Empires rise and fall based on their resource base, and how much they can extract from their dependent nations.  When an empire’s capital maintenance costs exceed its income, then that is when catabolic collapse sets in.  Capital maintenance costs always get exceed income eventually.  When the landowning class becomes small, when the landowner has lots of employees/slaves, and does not oversee it himself, when the farmland is measured as an profitable investment instead of a relationship where the land owns you and tells you what it needs, then you’ll inevitably get a lack of long-term investment in the soil health, which will lead to a reduction in yield, and eventual abandonment.  Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but on the whole, that is what is happening with vast amounts of wealth inequality.

In essence, empires must be violent.  They must expand or die.  When there is no place left to expand, because either the return on investment of invasion is negative, or because a competing empire is rising along the periphery, then they also die.  That much concentration of wealth and people must have a steady income stream of replacement parts, of food and water, of soldiers who have not led a couch-jockey lifestyle, or the maintenance costs will overwhelm them, and they will fade away.  How quickly they fall, without their daily bread and circuses!

Under POSIWID, the purpose of an empire is to loot, pillage, and steal the wealth and resources of the many, and concentrate it into the hands of the few.  Oh, I know, they always have the usual propaganda.  Look, you’re better off now!  You have freedom, and free trade, and democracy, and women’s rights!  Look at how much better your education system is now!  Is it, though?  Are things actually better?  Is there not still xenophobia, oppression, theft, fraud, mass murder, despair and suicide?  If things are so much better, why is the antidepressant use so high?

Have we not woken up homeless in the very land our forefathers died in battle for?  Have we not become hungry for the truth instead of the fake news and the entertainment surrounding us on all sides?  Have we not started to grieve for the destruction of the productivity of so very much of the farmland which used to feed us from its bounty?  If not, you probably live in a major city, and your paycheck depends upon you supporting empire.  When people understand how narcodollar recycling works, yet depend on dollars to eat, to have a roof over their head, to have water pumped through their pipes and into their houses, they don’t want it to stop.  Even while empire drones to death children, bombs hospitals, cuts off water supplies to people who, 100 years ago lived peacefully as neighbors with the people who were turned against them.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  Many empires have risen and fallen over the last 5000 years of written history, and much longer still.  The sun never sets on the American Empire.  The dark joke that goes with that, is that God doesn’t trust Americans not to kill and rape each other to death in the dark.  This is not a white skinned thing.  Take a good look at the history of non-white empires, of which there have been many.  This is not a Christian thing.  Take a good look at the history of non-Abrahamic empires, of which there have been many.  Who goes and steals cultural artifacts of the places they invade?  Empires do.  Not just Germany.  Not just the United States.  Not just the Vatican library.

This is the other side of the coin from the realization of self-determination.  I have the authority to decide what my actions are, to not mindlessly obey leaders.  Yet, some things in the world are inexorable, inevitable, and unchangeable by even the most potent hypersigil.  A great many things are not part of my story, yet are.  That the American Empire will fall is not something I can change.  How it falls may be.  Yet even there, the options are quite limited.  I don’t want nuclear war.  I don’t want sea level rise to melt down the understaffed ocean shoreline based nuclear reactors, when the jellyfish and plastic bags in the cooling intake valves aren’t enough.  I don’t want genome targeted virii to wipe out gobs of the population.  What I do want, I’ll have to wait to write more about, some other time.

In systems theory, there is a maxim that goes by the acronym of POSIWID.  It stands for “The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does.”  Over the last couple of years, I’ve found this method of analysis to be very useful.  It completely discounts any hand-waving and pontificating about whatever it is that people tend to say their motivations or purpose for doing something are, and simply relies upon the actual results.

I find that this method is great for cutting through political speeches.  Which US President, would you say, was the most xenophobic of them all?  Well, to answer the question, you simply go look up which one deported the most illegal immigrants.  You don’t comb through their campaign platforms, you don’t look at their speeches to the people, or to other governments.  You don’t look at what treaties were put forth or even signed, for we know that treaties are simply words or paper, much like the US Constitution is simply words on paper, unless it is actually enforced through real actions.  Would it surprise you to read that Barack Obama was the US President responsible for the deportation of more illegal immigrants than any other US President in history?  That is the power of the POSIWID analysis.  He has talked a lot about amnesty, but when the wheels hit the road, that’s not what he actually did.

POSIWID can be used very broadly.  What is the purpose of the US public school system?  Well, what are the results?  Are people who come out of the US public school system capable of reading critically?  Can they write with proper punctuation?  Can they read cursive?  Do they understand how compound interest works, or personal finance?  Can they even do the research required to answer these questions from their favorite search engine of choice?

What is the purpose of Facebook then?  Here, we come to understand that POSIWID has a multifaceted personality.  It isn’t just one purpose, because there is not just one result.  There are many results.  Facebook can connect people, yes, but it does other things as well.  It is a time compression algorithm.  It is a job search engine.  It is a recipe database.  It is a photo sharing engine.  It is a deep state data mining source.  It is a snitch that reports organized resistance activities.  It is a mood altering application, tending to increase depression because your friends went on vacation and you didn’t.  Facebook’s algorithms lead to echo chamber effects.  It also reduces the concentrated focus time of heavy users.

POSIWID doesn’t quite work in reverse.  You can’t discover why something happens the way it does, simply from the correlation of a thing.  Which religion’s adherents live the longest?  Oh, that’s an easy one to search, and somebody did their graduate thesis on it.  The answer is, the Jews have the longest life expectancy.  Okay, now you know that 70 years ago, the answer was not the same.  You could surmise all sorts of things about why that may be the case.  Maybe it is their diet.  Maybe it is the fact that they wash their hands multiple times a day and don’t touch the opposite sex outside of family, thus cutting down on the transmission of the flu and pneumonia in old age.  Maybe it is that they are a smaller group than other larger religions and genetically insular.  Or is it?  After all, the Gypsys, travelers, and tinkers are roughly the same, in terms of genetic and ritual cleansing insularity, yet they have a life expectancy 10 years less than the average population instead of 10 years more like the Jews.  Then you can think about wealth and education factors, and fall down the rabbit hole of why.

Correlation does not equal causation.  Maybe, we don’t need to know why.  Maybe, to make good enough decisions, we don’t need to be inundated with a lot of different theories, which change decade upon decade with more experience.  We just need to look at the actual reality in front of us, before looking for stuff that confirms our theories.  POSIWID can cut through a whole bunch of theories which don’t hold up over time.  For fun, you can apply POSIWID to vaccines.  Do they actually work?  Well, there are a couple million less people dying from the measles every year, because we have the measles vaccine.  That doesn’t mean that all vaccines work.  That doesn’t mean that all statins decrease the death rate of people who take them.  Ignoring the theories, and just looking at the death rate data is a good place to start looking at whether a particular pharmaceutical works or not.  Unfortunately, it isn’t enough.  If people who get flu shots have a lower car crash death rate in the following summer, you still have to run a reasonableness test.  Do you really think flu shots magically keep people from dying in car crashes?  Or maybe . . . there is an access to medical care issue that underlies both.

POSIWID is a great starting point though, especially when you’ve got way too much wild speculation about a topic.  What does the law enforcement system in the United States do?  It consistently arrests, locks up, and denies parole to racial minorities more than racial majorities.  It consistently protects the property of the rich from theft by the poor.  What do home owners’ associations do?  What does the local water board do?  What do the gangs do?  What does the local church actually do?  While POSIWID has its problems, it is a worthwhile way of looking at the world.

I was walking in a State Park with my children, when we came upon a pile of garbage.  Ironically, it was in the same clearing as a “No Dumping” sign.  I’ve come across garbage dumps in public spaces a lot.  It made me think about how things get cleaned up.

The County has a website full of information on how to report illegal dumping of solid or hazardous waste on the ground or in the water.  The website basically boils down to, you have to make a phone call.  Now, if the illegal garbage dump is in the biggest city in the County, you can actually report it on an online portal.  This isn’t the case if you happen to see the garbage dumped outside of that one big city.  I’m curious whether these garbage dumps ever get reported, and if they do, exactly how many years it takes before the County decides that it has enough funds or manpower to actually clean them up.

This line of thought usually leads down the road to my issues with authority.  Would it be better to have an open and transparent online list of illegal garbage dump sites, that interested parties, like Boy Scout troops, or churches, or motorcycle gangs, could go and pick up and haul to an actual garbage dump, paying the dump fees themselves?  Would the cloud of people in the community do better at cleaning their environment if given the opportunity?  Not if they think that the government must do it, or if they think that they must find the person to blame first.

The first issue is that the people who have skin in the game, who actually walk their dogs in the park and like to keep it clean, are not government bureaucrats who sit in offices all day.  Governments are not motivated to clean up garbage piles, unless there is a big public health problem involved, or unless it impacts their paycheck.  They don’t really have skin in the game.

The second issue, is the blame game.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we all knew who made the mess?  Still, even knowing who did it, this doesn’t mean that the person who made the mess has the power or motivation to clean it up.  As a parent, I cleaned up the bodily fluids and waste of newborn babies all the time, constantly, day and night.  I cleaned up vomit from the floor.  I am constantly cleaning up messes that I did not make, all the time, even while knowing exactly who made them.  Sometimes it is because babies can’t change their own diapers.  Sometimes, it is because the household runs well if somebody does all the dishes instead of everybody doing their own for every meal.  Sometimes, I will never know who made the mess.  I will never know which construction person built my front porch in a rainy climate out of non-treated wood, which rotted through.  Nevertheless, I have the skin in the game, so I clean up the messes that impact me the most.

Now, expand that example out further.  There are bigger messes out there in the world, which need cleaning up, besides your childhood bedroom.  Some of them are local, like all of those Halloween candy wrappers you find along sidewalks, or the edge of soccer fields, or in local parks which take almost no effort to bend down and pick up and dispose of properly.  Some of them, are a whole lot bigger, like the great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.  Sometimes, the person who made the mess is long dead, so beating their dead corpse just isn’t effective and getting the messes cleaned up, now is it?  Sometimes, the messes you need to clean up are not actually physical, but mental, or even metaphorical.  Sometimes it really is your parents’ fault that you feel the way you do about yourself and your potential.  Nonetheless, you are the one with skin in the game; you are the one with the power of your own two hands, and the vision of a better world than the messy one you see.  You are the one who, with the help of your friends, can clean up a mess that you stumble across today, no matter how small or large, and no matter who made it.  Even if you only make a tiny dent in it, you’ll feel just that little bit more powerful over your world.

In light of the recent US election results, and the emotional fallout of the election being experienced by many of my friends, some of my friends were discussing The Secret.  In case you don’t know what The Secret is, and I don’t myself, the very brief and therefore probably inaccurate summary is that you attract the energy of what happens to you by thinking about it.  Some of the atheists disparaged it, calling it magical thinking.  They don’t like the self-blame that is implied.  They don’t think that a 3 year old can be responsible for attracting leukemia.  They don’t like the implication that thinking leads to not taking action.  Yet, at the same time, there is something there.

“Claim victory in your heart, and the universe will follow.” – Teachings of the Minbari Priest Caste, Babylon 5. Yes, you can change a lot of things, simply by changing your expectations. What’s the closest I can come to that in a non-new-age context?

How about Derren Brown’s video on the Secret of Luck? The way I understood it, the people in a village were told that touching a statue would make them lucky people, and so they went out and were open to the opportunities which were always already there, but they just hadn’t been paying attention to before.  Did they attract the opportunities by believing they were lucky?  Or did they foresee greater immediately future opportunities, which allowed them to believe they were newly lucky?  (shrug)  I don’t know.  Maybe both.  The Universe does tend to work like that.  All that matters is that the change of belief worked.

There are limits, of course. You can’t expect to win the lottery without buying a lottery ticket, as Grant Morrison says. However, you can expect the dishes to get washed, and then wash them yourself, or suddenly your family actually washes them. No, 5 year olds don’t “attract” leukemia. Maybe their parents do? I really couldn’t say. It’s not like you therefore control everything that happens to you by changing your thoughts and storyline. At the same time, you know how music can change your attitude? Or listening to an old fairy tale/myth? Or reading a comic book where Superwoman kicks ass and you find yourself standing up against bullies with backbone you didn’t have before? There is a component to it that does actually work, even within a completely atheist context.  There are components to it that work even better in an animist context.

Which brings you to the self-blame part. Oh no! I am actually powerful over how I view myself and the stories I tell myself about who I am! That means that being a doormat and a victim is at least partly my fault. That means that being a terrible mommy is at least partly my fault. That really hurts. But. It also means that I can change those stories. I can be like my passionate friends, and grow a backbone, and figure out what it is that I really want. Maybe I don’t want to be really rich, really powerful, really famous/popular. Maybe I just want “enough.” So it doesn’t have to be about material success. Maybe you can attract friends who have your back instead of a very successful career. Maybe you can attract some helping land spirits. Maybe you’ve got things you’d like to banish/repel instead of attract, hmm? Maybe you just want to go through your day without experiencing harassment, belittlement, and bullying behavior. These are little things, and little things are much more likely to be able to be affected by any energy work within your influence than huge big things. That’s why people find pennies instead of a check for a million dollars when they wish for money. People actually notice the pennies on the ground in the parking lot when they’re open to opportunities like that.  That’s something you can try right away: A little thing, like wishing for an emotionally stable friend if you are feeling down.

The biggest trouble, is figuring out what the little thing is that you want to attract. That sort of thing leads to your deepest stories you tell yourself about who you are. Are you telling yourself that you are a warrior? Then there are consequences to that. Are you telling yourself that you are a priestess? Then there are consequences to that. Same with farmer and king and healer. All the little lies we tell ourselves about who we are, they cloud our sight at the opportunities to make the world a better place that are right there in front of us all the time.