Absence of Mendacity

Responding to CE’s & Robin’s birthday greetings to each other, I realized that I may indeed live to be 100, and that the world may indeed be a better place by then. What a strange vision! – me and my childhood friends, centenarians all, gathered around a huge birthday cake, all blowing together (vainly?) to extinguish 100 candles.

When the strangeness wore off, and reality crept back into the picture, the notion struck me that the birthday scene itself would not be nearly so strange as a world that has, in fact, become a better place. And on the heals (sic) of that not altogether pleasing realization came an idea of Spinoza’s, one that has stood me (and many, many others) in good stead. He believed that individuals would do themselves a favor if they would, in their minds, form an image of the person they would like to be. This image necessarily must be formed around a knowledge of what we understand as good for us and must avoid anything which we feel is not good for us. But given that we can with little success know ourselves well enough to know in all cases what is good for us, even less know what changes the future may cause us and our world to undergo, the formation of an image, or model, can only be partly effective. Nevertheless, we are better guided by a longer view of the good than by those immediate impulses and passions that would rule us if we possessed no model of the longer view.

This idea of Spinoza’s has been seen to apply in the very narrowest of cases, taking the form of certain biofeedback therapies. We can, for instance, cause autonomic processes like blood pressure to tend toward a desired level simply by focusing our attention on the goal and obtaining a real-time feedback of the progress being made. That was the essence of the weight control program I blogged in March (I think it was). By visibly recording a desired weight, and frequently recording progress, we can lose (or gain) weight without knowing the means our bodies have used to bring about the desired weight.

Taking a slightly broader view, we see that groups in which the members are conscious of their interdependencies function more effectively than those in which general distrust and envy prevail. Admittedly, the proclivity of many modern people – I cannot speak for the ancients – are such that fear of others is more prevalent than trust, but I have seen many cases in which groups were able to overcome their fears. I recall that I caused to be posted on the walls of the people I worked with this simple axiom: You can work miracles if you forget about who gets the credit. Sometimes they followed that advice and sometimes they didn’t, but I distinctly recall that the “miracles” we were occasionally able to achieve came about when the groups we were working with, and whose objections we had to overcome, were somehow led to accept our ideas as theirs. The analogy is a strong one, of the body’s unconscious response to “biofeedback” and our customers’ adoption of the goals we had preconceived.

Question: How might that analogy be extended to the entire world to make it a better place? And what model would we envision if the means were available to set up a “biofeedback”?

Just to get the answers started – you understand, I intend the answers to come from my fellow bloggers – how about we envision a world in which economic interdependence becomes the rule rather than the mercantilist goal of self-sufficiency that has ruled the hearts and minds ever since world commerce became possible. The great economist David Ricardo formulated an economic law demonstrating that more goods would be produced, at lighter expense, if every economic entity produced only that good which it could produce best, even if it could produce all goods more efficiently than anyone else. Ricardo’s Law of Efficiency (my name for it) doesn’t seem intuitively correct. I remember being dumbfounded as a freshman when the arithmetic was worked out proving that Ricardo was right. It just didn’t seem possible that our nation would be better off economically if we imported some things we could manufacture cheaper. (It still doesn’t sound right, but I know it is.) The difficulty with implementing such a policy has more to do with our fear of others than with the law’s negative appeal to intuition.

But think about it: Aren’t we less likely to destroy by war the productive capacity of nations who export necessities to us than we would be if we did not depend on them? . . . .

Hmmmm. I don’t like the answer to that one that came up for me. We’re right now making threatening gestures toward Iran, and have already antagonized Venezuela with warlike noises, when we – directly in the case of Venezuela – depend on them for a necessity, oil? Well, Ricardo, like most economists, must have assumed that economic entities behave rationally. Maybe that’s the problem, maybe that’s the image we ought to somehow create as our model – an image of all people being ruled by reason rather than by fear.

I’ll have to think about that one. I cannot conceive of a way to make that happen.

But then, I don’t know how that biofeedback stuff works either, not at any level. Is it possible that the human body is itself a rational entity? That it works fairly well without conscious input? Maybe, but there were those goals we envisioned, our ideal blood pressure, our perfect weight. Maybe Ricardo’s law fits as one of those. Wouldn’t that be something?