Tag: Science

First, let me define my terminology.  By “Establishment” I mean those entrenched, politically and financially powerful people who jealously guard those aspects of the status-quo which are structured to serve their desires for the ongoing or increased acquisition of worldly wealth and power.  Other terms which I’ve heard used to describe elements of this segment of the world’s population are:  the military-industrial complex, the oligarchy, the 1/10^th of 1 percenters, and I’m sure there are other terms used especially in different countries.  Since WWII this segment of the population has done exactly what President Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address :  “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…[while] we recognize the imperative need for this development…We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  Now, from the vantage point of the 21^st century, we can say with confidence that President Eisenhower had 20/20 foresight on this issue. 

How does a segment of the population who all have similar, and often overlapping, interests in seeing certain aspects of the world’s socio-economic condition remain at the current status-quo go about accomplishing their goal?  In a word:  control.  Control the banks, the media, elected and unelected officials holding key governmental offices, people holding key leadership positions within the military, the major industries including the energy industry.  Control every thing you can that has to do with the economic, political and the religious/spiritual aspects of public life.  And then, every so often, engage in an exercise in which you make behavioral demands upon the general public using rationales which have no solid foundation in reality just to get the public used to accepting orders blindly.  New technologies make possible levels of monitoring of the behaviors of private citizens which would have been impossible in the 1960’s. 

However, even with the utility of modern surveillance technologies, the ability to sway public opinion using the mainstream media and exotic chemical and electromagnetic technologies, the ability to manipulate what does and does not get into school textbooks, with all this and more, there still are limits on how much any person or group of people, no matter how wealthy or influential, are able to control the masses of humanity.  Within any group of people there are variables of experiences, education, and interests which can serve to foil external attempts to overly control a large population. Which brings us to the three-body problem.

In physics it is exponentially harder to predict the movement of three masses orbiting each other than it is to predict the movement of two masses orbiting each other.  These challenges are known, respectively, as the three-body problem and the two-body problem.  We can learn from this that even when we are talking about objects which are inanimate mass, there are a variety of forces which can come into play.   trying to predict the behavior of three objects orbiting each other is very difficult.  Co-Pilot AI has these things to say regarding the three-body problem:  “…while the two-body problem is a straightforward calculation, the three-body problem requires complex numerical simulations and does not have a one-size-fits-all solution, making it exponentially harder to predict.”  

So, if coming up with a long-term prediction of the movements of three masses orbiting each other is very hard if not impossible, if your task is to predict the movement of masses over an extended period of time wouldn’t you appreciate it if you could trim the problem down from three to only two masses?  Then, imagine how much harder even the two-body problem becomes if you’re dealing with human beings rather than inanimate objects.  Inanimate objects whose essential characteristics are fixed and predictable. 

With any two or more humans variations within their internal ecology and worldview are not only possible they are likely if not inevitable. Also changes to those conditions can and do occur at any given moment.  Such variations, especially spontaneous changes within those variations, produce unpredictable independent variables: chaos.   We can safely say that it is exponentially more complex to predict, never mind control, the movements of three people as opposed to only two. 

When the “body” in question is group of people, such as a political party, then any attempt at predicting or controlling that body is going to depend largely upon having one or more key “influencers” within the group. Even then, factors beyond the control of those who wish to exert it can enter in and confound things.  

Think about it, if a relatively small, covert group of people have invested countless hours of research, a great deal of financial investment and managed to acquire great power and influence within not just one, but two major political parties, how willing would you be to simply surrender that control? Especially if the exercise of power and influence within those two parties translated into enormous power and influence within the involved nation. What the realities inherent in three-body problem ensure is that if a third viable political party emerges within that system you better be prepared to expend exponentially greater amounts of human and financial resources if you want to maintain the same degree of power and influence which you have become accustomed to, For those wishing to control the system I don’t think it would be overstating things to say that is a monumental problem. When the system in question is the electoral and political system of the United States, I submit that for the average citizen desiring the system to work in the manner we have been taught that it is supposed to, the three-body problem becomes a great blessing.

This is the reality facing the people and the American political process at this time. Increasingly over the past few decades we have seen the Presidential election process become harder and harder for any aspiring candidate who is outside the mainstream political current to become a viable candidate for the Presidency or any elected position on the Federal level. Two major events which helped bring about this reality one is the repeal of the fairness doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission which became a policy in 1949. This doctrine “…was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.”, Wikipedia. While there were controversies which emerged regarding the doctrine, rather than amending it where it may have rightfully required doing so, in 1987 the decsion was made within the FCC to abolish it. This decision made coverage by the media of elections, candidates and their views something totally up to the discretion of whoever controlled any particular media outlet. What this translates into in today’s reality of increasingly monopolized big corporation media is that we hear what they want us to hear and we see what they want us to see. What we are seeing is that the mainstream media is all but completely ignoring RFK Jr.’s candidacy. Further that whenever there is some mention of his positions it is usually in the form of pejoratives and cartoons which ridicule but never explain. This prejudiced closed system fighting to maintain a dominance over our political reality is a manifestation of what President Eisenhower was warning us about in his farewell address.

The second major event which has assisted in increasing the control a relative few are wielding within the U.S. Presidential/Congressional election process was the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC). This ruling in essence turned the possibility of running a campaign to be elected to any Federal office into an exclusive club for the extravagantly wealthy. If a candidate is not extravagantly wealthy, to have any chance of success at all it is all but required that they have sufficient backing from people who are. These days it seems “donating” extravagant funds into any candidate’s campaign coffers is akin to investing in that candidate as a business venture. While the emergence of a viable third (fourth, fifth, etc.) party does not in and of itself do away with the Citizens United v. FEC ruling, by negatively affecting the ability of any group to predict and control the total field of candidates running for Federal office it increases the chances that someone with a mindset more sympathetic to the living conditions of average Americans might be elected to office. Which might lead to an effort to see that ruling repealed.

One thing American citizens need to be aware of is that while some or possibly even many of the people who have acquired this “unwarranted influence” are Americans by birth or naturalization, that cannot be said for the totality of those that have done so. Also, whether they are U.S. citizens or not, their actions are not limited in any way to affairs within the United States.  Their agendas and their actions are transnational. 

I would venture that even if RFK Jr’s political aims were largely consistent with the goals of those exercising unwarranted influence his candidacy might well still be regarded as problematic by them.  This is due to the aforementioned three-body problem and the complications inherent in allowing a viable third party to emerge within the American political system.  But RFK Jr.’s stated political aims clearly aren’t all that consistent with the goals of those, again, wielding unwarranted influence within the governmental policies and practices of the United States.  The same could have been (and was) said of the aims of his uncle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his father Robert F. Kennedy in their political careers.  I, for one, do not want to see the violence that befell these two Kennedy brothers in the 1960’s, or any violence at all, become a reality within the election or political processes in our current time.  We ought to be able to use our reasoning abilities to conceive of and work with positive aims and actions that benefit all of humanity.  To do anything less is to fail, again, to recognize the truth within another, lesser-known quote from President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address:  “…America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.” 

Lastly, I would like to call attention to the subject of chaos and what it means in regard to the health of the American culture.  First, there are a few different interpretations of the world “chaos”. The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines chaos as: 

I think that quite possibly the average person’s mental image of chaos is something like a scene in a movie in which a 200 ft. tall reptile emerges from the ocean and begins wreaking havoc.  The behavior of the populace is usually quite chaotic in such scenes.  This type of chaos is what is defined in “1 a” above.   

However, I think the best definition for the type of chaos which people who are oriented toward predicting and controlling a governmental, cultural or other human involved situation are facing is that found in “2 b” above.  “Inherent unpredictability” does not lend itself well to attempts at control.  Yet, as stated in the definition, this type of chaos is inherent in the behavior of a complex system. This implies that the behaviors we think of as “chaos” in a complex system are in fact essential aspects of the processes of growth and development within these systems. These “chaotic” behaviors are meant to be present and if curtailed it is at the risk of jeapordizing the natural processes at work up to and including the health, the viability of any living organism.

When we human beings set out to control one aspect of nature or another we have to be aware that any overly intrusive, overly rigid type of control, relative to the nature of the subject of control, is most likely going to have a profound deleterious effect on the thing we are trying to control. One example of this is that if people are compelled to think in a rigidly controlled manner. What we have seen historically is that their creativity is going to suffer for it. Back in the days of the Cold War (approx. 1945-1989) between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, this was a criticism often levelled at the more rigidly controlled cultures within the Eastern Bloc. A perusal of the music and the art which were being produced within the Western and Eastern Blocs provides a clear reference point on the truth in that criticism. It’s not that no worthwhile music or art was being produced within the Eastern Bloc, however, at the same time the West was enjoying an explosion of creativity in these and many other areas.

In order to have a healthy human culture it is necessary to find a viable balance between structure and freedom. The cultures within the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War obviously went too far down the path of rigid structure. Some might say certain behaviors, such as the Hippie subculture taking place in the Western Bloc went too far toward individual freedom. But I would say that in order to have a healthy, viable human culture we must have the tolerance to allow for the exploration of radical departures from some norms at any given time. However, there is real danger to the health of a culture posed by the extremes of either overly dismissing cultural organization and structure, which is at one end of what might be called a structure-freedom continuum, or to trying to impose a pervasive totalitarian rule on the other.

At this time those with “unwarranted influence” are currently moving us toward an ever-increasing culture of totalitarian control. Citizens United, the criteria for a candidate to be included in the nationally broadcast debates, the monopolization of our national media along with the control/censorship which has attended this development are all serving to restrict not just the number of candidates in a Presidential election, these factors are even determining to a very great extent who is allowed to be among that number. It seems that one of the goals of those moving us toward a totalitarian state is that the common U.S. citizen may have a choice between two candidates but both of those candidates will have been vetted and approved by those controlling the system.

As controls tighten within our culture, every new rule and/or development that limits the freedoms of and/or diminishes the economic health of the general public works to further quash the inherent desire for freedom and creativity within all of humanity.

That is why Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third party bid for the Presidency at this time is such an important thing. Almost regardless of his platform just his presence in the field of viable candidates serves to bring alive the three-body problem on the national political scene. If he is elected that will be a significant step in loosening the controls those with unwarranted influence have imposed and interfering with the imposition of further totalitarian policies. More directly, RFK Jr.’s stated goals include several which further threaten the agendas of those with or seeking unwarranted political/cultural influence.

These things explain a lot about why the Establishment is endeavoring so diligently to consign RFK Jr. to obscurity. The act of denying him traditional Secret Service protection is just one more indicator of the level of threat they perceive in him. Those holding unwarranted influence within the United States have no desire to relinquish any of their ever-tightening political/cultural control. Political/cultural control which is to a significant extent enabled by the predictability and controllability of Presidential and Congressional elections being limited to a two-body problem.