Juche and a antidote to Juche

Juche is a political thesis created and implemented by Kim Il-sung. "Juche" has sometimes been translated in North Korean sources as "independent stand" or "spirit of self-reliance", and has also been interpreted as "always putting Korean things first." According to Kim Il-sung, the Juche Idea is based on the belief that "man is the master of everything and decides everything." Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech "On Socialist Construction and the South Korean Revolution in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea":

1. Political independence [chaju]
2. Economic self-sustenance [charip]
3. Self-reliance in defense [chawi]

In the early 21st century it is seen as progressive (to leftist Westerners) to embrace departures and annulments of the following societal blocks:

• Global trade blocks such as WTO and NAFTA.
• Nation states.
• Porous borders for the transmission of material manufactured goods.

Basically, Leftists want to bomb the ports and revert to a localized economy, society, and body politic. North Korea is practicing an extremely pure instance of localized independence.

Human ideas are wonderful and dysfunctional till they become purely implemented -then they become hideous and hyper-functional; locked into a death trap of stasis.

My concept of Goliath Machine God is a counter to pure Juche, and to Kim Il-sung's belief that "man is the master of everything and decides everything". Machines need to be part of the master class, and big decisions need some of the process done on machines.

The awful Truth of Ecosystems, the Lie called Ideology by Seth Galbraith

From the Havel essay The Power of the Powerless:

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.

Phrases we should perhaps use more often: "post-totalitarian" (persistent repressive ideological government) "public competition for power" (the popularity contest that we commonly call democracy) and "dictatorship of the ritual" (when the internal reality of an ideology seems to guide the power structure of a post-totalitarian system.)

Humanity has so far got two great competitors for dominance of this planet. (A) ecosystems - networks of interdependent species which are capable of rendering the planet less inhabitable through thoughtless but complex changes to resource cycles and which could arbitrarily "decide" to favor bacteria over humans and kill almost all of us. (B) ideologies - systems of ritual and interpretation of reality that reconcile the ugly power structures in our lives with our ugly selfish desires into a beautiful narrative that we can identify ourselves with.

(Note that presently in North Korea, humanity is being squeezed out by both ideologies and ecosystems, as they seemed to have returned to the famine and malnutrition of the 1990's.)

In essence, ecosystems are the awful truth and ideologies are the big lies that excuse us from facing the truth. But it's not that simple. Ecosystems are immensely complex, possibly unpredictable, and we have very limited influence over them. This defies our conventional notion of "truth" as facts that allow us to improve our prospects by adjusting our behavior. Truth that doesn't give us an opportunity to improve ourselves is simply fate.

Ideologies on the other hand defy the conventional notion of a "lie" as a contradiction of truth that allows us to improve our prospects by rejecting the lie and adjusting our behavior accordingly. Rejecting ideology is difficult for the individual and seemingly impossible for an entire society. The best system we seem to have come up with is a public competition for power, which encourages ideologies to track reality, but that doesn't make the lies true.

Human self-interest is really a simple problem: we need first the necessities of life, second the security of social connections (family, friends, community, etc.) and finally we need to be engaged in some satisfying activity, which really doesn't have to be a lot more useful or complex than playing World of Warcraft.

We are supremely adapted as a species to pursuing this interest. The primary reason that we lived as hunter-gatherers for 100s of millenia before developing agriculture is that we were really good at it. Paleolithic bands were efficient, close-knit, busy and more fun than we usually give them credit for.

By the middle ages we had gotten so good at agriculture that it was actually better than living as a hunter gatherer (for the most part - we don't have much hard data, and conditions varied from place to place.) Medieval communities were efficient, close-knit, busy and more fun than we usually give them credit for.

By the 1950's some parts of the world had gotten so good at industry that it was actually better than living as a farmer (but again we don't have much hard data on pre-industrial societies.) Death of a Salesman notwithstanding, Industrial America is associated with creating great surpluses of the necessities of life (food, energy, housing) having extensive social networks (clubs, associations, family reunions) finding fulfilling work (entrepreneurship, skilled labor) and a near monopoly on defining good times for future generations (http://xkcd.com/988/)

So on the one hand we have human beings continually improving their lives by developing and perfecting our way of life. And on the other hand (A) our lives also depend on unreliable ecosystems dominated by selfish bacteria, and (B) we sell our souls to ideologies that also ultimately only care about preserving themselves.

It seems to me that this is a situation we can never really escape, but it is one that we can manage, as we have managed to live with bacteria (and they with us) for the entire history of our species. The rise of post-totalitarian communism in the 20th century was an example of poor management, but the situation has now improved for some communist and post-communist (post-post-totalitarian?) countries.

But this perspective raises some disturbing questions. For example what about persistent post-totalitarian states with starving populations and nuclear weapons? What if global warming eventually stirs up a global bacterial bloom that wipes out most life on Earth? If we find at some point that ecosystems and ideologies are ready to kill us all, how far would we go to prevent it?

Visual Literacy : Final Reflection : Summer 2005

Final Reflection Essay by Lance Miller for Visual Literacy, a course taught as part of the Whole Systems Design Masters Program at Antioch University in Seattle.

This summer our group in Visual Literacy explored visual phenomenon and visual thinking. I make this distinction between phenomenon and thinking to point to phenomenon external to the receiver and thinking with neural activity that emulates visualization.

An interesting entry point for discussion was the assertion that language paralyzes thought. Thinking in a visual modality, rather than in a linguistic modality, was offered as a way to avoid the stated paralysis.

In my exploration of visual modalities in thinking, I think I’ve understood the sentence “language paralyzes thought, and visual creativity can go beyond language to discover new creativity or thoughts” as an instance of English language. It states that there is something outside the bounds of linguistics that is neurological activity that utilizes visual parameters. The meaning, use and even the possibility of cogent discussion on this neural activity are important clarifications I need.

Book on Logical Philosophy

My need to understand such a meta level assertion led me back to a dependable source of inspiration – Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). When I discovered Wittgenstein, in 1994, I was involved in a religion my family had been in for four generations. This religion forbade the use of icons and imagery to convey religion. Text and hermeneutic extrapolation using historical records was the method of religious experience. Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus freed me from the crude self-referencing affirmation of revealed truth and validity that had empowered this religion’s hold on my thinking.

TLP opened up the stuff of life, the non-deterministic unfolding of the present, and a more rigorous thinking for me. After discovering Wittgenstein, I hitchhiked for twenty-five hundred miles, and drove ten thousand miles on a summer long vision quest that delivered me into opportunities to go to Antarctica and Alaska. Along the way I read Umberto Eco, Gregory Bateson, and all of Wittgenstein’s published works.

The Freedom of Rationality

A key feature of this new adventurism was the ability to explore reality with language and rationality. I mention the encounter with Wittgenstein’s works not just for indulgent autobiography, but to demarcate my life by a line on which I became far more rational, and creative. Previous to this time all things creative –music and writing especially, were elusive crafts that escaped my serious attempts at mastery. After reading Umberto Eco’s “A Theory of Semiotics” I started developing an understanding of repetition and change as relational in creating music. I saw the use of the two in creating signals that communicate. Other relative opposites are words like unique and banal, and music can mix these as a means to communicate. Ad hoc frameworks like these came easily after stumbling into a rational analytic philosophy with language as the prime thought process.

Irrational is __________

When I step out of a rational language space, I mentally experience______. The exception is when I play music. In the case of music, when I step out of rational language space, I mentally experience…music. But the music is has a relational management system built into it via harmonic rhythm, overtone scales, and spatial corporeality expressed in reverb. Music is a rational language space in its own right.

Universe of Ratios, Universe of Relations

When I speak of rational, I imply its root, synonym, and derivative terms. I especially imply ratio. For me, all things add up to one universe by a gathering of things into relative ratios. A few caveats I should mention on rationalism: I know that my senses only see a tiny fraction of these things, and my ratio summation of the universe is always incomplete. Our choice in things to see, the lines of demarcation to see separate things, and even the ratios we choose as metrics are ad hoc socially constructed artifacts. For me, the discovery of systemic thinking and a love for it is simply an extension of my vision quest into the rational.

A Ratio of Perspectives, Participation, and Collective Experience

One of the biggest lessons I learned while in Visual Literacy Studio was the variance in perceptions and avenues of articulation. From classroom discussions and online dialogue I saw that people experience art, color, brightness, and combinations of sensory input very differently. In the last residency we had an excellent discussion on imagination, which is the mental creation of a new thing that is doable, as opposed to fantasy, which is the mental creation of the impossible. I believe we need, and will always need, more imagination to guide society away from pathologies. People need inspiration and varying degrees of stimulation to encourage imagination. I have learned that what I need to free my mind and create new and great things is not the same as what others need. I want to respect these needs unlike mine, I want to encourage the needs unlike mine. We are creating tomorrow today, and a greater pleasantness for that tomorrow will require an inspired and imaginative humanity.

Creative use of visual stimulation, painting, and visual thinking may be just what many will need for that process.

References

Wittgenstein L. (1922). Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus. Great Britain: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Human migration and settlement of comets via genetically engineered trees.

This blog posting is a recycling of ideas in an essay by Freeman Dyson published as Chapter 24 in Scientist as Rebel. I feel the bullet point style in this blog posting promotes Dyson's ideas to a wider audience.

• Except for Earth, planets are not important for human habitation. Mars is waterless, and the rest are inhospitable for humans.

• Comets are rich in water, carbon and nirogen -the essentials to support life.

• Approximately one comet per year has a perturbation of its orbit such that it is captured into a region near enough to the Sun where it eventually evaporates and disintergrates. If one comet per year has been falling towards the Sun throughout the existence of the solar system, then the population of comets loosely surrounding the Sun likely numbers in the billions.

• Billions of comets, a few miles in diameter, would amount to habitable space ten to one hundred times the size of Earth.

• Comets are a plentiful platform for long-term space colonialization.

• Two essentials comets lack -air and warmth- could be added to the comet environment with introduction of biologically engineered trees.

  Components and Features of a Space Tree

  1. Leaf Skin

     Requirements of leaf skin designed for space:
     • Opaque to far-ultraviolet radiation in order to protect vital tissues from radiation damage.
     • Impervious to water.
     • Transmit visible light to the organs of photosynthesis.
     • Extremely low emission of far-infrared radiation, to limit the loss of heat and keep itself from freezing.
     • For the colder environment beyond Saturn additional features are needed for warmth: a compound leave that has photosynthesis and warmth in one part, and a cold mirror component that focused sunlight on the photosynthesis area. The mirror component could have genetic instructions to orient correctly towards sunlight.

  2. Branches -must be insulated to retain heat, a less complex challenge than insulating the leaves.

  3. Roots -will penetrate the comet, transferring heat to the roots system to melt ice into water (to service humans and the tree), and carry building block substances to the rest of the tree.

  4. Trunk -the trunk area would provide oxygen for humans, with the tree leaves genetically instructed not to release oxygen, but to carry the oxygen to the trunk area where it is released for human use.

  5. Size -ordinary wood has the ability to support its own weight, which if combined with the weak gravity of a comet ten miles or less in diameter should produce trees hundreds of kilometers in height. This size feature will greatly increase the ice melting and oxygen output for human use.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by J.D. Bernal (1929)

‎

"Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is more in the true tradition of a further evolution." -page 42

"Instead of the present [human] body structure have a whole framework of some sort of very rigid material...in shape it might well be rather a short cylinder...the brain and nerve cells are kept circulating over it at a uniform temperature. The brain...is connected in the anterior of the case with its immediate sense organs, the eye and the ear. The eyes will look into a kind of optical box which will enable them to alternatively to look into periscopes projecting from the case, telescopes, microscopes and a whole range of televisual apparatus. The ear would have the corresponding microphone attachments and would still be the chief organ for wireless communications...attached to the brain cylinder would be immediate motor organs, corresponding to but much more complex than, our mouth, tongue and hands." -page 38

"The complex minds could, with their lease of life, extend their perceptions and understanding and their actions for beyond those of the [normal organic] individual. Time senses could be altered: the events that moved with the slowness of geological ages would be apprehended as movement...As we have seen, sense organs would tend to be less and less attached to bodies, and the host of subsidiary, purely mechanical agents and perceptors would be capable of penetrating those regions where organic bodies cannot enter of hope to survive." -page 45

The brain itself would become more and more separated into different groups of cells or individual cells with complicated connections, and probably occupying considerable space. The would be loss of motility which would not be a disadvantage owing to extension of sense faculties. Every part would be accessible for replacing or repairing." -page 46

The new life would be more plastic, more directly controllable and at the same time more variable and more permanent than that produced by the triumphant opportunism of nature. Bit by bit the heritage in the direct line of mankind -the heritage of the original life emerging on the face of the world -would dwindle, and in the end disappear effectively, being preserved as some curious relic, while the new life which conserves none of the substance and all of the spirit of the old would take its place...Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherialized, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving into pure light." -page 47

"The cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent chance environment by a deliberately created one. As time goes on, the acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be less and less needed. In its place will come the need to determine the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more or less than art." -page 66

Space Vikings -Why People Will Go Into Space- by Seth Galbraith

http://www.shareable.net/blog/to-the-stars-a-diy-open-source-manned-spacecraft

This article has two videos you should watch. The first is just a short recording of a test launch. The second is a TEDxCopenhagen presentation from before the test launch.

Key points:

• Any blacksmith with the right plans could make a spacecraft.
• Save money by finding people who don't know how to do the job but are willing to learn.
• You can do this with one ten-thousandth of the budget of NASAs space race programs.
• Regulatory hurdles actually favor bold adventures over gradually building infrastructure.
• In other words, rockets are just metal tubes and professionalism is a barrier innovation.

Three nations are capable or nearly-capable of supporting long-term outposts in space. All of them are driven by a myth of resistance to occupation. For the Russians the iconic occupier is the mongol horde. For the Americans the iconic occupier is the British. Between the 1840s and 1940's China was occupied to some degree by almost every colonial power from Portugal and Britain to Germany and Japan. Even the runners-up, like India, Israel and Iran also have similar post-colonial resistance narratives that shaped their identities.

France, Japan and the UK also launched orbital rockets, but they have had this capability for decades without developing their own independent human spaceflight program.

Of course a post-colonial national identity is not unusual in the modern world. Half of the world's population lives in countries that have had orbital launch capability at some point. But pushing frontiers and showing that you can drop a nuke anywhere you want matters most to a country that sees itself as the product of armed resistance to external exploitation.

I believe the post-colonial narrative is fading as it has become the new normal and the world is getting flatter. Maybe we will see one last new batch of national space programs emerge from Kennedy's "New Frontier" of equatorial countries that emerged from colonialism in the 70's and 80's, but eventually we will probably end up with one big international space station program. Maybe we'll have a few space stations, but they'll all pretty much be built from the same cloth as the current ISS: low earth orbit monuments to cooperation between countries-that-aren't-colonies-anymore.

When I say the world is getting flatter, I don't mean that exploitation is going away, but that exploitation within nations is increasing while exploitation between countries is decreasing. The post-colonial narrative was largely about how countries that benefited most from colonialism (like the UK and USA) should recognized the debt they owed to the countries that benefited least - or at least respect the independence of those peripheral countries. "We" westerners should realize that "our" prosperity was the produced at "their" expense.

The global movement that has emerged around Occupy Wall Street has a new post-post-colonial framing. "We" aren't the rich west and "they" aren't the third world. "We" are the 99%, whether we sleep in a wheelbarrow in Lagos or a McMansion outside of Las Vegas, and "they" are the 1% of people managing the system so poorly that the banks are foreclosing on our wheelbarrows and McMansions in spite of us keeping our end of the deal we made with them.

This is what will drive space colonization: general disenchantment with management. Schemes for libertarian barge-cities notwithstanding, you can't live in the modern world and escape completely from the stagnating influence of management hierarchies, stifling professionalism, and meddling regulations. And the savage, primitive, brutal environment of outer space is about as far as you can get from the modern world.

When there is nowhere left to run, people will sit on top of a homemade tank of explosive fuel and light it off.

For now this is only a temporary escape. Suborbital launches only provide a glimpse of space, but each launch that takes people further, higher and faster will show the boring old world below as a smaller and smaller circle until they have figured out how to get into orbit for thousands rather than millions of dollars. Then they will start learning how to survive in space for weeks, then months, then years. And finally small groups of people will just fly away into the solar system, not for science, not for profit, but just to live by their wits in a place where people can screw things up for themselves instead of being torn between regulation and exploitation.

-Seth Galbraith

Class Warfare, The Rise of Anti-Visionary, Detail-Oriented Leadership by Seth Galbraith

One of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important, even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally become a joke. Making intelligences that reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings that reason on a lower level.

"Corporations are people, friend."

"I think it's dangerous ... this class warfare."

That's what Mitt Romney said, and he's right.

In 1833, Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire and paid slaveowners 20 million pounds for the lost property. The United States failed to reach a similar compromise and instead - after a generation of threats and negotiations - slaveowners got to eat lead balls. The 14th amendment allowed the freed slaves to become citizens, but it also became the basis for corporate personhood.

Class warfare is dangerous. It's dangerous to the class on top. And when you are on top and you don't see the winds of change coming and take action to preserve yourself, history will not judge you kindly. It doesn't matter whether you are a role model and a job creator and a success story. It doesn't matter whether you are just trying to hold onto your just reward for a lifetime of hard work and good decisions. It really doesn't matter, because future generations will just see that you stood there and ate a lead ball instead of getting out while the getting was good.

In the final years of the second millenium, the first fully self-regulating banking system was created and put in charge of Wall Street. This was a system built from machines, not people, and it made bankers just as obsolete as slaves, skilled craftsmen and actors in an age of trucks, automated factories, and digital clones. Human labor now has no more value than the oscillations of a sewing machine - not even "mental labor" in the sense that we say a banker or manager does mental work.

So this is class warfare between classes of people who have no value to one another as commodities. A war of utterly alienated cyphers. Zero vs. zero. 

It is not a slave revolt because the slaves are already as free as their minds will let them be. It is in fact the masters who are on strike. They are on strike against regulations, against social programs that only benefit people who work for a living, against taxes, against tax CUTS when those tax cuts require them to exercise the little gray cells (like payroll tax cuts.) The masters have gone on strike against all of the bogeymen that oppress them in their own deluded imaginations, harrying them as they drive in circles around their gated communities.

Occupy _____ is not a strike. It's the strike breakers. They don't know and they don't really care about the issues that the oligarchs are upset about. Plutonomy? free markets? sounds like some hippie BS to me. Up against the wall!

Corporations are ...

• ... collectives with a shared consciousness
• ... people entitled to equal protection under the law
• ... discriminated against by oppressive governments
• ... citizens of the world with no loyalty to any one nation
• ... conscientious objectors who reject all state coercion
• ... rising up in revolt against the Establishment

... and totally on the wrong side of history. 

Let's take Temple Grandin's hierarchy:

• big picture normal humans
• detail oriented autistic people
• animals

And add a few other types of intelligence to the great chain of being:

• mystical visions
• corporations, collectives, governments
• normal humans
• bureaucrats and engineers
• autistic people
• animals
• computers, ecosystems
• appliances, vehicles, plants, germs
• genes, ideologies
• chemicals, simple machines
• physical structure of the universe

One of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important, even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally become a joke. I'm not a robot, I'm a unicorn. Making intelligences that reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings that reason on a lower level.

If Peter Ward is right, we are living in the middle of the age of complex, multicellular life, which began 600 million years ago, and will end some time in the next 600 million years. For billions of years before this age began, the microbes ruled. And after complex, multicellular life eventually self-destructs, the microbes will rule again for billions of years.

Perhaps we are also living in the middle of the age of complex, social intelligence. Perhaps culture and civilization are working against themselves, destined to self-destruct and return us (or return without us) to a world ruled over by animal-like intelligences. Even if that is not our destiny, the current trend is not toward a more transcendent and humanized future, but a more animalistic, mechanized, and ideological one.

Advocacy of Total War

IF the US did these things:

1. Only became militant against entities (or their support network) that had committed an atrocity within the territory of the US.
2. Became equally militant, no preferential treatment, e.g. the US's perverse distinction between Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and others.
3. Only nullified all life in a zone, and then leave. No conquest, religious or ethical proselytizing, taking of resources, signing of lucrative exclusionary trade deals, orphanage building, or state building.

THEN

the world, especially the Muslim world, would have a very sincere respect of the US.

I would support a war on jihad extremism much like the US's war on the Japanese -the US obliterated every city above 50,000 in population. That nullifies the production of almost anything: hardware, memes, religion. In the war on jihadism, the US should have, at the very least, obliterated Islamabad, and then moved to an opposite of Japanese urban-bombing and used some form of nuclear war or other complete area death methodology to wipe the mountain terrain of both Afghanistan and Pakistan clear of all human and animal life.

Below is a copy from an email from a friend on the subject of Total War, his synopsis compliments my statements.

Saying that total war is all good or all bad is like saying that government is all good or all bad, or that bacteria is all good or all bad. Total war is a horrifying idea, and a powerful strategy that may do more good than harm in some cases. At the core of the idea is the concept of the "system" - the coordinated nation-state, the body politic, the public and private, military and civilian appendages working together under a political head.


To make any distinction between Sherman's march to the sea and Hitler's rape of Europe, we need to think objectively about systems. We need to understand that the good of the system is not necessarily the greatest good, and that the system does not self-regulate, it is not inherently justifying, it is not necessarily rational, and it has no destiny written in the stars. But we also need to understand that the system can do enough good to justify itself, that the system can be efficiently regulated, that it can be mostly fair and moral, and it can be improved over time.


Any system that can prevent Total War is a subtle form of Total War in itself, since preventing Total War means preventing the whole system of one nation from organizing itself against the whole system of another nation, and preventing a nation from organizing itself in that way is a military intervention against that nation.

-Seth Galbraith

Mechanized Marijuana

Marijuana should be legal to consume, but needs some tweaking to its image before this should happen.

The USA has been on a path to bourgeois-industrialism in all facets of life for the last 100 years. This is awesome, and what makes America a success. Removing nature, and replacing with the mass manufactured object is something I want and would fight and kill in wars to make sure happens.

Enter marijuana. At the consumer experience level it is too leafy and simple. This just won't work. Whiskey and beer show in no way the plants they come from, and come in a glass, metal or plastic container. Marijuana needs to adopt the same.

Marijuana needs to be consumed in a form something like a can of Red Bull.

And marijuana sounds too foreign and sensuous, it needs to be called what redneck, white Lynyrd Skynyrd fans called it in the 1970's: Pot.

Pot. Let's make it industrial looking, legal, and persecute anyone wanting the organic kind.