Holotopia: Convenience paradox

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Convenience paradox

The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowered them to seek happiness here and now. The lifestyle changed, and the culture blossomed. What will the next "great cultural revival" be like?

We are now ready to show how the methodological ideas we've developed, and proposed, can help us answer the Peccei's call to action directly. To have a solid foundation for doing that, we briefly summarize those methodological ideas.

The core of our proposal is "to change the relationship we have with information", from by extending what we know as "science", or "institutionalized academic tradition" which we call academia, to include the work with information for general, everyday use. This means two things: the creation of such information and the creation and use of information about information, or methodology. Instead of relying (only) on direct sensory experience, and having our preferences and systems altered by spontaneous power-related 'magnet' of power structure—we interpose a those two things as new element between ourselves and our choice of the 'way'. What difference will this make?

Like the power structure, the convenience paradox is defined as a pattern. Which means as an idealized way of looking. Both have a certain explanatory power, as we shall see. It is important to emphasize that they are neither reified as things, nor considered as absolute—just as seeing a feather fall slower than a pebble will not constitute a disproof of Newton's physics.

Both patterns show how our 'drive' to wholeness can be diverted (by power interests, and by delusion of our senses).

When we look at the world through convenience, we shun knowledge and wisdom as irrelevant, because we already know what we want. The "pursuit of happiness" then becomes a practical matter—of acquiring it.

The key insight, which we are calling convenience paradox, is that convenience is a deceptive and paradoxical value.

That with striking consistency, the more convenient direction tends to lead to a less convenient condition.

When the convenience paradox is understood, we readily see that we in fact have no clue about the life's important question: What is really good for us?

What is really worth aiming for?

It is at that point that we begin to seek the information that illuminates basic questions.

To counter the power of power interests and the delusion of the senses in a true academic way, we took recourse to knowledge of knowledge—and showed how a method can be built based on the epistemological state of the art, which allows us to broaden the narrow frame, (1) by extending the methods and the language of science by devising such things as patterns; and (2) by exteding its information base of science to include all potentially relevant human experience.

Our point so far was that we already have the knowledge and the technology to take this sort of step. That indeed, both demand that we do that. We have shown how to build the 'lightbulb' from the foundation (basic principles) up.

Our next task is to show that when we do that, when we change the relationship we have with information and begin to truly use it—the 'course' will change automatically, and we'll experience a cultural change of a similar scale as what science enabled us to engender in understanding the nature and in technology.

We here illustrate this bold claim—which is of course the essential point of the holotopia vision—by a few examples.

Stories

Political hygiene

The power structure insight points to a possibility—that our ascent to wholeness can be diverted by power interests, in ways that suit those interests. The convenience paradox insight points to the possibility the value we use to make choices leads us in a direction that is opposite from wholeness.

Our senses evolved to guide us to wholeness in nature; why trust that they can still serve that purpose in our completely altered civilized condition?

Wholeness is so precarious: One may have everything else in abundance—and a single nutrient missing in his diet could make it all futile!

Is our civilization (or 'bus') taking us to wholeness?

The interesting fact is that we don't know! There is a popular myth, that we must be living better because we are living longer. Can we answer this all-important question in a more reliable or scientific way?

Imagine this experiment: A sufficiently large human population is divided into two groups. One group continues to live the civilized way, and the other in the way this population lived before it got civilized. What sort of differences would develop?

Such an experiment is of course practically impossible. But it did happen—not in a laboratory, but in real life. In early 20th century a number of world populations were just reached by civilization—which brought about the division we are talking about. Weston Price traveled around the globe visiting those populations, and recording the data. The results were published in a book titled "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". Its message was that the change to civilized lifestyle was a step away from corporeal wholeness!

Price diagnosed that the people who lived in pre-civilized ways manifested higher degrees of wellbeing.

Werner Kollath took this line of work a step further, by doing experimental and statistical research—in for us a most interesting direction. We will, however, introduce it here with a caveat.

In knowledge federation we consider us all as imperfect humans (made more imperfect by the power structure we are part of), who once in a while stumble upon an idea that is vital to humanity ("vital" because it is an essential element in our quest of wholeness). We have conceived knowledge federation as a praxis of empowering such ideas—by giving them visibility, and by 'connecting the dots' or creating synergies with other ideas, and letting them drive a change toward a larger new order of things that they point to together.

When we began researching his ideas and writing about him, Kollath was not translated into English, and was largely unknown in the English speaking world. Now we found that there is a rather extensive Wikipedia article about him, which focuses largely on his Nazi affiliation. Highly compromising (for Kollath) sentences from his 1937 seminal "Grundlagen, Methoden und Ziele der Hygiene (Principles, Methods and Goals of Health)", which were deleted from the post-war edition, are quoted in German, and translated into English. We found this to be an ad hominem argument against Kollath's main or "vital" idea—which was not even mentioned. Neither was Kollath's book in which this idea was published, titled "Zivilisationsbedingte Krankheiten und Todesursachen. Ein medizinisches und politisches Problem (Civilization-Conditioned Diseases and Death Causes. A Medical and Political Problem)".

The question to which Kollath offers an answer is the first one we need to ask about his native field (if we are to create a society that is guided by information and information-based principles, not by power struggle and "survival of the fittest"): Why is our healthcare conceived as curing diseases, not as caring for health. There are two power structures at play: The food and consumer industries, who have business interest in making us prefer certain kinds of goods, and hence certain lifestyle patterns; and the biomedical and healthcare industries, whose "fitness" depends on expensive remedies, and people who vitally need them. It is easy to see that those two form a synergy.

When writing the mentioned book, Kollath's aim was to establish "political hygiene as science". His goal was, in other words, closely similar to ours—but in his own field. His aim was really systemic innovation in healthcare. His point was that the contemporary medicine originated through the successes in combatting infectious diseases. That the lifestyle-related diseases are on the rise. And that they require a completely different approach to health—focused, above all, on empowering the people to make right lifestyle choices, by resorting to the methods and esteem of science.

Weston Price has largely been ignored. But Werner Kollath was (according to the biography written by Elisabeth Kollath, his widow) actively eliminated—see our summary and comments.

Kanyini

There is also another popular myth, that the "human nature" is acquisitive and self-serving; and that therefore the societal order of things we are living in is the best and most natural one.

What do we really know about "human nature"?

It may well be the case that the order of things we are living in is just the one that emerged through societal "survival of the fittest"; and that what we know as the "human nature" is just the way we've been socialized by it.

Imagine a culture, living on a faraway island, in symbiosis with nature, but without technology, and without war. In what way would the "human nature" manifest in such a culture?

Imagine now that their island was discovered by our people. What would that meeting of cultures be like?

There is no need to imagine: This did indeed happen.

Our relationship with nature is to use is to satisfy our needs. The people who colonized Australia extended that principle to include also Aboriginal women. As the number of children conceived in that way grew, they became a political issue: Being half-white, their souls too needed to be saved. And so by a political decision, the half-white children were then taken away from their Aboriginal families, and made attend special boarding schools.

Bob Randall was one of them, who lived to tell the story. One of the first things he observed was that while the white people preached Christianity, his people practiced it!

Randall later returned to the area that used to be his home, but he never found his family. Now in reservations, his people were destitute. Inhaling gasoline (to combat depression? to once again experience that "high" that living in nature would afford?) was so common, that Australia had to infuse gasoline with additives to prevent it.

Randall left us a report about the original Aboriginal culture, and the kind of "human nature" and human relationship with nature it produced. One keyword "kanyini", interpreted as "the principle of caring and responsibility that underpins the Aboriginal life", expresses its essence (hear him describe it. Melanie Hogan undertook to federate this meme, by creating a documentary titled "Kanyini".