Paul Bacarte
Evil will generate evil!
How is the world to be led into prosperity and its inherent peace?
The future will recognize that a terrible shock-wave attended the birth of the third millennium. A monstrous terrorist attack on the American World Trade Center and the Pentagon announced that some things were changing dramatically, and as a consequence, others would have to be changed as soon as possible. Retaliation and suppression, merciless eradication of the Evil, were, understandably, the first emotional and sturdy exclamations to be heard ! Obedience to such barbarian tribal instigations and primitive mass instincts, without further considerations about psychological and societal causes of the despicable and grievous things that happened, and the rough consequences of the additional evil of ‘an eye for an eye’, is the very last the world is in need of. The world is vacillating dangerously at the parting of two roads, one ominous road tracing a diabolic spiral of aggression and blind destruction, the other, much more difficult, appealing to superior intellectual faculties, leading into generalized wealth and bliss everywhere. For the latter to realize, mankind has to take a high threshold, inducing some mutations in the worldwide ‘civilization’ as we have known it up to now. Happily enough, such mutations can take place within the frame of an adapted, much more humanized capitalism, which make them essentially less utopic to occur in the near future.
Suppressing the Evil
Is it meaningful to get involved in a battle against ‘the Evil’ ?
Nations or groups of people who are declaring or waging wars against the Evil are identifying themselves with the (absolute) Good. Their combat is a holy war.
Unfortunately, the identification with the Good and the Evil is reciprocal. Either party is fighting the realm of the devil, or rogue states, in the name of their God or gods (unassailable values). As a rule, neither party is housing people initially identifying themselves with authentic offenders, let alone terrorists, but, on the contrary, rather with defenders of higher values and potential martyrs, highly admired heros sacrificing themselves and even giving their lives for the good, or holy, sake.
It is just as paradoxical as it is dramatic that people who are defending values and, undoubtedly, have many human values in common, get involved in cruel and destructive conflicts. And reconciling or ‘ecumenical’ work always turns out to be hard and time-consuming.
Things, however, can get much worse. If persistent miserable material and social conditions (no home to live in peace !), resulting in poignant frustration and resentment, may somehow be imputable to the adversary as an indifferent or selfish, manipulating, corruptly opportunistic, imperial power, feelings of hate and repayment may swell, especially in some more fanatic characters. No less can feelings of extreme humiliation (by injustice, discrimination, invasion, occupation) and alienation –being bereft of the most cherished values of one’s own- instigate to getting one’s own back.
Understandably, such a situation is threatening, eventually deteriorating in explosivity.
Fanatic leaders (not seldom ideologically, religiously blinded, in some cases even paranoiac to a certain degree) will try to rationalize their extremist attitude and aggressive behavior on the grounds of patriotic (tribal, even almost racist), cultural and religious motives and will thus be able to persuade a significant part of the population (the virulent spread of malignant memes, most clearly demonstrated in pre-World-War II Germany), even to mobilize a lot of defensive warriors against structural violence and cruelty (they are simply vile, offensive terrorists in the eyes of the other side). Highly appalled in case of totally unexpected attack, the innocent victims, thoroughly indignant, sincerely believing there is nothing wrong to their system (that, apparently, is only serving the Good) are liable to emotional overreaction and, in their turn, rationalization of inclinations towards relatiatory war and revenge by the name of legal punishment and self-defense. This can be the starting-point of a diabolic spiral. In the private sphere primary reactions of personal revenge are forbidden; criminals will be summoned and sentenced in a more moderate, civilized way. In the field of political action and international relations, also under the pression of aroused mass psychology, reasonable and ethically justifiable, genuinely effective and justifiable reactions are much less likely to occur. Fierce acts of war, immediately and inevitably entailing only too much collateral damage, hitting other innocent victims, may readily generate new monstrosities (Dresden, Nagasaki, but also the common horror and terror of war, the risky flight to safer areas, the insecurity, the elementary wants of food and shelter). The alleged legal defenders are in acute danger of soon becoming more guilty than the original attackers themselves.
Not only selfish criminals and psychopaths but also unselfish, well-meaning fanatics and sectarian fundamentalists can become an imminent and devastating danger to themselves and their fellow-men. Legal, well-aimed, well-restrained self-defense, repression, adjudication and preventive measures, as much as possible avoiding collateral damage and attacks on freedom and peoples, may become unavoidable if the aggression is invasive or if there is enduring structural violence causing people to live in intolerable, suffocating circumstances. But only in these exceptional cases. Who is then to blame? Such psychosocial disasters have, in the past, befallen mankind almost like natural catastrophes and may, in the future, be avoided only by better considering human feelings, aspirations and sooner, efficacious, answering to material and psychosocial needs.
Wild, violent, requiting operations surely will readily be misunderstood, eliciting more wrath and hatred still. And this will start the diabolic spiral. –Why ?
By nature, humans are neither angels nor demons. Religions have learned, of old, that man is a sinful, morally weak creature, sometimes going to criminal extremes. In the latter case, human personalities often seemed to have changed so badly, as if they were inspired or possessed by unworldly Evil, demons or devils. Purely psychologically, inner and outer experience learns that, infatuated and poisoned by hate and wrath, the human mind can flip from an amiable, careful, benevolent, angelic state to a sadistic, malevolent, awfully demonic erratic state. In its normal, strongly dominant angelic state the human mind is taking altruistic contentment and pleasure in charity, in bliss for anybody, in creating values, in making the world a better place (like parents enjoying the success of their children). Up come sympathy and compassion, and helpfulness. In the demonic state, however, pleasure can be taken in teasing, distressing, tormenting, beating, harming . In the worst case, accumulated hatred in racist, ethnical or national conflicts ends up in rough discrimination, vandalism, deportation, rape, mutilation, massacre and genocide. That’s why distorting and enraging war propaganda, yielding to intentions of brutal revenge, or the demagogic sowing of hatred should be regarded as verbal crime, and treated and punished as such.
Making new innocent victims, a misdeed of emotional irrational requital, can never be allowed in any way. It is, in addition, utterly dangerous to the new perpetrators of cruelty, because nobody knows where a vicious circle, a diabolic spiral, is to come to an end.
Multiculturalism: respecting different world views or philosophies of life
Man is a creature continually in search of meaning. This meaning is identified with bliss. Identified, on the one hand, with temporal and limited bliss on earth by materialist thinkers, identified on the other hand, with eternal and unlimited bliss in heaven by those who believe in an afterlife or saving Supernatural Powers.
Cultural environment and individual mental traits will determine which world view (Weltanschauung) is preferred, picked out and cherished, e.g. an atheistic (naturalistic humanism, communism) or a theistic one (gods- or God-honoring religions).
Because the Weltanschauung is offering a relative spiritual rest, an anchor in the turbulent sea of life, together with practical orientation, and hope, and confidence and mental strength, anyone must have the right to firmly cling to his or her subjective truth of the heart, without, therefore, absolutizing it (fundamentalism) and chasing dissidents, who, evidently, must possess an equal right to stick by their conviction. Of course, in case of practical incompatibility (difficult) compromises and means of peaceful coexistence have to be found (democratic methods, respecting human rights). Incongruous ideologies and philosophies of life have to be respected (as long as fundamental ethical laws are not transgressed) and no world view must be forced upon anyone in any totalitarian way. Real conversion, if needed, can only be obtained by argumentation in three dimensions: by appealing to intellection, emotion and hopeful aspiration at the same time.
Since the Enlightenment, science (unable to answer the most vital questions, hitherto) is seeking intersubjective or objective truth, independent of subjective Weltanschauung (devoid of value judgments with a view to meaning), and this might bring world views closer together in the long run, because world views are turning out to be adapting gradually to scientific discoveries. But world views (trying to handle the most vital questions, indeed) are rather tough and are reinterpreting received, traditional, premises at a very slow pace.
Because science is gradually building up and gathering solid evidence based truths, in the past even mainly limiting itself to the sensory organs based evidence of the natural sciences, it has not possibly been able to present deep answers to questions on meaning and purpose of human life. Culturally and personally determined Weltanschauung, theistic (spiritualistic) or atheistic (naturalistic), will still have to fill the gap and offer a foothold and a beacon. For making life livable, evolution and human nature have very intensely fostered Weltanschauung, and until the Enlightenment objective scientific truth was by no means allowed to challenge traditional life-philosophical, religious or ideological beliefs and values. But neither were alternative or dissident life-philosophical opinions, all considered as diabolic heresies, tolerated anyhow. In the free world such absolutist and fundamentalist behavior on behalf of any Weltanschauung has, as a rule, not been accepted anymore since the Enlightenment. Everyone is free to adhere to the Weltanschauung he subjectively cherishes as telling the plain truth. This is psychologically stimulating and socially harmless, because it benefits peaceful coexistence in mutual respect. The fundamentalist temptation, however, is always latent, and in deeply frustrating circumstances, this can lead people into holy wars and terrorism, as being then deemed thoroughly legal and heroic.
Slow-motion, indifferent or macchiavellistically opportunistic international policies and painful socio-economic circumstances are likely to entail such ominous and disastrous consequences. The old political culture of devastating short term thinking and constant lagging behind has urgently to be replaced by professional anticipatory strategies that not only effectively solve existing problems (hideous poverty in the world, enervating, polluting and murderous car traffic) but largely prevent new ones as well.
Unfortunately postmodernism is severely spoiling the ideas of the Enlightenment by re-introducing chaotic thinking. According to postmodernism any truth is subjective and relativistic. Scientific truth, however, is intersubjective or objective by nature (intersubjective confirmation is science’s very criterion of demarcation). Too much untruth about the practical world would have been incompatible with life and evolution. Art, beauty and taste prove moderately subjective: life is compatible with rather differing perceptions of beauty and divergent tastes. Only Weltanschauung is utterly subjective and shows up thousands of philosophies of life, religions, myths and ideologies. Mankind has survived this cultural variety in tribal and medieval societies -not without much episodes of bloodshed and devastation- but would hardly be able to overcome a coming universal clash of cultures. Waging holy wars, in a modern world with so much destructive capacity in the chemical, biological, electro-mechanical and nuclear fields might be catastrophic, possibly extinguishing human civilization altogether. Mankind cannot possibly survive without the modern ideals of the Enlightenment: mutual approach in a worldwide collective and cooperative search for intersubjective, objective truth, meanwhile respecting everybody’s individual answer to the deep questions of life, an answer she or he is, subjectively, able to live and to psychologically thrive with.
Postmodernism is reducing all truths, especially scientific truth, either to revelations about esthetic possibilities hided in the universe (theories are creative, socially accepted, beautiful constructions like all works of art: estheticism, narrativism), or tentative revelations on metaphysical eventualities (scientific theories are relative, subjective, fallible modern myths: mythicism, mysticism), while, in actuality, the existence of solid intersubjective, reproducible, objective, scientific truth is most easily and elegantly explained by the simplest of all models: the model saying that a common, objective, material world is shared by the whole community of humans and entering their consciousness through similar cognitive experiences (that’s how the world is spontaneously, instinctively, pre-reflectively, believed to be like).
Openness to effective economic truth instead of nefarious ideology
The communist economic ideology turned out to be rather ineffective in comparison with free market capitalism. Altruistic motives balance selfish ones, but selfish motives surely are dominant. In an imposed collective enterprise, as a rule, people will try to get as much as possible by contributing as little as possible. This tendency is not absent among employees in a capitalistic society neither, but here harsh competition and private interests of entrepreneurs and/or highly remunerated managers are driving to self-exploitation and exploitation of employees (the latter nowadays, at least in developed countries, fortunately restrained at a tolerable and acceptable level by the fight for human rights and ethical business matters, by the action of trade unions and democratic, emancipating political forces). Without doubt, mitigated, democratically controlled, capitalism has found a workable, valuable system for motivating and driving people, and to be successful.
Why, then, is this success so local, so unequal? Why do millions starve while others do even better than thrive?
There is a dismal truth to expose here about an alleged dismal science… .
The naturalism (the economic system is a naturally given reality, not made by man) of the Physiocrats and the early social scientists was in wonderful accord with the aspirations of the rising Third Class of entrepreneurs and merchants, who wanted to produce and to trade in freedom, to rule themselves and not to be ruled: naturalism in this wise easily turned into naturism, the ideology holding that no intellectual or technical construction or intervention can surpass a natural course of things. Therefore, deregulation, ever more liberty, limitless economic freedom (no regulatory control and no state intervention) had to be promoted.
Undoubtedly, the blind economic reality has an important self-regulating capacity. But this must not be overestimated and absolutized. Liberty (from intellectual control) must not be overdosed. An overdose of no matter what is detrimental, no matter when, no matter where.
Laissez-faire liberalism was overdosing economic freedom. But neo-liberalism still is. International agreements in the context of globalization are constantly imposing further deregulatory measures and privatization, reduction of state and public interference. Equally necessary, however, are humanizing –enhancing the quality of life- measures regarding social security, working-hours, hygienic and safety conditions, flexibility and, last but not least, decent and efficient wages. Indeed, an economic unity cannot possibly thrive without wages assuring enough sales, a demand and purchasing-power correspondent to the (potential) capacity of production.
It is completely unethical, dangerous for social and world peace, to be competitive on factors threatening the humane character of the society and the whole world population. It is unallowable to maintain a harmfully dual society with (take-it-all) winners and genuine losers. All humans should at least be sure of basic incomes meeting basic needs. Capitalistic competition may never be allowed to transgress the boundaries of an harmless, functional, effective play without causing any real victims.
The argument that imposed humane measures will only generate negative, counterproductive effects turns out to be nothing else than superstition. Retarded countries must not, in the first place, produce for exportation. What they have to aim at, preferentially, is becoming autarkies with employees sufficiently remunerated to enjoy the produce of their efforts themselves and thus forming internal markets with enough purchasing-power on their own. Trade is a secondary useful activity, enhancing wealth by furthering the cheapness and variety of obtainable goods.
A retarded country must not depend at all on loans, or worse, foreign banks and institutes for obtaining the money it is in need of. It only has to estimate its own potential productive capacity and create and humanely allocate its own quantity of money (purchasing-power) accordingly. Potential productive power is the only rational and logical monetary standard. Money is a dependent variable (but most of the time it has wrongly been treated as an independent one –‘alas, there is no money for it’ often heard in spite of more than enough potential productive capacity and many persons seeking employment).
Unfortunately, really harmonic and beneficial self-adjustment in the capitalistic system is impeded by an essential flaw. The liquid quantity of money, eager to buy, ought to adapt spontaneously and accurately to the productive capacity, meanwhile delivering enough profits to the enterprises to re-invest and grow (if necessary, desirable). But it does so quite insufficiently. As a consequence, national banks and governments are continually trying to correct for this serious handicap by artificially manipulating interest and tax rates. But even these instruments of compulsory intervention and rectifying control (in order to prevent serious unbalance, depressions and catastrophes) prove rather coarse and tricky, often involving unwanted side effects and surprises. According to a wide-spread, nefarious opinion money has to be earned before it can be spent (unless it is lent). This is surely the case for families and private corporations, but, undoubtedly, not so for countries. In the latter case the (controlled, artificially created) quantity of money only ought to reflect the (potential) local productive capacity. If this cardinal truth is ignored, retarded countries unnecessarily engage in heavy loans and one-sided production for export (to get money) rather than in assessing and actively mobilizing the productive capacity for the domestic population and creating and distributing money accordingly.
Evidently, if instead of the retarded countries the advanced countries gradually enlarge their quantities of money, in this way creating extra purchasing power for taking up the cheap produce of the poor, a permanent relation of exploitation might be consolidated and enlarge the gap between the haves and the have-nots. World peace would, therefore, be further endangered and terrorism and crime might grow.
It is a source of hope and reassurance that retarded countries are, in actuality, not dependent on foreign countries and institutions like World Bank and IMF. In the first place they can and must take the initiative all by themselves, realizing that they are able to take the principal steps and that foreign help only must be seen as welcome to ease and accelerate highly needed developments. World Bank and IMF might act as a supplementary aid.
World Federalism
Humans apparently want to feel at home. This seems to be difficult without some form of home soil and recognized cultural identity. Therefore, each cultural or national group should be endowed with a minimum home ground, minimum self-determination and self-government. Advanced degrees of federalism and the right to easily choose one’s nationality (independent of one’s practical residence) might already solve many a problem.
Structures of common defense, economic unity and scientific and technical cooperation, even an eventual world federation, must not exclude many relatively independent cultural and national units with enough localized tax-revenues so as to meet their own desires and cherish their own special values.
Better exploiting objective truth, natural possibilities and intellectual power
Economics is often defined as the science dealing with scarcity.
In reality, economics is better defined as the science studying the existent (historically grown) societal production and allocation machine, possibly designing a better, mended, more ideal system as well (social and economic engineering). The conviction that out of blind laissez faire the best socio-economic machine is to self-organize and self-regulate is far from scientifically proven truth, but predominantly naturist belief (ideology). As a rule, the adequate, optimum, quantity of money, reflecting the local potential productive capacity is spontaneously not generated at all, nor is so any stable, universally beneficial equilibrium (a fortiori not so in a financially deteriorated casino-economy). And there are other dangerous flaws. Technological evolution is creative, but it is destructive and discriminatory too. Thanks to machines and robots productivity per man-hour is continually rising. It is quite unsure whether, always and everywhere, enough jobs will be created instead of the destroyed ones, especially low skill jobs. Employment can show up a viciously unbalanced distribution. This can create a dangerous army of frustrated, impoverished people, becoming violent and criminal in a turbulent worldwide dual society.
Natural scarcity cannot be used as a valid excuse for an enduring economic cataclysm in vast parts of the world. Scarcity, let alone poverty, is not an inherent trait of the economical reality, and when it occurs it can only due to ignorance and/or lack of goodwill. Ignorance prevails because economics has not grown out to the level of a genuine science yet (deteriorating ideological contamination).
Chemical elements are practically indestructible and can always be recycled if there is enough energy to do so. But energy proves to be potentially abundant for millions of years, even in the absence of mineral oil or gas. Water objectively cannot become a real problem, because in rain seasons it can be captured and stored in huge (artificial) lakes and subterranean reservoirs. Drinking water is rather easily obtained out of sea water as well, because sea water can be purified by passing ultra-membranes or vacuum evaporated while, theoretically, the condensation heat is recycled again and again.
Not only is the world very rich in natural resources, raw materials and energy, but also in astounding technical possibilities. Anti-pollution huge-scale recycling is only one of them. As a consequence, no part of the world must be poor for any physical reason. Failing humans adopting false economic convictions and conducts are the sole tenable explanation.
Why have pure and applied science evolved not faster than they actually have? Why has, especially, economics remained so powerless to stop needless poverty and misery in so many parts of the world?
People are uncertain and very eager for certainty, meaning and final purpose to their lives. Such certainty and meaning did they find offered in some, especially spiritual, Weltanschauung. As a rule, it was not accepted that the ‘divine’ subjective and hopeful truths and promises of the Weltanschauung were challenged by the more earthly, human truths and promises of science, that might make life more comfortable but were unable to overcome mortality and save man definitively, after all. A (partial) Enlightenment occurred but very recently, very late in human history, after the proven truths and promises of the natural sciences seemed to have grown spectacularly. Even natural science, however, never got completely freed of remnants of Weltanschauung (surviving as hidden prejudice), while a social science as economics stays seriously, even disastrously, contaminated by it even nowadays. Eager after the success of the natural sciences, economics tried to become a pure natural science itself. By doing so it played in the hands of the third class, eager after freedom and self-determination: if economics, as a natural science, dealt with a natural system, hadn’t this to be left to natural blind forces, highly or totally uncorrupted by harming, unnatural intellectual interference? Naturalism was held to imply naturism, and the function of the intellect in creating a universally efficient and humane economic system was severely reduced or completely denied. The economic system had to be liberally self-organizing and self-regulating in order to be the best. This naturist ideology of non-intervention, intellectual abstinence, has made millions of victims up to now, and this continuing catastrophe is alarmingly undermining world peace and well-being to future generations . While the world is utterly in need of intellectual power, postmodernism is just additionally weakening and affecting it. By preaching universal subjectivism and relativism, it is reducing scientific truths to the status of Weltanschauung, myth and temporal social conviction (pre-Enlightenment).
Science, however, is incompatible with such opinion and attitude.
The Weltanschauung, the philosophy of life, may not be allowed to dictate the essential answers. In creationism, e.g. it is a priori taken for sure that the role of God in the creation process of species will be affirmed. The obliged final answer, an intensely cherished truth and value, is an ideologically pre-determined one. Such an adaptation of scientific truth to the truth of the heart produces pseudo-science, inevitably. Also many alternative therapies have some Weltanschauung as a basis, not objective evidence.
Similarly, scientific economics must not be contaminated by naturist, naturalist, capitalist or communist ideology, belief and wishful thinking (a devastating, globally murderous common plague). The naturalist-naturist laissez faire conviction has caused that only negative interventions and agreements were of common occurrence, and, in addition, has impeded that capitalism, with, undoubtedly, powerful inherent capabilities, was ennobled by positive measures so as to grow into a humane, ethically acceptable, universally successful system. Economics as a cognitive discipline remained too much a labored, abstract mathematical rationalization of the capitalist doctrine instead of being a creative intellectual activity, a form of social engineering inventing measures and techniques to stop –in a short time- immoral worldwide poverty, pollution and corruption.
In the postmodern view the difference between science (which methodically cannot accept the ‘direct’ hand of God behind each event) and Weltanschauung (which may accept the hand of God behind each event, direct of indirect), science and pseudo-science, has become quite hazy again, almost non-existent. All cognizance is said to be subjective and relative, historically and socially determined.
Science cannot methodically accept neither the immediate action of God behind each phenomenon nor any form of genuine relativity (in the sense of relativism, dependence of truth on the observer) as working hypotheses. Because God and relativity explain everything and nothing at the same time. After introducing the immediate action of God (gods) or relativity as an explanation, all further searching and thinking is superfluous. Therefore, postmodernism (in cognition theory, not in art) is incompatible with science.
Science is neither relative nor subjective. This is proved by millions of technical and purely scientific pages (physics, chemistry, biology, lexicon and grammar, geography, mathematics) being universally accepted.
Unfortunately, the colossal body of objective science has not been completely free from some major flaws. Science has an observational, sensory side, but, inevitably, a rational, reflective side as well. Sensory empiricism is to remain powerless without concomitant rational reflection. Empiricism and rationalism have not to be mutually exclusive in science and its epistemology or methodology. On the contrary, they are inseparable partners. In the natural sciences reason has, at least, always be necessarily present as logical and mathematical reasoning. In the mathematical, more quantitative branches of cognizance flawless reflection and rigid rational reasoning is rather well developed, but the same cannot be said regarding the more qualitative, verbal, philosophical domain. Man has largely failed to develop clean, rigid, intersubjective, qualitative rational reasoning up to now. Like economics, philosophy has mainly remained a pre-science, intermingling scientific truth and Weltanschauung, cognition and conation, in the process accumulating all kinds of fallacy. Properly speaking, there is a cleft between any subjective, conative, philosophy of life (obtained by adopting tradition and further speculative, weak, wishful qualitative reflection) and really rigid philosophical reasoning with logical steps that, not less than in mathematical reasoning, are meant to be irrefutable and compelling to all.
It is an illusion that parts of cognition might be held totally separated. Philosophical, qualitative reflective truths will inevitably infiltrate science and exert a hidden influence at least. Science itself, of course, always is to be an applied epistemology, an applied cognitive philosophical theory (even if, for most scientists, this remains implicit, hidden). Therefore, science can never be complete, and, in addition, cannot remain free from serious fallacies without the company of a solid philosophy as a rigid, mathematically precise, science (Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft). Sensorial empiricism is powerless without accurate quantitative and qualitative thinking (mathematics and rigid rational philosophy).
Philosophical flaws in the interpretation of scientific results can produce utterly harmful effects, even spoiling the scientific theory for a great deal.
Quantum mechanics has too long known a misleading interpretation in the direction of subjectivity. Microcosmic phenomena, as complex vibrations in space-time (the physical vacuum), as a rule take on readily changing, intermediate, superposition shapes, which can be pulled in one definite direction by any interaction with other force bearing things (coherence/de-coherence). For a too long time this has been misused as an argument for subjectivity: the necessity of a subjective observer to eventually determine the definite course of all physical events. Until subjective observation, it was believed, things kept undetermined, even non-existent (reminding of Berkeley’s esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived).
This subjectivist philosophical interpretation and opinion inside natural science itself could help feed postmodern subjectivism and relativism. An equally wrong, philosophical analysis of Einstein’s theory of invariance (unfortunately, misleadingly dubbed relativity) was to make things even worse. Einstein exactly and undeniably proved that the electro-dynamic physical equations and laws of nature, like the mechanical ones, were invariant under certain operations linked with motion and acceleration (motion and acceleration, which, on the contrary, paradoxically influence and warp the dimensions of time and space). He never was able to prove, however, relativity (as some kind of relativism) in the sense of symmetric interchangeability of all kinds of moving and accelerated systems. In systems accelerated relative to each other, inertial forces are clearly felt only unilaterally. And there is an incontrovertible triplets problem: if two sisters space travelers leave earth at super-high speed in opposite directions while the third one stays at home, the two cosmonauts will hardly undergo age changes relative to each other, in spite of their gigantic relative speeds, but the two of them will stay considerably younger relative to their third sister at home in spite of their lesser speed with relation to earth.
Einstein took various philosophical positions during his life, starting with Machian positivism and instrumentalism, passing through some kind of relativism, indeed, and ending in more absolutism again as a consequence of its general theory, including gravity. He agreed ‘theory of invariance’ would have been a better, more neutral, less unequivocal name for his popular theory of relativity. But it is not so clear whether Einstein, for himself, ever reached un unambiguous and satisfactory philosophical, qualitative interpretation of his mathematical theory.
A possible grave case of qualitative misinterpretation also affects thermodynamics. According to Eddington the second law of thermodynamics is the supreme law of nature. Seemingly dogmatically, he states that he would rather give up the well-proven electromagnetic laws of Maxwell’s than the thermodynamic law expressing that, grand-totally, entropy (a measure of disorder) is never decreasing, or, in other words, that it is impossible to recycle free energy once it has been utilized and then dissipated as low-graded heat .
Eddington’s dogmatic statement about the Second Law has often been quoted in scientific texts. Science methodically has to remain open and critical about its established truths, but, practically speaking, it often ends in nearly absolute certainty. Ohm’s law is being confirmed every day, again and again, so that there can be no doubt it is an essential law in the province of the universe (the part of space-time) we are living in. According to statistical mechanics, the probability that entropy begins to decrease in any spontaneous process is nearly nil, and nobody hitherto has observed such event, except in extremely small fluctuations (Brownian motion). So it is a law of nature, or a rational mathematical insight, that in processes left to themselves entropy is always increasing (the chances of the opposite are infinitesimal).
However, the second ‘law’ of thermodynamics is more than a mathematically and empirically excellently established truth about the nearly infinite impossibility of things spontaneously and grand-totally creating more order than there was before. The famous second law is a bold extrapolation of that almost self-evident truth. It claims, in addition, the presence of mind or intellect does not matter for this impossibility to remain valid.
Regarding possibilities and impossibilities, though, the presence or absence of mind is essential. Complex living organisms show self-organization and self-correction, much simpler things like cars, planes, books, even computers do not. Up to now they did not originate and evolve in the absence of man’s active intelligent mind.
Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, and followers involuntarily induced the error by demonstrating how an ideal –read: abstract- heat machine caused zero increase of entropy solely if its efficiency was ideal –read: as high as theoretically possible. In all other (real) cases the entropy had to increase. So, entropy increase never went negative. And this implicated that dissipated energy never again could be upgraded to free, useful energy.
By immediately dealing with heat machines, inventions of the mind, entropy change in the absence and entropy change in the presence of active intellect got immediately mixed up, and the overwhelming evidence for entropy increase in blind-natural processes was considered sufficient for entropy increase in all artificial processes to be proven too. Very soon, efforts to invent energy recycling machines (also called perpetual motion machines of the second kind) were taboo. Serious scientists were expected to show their deep insight and high degree of erudition by doubtlessly accepting the second law and refraining from research possibly undermining this supreme and absolute certainty (this attitude, though, evidently conflicting with the open, critical mind of science, always trying not alone to confirm, but also to methodically doubt and falsify generally accepted truths).
As a consequence, the relevance of the active mind in entropy increase or energy recycling never has become a serious object of study. The absolute impossibility of energy recycling was generally accepted (and imposed to students) as, say, a dogma. Serious, important, investigation in this field has to be started still.
The Carnot heat machine is an abstract, ideal model. Nature, however, knows non-ideality too. Psychologically one is tempted to believe that such non-ideality must have negative effects. In actuality, it can have positively utilizable consequences as well. In heat pumps it is non-ideality that is mainly exploited in order to cool. If in heat machines the working gas might leave the exhaust in an under-cooled stage, it could absorb at least part of the normally wasted condensation heat (in the volume reduction stage) and so make the machine surpass the ideal Carnot efficiency –reducing entropy grand-totally! Who has ever proven this to be really impossible? And there are many other open possibilities.
Low-graded heat can be concentrated (heat pumps, mirrors) and so used for preheating e.g. water that is further cracked by concentrated sun beams (optical funnel) in oxygen and hydrogen: in this manner dissipated heat is stored again as useful chemical energy. Chemical energy can be harvested very efficiently in fuel cells (theoretically up to 100%). Traditionally the pathway chemical energy -> thermal energy -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy, was needlessly spilling 2/3 of the original energy content. The economically and ecologically very profitable direct way (chemical energy -> electrical energy) was hardly supported during several decades, all the big money vanishing in huge scale nuclear programs, which were supposed to yield plenty of energy in the near future.
The combustion of oil, a too valuable raw material in organic chemistry, in heat machines, fully in vigor still, is a double spill, in addition polluting the atmosphere. Oil could be utilized much more sensibly and gradually over a very long period. Instead, a great variety of energy sources should be tapped, especially the heat of the inner earth and the heat of the sun, directly or indirectly. The burning of natural gas, organic waste and coal derivatives in fuel cells could help, possibly excessive carbon dioxide being precipitated in the form of carbonates (or by other means). Even nuclear energy, by fusion and fission, could be partially allowed in safe, insulated, adequate subterranean nuclear parks, encompassing research, production, treatment and meticulous storing away of waste.
Oil producing countries and companies should engage in much more diversification long before the world’s oil reserves are exhausted so that a soft gradual change occur towards future technologies as well as materials and energy management. In the transition phase more economic and intelligent use of oil and fuel cell technology could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In a later phase the rapidly rising production and consumption in the third world (in need of oil as raw chemical material) will partially compensate for the much lower use of oil for energy production.
Evidently, a lack of energy, raw materials or physical and technical possibilities cannot be used as an excuse for enduring poverty. There is no inevitable scarcity at all. If any dearth somewhere exists, only responsible persons are to blame.
It seems not so unacceptable that the pessimistic view of economics and thermodynamics mirrors the western jewish-christian world view of a punished, suffering world that is slowly falling apart and will end in destruction (only the Messiah will then be able to change things for the better). Recycling and rebirth rather is an Asian conception.
Ennobled democratic politics
Nowadays, politicians are supposed to solve the general problems and difficulties people are coping with. In former times, much less democratic, even totalitarian, the intentions of the mighty were less obvious.
Arbitrariness was gradually replaced by the citizens’ own free choice, or better, the will of the majority. Democracy has surely led to a more humane society, but it hasn’t excluded dramatic deviations (as vicious as world war II).
These were due in part to people getting much too little psychological, social, political, ecological and economic training and erudition to make choices leading to real peace and bliss for all. A dangerous degree of ‘fatocracy’ instead of rational democracy has in this manner been subsisting. In the nineteenth century the Russian philosopher Soloviev rejected the idea of democracy because he feared the unfounded choices of the illiterate masses: which fatocracy will be worse, a fatocracy based upon inherited or violently conquered power or a fatocracy based on a multitude of unfounded opinions, full of prejudice, naive belief and emotional elements (demagogic propaganda)? Democracy only makes sense, real sense, if it is thoroughly intermingled with a high enough degree of ‘infocracy’ on the side both of the voters and of the elected. ‘Orthocracy’ (the right political system) means a sophisticated form of ‘infodemocracy’ with sufficiently informed voters and erudite, especially trained, wise rulers whom one can place confidence in (Plato’s ‘philosophers’, but not authoritative).
There is a second important negative factor, though, in democratic capitalism or liberalism. Liberals, as social and especially economic naturists, belief that things must be left alone. As a consequence, terrific flaws in the capitalistic system are not recognized, or, certainly, far from sufficiently counteracted.
Very much can be done to make the world a better place in a short period of time. As said before, relatively autarkic economic units have to creatively raise and adapt their liquid quantity of money to their potential capacity of production, meanwhile controlling the prizes (e.g. by defining maximum percentages of gain, so that more profits can only be achieved by increasing the output of production, not by limitless rising the prizes in answer to artificially risen purchasing-power, say, a purposefully distributed extra quantity of money –higher wages and minimum basic income per individual). All knowledge must become freely accessible on the internet (a process fortunately starting), and, in addition, producing under license should become an immediate right, so that technological skills are quickly spread all over the world. The production of life-saving drugs and strategies (e.g. synergistic treatment of cancer), not promising direct gain, should, on ethical grounds, be taken over by the (international) community, the government. In parallel, R & D-cost for revolutionary life-saving drugs should be refunded by the international community, so that such remedies can immediately become available for anyone.
Slow motion policies, postponing both theoretical and practical problem solving until things escalate and make victims, can no longer be tolerated on ethical grounds. International organizations, and an eventual con-federalist world government have to speed up humane solutions for world problems to a morally acceptable level.
Conclusion
The world must be freed of postmodernism which means a vicious backsliding into an irrational medieval, pre-Enlightenment mixing up of Weltanschauung (subjective world view), art and science, especially the pseudo-scientific intermingling of the cognitive and the conative (the conative then becoming dominant). Postmodernism may even have catalyzed the recent backsliding into chaotic thinking, entailing vicious things as tribalism (ultra-nationalism), fundamentalism and scatter-brained New Age ideology assimilating all kinds of superstition. Neo-modernism should consist in a corrected and enlarged Enlightenment which is aware of the rational malleability of the human world and its society, which is perfectly able to offer well-being to more than ten billion developed citizens all over the world. Especially economic thinking should abandon murderous irrational naturism and realize that the local quantity of money or buying power should be rationally and creatively adapted to local potential capacity of production (a maximum percentage of gain per sold unit being defined in order to prevent inflation and thus unwanted decrease of purchasing power). A sound world society will be born only if humans are completely opening up to reason. The limited and partial rationality of blind-natural self-organization won’t be enough. A happy future depends on the intelligent and benevolent creativity of the human mind in the first place, encompassing all domains of life and reality. Rationality must not be understood, however, as the suppression of feelings and wishful ambitions in the field of the ‘sensitive’ (esthetic, erotic and so on) or the conative (hopeful orientation up to purpose and meaning). Just on the contrary, reason inspires the mind in the direction of enjoying life and bliss and all sweet positive feelings and quickening hopeful expectations. Only the domain of pure and applied science should be completely dominated by a reason not yielding to things as feelings or ideological wishes at all, which could only deteriorate objective truth and disastrously hamper practical efficacy.
There is no doubt the future could be bright for all living intelligent creatures on earth. But there is no doubt neither that for such a future to achieve some significant cultural steps have to be taken. Let us hope mankind will be adult and wise enough to do so. Building a rationally and ethically somewhat acceptable society (avoiding tens of millions of victims a year) is the greatest challenge man is confronted with still.
Dear Sir, Madam,
Not being able to resist to the temptation to analyze our world civilization, I produced the above critical thoughts. Possibly it could become a source of inspiration for you as well.
Presented here is not a definitive text, but only a tentative one in need of critical examination and possible correction, or also modification and amplification by various groups and thinkers. It has the sole intention to designate some principal points that should be taken into consideration. There is no intention at all to start a new NGO or so, but only to offer some important thoughts to ponder on and, if estimated valid, to put into practice. The text is only giving an indication of what I would stress and propose in the imaginary case that I would start a new peace organization myself. My hope is that some already existent organizations (there are already enough of them) and responsible people can take advantage of my analysis.
Please, if You have significant criticism concerning this text, please write me.
Because it is impossible for me to know or to reach all individual persons interested in such text, please distribute it Yourself. You might add some critical or complementary thoughts of Yours in an attachment.
Kind regards
Paul Bacarte