Assessing and redirecting variables
Anything — and anyone — can be programmed.
As the world around us grows ever more complex, trying to assess and redirect an increasing number of variables forces each if us to confront our own limitations as individuals moment by moment. As you read on, consider asking yourself the question “How important is it to me to bake my own cookies?”
When you’re alone, you are able to make decisions that increase or reduce your comfort in the knowledge that your decisions affect only you. But when you connect others to your space, the decisionmaking process presents a very different set of challenges.
When you become part of a group, the impact of your decisionmaking becomes both diluted and amplified. When two mutually exclusive outcomes occur simultaneously, observers see chaos when, in fact, they are witnessing order, even if that order has a weak base.
When your ideas become part of a network — that is, a single ingredient combined with other ingredients — a system is born. This system then seeks to combine further networks that will serve its needs. The system thus assumes executive function over any future decisionmaking processes, while guiding its administrators (skilled individuals that feel safely networked and therefore protected from competing networks) to seek and acquire further ingredients that will sustain the system.
Staying with the metaphor of programming, lets look at what needs to happen if you want to make a cookie: if sugar, butter, flour and salt are networked (assessed and redirected) in certain proportions, then combined under certain conditions, both mechanical and chemical, you can produce a batch of cookies.
Once the cookie is complete, its ingredients can only be re-isolated under extreme duress, if at all. Think of the saying that refers to losing control — otherwise known as executive function: “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
Once a system has created itself by combining various networks which consist of a virtually infinite combination of variables, its relative vulnerability increases and decreases at the same time. In other words — to return to the cooking metaphor used above to illustrate the programming metaphor used to highlight the decisionmaking process of networked individuals — the cookie has hidden and therefore protected the sugar, butter, flour and salt. These ingredients are no longer alone, no longer available to others who might have combined them differently; a bond was formed and they now share a “fate” — whatever that “fate” will be — and are virtually incapable of expressing themselves as individuals ever again. In this example, the shared fate of these networked individuals that have formed a bond to become a system is to be chewed, swallowed and digested. The sugar, butter, flour and salt have been redirected to become part of an altered system that is completely different — and far less palatable — than either the individual ingredients, their initial network or the outcome envisioned by the cook → a pleasant and satisfying cookie.
Upon digestion, the now unrecognizable, dynamically altered ingredients are eventually divided and redistributed along two different paths: a select few of the ingredients are redirected to become integrated into the system that decided they were worth digesting, while most of them are excreted and swiftly transported to be rendered and broken down into the basic organic building blocks from which they were individually formed. The individuals have been destroyed and left to rot.
Either of these paths leads to places where the original attributes of the individual ingredients are no longer recognizable. Their individuality has been subsumed into a network and then a system which only serves itself. In other words, they no longer matter, at least not as individuals.
The cook in this story is a man named Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon is a skilled individual who has gained experience combining ingredients that are not particularly nutritious into networks that are largely shunned and ultimately into a system that is committed to destruction. Steve Bannon has decided — and quite openly announced — that democracy has to be destroyed. Steve Bannon has made it his lifelong mission to bring unhealthy individuals together into unmoderated networks that feed autocratic systems bent on destruction even as they cloak themselves in deceptions such as a commitment to Christian values, a commitment to the rule of law, a commitment to the US Constitution, a commitment to liberty, peace and prosperity. This deceptive cloak has been used to recruit further unhealthy, uneducated and otherwise lost individuals as willing partners in a long game that seeks an outcome that benefits only a select group, selected by Steve Bannon in consultation with other influential misanthropes.
Many educated, healthy individuals, robust networks and sustainable systems have combined forces after the failed and, frankly, hysterical attempt by the trumpa-lumpas to sack elected representatives in the US Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. Amid pathetic appeals for a Presidential pardon by some individuals who found themselves on the wrong side of a still-robust (though obviously fragile) judicial system due to their involvement in the tragic events which took several lives and traumatized so many more, an audience of billions is witnessing the transformation of a 250 year old mob — an experiment in democracy labeled “United States of America”— into a coherent, self-determined, conscientious, respectful and law-abiding community. This community will be led — for only the second time in the country’s history — by a network of representatives from each of the many fragments left behind when the cookie crumbled.
Even though I doubt it will happen, I hope the mastermind Steve Bannon — after an appropriate period of incarceration for his treasonous crimes — is given a chance to re-assess and redirect his energies for the good of the new community. An invitation to do so will have to come from the very individuals he has deemed unworthy of existing in peace and harmony alongside the loosely networked, unhealthy and uneducated lost souls he has been digesting to feed his own wheezing system. His confederacy is being slowly yet decisively dismantled as I write these lines and it is, indeed, a wrinkled irony.
I’m optimistic that I will once again feel good about presenting my US passport — granted me at my birth on foreign soil based on the citizenship of the American soldier whose ancestors produced me — to anyone who lawfully asks to see it.
What do we want Steve Bannon, the lead architect of the present crisis, to see when he finally leaves his prison cell? I think he will see more Amandas:
Our existence as citizens of this experiment in democracy has always been fragile. Our collective ability to assess and redirect the many variables presented to us during our lifetimes is limited only by our collective will to insist on meaningful, respectful and inclusive progress. Our programmes often lead to undesirable outcomes and will always need to be adjusted and adapted — or scrapped and rewritten. Yet our hope is eternal, no matter how the cookie crumbles. Oh by the way: Black Lives Matter.
I dedicate this unsolicited, spottily researched and highly biased article to my dear mother, who is turning 90 in a few weeks and has inspired me in so many ways. In her lifetime, she has watched the cookie crumble on two continents.
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Nikolay follows many paths, tunes in to many channels and bakes his own bread. Cookies are not a priority, rather eschewed.