World Peace will Give Us the Universe

I have no answer for the future except in peace and human collaboration and deep consultation. I do have a sense of the great possibility that emerges from such a future. .

There are signs from philosophy, psychology and brain sciences that the collective de-traumatised human experience, that might take several generations after complete peace breaks out, could create inventive power that itself is infinite or shall we say very very large.

This inventive power is based in the possibility of a state of human designated by the idea that, when we think of ‘who I am’, could it be that who I am is the showing / presence of everything and everyone in my experience. This leads to an idea of as complete reception of the world as it is, and, as all humans becoming competent and some masters of such receptivity, a ‘shared brain’. I intuit through this ability for collaborative engagement, the human future is infinite far beyond the sense that we think of as resource infiniteness.

I intuit that it is only under these conditions that certain breakthroughs will occur e.g. efficient and effective space flight and exploration. Such a breakthrough will establish access to a virtually unlimited resource, some of which aren’t even discovered.

On this planet however, the many necessary competent characteristics for every human being required to achieve a peaceful planet, will also provide the necessary applications to ecosystem details and flourishing while perfecting new more subtle energy technologies and resource farming. Going by the economic growth formula, this may also show a declining growth. The real question then is, if there is a flourishing ecosystem with a flourishing human planetary society but a declining economic growth, then maybe the whole model is transformed and we are not even using those measures to determine how we are doing.

There is in that future, a feedback loop between the new human way of thinking about ourselves and the ecosystem, even the solar or galactic ecosystem, and our exploration and population of the galaxy. Will we meet new friends? Will we finally determine whether we are already under observation. Will we be enrolled into a larger galactic civilisation with it’s own magical technologies. This is the stuff of science fiction but only so long as seems impossible. As breakthroughs in peace and global civilisation come about, we will notice something about ourselves as humans that will be magical to our current selves.

EVERYONE is NON-BINARY

Professional intelligentsia are people whose work largely begins in words and ends in words. There is a major logical trap that anyone of the professional intelligentsia can fall into, as a tendency to get locked into a logical cycling related to unfounded premises, rather than explore external views, diverse sciences, or research via the question, “Is this true?”

There are two religious cases of how that can distort or stagnate the fundamental principles.

The first relates to the strange case of the Orthodox Jew who, on a sabbath, ran a few hundred metres to the house of a non-orthodox Jew to ask that man to come and put out a fire, but could not participate in putting out said fire themself. This non-orthodox Jew had the practice of leaving the front door open on the sabbath so an orthodox Jewish man could walk straight in because he couldn’t knock on the door. It was a simple practice of the non-orthodox Jew to contribute to these neighbours yet it could not be reciprocated on a sabbath. And that it is not held by an Orthodox Jew that the religious law, if designed for purification, is not equally relevant for non-orthodox jew, is also discordant although perhaps a function of believing that the non-orthodox Jew is impure already and can’t be made more impure. Of course Jesus tried to debunk this in his story of the Good Samaritan, but did not prevail with the Jewish teachers.

The second case relates to the fundamental Islamic schools of Iran and previously Persia. In such schools, the sciences are avoided, superstition prevails and the Koran, revealed in the pre-scientific era and which initially fostered the sciences well before the Europeans, now becomes bogged down in an anti-technological, extremely socially controlling structure. Eventually that bubble will burst as the desire of the people to extend their capabilities will add a pressure beyond the control of the Islamic Republican fascism.

Why is this related to the concept of a non-binary human being and the multiple genders theory of some of the western intelligentsia?

Firstly to show that possible serious even fascist-like or just stagnating impact of politically accepting the outcomes of intellectual work that begins and ends in words. Secondly to begin to unpack the absurdness of much of the argument for a multiple gender theory. Thirdly, to show that such multiple distinctions has only one real outcome, the distraction of people from realising their true selves and role in the world as given to service in the path of social unification and the advancement of civilisation as a whole. While the last requires a much more lengthy discussion, for purposes here, the importance of ‘given to service’ of humanity is the critical attribute through which active community engagement and conversation across diversity of thought, experience, and culture, without proselytising (demanding others align for fear of retribution), is essential.

I am using the term ‘non-binary’ as a focus of the discussion of absurdness of the multiple gender theory. Clarifying definitions, binary means requiring two different, opposing but synchronous elements that when operating together can create a novel outcome. Non-binary thereby means not having (all that). As individuals, human beings operate by internal binary systems that establish complex negative feedback loops that create everything from stabilising the sugar content in the blood to formulating theoretical mathematics. However, as individuals, human beings, themselves, are all non-binary. I am non-binary. There is just one of me, whole, complete and indivisible.

As non-binary, in gender terms I am male and masculine. When I get together with a procreation partner, we are binary and can and have created novel outcomes.

Now there are some pop psychologist types who have said to me, “but what about your feminine aspect?”. When I ask them what they mean, they have told me that things like nurturing, kindness, creativity, intuition, are feminine. And force, protection, labour and legal and technical thinking is masculine. This is just another absurdity avoiding that the reality is something more simple.

Taking the premise that there are human virtues or characteristics that make humans, human, such as loving kindness, courage, nurturing, protection, high-mindedness, patience, creativity, intuition, problem-solving, and empathy, then the simple reality is that both male and female genders, and masculine and feminine affects have all of the characteristics. Once we acknowledge that all of the human characteristics are present as both masculine and feminine affects then when we look we can see that the only difference is the manner and degree of expression of those characteristics. Most obviously, a female will mostly bond strongly with the growing foetus and neonatal child because of the upwelling of hormones such as oxytocin. Men often report a more significant bonding at the moment they first held their child. However, when we look at the issue of protection we see that the female is highly protective both through direct force, indirect force and negotiation just as males are with the variation relating to a stronger empathy on the part of females which causes a more defensive posture, and a stronger capability of males bringing personal force into negotiations which causes a proactive attacking posture but is a capability steadily loosing value.

The problem that many people have in relation to masculinity is in contextualising the male as controlling, aggressive, even murderous. It is difficult to come to terms with the naturality of masculinity through this contextual lense and so some have imagined that more feminine nature is required to dilute the masculine to make a peaceful world. While that is an applaudable goal, it is unnecessary and even further obscures the potential of the unmitigated masculine and feminine affects in the advancement of civilisation.

The problem with men, if there is one, is the cultural mode that has developed over the past 10,000 years of the male as soldier, fighter, and war fodder for alpha males, kings, emperors. Recontextualising ‘who men are’, we can view cultural history since homo-sapiens stepped out, as a slowly distorted system, boosted (as per the story of Cane and Able) with the development of agriculture and excess wealth over the last 10,000 years, and through the amplification of primate tribalism based on the command of the Alpha male. However there is historical evidence to suspect that this form of socio-political orientation was destructive both intra and inter tribally, preventing the stability of social groups necessary to develop technologies, and intellectual and spiritual pursuits, all necessary for an advanced civilisation.

It is religion that mitigated that amplification of the impact of the Alpha male and allowed stability for the development of civilisation and improving technologies. Nonetheless such masculinity continues to assert itself and we now know that these males have a particular brain structure that heightens control and manipulation and diminishes empathetic responses that we now call psychopathy. On the female side there is also a hierarchy with controlling matriarchs but these operate in a less forceful manner than the Alpha males. In general, subordinate males and females, the vast majority of the human population, are empathetic beings desiring belonging in family, community and a general social cohesion. These are they who are attracted to the notions of religion and spirituality, create new technologies and sciences, and master artisanships, and are the real heart and body and impetus of the advancement of civilisation.

The issue of masculinity and femininity lies only with the affect of the genderisation of male and female and not with any human characteristic as specific as either mascuiline and feminine.

Genderisation is the foetal developmental process of forming a male or female. This process relies on a sequence of biochemical developments with each phase of embryological development. And such biochemistry is formulated by the genetic combination that foetus has been given by the mother and father in.e the binary procreators. This cascade of biochemistry influences both the physical characteristics of the embryo, the phenotype, and the minute and generic structure of the brain. Both the brain and physical characteristics of each embryo is idiosyncratic to that individual. Evolutionary processes have, in the most minor animals, founded a contiguous neural to body sense, what can be called the embodiment of the individual. This embodiment that includes odours, sense of smell, visual range and colours, and physical format etc, has the value of even the most simple animals being able to distinguish between their own kind and others. For example some snakes are snake eaters. However snake eaters usually don’t eat their own kind of snake. Males of the salt water crocodiles that are 240 million years on the planet, will eat their own young that are protected by the female, suggesting that such primordial distinctions weren’t as consistent in the earlier phases of evolution. And perhaps indeed, these brain structures that offer protection and nurture for the juvenile, are primordial structures for empathy.

What we can see from evolution of animals is that there are only two successful ways to procreate: the most widespread is binary sex, and the other way is asexual and in animals like snails this means that they have both binary, male and female, reproductive organs and can engage in binary sex and asexual reproduction.

The embryological development of the brain and body is a synchronicity that creates, for the individual, an obvious sense, an embodiment, of gender. In language it is simple to term the individual with a penis, male; and the individual with a vagina, female. Such nomenclature is simple as it is accurate to the embodied state of the vast portion of the population. In a small number of cases, the brain development is out of affective synchrony with the reproductive organs such that the person grows feeling ‘wrong bodied’ rather than embodied. Indeed these cases prove the issue of the relevant brain structural development. When a male with dysmorphia say they are female, they are noting that there are two genders, the one defined by their body parts and the one defined by their brain structure but which there is a failure of the brain to embody the physical nature of the person. Brain structure wins over physicality in all cases as the brain, expecting to find for example, a female physicality and external sex characteristics will be forever discombobulated when finding these physical traits missing and even other traits not expected, insitu. Indeed, the only resolution for dysmorphia is to surgically correct the physicality as, while the female sense of the brain structure could, theoretically, be ablated, a male sense cannot be in any way transposed into a brain. The brain, itself, only has a structural qualia model for either male or female and never, so far as can be ascertained, both.

The case of homosexuality is quite different. Homosexuality is when the embodied brain appreciates its maleness or femaleness yet the erotic orientation of the brain has developed for the non binary rather than the binary procreator. This tells us only that the brain has structures and processes for distinct aspects of gender and erotic desire. So in the vast majority of people the structures and processes are contiguous and synchronous, creating an embodied effect that begins with admiration for the specific gendered self and later attraction from the binary procreator as an erotic orientation.

Within the human population, the expression of gender and sexual orientation is essentially idiosyncratic to each person. In otherwords, I am a specific male unlike all other males and my sexual proclivity is specific to me and none other. Even an effete male will be unlike all other males and females and not at all like any females. Likewise transgender women are unlike all embodied females and often evince an uncanniness of masculine affect. Similarly, eunuchs are unlike all mature males and females, yet are proclaimed males. In practice the expression of gender is either male or female. In sexual orientation the expression for humans is limited by erogenous organs (physical attribute), and erotic desire (brain attribute). Erotic desire is impacted by libido with a consistent variation between genetical males and females. Erotic desire is also impacted by the desire for novelty, also an idiosyncratic aspect of brain structure. Libido can also be quite low in otherwise physically robust, sexually intake people, creating a non-sexual affect.

Sexual expression is also mediated by social moral education and this is a necessary education in the cohesion of society, albeit in the past often imparted with little finesse. Nonetheless this cultural modeling about sexual expression should not be confused with anything to do with modeling gender. The inverse is actually true, that embodied gender is one of the most significant drivers of cultural formation. In the main, how culture deals with asynchronous behaviours to the vast consistency of men and women, such as homosexuality, transgender and any number of erotic variations, is a distinguishing feature between cultures as determined by the story of successful social life that each culutre formulates. In any case, gender itself remains consistently male or female, each individual non-binary and each procreator couple, binary. Homoerotic sexual partners are also technically binary just as a binary computer code might have two zeros or two ones adjacent. But as such, this sexual connection is non-procreative.

Some intelligentsia assert that gender is a cultural expression. Although there is vague hypothesis for this, there is no scientific evidence for this. Gender is, perhaps, the primary embodied aspect of a human life as founded in embryological development. There are only two genders. While gender predicts sexual desire, and drives reproduction and the survival of the species, it is by no means an absolute control, and this can also be seen in other animals. These variations are part of the nature of evolution itself and do not need to be particularly successful, and, so long as they are not particularly unsuccessful, the variations will continue to be expressed from generation to generation. Culture is mainly an expression of the embodied genderisation of human beings and how we come to deal with our binary procreating nature.

Justice Accountability and Forgiveness

It is the season of Christian Lent and the Baha’i Fast. The wonderfulness of the teachings of Jesus Christ has lead to one signal cultural message down through the ages: no one is taboo by culture, love and care for everyone you come across, and who abides by that forms a brotherhood and sisterhood, a community, a church.

Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, pulled justice, the expression of true brotherhood through the larger socio-political lense, into the centre of a religious framing that includes the acknolwedgement that we are a global civilisation that requires integrative tools beyond that of the individual or the community.

Two qualities lie at the interface of the moral individual and the moral society: accountability and forgiveness.

Accountability is the voluntary open and honest exploration of one’s personal life. Given that the culture of accountability by which a society can go about its business in a secure and confident manner requires formal processes social process of accountability, all issues regarding the conquest and subjugation of another people, the takeover of lands, and the expression of this the enlightenment colonial powers performed on many generations after the first conquest, layers embodied trauma (psychic and physical) on those generation until the epigenetic qualities are ingrained in the lives of people living in a more supportive social environment.

Accountability and justice cannot be performed without recognising the true nature of the impact to the conquered people. Indeed I would argue that it is so difficult to outlive this trauma over generations, it is the one thing that has taken generation after generation to war for the past several thousand years. Only the very hard work of accountability can give the conqueror ease even as their descendants carry the trauma of their murders down through many generation afterwards, also living tortuously in our epigentics. Only a full and willing accountability provides a pathway out of our social traumatised behaviours.

When a full and willing accountability has been formally established, what some call a truth-telling, then two redemptive actions can be motivated: a recompense for the losses caused by conquerors (true justice); and, because the recompense can never be fully made for genocidal policies or slavery, the victims across time might resort to radical forgiveness for the shortfall. I would encourage the victims to forgive or at least play with forgiveness even if for the rest of life, for in that lies a path out of the malaise of victimhood to a true empowerment. However we need to be honest with ourselves that forgetfulness is forgiveness (not the other way around) and forgetfulness is only induced by being offered a full accounting of wrongs done against us and a full recompense where it is needed both individually and socially. Such social acts of social integration allows the perseverating mind to rest and turn to other more developmental, transformative and productive living.

Australian Referendum 2023 – THE VOICE

Today I received the official Australian Government referendum booklet to insert chapter XI (9) into the constitution.
The proposed changes to the constitution will be to add:

“Chapter XI – Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
(i) there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
(ii) the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
(iii) the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures. “

I encourage everyone to fully read this statement to really get clear what it says and what it doesn’t say. For example, get clear that we are talking about both Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders.
Ask as you read it, do I really know what each of these words and phrases and sentences refer? For example, do you know who a Torres Strait Islander is? Do you know who an aboriginal person is? Do you know what “make representations” means and what it doesn’t mean?

It is important for all readers to note that (iii) means that the Australian Government (parliament) has authority over the Voice and from government to government there is a possibility that the composition, power, functions, and procedures are changed in line with the policy position of the government of the day. I think it is reasonable to expect that a conservative government will tend towards marked limiting the powers of the Voice and even a labour government will tend to restraining the powers of the Voice. The actual functions and powers etc of the Voice may actually lie in the hands of the cross-benchers and greens. As I expect future elections to increase the independent ranks in the federal parliament, so the power of that group to impact the Voice will be considerable. Indeed, I wonder whether the Voice itself provides the platform for some First nations leaders to become well known across Australia and capable of being elected as independents in federal parliament.

The official referendum booklet comes with a fully sculptured argument for the YES and NO vote campaign.

The first thing I noticed after reading these campaigns is that they fall down into 2 classic social distinctions: i) the hopeful: those with an eye on a future that isn’t going to happen anyhow with all the hope that it will transform what appears broken in our society ; and ii) those with an eye on the risks that are being taken by going on a journey into that future that isn’t just the default future given by the current social and political framework.

I am, myself, a cautious person. However i am also a hopeful person. And while some people fall down fully as anti-risk and others fully as risk-taking, these two distinctions are not dichotomous. I prefer to have my cake and eat it. My, now, considerable experience of life (usually called being an old fart), has lead me to the conclusion that I can have my cake and eat it, that we as a society can have our cake and eat it. On one condition. Life requires effort. A good life requires extraordinary talent, education, research, and innovation. Democratic political life requires constant gardening by the population to both restrain the authoritarian’s power while ensuring we foster those extraordinary domains.

What does all this mean for the Voice? The Voice is a recognition that the Australian Government as currently constitutionalised since 1901 has failed and will continue to fail to bring First nations Peoples into a democratic process that works for them. It is a recognition that, in having a political system that fails First Nations peoples, also impacts mainstream society, especially by having us less democratic and more authoritarian than we say we value. The current response by the Qld Government to imprisoning 10 year olds (mostly indigenous children) in watch-houses is one such reach for authoritarianism in the face of far better practices to reduce juvenile crime. In other words, indigenous peoples, because they currently have no real power at the voting booth, are constantly being treated through an authoritarian lens rather than the lens of research and innovation, as befits a robust democratic society.

I expect the Voice will lead to all sorts of additional haggling in the policy arena. This will create some modelling for how our democracy might more fully develop to engage the population more fully into the future.

While there is no issue beyond the scope of the Voice, any well constituted representation will be savvy in the choice of their battles as per their cost-benefit analysis. In other words, we could leave the agenda of the Voice, to the Voice without feeling we need to hold a maternal or paternal nag over them. The parliament itself, of course, can apply a schedule for representations from the Voice such that it minimises delay in legislation. It would, of course, be of no use to ask for Parliament to use the same schedule for the political parties represented, and to limit the ability of parties to delay legislation on the table, or even getting on the table. In other words, certain politicians do seem to be arguing the issue of delay from a hypocritical stance.

The No vote has determined the Voice is more bureaucracy, and certainly I expect the institution to come with the relevant support required. Improvements to the main problems besetting first nations peoples does indeed require more public servants. It requires exactly the right amount of accountable administrative management. This is part of that extraordinariness I wrote above. The other big part of that extraordinariness is in the requirement for widespread expert social innovation services that have never been developed nor applied with any efficacy in Australia. It is my hope that the Voice will be a champion for social innovation as befits the best practice solutions for health and poverty. This is immanently doable but for the lack of political will.

The Voice is the possibility for restoring the failure of integrity with the original inhabitants of this land that occurred with the british colonisation and invasion of the lands, and the ongoing manipulations to ensure those peoples remain divested of the land. Such lack of integrity keeps Australia as a nation, in the doldrums of growth and development. We lag, not because of our incompetence to bring innovation to the table but because, in denying the indigenous peoples of Australia, we live in a world of denial. And more than any one area of denial, it is our denial of our own self worth that comes from failing to bring indigenous Australia fully into the national fold. When denial is our mantra, we deny ourselves a role in our own democracy, leaving ourselves to criticise from the sidelines, our own long time loosing team – Australia.

The Voice will not only be an amplification of the voice of first nations Australians and the possibility for bringing innovative solutions to bear, from developing productive and flourishing communities to vastly reducing prison numbers, the Voice will also become a lightning rod for every misconceived Government policy and every failure of mainstream communities to bring effort to bear in their own determination of unity. In this, I apologise to the First nations peoples and the leaders for, in supporting the Voice, bringing the additional grief you will be subjected. And in this, I promise to be in the public square making a reasonable argument for expectations and stalwart rejections of essential racists, political grandstanders and the socially indolent.

Being an Australian

This is not anything like the definitive article on being an Australian.

Today, 26th January 2023 is the official day chosen as Australia Day, the day when Australian’s celebrate our national identity.

I begin by acknowledging that for the First Nations’ peoples of Australia, this day does not reflect for them the possibility of being part of that national identity but rather reminds them of the confusion, conflicts, deaths, wars, cultural and family disruptions, loss of home and betrayals. I take a moment here to acknowledge that the First Nation’s peoples do not have a treaty with their English conquerors or the current other Australian peoples, nor have they ceded the lands known as Australia.

Take a moment, reader, to imagine the pangs you may have felt when first leaving the home and community you grew up, or a home you raised family for 20 years and then left. These pangs of grief are created by the embodied relationship we have to a place that has become an extension of our selves. We might say, the place is Us-I . Indeed if we take but another moment to quietly reflect who ‘I” am, it might dawn on us that who “I” am is all of the consistencies of our world, from the pathway to the door of our house, the way our family moves around in it, the rituals we have during the week and year from doing breakfast to organising special events. All these consistencies in life flow through, wrap around, bear down, and lift up, our own physical structure. They are who we become. And when another such as a grown child, leaves that place, a tendril of our own structure is pulled away. We might think it is like real physical pain. It is exactly real physical pain. The embodied life “Me”, “I”, “Us” is not a separation at the skin. The skin, and every other sensory organ, is a million dynamical attachments, keys, joints, between our perception of a discrete, contained and constrained, and controllable part of ourselves with what we perceive as the external, fluid, unstable, uncontrollable life. While we often think of ‘life’ as the thing we live in, this is just a perceptual comfort. WE ARE the life we life and everything that shows and has attachments with our attachments, that we draw ourselves against or that draws against ours. When a thousand of those attachments no longer exist to tag to, we notice it just as we notice with pain, the loss of a finger to a sharp knife.

Now imagine that the consistencies of Us is many thousands of years in the setting. Now in a very real sense, every rock, every blade of grass, every movement of air, every call of a bird, rustle of a lizard, enjoins Me-Us to rejoinder. In that place-time, where does my consciousness lie, where does my perception end? Perhaps Me-Us is the vast landscape the my hundreds of thousands of ancestors and me have roamed. Now imagine that every rock I can no longer evoke in my daily or weekly or annual ritual because some new intruder has pushed me back from rejoinder. And pushed me back. And broke the rock. And took me right away from all the landscape. Might not, at some time, the loss of so much of Me feel like I am dying, hanging on by the merest thread, perhaps not even a core, perhaps just a dissipated structure without connections, joints, attachments, really only 10% of who I WAS, perhaps less.

What would it take, then to restore Me to Who I AM?

With what capability is remaining of Me and what capability is available in the new space-time and the Others now here, I and Everyone and Everything is moving, feeling about for connection, and anticipating rejoinder.

Much of our landscape is now the landscape of our national population and the structure we have built, physically, politically and socially. Some of us, like many First nations people, have not been party to the new structures and find there are few places for attachment and connection, and the social landscape yet has offered few structures for attachment and less for wholehearted rejoinder. As a white fella I can only imagine from the resonances I feel in my own bones of ancestoral loss and tearing down and building up and other crimes against Me.

We are not yet, Australian, we who live here and only have a home, here. We are short by millions, billions, of attachments to the vital elements, the life within the geographical lines, each other, the First nations’ peoples.

We will vote for the Voice this year at referendum because we will want to have the whole of everything and everyone with the lines, in rejoinder. That is what it means to be an Australian.

We will move Australia Day to a moment when we saw that, indeed we were all in this national project together, as equals and in the possibility of ritual and rejoinder.

I will finish this reaching out and seeking new attachments by this more lighthearted but so very true reflection on who We are, Australian, Not yet Australian, even Un-Australian. Enjoy.