Considering the Little Things

I'm haunted by the fact that kindness and cooperation aren't the status quo.  I'm haunted by the fact that truth and reason don't invariably win against ignorance and irrationality.  Although I understand the mechanisms and motivations underlying the way things are, my understanding stops short of why we haven't made things better.  I know that there are people who agree with me on most of these things, and yet every day I feel like I'm a lone madman shouting at the sky.

Some people describe me as a nice guy as if it were some sort of anomaly or as if I've done something amazing just because I like to help in little ways.  They see me go out of my way to hold a door or help a stranger pick up something they've dropped, and maybe these acts of kindness don't happen enough, but in truth they take almost no time, effort, or other expense to undertake.  It's not as though I've rescued someone out of the way of a bus or donated my kidney to a dying stranger.  I like to think I would rise to the occasion should such extreme measures be necessary, but until such situation arises as they are, I'm hesitant to say for sure.

It requires so little to help people in little ways, yet it benefits everyone involved--perhaps not a lot, but more than a little--and so I don't understand why being friendly and helpful aren't the default states for people.  Yet I do understand that the problem is self-perpetuating--cruelty and conflict breeds mistrust and withdrawal from unnecessary interaction with strangers, leading only to more cruelty and conflict.  As such, if we focus on the evil in the world and in others, we'll end up adding to it, but if we look for the good, we'll not only find it, but we'll spread more.

Moreover, because of the nature of the feedback involved, we can't expect things to sort themselves out.  We have to continuously seek to be something better.  It seems that a lot of people try to decide who deserves help or who deserves kindness, believing that they shouldn't have to be kind to someone acting cruel, but this just limits kindness to persist where it already exists.  If it's spread, we have to take initiative, especially when so often I've found that kindness can diffuse cruelty better than conflict.  And often even good people slip--after a long day of cumulative troubles, or stressed by responsibilities, we all are jerks occasionally.  And, when we slip, we would want people to be sympathetic, offering us kindness, and so, too, is it important that we offer kindness to others even when they're acting like jerks.

Another problem is that many people confuse kindness for weakness, and they confuse strength for aggression.  It should be obvious, though, that showing kindness to someone being cruel does not involve siding with them.  I'm not expecting anyone to see cruelty and offer to help be cruel; I'm simply asking that we not be cruel to those who themselves are.  Returning cruelty for cruelty just makes people defensive, polarizing those involved and strengthening resolve on both sides.  However, kindness can often change minds.

I think, in the end, what terrifies me most, though, is that when it's so rare that someone's a good person in the little things, I don't know how we'll ever fix the bigger problems.  Every day we plunge deeper into economic disparities, government corruption, environmental pillaging, and a society of blame that--in addition to keeping us from being more helpful--diffuses responsibility so that no one's at fault and nothing is getting done.  Yet we can't even figure out how to do the little things.  We can't manage to be kind indiscriminately, especially in the little things, so how are we to change the world where it needs it most?  Because, certainly, it needs it.

A Brief History of Wealth

During the dawn of civilization when man was finding out that his intellect was useful for more than sharpening sticks and building fires, we began to farm, domesticating flora and fauna alike.  Suddenly, we had food that we didn't have to send groups out to track and hunt or tediously gather from plants scattered through the wilderness.  It wasn't perfect--it was still subject to droughts, pests, etc., and it was still laborious--but compared to the previous hunter-gatherer condition, there was now a greater abundance than there had been.

And this abundance brought change.  As we advanced our farming techniques and bred better, more robust, higher yielding crops and livestock, fewer people had to work to feed a community.  Indeed, we had more room for community, with everyone fed by the same farm, we had less reason to compete and more reason to cooperate.  And since fewer and fewer people needed to focus on acquiring food, this opened up opportunity for people to focus on other things.  People could devote their time to specific crafts--building homes or ships, weaving baskets or tapestries, even playing music or telling stories.  The artifacts available to the community increased in quality as the artisans were more free to practice their arts, and new arts, technologies, and even regions or natural phenomena could be explored.

Then, as we advanced, instead of just having the recent kill and some foraged berries, or even just a few varieties of crops, we had all sorts of marketable goods, from breads to beers to beef to blankets to baskets to bowls and beyond, and one can imagine that bartering became increasingly complex.  So, things changed.  Someone, somewhere, decided that instead of trading for things you needed, you could trade for something you didn't need, but which itself could be traded for things you needed.  It had no inherent value (although it was probably originally made from some kind of precious metal like gold that had some kind of value due to aesthetic, workability, and scarcity, but formed into a small disk with no practical application), but because everyone somehow agreed that it could be used to trade for things that had actual, inherent value, then it had value through equivalence.

Suddenly trading was easier.  We had more stuff available to our community, and it was easier for us to acquire the stuff we wanted.  We no longer had to worry about how many fish were equal in value to a pair of sandals, we could just use little shiny bits to trade for the sandals or fish we wanted.
But then things kept changing.  Somewhere along the way, we forgot that these coins had no real value--even as raw material, since they weren't to be used as raw material, that value was abandoned.  Somehow, we thought that because we had established this metric of value, the numbers we applied to things now meant something.  We invented this idea of "wealth".  Some merchants along the way undoubtedly noticed that some customers were willing to pay more for something than other customers would, and they started standardizing prices and tried to maximize the amount of wealth they could accumulate, which makes some sense because more wealth means more stuff.  But the problem was when they abandoned bartering altogether, holding fast to standardized prices, not because they only had so much to sell, but they knew they could sell it for more.  When there is indeed significantly less supply than demand, prices will go up, but sometimes when there is ample supply but enough of the demand will pay a certain amount, the part that would pay slightly less is excluded, resulting in a loss of goods for those consumers and wealth for the merchant (albeit, less wealth than the merchant would have had if the goods were sold at the designated price, but still if he had goods that weren't being sold, the wealth was lost).  We, as a people, began sacrificing abundance for this illusive idea of wealth.

Moreover, we developed this idea of exclusivity--that having something that others did not made you better, even if it meant nothing in practicality, or was available in abundance but simply overpriced.  Whole trades were created based on this concept.  And, worse, still, we combined concepts of exclusivity and our supply and demand to invent artificial scarcities, controlling the markets on certain goods so thoroughly that they could be sold for whatever cost, despite their actual usefulness or abundance.

Others, still, realized they could accumulate wealth by simply manipulating other wealth, moving it from here to there, even in imaginary contexts, and letting people use it a for a little bit but then making them give a little bit more back.  And so new systems were created that were based entirely around this concept of wealth--self-contained feedback loops that served no external purpose except as necessary to fuel their own existence.  Wealth became a whole craft unto itself, despite the fact that wealth, still, had acquired no intrinsic value.

All the while, our society drifted further and further form the things that allowed this wealth to come into being in the first place--abundance and community, which allowed for higher standards of living, specialized artisans, and technological advancement which led to the invention of money and this illusion of wealth in the first place.  Yet money is not bad--it facilitates advancement when used correctly.  Neither are the interplay of supply and demand nor even wealth itself inherently wrong.  The problem only exists because of this further pursuit of exclusivity and the illusion of scarcity.

I must ask: Why cannot everyone be wealthy?  In this age of mass-production, we have the technology available to further automation and make goods of ever increasing quality widely available, but because the focus is on the money and not the products, the consumers, or the community, money and quality are both sacrificed in the end.  Yet if we increased automation where possible, we'd decrease manufacturing costs and increase standard of living.  Most people see only that people would be put out of jobs, but fewer would have to work in families as the cost of living decreases, and there would be more room for pursuit of other careers, much like when agriculture opened our society initially to the opportunity for specialization.

I believe if we embrace our abundance instead of hiding it under the guise of exclusivity for the purpose of wealth, we'll take strides forward similar to those taken when we first became civilized and invented money, back when we still understood that it was simply a tool to facilitate society instead of something to be pursued in and of itself.  The problem is not the illusion of wealth, but the idea that wealth is the primary motivator instead of just a product of grander motivations.

As discussed in my last entry, we already have new means available for accessing global niche markets, and moreover certain new internet-driven concepts like choosing what we pay for albums demonstrates that our economy is shifting, but not enough on its own.  There is still room for us to remember that money is a tool, not a goal, and that wealth is something we get for being better craftsman and innovators, not something we get because we seek wealth alone.  We need only shift our focus to community, choosing to cooperate instead of compete, as discussed throughout my entries, and we can achieve a new abundance instead of unnecessarily reverting to the bitter competition of a hunter-gatherer society.  We can all be wealthy.

Occupy Our Street

Our businesses are run by businessmen, economies influenced by economists, and markets dictated by marketers; we should not be the least bit surprised when much of the machinations that drive our society are themselves driven by and for pure profit.  We should not be surprised that when we let only some of the players determine the rules for the game, those players come out ahead.  Yet somehow this is exactly how we seem to be, and so when we fight the corporate corruption or self-sustaining systems of wealth, we do so in their court with their rules, and we accomplish nothing but reinforcing their apparent power.
Yet these corporate constructs are just that—artifacts of our society that only hold power if we give them power.  Money is a form of communication—granted, not in direct parallel with language, but it is a form of communication.  And like words, the meaning of money is not inherent—there is no special law in the universe dictating that money has any inherent value, power, or meaning, just like there is no innate property of the letters or phonemes that make up a word like “ant” that give it meaning independent of our attributions of such.  As such, money is at its best a tool to facilitate certain exchanges between people, and at its worst an illusion, too often used to manipulate and control.
Now, I am certainly not arguing against the idea of money or currency.  Money is a necessary part of our society, at least for the foreseeable future, and it is a useful tool for our society.  All I wish to do is remind us as a whole that money is only a tool or a symbol, and it has no real power.  If we blame our failures on money itself, it would be like blaming our loss in chess on the pieces.  Of course, neither can we expect the other players to simply let us win.  I’ve expressed in previous entries that life is very much not a competition, unlike a game, and I explained why we should be motivated to choose cooperation over competition whenever possible, but we cannot expect everyone to simply accept this philosophy outright, especially when they are apparently quite successful in lieu of it.
Neither, though, am I saying we, just this once, compete against those who will not cooperate.  We have no need to make those who currently control the game change things, nor should we ever be surprised when our fist-shaking and finger-pointing fail to inspire them to do so.  Instead, we should simply change the rules ourselves.  We need only essentially play a different game—one of our own design that uses money only as the tool it is and not as some all-powerful, all-motivating force of the universe.
We can instead let other factors motivate us.  We can cooperate and still come out ahead, all the while happier and with better friendships.  We can make our decisions not only as consumers but as producers or service providers not on simply costs and profits but on quality, creativity, and ingenuity.
Gandhi said "Be the change that you wish to see in the world," and as I illustrated in previous entries, changing the world really is as simple as being a better person and helping other become better people, and the same strategy applies to business, politics, society, and anywhere else we find that needs changed.  I have seen that there are a lot of people out there who want to change the economic machine, but instead of occupying Wall Street, where we as literally as possible play in our opponent's court, we should simply move the game to our courts.
Moreover, the progression of our technology is facilitating a new shape for our economy.  Kickstarter has made investing not about expected financial returns, but investing in things we feel deserving.  The internet has moreover facilitated the existence of niche markets not fueled, designed, and dictated by corporations but by small businesses and individuals.  So, in addition to my usual message of cooperation, here I encourage all of us to utilize these technological tools available to facilitate a better economic environment, but at the same time to not rely on them to fix things for us.  It is still us who make the rules, and it is still us who play the game.  It is still us who decide if we play co-op or versus.  Most importantly, though, it is us who decide what game we play.

Robots in Hats

Note: The following is a post I made for my Facebook page, Robots in Hats, and is obviously less serious than some of my other posts.

You might find yourself asking, why put robots in hats?  To answer this, first we must ask, why bother with robots at all?

Of course, robots are great at a number of tasks.  We already use them for repetitive industrial tasks or extremely dangerous situations, but the potential applications are far from exhausted.  From minimum wage fastfood preparation where apathetic teens can't be bothered to accurately position cheese on a sandwich to dangerous mines where human lives are still risked daily, our society would benefit greatly from automation.

At first there is a concern about putting people out of work, and although I could pass this off as the nature of progress--for it surely is--the efficiency of pervasive robotic production would eventually lower the cost of living substantially, reducing the number of households with multiple jobs, thus allowing the natural unemployment rate to rise without compromising our standard of living.

Of course, there will still be jobs.  Most obviously, there will be a sharp increase in robot-related jobs: design, programming, maintenance, etc.  Moreover, much of the public would still prefer human-to-human interaction (and, to be fair, our capabilities of computational linguistics and speech recognition are severely lacking).  Many jobs in human relations should be created, allowing for a smooth transition into a robot-rich society and simply facilitating comfort amongst our fellow men.

In fact, this shift towards jobs where the primary requirements are communication skills and kindness would necessitate the nurturing of such skills within our own people, improving the nature of society as a whole.  Even those not immediately employed as such will benefit through empathy and imitation as well as the more apparent reward of never having to deal with frustrated sandwichsmiths during their day-to-day.

So, why put robots in hats?  Simply hiring smiling faces to tell you to ignore the robot behind the curtain will not be enough to integrate them into our society.  There will be robots out amongst people, whether delivering food (within a restaurant or across a city), cleaning messes, or otherwise diligently doing their duties where they can be seen.  At first this may seem acceptable, and to most it would be.  But there are those among our society who would have problems with this.  There are many who, through misunderstanding, would not be accepting of the robots.  There are others who understand perhaps too well that robots are not people, and the likelihood of vandalism against autonomous machines operating amongst people would be disturbingly high.

As such, it is necessary to create the illusion that robots are both friendly and relatable.  Most efforts to this end so far have been to make them more human, but as we progressed, we discovered the Valley of the Uncanny.  If you've ever seen one of those Japanese robots made to look and act like a human and found them to be somewhat off-putting if not downright creepy, then you're already familiar with the Valley of the Uncanny if not by name.  Yet there's a bizarre polarity to the behavior of the human brain: things that are obviously not human we have a tendency to attribute human qualities to, be they abstract personification of actions or motivations or the interpretation as a human visage--In the Man in the Moon we see a face where there is none, for instance.  Yet the more human something becomes, the more we scrutinize it, and contrarily, the more we are readily aware of what makes something not human, the more comfortable we are accepting that fact while letting it flirt with the idea of humanity.  Therefore, something that is almost human but not quite often appears to us less human than something only slightly human but obviously not.

Many of the biggest successes of relatable robots have been in entertainment, not academia or industry, and often it only takes a few suggestions of personification: a couple arms and a couple eyes is enough in the case of Wall-E, where the shape of his eye casings as they rotate slightly additionally serves to suggest the eyebrows that gave Johnny 5 much of his personality.  And although such mechanisms would be sufficient in most cases, twin cameras and fully articulated grasping arms are not necessary on most robots and would instead be costly over-engineering, and if you try to convince an engineer to add such things simply to make the robot "relatable" or "friendly", he would probably scoff before quietly contemplating why his eyes and hands didn't make him either of those things.

Yet a hat can be worn by any robot.  It doesn't need a discernible head; just something that can under the wildest of stretches be assumed as mildly head-like.  It's headishness need not determine the appropriateness of a hat; the hat will make it a head.  The hat can be adhered by whatever means necessary, and if the robot is manipulating molten metals, operating within active volcanoes, or otherwise partaking of tasks that might be less than friendly to the typical hat, then give it a hat of metal.  No one will care.  It might even appear more appropriate.

Take note that the type of hat is crucial.  A modern helmet does more to make a person look like a robot than the other way around, and a Viking helmet might not exactly be the symbol of friendliness we seek.  A ball cap could help humanize a robot, but otherwise it is entirely boring.  It seems evident that the best hat would be formal in nature, whether a top hat, bowler, fedora, or otherwise.  It not only helps us identify with the robot, it makes the robot seem dignified to be doing its job.  Also, robots in top hats are hilarious.

The Rules I Live By

For a few years now I've reduced my approach to life to six simple rules.  I don't remember for the most part what inspired them, but they've proven consistently appropriate to my life.  They are as follows:

1. Enjoy yourself.

2. Don't be a jerk.

3. Question everything.

4. Take action.

5. Put hats on robots.

6. Bacon.

Unlike most attempts at laws or commandments, they don't apply to specific situations, but each apply in many situations (except, of course, for Rule 5), and they overlap significantly in application.  However, they must be interpreted directly and fully; they must not be interpreted to justify our actions, but our actions should be made to fit the rules.

For instance, the first rule, "Enjoy yourself", is not a demand to pursue hedonism and selfish entertainment.  If this were the case, the rule would be "Do what you want".  Instead, the rule demands that we find enjoyment regardless of your situation.  Pessimism helps no one, least of all ourselves.  Yet often we've all used the excuse that we're "having a bad day", and we use this both to keep ourselves down and to justify our poor behavior around others.  We believe sometimes that they should be trying to make us feel better or at least staying out of our way, but we can hope at best for the latter, and at worst for confrontation.  However, if we try to be happy even when the universe conspires against us--to smile and be friendly even when we our hearts are not fully in it--we can make others happy, and then they will be more inclined to want to make us happy, or, failing that, we might trick ourselves into being happy.

What most people don't seem to understand is that emotions often act as feedback loops.  Certainly, other people's emotions are not the sole drive of our emotions, and our emotions are not forced upon others, but to some significant degree anger tends to beget anger, happiness begets happiness, and so on.  Moreover, anger, sadness, and fear feedback through simple causality independent of empathy; they tend to cloud our judgment, and the more we maintain these emotions, the harder it is to figure out how to create a situation for us to be happy again.

As for the second rule, "Don't be a jerk", it is important to note that there is no conditional part of the statement.  It does not say "Do not be a jerk unless they really deserve it", or "Do not actively be a jerk".  Don't be a jerk even to other jerks.  Also, it is a jerk thing to stand by and not help where we can, even if we're not ourselves hindering them either.  It's been said that "Every man is guilty of the good he does not do" (which I read is a rather interpretive translation of a quote by Voltaire), and I believe this.

On a related note, I cannot understand why people dismiss help with the claim that “I don’t need any help.”  To me, it is not a sign of weakness to accept help.  It does not demonstrate that you could not complete the task without help, but it instead shows that you are willing to facilitate both progress and camaraderie.  As such, I believe we should help those who don’t need it (but, of course, try more so to help those who do) and accept help even if we don’t need it (as long as the offer is sincere, and we are not taking advantage of our helper).

The third rule used to be phrased as “Learn something”, but when I heard the Science Channel’s slogan, “Question everything”, I decide this fit the purpose better.  An alternative, perhaps even better phrasing would be “Better yourself”, but many of the other aspects of this particular phrasing are covered by the first two rules, so I chose to stick with the more specific “Question everything”.

As far as its interpretation, it is pretty direct.  It demands that we learn about our universe, about each other, and about ourselves.  The only implications in the rule are its interaction with the first two rules: that we use what we learn to better our lives and the lives of others.

The first three rules were the original list when I created them (back when it still contained “Learn something”), and the last three were added later, each at a different time.  Rule 4, if I remember correctly, was actually added last, but being noticeably more serious than the last two, was inserted in the middle of the list.

Moreover, the first three rules were not made to convince myself to obey them.  They were essentially just a summary of what I had already learned to do with myself.  Rule 4, however, was added because I felt I was spending too much time planning and thinking then overthinking, and not enough time accomplishing anything.  Of course, Rule 3 dictates that we reflect upon what we can, but if this is all we do, then we’ll ultimately accomplish nothing.  As such, Rule 4 resulted as an application of Rule 3 to itself, and a new rule was seen to be necessary.  And, so, it is sometimes necessary to accept that we cannot know all the variables before we act, and part of ‘questioning everything’ is learning through experimentation.  We must learn as we go, and adapt likewise, thinking on our feet.

Rules 5 and 6 are, in many ways, extensions of Rule 1.  Admittedly, unlike the other rules, they are a bit more specific to my life.  I particularly enjoy these rules, and choose to maintain them as part of my rules, but they also suggest that the rules can be personalized and adapted to anyone’s needs or wants.  Although I believe that the first four are, for the most part, universal, they can sometimes benefit from additional rules.  I recommend, though, that if you add your own rules, you keep it simple.  Don’t try to create specific case-based rules for everything, or else you’ll lose yourself in the specifics.  The rules should not, at their core, dictate your specific actions, but instead should motivate them.

As far as why I chose those particular rules, firstly, bacon is its own reason.  As for the robots in hats, I will post here immediately following this entry something I wrote for a Facebook page I created to endorse the cause, Robots in Hats, which describes why I believe we should follow Rule 5.

Men Named Douglas

I think I've learned more in my life from books by men named Douglas than I have from anything else. The first of these men is the late Douglas Adams. Of course, many have read and enjoyed his books because of his witty humor, clever science fiction, and his chaotic plots. I, too, of course, loved these aspects of the books, but there was something else--numerous hints that revealed Adams' personal views and made subtle commentaries on society. It should probably be here stated if it was not already obvious that there will, in fact, be spoilers in the text ahead. There were, of course, the more direct statements, talking about how we are but overconfident apes too fond of digital watches to notice the alien race about to destroy our planet, probably because we were the descendants of the telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, and other more useless professionals of some alien race, and despite our pride, our entire planet with everything we know was reduced by some observant aliens in an entry in the most important book in the galaxy (and, indeed, the titular object of the first book) to two words: "Mostly harmless" (the title of another book). My favorite part, however, was how the villains of the series weren't classic story villains--those evil wizards and unseen murderers described in the first entry of this blog. The villains were the Vogons, who were so thoroughly bureaucratic that they would apparently not even bother saving their own grandmothers unless the proper papers were previously filed. Indeed, in our society, attempts to improve things have led to thorough over-legislation to keep society regulated, and in the end constant evils are perpetrated by those under the protection of this bureaucracy. Instead of learning morality and ethics, we learn law, and instead of doing what is right for the sake of doing what is right, many of us obey only the letter of the law, seeking loopholes for frivolous lawsuits or selfish pursuits, with employers exploiting employees, businesses exploiting customers, and politicians and police proving no better than the rest of us. And the poetry of the Vogons is amongst the worst in the galaxy, and if the rest of the parallels between their society and ours are any indication, this is likely due to the creative bankruptcy that underlies it. Moreover, in the Hitchhiker's Guide, the president of the galaxy is given no power, in that, as Adams explains, anyone capable of achieving such a position should by no means be allowed to wield it. Subsequently, this president is merely a celebrity to distract people from what actually goes on in government and society, for people to celebrate in good times and blame in bad. I feel here that I should apologize at this point for drawing so much apparent bitterness from the fantastically comical works of Douglas Adams, and I only wish I could express my dissatisfaction with mankind in as lighthearted a way as he did. In contrast to the mood of my previous paragraphs, it also amused me to learn later in life that objects have been shown to be able to exist in multiple places in once in certain circumstances, first, if I recall correctly, demonstrated with photons but in later experiments it was found that molecules as large as Bucky balls (composed of 60 carbon atoms) could pass through both slits in a duel-slit experiment at once. The first thing learning this made me think of was the infinite improbability drive, and that the works of Douglas Adams were more scientifically accurate in some senses than I would have ever guessed. I also was incredibly fond of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the plot of which was partially adapted from an unpublished episode of Doctor Who, but also I particularly enjoyed how it described the works of J. S. Bach as being not the work of a man, but the music at the heart of the universe and the laws of physics themselves, which, to me, is a remarkably plausible statement. I've often found that the works of Bach parallel certain mathematical constructs in both their beauty and complexity. And here the spoilers will cease, because so will the discussion of fiction, for the complexity of Bach was one of the many subjects discussed in my favorite book by another man named Douglas: Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I had long been a fan of two of the three men in that title when I bought the book, having yet to have encountered anything about Kurt Gödel at that point in my life.
I didn't know exactly what to expect from the book when I bought it.  I only knew that my favorite artist and favorite composer were listed in the title (if I could have chosen a third person myself to group with those two at that point in my life, the logical extension to me would've been my favorite author, Douglas Adams).  As I read the book, it danced across all sorts of ideas, from fractals to fugues, from tessellations to tortoises, genetics, particle physics, Zen Buddhism, and many, many other ideas, often illustrated by logic games and wordplay so that the ideas of the book transcended levels of the text in the way it described epiphenomena transcending their levels of patterns, until, in the end, it made the very mechanisms of consciousness and self awareness seem within reach, being as simple as sentences that describe themselves.
Much of what I discussed in my previous entries has been inspired if not entirely learned from that particular work by Douglas Hofstadter, although his work was essentially entirely free of social commentary.  My interpretations of the strength in numbers of good people, or the epiphenomena of society, verc., have come from elsewhere in my life, but got their start while reading that book.
The ideas of Zen Buddhism expressed in the book in particular suggest an abandonment of egocentricity or a strict perception of self.  Moreover, it suggests that to limit any particular object into a description entirely unto itself is inaccurate, in that everything interacts with everything around it to the point that most borders we dictate in life are arbitrary, but I believe discussion on that particular interpretation is best saved for another time.
It did parallel, however, one of my earliest rants on the flaws of society started out as a complaint to my companion at the time about the various non-engineering elective classes I had to take.  In particular I was bothered by the fact that they all seemed to be tedious history classes with focuses on outdated experts of particular disciplines instead of anything of actual use.  Eventually, though, the conversation took a turn towards the drive people seem to have to unnecessarily categorize things--in particular I was discussing the Psychology 101 class I was taking at the time, about how I didn't feel the categorization of the various psychological phenomena from mental pathologies to stages of development seemed to strictly reflect my experiences as an actual person, whether with regard specifically to myself or what I had observed in other people.
I never liked the phrase, "thinking outside the box".  A lot of things are in the box for good reason.  Other things that should be in the box aren't.  The problem, I found, was the box itself.  We needn't classify things as in or out of the box, but instead take each thing on its own merits when we consider it.  I can understand why we might want to summarize or generalize things that aren't of importance for cognitive efficiency, but when this same approach gets applied to human intelligence and interaction, society, politics, economics, etc., it does more harm than good, and we end up resembling the Vogons, overwhelmed with legislation and bureaucracy.
It was from this conversation I fully realized that education was constructed to parallel the chronology of our discoveries, starting with what we new earliest and building historically, instead of reflecting our current knowledge of the subject as a whole and building from a more intelligent core curriculum.
And so our education is built on memorization instead of reasoning, and we learn to ask "what?" instead of "why?" or "how?".  Our math is memorization of tedious laws and tables instead of the reasoning behind them or the wondrous implications they have for the world (for more of which, check out the works of Vi Hart, who has videos around the interwebs, and who reminds me of a younger, more attractive, female Douglas Hofstadter in the genius ways she connects ideas together).  Our language classes involve memorizing spelling instead of learning the history of words and how they relate to past languages and how all the weird formations of letters have reasons we've all but lost to time, and they involve memorizing grammar laws more based in Latin than our own language because some academics long ago decided that Latin was the language to be like, even if the laws have no meaning in the context of our own language.  Our science classes, even ignoring all their inaccuracies and outdated theories, still fail to cover a number of topics relevant to modern science, such as basic computer logic or electricity, when Ohm's law can be learned by anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics and algebra.
And in our psychology classes we could be teaching about the "lost in the mall" effect, which describes how memories can be falsified, or the Dunning-Kruger effect which is a sort of selfward confirmation bias.  Yet instead we study Freud, whose work may have inspired psychoanalysis (although if he is like other popular historical scientific figures I have looked into, viz. Thomas Edison, I would not be surprised if he gets more credit than he is due for even this), but whose theories have otherwise largely been dismissed.  And yet we do not explore the developments that lead to the dismissal of Freud, or even why we believed what we did.  We simply studied what he did, accurate or not, and moved on.
As one final tie between these men named Douglas, it seems that Gödel's incompleteness theorem which points out the paradoxes that inherently arise from any sufficiently complex system seems to almost directly reflect the inadequacies of our overly complicated and overly formalized government, where legislation and bureaucracy replace reasoning, much in the same way that we've replaced reasoning in our education system with memorization and formalization.  And I am left to wonder, is it the pre-existing mindset of this over-classification and over-formalization that led to the construction of our education around such mechanisms, or did our education system, existing as such, simply drive these ideas into those who later shaped our modern government?  Is there a beginning to this chicken-egg scenario (or, my favorite parallel, taken from Douglas Hofstadter: this ribosome-DNA scenario), or is it simply a feedback loop reminiscient of the kind discussed by Douglas Hofstadter?  Do the Vogons choose to teach younger Vogons to be like they are, or are they just incapable of seeing any deviation from their path?

The Ant and the Butterfly

The idea of the butterfly effect is simple--that a butterfly might flap its wings and generate elsewhere a hurricane.  Of course, it is not some kind of grotesque exaggeration of the strength of a butterfly's wingflap, but instead it demonstrates that even the slightest of variances in some set of initial conditions can effect catastrophic events in the future.  Yet obviously since the butterfly's wingflap is so insignificant, it's not struggling against the chaos of the atmosphere, but instead stumbling upon a set of conditions already in place that allow its tiny effort to generate an incredible storm.  It is as if the butterfly is the first domino in a long line.  All the dominoes are set to fall after the first, but without that initial push, nothing happens.  Yet to actually expect a butterfly to be able to generate a hurricane is similar to dumping a box of dominoes onto the ground and having them land in some configuration so that they can knock each other down each in turn.

It seems instead that for any one person to change the world, they should not hope to be like the butterfly, but they should hope to be like the ant.  Ants work together to accomplish things that are far more than the capabilities of a single ant amplified through multiplicity: they form structures out of themselves, they solve spatial problems, they domesticate fungi for agriculture, and they undertake many other remarkable tasks.  As I discussed in my previous entry, all it requires is for the ants to work together towards common goals, and even if each ant doesn't have a full understanding of the grander architecture, it takes shape nevertheless.

Yet one thing I find particularly interesting that I failed to point out in my previous discussion of ants is that there's another element introduced when you try to do the same thing with people working together: that we have capabilities of abstract thought that permit us to conceive of the patterns that exist beyond us, even those that we are a part of.  As such, throughout history there have been people who have bridged the conceptual gap between this ant and this butterfly--who have sought to make hurricanes by inspiring others to act with them, but whose individual wingflaps set the entire storm in motion.

I believe the Golden Rule is poorly stated.  Instead of "do unto others etc.", I believe one should be the person they want others to be.  This is not in contradiction of another mantra hammered into children along side the Golden Rule: "Be yourself", but rather it says the same thing, but without the accompanying sense of entitlement.    Too many people nowadays believe that just because they 'are themselves' that their flaws should be forgiven as part of them, and although indeed flaws should be forgiven, if we do not work to improve upon them ourselves, then we have no excuse when we transgress.  It is better to make mistakes in spite of who we are than because of who we are.
Yet this is of course not the only reason to improve oneself.  One of the tragic flaws of the Golden Rule is that it is often reversed, e.g.: "Why should I be nice to them if they aren't nice to me?"  Yet if we wait for others to take the first step in becoming better people, sadly we'll likely be waiting our entire lives.  Thus to wait for the example is just an excuse made to placate our consciences in light of our own selfishness.

Moreover, it is not the actions of others that define our character.  If we simply respond to the good will of those who are already good, surely we could be doing worse, but if we yet return evil for evil, we are not at our deepest depths good people.  If we, however, preemptively show kindness even to those who make choices we do not approve of or even those who wrong us, then we can take comfort in knowing that if they decide to act against us, it is a reflection of their actions and not our own.
Yet do not use this as an excuse to provoke people with passive aggressive behavior or prideful displays of superiority--our efforts for good must be true.  We should do our best to set a good example and to teach those willing to listen.  We do not aim to set ourselves above others, but to meet them and help them up.

Remember, we are not alone in this world, and so it's illogical not to cooperate with others.  If we lead the way, but we do so paying attention to any willing to follow, we will be like the ant in that we will be part of a greater colony making the world a better place, but we will also be like the butterfly, giving the world the push it needs to start into a storm of revolution, reforming society into something better at its core.