The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Redux Rendezvous VII

7 July 2010

Volume 12, Issue 27

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This is the final installment of our specific Redux Rendezvous series. That means it is the seventh in the series, which this seventh month comes out on the seventh day, our twenty-seventh issue of the year. Which as far as I know means absolutely nothing. It is not so much we have run out of ways to enlarge these redux basics, but rather in a forest of stupendously changing events we keep finding amazing trees and other life that needs deeper description.

Through this series timeline our separate Monday posts have become more important as descriptions of current events that got our attention in the previous week. These articles began in late January as a Week in Review posts, but over time they have become more focused commentary rather than spun reporting.

At the same time while doing the Redux Rendezvous series we have been able to focus on broader observations on what is developing in our world that no one seems to see or understand. Contrary to the uncertainty that you read and hear in the big bad world, everything that is now happening is following natural law, or more precisely is falling apart because we humans think we know better and hence create mess after mess as the result of our own foolishness.

This week we will sort of encapsulate our remarks in the context of a Ubermenschen failure. True, the world really has no superhuman people, except in their own eyes, but our human focus is still the belief that somehow the combined wisdom of humanity can make this whole adventure function better than it historically has been able to provide.

These uber-thoughts surfaced in the early morning hours as I was musing about the mess that Michael Steele has produced by remarks, at a Republican Party fundraiser over Afghanistan being president Obama’s war. Steele said it is doomed to failure because no power has been able to create a nation there in over a thousand years.

Steele’s observations are basically in line with our comments about the lack of somewhat related historic success when it comes to fighting counterinsurgency wars. Our thoughts are that Afghanistan could really become Obama’s Vietnam, and in the broader context just as the president kept the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels in charge of the financial system, it seems that he also kept the Bush era neocons in charge of foreign affairs.

Republicans are screaming that Afghanistan is America’s War and we need to fight it to win, seemingly without a thought of what truly is the mission there, is it truly obtainable through a counterinsurgency strategy, or what is the true cost of success, however success may be defined?

Warfare is hell on earth when the mission is clearly stated, obtainable within the limitations of the combatants, and those who are called upon to fight have the resources and time required to make it work. That sort of reinforces one of my pet peeves, that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, in the form we created those wars, would have been possible with the historic American citizen centered military.

In contrast, our now truly professional expeditionary forces lack the numbers, resources, and the mission statement to be the nation builders of the world. The Ubermenschen of military defense have been found unable to provide a workable and sustainable offense, even with all the best efforts of those sacrificing to bring it about. As my Colonel in the Army would have said, “Afghanistan is a lousy little war, but it is the only one we have.” The problem is that is a pretty lame excuse to fight a war in the first place.

Now when we broaden the Ubermenschen concept to the oil spill in the Gulf, we see a real disaster and then there is the oil still spilling after seventy some days. Not only does it appear that Beyond Petroleum is beyond, or grossly negligent in their drilling procedures in petroleum, the even bigger fiasco is from the interference of federal bureaucrats continually limiting counter measures while the only thing they know how to do is simply say, “You can’t do that!” Then they return to Washington DC, or their air-conditioned office, to worry about where they are going to go on vacation, now that the Gulf coast beaches have been oil tainted.

Just to simplify the solution and put it in the context we have discussed so far, if we truly had a citizen military, and if they had the mission to clean up the Gulf, the senior bureaucratic officers, of the “You can’t do that” leadership school, would have simply been fragged.

Moving from history into the longer-term future, beginning in the last century, the Ubermenschen haven’t done a very good job of creating new wealth and as a consequence in our country in which seventy percent of the commerce is based upon material consumption, we no longer make anything of significance. Furthermore most of that stuff we are supposed to be able to buy is shipped to us from about as far away as possible. Now if the Ubermenschen were as smart as we thought they were, does that make any common sense?

Let us see if we can figure out the logic. To be happy, people need to buy stuff. It follows that the more stuff you buy the happier you will be. Since you need money to buy the stuff the more money you will need to make. Now in a world based on stuff, it seems logically to follow that unless you are a stuff producer, you can never make enough money to buy the stuff you need to keep the world operating. But if the stuff is shipped from the hinterlands of the world because it is cheaper to make stuff there, because to produce the stuff domestically is too expensive, it seems there is no place along the distribution chain where there is enough value added to make the system work. So in our 2010 world, we are all to believe we will get rich living within small transfer margins where selling and buying stuff accounts for seventy percent of the economy, employing eighty percent of the people.

One material product that is produced domestically is housing. The inflation in housing really was the engine behind all this consumer stuff spending, because that housing equity or flipping ability became the mechanism to create the debt needed to fund the other consumerism. The problem is if you remove all the hype, people don’t make enough money now to buy a home priced by these inflated standards. So now we have really redefined wealth from your net worth to your gross borrowing ability.

If the average American salary is $45k, then historically that should support a home value of $112k. Double that for two people working full time with secure jobs and that brings the price to $225k. Now if that new home was constructed for $100 per square foot (about half labor and half materials) it all works, again provided there is job security. With 8 million people losing there jobs over the last couple of years and uncertainty about the future from a whole host of variables, risk everywhere increases. This makes the problem really one of deflationary pressure, including the fact that both materials and labor costs are still at the levels of the housing boom, rather than readjusting to true market conditions.

The Ubermenschen, as described originally by Nietzsche, are actually the Social Darwinists that have risen above the less highly evolved Christians and others who still believe in religion, myths, and other fables, and are unwilling to embrace the changes that this class of anti-Christs desire. As we have pointed out throughout this series, before they can ascend to their exalted levels the Ubermenschen must determine which of their evolved classes will triumph. For a winner or evolutionary super-human must survive the battle of the fittest.

As reported in Redux Rendezvous VI last week and other articles in this series, our wager is on the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels over the Collectivist Elitists. Furthermore the Scoundrels really have no problem with the less evolved, for as long as they make there money, other morals such as social justice has no place in their worldview. This is the current strife beginning to take place between the two groups, even if physical violence is limited. However both of these groups believe they are too highly evolutionarily evolved to fight a traditional insurgency or counterinsurgency, because after all, actual physical warfare is not the evolutionary high ground.

Keeping with those cultural five classes we developed last week, Radical Islamists have the same problems as maintaining a global materialism, except instead of working from the financial centers of the world; they must operate from remote sites in developing countries. So evolutionarily they are really not a threat to any form of material governance. While they would like to bring the infidels of western culture to our knees, we westerners are doing a pretty good job all on our own. The world will maintain a constant pressure on the Radicals because their form of Islam is one of the most primitive because of its required exclusivism.

Complacent Agnostics are a mutant class of people that came about because of the perceived universal prosperity of the last three decades. Just like the mutant bugs in the hospital, their effect is most virulent among sick people. The symptoms we all manifest materialize in the desire for personal peace and affluence with no social cost. Like their bacteria brethren, the Complacent Agnostics, while very menacing in the isolated culture of sick people, have a very difficult time reproducing in the real big bad world out there. Since human life spans are longer and much more complex than simple bacteria, this means that in order to survive in the more difficult less prosperous future, the Agnostics will have to adopt some sort of religion.

Traditional Independents have never lost their religion and furthermore are willing to defend it if pushed to the extreme. The Independents are in the process of understanding that for centuries they were belittled, but now are learning that they share an ancestry with the founders of the United States. Those founders understood for a culture to exist and prosper, absolutes beyond human reason had to exist and those truths must be not only the roots of the civilization but also desired fruit. Independents understand the only source of those absolutes is the God that created everything and mankind did not evolve by chance out of some rich primordial sea and a lightning strike.

Independents will soon begin to realize that all the other four classes of today’s world culture are just so twentieth century. While it is still early in the twenty-first century, what we are seeing is a rise of the worth of an individual within a larger community. Except for the Independents, others would like to go back to some previous era, where they were deemed special to others. Traditionalists understand that their reward comes from utilizing the gifts they were given by the Creator for the betterment of everyone. So in a way they become the antithesis of the progressive culture of the last century.

So what does that mean?

Afghanistan is a tribal culture. In the twentieth century we saw the rise of powerful nation states, most of the time overriding tribal, regional, and other cultural values. In that nation building concept, the bigger is always the better, because bigger means more power to the rulers. Tribalism however is the means by which humans have survived through most of our history. Even the Bible would place tribalism back to the post Babylonian Tower time reference.

Nation building and maintenance require three important synergistic inputs. One is sufficient inexpensive energy to transmit and disseminate to the second, the national information to the people to be governed. This leads to the third, where the population must be willing to accept and adopt those principles, essentially for personal good first and then the community thereafter. The bigger the nation, the more energy, the more absolute must be the nature of the information; expressed in a manner the folks can understand.

In the case of the American commitment to Afghanistan, a 2007 – Interagency and Counterinsurgency Warfare document running 617 pages, or a 2009 – Counterinsurgency Guide of 67 pages, both prepared by staff officers and think tank intellectuals basically create a on paper a Peace Corp with guns. That may not meet the informational requirements of Afghanistan, localizing energetic and human willingness, are even more questionable.

At the other end of the twentieth century continuum is the most successful and most powerful nation in history – the United States of America. But if you take an objective serious look at what is happening in America it really isn’t all that different from nation building happening in Afghanistan, except for one major exception. At least the generals, diplomats, and soldiers in Afghanistan have some major documents to guide the efforts.

In the USA the future is being administered by a president flying around the country explaining an unworkable vision and harping about others who don’t share his delusion of a collective socially just society. His all-wise detractors so far have only offered unregulated solutions that were somewhat responsible for the mess the president inherited. What is missing in America is the willingness to get over it and let us move forward.

Put in terms that no person in power wants to hear: Big government and big business working in slimy collusion got us into this mess. Multi-thousand page government bills, or just extending the Bush tax cuts, won’t do the job. The focus, for lack of a better term, needs to shift from gargantuan nationalism to flexible tribalism, that tribalism taking the form of small human enterprise. Those enterprises being for profit manufacturing and service businesses, nonprofit non-government agencies, and formal and informal religious institutions.

Really the same three things need to be developed as in overt nation building. First requires an energetic input as a form of liquidity. We then need a Redux Rendezvous outlook of the future where individual people begin to understand that they are the key to their communities’ success. Finally people need to understand that the past isn’t coming back and they need to focus upon taking control of their personal lives, and let elephantine government and monstrous business be allowed to go the way of the actual dinosaurs.

These Redux Rendezvous concepts are what build and adapt humanity to the natural forces of change in the real world. To say we want to just maintain our desired benefits without taking into account a continually changing world means we shall never be able to meet the new challenges of the future, for living in the past makes those mistakes real, and limits the opportunities of the absolute gifts of life itself.