How Much do You Really Know, About Your “Enemies”?

Spotting a Human Weakness

Firstly a heads-up; I normally do my very best to write inclusively, to avoid the emotional “Us/Them” style of writing we often see.

When I feel strongly negatively emotional about a particular party, the logical part of me says “Its not really them, it is the flawed system”.

But sometimes emotion takes over.

We all lapse, occasionally. At least those of us who “Wear our hearts on our sleeves”.

And to be honest, those are my favourite kind of people, the ones who are easy to read.

That said, there is a certain enemy amongst us; misinformation.

To tackle it, we must address its unwitting victims, who also most often happen to be its proponents.

When a topic goes viral in any forum, it is because something in it “Triggers” many people, in a way that they will automatically respond to it, applauding it, marking it up or down, and/or passing it on, to many others of their “bubble” .

Anyone who thinks they are not in a bubble, in the current age of profit driven internet, is misinformed.

All participants, on any profit driven platform, are members of at least one bubble. I’ve explained elsewhere why that is a natural function of profit driven network architecture, and we should be aware of that.

Knowing how few reads that explanation got, gives us a few good pieces of information.

Firstly it confirms the nature of the platform it was written on; driven by profit.

Secondly, that the majority remain misinformed.

My bubble in Medium is pretty small.

So from here it should be clear, where I say “You”, I say it knowing that there are a few exceptions, who fully understand where I am coming from.

None of us can claim to be fully informed.

We cannot have absolute certainty of anything. That is a natural limitation of our senses; we sense only a small fraction of the reality. Then we have literally make up the remainder.

For example, we burn our finger on the side of a hot kettle.

If we report that to others, we might say something like “I burnt myself with the kettle”

There, in that statement we already made a number of assumptions and simplifications.

Did we know the whole kettle was hot? Did we actually feel the whole kettle burning our finger? Why didn’t we say specifically “I burnt my finger on a hot part of the kettle”? Could there have been any cool parts on it at all, that we might have touched and been OK?

The recipient of the information then has to make a number more assumptions, for each of our assumptions, as well as the essential truth of our statement.

So it is easy to see how real news quickly gets laden with, if not completely replaced with misinformation, when it is passed from individual to individual.

Knowing this, we have to be wary of statements which appear to be all knowing. Every effort should be made to question the information and its source.

It is a common writing style now in forums like Medium, to omit references. I do it often now too. Saves time, and besides, if no-one is reading our posts, why bother putting in references?

In any case, to write effectively in that style, we need to say things in a way which is easily verifiable, and only those things should be taken seriously, when we read the writings of others, written in the style of opinion as fact.

If we imply that we are fully informed, by excessive use of opinion stated as fact, which is not easily verified one way or another, then again we demonstrate our tendency to amplify misinformation.

We all have this in us, and we all need to be wary of it.

So when it comes to a question of how we feel about a particular party, we need to examine all of the information we think we know.

We have to ask ourselves honestly, questions like;

• “How much do I really know about this party?”
• “Is what I know about this party, from personal dealings with them?”
• “How much of what I know about them could be gossip?”
• “What drives the particular individuals I think of as that party?”
• “How can I get to know them better?”

The last question is the big one. Progress towards that helps us easily follow on to answering all of the others.

Adding to the confusion, there are folks around, whose profit driven business is is to work around these concepts, to sieze the advantage of leading the narrative by generating whatever misinformation they think might generate revenue for them.

Take China for example.

Whether they are victims or perpetrators, seems to be something debateable.

And yet there are certain facts which appear to be consistently omitted from the debate.

Elephants in the room

• NSA and GCHQ guilty of the very things that the US (And now UK) governments accuse China of, spying on all citizens of the world.
• Assange in prison, for reporting that fact.
• UK GCHQ working with Huawei for 15 years, with no concerns of security.
• The US surrounding China with 400 military bases and troops, threatening a war which is unwinnable, not by anyone.
• China innovation proving to be far stronger now than in the West.
• China handled covid far more effectively, than we did in the West, as evidenced by the fact we are still dealing with it, and have sustained incredibly higher levels of damage from it.
• UK HSEC worked with Huwei for many years with no concerns.

Fallout

The current apparent friction between the alliance of the US and UK Governments, and China, is very high on my own personal trigger list, because it directly contradicts everything I know to be true of China, and has already done untold damage, not only to my own technological ambitions, but to humanity, all over the world.

By all of the mathematical laws of networking, common sense, and conscience towards our fellow humans all over the world, as well as ourselves, we must work collaboratively with China.

I can report that already, as a Western technical person working in the depths of software development, towards achieving a particular high-technology goal which has potentially huge benefits towards all of humanity, with both Android and Huawei platforms, those ambitions have been almost completely blocked already by the fallout of the friction Huawei are experiencing, by resistance towards their technology, by the West, who are largely misinformed.

Further, indirectly, the oviously unfair misinformation which perpetuates the US embargo on Cuba has been instrumental in impacting my ambitions there also.

On visiting Cuba, and making personal acquaintance with many Cuban people, the more familiar I’ve become with their values, lifestyle, and culture, the more I’ve come to see that the way they have been treated, and continue to be treated, is an injustice which impacts all of us, just as much as it impacts them.

Again, there are certain facts omitted from the debate:

More Elephants in the Room

• Cuba sent more doctors to the African Ebola crisis, than any other single country in the world.
• Before the African Ebola crisis, there was no known cure or prevention treatment for Ebola.
• Cuba develops vaccines and treatments for anticipated pandemics and epidemics on Government funding, with no expectations of profit, a humanitarian ideal which does not appear in capitalism.
• Cuba dealt with the class 5 hurricane Maria and its after-effects with a loss of less than 10 people, whilst the US territory of Puerto Rico, hit by the same hurricane, lost some 3000 people, mostly after the storm, from disease and malnutrition, caused by government neglect.

In truth, Cuba is a power-house of medical research which could be of huge benefit to the world.

The failure of our capitalist governments to recognise that, and to make more of it available to us, is something incredibly damaging to humanity.

The System we Built to Make Ourselves Extinct

We have created with the internet, something which will absolutely be instrumental in our future survival as a species, or in our imminent extinction.

There are increasing signs that our current trajectory is towards the latter.

When we look at the mathematical theory of the instrument that is the internet, its potential power is mind-boggling.

Metcalfe’s law puts a functionality value on the network, which is proportional to the square of the number of users in it.

Currently, considering only human users as the potential valuable endpoints, there are around 4.7 billion connections.

So its potential power to generate value is an eighteen figure number.

What that actually means is that the power of a population is multiplied by the number of its members, when it is networked.

For those versed in decibels, if we said that the value of one person represents a signal of 0dB, then the signal of all of the people in the world without a network is 90dB, and the signal when they are networked is 180dB.

We have seen many of our greatest technology achievements relegated to history, including such things as Concorde, the Space Shuttle, Moon Landing Capabilies, and we would argue now also; international flights, and public health services.

All have fallen victim to being unable to provide adequate returns to investors.

It is only a matter of time before all vital public services also fall victim to the same thing, profitability.

Internet Profit Peril

Almost all applications built on the internet were created with a view to making profit, rather than with a view to adding value to our planet, or us as a species.

Now, we have literally millions of intelligent algorithms of all kinds, learning how to do new tricks, better, every day, with the single aim of making more profit.

Every one was designed simply to make profit, rather than save lives.

Where those algorithms have the most profound effects, are in the news and media channels. Almost all forums have now become informal sources of news, taken all the more seriously since traditional mainstream sources have become mistrusted from being exposed as sources of misinformation.

In truth, we have already created a massive hostile intelligence on the internet. The sheer volume of these machine intelligence agents as a collective represent an intelligence which is way beyond our understanding.

It may not have consciousness as we understand it, but conscious it absolutely is, with “Nerve endings” connected to the most intimate details of every single networked human individual’s life.

Its sole purpose is to make profit.

We designed it to do this.

Profit, most simply means wealth transfer, from one party or individual to another.

That means the gradual migration over time, of all wealth towards a single point.

Where human lives might depend on a certain level of wealth remaining, this means nothing to the system. Human lives are only useful to this system where they assist to make profit. Where a human no longer returns profit, they no longer meet the requirements of the system, and are therefore unfit for the purposes of the system, and will be discarded by the system.

The ultimate conclusion of this process of elimination, is the extinction of all human life.

The mechanisms whereby this is occurring, are multiplying, with each one having progressively more severe effects.

Pandemics / Epidemics / War / Environmental Hazard / Famine

The pressures upon all of these things to destroy us mounts ever higher, as more and more wealth is removed from those of us most able to use it to generate value, where that is defined as that which we would consider valuable to humanity, and our planet.

How we see it manifesting, is in the “News” stories we see in the media.

Since almost every party involved in relating news is driven by profit, and has been for much of our known history, we see a wide spectrum of narratives on every item of news. This spins our perceptions of it in various ways. Each profit driven party adds their own narrative from their own perspective in a way in which the human individuals involved can see relatively little harm done, relative to the profit they might make. The perspective of an individual is based upon their own perception of the news, and the world as they perceive it, which itself is built on a history of twisted narratives.

Adverts are a good example of profit driven news; part truths, peddled as the whole truth, in the hope of raising revenue.

No part of our establishment is immune. As more and more of it has become oriented around profit, all of the narratives are further twisted.

The result is that articles like this story itself, are buried by the System, with very few eyes seeing it, ensuring that it can never become a threat to the destructive processes ongoing.

How can we Change it?

To change it, we need to look deeply at the root source of the problem; profit, what drives it, and what are the alternatives.

Historically, it came about as a trading arrangement, where individuals practicing it found they could increase their wealth as a result of it.

A transfer of wealth between two individuals can occur in the presence of value being generated, or not.

“Value” is that which is added to the world, which benefits all people and our planet.

Examples of value adding processes are things like the design and manufacture of new products beneficial to humanity, and the funding of art.

A new product cannnot be genuinely beneficial to humanity if its production incurs significant damage to our environment.

By the current system, the design of all new products should take the environment into account as the number one stakeholder, ensuring that the criteria of fitness for purpose always includes the requirements of the environment throughout the lifetime of the product, showing futher where that of unsustainable products are built-in, in such a way that it can never be overriden at some point in the future.

For example, a design for a new nuclear power station, designed for profit, should show not only how the safe disposal of the end-of-life waste will be disposed of, in a way that is truly safe for the environment, but further, how it will be enforced to be so, given the known untrustworthiness of authorities to carry this out.

Currently, there are no examples of truly safely disposed of nuclear power plants, whilst there are many examples in various states of hazard awaiting safe disposal. As is usual in the case of all kinds of environmental pollution, there appear no profitable paths to safe disposal.

We need to see this instinct to gain at the expense of our fellow humans as the single root cause of all our problems. To do that effectively, we need to understand completely its effects and recognise when we see not only others, but ourselves often being driven by it.

Anger is a classic manifestation of being “Beaten”, or even the threat of such, in any kind of competitive effort.

Every time we feel anger, we need to be able to trace it back to the source, to check what is the true cause of it, both in ourselves, and in others.

We need to do that to make sure the true culprit of our problems is finally beaten, rather than some other party, not truly the source.

This is the only way to fix it.

So the next time you feel like someone, or some party is your enemy, you need to follow that process, to ensure you really know them well enough, to see not only what might be driving them, but what is driving you.

If you haven’t read any of my articles on free money yet, like the one featured in my profile, I recommend you do. Everything is so much clearer, when we realise that free money might be the answer to all problems.

Free money looks like the universal antidote to a fatally flawed system.