When one rational system collides with another, reality may surprise us

If we are rational, then we can see reality clearly. Reality is rational.

Science taught us this. It looks at reality objectively, converts reality into a mathematical equation, and then tests its observation to see if the observation is ‘real,’ or faulty. Reality is what you see, feel and ultimately can control.

Business takes what science has found and applies it to create our survival system. Few of us have any real contact with Nature in our cities. We rely on money and grocery stores for our food. The marriage of business and science has solved most of the problems that have plagued civilization for 12,000 years. It is quite an achievement.

Power used to be in the hands of kings and their armies. Now it is in the hands of business. Our ancestors used to rely on Nature for survival. The modern citizen relies on money, business and science for their daily existence. Even the venerable farmer relies on banks and chemical factories. They only grow one or two crops, or animals, on their vast fields.

We have created an extremely comfortable lifestyle from the creation of business culture. It runs on its own logic. We all support and participate in it. Our survival depends upon it.

It is a rational, logical system. It provides immense benefits. It gives us food from around the world, medical miracles, and most of the poor have a TV, couch, fridge, and bed like the rest of us. The organizers of our society gain their power from pain relief. Business cannot survive selling pain.

Our hope is that our incredible system of not only survival, but wealth and freedom spreads to all humanity. It is happening as we speak. Economies between nations are integrating at an alarming rate. China follows the other Asian Tigers in their speedy rise to modernity. And there is a push to get laptops into the hands of pupils in Africa, who don’t have enough food to eat.

The business survival system works so well, it is only rational that all humans have access to it. Governments need to support consumer economies. The Soviet Union collapsed because it could not generate enough wealth to sustain itself. Communist China now uses capitalism to avoid the second rate status of the U.S.S.R.

The logic of the system is dependent on international money markets that can respond to any situation in the world instantly through computers. While most governments still try to act like sovereign states, the new global economy uses its own rationalism to undermine old nationalism. Wall Street and the Federal Reserve do not have the capacity to control the world’s financial system. It needs help from Europe and Japan when crises strike to stabilize the storms. When Thailand sneezed economically, as it did in 1997, computer programs went ‘viral’ and started a panic, nearly leading to pneumonia in Frankfurt and New York. Business is creating the new world order, and governments are increasingly being left to worry only about the sewers.

Even armies don’t work any longer. They are good for police actions to discipline countries that have not modernized yet. But it is unthinkable that the United States, Europe and China could go to war. It would destroy wealth, and thus power. The Iraq war points to the American military primary purpose not being ‘defense,’ but technological innovation and economic stability for local communities in the Homeland, as war increasingly makes the army just a consumer of war products, and a contractor for outsourcing to private enterprise. The old republic’s citizens’ army becomes the consumer army. The soldier is covered in technology, and the systems are so complex, it takes an army to just maintain them, leaving too few to actually fight. Remote control war, in the end, saves consumers lives and turns warriors into technicians.

It is all about supporting the economic system for us to thrive. Our efforts are to bring every human being up to our level of consumer comfort. By converting global humanity to the money, business and science survival system, peace will reign. We’re getting there. Al Quaida doesn’t realize that it is obsolete, just like the obsolete governments it opposes. Osama bin Laden is fighting the ideas of the West. Ideas don’t run modernity. Mathematics does. The equations of business and science.

How does a terrorist fight invisible numbers? How does one fight rational reality when it works so well? Even the I.R.A. and Red Brigade terrorists gave up in Europe. The comforts from the rationality of business systems and numbers ain’t that bad!
Consumer society can’t afford to oppress people like the English kings did to the Catholic Irish. It’s bad for business when customers are mad, poor, and are afraid to go to the malls. Let’s be rational, and focus on what works in reality. Life is sustained by the logic in the numbers now: in money, business and science. That is the reality of our situation. It’s only rational.

We live in manufactured products. There are few items in our homes that we haven’t purchased. Our contact with Nature is extremely limited. Daily life includes going to the office or factory, getting money to buy food, and then going home. Life is lived almost exclusively in business culture. We have to participate and support the system for our own survival. We have no choice, and so we learn how to control the system for our benefit.

We know we have it so good, and are confident we can defend it by adapting business and science to flexibly meet any situation. We believe it is resilient, because we can pull food from one country to feed another. And it is so complex, with competitors creating redundancies, that if one business ‘goes down,’ there is another to take its place.

It is no wonder that we regard Nature as a system, called ‘the environment.’ Our fears about global warming automatically start us thinking about how to control it using different levers of carbon emissions. Nature is like a car engine that we now have to tweak to prevent the threat to our artificial survival system, business culture.
Human life now depends on money and a grocery store for food. If the business supply chain fails, we all starve. And if we don’t have a job, then we don’t have money to eat. It’s as simple as that. And we trust our organizers to sustain it, because it is in their best interests as well as ours. We all know what business does to provide for us. As long as it feeds us, we buy into it.

The globalizing economy is beyond any one company or country’s control. The global environment is as well. What will happen when the artificial system of business collides with the natural system of Nature?
Business must feed us. But it is based on the emotions of greed and fear, and is computerized with lightning speed to respond to activities anywhere in the world. It relies on stability to keep the greed from turning to fear, to preserve wealth.

Our artificial economy is sitting on top of a system that is not responsive to human control, the weather. We’d like to think it could. After all, we started global warming, we can stop it. It is only rational. But our rationalism is limited, because we know that 200 nations in the world cannot act in concert now, and it is not in business best interests to stop tampering with the environment. The system is too big and running on its own logic. It must produce something real, ripped from the Earth, to satisfy the virtual world of money. We can see reality rationally, but our organizers cannot control it.

We have benefited greatly from the rise of rationalism through business and science. It accurately defined reality, and we got control of it to create this incredible artificial business culture. We control reality from small systems dependent on larger ones. If the economy loses control, then we have a problem, because humans have only been trained to survive using money, business and science. It is so vast, specialized and technical, each company relies on many other manufacturers’ components to make its products in a global supply chain.
We saw what happened during the Great Depression, when more people lived on farms. Survival skills from an earlier era could still be drawn from that wasn’t so dependent on money and grocery stores. That is gone now, and few stop to realize how many different businesses it takes to make one loaf of bread. It all relies on the stability of the weather, and the feathers of international capital.

What will happen if there is no alternative survival system outside of money, business and grocery stores, to feed millions? Nothing shocking has happened yet. It is not ‘real.’ And we trust that we can shift technology to help us adapt to anything. But if the predictions are correct, and massive climatic shocks are on their way, how will markets react? How will governments react? How will citizens react? Our rationality has created an organization that may no longer support our survival. And it is set up to support the interests of capital first, over the interests of populations. Where will the capital run to? The bigger capitalism gets, the more fragile it is.

Rationalism, based on science, appears neutral. It is how we use knowledge to control our reality that is at issue. We will defend our comfortable survival system that it is better than any other way of living. We are reliant on the organizers of our survival system to keep us fed. But it is becoming too big and complex for anyone to be at the helm. And the real reason for the manufacturing of our food is to make money.

We are so reliant on rationalism to define reality, we cannot imagine reality any other way. Our business survival system is based on relating to reality through the logic in the numbers in money, business and science. It is a big mathematical equation that is spreading throughout the world, an artificial environment unto itself affecting greater reality beyond it.
Our ancestors did not rely on numbers to survive, but from what they knew of living with Nature in a much simpler organization of human survival. We have lost the ability as a society to do this anymore. Even if we did, ownership and the concentration of humans in cities prevents this.

How do we defend this increasingly over-sized, fragile system based on the emotions of greed, fear and consuming the Earth when we can rationally see where it is leading? We now find ourselves within conflicting systems of business and Nature. We are confident we can still control Nature like we used to. But this confidence is based on a false understanding, not just of Nature, but the nature of the business environment and culture as well.

Are we really rational to the point of being in control of reality beyond money, business and science? How much of our efforts to ‘save’ the Earth is really just to save our brittle reliance on jobs, money and a grocery store for survival?