Created February 10, 2023
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
President Eisenhower warned us to be careful of the military-industrial complex. In a way, you might say what President Eisenhower was also saying was to look out for the people in the world who are impressed by and live by force, and want as much power as possible. Logically those would be the people to become obsessed with weapons and continuing to transcend last year’s weapons innovations. They would assume that with weapons advantages they could come pretty close to ruling the world without all that much risk to themselves.
Out here amongst the people, of course we want so many things, yet the thing we all know we want the most is not to get killed.
Whether you look down or up or straight across at it, the world since the atom bomb has been ruled by the threat of horrific world war. It is the central fear of the times. It puts its mark on everything in this historic era.
The people leading advanced weapons development are very intelligent. They are getting paid well and respected for doing their passion work that is at the cutting edge of basic science, advancing the key knowledge humanity seeks for purely curiosity reasons, leaving aside technological exploitation.
Their work is supported by businesspeople who are maximizing profits growth which is the main part of their job – the other part of their job is to be humane. The bigger part of the job tends to prevail. The lure of weapons and power does not necessarily attract people who are humane, although there is a spark of humanity in each and every one of us, waiting to be shown, or shining.
Our whole world revolves around two axes: hedonism and fear. The fear is atomic biological chemical all-out war and its terrorism foretastes, students shooting teachers, random people knifing random people. The hedonism is what we have now deified as the summum bonum of our culture, with cynicism to every idealism. What’s left after denying the perennial values is what you see and hear about. The world is not going to Hell in a handbasket for unknown causes. The reasons are totally obvious.
We used to believe in honor, dignity, sincerity, love, loyalty, doing the right thing, truth, hard work, stiff upper lip, good soldier, devoted parent/child, kindness, empathy, but now the corrosive humor of our put-down culture has marinated and soured that great upbringing we all got, and few of us are acting out the role of heroes. All of us are heroes inside. Some rationalize random cruelty to others while strumming their own self-delusion of being a hero driven by lofty ideals.
The military-industrial complex is only part of the larger complex of having lost our way, our moral compass, having lost faith in our spiritual intuitions which when genuinely followed by actions in the world, greatly succeed.
It’s as if the human race is saying, “Well, it sure looks as if God was just wishful thinking on our part, it’s obvious that the scientists enabling the new weapons don’t believe in it, so that proves there is no God!”
The word “God” (now captured by science as a theorized Higgs particle field) is a conversation stopper in most cases, because of the complexity of associations one has with the word. It’s best to start from a new word or phrase.
Let’s call it the intelligence of the universe.
There. Doesn’t that feel better? It isn’t so hard to imagine that the universe could be intelligent, and conscious, why not? Science has taught us that the world is much more complicated and strange than we could ever have imagined. Probability waves in quantum foam intercepted by a consciousness materialize into deterministic existence. Higgs fields that magically (no one has explained how) confer mass onto every particle in range, otherwise all particles have no mass.
This all sounds so crazy the idea that “it” (the universe) is intelligent seems tame by comparison. It’s almost as if the inductive logic of observing all these strange new explanations of what reality is, lead us evermore to the suspicion that intelligence was behind the creation, not just lucky accidents occurring continuously. How did they ever put that one over on us, that all of this is one great big accident somehow luckily creating life and consciousness?! It seems so ridiculous in retrospect. We have not been firmly grounded. Each of us has been somewhat overwhelmed by the lives we live now. Some things have fooled us and we must think more deeply about them.
Love to all,
Bill
