vol VII: Notes
2015
Notes
[Sunday 14 June 2015 - Saturday 20 June 2015]
[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]
[page 158]
Sunday 14 June 2015
Letter to PM
Hi Tony,
You will be pleased to hear that SA is well on the way to 100% renewable energy: Mark Diesendorf
Also I would like you (or one of your department) to explain to me why you are so intent on destroying jobs and investment in the renewable energy industry. Do you want us to source all our renewable energy equipment from China?
Yours sincerely,
Monday 15 June 2015
Letter to PM:
Dear Mr Abbott,
Re: Dictatorship does not work
One thing I have noticed about the way you play the prime ministerial role is that although you profess to be a Catholic, many of your government's decisions are decidedly unchristian.
I too studied for the Catholic priesthood (in the Dominican Order), but was ultimately knocked back as a heretic. So I have a few ideas about where you are coming from.
The Catholic Church is an ancient institution that develops and markets a brand of Christianity. The Church itself is not inherently Christian. It is a powerful political corporation, a direct descendant of the Roman Empire. The Christians struck gold when they convinced Constantine to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
The fundamental defect in the Church is that it is an imperial monarchy:
Can. 333 §1. By virtue of his office, the Roman Pontiff not only possesses power over the universal Church but also obtains the primacy of ordinary power over all particular churches and groups of them. . . . §3. No appeal or recourse is permitted against a sentence or decree of the Roman Pontiff.For this reason the Catholic Church is politically unstable. On the other hand, Christianity is fundamentally right in that it respects the democratic nature of the world. From a Christian point of view, we are all exactly equivalent.
As a Catholic, you clearly sympathize with the divine imperial monarchy. Already, after less than two years in power, and despite strenuous attempts to maintain secrecy, the inhumanity of this government is clearly on display to the whole world.
I am sure that if you are competently advised and listen to your advisors, that you are fully aware of this. The question is: why is your government so unchristian? I think it is because you are Catholics, who, following the ancient Papacy, have been so corrupted by political power as to lose sight of Christianity.
Christianity is based not on power but on love, love of God (what is), and love of neighbour. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan to emphasize that everybody is our neighbour, refugees and tycoons.
Why does power corrupt? Probably because the powerful are blinded by their own power You think you know, so you avoid looking to avoid changes of mind made necessary by the evidence. Without sight, one cannot steer rationally, and a crash is almost inevitable.
Your job is government. The science of government is cybernetics. Cybernetes is the Greek word for captains, helmsmen or governors. Control systems work through a cybernetic loop: measure, interpret, act, measure . . . . One of the simplest controllers is the oven thermostat. The thermostat measures the temperature of the oven, decides whether it is too high, too low or just right and adjusts the energy input accordingly.
Government at the national level is more complex but the principles are the same. You have public servants to measure the state of the nation, speculate on the consequences of that state and execute procedures designed to move the nation toward the course you have chosen.
Here the principle of requisite variety, a fundamental principle of cybernetics, becomes relevant. A controller, to be effective, must be able to deal with every possible situation. If something happens that it cannot deal with, trouble will probably follow. We are able to approximate total control in simple technological systems like computers, but it is simply not possible in a complex system like a nation. We must approximate by acting cautiously and keeping a close watch on the results.
The principle of requisite variety tells us that one dictator cannot control a large number of people without reducing them to clones of himself. Since human creativity renders this impossible, failure is inevitable. On the other hand, the best approximation we can make to a perfectly controlled human system is to give everyone an equal role in government and listen to them, the system we call democracy.
Bertrand Russell eloquently outlines the problem with dictatorial rulers and the only satisfactory solution:
When Gregory VII was engaged in enforcing the celibacy of the clergy, he called in the help of the laity who, even when happily married themselves, were delighted at the opportunity of persecuting parish priests and their wives.
It is the strength of this impulse in human nature that makes democracy necessary. Democracy is desirable, not because the ordinary voter has any political wisdom, but because any section of mankind which has a monopoly of power is sure to invent theories deigned to prove that the rest of mankind had better do without the good things in life. This is one if the least amiable traits in human nature but history shows that there is no adequate protection against it except the just distribution of political power throughout all classes and both sexes.
The Pope is an absolute dictator, just like the Roman emperor, who can do what he likes with anyone. If he says women are inferior beings, that is that. As the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse suggests, this attitude has trickled down to the staff: you can do what you like with the children.
Institutionally, the Church stands diametrically opposed to the democracy and science. Its own Academy of Science does not even rate theology as a science. The authoritarian approach taken by the Church arises because the Church is working against reality. The Church claims that its magisterium is necessary because we are damaged creatures in a damaged Universe, original sinners that only the Church can save.
It is easy to see that much of the sin we see in the world is a political product. Make people's lives impossible until they react, then declare their reaction evil. Monarchies find it convenient to invent evils to justify attacking people they do not like. It seems that you, in the spirit of the Crusaders, are hell bent on continuing the ancient Catholic vendetta against Muslims.
We have two ways to learn what a government is thinking. The first is what it says. The second is how it spends our money. Your government is becoming famous for talking up problems (like the debt crisis) and then acting in exactly the opposite direction, relentlessly spending to increase rather than decrease the budget deficit. It is not surprising that your credibility is very low.
In a democracy, guidance does not come from the top, but from the population. To control the government, we must first learn what it is thinking and what it is doing. It is here that I see the power induced blindness of your government. You are hiding from reality, trying to avoid democratic control through secrecy.
Like the Church, you have hidden the child sexual abuse in your prison camps. Like the Church, you treat women with disdain. Like the Church you declare anyone who does not agree with you a heretic, and if she happens to be a woman she is doubly damned. Unfortunately (for you) but fortunately (for us), cybernetics tells us that this 'captain' style of government is doomed to fail.
The Church has been on the back foot since the invention of the printing press destroyed its monopoly on the written word. The internet has taken this a step forward, allowing any piece of information to be multiplied endlessly with very little effort. This means that anyone can in principle find and publish almost anything that is stored in the network.
The Church is clearly guilty of corporate misconduct, but as with governments, banks and other corporations, the veil of secrecy behind which it operates acts to protect the individual servants of the Church from facing the consequences of their decisions and actions. Fortunately for us all, this veil is coming down now, as the crimes of the Church attract more public attention.
Your mismanagement of Australia is unlikely to affect your own welfare. This is a natural tendency of conservative government, which helps the old aristocracies of wealth and power to preserve their privileged way of life. This tendency is obviously socially disruptive since it creates tension between the haves and have nots.
How are we to combat this behaviour? I think we must begin at the top with theology. From a Catholic point of view, the obvious answer is to emphasize the modern equivalent of Christianity, respect for human rights and dignity. Pope Francis appears to be working in this direction. To make serious progress, the Church must abandon the false God that it uses to justify its own political supremacy.
Theology may become scientific and democratic if we accept that the Universe is divine. In the Bible God says I am what I am. The world is what it is, and there is no reason to deny its divinity. The natural alternative to the mysterious God of Catholicism is the visible God of reality. Every human experience is experience of God: revelation, if you like.
We are not original sinners. We are divine creations, parts of God. The foolish ruling class project of dividing the world into us and them is ultimately bound to fail. We are all one on Earth.
From the point of view of monarchy, the original sin is independence. We see this in the Book of Genesis, where God punishes and degrades the whole of his new creation with death, pain and work because the young people were curious.
From the point of view of independence, monarchy is the original sin. As long as you try to use secrecy to govern for a minority you are exposing yourself as a hostage to fortune. The Catholic Church used to terrify us kids by teaching us that God sees everything. The internet will eventually guarantee that everything governments do in our names will be exposed and judged in public.
Yours sincerely,
Writing an appendix to Francis letters in anticipation of new encyclical . Perhaps when it comes out can produce an exegesis linking it to my letters to Francis. Will never know if it is true so it must come under marketing / promotion rather than gospel truth (!?).
Market failure - split incentives - lack of orthogonality.
The Roman Catholic Church is seriously in need of a Magna Carta: 'The sealing of the Magna Carta marked the first time that the notion that an unelected sovereign should be restraind undr law was officially recognised. John Stanton
The social contract oscillates between absolute monarchy and absolute self determination [correlation ranging from 1 to 0]. Monarchy fails through conflict between ruler and ruled. Absolute self determination fails when people become so intransigent when desires conflict that they turn to violence [the political situation in the US, coming to Australia?]. Rather we need the theory of peace that shows that spiritual resources can be multiplied without limit. What we want to do is maximize the ratio
[page 181]
spirit/physical substrate.
Gillian Triggs: 'Within nine weeks of the signing of the Magna Carta it was annulled by Innocent III. Civil war soon broke out and within a couple of years the king was dead.' Gillian Triggs
Tuesday 16 June 2015
I am beginning to feel that I have come far enough policy wise to begin to take a political approach to my ideas and begin to promote them even though they are not in the academic mainstream or peer reviewed,
Wednesday 17 June 2015
Comment to Monbiot: George Monbiot
Hi George,
A lot of our intellectual and motivational problems with looking after Earth will be on the way to solution when we accept that the Universe is itself divine. 'God' is not some invisible alien but the Universe that created us. All our experiences, including love, are experiences of God. I have tried to give this idea some substance at www.naturaltheology.net. It is good to see Francis batting for the Earth, but it remains true that his Church, which considers us to be specially created aliens entitled to do what we like with the Earth, is one of the principal obstacles to real planetary salvation. The Church is a nest of contradictions which can only be sorted out when we replace the proposition at its root, 'god is not the world', with the proposition 'the world is divine'.
The principal function of a network is traffic control, which, as on the roads, messages must not collide, that is become confused with one another.
Love in the network. Messages interact in computers. The receiver provides the decoding, the sender the encoding and they must be 'reversible' encode X decode = 1.
Rendering : moving from abstract to concrete. An abstract policy must be rendered to take effect.
The sudden onset of the cyber age has widened the gap between conservatives and progressive because a lot of the conservatives are pre-internet and think they can go on ruling with a combination of secrecy and arbitrary power.
[page 182]
Thursday 18 June 2015
Metanoia: changing 1 bit from 0 to 1 is metanoia. Metanoia - Wikipedia
Boltzmann's formula assumes no correlation between particle states, ie complete independence, equiprobability, maximum entropy, maximum bandwidth.
Letters to Francs Appendix 2: A critique of Laudato Si, in the light of the theology I outlined to you in my previous letters.
Because the Universe is divine, God is vulnerable to us.
Friday 19 June 2015
Laudato Si: The Pope no longer commands but argues. Could he tell everyone to use renewable energy in the same was as he told them not to use the pill? They didn't listen then. Now he may be going with the flow.
Saturday 20 June 2015
The Pope (if not the Papacy) is heading toward the right track at last. Since at least the time of Galileo, scientists have been trying to get theologians interested in science. Instead of truth being a feature of the fantastic adventures documented in the Bible, let us look at the world we inhabit. Practical people have always been closely tied to reality but the ruling class, encouraged by the theologians have been off in a land of their own making thst serves them very well since a large proportion of the population have learnt their place by being indoctrinated
[page 183]
the ruling class picture since birth.
Party day. What does this mean? Carefully prepared rational(ish) exhuberance.
