Who is insane?

The problem with insanity is that it varies between contexts and cultures. A Norwegian killing Taliban fighters in Afghanistan is a hero, but Anders Breivik is mentally ill. If an American governor thinks he’s been “elected to decide who can live or die”, it’s a simple factual statement, but if Breivik thinks so, he’s a madman. Why is it so?

Defining insanity rises from the needs of society: how to otherwise understand a person who starts shooting people quite randomly? Breivik simply had to be defined ill because “no one in their right mind would do such things”. Insanity is a tool for the society to define to itself what it is: what is healthy (the somehow “natural state”) and thus acceptable, and what mental structures and attitudes are not favorable.

In this point the reader rises up and shouts: “But it’s totally different thing! You can’t compare NATO troops to Breivik. And he really is mentally ill.” Well, again: the basic axiom of any discourse (or culture) is that there is no truth outside the discourse. When the truths of the discourse are given as premises, the logical thought is exactly the common man’s response: “This analysis is false and it insults X, Y and Z”. There is no way to judge how things actually are unless all of the participants are able to also evaluate the initial premises.

Some questions to do the evaluation could be: Does the concept of “insanity” exist so that the society can define itself as sane, and thus all that is done is morally justified? Can whole cultures be insane? Is sanity something that is on or off in people or can it be that the level of sanity usually differs between life areas?

Maybe the biggest question is: Do you consider yourself mentally sane? Try to think beyond the initial “Of course!” response. Where do you base your evaluation? On the fact that you wouldn’t do those kinds of things? If that is the case, read this post again.

Measuring economic and societal activity

I started to think of possible ways to measure economic activity beyond GDP. What should be understood is that economy is actually very deep in relationships between human beings, so actually economic growth per se should be considered nothing and focus should be put on the activity of the economy. This could be thought as the amount of “swarming” in the society. Comparing economic activity to some “societal activity” index (the non-money side of society) would be interesting!

There already is Human Development Index, but I think its scope is too narrow. The indicator business should be exploded by releasing worldwide data in one easily accessible database and let the users figure out different kinds of indexes. Perhaps there is no one perfect indicator, but we will settle for some basic principles.

Couple of things that could be included in the economic activity indicator:

• amount of new businesses
• amount of patent applications (by small and medium enterprises so patent warfare is excluded)
• size distribution of businesses
• attitudes towards entrepreneurship

The societal activity index could include things like:

• amount of users in public libraries
• amount of new NGOs
• attitudes towards civil society (e.g. how many consider good level of public libraries to be essential in the society?)

There is always value choices done in selecting the factors to the indicators, so it’s best just to state this openly.

The new indexes would also give room for improvement for the wealthy western countries that easily start to consider themselves as the ideal societies with perfect policies and practices (and nothing to learn). There must be a fundamental paradigm shift: instead of measuring some aspects carved in stone, the new indexes should measure the amount of buzz in the economy and society in general.

P.S. Rick Falkvinge has a post on swarm economy. There are good points such as “writing to Wikipedia isn’t currently considered as creating value”. Perhaps Wikipedia editing activity should be included in the societal activity index?

Taboos and conventionalities

In the world dominated by the monologue of commercial media every news story builds and supports the status quo. Protests are framed so that the stories repeat:

There is some instability far away from you, but it will be sorted out when our president condemns the use of violence against protestors.

The job of news is not so much to tell people what happens in the world but to construct and maintain acceptance to how things are. This is the reason why there never is “good news”, at least not from abroad. Threat does the job better. These subjects of conventional interpretations vary between different publicities (cultures).

Example: In Finland, Russia is often portrayed as “the big neighbor one shouldn’t provoke”. There never is positive news from Russia; every news item is formulated so that it maintains the idea of Russia as a threat. In other words, when journalists are portraying themselves as heralds of objectivity, they actually just reflect their cultural background to the reporting, making themselves the servants of the existing social order.

Note that the question is not whether Russia somehow actually is this or that, but that there exists conventional discourses in cultures in which truths need to be retold again and again to sustain the way things are. In Finland, the compulsory military service for men is one of the hippos in the living room. Because there is no truth outside culture, the debate cannot be solved rationally within the culture.

All in all, the ideas of national culture and nation state cannot stand equal comparison to other cultures or countries, because their premise is that our culture is the best in the world. This justifies their existence. (Phenomena like racism are just logical consequences of this mindset.)

Participation prerequisite

Participation is a prerequisite for democracy. Thinking is prerequisite for participation. Perception is prerequisite for thinking.

Information and intuition

So to synthesize the concept of information and its flow: What happens if there is mixed information? How does it affect one’s being-in-the-world?

We could imagine a situation where culture industry sends a certain image of “how things are”, local and international media send different kinds of messages and perhaps one’s peers give a totally different picture, giving hope to the belief that retreating to a limited scope of “social life” is the answer to the mystery of life. In fact, this description is probably what resembles reality more than the idealized picture.

In this chaotic situation, what is one to do? There is only one answer: intuition. The person should start sharpening his senses – that is, raising his awareness. In practice this means developing thoughts of things. A good way to do this is to start discussing with people or start writing a blog. Blog is good because it allows quick review of thought, from writing it to reading it yourself with a critical attitude.

The person should also start developing the feedback mechanism between his actions and the results, constantly reviewing the latter to improve the former. Here it’s important to acknowledge: how does one interpret hostility towards himself? What meaning is given to despair that will eventually arise?

It should be understood that the relationship between individual consciousness and reality is dialectic, with the main variations of monologue, dialogue, dispute and warfare. And it’s more useful to have a dialogue with the reality rather than a war.

What actually is information?

I remember writing in high school about the relationship between information, knowledge and wisdom. What is interesting is that this follows pretty much the consciousness approach I have been developing in this blog. However, I now started thinking of information in more detail. What is it and how does it relate with individual consciousness?

Let’s think of a piece of information. Example: “European Union is in crisis.” What actually is this statement?

It is an emergent product of my consciousness where I declare a state of reality the way I see it. The emergentness can be seen in the way this statement encapsulates background information in itself; For the statement to make sense, the reader has to have understanding of English language and meanings of the ‘European Union’ and ‘crisis’. The reader also has to have knowledge of recent developments or otherwise he asks: “What do you mean?”. Without the background knowledge, the reader has no way to connect the thing I just said to anything so he becomes confused.

The statement automatically transforms consciousness, building the conception of “how things are”. The individuals are, however, on different levels when it comes to information processing skills, and that causes different responses (confusion/rejection, enthusiasm, curiosity, leadership).

What should be noted is that even the reader’s negative response still builds his consciousness. Aggressive response emerges, but the result of it is still transformed consciousness: “European Union is not in crisis.” Note that this is more awareness than there was before the initial statement, even though it may not be that accurate a belief.

This is why individual’s thinking should be started with the attitude: “Just say something about this, whatever it may be.” Opinions shouldn’t be considered as anything static but always flowing and altering consciousness – and through this process, changing the world.

Of information flow

I’m trying to get a clearer picture of how information flows in society.

In this model it is thought that information flows upwards from reality. It flows to the spectators as pleasure through the culture industry and to the activists and researchers through the cultural lense. Researchers distribute this information to the society via media, while activists’ role focuses on mainly producing feelings of guilt in the spectators (they lack the practical know-how, so they can’t change much). Managers use the information as a tool for organizing action towards the reality.

Different groups of people are seen as different level of information processors:

• Spectators: unskilled in information processing, become confused and react by escaping to the reality produced by culture industry or start longing for the “good old days”. Motto: “Everything is vanity.”
• Activists: skillful information processors. Produce the culture, but from spectators’ point of view, they produce guilt. Are confused with the practical action. Motto: “Something has to be done.”
• Researchers: professional information processors. Produce scientific information (scientists) and cultural information (journalists) to be distributed to the society via media. Motto: “I’m just telling how it is.”
• Managers: practical information processors. Produce practical action with the aim of influencing reality. Motto: “Let’s get down to business.”

So, it can be thought that each group produces also their own roles in the society as the result of the information flow into them. Therefore information is approached as “formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching”. See History of the word and concept “information” in Wikipedia.

The Circle of Life

Now we could start philosophizing how the process goes in this. Perhaps it’s something like this:

1. Spectators observe the world. Some stay at this level, but others become more interested in the world. They turn into
2. Researchers, who study the world in more detail, learning “why the world wags and what wags it”. At some point some of them have had enough so they become
3. Activists, willing to change the world. To actually make a change, however, some of them have to become
4. Managers, seeing that everything functions as it – in their opinion – should.

Now this does bear resemblance to the typical circle of life, does it not? While we’re at it and the Lion King tune starts playing in the reader’s head, there’s no use of fighting against watching the video ;)

Structure of the Society

In the spirit of my ambitious attempt to define the world, I hereby present: The Structure of the Society!

In this reasoning, the society consists of four types of people, classified on the basis of their approach to (and relationship with) the world. In practice every person is often directed towards more than one field, and they have different roles in different circles – example: CEO is a spectator of politics. And note that here the x-axis is based on orientation instead of access; it could be thought as “orientation towards the world”.

Managers manage things with the goal of sustaining their functionality. They are the operators of the machine of the society. Their goal is to keep things running as smoothly as possible. Politicians and business executives are examples of these.

Researchers describe how things are in the world. They are the professional information producers in the media society, directed towards the public. Example: journalists and scientists. The journalist is a lightweight version of the scientist – a researcher without the science.

Spectators observe the world that is described by researchers. The archetype is the common man, who “just lives his life” while being a bit interested in the world. Nonetheless, he is a passive participant. He is directed towards his own circles.

Activists want to change how things are in the world, as opposed to the managers. Directed towards the public. Example: political activists.

In this picture, a couple of groups could be added but they don’t quite fit in the picture:

Engineers actually change how things are but they usually don’t promote themselves. In a way they could be seen as activists with a practical twist. They are opposed to managers in the way that they have the practical knowledge of things. They are situated somewhere between spectators and activists in the orientation axis, being directed towards the practical problems.

Artists are sort of researchers, but instead of researching how the visible world works they philosophize the invisible world through the creative process. Art is the product of this philosophical action. Artists are directed towards the public.

The way I see it, this same structure is present in many levels: e.g. when one starts any collaborative action, the same roles emerge, but with different names: leaders, researchers, observers and critics. Of course there are researcher-activists (Teun A. van Dijk), artist-activists (Banksy) and to some extent manager-activists (Steve Jobs).

Spectator can be seen as the role that each of the three – managers, researchers and activists – has in some respects, it’s the attitude towards observation. It’s only the activists, though, who take a moral stand against “what appears”; the others go with the regular “what appears is good; what is good appears”.

Edit: Made small revisions to the image and terminology (access -> orientation, reporter -> researcher).

Scoop.it: Sphere of Politics

As an effort to start building a new political publicity – and hence, politics – I started a scoop.it topic called Sphere of Politics.

That’s a fine looking picture of Aristotle right there, is it not?

Edit: The Scoop.it blog has an interesting introduction to curation.