Is this the point where a socialist turned into an anarchist? Did this just happen? I never gave it much thought really, I guess I thought Anarchy is just utopian, like all its critics do, as well as thinking it is probably not going to work, which is besides the point, as no other system has proven to work, certainly not the current one. I'll start at that moment, or a couple of moments before, I was running up a hill, a hill that I run almost daily. It is not an easy climb, but I am used to it, and my mind alway wanders and then.. I am at the top before I know it. I was thinking about something, not sure what, and the voice in my head was judging and calling one idea a 'mature' idea, and how for that reason this should be the accepted idea, being close to 'objective' and 'correct' and 'true', only at that moment it broke and I realised there is no objective and whatever idea will depend on perspective, on a point of view, and on context. So what we call 'mature' represents such point of view, and some interest in a specific outcome.

Ideas that an individual adopts are not orphans, they are true to a context, they are selected once they support the individual’s stance, justify its existence and its behaviour. People are born to the left and to the right, those ideas appeal to them, as they suggest that they are alright, and they keep going, others might move away from their birth inclinations due to a personal story, this too justifies the appeal of certain ideas and the rejection of others. Currently we are running our most important democratic institutions by the rule of the most popular idea. Democracy has evolved into a system to govern, and a game to be won by those who write the rules. This combination forever erodes the ideas that are less popular, regardless of their validity, and so we ignore truth, wisdom, fairness, or any other virtue unless it happens to be popular. And I thought… wait a minute… This is not how it works in nature. It is not “the survival of the fittest”, or whatever other evolutionary interpertation one might apply to describe it. In nature all the ideas live side by side, or in and out of eachother. Is this the point where a socialist turned into an anarchist?

OK… so laying aside the question of why should that matter practically? and, can being aware of the causes of our and other’s tendencies support a fairer more democratic system? I’d like to question those biases, which is basically dive right down into our pre dispostions and prejudices:

A few years ago, I bought and read a couple of books that were recommended to me. Both were speaking about trends, and about where we come from and where we might be heading. One is called Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling, and the other is A short history of progress by Ronald Wright. Wrights’ book is describing a civilization that is responsible to its own destruction, for him progress is a trap, while Rosling is painting a rosy future, where our progress banishes poverty and promotes longevity. Wright’s book is endorsed by environmentalists, and Rosling’s book endorsed by capitalists. Interesting that both books rely on facts, and so the bias rises from the choice of facts. I have produced a couple of graphs to illustrate that point. By Rosling and the organisation Gapminder, GDP per capita including a prediction of the trend till the end of the century (up we go…):

On the contrary, below is an interactive scatter chart comparing a list of countries which vary in their level of economic inequality. It is showing the correlation of inequality with a variety of social measurable criterias. The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of dispersion used to represent income, wealth, or consumption inequality within a population, 0 is perfect equality 10 is really the widest disparity.

This second chart comes to show that things aren’t going as well as the first chart claims, while the first chart claims that things aren’t going as bad as the second one. I know… There is a lot to be said on the selection of data, the specific countries selected, and how terms like poverty are defined here, but what is clear is that each chart appeals to a different crowd.

Now to move the subject of physics, I for a while was fascinated with the forth dimension, well with any number of dimensions, and in my research I came across some visual explanation that opened up a window for me. It was about our blind spots. We, who live in 3 dimensions, are blind to events that happen in a dimension that we don’t have sensory awareness of. That is to say that for an event that happens in another dimension we can measure the possible effect in our plane, but we can’t explain what happened as we are lacking data. Phycists are building worlds in that realm, since they had to invent a math that explains things they measure but can’t be explained with the data gathered, something is missing. oh… and the visual explanation I came across was quite simple, it was showing a graph in two dimensions that shows some tendency, let’s say the graph was going up in some rate with some ups and downs. Now looking in those two dimensions you can tell a story, but if you expand the graph to now exist in three dimensions, a whole new story can appear, a boring straight graph, can have a sharp change in the z axis that is not at all noticeable looking only at the x and y. That was a kind of an analogy to the other dimensions that we are not aware of. In some cases the affect might be dramatic, but the cause is invisible, in other cases there might be a small negligeble effect, but we might just have missed something huge.

So why am I mentioning the extra dimensions? well, I find that it is an alegory to the picture of people’s point of view, and their blidness to the validy or truthfulness of a different point of view. In a world where ideas compete to become the governing idea, and in a system where democracy is interperted to be the rule of the most popular idea, rather than a perhaps more mature interpertation that takes in account that: all ideas are born of a pre disposition. Isn’t that more like nature? instead of utilizing the idea of nature to promote a social concept from Darwinism to Liberterianism or speaking about selfish as natural ( as they do when a leader is proven to be corrupt ), I suggest to learn from nature, nature is multi faceted, nature desregards personal will, nature does not have lobbies, and centres of power, nature has no preferences, it favours nothing. We are the only species that can decide to ignore nature, or to work against it.

The simple mantra proposed in this humble letter, is “Things you see from here, you don’t see from there”. I find it explains a lot about my neighbours, my fellow workmates, my fellow countrymen and women, ones family..