JohnHenry.US

Tag: ethics

  • The Ownership Class

    “Ownership class” is a phrase I use fairly often, and even in doing so I understand that it can be ambiguously interpreted.  For that reason, I’ve added this definition to the JH Lexicon, to be defined as follow:

    The “ownership class” is not simply filled with the people who own things; rather it refers to the very, very small group – on the order of no more than a few hundred individuals, give or take at any particular point, and depending on how you’re measuring – who control most of the world’s wealth.

    These people control everything from institutions of higher learning (and on an ever-greater scale, primary education) to the media where we get the information we’re supposed to be learning to understand in school but aren’t.  As comedian and philosopher George Carlin pointed out as have others, it is simply not in the interests of this small group of people to have a generally informed, educated, and engaged population.  That sort of person challenges their power and can take it away.

    So they control the information, Orwell-style, to keep us distracted from their mendacity.  Part of that is ensuring that we’re always fighting and competing amongst ourselves, often over superfluous notions like religion that have no substantive impact on the Universal Morality.

    As mentioned above, in any given context “they” could refer to as few as the half-dozen or so people who own more of the world’s wealth between them than the “bottom” half of the total human population, or it may refer to as many as a few hundred people who make the most money from and control the behaviors of the largest corporations in the world.  It is not any one ethnic group, skin color, religion, gender, or sexuality per se, although the tables have been tilted largely in favor of some people based on those considerations.  It’s about individuals, making individual decisions including the decision to influence, for selfless or selfish means, the decisions of others.

  • The “Universal Ethic” or “Universal Morality”

    I often use the phrase “universal morality” in my writing, or refer to that morality.  It’s a paraphrase of a quote by Robert Heinlein, to wit:

    All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying. – Time Enough For Love

    In the context he was writing, “racial” here doesn’t refer to “ethnic” but rather the “human race.”  While I don’t agree with everything the man wrote, his ability to distill ideas was remarkable.  Even as his work and characterizations seem more archaic and even offensive with time, that very fact is because we are finally internalizing realities that in some cases Heinlein was once very much ahead of when the rest of the world was behind.

    This basic truth, that human morality can and ultimately must boil down to “what keeps the species alive and propagating,” leads to other inevitable realities.  And it is not merely “a” basic truth but the basic truth of the human species or any other.  To whatever extent possible, both we internally as a species and all the other species to whatever extent it is possible for them, work to ensure out own perpetuation, and one of the important ways we do that is through strength in numbers.

    However, with human beings the more educated and affluent they are, the more “necessary work” can be done by fewer actual human beings, because they will continue to develop technology both for production and recreation, which means they’ve got things to do both for fun and to help ensure their ability to survive, other than reproduce.

    Over time as the species becomes better educated and more affluent, ideas like human rights, gender equality, women not having to be enslaved to their reproductive ability, humans not treated as “less than” because they own a smaller piece of the planet’s wealth or they have different skin color or shape to their facial features or texture to their hair, all become both more self-evident and more imperative to pursue to ensure the further progress, survival, and propagation of the species.

    However, the paradigms that are now beginning to seriously crumble as I write this in the early summer of 2020 rely on aspects of inequality and prejudice and privilege and entitlement to perpetuate themselves to the detriment of this universal morality, and those who are unable to or refuse to abandon them thus ultimately will be a terminal subspecies.  I don’t say they “should be eliminated” or any such provocative nonsense, and that’s important.  They are being eliminated right now, by natural occurrence often brought on as the direct consequences of their own behavior, and the longer a subset of us exist who continue to try to avoid this reality, the longer it will be until we can truly progress forward as a species in the never-ending pursuit of survival and propagation.

    Nobody’s “doing that” or enjoying the fact that it’s happening; it’s the natural consequence of us continuing to work against our own interests as well as those of the other species on this planet whose lives are critical to our own one way or another.  It will continue until we stop acting that way, because we are a threat to the universal morality not only within our own species but for every other, and those species together create a discrete system of life which also has its own collective survival and propagation as its number one universal priority on which all other activity is based at every level, and they act the same way.

    That’s where the viruses come in and even the earthquakes from fracking.  Literally we’re breaking the planet for everything, and everything including ourselves absolutely will come together, one way or the other, being it by some “natural” agent like a pandemic or disaster, or “man-made” through war or greed, to mitigate our influence on the rest of the planet to a survivable nature and level.

    Because at all levels of life human and otherwise, the one universal and fundamental morality is and must always be the survival and propagation of life.

  • America’s Drug Problem Part 1 (2011)

    This video and post were originally published in 2011. Please note that the domain names mentioned, lowgenius.net and 40yearoldfreshman.com, are no longer active. Special thanks to my nephew James for the camera work!

    Hi, everyone.  JH here, taking on a big issue that has had a major impact on my life all my life:  America’s Drug Problem.

    The videos speak largely for themselves, but I wanted to clear up a few things pre-emptively.

    • I am not endorsing, condoning, or approving of the use of drugs, legal or illegal.  I am only imparting information that I think is important for people who choose this behavior to be aware of.  One of the key side effects of our entirely broken approach to drugs education is the dangerous equivalence of drugs which are physically addictive, and drugs which are not physically addictive, and I think this false equivalence is a root cause of much of the “hard” drug abuse in western culture today.
    • I blew a line and described a neuroreceptor as a “brain cell.”  A neuroreceptor is part of a brain cell, and by leaving those two words – “part of” – out, there’s a risk of confusion.  I corrected this in the transcript, but I just don’t have the resources or patience to go re-shoot an entire three-part video just for the sake of two words.
    • Yes, I’m aware that the wind noise is irritating.  I’ve done my best to eliminate it in post-production, but there’s only so much you can do.  You can view a transcript on-screen using the close-captioning button, or simply read along below.
    • This is the first of three videos dealing with this subject, and I strongly recommend you watch them all.  Our problems understanding the risks and differences between the drugs we’re on is only one small part of a very large problem.

    Transcript:

    Hey there folks, John Henry, LowGenius.Net, 40yearoldfreshman.com.

    This country has a drug problem.  We actually have three drug problems, and I want to discuss them, because there’s a lot of bullshit that goes around, everybody talks all kinds of mad shit, this and that, everybody’s got their agenda, everybody’s got something to  say about it and everybody thinks this and thinks that and it’s all this conflicting information.

    So, the first problem that we have, with drugs in America is that there are people that are on drugs in America…now, it’s not something that I’m proud of, or even that I really like to discuss, but it needs to be said:  I spent about thirteen years of my life wrapped up in hard drugs I know what it’s about, I know what the lifestyle’s about, I know how it works.

    There’s something that a lot of people don’t understand about drugs and drugs addiction, and that’s…that there are two different types of addiction.  There’s a physical or physiological addiction that has a physical component, there’s also psychological addiction.

    Now you can be psychologically addicted to anything that you use or abuse in an unhealthy manner, whether it’s, you know, sex or reading books or playing video games or World of Warcraft or Facebook or whatever, you can be addicted in that sense to anything.

    Physiological, physical, addiction is a little bit different.  With physical addiction there are certain drugs that actually change the shape of the neuroreceptors in your brain.  For those of you who don’t know what a neuroreceptor is, it’s (part of a) brain cell, the neuroreceptor is basically a mouth on that brain cell that eats nutrients. And it’s shaped in a certain way so the nutrients fit into it and it seeks those out, and that’s what causes hunger and on and on.

    So:  drugs that are physically addictive change your body to believe that that drug is a necessary substance for life, like food and water.  That is why physical addiction can be so very compelling, because on a primal level the addict believes and behave just as they would if they were starving, okay? That’s physical addiction, that’s the nasty shit, that’s the bad shit.  That’s what I went through for 13 years when I was doing hard drugs.

    Physically addicting drugs are your methamphetamines; cocaine-based substances; opiates – heroin, morphine, oxycontin. A lot of prescription drugs, especially painkillers, mood elevators, and anti-depressants have a physically addictive component – not all of them, and I don’t have a comprehensive list of which ones are which, but keep your eyes open.

    Those are physically addictive things, they WILL hook you.  Crack cocaine.

    Alcohol is physically addictive.  There was a study done in the early ’80s where an anthropologist looked at the brains of dead skid row bums, dead alcoholics, and the brains of alcoholics had changed in precisely the same ways and were even generating some of the same substances as the brains of people who had died of heroin overdoses after long-term addictions. So what I’m trying to tell you is that these things are very much the same, and people don’t realize it.  Nicotine, cigarettes, is another one – physically addictive.  It hooks your body, it doesn’t just hook your mind.  Now…marijuana?  Not physically addictive. Magic mushrooms, not physically addictive.  LSD?  Not physically addictive, as far as anyone’s ever proven or shown.

    Speaking from my own experience, those drugs are not physically addictive.  I’ve done them all.  I’ve also done drugs that were physically addictive, and I know what addiction feels like.  It’s a different thing.  If somebody who is a heavy pot smoker runs out of pot, doesn’t have any way to get any more…they might be bitchy for a couple of days, you know?  But they get over it, life goes on, blah blah blah whatever.  Somebody addicted to cocaine runs out, and they break into your house and steal your television set.  That’s the difference between psychological and physical addictions.  That’s not to say that psychological addiction cant be as profound as physical addiction, but it’s much more rare.

    So.  I’m certainly not going to recommend that anybody go do anything illegal or abuse any kind of drugs, but even if you’re going to take drugs therapeutically and legally for pain or whatever, be aware.  Be aware of the risk of physical addiction.  Ask your doctor, is this drug physically, physiologically addictive.  Do the best you can to avoid the ones that are.

    That’s our first problem, is the fact that people are using drugs and they don’t fully understand what the risks are of each individual drug and what the differences are between each individual drug.  The next video, we’re going to talk the second problem – which is the way we educate ourselves, each other, and our children about drugs.

    Thanks for watching.  I’m John Henry, Lowgenius.Net.  Remember to share, like, comment, drop by my blog @ lowgenius.net and 40yearoldfreshman.com, spread it around, I need all the traffic I can get, thanks very much.

  • Cutting Education Funding Is Wrong (2011)

    Another of those subjects that just refuses to go away because the fascists we’ve allowed to take part in our government know that keeping us stupid is their best weapon.

    The sound quality on this really stinks, I’m afraid, and I don’t know why. Unfortunately all the source video has been lost to the inevitable costs of poverty, but if it’s that tough to hear feel free to DM me via FB or Twitter and I’ll go ahead and transcribe it here.

    What’s interesting about this video to me is that it inadvertently documents one of those “things I never do,” in this case working with Eric Byler and a group of fellow students who eventually called ourselves “Michigan’s Future” (clearly reflective of my traditionally-aged colleagues!) at Western Michigan University to get a resolution passed by the local city council that they would refuse to enforce any attempt at creating an Arizona-style “show your papers” law. I’m pretty bad about documenting the things I do; in this case it turns out that I did, and totally forgot. You also see legendary Kalamazoo city council member Don Cooney speaking at a pro-education rally, among other things; Don turns up again in a documentary I did about the Occupy movement.

  • Stop Wasting Food! (2011)

    Back in 2011 I cut this video about the massive food waste that happens particularly in developed nations. This was the description of the video at the time:

    Each day in this country millions of people go hungry while corporate food service throws out tons and tons of perfectly good food with excuses like “we will get sued” and “it will take away from our sales if we give this food away.” I’m calling bullshit, and challenging corporate food service to step up and do the right thing. Please join me; they will respond to public pressure, if there’s enough of it.

    Now, twelve years later, we still haven’t really addressed this problem very well, but movement has happened including the French government mandating waste reduction and distribution efficiency regulations. Just like it says in that last sentence, “please join me; they will respond to public pressure if there’s enough of it.” Hardly surprising that the earliest meaningful movement we have seen on this issue is in France, one of the world’s more infamous sources of social change via public pressure.