ECONOMIC TERRORISM

Evil is ... the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.

James P. Carse

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist and sociologist (1848-1923). He formulated the 20/80 law, where 80% of the value of anything was represented by 20% of the total; hence, 80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the people. Pareto claimed that in most systems there is a 20/80 ratio. For example, 80% of the power is controlled by 20% of the people or 80% of freedom belongs to 20% of the people.

“Work will set you free” was the motto hanging above the gate of a Nazi concentration camp. It is the first law that a rich man makes for poor men.

I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.

Thomas Jefferson

Economics is less a science than a public relations and propaganda tool. It is useful chiefly to persuade the poor that they should be grateful to be the cattle of the rich. It is an argument more or less in the same vein as Aristotle's view that most men are naturally born to be slaves.

The middle class does not really enter the equation. When they become irrelevant to the purposes of the rich the middle class is eradicated. In the U.S., as the classes become more radically polarized, the middle class will disappear by attrition within another generation. The middle class is useful as a herd of consumers and the real purpose of consumers is to provide a media for the flow of wealth from the population at large to the wealthy. When the wealth is consumed the media is irrelevant.

The middle class walks an untrustworthy tightrope. Without ceaseless toil a middle class stock animal falls into poverty. Admission to the ranks of the rich is a carrot dangled before him in his toil. But the rules of wage slavery are designed to prevent the acquisition of wealth. To be a denizen of the middle class is to be an economic gladiator. It is either death or another three square meals.

Most of the world and the vast majority of the human population operate in a state of economic terrorism. The tragedy is that these lifetimes of perpetual threat and desperate fear are not necessary. We have the means and the resources to relieve such misery. We apparently do not have the brains or the will.

Business and the rich have modeled their economics on the behavior of predators such as sharks and the agricultural practices of slash and burn. When the feeding territory is exhausted they move on. In the past it took generations to absorb the wealth, labor and resources from some geographical region. Now, as cultural time moves faster, it is possible for capitalism to exhaust the wealth and reduce the population to poverty in a much shorter time. The economic globe has shrunk so drastically that there are relatively few territories left able to support the rapacious appetites of the rich and the Corporate Super State.

Free market economic systems were naturally evolved from humanity's inborn rapaciousness, combined with its hysterical fear of risk taking and complicated by its curious reluctance to think.

In primitive times the medium of exchange was simple barter. A potato for a carrot. Two sheep for a cartload of grain. New sandals for a day's labor. Not very effective, not very flexible, and not very taxable. Some unknown genius invented money. Money has absolutely no value in and of itself, but it represented something of value, some kind of goods or commodities. Money is primarily a medium of information about wealth. At first it represented things like so many bushels of wheat, or even so many gallons of water, but this was not standardized enough to permit foreign trade. So it came to represent gold, which was considered to be valuable all by itself.

It was a watershed economic breakthrough when some other, unknown financial genius realized that the money itself was a commodity. If you could make money selling commodities, then you could make money by selling money. This lead to the invention of banking and usury. It was a gift from the gods. To make money by actually producing something that was useful is merely middle class labor or wage slavery. Real wealth is being able to use money, especially someone else's money, to make money. This was the first major step in abstracting money away from actual wealth as represented by goods that had survival value.

The trick was to convince the majority of the people that honest labor was dignified and rewarding. Believing this the population eagerly became wage slaves. That left the field of finance open to the smart people. It was imperative for the elite to establish that profit is a divine right. When divine right passed out of fashion as a believable justification, it was imperative to equate profit with a natural law. Profit is the only way to create wealth out of nothing but the sweat of the wage slaves. It is mandatory that even a non-human entity such as a corporation be allowed to accumulate profit. Profit, we are told, keeps the world turning around.

The next economic breakthrough came with the realization that it was possible to make money on the flow of money. Every time money exchanges hands tribute is exacted; the exchange is taxed. It does not matter what form the exchange takes; income for labor, owning something of value, buying, selling, inheritance, even gifts; if wealth changes hands it is taxed. That's what truly made government possible. This was all well and good for government, but in order for an honest member of an elite class to siphon wealth from the money flow they created stocks, bonds and credit. Now anyone could speculate on buying the commodities that represented the commodities of someone else's food, goods or labor.

The abstraction from real wealth increased when it was discovered that it was possible to buy shares of other people's ability to buy shares. Money could be made on someone else making money. There was no longer any need to produce anything in order to make money. Free market became the perfect pyramid scheme. Everyone gets rich except the middle class who produces the goods and the poor population on the bottom who must pay for it all. Naturally, they go into debt. So it is of absolute importance that the population is always expanding. We didn't ask to be born, but the state has decided that we have a right to life no matter how miserable it may be.

When the buck finally stops, somebody has to pay the price. If there are no more resources or if the population cannot pick up the tab, then the simple solution is to destroy the humans that are the bottom level of the pyramid and thereby cancel the debt.

It also has the critical benefit of interrupting the flow of information from generation to generation at the bottom level of the pyramid. The poor and unempowered do not retain the critical information that would allow them to become free of free market slavery. Only the elite transmit this information from generation to generation, since they are never wiped out by cultural catastrophes.

It soon became apparent that speculating on the stocks was just a crap shoot. It was risky to gamble wealth on the vagaries of an unpredictable market. There are two ways to eliminate the risk. The first is to become a broker. Simply skim money off the top of any exchange. This is a guaranteed means of acquiring a fortune without ever doing a days labor; just rake it in from other people's risk taking, something like pari-mutuel betting at the race track. The other method is to obtain inside information. It eliminates the risk by accumulating the money that other people lose by not possessing inside information. It is the purest form of money for money's sake.

The system undergoes constant improvement. The gold standard was removed in favor of petroleum as the basis for wealth. It makes more sense, as it is the basis of producing the commodities that no one really needs, it is a finite resource, and it is already totally owned and controlled.

The economy is even now moving away from petroleum, which does have the disadvantage of being a diminishing resource that does, in fact, actually exists and the control of which is not reliable. The new goal is for money to represent information about money; data banks full of who has how much, and where it's at. The money doesn't really have to exist anymore, just the information about it. Those who control the information about money will soon be able to create wealth from pure fantasy. And that is an economist's paradise.

THE SUFFERING OF THE ELITE AND PHILANTHROPY

There are rich men and there are poor men. Poor men will sometimes help other poor men. But no rich man has ever helped the poor.

The rich desire the public relations value of appearing to help because it keeps the natives from becoming restless. It also contributes much to satisfy the wealthy's constant need for ego massage. So the rich help only if they can realize some direct personal gain. If they cannot realize any direct benefit they soon forget their promises and simply revert to the extortion of wealth. It is not that they are heartless, they just can't seem to break the habit of plundering the weak.

Somewhere or other that have lost or have bartered away their souls. It is their humanity that they have traded for wealth. In the first place, no one chooses to play the wealth game. They simply fall into it by default, since they do not have the brains to think of a more interesting game.

The game itself is so trivial that they soon become bored with success. Moreover, because they have no other skills at life, life for the rich is also fraught with pain, distress and the other grievances associated with the human condition. They have no alternative but to claw their way even higher up the ladder. Somewhere or other, they forgot that other games existed, or they think that all games are tedious and empty.

That is why they often claim that money is nothing to them, only a way to keep score. What is only a score to them is life and death to the vast majority of human beings on the planet.

Not only do they start out being impotent and bored, but they soon find themselves in the position of having to defend their wealth. The rich man lives under a constant threat. Someone is always trying to plunder his plunder, whether it is another wealthy barracuda or an enterprising thief. But the real curse is that everyone in the world is quietly accusing him of possessing vast and meaningless excesses of wealth, while all the rest of humanity has so little and a child starves to death once every twenty seconds.

The only way a wealthy man can find any comfort is in the company of other rich men. He is forced to treat all non-rich humans as the enemy, if not a threat to his wealth, then a constant threat to his peace of mind.

So the wealthy elite lose their human empathy. The rich man has never experienced the condition of poverty with no choice. Even if he happened to start out poor, some choice allowed him to become rich. And so he assumes that poor people are just idiots by choice; that they won't lift a finger to alter their condition. The fact is, however, that most poor people have no option. At bottom they believe that no option exists.

No one minded when the rich became rich, but when they forced the rest of humanity to become wage slaves to support their wealth, they became evil. They went farther than that. They realized that wealth was supported by poverty. So they rigged the game to be very difficult for a poor man to become rich.

In order for a poor man to become rich, they had to know the secret. The secret is to know that the idea that honest labor is its own reward is a lie. The rich know that the secret to becoming rich presents only one clear choice; to cease being a sheep, and learn to prey on sheep. Honest labor is merely an impediment and a distraction on the road to wealth.

And so rich men plunder poor men the way a slaughter house kills cattle, without a thought and without empathy.

The rich bear no special responsibility for the poor. They also have no right to plunder the poor. The poor do have the right to a guaranteed survival. The only way to accomplish both goals is to remove the ability of the poor to survive from the predation of the wealthy.

Poor men are also in danger of losing their humanity. But they are wealthy in one respect: they have a real choice. They can either become wealthy, or remain human.

Many people have chosen to remain human. That is why the poor help one another so often, and the rich never help anyone but themselves. Charities are a feeble attempt at purchasing back some modicum of humanity. It is too pathetic to merit attention. More often than not it is merely a way to employ friends on the pretense of distributing wealth to the needy, as a tax write-off or as free public relations for media sharks. It is the same with art. The rich buy it in a vain attempt to purchase back a little soul. They can see that what makes an artist great is that he is intensely alive, and in their fog of greed, they think that art is just another commodity to buy. Art cannot be bought and nothing purchased can be art.

There is no way out of the system. The first thing the wealthy do is to write laws preventing any alternative games.

A farmer that is totally self sufficient is able to produce food and make clothes and other necessities. Such a farmer, in a certain sense, might be free. There is no need to participate in anyone else's game, no matter how much they want to force everyone into their game.

So the elite invented eminent domain and police to take away the farmer's land. Then they invented property tax to force him into a money game. There is no escape. All choice and alternatives have been legislated away.

To say that living well is the best revenge is to imply that revenge is more important than retaining one's integrity as a decent human being. There is no middle ground whereby the rich, the powerful and the elite can be subdued by beating them at their own game. It is apparent that living well is becoming them.

As long as there is a single starving child on the earth and there is also a single rich man, then a decent individual must be ashamed to be called human.

GIVING THE STORE AWAY

When the U.S. lost control of Iran and the CIA lost control over the opium monopoly it became necessary to turn to cocaine as an economic monopoly and source of clandestine finances.

In order to keep profits high it is necessary to maintain the illegal status of drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Since the drugs are made illegal governments cannot appear to traffic directly in the trade. It is always done through proxies.

The international crime cartels are the implicit partners of government in the business of narco-terrorism. When no cartel is in place, the government creates one. When the opium monopoly was lost the Mafia was not in place to conduct the cocaine trade and the Colombian cartel was created. It was the answer to the policeman's prayer. As always a threat to the population must be manufactured in order to persuade the herd to pay for protection that it doesn't need by a sub-culture of incompetents whose only motivation is infantile domination.

Engineering the cocaine cartel was simple. By utilizing free market profit motivation it was not difficult to create the demand in U.S.. They provided an easy means for smuggling, complete with a high profile interdiction in order to keep the profits high. Sure enough, the business pool soon supplied a cartel with the required venality to fill the need of creating the market demand, producing the drug and establishing the smuggling system.

The modern cartels of narcotic production and distribution cannot exist without the cooperation of governments. The modern price structure makes the profits high enough to support the rapacious appetites of governments, crime cartels and the police. The profits are probably higher than other monopolistic cartel with the exception of insider trading and the insurance industry.

There is no adequate means to measure the cost of illegal drugs. There are estimates from $20 billion to $120 billion a year made by the crime syndicates. There are many billions spent every year on police interdiction of the supply route. There is no way to even guess at the cost per year in billions of dollars spent to support police, judges, lawyers, prisons and all their affiliated industries to prosecute the drug user. Prisons are now a growth, for-profit industry. There is also untold billions spent on social costs such as the medical treatment of drug users and victims of drug related violence. There is another booming industry related to weapons. The social costs in terms of productivity loss and the de-education of entire generations of the young are beyond reckoning.

But the greatest cost of all is the total eradication of common decency and human empathy in entire sub-populations of the young. It has created isolated sub-cultures void of intellect, empathy, joy, hope, opportunity, vision or art. It is a culture based on violence, murder and sadism. It is myopic, parochial and recidivist.

All of the above industries lobby to keep cocaine and other drugs illegal. Drugs represent the largest single chunk of the GNP which include legal, medical and social costs. The crime syndicates have proxy lobbies. The government and the CIA have their own lobbies. The vast bureaucracy of police, lawyers, the judicial and prison systems have powerful lobbies indeed. The medical lobby has always had its own interest in anything that promotes high profits.

What passes for modern democracy doesn't have a chance. Free markets cannot exist in a real democracy with free speech, public ownership and access to the media and an intelligent electorate.

The Iran/Contra 'affair' clearly reveals the connection between clandestine operations, illegal arms sales, illicit armies, the drug interests of the U.S. government and its intelligence community. Their agenda coincides with that of the Corporate Super State.

The invasion of Panama accomplished the removal of Manuel Noriega, a lose cannon in the supply line, and tightened security on the CIA monopoly of the cocaine trade. The insatiable need of the international intelligence agencies for untraceable money to fund private armies, coups d'etat, front groups, proxies and terrorist cells has only increased.

The source of that funding is the population of the United States of America via the illegalization of drugs. It is probably the single largest contributor to the collapse of that country's economy and culture.

Business and the wealthy pursue two goals. The first goal is to neutralize democracy in the U.S.. This has already been largely accomplished. The population is de-educated. The information media has been purchased, as has the government. Elections are also purchased and alternative political and economic solutions have been eliminated. It only remains for the legal and formal creation of the Corporate Super State outside and above national and international law. The second goal is to remove all the wealth from the U.S. into the treasuries of the Corporate Super State.

When Reaganomics began to take effect it was the straw the broke the back of the U.S as an economy distinct from the Corporate Super State.

When the economic feeding frenzies of the early part of the century finally resulted in the inevitable depression, the solution was Word War II. The U.S. economy had become essentially a war economy. The means of production gravitated away from products and services oriented toward human use and needs to the production of war materials. The reason was obvious: the bureaucratic environment of graft guaranteed that profits were far beyond even the usual unreasonable expectations of business rapaciousness. Inferior products were commonly manufactured because the lowest bidder won the contract, the products only occasionally needed to be proven effective, and since the product was susceptible to the constant changes of technology they could be scrapped and reinvented on a constant basis.

American resources, R&D, education and production were all oriented to this end. When the economy flagged it became necessary to stimulate enemies, wars and conflicts in order to manufacture the public consent necessary for more money to be extorted from public pockets and funneled into the military industrial complex.

By the 1960's and the Vietnam war America was just on the edge of losing its competitive edge in relation to the rest of the industrialized nations, who had finally recovered from the destruction that World War II had inflicted on their means of production. The Vietnam war was the longest in U.S. history. It broke the bank simply because America had failed to recognize its need to once again become producers of honest goods instead of being complacent. It needed products and services that answered human needs not corporate profits. And the actual fighting of war was no longer profitable. Ideally only the manufacturing of war machines is profitable. The actual fighting is expensive indeed when it can no longer be fought in an informational vacuum. The technology and industry of war had become far more costly than the return in profits on the manufacturing of unused and unnecessary war materials.

By the end of the war the American economy was broke and the means of producing wealth by producing useful human products had seriously deteriorated. We had forgotten how to make a better automobile, how to educate the people and how to maintain the economic infrastructure.

In the meantime the global economy had become integrated. National economies no longer operated within vacuums.

The last half of the 70s were spent trying to tax and spend our way into economic recovery. It failed.

With Reagan and Company, the economy took yet another radical turn into dementia. The economic theory of <169>Free Market<170> was put forth. It was neither free nor a market.

It was not free in that it was a tightly controlled corporate monopoly of the market. This represents a truly cooperative effort on the part of the economically powerful. What used to be a market became a ranch of economic cattle. The entire philosophy was a pyramid scheme. The idea was to produce as little as possible for as small a cost as feasible, and sell to a monopolized market thoroughly insulated from all competition. The idea was to absorb wealth at the top of the pyramid by plundering the base. The base in turn is supposed to pass the debt on to an ever increasing population and to succeeding generations, to a new and wider base of poverty. But the possible expansion of the base is finite.

Nevertheless just the idea of an ever increasing population is critical to free market schemes in order to make the free market scheme palatable to the economic cattle who must pay the debt. The population of economic cattle must believe that the pyramid scheme has some potential target to pass the debt to, otherwise they might revolt. When resources become finite and the base becomes economically incapable of paying the debt, the next option is to pass the debt on to future, unborn generations. The irony is that anti-abortion fanatics who espouse the rights of the unborn are more than willing to not only ignore the rights of the living children of other nations and races, but are perfectly happy to remove the economic rights of the future generations of their own unborn.

When passing the buck to the top and the debt to the bottom reaches it limit, the solution is to wipe out the debt by wiping our the base of the pyramid, usually through war, starvation, disease and depressions.

By the early 1980's the resources were limited indeed relative to the consumption of the increased population. The base was economically broke. Mere manufacture of military hardware no longer sufficed to keep the economic fantasy afloat. Actual war was too costly.

It became necessary to replace war with the threat of war. To have implacable enemies without the expense of war was the answer. This dovetailed well with the underlying principle of the service economy. This was an enhancement of the root philosophy dating back to the 1920's that profit is greater when money itself is treated as a commodity and manipulated in lieu of actual manufactured goods. We became a nations of brokers, real estate salesmen, snake oil hustlers, insurance brokers, lawyers and government bureaucracies. The primary definition of these industries is that they produce nothing, they merely manipulate wealth as a commodity in and of itself.

The idea of an actual free market will only work in the case of an economy consisting of actual products and honest goods. However, most producers are not honest. They are generally oriented toward profit only. An honest producer is concerned with his market, the best product at the lowest price, and the welfare of its employees. Most corporate producers are merely money manipulators; that is why automobile manufactures have recently become credit card hustlers and retailers have become banks.

Aside from the mixed metaphor that government and business are equivalent, there is the misleading metaphor that competition stimulates the evolution of better products, better services and a better life. It does not. Competition acts to retard the development of better products because the market is not concerned with products per se. The competition is entirely between power entities. In other words the product that survives is not the better product, it is the better marketed product. Better marketing almost always turns out to be based on power or wealth. Power and wealth can market a cheaper, inferior product and so it accumulates more power and wealth. Microsoft is an obvious example. Free market competition actually degrades the quality of life world wide and only grudgingly permits the development of a better product.

Corporate piracy is based on primitive concepts of cattle theft, power, profit, exclusion, class, monopoly and wage slavery. The underlying agenda was simple: plunder the public wealth and bury it in the private treasuries of an elite class. Such treasuries are protected by the inability of governments or the public to retrieve the wealth.

<169>Trickle Down Economics<170> was the public relations program of lies and disinformation that sold such ideas to the public. There was never any intention of letting wealth trickle down to the lower classes of the pyramid once it was safely squirreled away in the elite treasuries.

Deregulation was the critical legal necessity that allowed the corporate subculture to plunder the body politic. It was nothing less than a license to steal. The Savings & Loan debacle cost the American economy well in excess of a trillion dollars. This wealth is irretrievably lost to the netherworld of the elite treasuries. It is forever gone form the U.S. economy into the Corporate Super State.

Privitization is the idea that government should not provide services of any meaningful use to living human beings or to its constituents. Apparently government should only collect massive taxes and spend them to the benefit of the ruling oligarchy. While the decline of the airline industry is an example of the destructive nature of deregulation, the privitization of the Post Office is an example of the fundamentally erroneous idea that government itself is some sort of business which, of necessity, must turn a profit. By privitizing the Post Office the Federal government was relieved of an expense and the Post Office, in turn, passed the cost on to the customer. Increased postal rates are another form of a tax hike.

Given a license to steal, the insurance industries looted at will and their theft was enforced by the government. Laws exist which state that every citizen, under certain conditions such as driving an automobile, must purchase some product from a private provider or suffer punishment. That is banditry pure and simple. If the state mandates that citizens must, by law, purchase some product, then it is only reasonable that the state becomes the provider of that product, and it should provide that product at no profit. While legalized enforced expenditure is a tax, the enforced appropriation of a citizen's wealth for the benefit of a private corporation which does not have to account for its rate of profit and which is a completely unregulated monopoly can only be appropriately called state extortion. At the very best, it is taxation without representation. California Proposition 103 clearly announced the end of democracy when that law was voted in by an irate citizenry and then ignored by the insurance industry and the government alike.

Government in general and the Congress in particular had already been purchased lock, stock and barrel by the corporate world. Wealth, money and currency alone represent power. When the state was divorced from religion the culture lost a mitigating means of power. When the state was wedded to the interests of business all other forms of regulating power were eliminated. Wealth is the only power system left. Ethics, public right, values and opinion no longer have power. We now have government by PACS, lobbies, special interests and corporate interests. The body politic is in control of nothing. Congressional members are out of control and for sale to the highest bidder. the highest bidder is always the corporate super state.

The Corporate Super State is the business matrix that lies outside and above nations and law. It maintains its own agenda, police, rules, wealth and taxation independent of any state or human need.

In addition, Reagan personally enhanced the degradation of government by obtaining non-traceable wealth in the illegal drug trade, then by selling American arms to its ostensible enemy, Iran, and finally using the profits for personal gain and to maintain an extra-legal, Corporate Super State army to fight an entirely unauthorized war on behalf of the elite class. All of this was done without the express or implied consent of the American people.

When Mr. Reagan was in flagrant disregard of democracy and committing illegal and immoral acts he was not considered to be in conflict with the <169>American Way.<170> It was nothing personal, just business. It is only for the indiscretion of being caught that he was considered remiss. To not own up to his responsibility and to allow his lieutenants to take the blame was merely stupid.

The general goal was to emasculate government by converting its function from that of protecting the citizens and regulating the corporate world to protecting the corporate world and regulating the citizens.

One means of accomplishing this goal, besides the ownership of Congress and the deregulation and the ownership of all democratic forms of media, was to maintain the illegal status of the drug trade.

The <169>War on Drugs<170> is the biggest snake oil hustle of this century. The primary reason for the continued illegalization of cocaine is to employ two major industries that produce nothing, do not feed, cloth, house or heal a single human being and are, at best, dangerous parasites on the culture.

The two major industries are the illegal drug trade and the legal industry comprised of various types of police, lawyers, judges, prisons and other related systems to fight the war on drugs. It costs the U.S. somewhere between 50 and 200 billion dollars every year to keep cocaine illegal. All for nothing, for a drug worth less than aspirin.

There are two hidden agendas: the first is to keep clandestine operations such as the CIA well financed with non-accountable dollars. The profits from the drug trade need never darken CIA bank accounts or touch CIA fingers. It need merely be transferred from CIA associated drug lords to CIA associated sub-contractors. Wherever illegal clandestine operations need funding or operations need execution, money is made available by the drug industry. Like all American foreign policy, all decisions, actions and spending are made in favor of corporate interests.

The second hidden agenda is to maintain a police state at the taxpayers expense and with the enthusiastic support of the taxpayer. The purpose of this police industry is not to control drug lords, but to control our own citizens.

Reagan and company further plundered the body politic by more sophisticated military swindles. SDI (Star Wars) elevated military theft to an art form. It could not possibly work. It could never be used or tested, and if it was, no customer would be left to accost the complaint department. It cost billions just to consider how to waste further billions on an entirely worthless product for an enemy that never existed in fact.

Another act of piracy was the wholesale raiding of social spending. All forms of human needs were plundered; education, health, roads, bridges and highways, welfare, infant care, day care, etc., etc., etc..

The gimmick was to lower taxes. Mr. Reagan promised to lower taxes. Federal <169>income<170> taxes were indeed lowered, at least long enough to sell the plan to the public. But every other form of tax increased dramatically. The Social Security tax, for example, increased. But the primary strategy was to cut funding from local expenditures such as education, health and other types of infrastructure. Consequently local taxing institutions had no choice but to institute and raise local taxes of all sorts; property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, city income taxes, parking and traffic citations, garbage collection, utilities and power and any other service performed by local government. The other form of local taxation that was sharply escalated was something called fees: legal documents, licenses of all sorts, parking permits, smog checking and licensing, school expenses, etc.. Nearly all local services previously performed by the government were now subject to fees or taxes. The net result was that Reagan and Company could righteously claim to have lowered Federal income taxes, to have ceased spending money on human needs, to have plundered billions into the elite treasuries and to have drastically raised the net, sum total of taxes in general. It was a master stroke of misdirection and piracy.

In conjunction with such massive means of public theft was the ever increasing cost of living, which merely reflected the rapid rise of corporate piracy that was permitted by deregulation and the neutering of the watch-dog laws. The massive profit taking for worthless products had to be paid for by someone and that someone was the American citizen in terms of cost-of-living, taxation and other forms of outright theft, such as are represented by the plundering of the S&L's. There was also a constant need to prevent inflation of the money supply in order to protect the global corporate interests. In order to reduce the risk of inflation, the money supply was constantly withheld from the public and given to the corporate world at the most favorable rates of interest. This aided the corporate strangleholds over monopolies by preventing entrepreneurial competition from the <169>little people.<170>

The U.S. economy could not be allowed to <169>crash<170> without effecting economies on a global scale. So the rest of the world, and the corporate world in particular were obliged to carry the U.S. debt. This will remain true until the wealth of U.S. is drained in its entirety, or until there is no U.S. worth further consideration.

Reagan and Company conspired to achieve three main goals:

1: To plunder the public wealth into an elite treasury.

2: To destroy government as an effective democratic watch-dog mechanism to regulate corporate predation.

3: To create a Corporate Super State outside the powers of nationalistic governments. The only response that humans could possibly make to this gambit would be the creation of an international institution to regulate the Corporate Super State. The first response will be to dismantle or neutralize the United Nations.

Reagan & Co. are the consummate Flim Flam artists of the 20th Century. He was elected based on the public's perception of a need for change, on the disinformation of a tax-lowering policy, and a <169>Trust me<170> charisma. He was not voted into his second term for his economic policies, but rather for his perceived foreign policy. He had no particular mandate to steal the wealth of the United States of America and give it to a nebulous Corporate Super State. He had a mandate to plunder the third world.

Mr. Bush was merely Mr. Reagan's cloned appendix and continued the policies of the elite class without serious revision and with considerably less attention paid to keeping the public misinformed and happy.

Mr. Clinton is Mr. Reagan's partner. As another loyal employee of the Corporate Super State Mr. Clinton has the unenviable job of collecting the bill for Mr. Reagan's spending and plundering. The U.S. cultural system no longer has the mechanisms intact for making necessary modifications to its economic system and the situation is both out of control and hopeless. Mr. Clinton's primary task will be to hold the body politic together long enough for the remaining wealth to be bled away without the danger of a catastrophic crash.

To this end he has, to date, pursued three main policies. NAFTA and GAT are the formal and legal means to declare the Corporate Super State as independent of and outside of national law. It is noteworthy that the Mexican economy completely collapsed shortly after the implementation of NAFTA. The plan is working; move the industry to a client state, collapse their economy, lower the wages, encumber them with debt and escape U.S. government regulation and taxes.

The purpose is to free the corporate world from the high cost of production in the U.S. and to be allowed unrestricted plunder of the world for markets, labor, resources and the right to pollute indiscriminately.

The health industry issue has five goals. The first goal is to trick the public into complacence by the mere appearance of pseudo-reform. This follows the policy of any good cattle rancher to keep the herd from stampeding. The second goal is to protect and even increase the already outrageous profit taking of the medical industry itself while allowing a general degradation of the quality and availability of services. The medical cartel is already protected by a monopoly, a powerful union and the legal restriction of competition. The third goal is to perform the same service for the health insurance industry that government already performs for the automobile insurance industry. Mr. Clinton wants to institute a tax collection agency for the benefit of the insurance industry which will extort more wealth from the public in the form of another mandatory tax under the penalty of law. Once again, the idea is to utilize state force to collect wealth for private industry in return for no product and no service. The fourth goal is to employ another vast government bureaucracy. And the final goal is make the public pay for all of the above. There is very little reform of actual health services in the package. What reforms do exist are strictly cosmetic.

If a citizen of the U.S. is seriously interested in maintaining health it is necessary to become one's own doctor. Self health is the only option open when the principle motivation of the medical industry is confined strictly to profit. In the name of profit the medical industry, the AMA and the health insurance industry has conspired to take away the right of the American citizen to determine his own medical fate.

The Crime Bill is nothing more than a continuation of the policy of state narco-terrorism by stealing more money from the public and funneling it into lawyers, judges, prisons and police. Again, what minuscule benefits actually accrue to the public in the form of protection from state induced violence is strictly cosmetic.

COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS

Lipari is an island just north of Sicily. After the Doric Greeks from Asia tried to seize the western point of Sicily and were defeated by the Phoenicians, they occupied the Lipari Islands and formed a semi-communistic state in which the land was re-divided every twenty years. It was greatly admired for its harmony and lack of classes. They made an honest buck as pirates.

Primary myths act as bottom-up heuristic rules in a complex system. These rules evolved in response to certain conditions in a survival context. As the contextual universe of the system evolves the causal matrix alters. The rules become either obsolete or dangerous.

For example predation makes perfect sense in the context of Paleolithic humans eating game animals. The ecosystem remained fairly balanced and the human species enhanced rather than threatened its survival by such behavior. Predation became a primary myth and no individual questioned its utility.

By the twentieth century predation became the hunting and plundering of resources primarily from other humans. Predation became mythologically equated with free market economics which in turn is mythologically equivalent with war. An army is, after all, the ultimate sales force. Predation, and its mythological synonym, 'competition,' are justified by the claim that they are the 'nature of things' simply because they are transparent as primary myths. Competition and predation are then elevated to the status of natural laws. This occurred with the advent of Darwin's evolution and is occurring again in the research on complexity.

The useful myth of predation evolved into the myth of economic competition and war which is applied in a cannibalistic manner by humans against humans and has brought the species to the brink of nuclear war and annihilation.

It is a primary myth in need of redefinition.

In the above sense the elevation of the primary myth to the status of law converts it into a heuristic rule that governs the behavior of the cultural system by defining the bottom-up behavior of each individual.

Predation allowed the species to be fruitful and multiply without the need of top-down laws and policemen until it became cannibalistic. At that point it threatened the species and so top-down laws and police enforcement mechanisms were instituted to control a heuristic rule that had outlived its usefulness and the survival context it was designed to operate within.

Now the system is encumbered with the useless system overhead of top-down laws and policing mechanisms to prevent humans from excessive predation and over-grazing on other humans.

This kind of overhead is an irrelevant expense in terms of system purpose and operation and will eventually bring it to catastrophic collapse.

The only obvious anodyne to predation is to replace it with other primary myths. Human maturity as defined by the use of empathy and the reorientation of the mass of individuals to higher goals and purposes than economic predation are two such possibilities. Obsession with complex systems such as business is a game in that it is pursued solely as a means to relieve metaphysical ennui by individuals who do not have the inner resources to pursue higher goals.

Economic predation is no longer a necessary paradigm for the survival of the species. It can be replaced with a static, highly ordered system and used as a foundation for more critical and more interesting complex systems such as a global mind, space exploration, longevity and the pursuit of human values. We do have better things to do.

It is imperative that such Neolithic concepts of economics be reexamined, redefined and modified. Recent conceptions regarding complexity and the roles that competition and cooperation actually play in a complex system imply that cooperative economics will be the hallmark of the third millennium.

A binary monetary system is an attempt to prevent the exploitation of human labor, while permitting rewards for human endeavor and excellence.

It is, however, doomed to failure if it is merely a system of high order laws enforced from the top down. The only evolution in cooperative economics likely to be self-sustaining will be based on heuristic rules from the bottom up. Bottom-up heuristic rules require no enforcement.

Four centuries ago it was realized that it was imperative that there must a separation of church and state. It is now time for and another, analogous concept to take effect; the separation of the state and business.

The state is not a business. Business is not a synonym for government and is certainly not identical to the welfare of the people.

The state does not function for the making of profit, generating wealth, producing goods and services, nor for the purposes of banking and loans. The state's function is to maintain civil order, resolve disputes, provide infrastructure such as education, health and postal services, to ensure media rights and access; to provide for the welfare of the people; protect the citizenry from foreign invasion, natural disasters and the predation of the business community. The state should not be required to turn a profit and it should provide for the needs of its people, not the needs of business.

And business is not government. It should be divorced absolutely from legislative bodies. It should have no influence nor should it be able to purchase influence regarding the creation of law. The interests of business are not identical to human interests.

Business is not a state and must not be allowed to govern the people or dictate to the culture. It must be divorced from the dictatorship of cultural values, goals and human services. Human beings do not eat profit.

No government employee or elected official should be paid above the mean average income. The maintenance of currency and governmental budgets should be outside considerations of profit and divorced from the exclusive concern for and the goals of business interests. The vast majority of humans on planet earth do not need an explosive GNP. They do need food, shelter, clothing, education, a humane medical system and freedom from economic extortion and terrorism.

Currency is the medium of plunder.

In addition, it is assumed that economics must cease to be the primary consumer of human energy and interest. On the mythological and cultural level and in the realms of value we have other, more pressing concerns. The race has more important matters at hand than trivial obsessions with bean counting and economic machismo.

Economics must be recreated as a stable system. There is no need to give it divine stature and equate it with life, evolution and consciousness. It does not need to be in perpetual fermentation and infinitely expanding. It should keep every human individual in a minimum state of physical security with a minimum of preoccupation with IOUs and economic serfdom.

A BINARY MONETARY SYSTEM

There has been no workable solution to ridding the planet of economic systems based on profit, imaginary infinite wealth, competition and plunder. The only solutions proposed to date are based on authoritarian, top-down, legalistic structures such as communism. The problem is that authoritarianism engenders disinterest or revolt. Legalistic structures always provide loopholes for the lawmakers, creates criminals where none were before, and never proscribes the desperate. Free markets promote piracy, plunder and economic wage slaves.

There has to be some control over economic predators combined with some form of economic free will. There is no economic system that is self regulating, that operates without major catastrophes and without legal regulations. Free market systems regulate consumers, workers and entrepreneurs from revolting against monopolistic control of markets. Socialistic systems regulate the economic piraticisms of monopolies and the powerful.

The best that can be imagined at this time is a system of regulations that allow the best of both while controlling their worst offensives. The two main goals are to eliminate the concept of profit since profit is based on an imaginary pyramid of infinite wealth, and to emphasize cooperation over competition since competition is ultimately self destructive.

The goals are to eliminate profit as an omnipresent corrosive, the withering of competition, to reduce the ability of the state to tax punitively, the separation of state and business, to guarantee the right to economic survival, to eliminate the possibility to accumulate outrageous wealth, to regulate and redefine predatory corporate entities, to eliminate parasitical industries such as brokers, insurance, government bureaucracies and other types of system manipulations that produce nothing and to allow the stimulus of competition.

A binary monetary system would use at least two types of currency; for example dollars, would be used exclusively for luxuries and discretionary buying, and drachma for the necessities of survival. Survival must be a guaranteed right of every living human being, because guaranteed survival is the only means that allows for the existence of a free citizen. There can be no democracy in a free market economy since it is based on economic coercion and voting choices are not freely made. Furthermore, the population must be protected against the economic predation of the state.

In a binary monetary system it is against the law to accept dollars in payment for food and necessities. Only drachmae can be accepted.

Dollars apply strictly to superfluous wealth. All you can do with dollars is buy unnecessary luxuries. Necessities can only be purchased with drachmae.

Barter must be built into the system to exclude the plundering of the people's wealth and labor by the state. For example, a standard charge for a meal is a half hour of labor in the fields.

The redistribution of wealth is necessary, but must be regulated. It would be useful to redivide the land every twenty years. But of course, the reapportioned land must be paid for. The idea behind a free farming society is that every citizen has a right to some portion of arable land. The free human being must be capable of producing her own food and shelter. Private land cannot be taxed or be subject to any form of eminent domain. Land cannot be bought or sold. Land can only be traded for equivalent land. Land is outside the money economy.

Every citizen is a free farmer. This by no means implies a strictly agrarian based society whose only major product is food. This would be a highly industrialized culture. The difference is that it is totally decentralized. Thanks to modern communications, all of the highly populated urban centers can be decentralized into small towns with minor local businesses and one or two major manufacturers.

Ownership by labor is imperative in order to prevent a nonparticipating ownership from abandoning the matrix that nourished it. In addition, corporations cannot be allowed to be defined as a greater entity than the humans that compose them. They cannot be permitted tax breaks and voting rights. Corporations are not citizens. They must not be owned by non-participating investors. Investors are not interested in the production of goods, they are interested solely in the production of profit. Investors tend to view a corporation as a manufacturer of profit and not as an employer and a manufacturer of goods.

Many professional careers are quit capable of being sustained in cottage industries. Programming, software development, chip farming and numerous other types of office processing are all jobs that can be done at home through the Network. This includes education as a public Network utility.

Every citizen must produce the bulk of his own food. Each citizen must spend ten hours a week on food production. A human then gets ten hours of good exercise a week. They get better food. No additives. No preservatives. No chemical fertilizers and no depleted soils. They eat less refined sugars and no rancid fats or fast food.

They tend to care for their land carefully, since it is literally their meal ticket. They are healthier.

And they are free. They are not slaves to a food industry, totally at the mercy of transportation unions. The government cannot force them into a money economy if they do not wish to participate.

Since most citizens own some bit of land, there are no poor to feed, and no one is standing in a welfare line.

A single citizen is allotted some portion of land, based on available acreage and population, perhaps an eighth of an acre. For every additional citizen that lives with him, an additional sixteenth of an acre is added. When land is redivided, it must be paid for by the new owner. The government cannot take land from any citizen for any reason. There is no eminent domain and there are no property taxes. The state can only force the sale of land from one citizen to another during the twenty year redivision. And since it is a true democracy the citizens redivide the land by vote on the Network.

The goal is to remove basic needs that are necessary for the individual's survival and freedom from the predation of the free market. Everything beyond those guaranteed necessities is free of regulation and restriction. The drachma is fixed to a time unit of human labor. The dollar is a currency of floating value based on supply and demand.

In order to provide for every citizen's basic needs and to ensure freedom from manipulation at the hands of unscrupulous people who grab power by monopolizing basic needs, every citizen is not only responsible for the bulk of his own food supply, but he must earn his other necessities through his job.

Every citizen is allowed to work at some job of his choosing for an additional ten hours a week. But only after he has completed ten hours of food production. There is no requirement to do so, but if he wishes to earn any spending power in the economy at large, he must have a job. He can work at any profession he wants; in a factory, programming at home, become a self employed artist, be a doctor, or own his own butcher shop. Whatever he works at, the first ten hours of every week must be paid in drachmae.

The hourly wage is fixed forever at one drachma per hour. Every citizen regardless of sex, age, race, or profession earns one drachma an hour for the first ten hours on the job per week.

There is no inflation on drachmae. There is no excessive accumulation of wealth in drachmae. There is no tax. But there are two other major differences between drachmae and dollars.

Each drachma is created for each unique hour of work performed. It is tracked in the Network and credited to the citizen that earned it. But when the citizen spends it, it ceases to exist. That is, another citizen cannot spend it or accumulate it. All it does is to be erased from that person's drachma total in the Network. It is in effect a barter system for labor.

A third form of currency can be accumulated in the form of social credit. When a person exchanges something for another person's drachma, that drachma disappears from the buyer's total, but a small percentage can go to the state as tax, and another percentage to the seller as a social credit. Social credit cannot be spent. It is merely credit with the state that buys retirement or disability benefits. Credits cannot be accumulated and spent on anything else. All credit in that person's name disappear at death.

So a small percentage of the drachma is converted to credits as sales tax or as a system tax for the differences that occur in exchanges. Otherwise it disappears. There is no profit associated with drachmae, either with earning it, or with spending it. It is not taxable by the state.

The second major difference is that drachmae cannot be spent on anything other than officially designated necessities. These are all basic foods, a basic working wardrobe, the Network, education, utilities such as water and power, health, infrastructure, retirement and disability and media, the construction of living residences and the acquisition of land. Everything else, which is the greater bulk of available goods, falls into the dollar economy. Under no circumstance can these necessities be bought with dollars, and the prices are fixed by law. Again, the citizens are the law, and the citizens vote on changes in the definitions of necessities and their associated prices by Network.

It also tends to eliminate the poor and the welfare rolls, since it guarantees a decent living for each and every citizen. Obviously, they can live as well as they choose to live, but even the lazy and apathetic are protected from poverty.

In order to not emasculate individual initiative, to not obliterate incentive and ambition, to not deprive the best and the brightest of opportunity every citizen is not only allowed, but encouraged to participate in the dollar economy. It is never required. All effort beyond the first twenty hours a week is in the hands of the citizen. He can sleep, or dream, or write bad poetry. But he can also work another sixty hours if he chooses, at whatever rate of pay is established between him, his employer, his customer or the market. He fixes his own price in relation to competition. He may continue to work at the same job, or have an entirely different career. It is a completely free economy. All earnings or profits are taken in dollars, and dollars are hard currency. They are, of course, subject to income and other taxes, which are established by general vote. The only restriction on dollars is that they cannot buy officially designated necessities. But they can buy everything else, including all luxuries and entertainment.

The mode of taxation must be a democratic flat tax. Some percentage of tax on income is fixed, for example, at 10%. Each taxpayer then votes by determining exactly how his 10% is spent by allocating its distribution on the tax form. All tax revenue must be spent by the state on necessities such as land, media, the Network, health, education and infrastructure. Tax revenue cannot be allocated to anything applying to the dollar market.

When there is something that falls in a gray area such as improvements to a residence, then the improvement must be designated as either a necessity or a luxury. This is determined by simple vote on such matters as square footage, types of material, usage, etc. This can be a local, neighborhood vote determined by local standards.

This system tends to generally raise the standard of living for all citizens. It goes without saying that there also exists an intelligent means of controlling population, or even an effective means to reduce it.

PREDATION, COMPLEXITY AND ECONOMIC MODELS

Contemporary economic systems, tributary societies, plunder, profit and even socialist solutions are forms of top-down processing. Higher levels of law are superimposed upon the system in order to maintain social coherence. They are always authoritarian structures imposed by force. Realistic solutions must be engineered that are bottom-up processes. Such solutions are complex models in that the behavior of the individual is guided by heuristic laws that establish behavioral rules common to all individuals. They do not require high level laws and policemen. It is a matter of intellect in lieu of law.

The bankruptcy of bronze aged economic systems based upon infinite resources such as free market religions is obvious to all but an elite class of predators. Free markets and illusions of infinite resources form the basis of the ultimate pyramid scheme. Theft always forces wealth up the pyramid. Debt is always passed down. There is no final debtor. Wealth and resources are not infinite. The Machiavellian manipulation of human labor is exemplified in the motto of Dachau <169>Work Will Make You Free.<170>

Work, by no stretch of the imagination, can be equated with freedom.

The cloudiness of debate about predation and competition as social, cultural and economic models is the result of the fact that it is always fraught with the vested interests of the corporate universe and its free market apologists. Cultural entities that are dependent on economic predation are always funding research and promoting those theories that elevate predation and competition to the status of universal law. Any theory which enjoys currency within scientific fashions and is elevated to a law of nature, Darwinian evolution for example, is then employed to justify economic predation, war and imperialism. The latest attempt to camouflage human cannibalism comes under the newly emerging sciences of complexity. Research institutions such as the Santa Fe Institute are funded largely by the corporate world, especially large financial institutions such as banks, who have a vested interest in proving that not only is economic predation a fundamental law of nature, but that there is no higher cultural state to evolve into. A child starving to death once every twenty seconds is as good as it gets.

This means that there are only wolves and sheep. The best prey for any wolf and the easiest way to get dinner on the table is to invite the sheep over for dinner. Simply convince sheep to voluntarily walk into an economic feeding frenzy based on the mistaken illusion that they too can become a wolf.

Free markets are never free. They are a ritualized form of gang warfare much the same as is practiced on the cocaine infested streets of South Central Los Angeles.

When markets are portrayed as free they are intentionally painted as a model of free economic individuals in fair competition with other economic individuals. This is called opportunity. However, the actual market is quit different. It is in fact the freedom of those economic gangs called corporations and businesses to prey upon isolated and weaker economic individuals called consumers who are absolutely powerless to resist.

Predation and competition are commonly defined as a fundamental law of nature. This fundamental law in turn is assumed to prove by analogy that human beings will forever be at the mercy of their basic nature which is entirely determined by such laws of the jungle as the survival of the fittest.

For free market apologists predation and competition are always defined as a force of nature. Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition, Page 1061, defines Predatory as <169>living by capturing and feeding upon other animals.<170> For the purposes of free market apologetics, this definition is usually taken to a higher level of abstraction.

Predation, defined for the purposes of those with vested interests, is the process through which individuals and species compete for access to scarce resources.

In fact, the argument goes no further than this no matter how involved it may become. It always boils down to big fish eating little fish. The science of complexity takes the argument to the next higher level of abstraction, into the rarefied heights of mathematical modeling.

The best evidence available indicates that plants evolved before animals. The cost in energy and resources of having to manufacture food from various non-living materials and light from the sun make it impossible for plants to support many of the functions common to animal life. Faced with this obstruction to further evolutionary development, a two-stage process evolved in which plant life manufactures necessary food through photosynthesis. A new variation, animal life, then makes use of that food and not having had to bear the direct costs of its production, is then free to develop the higher level functions of mobility, sensory sophistication, intelligence and consciousness.

This means that all animals are to some extent predators upon and parasites of the plants. To a certain degree, it may even be claimed that plants are also predators in the sense that they compete for resources such as soil, sun and rain, and have even evolved means for killing off other plant competition. At this point it is possible to speculate upon the <169>fairness<170> of all this to the plants who have to do all the work while animals reap all the rewards. But the higher functions of animal life are unavailable to plants under any circumstances. So it really isn't a loss on their part and it simply represents another example of how everything in nature is recycled.

Those animals that prey upon plants can be considered to be First-Order predators. However, opportunity in nature begets adaptation. As a result, the world soon had Second-Order predators who preyed upon the plant eaters. No sooner did the carnivores get comfortable in and convinced of the permanence of their position at the top of the food chain, than one of them developed a big brain and began to prey upon plants, animals and other predators alike. In what seems to be the normal order of things, this Third-Order predator soon became convinced of its permanence at the top of the food chain and came to believe that something called <169>God<170> had created the world and everything in it expressly for the benefit and amusement of Third-Order predators. It may further be speculated that in some not too distant future a Fourth-Order evolves, an artificial consciousness that is even more intelligent and powerful than sentient apes.

At this point the analogy begins to fade into noise. At the point of the evolution of intelligence there is no clear analogy to predation as a linkage in the hierarchy of who eats who, other than an increase in hunting skill brought about by a bigger brain. It is not clear why artificial intelligence would even need to predate animal life. There is no occasion for a computer to eat a hamburger, human or otherwise. It may be possible that a time would come when intelligent and artificial intelligence would have to compete for declining or scarce resources. But the only animal intelligence that we know of is perfectly capable of annihilating itself without such outside assistance.

Once again, for free market apologists, it boils down to the issue of scarce resources and the competition for access to them. What we see as predation, they claim, is merely one aspect of this competitive process that operates in nature to insure that eventually, scarce resources are put to the best and highest use. In nature, nothing is really wasted and virtually everything is reused and recycled.

This may be true in some sense, but the analogy fades with the introduction of intelligence and disappears entirely with the advent of culture. Moreover, it is difficult to see how predation specifically applies to ethical issues, human empathy and evolution above and beyond the jungle. And finally, nothing is as wasteful of human resources as free market predation.

It really does no good, the economic barracudas proclaim, to get all teary-eyed and snuffle-nosed about the more juicy and lurid aspects of this process. It is there because it has to be there in order to maintain the necessary degree of efficiency in the system and is likely to remain there whether we are around to complain about it or not. Predation, they claim, is necessary to guarantee the evolution of sentient apes.

In other words, predation and competition are fundamental laws of nature.

We all have to compete for scarce resources, as individuals, as groups, as cultures, as societies, as nations and as a species. In an ecological context, it may mean the ability to cooperate as a family group to better detect, run down and kill the weak, the old and the sick, to put them out of their misery and into the commissary.

The trouble with this line of analogy is that while it is true that predators in the jungle hunt down the old and the sick, human predation is more closely analogous to cannibalism in that it destroys the young, the unborn and the poor. Poor humans may very well be in possession of better genes and greater intelligence and by the accident of birth alone have fallen into the cattle pens of human economic predation. Human poverty and political impotence is not analogous with old, sick animals, it is analogous to cattle ranching. In the economic cycles of the hamburger perfectly healthy, young animals are killed in slaughter houses every day. There is no grand cosmological necessity or fundamental law of nature that is maintaining the health of the bovine species by eliminating the old, sick and genetically undesirable. It is for no greater reason than the production of the Big Mac that cattle are slaughtered and rain forests are turned into swamps and deserts.

Economic and political predation is always made analogous to the hunter's ability to soar to great heights so that it can scan for carrion over a vast area and arrive more swiftly than more powerful, but ground-bound competitive scavengers. Skill and advantage are always promoted as the end product of the laws of nature. Presumably, this is so because the only intelligence humans know of is a predatory ape, and that predation is necessary for the evolution of intelligence.

This may be true, but it does not mean that predatory intelligence is the apex and end point of evolution.

In an economic context, in the opinion of economic marketeers, predation means the ability to develop and market a better product at a more attractive price. In a social context, it may mean having access to the blond, blue-eyed and buxom woman.

For some reason a better mouse trap at a cheaper price is considered to be fundamental to the betterment and survival of the species. There is some reason to suspect, however, that this is not the case. Economic predation has brought this massively intelligent species close enough to the brink of annihilation to peer over the edge and ponder the unthinkable.

The specific processes of predation are assumed to vary widely from one context to another and that what may well be appropriate to a given context may be totally unacceptable in another. It is the process that is inescapable.

The intelligence of mankind provides no escape. For free-booter economics intelligence is just a better tool to get that Big Mac to the dinner table. Indeed, they rhapsodize, our intelligence has made it possible for mankind to be involved in competition for scarce resources in many more varied ways, ironically making us, as a species, more deeply involved in the process than any other.

How true it is. But in the jungle, most predation is perpetrated by one species on another. It is only in the case of overpopulation that a species cannibalizes itself. Most human predation in economic and political terms is cannibalistic.

At this point competition may be defined as the struggle for access to rare resources, such as plants competing with other plants for sunlight. Predation is an animal species of life eating another species, such as sheep eating grass. Hunting, a type of predation, is one animal species eating another, such as the wolf eating the sheep. Cannibalism is when a member of a species eats another member of its own species, such as insane rats in an overpopulated cage, human wars, ethnic cleansing, or free market economies.

Free market apologists, ranging from the most stodgy of complexity researchers to the junk bond privateers, in the heat of the feeding frenzy become strident in their impatience with contrary points of view, inconvenient facts or embarrassing theories and dismiss them as non-scientific, as nonsense or as non-sequiturs.

They feel constrained to point out that any consideration beyond or outside the laws of predation is Marxist and they dismiss it at that, as though the mere label constitutes a philosophical and scientific proof to the contrary.

The basis for the argument against predation as the final model for the evolution of economics and politics may be summed up as nothing more than the observation that predation exists in nature.

But the jungle model does not necessarily apply to human culture, economics or politics, because the human species possesses two factors uniquely distinct from all other known life forms.

First, humans posses intelligence of a kind that is beyond all other known life forms, certainly in terms of magnitude, and possibly different in kind.

The second factor is that on planet earth, the human species is the only form of life is possession of a culture. That is a culture as distinct from a society. A society is a cooperative structure possessed by bees and wolves. A society is a form of social organization that learns, teaches and transmits information within the biological media of the species. The information is either transmitted genetically as in the case of ants, bees and termites or it is transmitted as learning from individual organism to individual organism and from generation to generation as in the case of wolves, chimpanzees and cheetahs. By contrast a culture is defined in terms of information preserved and transmitted outside the physical organisms of the biological species. A culture is an exobiotic media. Writing, books and all other technological forms of data storage and transmission are media that allows culture to exist.

There is no animal model for this. There are no ant libraries. There is no wolf museum or data bank. There are animal models for social cooperation, some language ability, and various degrees of intelligence, but none for information carried outside the physical organism.

Human culture is different in kind than animal intelligence or social structures. In the case of culture we have already transcended the law of the jungle.

Without a cultural matrix, individual human work in the creative sense is not possible except on the most primitive scale.

Since we cannot claim that evolution has stopped or reached a final goal, there is no reason not to assume that predation and competition will be transcended in the process of further evolution.

Culture is an artifact of human evolution and behavior that transcends all animal models. There is not a single instance of animal behavior that transmits information in an exobiotic form. There is every reason to think that other human modalities will also transcend animal models. Intelligence has solutions available to it other than reliance on genetic programming.

There is no good evidence that human cultural predation performs any necessary or useful task. In fact it seems to promote a population of less functional minds instead of promoting a high ratio of productive minds.

Finally, there are other solutions available to human intelligence and culture that are not available to animal models in order to solve the problems of scarce resources.

Predation may be perceived to be necessary simply because big fish eat little fish. Humans, however, are smarter than fish.

We are not compelled to compete under the lash of cultural imperatives. We do have other solutions. We are compelled to husband our resources, not waste them in trivial competitions, and we are compelled to do what any wolf pack would do, control our population in relation to resources.

Ultimately, the question of whether or not predation is ethically or pragmatically defensible seems to resolve itself into an argument about the status of dysfunctional humans. The issue is whether or not dysfunctional humans be considered as analogous to prey or cattle, or whether or not poverty, low intelligence or cultural incompetence is a sufficient definition of dysfunctional to define certain classes of humanity as prey or cattle.

The sad fact is that the vast majority of the species is made dysfunctional and kept dysfunctional in nearly every significant way precisely in order to serve as cattle or as prey. That is they do not function well in the culture, they are not especially intelligent, they contribute little in terms of creative product, they do not accumulate vast sums of wealth and they are often dangerous. But they do consume commodities. They eat, consume, are utilized as an economic slave force and then they die. The ethical problem is more clearly resolved with those humans who cannot even serve as prey or who are considered to be generally dangerous, the criminals and the insane. They are disposed of either by extermination or by incarceration. The discussion is always focussed on the criminals because it avoids the real issue and because the solution is clearer. The rest of humanity remains, however, in the economic stockyards.

There are perceived benefits to the process of predation in response to certain cultural, political and economic problems. But there are solutions to these problems other than predation which make predation unnecessary and probably harmful to the species.

The argument against predation is that the jungle analogy does not hold, that it doesn't work, that there are other solutions and that the human species is still subject to evolution.

Garbage collection, defined as the human predisposition to rid itself of dysfunctional individuals, and sometimes whole classes, is simply not necessary.

The species no longer suffers great hardship maintaining the existence of dysfunctional members. Setting aside the criminally insane and the uncontrollably dangerous the culture can afford to support the life currently in existence.

Genetic decay is insignificant and is not at issue. The human brain is already so overpowered with redundancy that slight declines in small sectors of the population are trivial.

Other important skills such as IQ and empathy are teachable by definition. The overall loss in terms of mental function is minimized so long as adequate nutrition is provided.

The free market desperado needs to minimize the horror of economic predation in order to keep the herd from stampeding. They assure us that an individual may compete with others in a social or economic context without the necessity of eating a competitor's liver with a fine Chianti.

In other words economic predation is nothing personal, just business. The frenzied sharks are not really enjoying themselves. They are merely obeying nature. Nevertheless, eating is eating, with or without Chianti. From the prey's point of view the vintage is irrelevant.

The harmful effects derived from the behavior of dysfunctional humans are more easily, more humanely and more cost effectively neutralized by other means.

It is better to remove their power than their lives.

Institutionalized population control is more acceptable than poverty, pandemics, war and the incalculable suffering of millions of living human beings. Producing and creating less numbers of dysfunctional individuals is the obvious solution. Adequate nutrition, education and social opportunity are prerequisites along with a more civilized economics, standards of empathy, elevated primary myths and the decline of economic and political threat.

Life in a deep sense is sacred no matter what perceived short term gain accrues to some powerful minority, including the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.

In addition, no cultural or human decision based on the theory of an afterlife or the various styles of divine justice can justify the destruction of human life, or the atrocities committed in the name of religious fanaticisms.

No one is absolutely qualified to determine what life is or is not worth living and everyone is therefore incompetent to judge who is prey and who is not.

There is no such thing as human garbage since every human life is unicentric, meaning that every human life is the center of some universe.

For the scientific reductionist, the economic predator and the politically hungry life is not sacred in any context. Life, they inform us, comes with opportunities, not guarantees. Good old individual ruggedness, private initiative and unbridled ambition will guarantee that some will be wolves and the rest will be sheep. This applies to humanity as well as the Spotted Owl.

Lack of guarantees, however, is not a license for cannibalism. Furthermore, from the moment of birth, opportunities are not equitably distributed. A cultural philosophy of the strong preying upon the weak really does confine the species to the status of predatory ape.

To the free market apologists humans are cogs and ciphers in an impersonal process that merely redeploys the available resources.

<169>The redeployment of available resources,<170> is simply another way of saying that wholesale human destruction and the misery of the vast majority of human individuals is an acceptable price to pay to maintain the status quo and lifestyles of a class privileged with the possession of ludicrously vast amounts of wealth, power and opportunity. Redeployment of resources and human destruction are fundamentally identical terms, since the results are the same.

In addition, in the human case, the resources are not saved or redeployed. The resources may be useful to plants, roaches and sharks, but in terms of the human species and its culture the resource are lost. Natural resources are expended, some of which are not renewable. Human effort and creativity are wasted on such trivia as war and crime instead of famine and disease. Finally, the experience of human life that is thrown away to ignorance and the wastes of the free market is lost forever.

That life is sacred comes under the vague headings of belief, value and choice. Beyond legalism and moralism life is sacred on the grounds that it is the only organism we know of that appreciates the universe, smells the roses and considers the ramifications of predation. Life experiences this magnificent world and in that sense, an admittedly poetic sense, life is sacred enough to not be abused when there is a choice and there are alternative means.

Stimulation of creative production and the motivation to endure meaningless labor, both cultural and individual, is considered to be a another fundamental law of nature. Economic productivity is assumed to be more sacred than human life itself. Any economic theory based on one free lunch and infinite resources finds that it is mandatory that productivity always increases and population forever grows. Otherwise there is no one left to pass the debt on to, and the human cattle pens are underutilized.

Stimulation is usually defined as enthusiasm for playing the essentially trivial game of free market predation. Economic stimulation usually assumes a system of rewards and punishments as motivation. Otherwise the naturally lazy and shiftless human animal would simply nap its life away basking in the afternoon sun.

There are two primary arenas of reward/punishment. The first is the physical survival of the organism and involves wealth, power and access to critical resources.

The second is to pander to egotistical inadequacy.

The threat of punishment is by far the greater motivation. The threat of physical suffering and a short life is the primary motivation for cultural predation.

But the fact remains that there are two kinds of stimulation, one for the predator and another for the prey. Stimulation for the cattle in fundamentally a PR ploy to keep the herd from stampeding. Each economic cog must remain docile and in place and follow the rules that are laid out for cattle. This is necessary so that the economic predators are able to feed off the labor of the cattle with a minimum amount of risk and inconvenience. Stimulation for the prey is the punishment/reward system that is represented in the tension between driving a two-year-old Toyota or standing in the welfare line.

The stimulation package for the predatory elite differs radically. It is based entirely on a reward/reward system as represented by the tension between buying a new Lexus, taking a six month cruise, or both. For the economic predator the threats and punishments are reduced improbable trivialities.

The level of motivation of the prey in the presence of rampaging predators declines. No one is highly motivated when it becomes obvious that their fate is confined to the status of cattle. The benefits of stimulation do not apply to the species as a whole, but only to successful predators.

Every predator is some other predator's prey. No predator is ultimately successful. Even so, the predatory elite are very much inclined to cooperate in the care, feeding and slaughter of the cattle.

On the other hand the promise of reward for the prey is limited to low odds, small chances and unequal opportunity. Recently, the only acceptable medium of reward has been confined to money (not necessarily wealth). This degrades any system of values that lies outside the arena of money including art, spiritual undertakings, empathy, learning and the pursuit of joy, peace, liberty, justice and wisdom.

The disparity is too great between the out-of-control predators and the prey. The physical survival of a subset of individual humans does not require the massive starvation, poverty and death of the majority of the species. It can well afford a more equitable distribution of necessities without serious loss of perceived rewards.

Cultural predation does not tend to stimulate the creation of products beneficial to the entire species, but to products beneficial to the subset of cannibalistic predators. The products tend to be oriented toward war and other cultural control mechanisms. Even what benefits are produced by stimulation are confined to the elite.

Egotistical inadequacy seems to be primarily relieved only by some perceived value, elevated status or power relative to other humans, usually in the form of dominance and manipulation. Certain types of infantile humans must accumulate power, as wealth or otherwise, in order to appropriate resources that might otherwise have been used by others. Certain predators are, moreover, only mollified by egomaniacal gratifications such as intellectual, scientific and artistic recognition and superiority over others.

This is nothing less than infantile egotism. It is entirely contrary to love or empathy.

This form of self-worth is based on dominance and not on the empathic recognition of the unicentric nature of other human beings. That is, other humans can only be perceived as either threats or as potential prey.

Empathy, on the other hand, is teachable. Since not every human is likely to become a mystic, then education and cultural controls are necessary. The least acceptable teachable skill must be empathy. When eleven-year-old children are commonly involved in sadistic murders it may be assumed that the cultural mechanism for teaching empathy has failed. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are no longer cultural icons, nor would they fit easily into today's headlines about children.

There is little doubt that cultural predation promotes a tendency toward destruction, not creation.

Destruction of large scale cultural artifacts such as the break up of GM or ITT may be necessary on one level, but it does not map isomorphically as an analogy to justify the destruction of human life.

More human resources in the forms of intellect, creativity and ingenuity are dedicated to the engines of destruction, significantly war and weaponry, and to economic theft than are devoted to products that promote the general welfare of the species. Such engines of destruction are necessary to maintain the hunting superiority of a class of economic predators.

Even if the loss of human resources were less so, any and all resources lost to such ends are forever lost as unrecoverable waste. Outdated tanks and airplanes represent human life, wealth and resources that are forever unrecoverable.

Human impotence is the final motivation for the egotistical and infantile predilection toward human destruction and cultural predation.

The cultural rewards that are promulgated as motivation for predatory behavior can be supplanted by teaching other types of ego fulfillment; empathy, the security implied by human cooperation, and the relief of stress placed on individuals and the culture by the threat of cannibalistic predation.

The animal model of predation is not productive in an evolutionary sense once culture has emerged. It is devolutionary and atavistic.

Darwinian evolution may not be entirely random, but it is not evolution by design. It is controlled by arbitrary events and the complex vagaries of environment and resources. To merely enhance Darwinian evolution is by no means an evolutionary leap. To merely use science and technology as a means to enhance our ability to prey on one another is not an evolutionary gain for the species.

Evolution by design is a definite, and hitherto unknown, leap as opposed to evolution by survival of the fittest. It turns out that survival of the fittest is a tautology; what survives is the fittest and the fittest is what survives. There is no fundamental law or intelligence that determines what the concept <169>fittest<170> is meant to define.

Evolution is analogous to awareness becoming conscious in an act of self-awareness. The obvious step for a species that has evolved intelligence by forces external to itself is to use that intelligence to engineer its own evolution by design.

At some point, it is reasonable to assume, that the animal model, predation and even biological life itself may be transcended.

The human species has already evolved certain systems beyond the animal model.

The most obvious is that of culture as a trans-generational, exobiotic media for the preservation and transmission of information.

Another is technology, a means of manipulating the environment with tools beyond the physical body.

Technology has given the species a global and near instantaneous media of information transmission; the burgeoning networks based on computers, television, telephone.

It is a system whose complexity is approaching that of an artificial intelligence. A non-biological and non-sexual intelligence will not be bound to animal models of predation.

A bionic symbiosis between the human animal and machine intelligence may become feasible provided the species survives long enough to implement it.

Genetic engineering is already in its infancy. The ability to evolve according to intelligent purpose is now a possibility.

Potential gains in human empathy, increased intellectual ability, telepathy and the higher forms of spiritual realizations and experiences are no longer impossible fantasies, or even unlikely dreams. They are realistic human goals.

Culture as a complex organism is capable of maturation and consciousness in the sense that the sum total of human brains are the basis of a cultural mind, or consciousness.

An increased density of human minds in addition to enhanced connectivity and complexity resulting from electronic media allow for the possibility of the evolution of a cultural consciousness.

More functional, more mature humans yield a greater chance of cultural evolution. If more humans are allowed the privilege of creative thought by being released from the threat of human predation, then true stimulus for the progress of human culture is greatly enhanced.

For this reason there is an urgent and imperative need to promote human maturity and functionality, not merely to breed human cattle.

Although complex systems require a tension between cooperation and competition, the emphasis on competition alone in our culture is a prescription for catastrophe. There is a now a mandatory requirement to shift that emphasis to cooperation.

There is little doubt that cooperation results in higher productivity for the kinds of goods that are humanly useful.

There is less waste, enhanced creativity and real problems are targeted in lieu of the problems resulting from the pursuit of more effective means of human cannibalism and predation.

An intelligent species that cannot transcend cultural predation may be to smart for its own good. Intelligent predation as reflected in cultural cannibalism may guarantee racial extinction. The logical conclusion of cultural predation is Auschwitz.

The analogies of natural law range from particle behavior to the law of the jungle. They do not map one to one to the behavior of the human species because the species has the additional qualities of intelligence and culture which transcend those models at a fundamental level.

Wolves do predate other wolves for the purposes of population control, but they cooperate to predate other species. Wolves also abandon their young in the interests of population control. It is interesting to note that competition between adults is avoided when controlling population by terminating the young. This is a form of birth control similar to abortion.

Other species also utilize cannibalism. Overpopulated rats will lapse into psychotic cannibalism to reduce the population.

Animal cannibalism does not contain an ethical factor. It is a matter of pragmatic survival. Wolves do not ponder at what point an embryo has a soul. Human economic and martial cannibalism does contain an ethical factor since humans have alternative means of population control and the ethical awareness to use them.

Economic predation does not limit population. It promotes poverty and nothing promotes increases in population like poverty.

Predation promotes a lower IQ species wide by denying proper nutrition and ineffective education. It wastes resources, both natural and human. It absorbs more wealth on welfare for dysfunctional humans. It decreases productivity and arrests intellectual and cultural progress. It arrests cultural development in a morass of infantile aggression. It denies the value of intelligence and evolution.

War represents only a minor perturbation in the overall escalation of population. In spite of war, the fact is that population density has steadily increased. In fact, aside from the initial population decrease due to untimely death, war often promotes population increases such as the World War II baby boom. It also promotes a false economic stimulus based on military industries which in turn promotes the illusion of false resources but still it produces nothing to meet the needs of the increased population. The weapons in turn stimulate the impulse to war.

Economic predation does not improve the conditions of the species en masse. It promotes the well being of a predatory and cannibalistic sub species who do nothing to restrain population, but encourage it much in the manner of any cattle rancher. They do not behave as a species performing cannibalism for the purposes of population control. They behave more like one species preying on another.

Economic predation occurs when the perceived resources do not fulfill the perceived needs of the population. But often the perceived needs are excessive. Greed or infantile egotism are the only explanations possible when the perceived needs of the elite are so clearly beyond biological necessity.

Using economic predation to solve these problems is to deny intelligence and culture as viable human functions. It reduces the species to termites and hyenas.

If Wittgenstein was correct that value and belief are beyond the limits of knowledge and science, then the ability of the species to evolve beyond known paradigms may depend solely on value and belief.

The final disposition of humanity becomes a function of human choice. If the species chooses to believe that predation is a fundamental law and adopts it as its operational paradigm then predation will never be transcended.

Predation may marginally perform certain function, but none that intelligence and culture cannot do less traumatically. Predation will certainly terminate the species in a morass of waste, population and aggression.

If the species chooses instead to accept the possibility of evolution over predation the worst case is that it may fail to survive. In which case, it has lost nothing since predation would have terminated the species in any case. But there is everything to gain by choosing to evolve, to become, finally, gods unto ourselves.

Predation is not the only solution to the problems of garbage collection and other forms of ethnic cleansing. Nor is it the only solution available in answer to the need for creative stimulation.

Cannibalism is unnecessary because dysfunctional humans will proportionally decline relative to functional individuals in a mature culture with a controlled or declining population.

If basic biological and emotional needs must be met in order to prevent revolutionary unrest, immense sums of human wealth, resources and creativity will be saved by not having to police, control, or destroy a massive dysfunctional population which could be left to quietly go about the business of breeding itself out.

It is the recidivist anachronisms such as cultural predators, cannibalistic aggression, war and free market pseudo-economics that comprise the current sub-species of Neo-Neanderthals.

With a modicum of intelligence the new species can simply wait for them to breed themselves into extinction. Such recidivists truly belong on the windy plains of Troy hacking one another to pieces, not in a world of high technical capabilities and newly acquired cultural values and freedoms. The bronze age free market predators will eventually go the way of the Neanderthal either by cultural control, education or simply by breeding out.

The alternative is for the entire species to disappear through runaway population and extinction by mindless wars, cannibalism, economic collapse and ecological exhaustion.

In the likely case of catastrophe then it becomes imperative for an intelligent, self-evolving species to preserve such resources as information, technology, culture and the means to biological survival. Perhaps this may occur in conjunction with an artificial intelligence and certainly through large scale computer networks.

The minuscule stimulation provided by predation is more than offset by the waste of time, resources and human creativity, and by the ever increasing population which it promotes.

Greater stimulation is provided by a system that emphasizes rewards rather than threats and punishment. This awareness is demonstrated by those industries and corporations that have come to realize that happy employees, having fun and not being subjected to undue stress, are more productive employees.

It is cooperation as opposed to competition that enhances creativity. Brainstorming is a typical example.

Culture allows freedom from the jungle, from predation and from the perpetual necessities of biological survival. Such freedom permits the luxury of creative thinking. Culture in evolutionary terms is a media that preserves and transmits information outside the physical organism of the species.

If every human being died the culture would still exist separately as long as the physical media exists in exactly the same way that Mozart's 27th Piano concerto exists as sheet music and recordings, on paper, plastic or magnetic storage without Mozart, a musician or an audience.

In all other predators information outside the genetic code is preserved and transmitted by the physical organism. Interrupt the generations and the education passed directly from parent to young and the cheetah or the wolf is no longer able hunt effectively.

Beyond its individual constituent members a culture exists in a synergistic way. The sum of the culture is already far beyond the capability of the individual to absorb its total informational content.

Humans en masse as a culture behave the way water molecules do in a pipe, as yeast behaves in grape juice, and as big fish eat little fish. They do no behave en masse as an intelligent human individual does. Culture exists independently of its component humans for no other reason than this pragmatic distinction; to this date human culture has displayed no high level of intelligence.

If cultural evolution and maturity depends on a complex organization of interconnected mature minds, then it is not population that needs to be increased. The ratio of mature minds to dysfunctional minds needs to increase.

Technology needs to evolve media of more complex organization and greater connectivity such as newly emerging computer networks. Population needs to decline in order to secure creative space free of predatory stress.

To say that only individuals create intellectual products is false. Einstein is credited with creating relativity. Setting aside the problem as to whether this was creativity or discovery, without culture to provide a medium of biological security, language and the preservation and transmission of information, Einstein would have had to reinvent language, mathematics, physics, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton from scratch, and then get on to the task of relativity.

Had Einstein been abandoned on a deserted island he may have come up with a better way to crack a coconut, but he wouldn't even have a word for coconut, let alone E=mc®MDSU¯2®MDNM¯.

Creative mental products are the result of a cooperative synergism between culture and its individual members.

Individual humans are the medium through which a culture creates mental products in exactly the same way Mozart uses a piano as a means to manifest an actual piano concerto.

If an electronic machine assembles a widget from components we cannot properly say that it creates or produces the widget ex nihilo. The machine requires an electric power supply, other machines to supply the components, a human culture to design and build the machine, the concept of the widget and raw materials.

There is no single human artifact or creation that was accomplished by some human completely outside a cultural matrix. Culture is necessary to human creative thought.

If Heraclitus was right that the primary fact of existence is change and that life itself is a constant state of flux and evolution, then certainly predation is another phase that, in time, will pass during the course of the evolution of intelligence and complex organization. Indeed, biological life itself may only be a passing phase. A machine may not require the model of animal predation to perpetuate itself or to further evolve.

To date science has chosen to limit itself to the set of known observables. These observables cannot represent the sum total of reality. They certainly do not represent that which has not yet evolved.

The human species must consider potential evolution beyond known observables and the paradigm of the jungle in order to evolve beyond the death of cultural stasis.

Because we have observed evolution only to the point of predation does not mean that predation is an end point or final product of evolution.

The universe, life and culture seem to evolve toward complex organization, recursive self reference, self generation, self awareness, self evolution and sentient minds.

If Heraclitian flux is the case then predation may be a passing state in the course of evolution.

Infinity is the final refuge for the argument that mind is epiphenomenal and that evolution is the happy accident resulting from an infinite number of improbable traits randomly generated, that is, generated without benefit of design.

In order to accommodate the extreme improbabilities it is necessary to suppose a universe infinite in time, or infinite in extension, or an infinite number or universes, or all of the above.

Infinity implies that everything occurs and nothing is necessary and that intelligent purpose is irrelevant.

Even if it were so it is not provable and so we come back to belief and choice of action. It is better to choose to believe and act as though we can design our own evolution and are able to engineer a better culture. If we fail, then at least we fail having tried.

Competitive predation does not universally stimulate creative thinking.

It is a telling argument in the defense of predation that even the most enlightened and intelligent human individual must behave in a parasitical and predatory manner if for no other reason than to maintain biological survival.

Yet, given culture, biological survival is our least creative act. And, en masse, as a culture it is not yet proven that we are not steadily populating ourselves to extinction.

Some individuals give up in the face of overwhelming predation, such as in Somalia or as in urban hopelessness and apathy. They are not motivated by extreme duress to produce works of art or a better mousetrap. They lose hope instead, and find death a tolerable release. Some people will only produce for rewards and benefits.

In many cases an individual's most creative work is not motivated as a response to the threat of predation, social ostracism, ego gratification, or the biological necessity as represented by money. The work is often created in spite of the fact there is no reward and that the overall sensation is one of being punished in terms of biological and economic well being. For many people creative work is its own reward.

For some individuals the primary drive seems to be knowing and creating. The motivations of status, wealth and comfort are a distant second and the threat of punishment is meaningless.

Predation may be perceived to be operationally functional in the less intelligent species such as big fish and little fish. On the whole these species have populations that have declined or remained static, with the exception of those species that are parasitical to human culture.

In spite of mutual predation the human species has steadily increased in population. Predation does not work either as garbage collection, population control or as a creative stimulation.

No fish ever had an idea for a new solution to the problem of a dwindling food supply. The options for fish seem to be limited to either extinction or the happy accident of genetic mutation.

The only argument that the free market apologists seem to be putting forward is that of scarce resources. If primitive needs such as food, shelter, clothing and a degree of human dignity and satisfaction could be met by cooperative means instead of competitive means, there still remains some resource that will be considered scarce.

This is so if for no other reason than the fact that infantile humans will always require something to aggrandize themselves with, some means to shore up a flabby ego. The only solution to this is education and the reengineering of primary myths.

If it is true that there will always be some scarce resource and some infantile human, then at some level there will always be predation and competition. They are trivial instances in comparison to the benefits that could be achieved by cooperation. Such runaway predation and competition as represented by free market feeding frenzies needs to be severely curtailed. At the more fundamental level of resources and needs there is no longer any need for predation, and that in fact, it degenerates the quality of life for all humans and has put us within viewing distance of annihilation.

THE NECESSITY OF COOPERATION<R>AND THE REFUTATION OF COMPETITION

Complexity research involves almost entirely computer models of complex systems.

Such models as <169>Life<170> and <169>BOIDS<170> have revealed that very complex behavior evolves from simple rules, that order can arise from disorder and that initial starting conditions are critical to the emergence of complex structures and their behavior.

Since the behavior of these models appears to map very closely to complex systems such as the evolution of life, intelligence, culture and economies it is assumed that the rules that govern complex computer systems also govern life, intelligence and economies. This is a serious leap of belief but is also not an unreasonable assumption.

The most telling argument against it is that complex systems are deterministic and that the brain, intelligence and fundamental reality may have operational access to random events.

The attraction to complexity is that it precludes the improbable explanation of random evolution by chance adaptation. Moreover it precludes both purpose and divinity; two concepts repugnant to scientific reductionism. The problem with random evolution is that it is ridiculously improbable. Complexity permits a highly probable and deterministic emergence of complex structures from disorder in a very short time. Since it is deterministic and not random it just feels more like a scientific law.

Complexity precludes non-deterministic improbabilities but reintroduces purpose. Every complex model has heuristic rules that establish the behavior of the actors or logical objects within its logical space.

Computers themselves, on which every complex model runs, are highly deterministic.

Purpose is everywhere present in complex systems. In order to rid complexity of this scientific embarrassment great effort has been focused on eliminating heuristic rules. The rules became simpler, more primitive and essentially something analogous to hidden variables.

But the rules cannot be eliminated in principle. At the root of every model is heuristic rules. If nothing else there are the binary rules that govern the hardware and the software. There is always the machine architect, the engineer and the programmer. Their collective goals, purposes and wishes determine the rules which underlie every model. Teleology and purpose are inherent in every complex system.

When is became obvious that purpose could not be eliminated it was disguised with such terms as teleology and purpose and was said to not exist in the system. What existed was heuristic rules. When heuristic rules were discovered to be purpose in disguise they were simplified or changed and then renamed as just rules.

A rule by any other name is still a purpose.

But the real issue is not whether or not purpose exists in complex systems. The real discovery of complexity is that complex systems are programmable with the selection of simple, primitive rules.

By far the most favorite rule selected for a complex system is the competition for finite resources.

This is, of course, loading the dice with the underlying heuristic rule that implies that all economic systems are fundamentally competitive. To no great amazement the Santa Fe Institute was able to prove to Citibank that competition was the fundamental behavior of all economic entities. It is perfectly alright to be a predator because it has now been elevated to the status of a scientific law. And science has the chutzpah to giggle at the incredible leaps of faith taken by religious thought.

But besides purpose another forbidden economic ghost appeared in the machine. No economic model based on complexity alone will evolve into a stable complex structure. A complex economic structure requires cooperation.

In fact, a close examination of the models reveals that competition is a cannibalistic type of theft occurs between predators. Cooperation is the complex behavior of predators making maximum usage of resources.

In computer emulations of the Prisoner's Dilemma, a strategy called Tit-For-Tat always wins in competition for scarce resources. It is a fundamentally a cooperative strategy. The evidence that it maps closely to real world competition is tenuous at best. It assumes informed and intelligent players. It assumes a set of rules that favor cooperation, whereas in the real world, competition is often weighted with advantage. It assumes that the informed players have total and equal access to game history and information. It assumes that informed players know everything about the rules and logical space from the very first interaction. It assumes such a small number of players that it guarantees repeated interactions. It assumes non-lethal first encounters and it does not deal with situations of diminishing resources and massively monolithic cooperative structures analogous to corporations, nations and armies. Nevertheless, Tit-For-Tat shows a striking evolution of and necessity for cooperation. Cooperation outperforms competition every time.

BOIDS on the other hand excludes competition and establishes only the rules of interrelation between logical actors and their cooperative behavior in relation to alien objects. The logical actors, BOIDS, display behavior strikingly similar to the way flocks of birds fly in formation and avoid obstacles.

Cooperation is seen to be a more fundamental rule than competition. Cooperation is the successful strategy in a logical space that includes competition, and it is the successful strategy in logical spaces and exclude competition. Competition alone produces only anarchy and chaos. Rules, by definition, establish cooperative relations.

The hidden agenda that motivates the funding of complexity by business is to find a convincing camouflage to hide the fact that all business entities do in fact cooperate together in order to commit predatory theft from human cattle. The cattle are not permitted to plunder in return and so the <169>market<170> is not <169>free<170> in any meaningful sense. The only real competition is between human needs and business interests.

The essential point here is that a system that closely resembles economic systems can be created with fundamental heuristic rules that favor the evolution, success and survival of cooperation as opposed to a system that evolves competition and terminates in annihilation.

The problem is that all economic solutions until now have been aimed at high level, top down regulation. It is not possible to achieve the goal with binary monetary systems, communism, socialism, basic incomes or maximum allowable wealth. Economic entities cannot be forced into certain behaviors by the creation of new laws, regulations and institutions. This only adds to the system overhead which is ineffective in any case and only hasten system collapse.

The solution lies in the engineering of low level, bottom heuristic rules as opposed to law and regulation. This is the only sense in which anarchy has meaningful utility. Getting rid of legal and regulatory overhead is only good sense. It is the primitive heuristic rules which allow egalitarian societies based on abundance rather than scarcity.

It is known that the nature of man is neither competetive/agressive nor cooperative/empathic. In early kinship, pre-agrarian societies it was the heuristic rules of survival that allowed for cooperative and empathic behavior to operate as the nature of man. In tributary societies, either free market or socialistic, the heuristic rules favor competition and aggression.

Cooperative and empathic economics is designable as a complex adaptive system. It is achievable if research organizations such as the Santa Fe Institute could find the funding and moral backbone to pursue the research.

The fundamental issue that really faces the species is the determination of which paradigm will be the surviving evolutionary mechanism.

The first paradigm is that the underlying programs and heuristic rules of the universe, the laws of the jungle, are so fundamental that sentience will always remain enslaved and bounded by those laws of the jungle. In which case we should all become stock brokers and insurance salesmen.

The contrary paradigm is that intelligence will transcend its matrix of primitive programs and heuristic rules, realize the possibilities of self genesis and reprogram a better universe with new heuristic rules based on sentient purpose.

Michael Andrews

01/10/2003