How is the United States Government (and the Culture) Like "The Fonz"?

They Both “Jumped the Shark”

From the Wikipedia article on the TV show “Happy Days”:

"Jumping the shark" The term “jumping the shark” arose from a fifth season episode that aired on September 20, 1977. Fonzie (clad in swim trunks and leather jacket) jumps over a shark on waterskis. “Jumping the shark” describes an outrageous stunt designed to boost the ratings of a dying show, which has the opposite effect, essentially killing the show. Though in the case of Happy Days, the show actually continued for another six seasons after it literally “jumped the shark”.

Yeah, but without Ritchie!

I think the current government of the United States has jumped the shark not once but many time in recent history. The Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidents, at least after Kennedy (and excluding Carter) maybe, have all had their jumping the shark exploits. Right now the Congress' popularity ratings with voters is at an all time low. Hardly anyone thinks they are worth the salary we pay them. The “Super committee” and its failure (at which no one was surprised) was a jump over Jaws itself. I could hear Harry Reid say to Nancy Pelosi, “We're going to need a bigger set of skis!”

The Supreme Court just last year validated the idea of corporations as people with free speech rights meaning they can talk with their money to influence voters to vote against their own interests (see:Corporate personhood and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) . That was a doozy of a jump. And it is easy to visualize those large corporations, especially big Wall Street banks and brokerages, as sharks these days. The whole financial industry feels like shark-infested waters where the lower classes are the prey.

And presidents? Boy what a bunch of jumping episodes they have had. Nixon with Watergate, Clinton with Lewinsky, Bush Jr.. with Iraq (remember WMDs?), and then Obama with his choices for his economics team, a group of people devoted to Wall Street and a corrupt financial system. They carried forward with Bush's bailout plan with the result that the banksters could pay themselves outrageous bonuses while the rest of the country got a whole lot poorer. He has basically not done (or even tried very hard to do) what he promised to do on many fronts. Ineptitude is like jumping a whale shark; it is a really huge shark compared with a human, but it eats plankton! Obama jumped the whale shark everytime he tried to make nice with John Boehner and appease the Republicans. He thought it would look good, but actually be pretty safe! And never learning from a mistake? He made that jump many times.

And every single one of these jumps has moved the nation closer to the death of whatever passed for democracy once upon a time. The show is about to be canceled folks.

What Did We Really Expect?

The nation as a whole, though, has jumped the shark in terms of its over-the-top borrow-to-keep-consuming-more-and-more culture. The ratings for our education system, our trust of corporate governance, our confidence in the future or the so-called “direction” the country is going in are all in the tank. And that doesn't just apply to citizens of the US. The rest of the world has lost trust in this country. They no longer look to the US for global leadership and with good reason. We are as lost in the fog as everyone else. But many people in the rest of the world have lost trust in their own governments as well. Arab Spring. Greek riots. The spreading tensions in the Eurozone, rumored riots in China. People are pretty unhappy about the way governments are handling things and they are starting to show it.

In my last blog I pointed out that to have a truly sapient (i.e. functional in light of high complexity) government you need to have a sapient citizenry. Where humans are right now in terms of average sapience is simply too low on the scale to provide that kind of citizenry for our kind of civilization. Our brains (or specifically parts of the prefrontal cortex responsible for higher level judgment; see: Working Papers on Sapience if this term is new to you) need to undergo additional evolution to boost the average sapience level to a point that citizens would grasp the ways to live wisely (which, in my not-so-humble opinion is exactly the opposite of the ordinary American lifestyle). The sad part is that the seeds of brain structures that would need to be expanded are there now. That is why we do call ourselves sapient in the first place. But the structures that evolved were only competent for life in smaller, less complex societies. Our cleverness was good for building very complex large societies and we did. Now we find we are not generally wise enough to manage those societies or our own roles as members of the Ecos.

Ideally a sapient government would be comprised of men and women of above average sapience (and wisdom, where that average is far above the current one - see below discussion on sapience distribution) elected to those positions by a sapient electorate that would be wise enough to recognize the greater wisdom of those people. What we have today is so NOT that kind of system. We have neither a sufficiently sapient citizenry nor does the citizenry we have value wisdom in leaders. So it is no surprise that we get the governments we have. The only thing we can do is try to get some entertainment value out of everyone jumping sharks (and thereby killing the show even more quickly). Rupert Murdoch is there to make sure we all see the many shark jumps going on around the world.

Once Again an Impossible Vision

There really isn't a whole lot more to say about our situation. We are what we are and that is simply not sufficiently fit to maintain our presence as a species given the kind of environment we have created. That part is pretty simple. I guess you could say the species, Homo sapiens has jumped the shark (our wowy-zowy high tech, pop cultures) and as it happens the ski boat is running out of gas and a stormy sea is ahead!

I think some readers still hold onto the hope that sapience can somehow be instilled in the current population, if only we had the right words or right approach (say in education). But that is not how sapience works. It can't be learned since it is an inherent brain capacity. What is learned is wisdom. You need to have sapience in order to be able to learn from your life experiences (from your own successes and mistakes as well as those of others that you observe). Sapience guides the process of maturing into a wise adult/elder. In this regard it is very much akin to intelligence in which your brain is genetically programmed to have a basic capacity (general intelligence). The more you have the more you can learn, especially of explicit knowledge. Through mental exercises, like a stimulating education (not what passes as education in the US today, of course), you can boost your intelligence a bit. The brain is a lot like a muscle in this regard. But you can't really learn how to be more intelligent. People are born with a range of basic capabilities and that is what they have to work with in life. Intelligence appears to be normally distributed (as measured by, say, IQ tests). Levels of sapience are also distributed in a similar fashion in the population. Only sapience may not be normally distributed (by a Gaussian function). Rather there is reason to believe the “peak”, representing the bulk of people in the population, is skewed toward the low end of the scale with a thin tail out to the right (the high end of the scale). There are basic evolutionary reasons for this likely distribution. This would account for what we observe, that most people have poor judgment and seem to be unaware of how reality actually works; they are foolish but clever. Only a very few people ever demonstrate what we would call wisdom. Generally it emerges later in life. And it is rare. I personally think Gandhi was a fairly wise man, but how many are there like him? And, especially, how many leaders in our world would we think of as wise?

So that is our predicament as a species. There are so few highly sapient people out there and an overwhelming number of low-level sapients. Being clever is not the same as being sapient, so you can't really tell who is a candidate simply by observing their cleverness. Clever people can actually understand these arguments and even agree with them. But that doesn't mean they will live wisely (basically in balance with nature). Very clever people in government and business do understand the situation with human induced global warming. But they can't do anything about it because that will destroy the economies of the world and they choose the current economic situation over the future climate situation. It is fundamentally a deeply unwise choice.

Once more let me project the most likely scenario. We have sealed the fate of Homo sapiens. The future world of limited energy supplies and devastating climate change will put extraordinary selection pressures on humanity. The most likely outcome is the extinction of the current species (say in several thousand years). The question remains, will a new species emerge from a small population of those who are more adaptive to the future world and thereby fit enough to continue? If so what kind of sentience will it be. I've put my money on Homo eusapiens, a species that arises from H. sapiens eusapiens, a subspecies of us comprised of the higher sapients in our populations. I've explained many times why.

I no longer think it is a question as to whether this scenario will play out, but just how dramatic, and traumatic it will be. As far as I am concerned the only reason to have a basic government that is not spending its time jumping sharks, and is comprised of people who are at least a little bit more sapient (and wise) than those who seem to be the denizens of Washington DC is so that they can guide the rest of us through a more managed decline. It should be possible to find ways to deal with both declining energy supplies and changing weather patterns to minimize the pain and suffering that would otherwise ensue. Everyone will be poorer, there is no getting around that simple fact. Less energy means less wealth production and that means less creature comfort for everyone. What the government could do is organize our food production systems in order to assure there is at least enough to eat. I actually doubt that a national level government will be able to do much along these lines, but it could play a role in maintaining a basic communications and education infrastructure (I, of course, mean a real education system). Local governments will have to take the leadership in food and basic supplies (water, what fuel there may be, etc.). The degree of localization will probably come in a set of stages. Large nations like the US, Canada, China, Russia, etc. will likely devolve into regional jurisdictions as the energy problems start to bite. Later, states, then counties and cities, will become the focus of governance. Eventually the scale will be that of villages in locales where climate conditions permit..

The governments that are currently in place are failing miserably because they are trying to bring back the old growth-oriented vision of an economy. Materialism equals happiness in this vision. They are bound to fail because it takes a lot of high-power energy to make that system work, and we are running out of that commodity. But they will continue to try because the general population doesn't grasp what has happened and also believes that we should be able to get back to that prior Nirvana. So they expect the politicians to promise them that they will succeed and we keep voting idiots into high offices because most of us maintain that belief. Two things would have to happen to change this futile approach. One: the people would have to garner enough cleverness to begin to see the reality of their changing world. Unfortunately that takes (probably many) catastrophic events before they start questioning their given assumptions. Two: some wiser people will need to step up to the plate when the people are ready for them. They will need to tell the people the truth and provide them with ideas for how to make the decline much less painful. Can these two conditions be met? I don't really know the answer to that question. I hope so, but I must admit, based on what I have seen so far it is more likely that the people and the politicians will simply look for bigger sharks to jump.

Comments

[Selfgovus]

George - "The governments that are currently in place are failing miserably..."

The existing platform doesn't have enough flexibility or tactile control over it's constituent parts.

The platform the culture created to govern itself isn't working any more.

Our system of "hierarchical management" is now failing because the culture also created the internet in a, "...movement toward greater hierarchical management of [the culture's] behavior in order to produce greater complexity in that behavior to address the greater complexity evolving (co-evolving) in the environment of [the culture]."

Fortunately, the internet, the world's neocortex, has begun to auto-organize in direct response to the archicortex's failures.

Given Mobus' Law of Complexity, I think humanity has reached the "point" where the system needs rapid and massive restructuring to survive.

To satisfy the demands of the emerging neocortex, the existing system of hierarchical control will need to be restructured.

It is being demanded...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyp1n2WXUho

Unfortunately, this awakening is taking place as the planet is facing innumerable looming crises. Evolution works in mysterious ways.

Mobus' Law of Complexity

As complexity emerges in a system (to respond to complexity in the larger embedding system) a point is reached wherein the system must restructure to enhance a hierarchical control network in order to improve coordination and avoid the diminishing costs of increasing complexity.

[Selfgovus]

"Unfortunately, this awakening is taking place as the planet is facing innumerable looming crises. Evolution works in mysterious ways."

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” -Kurt Vonnegut

[Robin Datta]

There is no need to jump the sharks, they are swimming with them: and the sharks have them in their jaws. 

K Street Documentary: The Best Government Money Can Buy?

[AlT]

democracy is not sustainable form of government and therefore there is no way to "elect" homo eusapient people to restructurre governement

the momentum of overpopulating homo sapiens simply cannot bew stopped even if we tried but nobody even is trying because the complexity is outside of the range that can be handled by homo sapient

the nature and course of human evolution is clear:
civilization of homo sapiens craches; population begins a downwward spiral that will continue until the homo eusapients come forward , connect, understand that democracy is not the kind of government that can work and work out how they will take over government and human condition to establish the sustainable government with whatever left of the planetary resorces (biodiversity, quality of air, availability of clean water, climate unpredictability, etc.)

all we can do at the moment is work on the mechanisms that will allow homo eusapient to rrecognize each other, connect and form a viable community under democracy but completely different from it

knowledge is power

the better we organize the knowledge, the bettter we prepare to pass it to homo eusapient, thehigher will be the chances of quick cristallization of homo eusapient out of homo sapient on the background of civilizational collapse

evolution works and never stops

[D]

I was going to say something similar to what Selfgovus said:

"The existing platform doesn't have enough flexibility or tactile control over it's constituent parts."

Over the last few years, the notion has been developing that our one-dimensional "price signal" system does not provide enough information for flexible, tactile and intelligent control over our free markets and thus they are not intelligently controlled.

We need something different. A more complex signalling system.

Exactly how that will come together, I don't know. But I'm glad to see that others here are seeing the same kind of problem with the "platform" we now use.

[George Mobus]

Selfgovus,

"Mobus' law"!! I'll have to send that to Joe Tainter! He could then show how essentially every civilization has failed to follow my law!

-------------------------------------

Robin,

Thanks for the link.

-----------------------------------
AIT,

all we can do at the moment is work on the mechanisms that will allow homo eusapient to rrecognize each other, connect and form a viable community...

Yes, this is more in line with what I was thinking.

---------------------------------
D,

I have long felt the problem with markets based on money as we think of it today is precisely this price signal issue. I have proposed, on several occasions, that if money were based on an energy unit of measure (like a gold standard but based on real value) then prices could better reflect a base cost plus what someone was trying to claim as their value-added (e.g. from skills and knowledge). I think you can find it under an early blog called What is money, really?. A companion piece called , What is value? expands the ideas there.

With this type of valuation approach it becomes much easier for a coordination level control system to keep markets honest and operative. At least that is the theory. The only time we know that it worked was way back when farmers bartered, trading their work efforts for someone else's work efforts which, by the nature of a less complex society, were transparent to all. It was just inconvenient so money was invented to facilitate trades. Worked beautifully until humans forgot what money originally represented!

George

[Amjad Syed]

Why do we consider that human should be sapient?

[George Mobus]

Amjad,

In my thesis humans are already sapient. You can read my thesis in a set of working papers at: Question Everything: Series Index. There are links there to the various papers on the subject.

The problem is that humans are not sapient enough to wisely manage their affairs in balance with the Ecos.

George

[step back]

George,

My premise is that the jumping the shark moment has come because most in the OECD countries do not understand what is money (really) or what a job, job, job is. They just parrot the same noises they hear from equally, less than fully clued "professionals".

Yes, you are correct that money replaced the face-to-face barter system. Back then; when two people made a trade, they knew exactly who was making what set of promises in exchange for something else. They knew how to calculate the risk that promissor will deliver on his promise.

Today, with money, we don't know. We don't know who made the promise or what the promise is or how it will be fulfilled. We kid ourselves into believing that a magic, Invisible Hand will deliver, will make good on the vague set of promises.

When "the Hand" stops producing the promised thunder claps, we panic and we jump the shark. What else can we do at this late stage in the show?

The Fonz would be right proud of us. We are acting so cool in the face of crisis.

(p.s. For some strange reason the system listed my last comment as "D". It was really me.)

[Free EMR]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
[Moderator edit: removed commercial URL]

[Tom]

George, i imagine you've seen this, but if not, when you have two and a quarter hours to watch a video this would be a good one to "waste your time" on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT50SV3W5K0

Happy holidays to you and all your readers/commenters.

[rc helicopter reviews]

Impressive blog! -Arron

[Aboc Zed]

@tom

thanks for the holiday wishes

same to you

that movie you posted is indeed waste of time (without quotes)

woo of highest quality mixed with talking scientists and pseudoscientists

my recommendation to readers and to george not to watch that movie unless they want to practice their bs detector

[George Mobus]

Step Back,

I agree. We have collectively jumped many sharks, each one a bit bigger than the last, in our attempt to get our ratings back up. But it has always had the exact opposite effect!

Money as a symbol for work could work (e.g. an energy value based monetary unit) but, alas, it would require everyone interpreting its meaning properly. Given the sapience of the current population that is not likely to be possible. Maybe next time there is something like a market-enabled civilization with more understanding citizens. If there is a next time!

---------------------------------
EMR,

If you are still reading you will notice that your commercial URL has been removed. My policy on this site is no commercial advertising. So .com urls and user names that imply a commercial interest are often treated as spam. If you meant what you said about participating in this blog, fine.

----------------------------------
Tom,

I had seen it. My wife wanted to see it and I wanted to stay married! The movie contained several factual errors that made me a little less than sympathetic to the overall message. But then I do tend to question everything!

---------------------------------
Arron (helicopters),

Thank you for the comment. Your URL escaped edit since it is .org. I hope you will have more to contribute in the future because this simple comment looks a lot like spam. Gave you the benefit of the doubt this time.

-----------------------------------
Aboc Zed,

Actually practicing your BS detector is something to be done all the time! It is like a muscle, use it or it atrophies.

George

[c woof]

George
Perhaps I'm late for the train, but didn't many many indigenous societies handle sustainability to the satisfaction of ever continuing? Isn't it just our current western-based society, which has removed itself from the consequences of action from nothing to consumption which is at fault? eg- By thinking we can burn coal without cost is arrogant and myopic, but understanding that there are consequences is not beyond mankind, just beyond certain societal pressures which are limited in scope.

[George Mobus]

c woof,

Welcome to QE.

Craig Dilworth ("Too Smart for Our Own Good") has done an excellent job of laying out the situation for humans from the late Pleistocene establishment of our current form. He looks at both the hunter-gatherer societies of today, their customs with respect to social practices to provide internal checks on population (e.g. infanticide), and the fossil record of human expansion (out of Africa) and the major extinctions of megafauna shortly after humans arrived (e.g. in the Americas). The picture is that humans need a long time, on the order of 20k years or so, living as hunter-gatherers to come into dynamic equilibrium with their environment. They respond to both internal and external checks just like other animals, but the amount of time needed to find the balance is relatively long after pioneering a particular ecosystem, and requires some time to adjust after first killing off the low hanging fruit, i.e. the megafauna species.

So, yes. It appears humans are able, at least subconsciously, to find social/cultural practices that put them in balance with the resource production/waste disposal rates of their particular environments. But it takes a while.

Meanwhile, after the development of agriculture and technologies removed the normal external checks, the biological balance finding mechanisms were overridden. Modern industrial man is chasing some kind of balance but has been caught in a vicious cycle of trying to solve problems with more technology. This path only leads to accelerating consumption of resources and pollution. It has also led to unrealistic expectations by the populace. That last part is probably the crux of our problem. We seek happiness from more stuff, but can never find balance that way.

I think there is a possibility of humans eventually finding a balance with the rest of the Ecos, even using some forms of appropriate technologies, but it will require a very different mental competency than our current species has. For an explanation of this, I'm afraid I have to point you to some other writings on this site. See, in particular, the category (left-hand column) Sapience.

George

[c woof]

George
Thank you for your informative and timely reply. It brings together some of what I already knew into a much clearer picture.
I was having a problem reconciling the societies which I knew had "learned the necessary lessons" with the plucking of the low-hanging fruit, as you call it. Obviously, everywhere mankind has first shown up, large megafauna have paid the price, presumably because they are not only easy targets, but direct competition. Also it seems everywhere there has been empire, forests have paid the price.

ON another note, I have been working (lightly) on a solution which I would like feedback from someone who knows more than I to the energy storage problem, now dominated by talk of lithium batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, etc. It is a simple concept of using a gravity well based on elevators, with wind and solar being the power source-i.e, raise a weight while the sun shines, wind blows, lower it when they don't. Build such units in every new dwelling/building, retrofit existing ones. It could be disguised like an elevator, or not, like a chimney. Simple concept. I've no guarantee that even if the entire planet suddenly thought it was a great idea and embraced it tomorrow and began cranking out workable units that it would save our bacon, but to me it looks attractive. The technology exists, merely needs to be put together in a package.
I also thought the concept (gravity battery) would be a worthy project for an engineering class to solve.

[George Mobus]

Hi C Woof.

That does sound interesting. Elevators are relatively efficient because of their counterweighting mechanism. However, they still expend energy lifting whatever weight is added to their cars and proportional to that weight.

I assume you mean to lift the water to run back down through a turbine to run a generator (as opposed to drinking and flushing water). The lifting will have to use energy and the key question is, how much of that can be recouped from the gravitational potential when the water falls back down. I'm guessing it will be the same efficiency as the so-called pumped hydro storage systems now in use. So you might check those out to see what their percent recovery is. I understand it is considered a better solution than batteries, but it can only be used where there are reservoir holding areas (e.g. mountains). Maybe the idea of individual buildings adds something useful there.

George

[c woof]

@George
Yes, the concept is the same as using water as the storage unit (my first thought), but using plain old weights, not water. Water versions have been in use for awhile in certain places where water storage is possible, but that is a limiting factor. The energy needed would come from solar panels and wind turbines when the sun shines and the wind blows. Jay Leno put both systems in his exotic car garage, with mixed results. The solar panels are still in use, it's unclear what the story is on the turbine. But his garage doesn't need overnight power, so no storage was conceived (AFAIK).
As I am not expressly a civil engineer, the energy loss involved is not my forte, so I don't yet have a clear idea of how small is too small to be of use, but I was thinking perhaps individual housing, as, as I said, elevators and chimneys are readily accepted by everyone now, so even retrofits would be ok. But how much storage is possible? How efficient can the turbines become? How much weight for how much energy for how much time? Etc.
The spark came from taking my mother to a heart specialist whose office was in a small 2-story building on the second floor. From the outside, it was not evident that there was an elevator built into the building whatsoever, and, well, it got me thinking and spread from there.
I'm one of those noobs who thought long ago that everyone should have their own personal wind turbine and solar panel setup and solar water heating, etc. The advantage of taking a class thru university extension 35 years ago on "ecological homes" also contained a disadvantage-- thinking that that was the wave of the future, Trombe walls, subsurface homes, etc. Little did I know that was the only time I would be privileged to see such homes over the last 35 years and that the construction industry is made up of those you talked about last blog where progress is measured in tenths of an inch, not in new ideas.