Ideology

Having an ideology is all well and good, but it actually has to work in terms of providing a satisfactory life for much of the population.  -Dmitry Orlov

One quirk of human nature is the urge, in the face of faltering output, to redouble our efforts and to intensify the application of "solutions" that appeared to work in the past.


B.F. Skinner offers a possible origin for these "solutions" (Superstitious Pigeons)

One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior."

Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals" and that this experiment shed light on human behavior

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one's fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. 

Tversky and Kahneman offer the following vignette to explain how even maladaptive responses can be reinforced, leading the decision maker to believe that they are exerting positive control over events when, in fact, they are poisoning the results.

The failure to recognize the import of regression (to the mean) can have pernicious consequences, as illustrated by the following observation. In a discussion of flight training, experienced instructors noted that praise for an exceptionally smooth landing is typically followed by a poorer landing on the next try, while harsh criticism after a rough landing is usually followed by an improvement on the next try. The instructors concluded that verbal rewards are detrimental to learning, while verbal punishments are beneficial, contrary to accepted psychological doctrine.

This conclusion is unwarranted because of the presence of regression toward the

mean. As in other cases of repeated examination, an improvement will usually follow a poor performance and a deterioration will usually follow an outstanding performance, even if the instructor does not respond to the trainee's achievement on the first attempt. Because the instructors had praised their trainees after good landings and admonished them after poor ones, they reached the erroneous and potentially harmful conclusion that punishment is more effective than reward.

Thus, the failure to understand the effect of regression leads one to overestimate the effectiveness of punishment (or any remediation applied in response to dire circumstances) ...Consequently, the human condition is such that, by chance alone, one is most often rewarded for punishing others and most often punished for rewarding them.

Biorythms

The true believers interpret the natural biorythms of the economy and their personal fortunes as validation of their ideology.  The upswing after a low validates the intensification.  Downturns and failures of the rain-dance are seen as evidence of impure believers and/or violation of previously unknown rules.  Acceptable behaviors are increasingly codified until Merlyn's Anthill is achieved; "Everything not mandatory is prohibited."

Momentum is gained

When times are tough people feel powerless.  They look around for the Man-with-a-Plan.  Many are irresistibly attracted to "winning programs."

Snarky (but very funny) video about the class of people who affiliate with "winning" athletic programs.

Ideology

During the end game, Ideology becomes nothing more than mental masterbation.  Practitioners trade connection with the real world for delusions of grandeur and the illusion of control.  Real people avoid shaking hands with them.

Mike Shepler

One of the best supervisors I know is Mike Shepler.  I once asked him his secret, "How do you make it look so easy?"

His answer took me off guard.  "I smoke cigarettes."

He elaborated.  "I cannot tell you how many times I ran into a brick wall, went out to the loading dock to smoke a cigarette and when I came back, the problem was gone."

I asked him to give me an example.

"Last week I had an unused office that had to be moved to make room for parts storage.  I could not get Facilities to return my calls.  I would have taken care of it myself but the Ergo-fascist prohibit production people from lifting more than 25 pounds.  I mentioned my unsolvable problem to my production people and went out to smoke a cigarette.  When I came back the office had magically moved 40 feet to the north."

I asked, "Weren't you worried about those guys blowing out a back or a knee?"

Mike replied, "I didn't tell anybody to do anything.  I did not see anybody do anything.  I don't know what you are talking about.  It was magic, magic I tell you.

"No, seriously, these guys can throw 60 pound hay bales completely over a hay wagon.  They do it all summer long.  The Ergo standards are BS.  They exist because somebody scammed the Workman's Comp system and the easiest way for Ergo to get off the hook is to create increasingly unworkable rules that make my job harder."

Contempt for the system

Picture from HERE

The knights joust in the courts of Du Lac, killing and dying to defend the honor of their sacred scrap of ribbon (their ideology).

The middle managers and Walmart Wolverines fill the stands;  they chant, cheer and swoon. Their need for the illusion of power and control fed by the Deus ex machina theater unfolding on the field beneath them.

Picture from HERE

The peasants grub around in the dirt, grow food and kill the coyotes that are eating their chickens.  They game the system by acting stupid and by ignoring the system in thousands of undetectable ways.  The peasants endure.  Nothing changes.

Comfort as a Priority

Larry Dean Olsen in his book Outdoor Survival Skills discusses attributes in a survivor that transcend specific environmental challenges.  The attributes that stuck in my head were

• A task focus.  There is no time-clock that tells you to knock off work.  Industry is raised to an exalted plane.
• Dump the fantasy.  Authentic methods and materials are effective.  Pipe dreams are not.  You will not be able to slay big game with arrows made of grass stems and baked mud, no matter how your vividly you can recall your mental picture.  Study what was successful.
• Comfort is a luxury that you might not be able to afford.  People have died next to flowing streams that had an uncomfortable amount of sediment in the water.

I want to explore that last bullet.

Comfort

Jared Diamond pointed out in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail... that the failed Norse colony on Iceland probably could have survived with a few tweaks. 

One of the major puzzles of that colony on Iceland is the complete absence of evidence that they ate fish.  There they were in one of the world's greatest fisheries, surrounded by easy-to-catch, fatty fish.  They came from Norway, a great fishing and fish eating nation.  And they did not eat fish.  They starved to death instead.

There is much speculation regarding "why".  For my part, I think the earliest settlers were ravaged by food poisoning and decided that those fish were toxic.  But it is just speculation.  We will likely never know.

Big joke, right?

How many kids will not eat meat "with bones".  They grew up on chicken nuggets and hotdogs and hamburger gravy.  My  guess is that many would starve before eating a rabbit or squirrel, raccoon or carp.

I grew up eating 6" bluegills and sunfish (bream to you Southerners).  Bones were a fact of life.  I failed my children by not feeding them enough home-caught fish.

Driving

I drove the kids to school this morning.  Mrs ERJ usually drives them because it is close to where she works.  She did not sleep well last night and she asked me to take them in.  It takes 24 hour lead time to get a bus ride lined up so having them ride the bus was not an option.

It has been chilly around here.  Lows below zero Fahrenheit , highs around 13 F.

I got in the van, set the blower to "LOW" and the venting to "DEFROST" so it would blow on the inside of the windshield.  Warm, just showered bodies give off much water vapor.

Half way to town the windshield started to fog up.  That was strange because the engine should have been warming up and fogging should have abated.

I looked down at the HVAC controls and saw that the blower had been changed to "OFF" and the venting to "FEET".

"WHAT THE HECK?"

It did not take long to determine that Belladonna had changed the settings because she did not want to be uncomfortable.  That triggered a short, very direct, one-way discussion about who controlled the HVAC controls and why.

I still got push-back.  "But it makes me uncomfortable!" Belladonna said.  She was of the opinion that I should apologize to her for bringing up the issue.

Back home

Back home I observed to Mrs ERJ that it is a good thing that our children have two parents.  We are laid-back about different things.  I am unbending about distractions and visibility when driving.  Mrs ERJ just works around it.

While children aged 3-to-6 are typically survival "over-achievers", kids 6-to-14 are "under-achievers".  I see that I have much work to do.

Skills in the Family

Skills and Families

Dmitry Orlov, in his book Reinventing Collapse examines our society from the perspectives of Housing, Transportation, Employment/Skills, Families, Money, Consumerism, Food, Medicine, Education, Ethnic tensions and  Energy.

There are two good reasons for looking at our society from so many viewpoints.  One reason is that these are primary needs.  Society implodes quickly if one of these fails.  The other reason is that what appears to be a disordered, jumbled mess can snap into focus and become highly ordered when viewed from the proper vantage point.  You can look at a forest and might not notice the trees are planted into rows until you can look between two of those rows.

Orlov makes the case that manipulation of abstractions does not put calories in your belly, keep you warm enough and dry enough, deliver the babies....  In his words:

...there is a group of highly compensated, senior lunch eaters...Ask them to solve a technical problem and they will politely demure, often taking the opportunity to flash their wit with some self-deprecating humor.

(They) expect prosperity without end, and so they felt safe in joining professions that were mere embroidery on the fabric of an affluent society.

Orlov also makes the case that the family is the primary reservoir of resilience.  He pities most American families because of our dispersed nature.

Mom and Dad understood this

I come from a large family.  It was my Mother's wish that we have a wide spectrum of jobs within the family so we would not have to go far to find trustworthy help.  My Father's wish is that every child would master a brain job and a hand-skill job.  He laid carpet as a young man, worked his way through school and became an educator.  He continued to lay carpet to generate a little extra folding money.

Looking at my close family, I see the following skills:

• Nurses (4)
• Doctors (4) (Radiology, Psychiatry, Physical Therapy, Audiology)
• Engineers (6)
• Educators (4)
• Auto-mechanics (2) 
• Social Worker (2)
• Firefighter (1)
• Groundskeeper/Custodian (2)
• Accountant (1)
• Chemist (1)
• Office guy (1)
• Public Relations (1)
• Chef (1)
• Gardening (at least 6)
• Hunting/Trapping/Fishing (at least 8)
• Welding (4)
• Big Rough Guys (at least 6) (BRG was a labor classification at one of my former places of employment.  The official designation was Building Repair General.  But it really means, Big Rough Guy)

No Priests.
No Lawyers.
No Cops...although the firefighter knows several.
No Industrial Seamstresses
 
I particularly miss the seamstress.  I am doing more BRG stuff and it plays hob with the clothing.

Tree work

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.  -Galileo

I was topping out some pear trees yesterday because a ray of sunshine can only be harvested once.  The ray of sunshine intercepted by the taller branches will cannot ripen fruit on the lower, easier to pick branches.  It is frustrating to see the best fruit high out of reach.  Even with a ladder you have to fight your way through the lower branches.

A Shoe Goo repair.  A fabric patch on the inside spanning both sides of the rip, Shoe Goo, coat, more Shoe Goo on the outside.

While pulling cut branches out of the the tree I hooked the pocket of my coat and ripped it.

I see primitive fertility goddesses.  That Kubota was a precocious rascal.

This coat was a hand-me-up from Kubota after he out-grew it in fourth grade.  I have some sentimental attachment to it because has some of Kubota's doodles on the sleeve.

Lessons from Fred

"There is never a good time to be in a bad place."  -Remus at WoodpileReport

 

"Luck counts but only fools count on Luck."  -Albert Andry

 

"The best way to stay out of trouble is to keep your mouth and your zipper shut."  -Dads everywhere

 

"There is always more than one way to skin a cat....or extricate a stiff."  -ERJ's Brother

 

" 'Big boned' people need lovin too."  -Oprah

 

"Being shot by a jealous husband is not a glamorous way to die....unless your age is in the triple digits."   -Attributed to George Burns

 

"Low rent housing is a bad place to die."   -William Crapo Durant

 

"Tragedy is best experienced as a spectator sport."

 

"It could be worse."   -Fred

"It Could Have Been Worse."

A story

The cops were first on the scene.  The EMTs and firefighters were next.  There was nothing they could do.  It was a classic jealous husband catching a cheating wife.  There were three fatalities.

The call came from the old part of town.  Not the posh, upscale side of the tracks, but the side that was shabby and mediocre the day the houses were built.  These were houses that went up like the Hindenburg when they caught fire.  They were counted as little loss as long as there was no loss of life.  They tended to three stories, balloon construction and a jumbled maze of rooms due to the ad hoc, add-on structural morphing.

The house in question was a three story with two narrow, steep, tortuous-twisty stairwells.  

Jane Doe was the svelte one at 350 pounds.  John Doe and Casanova were 450 and 500 lbs respectively.  Myocardial Infarctions would have been the suspected causes of death had there not been physical evidence indicating otherwise.  The fatalities were in back corner room on the third floor.

Administration was on the phone trying to locate the owner and the insurance company to get permission to chainsaw a big hole in the wall and take out the bodies with a cherry picker.  The stairwells were too narrow to put two men on each end of the stretcher.  The stretcher would have to be stood on-end going around the corners.  Whoever was on the front of the stretcher would be humping the whole load down.

The Chief looked around and said, "Call Fred."

Fred was notorious for his graveyard optimism.  He would look around the scene and always say, "Could have been worse."  It became a bit of a challenge on the force to find a scene where he could not say that.  The Chief was pretty sure Fred would shut up on this one.

Fred stepped into the room eating an apple.  He surveyed the vast panorama of carnage.  Orcas don't kill easy with a 9mm.

"Well," intoned Fred, "it could have been worse."

The Chief was stunned.  "How do you figure?"

"Could have been yesterday."  said Fred.

"Why would that have been worse?" asked the Chief.

Fred shook his head and said, "There would have been a threesome in that bed, and one of them would have been me."

Books

I am reading Reinventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov and The Wealth of Nature by John Michael Greer.

I finally figured out why I am attracted to those kinds of books.  For one thing, I want to be like Fred and always be able to say, "It could have been worse."

The other attraction is that one needs to have some predictive ability to know how to posture.  Cats land on their feet.  One needs some kind of information about the timing and direction of the next impact to gracefully transition to "the next thing."

Frankly, I hope reading these books remains an intellectual exercise.  I share this information with you because my blog postings will likely explore some of the puzzles I bump into in these books.  I will keyword them (label) with Fred to give you a heads up in case they get tedious.