The Synthesizer

9 Nov 2022

Congrats on another election, America. Keep on democracying.

Now half of you are having a crappy day, and half are having a better-than-usual one. It's the way of our time, at least for now.

Really if we could keep Ecclesiastes in mind, I think it might help.

"To every thing there is a season; a time for GOP insurgencies, a time for Democratic upsets; a time for normalcy, a time for progress; a time for speaking our minds and a time for seeing another's perspective; a time for righteousness, a time for pragmatism; a time for local, and a time for global; a time for parochial, and a time for cosmopolitan; there is a time to run, and a time to govern; a time to vote, a time to serve as a poll worker; a time to critique, and a time to take criticism to heart."

(Of course I could go on, and so could you.)

I repeat myself when I say that those who face the world as it is will be the ones to build the future.

I am also a believer that both of the two predominant political currents flowing through this country have essential, if partial, views of reality.

It's not so different from the two hemispheres of the brain.

Neither the left hemisphere nor the right hemisphere is complete. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. Most tasks, though, utilize both hemispheres. The corpus callosum joining them is key, like the political center when functioning properly.

Should Trumpism recede into the rear-view mirror, there may be an opening for the Republican part of "the center" to grow again; but if Republicans again fail to repudiate Trump, the center will continue in the wilderness.

A strengthening of Joe Biden may also help to moderate; but beware culture warriors like De Santis—Trump-lite is he.

GAaCCA:

Give America a Corpus Callosum Again

Our first merch item if you want it.

Keep it up, everybody. Especially, the living of normal, non-political life.

–Moog

9 Jul 2022

The dark is something we do together. And, believe it or not, it is optional.

To push against it requires a force of will far greater than that of the stone resisting the flow downstream.

The stone, if it knows, knows little. If it chooses, it chooses little, and slow. If it sympathizes with the water rushing by, hears the call of the downhill, it is unmoved—or, moved only one molecule at a time, over millennia, becoming the riverbed, then the sand of the sea.

We are not stones.

We want to belong—need to belong—to the social forces rushing by.

That's how it feels.

We need to despair with the despairing; we need to abandon hope to show all the others that we too abandon hope. That we are not rubes, that we don't say golly gee this is neat, things could be good, things could be great.

That's what the Apollo astronaut said, riding the lunar rover around the Moon: This is so neat.

We never say this is so neat anymore, we say This is my Trauma Trauma Trauma, we say Disintegrate, Divorce, Discord, we never never say neat but it is so neat.

The naive thing is to believe that well past the age of sail and steam we can't tack upstream.

Even the sailor with no engine, by sails alone, can sail into the wind. They can exploit the deviation between the direction of travel and the direction of the opposing force to zig-zag systematically on the desired course.

The dork of course is undersocialized. But what is the non-dork being socialized into? A resolute belief in the shittyness and futility of everything?

A prerequisite for positive action is the belief that action can be positive.

To make breakfast, one must first arise from sleep.

Just leaving this here...

–Moog

6 Jul 2022

The objection is heard: why must a central synthesis be found? There are fifty states, with territories besides—why must they be governed by a single policy?

Is it not a good thing that the federal government decays, and that the policies we operate by today are those we've been operating by since Congress last functioned effectively?

Is it not better to let the disagreement in the populace be reflected by a federal government in stasis?

In favor of this point are demographics: perhaps 330 million is simply too many people to agree on anything. With so many waves of immigration, and the melting pot so to speak running at lower temperatures, and more importantly with the deepening ideological division between left and right, perhaps it is for the best to atrophy the central authority.

To me this is akin to saying that because the foundation of the house is crumbling, it ought to crumble; and moreover that it ought not be repaired.

It is the delusion that if the neighbors hate each other sufficiently, then the road need never be paved.

Or, to resort to the Synthesizer's metaphor, it is like saying that channel 1's sine wave and channel 2's triangle wave are simply too different: nothing beautiful could ever be made by their combination.

But the magic of synthesis is that the sine wave and the triangle wave can combine to produce anything they wish—textures far more beautiful than either waveform alone.

And with effort, the disparate viewpoints of the American political spectrum can be substantially synthesized into a renewed social contract.

This is only an assertion that it is possible, which I take as an article of faith, to be proven in the doing (Universe willing).

But is it desirable?

Indeed yes.

While some value the stasis of federal statute, it has numerous harmful effects.

First, as Congress operates without a synthesis, it passes less law of substance, leaving the executive and judiciary to make most policy of note. The enfeeblement of the legislature has allowed a veneer of harmony on issues such as abortion, while in reality a central fiat was imposed on the populace, leaving many dissatisfied. The recent reversion of abortion policy to the states, while ostensibly empowering of democracy, ironically cements the judiciary as the most powerful organ of central governance today—a thing that should not be.

Without Congress functioning as the engine of creative compromise, national policy defaults to either one un-synthesized vision or another, depending on the party of the officeholders in question. We've been enduring the whiplash for decades.

A second harmful result of the decay of the federal legislature is that, because the executive and judiciary are not built for policy-making, national policy falls increasingly behind the demands of the time. Because we operate de facto by rules written twenty or thirty years ago, we are governed not by ourselves, but by a prior generation. This is a failure of democracy, for the government should be responsive always to those alive now.

It is a sign of the hubris of our time that everybody prefers their own, unmodified opinion be passed as law. Such egotists say that to alter one's opinion is to admit error. Of course, the opposite is true: to alter opinion, and especially national policy, in the face of broader views and broader information, is the true sign of wisdom.

The stasis of federal policy, thirdly, is a failure at the boundary of international relations. So long as federal authority remains sufficiently legitimate, the peace between the States is all but guaranteed. After all, no individual State possesses nuclear weapons: only the united States. And we really ought to keep it that way. A division of the States against each other would also open the door wide to foreign domination—the exact thing we revolted against to begin with.

I leave you with a fable, not of my making:

A Lion used to prowl about a field in which Four Oxen used to dwell. Many a time he tried to attack them; but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another, so that whichever way he approached them he was met by the horns of one of them. At last, however, they fell a-quarrelling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field. Then the Lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four.

–Moog

3 Jul 2022

Politics are a spectrum. The left/right divide is a false dichotomy.

Our current leaders benefit from the belief that those people are the problem, but we are the solution. But in fact those people AND we people are all needed together to make the best possible version of America.

We are those people. We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Drawing on more perspectives means benefitting from more information. If only the apparent contradictions can be reconciled.

And they can be. In reality, there are no contradictions—things simply are as they are. The quantum world even allows a thing to be both present and absent simultaneously.

There are no ideas so foolish or reprehensible, that there isn't a truth hidden within. And there are no beliefs so virtuous, that they don't hide a dark side or unintended consequence.

The dose, after all, makes the poison. Warfarin was made to kill rats, but at lower concentrations acts as a blood thinner, saving lives.

Political philosophies that flee to the safety of their echo chambers will stagnate and die.

Those that engage ideological rivals—and things as they are—will contribute to the synthesis on which the future is founded.

Abortion

Absolutism may stir true believers, but makes bad policy for the sprawling multiethnic nation-empire-republic that is the United States of America. Those insisting abortion be illegal in all circumstances constitute but 13% of the populace, while half of us prefer it be legal only under certain circumstances. With such a plurality in favor of compromise between the absolute legality of Roe and the absolute prohibition many states now revert to, the time is ripe for national legislation legalizing abortion up to twenty weeks—or just about any other number than 0 or 40.

I hope this may be known as Moog's Dictum: if a disagreement can be expressed numerically, the best synthesis of views is often their average. Have many people guess the number of marshmallows in the bag, and the average of their guesses may well be correct. (Rounding to the nearest integer, of course.)

It's no wonder there's such division about abortion: people's views depend largely on their views of human nature, and how conscious experience is explained. On this there are innumerable unprovable philosophies, both religious and irreligious, more dizzying than a circus's TikTok feed.

Progressives are tempted to dismiss conservative views on the issue on account of their religious origin. This is a grave error: the Constitution forbids making laws establishing an official religion, and for good reason: the European wars of religion dragged on for centuries, killing millions at a time when there just weren't that many people to begin with. Of course, this is the twenty-first century, and those not identifying as religious are the largest "religious" grouping in the country. "With great power comes great responsibility": unbelievers should take care that they do not try to establish unbelief as a prerequisite for participating in our democratic republic.

The Republican party of course being guilty of the inverse: of the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court, five are Roman Catholics (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Barrett); the sixth (Gorsuch) is an Episcopalian who was raised Catholic. This constitutes a de facto religious test for office applied by the Republican party, meant to assure conservative activists that the nominated justices would reliably oppose abortion, which indeed they have. One would expect even a conservative incarnation of the Republican party to produce a more-diversely-religious slate of justices than this.

(Whether Republicans are indeed conservative is a subject for later discussion.)

A New Synthesis

These partisan gurbludgleings (from v. intrans. gurbludgle, also gerbludgle, kerbludgle dial.) serve only to illustrate the torpor and self-serving of the ruling parties. By playing to the passions, they have inhibited the essential workings of reason—the very same that wrought the Enlightement, and the Revolution to begin with.

A state of perpetual freakout does not serve our interests.

But it does—cui bono?—serve the interests of the advertising-funded media and the politicians who prefer manipulating over responding to the minds of the people.

We are not robots—we are human beings. This means we must integrate the higher faculties of the cerebral cortex, with the lower faculties of the brainstem, and everything in between.

Our society, like the brain, cannot function well in a state of panic. Already we are experiencing cultural dissociation analogous to that which afflicts victims of trauma. To re-establish integration, we must calm ourselves—tune out the gurbludgleing, focus on what we do know, and what we do value, and what does work. Only in such a frame of mind can we form a new synthesis—a government of today and tomorrow, not yesterday alone.

–Moog

Notable Listens

• Abortion Law Is Here, If You Want It: Obama's Belief That Roe Would Last Forever And What Happens From Here
• Every Time We've Rigged the Supreme Court
• How Minds Change