Two World Trends

Two world trends: Convergence and multipolarity

Materialism drives industrialisation, which drives education, which drives value convergence. Every country is now subordinate to the global commons because of this value convergence within their electorates. States which do not follow this necessity eventually become irrelevant to the global order. Trade and Technology-driven power necessitates the primacy of the influence of this developmental dynamic. Convergence also implies that the technological gap between emerging and advanced economies will narrow in the long run.

Multipolarity is driven by the desire of emerging countries to free-ride on the developed countries for global public good provision until the latter can no longer afford them. World leadership will then evolve into multipolarity and regionalism as US cost-benefit calculation tilts in favour of self-interest, and its position subsides, without equivalent replacements. Strategic allocation of resources by the US would matter, but the ability of the polity to do so is in doubt. Perhaps some form of fee for safety and protection will be provided, as the US commercialises it's military advantage to serve as global policeman.

Note 94

The transcendence of space is possible if you understand that we are information, not things. Perception is just a process in which information is being used to interpret other information. Experience is determined by the way you perceive and interpret information, by the ways in which information interacts with other information.

Note 93

One of the most important issues in applied social science is understanding the correct level of analysis. Academics tend to speak in dangerously misleading generalities. This means that what they do is tangentially useful to the real world. The practitioner's job is to connect the many tangents within the current context. It is about identifying the appropriate level of analysis to the situation, and weighing the factors. This is an exercise in judgement, which is the ability to piece together key facts in a roughly right way in the presence of incomplete information.

Note 92

As the productivity of production grows while the productivity of consumption remains stagnant, and working hours remain fixed, demand lags production, and deflation ensues.

So what we need as a society is a flexible work schedule. Unemployment is an ineffective adjustment mechanism that occurs due the fundamental inability of society to develop work processes and structures that work around employment frictions. That is the task that economists, management scientist and unions have failed to set themselves. Adapting the efficiencies promoted by the gig economy while preventing the downsides is a useful step forward that policymakers at present can pursue.

Note 91

If you feel naked, weak and exposed in the shifting sea of men and ideas, that is exactly where you should be, not the dull comforting conformity of a cog in a machine.

Note 90

It is the specific characteristic of human development that negative freedom co-evolves with positive freedom. Negative freedom enables positive freedom to develop, which creates transcendence of a greater set of conditions, generating greater negative freedoms and more positive ones, and so on. More specifically, this happens not just in the physical dimension, but in the mental realm of ideas. So one could imagine a new utopia of transcendence through awareness- a radical incorporation of consciousness into the hard facts of life.

The strange miracle of existence

The reason why people feel lost is that they are looking for meaning in life which doesn't exist.

Life is like a spinning top; let it go round. When it drops, you wouldn't even know it was possible.

How do we enjoy life, when we have pressed ourselves into so many trellises of it, and are trapped in the infinite munificence of this maze?

Time is not real, it is just a way of identifying linearity in our perceptions of change. Because of this, we understand change, and know that life must end.

So we dance in this vast sea, mites in the universe, allotted our share of wonder, to witness the strange unknowable miracle of existence.

Bach

What does Bach teach us? To never give up on the soul.

Note 89

Consciousness is meta awareness - awareness of awareness. This is a kind, not a fact.

Solipsism

Solipsism is the form of mental constructs. The mind creates the world within which truths are assessed. Truths are only as real as the mind which creates them. Without mind, there is no truth. Mind constitutes the forms within which subcategories of truths are externalised and assessed. So what we mean by "God" is really an implicit recognition of the constitution of the forms of being by mind.

In other words, there has to be a coherence of principles within a framework for correspondence of objects to each other within that framework to be possible, which gives rise to what we might call "truth". A principle has to be applied within a field outside of itself in order to generate truth conditions.

In the case of existence, that framework is constituted by the coherence of being and mind, which is solipsistic in form. Hence mind and being are closely intertwined.

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Subjective and objective are pairs within a frame. When there is no objectivity to compare subjectivity to, or when what we refer to as subjective is an experience and objective as an idea, then our talk becomes meaningless, for the question becomes whether there are objective experiences or subjective ideas.

Why Singapore feels/is sterile

Singapore is a top down country, where the state determines the forms that interactions between state and society, and state and economy takes. The state determines the parameters of society. Society does not know what it is; its functioning and purposes is interfered with by the state; there is an absence of the art of living; and without the ability to determine the forms that societal interactions take, there is no collective sense of the space of possibilities for the evolution of society. Without empowerment, there is no possibility of the development of institutional forms and principles for the energy of its people to latch onto, or to apply itself upon; no spirit; sterile.

Democracy is a continuous meta conversation, not just of the role of government, but the scope of government, within the space of interaction between state, society, and market mechanisms.

This is not to say that the system as it has evolved into its current state is not the best under the circumstances, although it is too early to tell ex ante what the best form is, involving a good deal of unknowables and luck. Good in such cases is so conditional as to be meaningless. The key question is if the combination of mechanisms and characteristics are optimising the energies and capabilities of a people at any point in time, as well as creating the incentives to do so across time, and if existing institutions are generating the balance between stability and discovery in the right ways. And if the essentially totalitarian system is antifragile.

There are 3 goals of government: law and order; empowerment of citizens to change state and society; risk pooling and intergenerational contracting.

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Society consists of the building blocks of institutions and the ideologies that underlie them.

The life of a society is the embodiment of the continual philosophical conversations that it engages in to determine ends and means.

Sterility is the absence of philosophy due to the predetermination of values and actions and the institutions used to achieve them - namely, wealth creation.

That is the weakness of ossified societies - the predetermination, rather than the dynamic flux, of values.

In short, Singapore is a society of Last Men.