Class and the absence thereof

In a country far away, class distinctions are vividly portrayed.  Although tribal ties seem essential, the primary element for distinguishing between classes is wealth (possessions, land, productivity, liquidity) and influence. 

• In the upper reaches, it may be family wealth, leveraged wealth, and corporate ownership that determine ones placement.

• In the middle realms, regular labor and income are the wealth elements.

• At the lowest, individuals have neither possessions nor significant income nor even perhaps fair labor opportunity.

Class perspective includes a sense of superiority looking from upper to lower as though there was greater human and social worth associated with the upper positions.  Individuals relegated to the lower echelons are presumed to be of lesser value, lesser intellect, lesser ability and significance.   Lower class members are artificially and deliberately constrained from moving upward.  

Oh wait, that's US. And the rest of the wealthy world. My mistake.

Interestingly the wealthier people become, the less relevant they tend to be as members of a community.  

Generally, the wealthier a family is, the fewer truly meaningful connections they have to others.  They have no need of connection and are aware of the risks associated with being too available; it might make demands.  The children of the wealthy are often narrowly constrained to their 'social class' and its associated thinking.  Great attention is given to educational development, but perhaps little attention is given to character development.  The fundamental elements of humanity may be neglected, even unknown for generations within a wealthy family lineage.

Among the wealthy, life tends to focus on position, prestige, power and profitability.  Upward mobility, bigger/ better/ more  house/ car/ clothes/ gadgets/ vacations.  Humanity is slowly squeegeed out of the mix.  

Decisions become of greater significance but are made with progressively less awareness of the risks and impact on others.  Ford's Pinto and its tendency to explode are an illuminating example from decades back.  The high probability of killing someone in an inferno and the human need to preclude it happening, those issues never made it into the boardroom decision making process.  GM's deadly ignition switch followed a similar conscienceless path this year.

The world has turned upside down.  Everything you thought ... may not be.

If a wealthy fellow had to survive apart from the shelter of his wealth, he'd die within days, and his family would die with him.

If a poor fellow had to survive apart from wealth ...  what's new?  He's been doing it for years, and taking care of his wife and kids too.  He's the more extraordinarily capable of the two.

On the other side of that equation ... 
If you're looking for good-hearted openness, got to the poor.  
If you need a place to be accepted, to be received, to be loved, go to the poor.  
If you want to see whole-hearted sacrifice or courageous nobility, go to the poor.  
The wealthy, as a rule, are unable to do such things.  They fear you are after their wealth.  Sick, broken creatures, they're poisoned by their luxury.  They have difficulty even making an overture of genuine friendship.  They worry about what it might cost them.

Upper class
Middle class
Lower class

There's no such thing as a lower, middle, or upper-class of course.  There is a middle income group, however, that continues under duress these days.  The gap between rich and poor is widening at an accelerating pace, and the middle income group is disappearing, merging into the 'working class'.  That's the salaried folks and the hourly folks that provide the wherewithal for rich folks to get richer.

So where is the virtue in such an arrangement?  Where might one find a hero worthy of admiration?  Should we look among the ... ?

Things you know that you didn't learn

Fearfully and wonderfully ....

 The genius for math or science, music or art seems to be inherent in us all, if modern science is correctly understanding what we find in the human brain.  We probably have all the natural genius abilities.  We were born with them, designed genetically to have them, but they are inhibited in most of us.  Why?

Science has concluded that such impressive abilities are likely inherent in us all.  As yet though, science has little insight into why or how such abilities are enabled. Or not enabled.  And if the abilities are already there in each one of us, why might they be 'switched off' in most of us and only fully functional in a few?

Photographic memory, intellectual cross-processing of the content in thousands of books, so many abilities show up unexpectedly in those we call either genius or savant.

"It is hard to overstate the complexity of the brain. Not only are there tens of billions of individual nerve cells, or neurons, which make literally tens of trillions of connections between each other. The complexity really lies in the fact that there are hundreds or maybe even thousands of different types of neurons, which are arranged in highly-organized patterns, and which connect to each other in very specific ways."

For the IT folks, that means that one human brain is more capable in terms of processing (and perhaps storage) than any computer or supercomputer (network of computers) today. No binary data bus, no simple logic gates, the brain processes cross into realms of variable signal strengths, variable signal iterations and sequence flags, context modifiers, and multi-parallel processes with continuous real-time decision model modifications.

"Neurons are polarized – they have an end for inputs and an end for outputs. Each of these may be branched to give thousands of independent sites of input and output. For any given neuron, there are other neurons that connect to it (information flows from all those neurons into our subject neuron) and other neurons that it connects to (information flows from our subject neuron out to all these neurons).

But neurons are not all the same. The most obvious and perhaps most important difference between neurons is that some are excitatory, some inhibitory, and some modulatory. When an excitatory neuron is activated, it releases neurotransmitter at the connections it makes with its output neurons – this neurotransmitter tends to make those other cells electrically active. The exact opposite happens when an inhibitory cell is activated – it releases a different neurotransmitter onto its target neurons, which makes them less electrically active.  If modulatory, it provokes other long-lasting effects.  Too, we've discovered, the same signal may have different effects depending on the state of the receiving neuron, so the distinctions are not absolute.

There are hundreds of subtypes of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, all with different jobs to do. The way in which these different cell types are interconnected determines the functional properties of each little microcircuit in the brain – the type of information that comes into the system, how it filters and transforms that information, how long a neuron will be active before it's shut off, whether it will fire with a rhythm and at what frequency, etc."

Dr. Kevin J. Mitchell on September 25, 2011, 12:00 AM

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is a geneticist who studies neural development. 

You've got perhaps 85 - 95 billion neurons and each neuron has about 2500 connections or synapses; that's when you're born.  As an adult, you'll have 10-15,000 connections per neuron.  Connections are electrical or chemical, and add up on average to the equivalent of 120,000 of our most powerful computer processor chips.

"As to processor speed, let’s assume a very conservative average firing rate for a neuron of 200 times per second. If the signal is passed to 12,500 synapses, then 22 billion neurons are capable of performing 55 petaflops (a petaflop = one quadrillion calculations) per second.

The world’s fastest supercomputer, a monster from Japan unveiled by Fujitsu at a conference this past June, has a configuration of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs. It tested out at 8 petaflops (which only five months later was upped to 10.51 petaflops). Our brains are about five times faster."

... and that's just in the cerebral cortex or about one-fourth of your brain.

"On top of that, we are only beginning to understand the complexity of that wiring. Instead of one-to-one connections, some theorists postulate that there are potentially thousands of different types of inter-neuronal connections, upping the ante. Moreover, recent evidence points to the idea that there is actually subcellular computing going on within neurons, moving our brains from the paradigm of a single computer to something more like a self-contained Internet, with billions of simpler nodes all working together in a massive parallel network. All of this may mean that the types of computing we are capable of are only just being dreamt of by computer scientists." 

 To expand a bit on the actual magnificence of a brain, note that a computer processor chip is manufactured, installed, and then used by software.  The brain is continually manufacturing itself; it's structure is dynamic, changing and adapting, adding and discarding as needed.  Further, that's today's common human brain.  The stunning possibilities suggested by the occasional genius and, even more provocatively by the acquired savant, are suggestive of a surprisingly even more capable design from earliest history.

Experiments in Australia suggest that genius/savant abilities may be temporarily accessible through external magnetic manipulation.  Controversial, of course, but what if we could be enabled?  What if each of us could have instant language acquisition, musical and artistic abilities, and grasp of sciences?  The world and humanity would be rather different almost instantly.

Interestingly, we may as a species have once been fully enabled.  We lost it somewhere along the way.  Life became difficult as we had to work rather than breeze through problems.  Languages became confused, memories and much wisdom were lost.  I've heard such before, of course.  In Sunday school.  Is science proving that my Sunday school teacher was right? :)

Know where you are?

Data updated, August 2015

Look where you are in the world.  Those to the left of you in the graph live in a progressively more constrained economy and with fewer resources.  Those above you in the graph have less in the way of health care, immunizations, nutrition, and clean water.  And their children die at a rate higher than yours; maybe twenty times higher or more.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in a healthy economy are so extraordinarily privileged.

Now what are we going to do with the opportunity we've received?

It's difficult to remember the odd and unusual ease with which we live compared to our brothers and sisters who struggle to feed their families, to battle things like common illnesses, and to make a better world for their children.  It's difficult to remember and be thankful... and perhaps to do something meaningful with the chance we're given.

A 'starter' home in the west vs. real life for more than 50% of the world.  We can help, you know.

The hardest question I've ever been asked, "What are you going to do with what you know?"

Scrambling.

I beileve ...

We believed when we were told that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there were massive troop buildups on the Saudi border.  There weren't.  More than 200,000 died.

We believed the government knew what it was doing when it legalized the derivatives marketplace.  They didn't.  More than 1,000,000 starved following the world market crash in '08.

We believed the president when he told us that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was an attack on the U.S. Navy vessel.  It wasn't.  It never happened.  He knew it.  More than 3,000,000 died.

We've believed that supporting Pakistan will make sense in the long run, that bailing out AIG is a good way forward, that balancing the budget is unnecessary, that ....

The above statement circulating on the web is an interesting expression of the deep dissatisfaction many now feel toward national and international leaders.  Do they share our goals any longer?   Are they constrained by ethical considerations?  Or do they, as it so often appears, serve the rich and influential few at the deadly expense of the majority?


Note: Despite government involvement after the catastrophic market crash of 07' - 08', JP Morgan Chase this year managed to lose around 9 billion in a single transaction in the credit derivatives market.  That's investor's money they lost.  Their risk model (betting strategy), like all gambling tactics, couldn't cover all the possible failure points.  Beyond that, they're under investigation for manipulating the power/energy market and for pressuring their customers into their own under-performing and expensive mutual funds.  These are some of the folks our government supports, bails out, and backs.  With more than $2,000,000,000,000 (trillion) in financial assets, JP Morgan Chase is larger than the economies of all but 10 or so of the world's countries (GDP, GDP-PPP).

Have things changed since '08 so that we might breathe a little easier?  No.  And has the government reasonably and adequately addressed the issues involved?  No.  It's no longer just investors who are harmed by such practices.  The size of the market for which JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, and others hold the reins is such that the world reels when they make a mistake.

 The world of banking, it’s becoming clear, operates according to different norms from those of the rest of the business world.  

From where does character come?

From where does character come?

We teach our children to tell the truth, to be fair and just, and not to hurt anyone. No fighting, no bullying, no bad talking about others. We spend years investing in their moral formation, but we often find ourselves in competition with the news, the entertainment industry, and the culture.

Little is learned by words, we've discovered, unless accompanied by actions children can watch or perhaps do themselves.

An interesting study some years ago was inquiring into how children learn. For a group of preschool kids, they showed a brief video of a child punching a stuffed animal. Upon return to the playroom, children found a similar stuffed animal and began to hit it, even using other toys as bludgeons.

We'd like to think that the things on which we spend so much time (TV, movies, ...) have little effect on our behavior and choices. Perhaps that’s naive.

A culture is the sum of it's contents; things we see among us and acknowledge as our own. For instance:
Women often learn their place by experience. Unless it's challenged, it'll stick for a lifetime.

There are so many battles our children will fight. Right thinking about love, life, faith, wealth, generosity, luxury, sacrifice, compassion, violence, ... While they're young, we control what they see and do. And learn. We have the upper hand in their character formation.

And in our own. The choices we're making are still forming ours.
Hmmmmm.

Hard work

I spent evenings sitting with men in western Africa.  They would brainstorm about what 'little business' might succeed.  They built and stocked kiosk stands beside the road, they tried to rebuild a wrecked taxi and return it to service, they transported produce from the countryside to the town market to sell ...  because good jobs don't exist for them.  Even for those who completed public school, there aren't enough jobs at entry level or any level.  All of them work harder than I do or you do, all day, every day.  Their lives are harder, shorter, and their children face near-impossible impediments to escaping poverty.  Jobs are reserved for the privileged and favored.  If you're from the wrong tribe, the wrong family, the wrong race or ethnicity, it's harder.  That's how discrimination works in every culture and country.  Even ours, today.  That's the way it works.

My conservative friends sometimes quote the Rush Limbaugh-esque solution, "they just need to get a job and work hard like we did."  It's embarrassing to have to explain real life.