Public Option and Competition

I'm a little bit confused by the opposition to a public option to the for-profit health-care choices that dominate our system.  On the one hand people are concerned that these programs will be a drain on public resources.  Then, without missing a beat, we are told that such a program ... even one without public subsidies, would present unfair competition to insurance companies. 

In general, most people leveling these criticisms believe them.   honestly intended, but inconsistent.  I mean, either the system is so inefficient that we can't afford to offer it, or it's so efficient that it is unfair competition to 'for-profit' competitors. 

The reality is that it is neither. 

Little Sisters and Birth Control

… and if your manager is a nun, you don’t even need to bother asking. 

In a way I don’t blame the Little Sisters of the Poor for their objections.  It makes sense because we pose the wrong question in this country.  Even with the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or ‘ObamaCare’), the procurement and administration of health insurance is still left to employers, who peruse the details of costs and coverage.  This is a vestige of the ancient ‘patron’ theory of employment—which enabled broad invasions of employee privacy—most aspects of which have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Health insurance is a human right, and the minimum basic coverage required under the ACA is bare bones.  It is much better to view paying for the coverage as part of the cost of employing people, while leaving the selection and administration to professionals.  That administration is time-consuming and costly for small employers; it is terribly inefficient for, say, a restauranteur to be expected to gain enough expertise (not to mention power) to negotiate with a huge insurance company.  No other advanced industrial country burdens employers with this; we shouldn’t either.

It would be much more efficient and affordable to establish a single risk pool, called ‘human being’, and negotiate rates for minimum basic coverage en masse.  For those employed, the employer’s role would simply be to contribute the appropriate amount into a fund to cover their obligation – much as is done with Social Security and Medicare.  It is not an employer’s business to look into the details of a human being’s healthcare coverage, any more than a range of other personal choices they make. 

I understand the Little Sisters balking at having to specifically procure health insurance coverage that contains clauses they find immoral.  This should not be in their hands; they should not be customizing coverage – any more than an employer who is a Christian Scientist might customize coverage that covers only prayer. 

Modern Propaganda

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
  - Garry Kasparov

We are inundated with an amazing torrent of misinformation.  I had naïvely hoped that the global pandemic we face might have encouraged at least some of the purveyors to take a break, or tone it down a bit.  But, to the contrary, they have ramped up the nonsense, and the sources have proliferated.  

Manipulators easily find wedges, and offer easy answers to those confused by the complexity of the real problems we face.  Otherwise intelligent people are overwhelmed by it all, and give up their filters.  The timeless siren song of the deceiver, ‘You can’t trust anybody … so trust me!’ echoes throughout the canyons of our society, emerging from the depths of the dark web.  And we products of the sixties and seventies, trained to be skeptical of authority, are easy prey for those who claim that their voices have been silenced by a cynical establishment.

There is an entire ecosystem of fraud.  Much of it is not even internally consistent, but once somebody has been captured within its web, they no longer expend the effort to connect the dots; they just believe.  And because distrust of outside influences is integral to the program, it is extremely difficult to correct the record from outside the bubble.  

We who exist outside the bubble face the difficult decision to either listen dispassionately, as people repeat these paranoid fantasies, or offer corrections and clarification - tearing friendships apart, and promoting the very social discord and disunity the deceivers seek.   

I, for one, am utterly exhausted, depressed, and totally pessimistic about the potential victory of truth over ‘alternative facts’; of serious peer-reviewed science over ‘maverick’ nut-cases; of evidence and statistics over well-coached gut feel, denial, and cognitive dissonance.  

Mechanisms of Cults

Observing the workings of a cult is an excellent study in human psychology and sociology.  If you don’t know what to look for, you can miss it as it takes root and grow in your midst.  

Cult leaders rarely start right out with the ‘big lie’.  Even the most gullible of potential members would laugh in their face and move on if they did.  Rather, they lay the groundwork over time; exploiting their followers’ alienation from the modern world – or fear of changes in society.  They begin with smaller, more ambiguous fabrications that gradually draw followers in. 

As leaders strengthen their hold, they isolate followers from outside influence.  This may be overt—prohibiting members from contacting families, reading newspapers, watching television, or listening to the radio—but is more likely subtle.  It is equally effective to consistently ridicule outside sources of information, encouraging members to cut themselves off.  Over time, these sources are less frequently brought into conversation – unless distorted for use as a straw-dog, to reinforce the cult’s orthodoxy.  Outside news sources are ridiculed as the ‘liberal press’, ‘mainstream’ media, ‘drive-by’, or ‘lame-stream’ media.  Peer pressure and embarrassment cause members, over time, to avoid these altogether.  Those who stray from this prohibition are viewed with suspicion by their fellow members. Rather than risk alienation from the group, the transgressor mends his or her ways, and avoids connection with these threatening influences. 

The true test comes when the cult leader tells members something that is clearly, verifiably, false … then asserts it repeatedly.  If the hook is set, followers will come around to believing the leader, rather than their own eyes.  A guru may claim he is flying, thought he is clearly just sitting still in the lotus position – or that he is bench-pressing some ridiculously high weight, when a system of pulleys is clearly visible.  Or a leader might claim to have attracted the largest crowd in history to his inauguration, when photographic evidence clearly shows a sparse crowd.  So, who are you going to believe; your eyes, or the object of your adoration?  

Once this point is reached, credulous True Believers can be led to believe almost anything, and followers become, in essence, an extension of the leader.  Outsiders lose all influence; their silence is perceived as assent; disagreement, if heard at all, is perceived as a threat.  Cognitive dissonance—the fear that if one admits the error of one claim, it could weaken of destroy one’s entire perceptual framework—creates a curtain of denial.  The more ridiculous the lie that comes to light, the more intense is this effect.  Rather than causing followers to question their beliefs or their fealty to the leader, a clear falsehood makes them cling ever more tightly. 

Those who help cultists escape the hold of their leaders have a daunting task under the best of circumstances.  Escaping members they must be shielded from cult influences in order to reenter normal reality – and even so, it takes a long time, and leaves the former member disoriented and unmoored.  When a cult has multiple, easily accessible channels of mass media, and controls all branches of a nation’s government, the prospects for members to escape are dismal.

Problem Analysis - Gun Violence

To seriously analyze a complex problem, one must deconstruct it and look at the pieces: where is it happening, and where is it not?; when is it happening, and when is it not?—then look at the differences.  Keep asking ‘Why’, even after you think you’ve gotten to the answer, because it’s likely that the root cause is much deeper. 

Why does the United States, with only a small percentage of the world’s population, have such a huge percentage of the mass killings – as well as other firearm deaths?  Is it the violence in our movies?  Is it those first-person shooter video games?  Is it young men raised in homes without fathers?  Is it untreated mental illness?  Social isolation?  

All of these factors may play a role in tipping an already unbalanced person toward violence.  And all are worth examining for ways in which we can improve them as a society.  But are they unique to the United States?  

Regardless of where they are produced, Hollywood’s reach is global; our movies are everywhere.  Single-parent households, mental illness, and social isolation are likewise not uniquely American issues – though the fraying of our already thread-bare social safety net means that many human needs, which are addressed elsewhere, are left unmet in our country.  

But the most relevant factor that truly is unique to the United States is also the most obvious.  It is incredibly easy for anybody—including unbalanced, potentially violent people, many of whom may have been affected by the factors mentioned above—to access weaponry that can amplify an angry outburst into a community-wide tragedy.  

To pretend to analyze gun violence in America, while discounting our ongoing wide-open nationwide firearms bazaar, is to ignore an elephant that utterly fills the room.  It’s not real analysis, it’s industry-sponsored verbal gymnastics.   Those who smugly scorn the students who are peacefully protesting gun violence today tacitly condemn those who will be the next victims, and the ones after that, to a cruel fate.  

The Battle of Passchendaele

One hundred years ago today, the Third Battle of Ypres—better known as the Battle of Passchendaele—began in Belgium.  It was an attempt to gain high ground near the northern end of the Western Front, before German reinforcements arrived from the Eastern Front, in the wake of the Russian collapse there.  

The prior three years had been a horrific, bloody stalemate near Ypres, with troops in mud-filled trenches—shouting distance apart—under constant artillery bombardment.  

In a war remembered for wasteful, senseless carnage, Passchendaele is remembered as one of the worst.  A wildly optimistic British plan for quick victory, degraded by weather into a battle of attrition. By the time the fighting slowed (it never actually stopped on the Western Front) in mid-November, over a half million casualties had been suffered by the British, their imperial and commonwealth allies, and Germans.  

Nasty little crossroads in that area.  Twenty-three years later, there would be a massive evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, about 40 miles northwest of Passchendaele.  And 103 years earlier, Napoleon’s career ended about 90 miles east, near a place called Waterloo.  

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-40727428
 

Gravity and Society

Gravity is one of the fundamental forces that define our universe.  It is the effect of matter that organizes moons, planets, and stars – keeping them from simply wandering off on their own.  Gravity holds us to the Earth, and holds the elements of the Earth together—even defining our planet’s spherical shape.  It is the physical manifestation of matter’s drive to aggrandize itself across the vastness of space.  

Concentrated in stars, gravity is so strong, it literally warps space-time, creating a well, drawing distant objects nearer.  It crushes hydrogen atoms, fusing nuclei together to form helium, generating and radiating massive energy to heat and light our world – making life possible.  

But where the aggregated mass is too great, space-time is not just warped, it is consumed.  Gravity becomes an end in itself, swallowing up everything nearby, even light – which is why such phenomena are known as black holes.  Within this region, the distortion is so complete that the normal laws of physics no longer apply.  The distortion reaches far beyond its black horizon; nothing within a vast area is unaffected; ultimately everything is drawn in and destroyed.  

In human experience, the desire for material goods and control are likewise fundamental drives.  In normal proportions, these drives encourage us to independently feed and shelter ourselves and our families, provide security, sustain communities, educate ourselves, learn productive trades, seek self-actualization, and build a legacy to assure a better life for our children.   It drives incredible innovation and creativity.  

But when wealth and power become comingled and overly concentrated, they too become ends in themselves; reshaping reality, and isolating those within from the outside.  This concentration distorts everything nearby.  The rules of normal civil society no longer apply.  Information filtering in from the world outside is warped to fit the reality within.  Evidence, established science, and any sense of community, are mangled in transit; replaced by an elite plutocratic alternate reality.  Concerns of the world—if they are perceived at all—are faint and unclear, filtered and distorted through the thick, blurred window of entitlement.  

Advanced societies have institutions to counter this concentration of wealth and power, serving to slow or prevent societal collapse.  Progressive taxation of income and wealth, a fundamental culture of community, self-sufficient educational institutions, and an alert, assertive mass media all serve as bulwarks to sustain balance, maintain awareness, and act as an enduring reference against the alternate reality within.  

But, in their relentless drive for greater wealth and power, those at the center of this concentration seek to draw in, and co-opt these protective institutions; absorbing and distorting them, nullifying their restraining effect, and accelerating the drive toward singularity and socioeconomic annihilation.  Without these moderating influences and references, the population is helpless to resist the trend, or at times, even be aware it is occurring.  Perhaps the most pernicious distortion is the assertion that democratic institutions, and market competition can continue to thrive within the black hole of its influence.