Arrow of Blame

A key reason I don't believe that humans are intelligent or honest enough to survive our own impact on the environment has more to do with viewpoint, with perspective, with psychology than with IQ: no matter what happens, while our minds function, we can blame something external for our misfortunes: The tobacco company made me smoke.

John Belushi reached one of his several pinnacles of comic excellence in the mind of this consumer when in The Blue Brothers his character is confronted, in a sewer no less, by Carrie Fisher's jilted bride: the slob has stood the cute girl up at the altar. Belushi rants a series of excuses: He ran out of gas, he was kidnapped by Martians ... climaxing with this narcissist screaming, "It Wasn't My Fault!"

Compare disgusting individual slob Belushi with the character of any human group, infantile narcissists all: nothing is ever our fault. All frustrations are always attributable to the previous administration, to the last generation ... America could expand to infinity, raping open the Gates of Heaven, if only it weren't for the Indians, or the Liberals, or the FreeThinkers, or the Communists ... or Hitler ... or the Women, or now the Terrorists!

Everything in the Jews' history would have been wonderful ... except for the Gentiles: the Philistines ... the Babylonians ...

Everything in God's universe would have been wonderful ... except for Lillith, for Lucifer ... (for narcissists other than that god himself.)

Cultures magnify their own immaturity(s) through their institutions: churches pretend to worship god, to defer to god, to study god's nature; actually they stifle all thought, all communications, except those they recognize as Given from the cradle. The myths central to Judaism emphasize this: Adam didn't listen (though he could blame Eve), the Jews didn't listen (though they could blame ... a list of things) ... Christianity doubles the ante: the Jews didn't listen even when it was God's Son who was doing the talking!

No one listens to pk because pk has always pointed out this pattern but without blaming any one but OurSelves!Notice: I don't exempt myself. I don't claim that my administration, had you made me your Stalin, would have been exempt from the laws of the universe: exempt from homeostasis, for example. No: we all try to preserve what we perceive as stability.Human groups don't listen to science either. One primary way we do that is to get some craven bully of an institution (like government) to fund additional delusional activity which we then mislabel science. In no time science will answer to the preference of the ignorant stupid lazy slob majority. We use universities the same way we once used churches: to pretend that we're interested in learning, in free speech, in free inquiry, in intelligence, in imagination ... while in fact we punish, torture and kill manifestations of it. My attempts to testify against my church, against my school, against my family went merely ignored until I actually did something courageous about it: offering to network people cybernetically in 1970, joining Ivan Illich to help lead his "deschooling" movement.Deschooling: I hate that term. I have always hated that term. Illich didn't like that term. Illich didn't invent that term. But we're stuck with it.
The trouble is: it puts what we were trying to de-emphasize, school, right in the center of things. Freedom fighters is what we were. We opposed coercion. We opposed vertical authorities.Illich loves "the church" of Christ-love. (So do I, though I don't call it a church.) We both hate the Church of coercion, of authority, of arrogance: of hubris.The group did what the group typically does: it shoved me onto a social side-rail, barely able to feed myself, until it found a way to plagiarize my decentralizing tool into another centralized-and-centralizing monopoly for the hierarchical authorities. The government (and government science)'s internet serves not diversity, not freedom, but authority: big corporations can swamp the dot.comers (but the dot.comers were already plagiarizing Christ-Illich-pk! paying no royalties.)

I don't say that all imperfections are my fault, or your fault ... or the fault of the Chinese. But the arrow of blame ought to be able to swivel in any direction as we try mental hypotheses. And when it comes to institutions, one solution might be suicide.

Imagine Ronald Reagan saying, "We want the government off our backs? Hey: how about I nuke DC!"