From the previous musing, "If Life were a Basketball Game", I forgot to mention the trash talking that has also become part of basketball. Alarmingly, it is now also in the midst of our political and social landscape. The polite discussion of ideas, the civil arguments that were the defining measures of how well we have advanced as a civilization, how well we separated our humanity from barbarism, are getting lost in the din of rhetorical nonsense that fill the air waves, television and print media.
We go to Seguey again, our extraterrestrial visitor. It had been filing reports about our planet back to its home base, far, far away. It has an explanation for its 500 year existence and its journey to this tiny blue planet. If we open up the door to our imagination just a little wider, we get an unlikely view from the outside looking in. And, we may not like what we see. But, must we just ignore it?
Out of deep space, from an incredible distance that is only measurable in light years, landing on earth was the quintessential shot in the dark. Well, it is only apt to find out what it has to say. Seguey explains further the views it held in, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall".
Here is Seguey:
Out of deep space, from an incredible distance that is only measurable in light years, landing on earth was the quintessential shot in the dark. Well, it is only apt to find out what it has to say. Seguey explains further the views it held in, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall".
Here is Seguey:
Report 3, Seguey, Sector 3rd Planet from a Medium-Size Stellar Mass
500 years are what I am able to retrieve from memory. I interpolated everything else. Now I know I was one of millions catapulted in pods a few thousand years ago at tremendous speed, scattering to all points of the intergalactic unknown. I marvel at the technology that made that possible. Though I find it perplexing that earthling's idea of space travel is so primitive. Pure biological entities, the whole human body in particular, are confirmed to not survive prolonged space travel.
My conjecture: I and my other clones were sent out in microscopic capsules. Each one a bundle of coded information - more sophisticated than human DNA, with super adaptive ability, yet technically simple. Simple, because we were designed to adapt to every possible life form. Time was the main ingredient. I started by inhabiting the most basic life form on earth - a microorganism. This is not an exceptional feat. Viruses and bacteria predate all other living things. The difference I had from the virus is that I was able to jump from species to species, learning and accumulating knowledge as I went along. My contribution to the species is that traces of my adaptive abilities and intelligence remained in the life forms I inhabited, passed on from generation to generation. That explains the intelligence that higher species, like dolphins, whales, dogs and primates now have. That, by the way, also begs the age-old question of why are dogs smarter than cats?
I don't know how long ago it was when I first arrive here and I have no way to tell the origin of animal intelligence. Was it I or from others, if there were others that landed on this planet, that developed intelligence in species? There is no way for me to even guess. My earthling, human adaptation begun only 500 years ago. I surmise I arrived here perhaps many thousands of years earlier as a coded micro-entity. And it so happens that by the time I had established a capacity for memory, human language was well developed.
If humans know of my existence they will be torn by how to classify me. Am I a legitimate citizen now or am I always considered an alien? In case you wonder, I look and live like a human. No one can tell the difference. I am more diverse though. I can talk science, dig into philosophy and historical novels and appreciate all musical genre, but it is never lost on me that I am from another world.
In my report on mirrors and walls I lamented on the decline of civilizations many times over in earthling's history. I do have to clarify what I meant when civilizations collapsed from within.
How did nations go from one of cohesion and single purpose to achieve success only to crumble in a handful of generations. I looked into one of their oldest religious books and I have to ask why the Israelites turned against Moses and their God after The Exodus? In just a generation and a half the whole population had forgotten how they were freed from Egypt and survived the 40-year trek across the desert and into the wilderness. Instead they lost their way and became morally weak. 6,000 years later, my adoptive land is in a similar crisis today.
In a short period of time this country saw and fought resolutely in two world wars within the span of just one generation - exactly 25 years, in fact, between 1914 and 1939. The big issue today and debates over the wall would have been unthinkable three generations ago in the 50's. After the war the whole country was very much one nation, united in purpose, quickly becoming an economic power, and awash with prospects of prosperity. It understood the plight of displaced populations from all of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. But the country was of one mind. They had compassion but they knew from the wars that territorial sovereignty must be upheld. The only way for people from other countries to come and reside here legally was to come in through the legal process because the invasions of Europe and Asia were the most extreme methods of illegal entry.
As late as a decade ago both political parties echoed the same positions on illegal immigration. What happened? What changed? In that short period of time the political divisions that usually only infect and were limited to politicians and their avid supporters, have now leached deep into the population, spreading unfettered animosity. The country is divided.
This country and others like it - similarly patterned after the principle they call democracy - are failing to adhere to one truism that they all used to accept, as if the concept is so foreign to them now. That concept that I used to hear a lot is, "United we stand, divided we fall". It is quite simple, even a very elementary philosophical tenet, but it seems that every mature civilization tries very hard to fight that principle. The country is divided.
And there lies the basis for my observation. Every one of the empires that came and went eventually succumbed to internal maladies of infighting and a massive divergence from the principles that made them great and powerful. Each of the historical records only pointed to one thing. The slow decline begun when the empire was divided from within.
I will not cast judgment on how empires grew to amass so much power and wealth. This I know. Since this planet is a closed system, earthling theoreticians came up with a game theory called, "Zero Sum Game".
It is actually an economic theory as well. The gain or loss of one or some of the participants are exactly equal to the gain or loss of the rest of the participants. Since resources are limited and confined to this one planet, when empires grew large, it is bound to produce an imbalance of wealth distribution - the proverbial "haves and have-nots". My example earlier of heat transfer that moves from hot to cold is what propels migration.
The problem is that national territories had long since been established that defined physical, cultural and political boundaries. This, by the way, is the result of conflicts over hundreds and hundreds of years, which is how walls begun. Territorial boundaries were deemed necessary to preserve and conserve wealth. The problem is that people will always behave along the preservation and survival of individuals and families. Politics is what gets people to align in certain ways.
Politics, which is a major determinant in how nations behave, is unfortunately also a zero sum game. If all the political power can be summed up to 100%, the party that has 51% or more drives the agenda. This country is a 2-party system so zero sum game is obvious. In other countries, the parliamentary systems are a lot more complicated. In totalitarian states, absolute power is wielded absolutely by a handful of people so the zero sum game is a dire and grave situation for the general population.
The plight of population from depressed, violent, or failed governments is a symptom from multiple maladies. The failures of the countries of origin caused by corrupt regimes are inevitably part of the zero sum equation. The wealth amassed by the oligarchy and the accompanying power they wield are equivalent to the loss and suffering by the general population. But then those conditions have a way to cause ripple effects to the surrounding environments, like the disturbance of a pebble dropped into one corner of the pond causing waves and wavelets to spread out along the entire body of water.
That is my short analysis of what is happening. The walls are like water dikes. Until the pressure is eased off that causes the water to flow from its source, the condition will build up to a condition with unpredictable consequences. I do not have the algorithm that can predict what happens next. But this I know. If the population from within the walls is weakened by disunity and uncivil political discourse, combined with unrelenting waves of illegal and out of control migration from the other side, the result is simply a historical refrain repeated over and over for millennia.
This is it for now, until my next report.
Seguey is learning quickly. But, are we?
As late as a decade ago both political parties echoed the same positions on illegal immigration. What happened? What changed? In that short period of time the political divisions that usually only infect and were limited to politicians and their avid supporters, have now leached deep into the population, spreading unfettered animosity. The country is divided.
This country and others like it - similarly patterned after the principle they call democracy - are failing to adhere to one truism that they all used to accept, as if the concept is so foreign to them now. That concept that I used to hear a lot is, "United we stand, divided we fall". It is quite simple, even a very elementary philosophical tenet, but it seems that every mature civilization tries very hard to fight that principle. The country is divided.
And there lies the basis for my observation. Every one of the empires that came and went eventually succumbed to internal maladies of infighting and a massive divergence from the principles that made them great and powerful. Each of the historical records only pointed to one thing. The slow decline begun when the empire was divided from within.
I will not cast judgment on how empires grew to amass so much power and wealth. This I know. Since this planet is a closed system, earthling theoreticians came up with a game theory called, "Zero Sum Game".
It is actually an economic theory as well. The gain or loss of one or some of the participants are exactly equal to the gain or loss of the rest of the participants. Since resources are limited and confined to this one planet, when empires grew large, it is bound to produce an imbalance of wealth distribution - the proverbial "haves and have-nots". My example earlier of heat transfer that moves from hot to cold is what propels migration.
The problem is that national territories had long since been established that defined physical, cultural and political boundaries. This, by the way, is the result of conflicts over hundreds and hundreds of years, which is how walls begun. Territorial boundaries were deemed necessary to preserve and conserve wealth. The problem is that people will always behave along the preservation and survival of individuals and families. Politics is what gets people to align in certain ways.
Politics, which is a major determinant in how nations behave, is unfortunately also a zero sum game. If all the political power can be summed up to 100%, the party that has 51% or more drives the agenda. This country is a 2-party system so zero sum game is obvious. In other countries, the parliamentary systems are a lot more complicated. In totalitarian states, absolute power is wielded absolutely by a handful of people so the zero sum game is a dire and grave situation for the general population.
The plight of population from depressed, violent, or failed governments is a symptom from multiple maladies. The failures of the countries of origin caused by corrupt regimes are inevitably part of the zero sum equation. The wealth amassed by the oligarchy and the accompanying power they wield are equivalent to the loss and suffering by the general population. But then those conditions have a way to cause ripple effects to the surrounding environments, like the disturbance of a pebble dropped into one corner of the pond causing waves and wavelets to spread out along the entire body of water.
That is my short analysis of what is happening. The walls are like water dikes. Until the pressure is eased off that causes the water to flow from its source, the condition will build up to a condition with unpredictable consequences. I do not have the algorithm that can predict what happens next. But this I know. If the population from within the walls is weakened by disunity and uncivil political discourse, combined with unrelenting waves of illegal and out of control migration from the other side, the result is simply a historical refrain repeated over and over for millennia.
This is it for now, until my next report.
Seguey is learning quickly. But, are we?
No comments:
Post a Comment