Government is bureaucracy.

We like to pretend like they are separate things, because that fits better in our hierarchical naked beach ape minds. Goverment, we like to think, is that top layer where our political alphas do their important political stuff that we, the rest of the monkey troupe. need them to do in order to keep us safe.

Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is that annoying stuff with people shuffling pieces of paper around and making you go through a bunch of seemingly needless steps just to get your goddamned driver’s license renewed.

But that’s a false separation. A bogus duality. Government is bureaucracy, bureaucracy is government. Government is made of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the government. There is no government that is not also bureaucracy.

It is easy – childishly easy – to forget this. We make a game of pretending that the parts of government we like are “the government” and the parts we don’t like are “the bureaucracy”, but you just have to compare maps between two random citizens to realize just how petty and arbitrary a distinction that is.

Every part of government is a part of a vast bureaucracy. The solider in the field, the cop on the beat, the road worker repaving a section of sidewalk, and the middle management interdepartmental liaison are all equally bureaucrats. The fact that they are at the lowest level of the structure, the parts you can actually see working, doesn’t make any of them more important or less a part of government any more that the wheel of the car is more important than the engine because that’s the part we can see and interact with. It is all government.

We Canadians seem to have a somewhat better grip on this than the Americans. After all, they have “truth, justice, and the American Way^[1]” and we have “peace, order, and good government”. We Canadians are, however dimly, aware of the fact that we are the government and the government is us. Whatever level you are dealing with (national, provincial, municipal, school), we remain aware that the bureaucrats we are talking to are fellow Canadians, just like us, and so we feel the same obligation to deal with them in a polite and reasonable fashion as they feel towards us.

Not so down south. Americans are constantly at war with their own anti-authoritarian oppositional/defiant nature, and so they are compelled to divide everything into two camps, Us versus Them. The Little Guy versus the Government. Republicans versus Democrats. Coke versus Pepsi. Great Taste versus Less Filling.

But we are talking about degrees of the same disease. Every democracy struggles with these same false dichotomy these days. The Baby Boom generation cannot stand to be told what to do, no matter how righteous the order. So they reactivate their faded memories of being anti-authoritarian rebels and pretend like it is still Us Versus The System, even though they are the system now and have lost all rights to be considered the underdog.

I guess they never learned to be responsible. Responsibility, after all, restricts freedom and is therefore evil. Nothing else is relevant. Any arguments that they are being irresponsible meet with “LA LA LA, I CAN’T HEAR YOU”, or its equivalent.

So even though they are in power, they are The Man, and they are The System, they still behave like spoiled teenagers for whom everything is optional (or should be) optional, including taxation, law, government, and anything else they don’t like.

Global Warming is going to kill us all? LA LA LA! The wealthy are destroying democracy? Whatever, dude, I’ll be fine so who gives a shit. The police are shooting black people, like, a lot? Nah, we killed racism, everything’s cool. Whatever they have to believe in order to justify doing whatever feels good or is fun to them, they will believe it.

They did it when they were hippies telling themselves having lots of sex and taking lots of drugs will somehow bring about world peace, they did it again when they decided getting jobs and going corporate wasn’t really selling out, they did it a third time when they convinced themselves “greed is good” in the Eighties, and they have done it again now that they are the system and the power but they don’t feel like taking on the responsibility that clearly entails.

Nope, we’re still the put-upon victims of a tyrannical System that only wants to keep us down by doing the worst thing possible in the entire catalog of human sins, making us less rich and more poor. We literally cannot think of anything worse and there is literally no possible justification for it, ever, period.

And this will remain true no matter how many fun wars we vote for. We don’t have to pay for that, The Government does. The Government has unlimited amounts of money from…. I don’t know, somewhere… and therefor can do whatever the hell we want it to do without having to charge us one red cent for it. They only take our money because they are big greedy meanies who like hurting people and hate success!

That’s what we have to believe in order to continue being selfish, callous, and irresponsible, so that’s what we believe.

It’s high time we make these motherfuckers grow up at last. You can’t always have things your way. Some things remain true no matter how much you dislike them. There are lots of things that you still have to do even after your tantrum. There is no Great Depression generation to be the responsible parent and clean up after you any more.

You’re in charge. Behave yourselves. Take a good hard look at reality and deal with life as it is, even all the parts that suggest, however mildly, that sometimes you should not, in fact, be allowed to do whatever the hell you want.

It is high time you admitted to yourself that you are the grownups now, and it’s up to you to clean up your own messes.

There;s this interesting bit of theory floating about called Spoon Theory.

The basic idea is that everything you do in life costs you a spoon. That spoon might represent physical energy, mental determination, emotional coping resources, or anything else you might have on hand to use to face the day.

Healthy people never pay attention to their spoon supply for the same reason that rich people don’t pay attention to how much things cost : healthy people have lots and lots of spoons and they can go through the day without even thinking about them, or even know that spoon transactions are occurring.

But us sick people have far, far fewer spoons. (Why spoons? Click the link above, it explains all. )

Because we are short a lot of spoons, the spoon-rich people can’t understand us. What to them is a negligible expenditure is a massive investment to us. To them, we look like we are being petty and fussy and “making a big deal of things” because we are being so deliberate about how we invest our time.

Obviously, what is a tiny expense to them is a huge decision for us, but without the right kind of language to use to express this idea, we spoon poor misers come across as uncaring, aloof, boring, a wet blanket, and so forth and so on.

People who have never had a long-term illness (because it is the days on days on days that drag you down) can’t understand this. It is entirely outside their frame of reference. No matter how well-intended and caring they are, they will never truly understand what it is like to have so few spoons.

An interesting extension of this spoon based metaphor can be found in this article.

In it, the author talks about how different people have a different number of spoons for various kinds of activities in their spoon drawer every morning. There are spoons that can only be spent on physical activity, ones that only work for language tasks, ones for pure cognition, and so forth and so on.

When you run out of spoons in a given field, that is it. Any further endeavour in that field will come at enormous cost. If you need a Type A spoon when you have none left, you can’t just use a Type B. Instead, you may have to burn every spoon you have just to keep going, and that can only last so long.

Again, this is largely invisible to the spoon-rich people of the healthy world. They can’t understand why doing a little more of something can be a big deal for those of us on a very harsh spoon diet.

Myself, I always have tons and tons of mental activity spoons. All I do all day is exercise my brain, after all. And I usually have a decent supply of sensitivity spoons at hand too.

But my social coping spoons are in very short supply. And my physical activity spoons are there, but most of the time they are locked away in a steel compartment marked “depression”.

So the firewood is there. I just rarely have the coping resources to light the fire.

That’s another set of spoons I have in short (and somewhat random) supply : emotional coping resources. In the past, I have called that ATC, or Ability To Cope. When you suffer from depression like I do, even everyday living taxes your ATC spoons. Things outside of the comfort zone of your routine can seem impossible to afford. Suggestions or invitations to do things that would be a perfectly reasonable expenditure for most of humanity are the equivalent of asking you to mortgage the home so you can go out for some ribs.

And the way healthy people don’t understand spoon poverty goes triple for people with mental illnesses, especially depression. Depression is one of the most invisible disabilities there is. There are no externally verifiable symptoms. It really is “all in your head”. There isn’t even a medical test that can prove you have it.

To all eyes except the one inside your tortured mind, you are perfectly healthy. A cancer patient can point to tumours on an X-ray. A blind man can show you his clearly nonfunctional eyes. Nobody disputes a broken leg. ^[1]

But us depressives have nothing. Healthy people, not entirely unreasonably, often feel like we are in some sense faking, even when they know that isn’t true. It is hard to believe in a thing for which there is no physical evidence.

One thing that I have not seen covered is the possibility of changing your spoon drawer. Those allocations are not set in stone. I know, for example, that therapy has expanded the emotional coping section of my spoon drawer. Problems that used to loom enormous on my spoon budget, so that I felt I had to save up all my spoons just to cope with them, now seem minor.

I can go around in public now with almost no social anxiety. I won’t say it’s gone, because it will never be gone. I can feel it rattling around in the attic of my mind when I am out and about, trying to escape its bonds.

But for the most part, I am fine. Taking it to the next level and having me go someplace where there will be strangers is another thing entirely. But I no longer feel incredibly exposed, like everyone is staring at me, when I am on the street or sitting alone in a restaurant.

All the hubbub of humanity around me feels safely distant now. Part of that is the drugs, I know, but most of it is true recovery. The drugs only cover up the symptoms long enough for the real treatment to take effect.

So I will sign off this episode of the Spoon Show by saying don’t assume your spoon drawer is your destiny.

You can be so much more.

This is a continuation of yesterday’s commentary. I wandered very far away from the point I set out to make yesterday (gee, how rare) and so today I am going to take another crack at it.

In his TED talk, Harris examines the question of the relationship between science and morality, and I certainly agree with him that they are far, far from being mutually exclusive and that the notion that somehow science cannot answer moral questions is just another bit of superstitious anti-science nonsense like the idea that some areas of knowledge are “sacred” and therefore not to be tread upon by the hobnailed boots of science and reason.

Repeatedly, people try to wall off certain subjects to protect them from reason. The very act of doing so betrays a dark suspicion that one’s beliefs are not literally “true”. We are still a long way from widespread acceptance of the materialist truth of human existence : that there is no special category between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ where something can be real without having to follow the rules of reality, and that all we are is matter and energy, with no special exceptions.

This said, I think Harris does not quite hit the mark. He is making a vitally important point, that we can, will, and must use science to find the best answers to our moral questions, but in doing so he misses a very vital distinction in what science can and cannot do, and it is this distinction that I wish to make today.

It is true that science can, will, and must be used to find the best solutions to moral problems. Take this example :

A father is home alone with his toddler son when the son manages to find and drink something highly poisonous before the father can stop him. Luckily for the kid, his father is a chemical engineer, and in a flash comes up with a concoction made from household chemicals that neutralized the poison and saved the boy’s life.

Clearly, the father used science (his knowledge of chemistry) in the pursuit of a moral goal (saving a child’s life). Very few people would argue that the father should have left science out of his morality and let his child die.

So it is clear that science can, indeed, find answers to moral problems. But the distinction I am making today is that while science can find the answers, it can’t ask the questions.

Not at a fundamental level. The very basis of all morality is the assumption that it matters what happens to human beings, and that is a logically unsupportable assumption. In the light of so-called “pure reason”, there is no basis to prefer people living to people dying, people experiencing pleasure over people experiencing pain, or people experiencing joy over people experiencing despair. As human beings, we care about what happens to humans both because are humans ourselves and because as humans, we have a strong instinct towards altruism and mutual care.

But from the point of view of logic, there is no reason to care what happens to human beings at all. Logic alone could not ask the question of how to save the boy, because it could not provide a reason to act at all. The impetus to action had to come from the emotional core of the father who desperately wanted to save his son.

So what is the role of science in morality? Its role is that of the most powerful servant morality has ever had. Reason is and has always been the servant of emotion. Science is simply the codification of reason into a very powerful system whereby knowledge can be generated, tested, communicated, and most importantly of all, accumulated. The scientific method gives reason a way to add knowledge to an ever-growing model of reality that can then be used to make predictions about the future.

And prediction is the ultimate test for all forms of knowledge. Whether it is predicting the next solar eclipse or knowing what will happen if you mix two chemical together, science is the most potent engine for influencing the universe we know.

And influencing the universe is precisely what morality seeks to do. The goal of morality is always to make the world a more morally acceptable place. Reducing suffering, increasing public safety, protecting people from outside threats… these are all moral problems which have practical, scientific, logical solutions.

Some people do not like that approach. They prefer to think of morality as some sort of special sphere that is not suitable for the pure clean light of reason, and claim that the powerful pragmatism of science is far too crude and thoughtless an instrument for something as special and delicate as morality.

But what these people really fear is that science will force them to change their mind about something. The data won’t match their assumptions and they will be forced to either change their minds or start denying science. They would much prefer that science just stayed out of it so people who never liked math or science in the first place can keep their pet theories.

And what people really don’t like about science interfering in the moral realm is that science might lead to conclusions that don’t feel right. A lot of people are going through the world today with only the basic package of human morality installed, the things we all share. The package that boils down to “be nice and only do nice things”.

And this is a very effective package for the say to day running of a human life. You can be a highly moral person who feels passionately about the welfare of one’s fellow human beings and never have to leave this basic mode of morality.

But true morality is not about doing what feels good. It is about doing what is right regardless of how we feel. It is more important to get the best solutions we possibly can, even ones that do not pass a moral “sniff test”, than to preserve our feeling of being a super nice person.

Well that is all for today folks. I think I hit the mark today. Mu basic point is that Harris is correct that science has a very big role to play in answering moral questions.

It just can’t ask the questions itself.

I will talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.

This is one of my fave Ted talks ever, and that’s saying something.

I’d seen it twice before today, but I was happy to watch it again as part of my coursework for that online philosophy course that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. ^[1]

However, when I watched it this time, I notices a flaw on Harris’ reasoning, or at least an area that can be clarified, and so I thought I would tackle it today while I am still feeling all smart and academic.

Repeatedly throughout the talk, Harris asks where we get this idea that all opinions should be treated equally when it comes to ethics. I realize the question was rhetorical, but I think it needs addressing regardless.

This notion of active moral relativism did not come about in a vacuum. Instead, it is something that naturally occurred out of the rise of pluralism. In the 20th century, one of the most important lessons was tolerance. We learned to live and let live.

This is not a new concept. It is, in fact, how all great empires and large cities have been forced to evolve. The more diversity a city or nation has, the more it must learn to let people have their own customs and beliefs and only get the government and the law involved in things which involve multiple cultures.

As far back as Babylon, there were peoples of radically different cosmologies (and to a certain extent, moralities) living side by side who all had to learn the basic lesson of tolerance : that tolerance for me and my kind comes at the price of tolerance for everyone else’s kind. You only get the tolerance you give.

Groups that could not learn that soon found themselves driven out. Cities that could not achieve this were rent asunder by inner divisions. Nations that could not learn this did not last.

So what Harris is really lamenting is that we have passed the point where the very good and necessary virtue of tolerance spills over into the total abdication of intellectual responsibility on the part of the media, the politicians, and to a certain extent the populace themselves for not demanding more.

The tricky part is negotiating the difference between respecting people’s right to their own opinions and people’s right to have those opinions remain unchallenged. Allowing people to have their own opinions does not need to mean that everyone can say whatever fool thing they want and nobody is allowed to object or point out flaws.

The freedom of speech that protects your right to state an opinion always protects my right to criticize it.

This is the gulf we must cross in this modern Internet-soaked era. We must learn to stand up to those who try to shield themselves from criticism by claiming freedom of speech and tell them, powerfully and simply, that if they put their opinions into a public forum, they are opening them to criticism, and that applies equally and fairly to everyone.

This is the soul of the marketplace of ideas, and said marketplace is vital to every democracy. It is the crucible in which the future of a democratic nation is forged, the laboratory in which new ideas are tested to their limits. It is always the nation with the most lively marketplace of ideas that produces the ideas that will lead the world into the future.

And it is always the side of the argument that cries “no fair, you shouldn’t be allowed to say that!” who inevitably loses. To say so is a tacit admission that your ideas cannot stand up to rational challenges and the only way to preserve them (and, more importantly, your belief in them) is if nobody is allowed to disagree with you and shatter your fragile illusions.

You’d think today’s pro-capitalism would understand this, because the marketplace of ideas is exactly like the marketplace of capitalism. The strong ideas that can withstand competition survive, and the rest die.

It is no coincidence that it is the Internet that has brought this issue to light. With the explosion of the Internet in the last 20 years, the marketplace of ideas, like the marketplace for goods and services, has gone global, and ideas that sold well in small local markets now face stiff competition from ideas from all around the world.

It has never been easier to share your opinion with the world, and for the world to share its opinion right back at you. Sure, you and your weird group of friends can keep on believing that the biggest threat to world peace is a secret army of well trained and heavily armed turkeys, but sooner or later you are going to want to let the rest of the world in on what they need to do to survive (random guess : cranberry sauce?) and then your ideas will be in the marketplace. ^[2]

So to answer Harris’ question : We got the idea that all opinions are equally due respect from the very trend towards tolerance that has been a vital portion of the forging of modern society and all this cooperation we have with one another.

This does not detract from Harris’ main point, which is that science can and will be used to answer moral questions.

But once more, I have run out of words, and will have to return to this topic another day.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.