I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

Mon June 12, 2006

Observations

1. I am growing less vehement in my convictions on any given subject, and more open to alternative viewpoints. This is largely restricted to methods and observations, not goals (although the scope of my goals has changed). I think this is partly due to experience and mostly hormonal. As I get older, the agression-hormones fade a little, letting me examine other viewpoints in greater detail.

2. Terrorism, protests/complaints/criticism etc are vastly over-represented in media and convseration. None achieve significant damage or change, but are more often used by existing power brokers to further their own ends. There are plenty of constant pressures that achieve more damage and change, but as they are ever-present, they have become invisible.

3. Humanity is largely a seething mass of self-centered animals bent on their own short-sighted goals, with narry a thought to others or the collective whole. This is evident in every world, be it real or virtual, we exist in.

4. Every deliberate change to anything in human history has been achieved by wielding power. [Therefore it seems likely that] all attempts at change that do not wield power will fail. Protests and terrorism rarely yield any results because they focus on combining the power of a few individuals for a day or a few days. A very large protest may move a democratic government to change a policy in proportion to the threat of the number of votes it represents, or a dictatorship in proportion to the threat of an uprising it represents. However, this is not Power. This is informing people with Power of a strong change in public opinion. Terrorism on the other hand, has not achieved any of its overt goals in history, except for its immediate operational goals. EG terrorism has never brought down a government, but it has blown up plenty of buses.

5. The three most powerful bodies one can observe in history are:

a) A corporation. I’m deliberately doing this from the present day backwards. A corporation is a body of people who do not eat unless they conform to the chain of command’s wishes, and in many cases absolutely get off on performing their individual tasks. Person for person, this is the most efficient body for achieving a broad range of things, especially constructive goals. Most focus almost entirely on their income stream, and expend all resources increasing it, thus being self-perpetuating. Corporations live in a competitive world of other similar organisms, where less efficient models of activity fall by the wayside in the classic darwinian style.

b) A government. This is like a corporation but is generally more powerful due to size, and the fact that few have to do anything much to maintain their income stream. For this reason they also tend to last a bit longer than corporations. However, governments tend to be incredibly lethargic compared to corporations on a person-by-person basis. This is largely because they don’t have to maintain their own income stream - other organisations produce it for them - and because they live in a largely non-competitive world. The only competition governments have in their own little ponds is from opposition governments. Even in democracies though, this opposition is quite abstract and held at arms length. The long term result of this non-competitiveness is that corporations are now much better at almost everything, especially selecting people for roles. For example, the best CEO in a given country is usually massively more effective at their job than the head of government, even though he or she controls far fewer resources. Governments also have way more rules imposed on them that do not directly relate to their efficiency.
c) An army. Used here loosely to describe a gathering of military force, an army is great for destroying things, and killing large numbers of people. Armies are fairly crap at everything else, and generally only see their competition during actual warfare. Armies tend to be controlled by governments, which further limits their efficiency. Armies also do not maintain their own income stream and can become incredibly expensive at destroying things, as the latest technology is usually a killer advantage in war, and insanely expensive to buy. Armies are free to use means (including deadly force) not available to other organisations, and can apply the most strict rules to their member individuals. This makes them very effective at their destructive tasks. Despite their primary use being destruction, armies can be, and often are used to simply display the threat of destruction. In this way they can actually maintain peace or order by showing the other guys that destruction will be suffered mutually.

6. All of the bodies of lesser power are generally loosely knit, which is to say people are not tied to a chain of command by anything but agreement, and often are part-timers - spending most of their time maintaining their own survivial in a regular job etc. The exceptions are bodies of lesser size, which are also relatively powerless for that reason.

7. If the coalition of the willing were to wage a war on Smoking that was in proportion to the number of people killed in the last 10 years by smoking, as compared to Terrorism, they would need to completely destroy planet earth with nuclear weapons. I don’t mean just clean the surface off either, I mean literally break the planet apart with massive blasts.

8. If you were to combine all of the expense of an Army, the inefficiency of a Government, with the Vulnerability of a corporation and the loose-knit-ness of a terrorist organisation, you would have the world’s most useless and short-lived organisation.