• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Natural selection plays complexity and simplicity as it does conservative and bold. In general, bold action (which typically arises from the reduction of complex situations to a simple "grasp the nettle" understanding) increases the risk of failure, so organisms and organizations tend to make changes only when forced to do so. With the risk bias favoring conservative action or no action, they make changes to lessen the risk of a false step.

So complexity piles up as new adjustments and layers are added to existing systems. Over time the entire system may become energy-inefficient and unwieldy, at which point it collapses under its own weight or is forced to make radical adaptations to survive.

Households can be viewed as an ecological system. When they become overly complex and inefficient, consuming more than they create, then they are vulnerable to collapse.

The process of paring complexity can be summarized as "getting rid of what no longer works to our benefit and keeping what does." Humans habituate to circumstances very quickly, and so just as we stop noticing the clutter in the garage we also stop noticing behaviors and processes which are no longer in our best interests.

Do more of what's in the household's best interests and pare away what isn't. That is a starting point.

If I was asked to draw up an "action list" derived from the above principles, it would include these items.

A stupendous number of people are smarter and more experienced than I am; they will figure out solutions which work for them in their situation. I don't claim to have solutions for anyone--recall that the way the "problem" is posed sets the "solution."

Regardless of the situation, these principles are at least a good place to start.

An integrated understanding is not dictatorial or coercive. It focuses our attention on what's in our best interests and attempts to avoid/limit what is self-defeating or self-destructive and thus not in our best interests.

1. Add a feedback loop. On the household level, if there is no accurate, transparent budget of true income and expenses, then assembling such information is adding a feedback loop which did not exist before. If you write a letter or email to your city council representative, you are creating a feedback loop which did not exist before.

As we have carefully described, the market is not invincible or even very prescient. Its power rests in being a feedback loop; central planning fiefdoms (such as the Federal Reserve) which attempt to bypass or over-ride the market by creating perverse incentives have limited feedback from reality and hence they fail on an ontological (inherent) level. They are systemically doomed from the start.

Magical thinking and wishful thinking have no feedback from reality, hence they too are doomed.

Making realistic assessments means obtaining feedback from reality. Engagement via AADD and/or OODA is adding feedback loops which do not exist when we sit passively by.

2. Stop watching network/cable TV except as a rare guilty pleasure. A responsible parent limits his/her children/teens' time absorbing the destructive propaganda of network/cable TV/videogames; what works for kids works for adults, too: everyone in the household should be restricted to an hour or two of "guilt-free TV" a week. (Now that the TV propaganda has migrated to the computer via the Internet, then that also means limiting exposure to mass media propaganda on the computer.)

Setting limits forces a healthy triage: having to pick your favorite two or three shows and letting go of all the rest is a good exercise.

The way to stop being poisoned is to stop taking the poison.

As I hope I have made abundantly clear, the primary means of controlling our experience and thus manufacturing our passive acceptance of a debt-serf/financial "Plantation" economy ruled by a partnership of a corrupt, over-reaching State and rentier-financial Power Elite is the mass media/marketing complex owned and operated by a handful of global media corporations.

To stop