MONDAY, MAR 6, 2022: NOTE TO FILE
Nature's Grading System
Hint: Mother doesn't grade on a curve
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: GIVE ME AN A, FROM THE WIRES, OR MAYBE AN F
Abstract: This message is for all the academics out there, or anyone who is a product of the modern education system. Specifically, I'm thinking of professors, scientists, know-a-lots, and assorted savants I know, know of, or have known.
COOS BAY (A-P) — All who have endeavored to understand humanity's problematique, our 'Houston, we have a problem' predicament, end up grading themselves. They spend 90+% of their life endeavoring to understand problems and communicate them to policymakers, politicians, media pundits, CEOs, religious leaders, the public..., so they can solve them. They confess they have no solutions, but their job description calls on them to do what they can to inform others, you know, whomever is running the show, that something has to be done. None realize they don't work for the world socioeconomic-political system, but for posterity who are likely to grade them differently than the system they serve will grade them.
In the end, they may quote Einstein, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” The implication is that spending over 90% of your life doing good work towards understanding problems will earn you an A, if not an A+. All high-functioning achievers need to see themselves as at least meriting a A in life, since that was the grade they were used to getting in school. Being told that they get an F in life just doesn't seem right, so it isn't.
But Nature doesn't care what academics or scientists or the public thinks (not even me). So what does Nature have to say? Don't ask me. Listen to Nature. 'To think is the listen'. So listen to Nature who has all the answers. And what do I hear Nature saying? Okay, I can answer that, for what it's worth, as I could be totally wrong about everything.
Back to the Einstein quote—it isn't, it is attributed to him, it is fake like almost everything else we think we know. The bottom line is trying doesn't count. The five minutes, if a solution follows, counts. Spending 55 minutes trying to understand the problem, as precondition for a solution, if a real solution follows, counts. Only solutions to the problem of persisting count as evidenced by your species' persistence. You can write about humanity's problems at multiple book lengths, but if no actual solution is forthcoming, i.e. the Apollo 13 astronauts die, then no cigar. We really are playing a high stakes endgame.
From posterity's point of view, the view of the few who may live through the overshoot debt we are incurring, the few lucky ones who can remember how ghastly the bottleneck thing was, will wonder why the few who could foresee their ghastly future before climax and collapse failed to do something (as distinct from write books and give lectures) about it.
Those who may have some foresight intelligence, who inform those that do not have any that there are problems they need to do something about, who are cluelessly oblivious to the condition that only those who may have some foresight intelligence can do something (as choicelessly compelled by their understanding), are the only humans who will merit an F.
All the other humans will get an 'Incomplete' as their failure will have been locked in. They are not contenders who could possibly not fail. Those who actually have some clue are the only contenders who could envision a real solution, or know one if they tripped over it. To inform politicians, CEOs, media, religious leaders, or the public, and give yourself an A for effort, is Failure, is the F that Nature may well give humanity in the form of posterity's failure to persist.
Those who may not be clueless need to stop telling those who imagine they are running the show to do something. They need to self-organize and do what their best guess may be as to doing what might work, derived entirely by listening to Nature through their mind's glass darkly, tells them to. Discount listening to humans who do not endeavor to listen to Nature (the 99+%), and maybe consider what those who do endeavor to listen say.
Together, those who endeavor to listen, can guess then test all possibly viable solutions that might actually work to allow humans to persist and evolve as viable subsystems of Gaia. Those who opt out of any proposed experiments in living may be self selecting out of futurity. So sad..., but the concern is will any humans be selected for? Will any modern human renormalize as evidenced by being selected for as the millennia pass?
A failure to save 8 billion and counting humans from life as they know it is not an existential threat to our species. Failure to select for a human that really does understand the planet (Gaia) and can live with it properly is failure, a failure to persist. The coming bottleneck is the Great Selection needed to select for a viable form of human (non-expansionist) that can auto-organize into a viable form of civilization. The challenge of persisting is likely impossible to overestimate, so expect any potentially real solution to seem like real change, e.g. the Four Rules.
