Clarifying One’s Thinking – by Guest Blogger Akallen

In your act of reading this, I can make certain assumptions. You have an interest in what might be broadly characterized as ‘not business as usual’. While possible, it is unlikely that your eyeballs got here through a Bing or Google mishap. Most such ‘mishaps’ involve the legal tender. You likely know Craig, or are ‘in circle’ (first three layers) in the six degrees of separation sense made popular by Facebook, et al. Your interest goes beyond the casual, else you would more likely be engaging in such profundities at your favorite watering hole (or equivalent) rather than the blogosphere.

You want to do something. You care, positively being the more likely case, but negatively possible as well, since Sun Tzu admonishes us to do so. Doing something starts with a formed opinion. A formed opinion more properly comes from knowledge of the situation. Maybe you know how you got there, and maybe you don’t. The voyage of my own shifting opinion has been as Odysseus traveled the Aegean.

Most of us are as a cork on the ocean of technology. We float on it and use it to the extent possible, but are not truly one with it. I haven’t the foggiest notion how to repair an iPod or to design its replacement, despite the fact that I use it. For the majority of us, the biggest issues of our time are not ones we innately relate to or that our background is sufficient for comfort in learned debate. This is not new. It has happened with increasing frequency in the age of technology, and engenders personal discomfort when our votes must be counted. If you are not unhappy with such circumstances, then you can stop reading right here. I’m probably wasting your time.

First, what are the issues I am referring to, and have inferred are the meat (or veggies) of this audience?

We have:

1. Peak oil.
2. Threatened national security via a critical dependence on that which we do not control.
3. Air pollution from fossil fuels of all kinds. Along with the pleasant orange glow at sunset come the health problems.
4. Balance of trade economics not in our favor due to all supply chains starting with energy, and energy now coming principally from other countries.
5. Green house gas in the form of carbon dioxide.
6. Green house gas in the form of methane from animal factories, principally bovine.
7. Green house gas in the form of methane and its hydrates trapped in the permafrost and oceans. As CO2 warms us a bit, we exceed the methane tipping point and it then warms us a lot.
8. Thermohaline circulation being substantively disrupted and causing major climate events.
9. The economics of negative externalities. Free market economics is generally believed to work if all variables are accounted for. How do we price in that which up to the present has been priced out?

10.  The politics of the level playing field. How does one compete in a world economy when potentially every competitor plays the game under a different rule book?

11.  Global warming, taken as the totem for the giant hairball we seem to find ourselves within. It’s one world, but when was it one humanity? Answer: Tens of thousands of years ago when we got our start. Hasn’t happened since.

12.  Timing. For a hamburger today I will gladly repay you on Tuesday. Getting started is a tough endeavor, with the art of procrastination in the majority of our DNA. Correspondingly, the ENTJ’s will want to get off the blocks asap. Consensual group timing is thus more than a bit tricky.

13.  Cycles. Well known neurological fact: Humans are terrible with their grasp of large numbers. Less often mentioned fact: Humans do not relate to long cycle events, let’s say years, in any useful fashion. Long cycles are thus not perceived as cycles, but rather a whole new experience. Doomed to repeat history? For the most part, count on it.

14.  Good old fashioned its-all-about-me. I don’t want my standard of living to go backwards.

15. Fear of the unknown. Humans have raised this to the level of high art. Might be why we are still here and also why we are our own Four Horsemen.

It is almost certain that we all have fully formed opinions. For some of them, don’t discount happenstance. Many times in life, I have simply reacted as my mother or father or some other major figure would have reacted, because I had no information base of my own from which to draw my own answer. I bet it has happened to most of us.

I want to examine the above mentioned bullets through the lens of each person asking themselves why it is their issue. For some, but not all, I will use myself as the guinea pig (with an eye in the rear view mirror for PETA :). I will be trying to home in on the personal questions that stimulate our individual muses toward the acquisition of an information base, and perhaps no longer parroting mom, as in my case. That said, there is no assured destination.

Postscript: With faith that even the most innocuous and information free perambulations can engender strong opinion, I remain hopeful that such opinions will feed the quest rather than be the troll.