December 1, 2024: Making New Arrangements

You have no right to falsify life.  Mari Sandoz (Nebraskapublicmedia.org: Ron Hill Remembers, air date April 27, 2015)

Human history is highly non-linear and unpredictable.  Michael Shermer

The Arrangement: The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Jean-Jaques Rousseau

Believing is seeing.  Michael Guillen

It certainly seems a lot less chaotic to have arrangements. If the outcomes of our arrangements work, all can seem right with how we’ve engineered reality—it comports with our expectations.

However, we make up our arrangements, whether reality seems to comport with it or not. An arrangement that seems to work, can become an association (what we look for “magically” appears thereby making it easy to assume we’ve discovered an association rather than creating one).  This relationship does not mean there are no other appropriate arrangements.

The Application: If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. (So many authors).

Questions about the arrangement are basically over when the application works.  But the linear view and application of antecedents, behaviors, and consequences (the “ABCs”’ of sorting “reality”) are not always objective facts, they often are interpretations masquerading as facts. Just because a rabbit runs safely across the road, doesn’t mean the rabbit knows how to safely cross the road.

Altering the Arc (whether Noah’s or other kinds of arcs): I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.  Jimmy Dean (yeah, that guy…I wonder if he meant “sales”—absolutely no offense intended)

It is not so much the events in our life, but their interpretations that matter. Alfred Adler paraphrased (I know it captures the point.)

Life is a paradox.  Sometimes it’s ironic, sometimes an enigma. “The early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese.” Two heads are better than one; too many cooks spoil the broth.” Circling the drain can mean withering away or that clearing away is afoot. For instance, if we’re lucky and pay attention, we can learn to get better as we get older, though some facets diminish.  “Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age” (Aristotle).

We cannot control as much as we can manage, and even at that, managing is never a permanent proposition. The fulcrum of life is dynamic.  Failing to acknowledge that is not only lazy, but can result in a life of overcorrections (I am no seer—these problems are also my problems).

Making New Arrangements: People in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. Don DeLillo

If you want something you never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.  Thomas Jefferson

Secrets are tricky. Sometimes secrets are important in the short run (think game strategies) and sometimes secrets are personal and no one’s business. However, secrets about grabbing and keeping power are egos mismanaged.  This is true across the spectrum of human interactions.

Change alone is an insufficient reason to do something different. Walking off a cliff will cause change, but not wellbeing.

Monopoly unchecked is power unchecked and that means no checks and balances—a staple of democracy.  It doesn’t matter if it’s an ordinary individual, the President, members of Congress, the judiciary, corporations, religious institutions, the financially very well-off, the educational sector, or citizens united of any kind. Before we act, we can benefit if we ask, “because we can, should we (or should I)?

Exploration of anything (research and development, of space, this or other planets, etc.) has to interact with wellbeing—even decisions made by first responders are involved, though they are tasked with causing no harm (sometimes a nightmare of a conundrum).  To generally exclude wellbeing is to eliminate one side of an equation that is supposed to result in the wellbeing of most, if not all of us as well as our planet. It is not the sale that ultimately matters, it’s an actual positive outcome.

Why does it follow that because we all need help, we need folks who are better than we are?  Elites can be better at some skills, but that doesn’t mean they’re better humans.

Why do we tend to venerate some and denigrate others?  Neglect is a third category, though it seems a passive one compared to talking some folks up and others down. And how do we fit ourselves in that arrangement?

Why do we organize, nearly without question, life as a linearity?  That’s fine, but not without recognizing the non-linearity of things as well. Otherwise, we’ve trapped ourselves in our own creation.

Democracy is a human arrangement that means a pretty level and accessible field of opportunities for citizens and others—in other words, freedom of movement, freedom to think, to challenge, to feel, to grow, to change, to individuate, to join, to leave, to decide one’s own path.  Obviously limits are imposed so that order is maintained—a morality we impose (I’m in favor of some form of morality) so an individual freedom does not unilaterally take away another’s.

We accept that without such a democracy, the population will be told what’s what, where to be, what to do and think, what to worship, and what class they will serve.  They will be told by the those who believe they are themselves elite beings (as opposed to being good at some things) and feel they should decide what currencies are valid, including freedom of movement (though all freedoms have checks and balances).  Fealty to the “chosen ones” become the norm, rather than a broad wellbeing.  To control a change benefitting a few, it is necessary to convince the many that their position has been, is, or will be worse. This bit of managing perception is like engaging in hypnotic practices rather than best practices.

We have just gone through a well-orchestrated change involving more than a new leader.  We’ve opted for a new arrangement.  Who benefits and to what extent is an errant question if asked narrowly and based largely on belief.  Is a democratic arrangement about benefitting a greater ratio of people or about believing the elite deserve the power and the rest fall where they fall?  To think and act as though it’s all good if secrets are kept and people get by is not a democratic notion.

Regardless of who or what “won,” we are obligated to accept the change and allow a peaceful transfer of power. That transfer is critical and can only be abandoned temporarily and only in extraordinary circumstances.

I’m not convinced we have to war as we have and as we do. To make war over resources, or positions, and disguise it as a morality-based war brought on by others is to manage perception via a kind of hypnotic state.  Warring or delicate peace is not a sign of wellbeing, but of beings on edge. It is a telltale sign we’re not getting the principle of democracy and empowerment of more than an elite few. This is not progressive liberalism I’m talking about, but the very heart of conservativism—something we want to preserve and to serve.  In that, both sides of the aisle can agree it is worth it to have people thriving, not just surviving, in their relationships with themselves, others, and the environment.  We start there, again, for the first time.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.  Benjamin Franklin