gain are the natural order of human social evolution; such is not the case. “Gain and profit made in exchange never before played an important part in human economy.” Adam Smith theorized that the division of labor results from man’s “propensity to barter, truck, and exchange one thing for another…This phrase was later to yield the concept of the Economic Man.” This observation represents a misreading of the past and a great fallacy that has led us into today’s culture of human social behavior becoming dominated by economic ideology. We must discard some 19th century prejudices underlying the hypothesis of primitive man’s predilection for gainful employment. The bias that caused Smith and his generation to incorrectly view primitive man induced succeeding generations to lose interest in early man. “The tradition of the classical economics, who attempted to base the law of the market on the alleged propensities of man in the state of nature, was replaced by an abandonment of all interest in the cultures of “uncivilized” man as irrelevant to an understanding of the problems of our age.” Anthropologists inform us today that there has been a remarkable sameness for all societies throughout earlier history and that sameness is “that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social assets…the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives…All social obligations are reciprocal.” Our present economic system of acquisition with little or no regard for the rest of society is not our naturally evolved culture. This is a totally artificial system that we have been raised to recognize as a natural phenomenon. Our ignorance of many things is maintained by those who manage to control social policy and especially our educational systems. We are maintained in a semi sophisticated state of ignorance in order to prevent us from critically evaluating our institutions and changing them in a manner that is less alienating to our nature. Quotes from The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

Modern Economics: Natural or Social Science? Economics is a natural science because natural science is about the study of objects rather than subjects. Labor, land, and money, the basic elements of economics, are all commodities of modern economics (objects of commerce), i.e. humans are reified (made into objects) thus losing any consideration as subjects. “A market economy is an economic system controlled, regulated, and directed by market prices; order in the production and distribution of goods is entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism.” Such a system contains the following assumptions: 1) Human behavior is such as to seek maximum money gains 2) The supply of goods and services are available based on demand at market prices 3) Money, functioning as buying power, is in the hands of prospective buyers 4) Nothing beyond prices must interfere with markets 5) All incomes are supplied through markets 6) Prices, supply, and demand respond only to market forces Production and distribution will thus depend upon market prices alone. “Self-regulation implies that all production is for sale on the market and all incomes derive from such sales.” Under feudalism and the guild system land and labor formed a part of the social organization: the status and function of land were determined by legal and provincial rules, all questions about land were removed from any organized market of buying and selling and subjected to various institutional regulations; the same was true regarding matters of labor, the relations between journeymen and apprentice, the terms of craft, and the wages were regulated by the custom and rule of the guild and the town. “The self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and a political sphere…It might be argued that the separateness of the two spheres obtains in every type of society at all times. Such an inference, however, would be based on a fallacy…normally, the economic order is merely a function of the social order…Nineteenth-century society, in which economic activity was isolated and imputed to a distinctive economic motive, was a singular departure.” A self-regulating market cannot exist unless society is subordinated to its requirements; a market economy can exist only in a market society. Quotes from The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

Greed--excessive or reprehensive acquisitiveness. If greed where an emotion we must have inherited it through natural selection. Animals other than humans do not display greed.

Emotions equal instinct. First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. What are the emotions? The primary emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. The secondary or social emotions are such things as pride, jealousy, embarrassment, and guilt. Damasio considers the background emotions are well-being or malaise, and calm or tension. The label of emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to states of pain and pleasure. Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book The Feelings of What Happens that the biological process of feelings begins with a ‘state of emotion’, which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by ‘a state of feeling’, which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become ‘a state of feeling made conscious’. ”Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life…emotions are biologically determined processes, depending upon innately set brain devices, laid down by long evolutionary history…The devices that produce emotions…are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states…All devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation…The variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.” The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival. “Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward and punishment, pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage or disadvantage. Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil.” Emotions result from stimulation of the senses from outside the body sources and also from stimulations from remembered situations. Evolution has provided us with emotional responses from certain types of inducers put these innate responses are often modified by our culture. “It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.” First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings. Human emotion and feeling pivot on consciousness; this fact has not been generally recognized prior to Damasio’s research. Emotion has probably evolved long before consciousness and surfaces in many of us when caused by inducers we often do not recognize consciously. The powerful contrast between emotion and feeling is used by the author in his search for a comprehension of consciousness. It is a neurological fact, states the author, that when consciousness is suspended then emotion is likewise usually suspended. This observed human characteristic led Damasio to suspect that even though emotion and consciousness are different phenomenon that there must be an important connection between the two. Damasio proposes “that the term feeling should be reserve for the private, mental experience of an emotion, while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable.” This means that while we can observe our own private feelings we cannot observe these same feelings in others. Empirical evidence indicates that we need not be conscious of emotional inducers nor can we control emotions willfully. We can, however, control the entertainment of an emotional inducer even though we cannot control the emotion induced. I was raised as a Catholic and taught by the nuns that “impure thoughts” were a sin only if we “entertained” bad thoughts after an inducer caused an emotion that we felt, i.e. God would not punish us for the first impure thought but He would punish us for dwelling upon the impure thought. If that is not sufficient verification of the theory derived from Damasio’s empirical evidence, what is? In a typical emotion, parts of the brain sends forth messages to other parts of the body, some of these messages travel via the blood stream and some via the body’s nerve system. These neural and chemical messages results in a global change in the organism. The brain itself is just as radically changed. But, before the brain becomes conscious of this matter, before the emotion becomes known, two additional steps must occur. The first is feeling, i.e. an imaging of the bodily changes, followed by a ‘core consciousness’ to the entire set of phenomena. “Knowing an emotion—feeling a feeling—only occurs at this point.” Quotes from The Feelings of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

I have heard many people speak of greed in a manner that indicates that they think of it as something that humans are born with. In fact what set me off on this OP was listening to Allan Greenspan speak of greed in this manner. I suspect that he knows that greed is not an emotion but he seemed to want to endorse that implication. I suspect few people give this matter any thought but I am confident that many people think that to be greedy is "jus doin what comes naturally". I think that it is important for everyone to be conscious of this matter.

Why do Social Theories Become Ideologies? An ideology is systematically biased by its assumptions and it constantly must protect its assumptions from erosion if it is to maintain the status of its ideology. For Marx the ideologist becomes a constant apologist for his ideology. An uncritical or vulgar social theorist, even though personally very critical of the established order cannot overcome the social osmosis resulting from the society and is unable to realize his critical intentions. A system of knowledge is inherently limited and distorted by its assumptions. Because of these assumptions it abstracts certain aspects of reality and conceptualizes the subject matter in a highly selective manner in accordance with the assumptions. The physicist restricts her focus to matters that can be quantified in terms of weight, time, distance, and perhaps wavelength. “Each form of inquiry operates within the framework of and the limits set by its basic assumptions, and offer an inherently inadequate account of the world.” Since non-philosophical inquiry is not aware off or able to question its assumptions “they have a constant tendency to claim universal validity and transgress into areas not their own.” The author argues that “the assumptions underlying and constituting a point of view may be not only methodological, ontological, and epistemological, but also social…To be a member of a society is to occupy a prestructured social space and to find one self already related to others in a certain manner.” The superficial student of social theory “is compelled by the very logic of his inquiry to become its apologist. Even if he were critical of his society, his very level of investigation condemns him to becoming its apologist…because the surface of society is ideologically constituted, so that whoever remains confined to it can do little more than reproduce the underlying ideology.” All accepted social theory becomes ideologically constituted because society in general becomes its apologist. Society in general becomes an apologist for a social theory because that society, which has never been taught critical thinking, is unable to comprehend matter beyond the appearance of reality. The inquiring mind requires a philosophical attitude if it is to illuminate that which is beneath the surface of social reality. I claim that ‘CT (Critical Thinking) is philosophy lite’ is a useful and accurate metaphor for the student of social reality. CT is the first step toward facing and conquering the “apologists’ dread”. I think that Marx would say that ideology is a set of ideas to which a group of individuals place great trust. Within this group of individuals most will become apologists for this ideology because most members have never been taught to think critically. Thus every set of ideas to which many are drawn will become an ideology. An ideology then is a set of ideas that is very popular and which is forcefully promoted by a large number of apologists. Thus the ideology is enforced by force. The difference in being a critical thinker or an apologist is that the critical thinker is conscious of his or her fallibility and is conscious of the assumptions that are part of the set of ideas making up that particular domain of belief. The critical thinker recognizes the tendency to be biased and can remain rational about his or her set of beliefs. The Christian or the Muslim who remains a critical thinker rather than an apologist can keep the set of beliefs while maintaining a balanced view of that domain of knowledge and how that domain of belief fits into a society in harmony. “Strange as it may seem, Marx’s concept of apologia bears a remarkable resemblance to, and can be best understood in the context of the traditional discussion of the nature and task of philosophy.” Philosophy is, as a philosophy professor said to me when I asked him what philosophy was about, a radically critical self-consciousness form of inquiry. Philosophy is the only domain of knowledge that has the attitude and discipline required to critically question its assumptions. All domains of knowledge start with assumptions and if these assumptions are challenged then the whole domain of theoretically defined knowledge loses its theoretical rational and legitimacy. Pull away the foundational assumptions of any domain of knowledge and the edifice crumbles without it. Quotes from Marx’s Theory of Ideology by Bhikhu Parekh.

I walk by a store front and notice in the reflection by the front window that I slouch as I walk. I am not pleased with this slouch. I immediately suck in my gut throw back my shoulders and raise my chin. I walk like this until my mind wonders. Later I see that I still walk with my slouch. I command myself to develop a better posture. This cycle repeats itself until one day I see my slouch has disappeared and I have a posture more to my liking. I have developed a better posture meaning that I have, through constant effort driven by my will, developed a new habit. Emotion, i.e. instinct, is the result of natural selection. Our animal ancestors live at a subsistence level. They do not work for gain but only to stay alive and nature has selected them accordingly. Humans have broken that chain, especially when we developed the age of what we now call the Industrial Revolution. We are now part of a self-regulating market economy wherein subsistence has been replaced by gain and everything depends upon production and consumption of natural resources. We are all now commodities in a self regulating market system

No

Greed is a Character Trait not an Emotion! Greed is a habit formed through constant repetition. It is an act of will. Emotion, also called instinct, is a product of natural selection. Only the human animal is greedy. What is character? Character is the network of habits that permeate all the intentional acts of an individual. I am not using the word habit in the way we often do, as a technical ability existing apart from our wishes. These habits are an intimate and fundamental part of our selves. They are representations of our will. They rule our will, working in a coordinated way they dominate our way of acting. These habits are the results of repeated, intelligently controlled, actions. Habits also control the formation of ideas as well as physical actions. We cannot perform a correct action or a correct idea without having already formed correct habits. “Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction.” “The medium of habit filters all material that reaches our perception and thought.” “Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness.” “Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will.” My understanding of character and the quotations concerning the nature of character are taken from Habits and Will by John Dewey Emotions equal instinct. First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. What are the emotions? The primary emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. The secondary or social emotions are such things as pride, jealousy, embarrassment, and guilt. Damasio considers the background emotions are well-being or malaise, and calm or tension. The label of emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to states of pain and pleasure. Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book “The Feelings of What Happens” that the biological process of feelings begins with a ‘state of emotion’, which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by ‘a state of feeling’, which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become ‘a state of feeling made conscious’. ”Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life…emotions are biologically determined processes, depending upon innately set brain devices, laid down by long evolutionary history…The devices that produce emotions…are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states…All devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation…The variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.” The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival. “Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward and punishment, pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage or disadvantage. Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil.” Emotions result from stimulation of the senses from outside the body sources and also from stimulations from remembered situations. Evolution has provided us with emotional responses from certain types of inducers put these innate responses are often modified by our culture. “It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.” First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings. Human emotion and feeling pivot on consciousness; this fact has not been generally recognized prior to Damasio’s research. Emotion has probably evolved long before consciousness and surfaces in many of us when caused by inducers we often do not recognize consciously. The powerful contrast between emotion and feeling is used by the author in his search for a comprehension of consciousness. It is a neurological fact, states the author, that when consciousness is suspended then emotion is likewise usually suspended. This observed human characteristic led Damasio to suspect that even though emotion and consciousness are different phenomenon that there must be an important connection between the two.

How can I learn my optional illusions? How can I reject my optional illusions? In the dialogue “Apology” Plato writes about Socrates while in the dungeon just before drinking the hemlock that the citizens of Athens condemned him to be executed. In the dungeon shortly before drinking from the hemlock cup Socrates spoke to his followers. He spoke about the accusations against him at the trial. He said that the sworn indictment against him was “Socrates is guilty of needless curiosity and meddling interference, inquiring into things beneath Earth and in the Sky…” Socrates further adds that he is accused of teaching the people of Athens, to which Socrates vehemently denies that he is a teacher. He points out that in matters of wisdom he has only a small piece of that territory; the wisdom that he does have is the wisdom not to think he knows what he does not know. Socrates conjectures that he has the wisdom to recognize the boundary of his present knowledge and to search for that knowledge that he does not have. “So it seems at any rate I am wiser in this one small respect: I do not think I know what I do not.” For Socrates a necessary component of wisdom is to comprehend what one is ignorant of. How can I know ‘what I think I know’ but which I really do not know? How can I learn what are my illusions? I think that the kaleidoscope might be an appropriate visual metaphor for attitude. With each turn, while the core matter (intuition?) remains the same, the presentation changes. The changing pattern is our only correspondence with the intuition (core matter?). We display an attitude toward most any subject. An attitude cannot be described explicitly but is a notion, which is an inference, based upon behavior. We are all inclined to behave consistently to a situation and this behavior is attributed to our attitude. Our attitudes and the quality of such attitudes are judged based on observed behavior. Britannica specifies that attitude is “a predisposition to classify objects and events and to react to them with some degree of evaluative consistency.” If I consult my inner self I cannot focus upon an attitude but can infer such an attitude based on behavior. If I wish to become conscious of my intuition I can through observation of behavior describe the attitude, which, in turn, allows me to ascertain the nature of my intuition. When a mother tells her son “you must change your attitude”. The son cannot change the attitude but the son must change his intuition from which the inferred attitude emanates. This does become a bit convoluted but in essence when we wish to change an attitude we are saying that our intuition must be modified. The point of all of this is that it is the intuition we wish to understand and our attitudes are a means to discover the profile of our intuition. Attitudes are email from the intuition. I think email is an appropriate word because the attitude is reasonably clear and the source is mysterious and at the present unknowable. The attitude directs the behavior. The public and I can observe the behavior and from that gain insight as to the attitude. Under attitudes one might create the categories of values, interests, sentiments, beliefs, predisposition’s, irrational tendencies, taste, knowledge, certainties etc. The public from my behavior can infer attitudes. The question is how do I use the attitudes as a vehicle for making conscious to me the nature of my intuition? The answer is that through solitude and concentration I can focus my conscious intellect and develop inferences as the structure of my intuition. Solitude becomes the catalysis for developing insight into the nature of intuition. This insight may provide a pattern from which further inferences can be drawn thereby making other aspects of the intuition accessible to the conscious intellect. Solitude is not meant to be sensor deprivation, which can lead to hallucinations. Solitude and perhaps a modification of normal environment can facilitate the faculty of imagination. Solitude creates a mood that enhances the faculty of imagination, which becomes the driving force for conscious action. The faculties of imagination and reason set the human species off from our non-human ancestors. Imagination as a force for human discontent is therefore the force for human advancement. Human flexibility motivated by the discontent of imagination has provided the impetuous for human material advancement. Goya said that fantasy united with reason “is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.” Fantasy, the child of imagination, plus reason has produced all the scientific and humanistic and artistic accomplishments. It can also help us comprehend what are our illusions.

Natural Science “don allow no meaning in here”! Natural science clears the land before it builds its structures. NATURAL SCIENCE IS BULLDOZIER might be a useful linguistic metaphor for comprehending how the natural sciences function. The first thing that a Normal Science (as defined by Thomas Kuhn) does is create a paradigm, which is to say that the bulldozer comes in and clears the land of all obstructions and establishes a foundation upon the solid rock of “measurement by standards”. If it cannot be properly measured in accordance to an established paradigm it does not exist. Since emotion, feeling, and meaning cannot be so measured then such things must be removed. Only the measurable and the commodified are meaningful in the land of the natural and economic sciences. This habit of removing all the things that do not fit the science has allowed the natural and economic sciences to be very productive in the human competition with Mother Nature. But I claim that this success, obtained by eliminating considerations based upon human meaning, comes at a heavy price. The science of economics has emulated the natural sciences and has reaped great successes as a result; if one does not take into consideration the human, social, and ecological costs of such sciences one can be deluded into bulldozing aside all considerations of human meaning as we construct our high tech society. In his book The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time Karl Polanyi argues that a self-regulating market economy requires “that human beings and the natural environment be turned into pure commodities, which assures the destruction of both society and the natural environment…the definition of a commodity is something that has been produce for sale on a market…land, labor, and money are fictitious commodities because they were not produced for sale on a market…Modern economics starts by pretending that these fictitious commodities will behave in the same way as real commodities…economic theorizing is based on a lie, and this lie places human society at risk.”

Does Natural Science Encourage a Narrow Mind? Paradigm directed science encourages the scientist to steadfastly adhere to carefully crafted narrow minded thinking. Because “normal science” has been so successful in achieving its narrow goals I claim that our whole society has become dangerously enchanted into viewing all domains of knowledge in restricted narrow constraints. Normal science is a puzzle-solving enterprise. Normal science is a slow accumulation of knowledge by a methodical step-by-step process undertaken by a group of scientists. ‘Paradigm’ is a word that was given great meaning and clarity by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. “One of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions…A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies.” The author notes that all “real science is normally a habit-governed, puzzle-solving activity” and not a Critical Thinking activity. Paradigm and not hypothesis is the active meaning for the ‘new image of science’. Paradigm is neither a theory nor a metaphysical viewpoint. Kuhn’s new image of science—the paradigm—is an artifact, a way of seeing, and is a set of scientific problem solving habits. Normal science means research based upon one or more past achievements ‘that some particular community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice…and these achievements are sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group pf adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ furthermore they are sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to solve’. Such achievements Kuhn defines as paradigm. “A puzzle-solving paradigm, unlike a puzzle-solving hypothetico-deductive system, has also got to be a concrete ‘way of seeing’.” Kuhn constantly refers to the ‘gestalt switch’ when discussing the switch in reference from one paradigm to another as ‘re-seeing’ action. Each paradigm has been constructed to be a ‘way-of-seeing’. Here Kuhn is speaking not about what the paradigm is but how the paradigm is used. He is defining a paradigm as a newly developed puzzle-solving artifact that is used analogically to understand another artifact; for example, using wire and beads strung together to facilitate understanding the protein molecule. I think that we place “Science” (meaning normal science) on too high a pedestal and thereby distort our comprehension of political and social problems. We cannot solve social and political problems like we solve the questions formed by the normal sciences. Do you think that the techniques of normal science are directly applicable for solving the social and political problems of society?

I think that apathy is a greater danger today than it has ever been. The reason for this danger is that we humans have created a technology that places extraordinary power into the hands of unsophisticated apathetic ordinary people. We are like children sitting in a pool of gasoline playing with matches.

Craig What is this disease to which I allude? There is a chain of cause and effect in many things and it is difficult to determine the sui generis of this chain of reaction. I shall just take the present obvious effect to define our (American) disease to be our uncritical faith in laissez-faire capitalism. An oligarchy controls public policy in America. The oligarchy consists of those who manage the great wealth of American institutions. This oligarchy designs our educational system to graduate good producers and consumers and does not desire independent thinkers. CA (Corporate America) has developed a well-honed expertise in motivating the population to behave in a desired manner. Citizens as consumers are ample manifestation of that expertise. CA has accomplished this ability by careful study and implementation of the knowledge of the ways of human behavior. I suspect this same structure applies to most Western democracies. A democratic form of government is one wherein the citizens have some voice in some policy decisions. The greater the voice of the citizens the better the democracy. The greater the intellectual sophistication of those citizens the better the democracy. In America we have policy makers, decision makers, and citizens. The decision makers are our elected representatives and are, thus, under some control by the voting citizen. The policy makers are the leaders of CA; less than ten thousand individuals, according to those who study such matters. Policy makers exercise significant control of decision makers by controlling the financing of elections. Policy makers customize and maintain the dominant ideology in order to control the political behavior of the citizens. This dominant ideology exercises the political control of the citizens in the same fashion as the consuming citizen is controlled by the same dominant ideology. An enlightened citizen is the only means to gain more voice in more policy decisions. An enlightened citizen is much more than an informed citizen. Critical thinking is the only practical means to develop a more enlightened citizen. If, however, we wait until our CT trained grade-schoolers become adults I suspect all will be lost. This is why I think a massive effort must be made to convince today’s adults that they must train themselves in CT. “Thomas R. Dye, Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, has published a series of books examining who and what institutions actually control and run America. to understand who is making the decisions that affect our lives, we also have to understand how societies structure themselves in general. Why the few always tend to share more power than the many and what this means in terms of both a society's evolution and our daily lives. they examined the other 11 institutions that exert just as powerful a shaping influence, although somewhat more subtle: The Industrial, Corporations, Utilities and Communications, Banking, Insurance Investment, Mass Media, Law, Education Foundation, Civic and Cultural Organizations, Government, and the Military.”

Er...to quite my post "Caring is necessary for understanding; caring cannot begin until we first “feel” a necessity for caring. The skin rash of the oil spill can serve as that feeling."