I’m constantly amazed at how good and well-behaved most people are most of the time. Of course, I live in a good area in a very wealthy society. What amazes me even more is how many of my peers think our lives are horribly crime-infested.

Mostly, I guess, it’s the “media.” News and entertainments about horrible crimes are a lot more interesting than those discussing hobbies or good food. But the fact is that in this place, at this time, most violent crime involves fights between people who know each other pretty well. Most property crime is reimbursed by insurance and in any case rarely threatens someone’s health and well-being. I remember too well the bad old days when we all carried cash, and a street mugging (violent or not) could take a week or more of earnings and leave us unable to pay bills or even to eat in the days before credit cards. 

Nevertheless, folks seem to think the worst. 

People are much more likely to be involved in traffic accidents than to be affected by serious crime. “Abducted children” are usually involved in custodial arguments or are running away. Folks almost never encounter violent “illegal” immigrants. But the fears of all kinds of suburban and urban myths multiply. 

It’s one of the penalties we pay for partially inhabiting a distorted virtual reality on the internet where we are surrounded by more horrors than miracles all the time. The opposite, actually, of real life 

Any authoritarian movement can be evaluated by the size of its tribe and the strength of its boundaries. By definition it is led by one person absolutely certain of his or (rarely) her intuitions, intelligence, and abilities. After that, how toxic such a movement becomes mostly relates to how isolated its inner members are from the rest of the population. 

Leaders always know that. The first thing an authoritarian must do is separate his congregation from all the “others” who are either too stupid to know better or – in the worst cases – “not people” at all. 

Because once you have tagged those outsiders, you no longer need to treat them like your fellow tribesfolk. They can be defined as animals to be trained and enslaved, or simply germs to be killed. None of the tribal beliefs and laws apply to anyone who is not part of the cult. 

Authoritarian leaders only survive by being ruthlessly powerful. Their only core concern is maintaining that power whether they believe their goals are true and bright or whether they are simply augmenting their own status and wealth. Anyone in their way is – again by definition – an outsider and in the worst cases not a person at all.

It remains an open question whether those who believe “all humans are people” can endure against our modern, technologically enabled, authoritarian gangs. 

There is a serious court case where a man says no contraceptives should be sold to anyone because his daughter might use them to become sexually active which is against his “religious beliefs”. A band of native Americans are suing to stop people going to the moon because they consider it a “sacred object”. And much more.

Religious belief has always involved conflict because what is crystal truth to one person or tribe is foggy nonsense to another. America tried to solve this with individual right to freedom of religion, with no state enforcement of one or another as there used to be in medieval Europe. America has always been home to all kinds of imported, homegrown, or personal religions – each mutually crazy to one another. 

But the right to one’s own religion should never extend to control over others. Such rights stop at the boundary of your skin. “’Your religion” may say all short people should have their hearts ripped out. The state is not defiling your right to religious freedom by stopping you.

In the “normal curve” of people’s personalities there are always a certain number of blindly driven fanatics. The various laws try to keep them from hurting others. Even their own children, who also possess rights. 

Most people have a spiritual component, and need the right to express it as they see fit. But never the right to take away anyone else’s similar right because -well- those others are also absolutely certain they are cosmically right 

The obscenely wealthy have many rationales and excuses. We are aware of them all because they can afford the best publicists. 

We are informed that in a democratic capitalist society cream rises. The best and the brightest make fortunes and in so doing enrich everyone. They invest wisely to benefit society by increasing productivity and channeling wealth to where it is most useful for all.

An honest look around may contradict a lot of that _ I read media devoted to the upper layers of the economy where ads for half-million-dollar cars and remote multi-million dollar dwellings proliferate. Unique experiences for tourists, costing decades of normal salary. But I need not go on. More is virtuous, more is better, more can do no wrong. Somehow, some way, all this spending actually benefits peons like you and me. Or so the publicists tell us.

The old word for this was “gluttony.” Never having enough, never being satisfied, stuffing oneself with momentary, passing, uninhibited extravagance simply to show off because one is bored. At least in the recent past gluttony was not considered a social virtue.

But these are modern times 

Walking along the inlet on an extremely windy day which significantly dropped the apparent temperature I spotted two flocks of ducks. 20 or more black ones were flying and quacking loudly enough to hear over the roars of the gale in the leafless trees. Another group of buffleheads – tiny with cute white heads – rode in a larger group than I had seen all winter.

The sight was pleasing of course. Like many, I worry at the profound drop in quantity of what I once took for granted when younger. There are fewer birds, insects, wildflowers. No box turtles or snakes and vanishing milkweed. The lobsters are gone long ago. Bait fish and hermit crabs and gulls are still plentiful. But I wonder at tipping points, and when a few less become too few less and soon there are no more. 

Sometimes I fear I have seen the best of times. The planet was a lot bigger in my youth, a lot less people, a lot more truly wild spaces even tucked in the just-beginning-to-explode suburbs. More room for native species before monoculture flattened diverse farm ecologies into barren product factories.

Maybe it is too late already, but in any case I see few signs of grand hope. Maybe that is why everyone is so anxious _ even those theoretically surrounded by all they could ever want.

Well, I truly enjoyed those ducks anyway. Wished them well, as I do any transient beauty I may encounter day-to-day. 

In these degenerate days, “amateur” means doing something without concern for money. Because, of course, everything else is supposed to be about money, or at least tangible gain. The obvious goal for all amateurs is to become “professional” and get paid for what they do. 

But originally, amateur had more the connotation of what “passion” (as in “follow your passion”) does now. Just doing something because you enjoy it or feel an internal reward. For a short while, even in a completely capitalistic society, being an “amateur” was kind of noble, even as the term inevitably took on connotations of not being particularly excellent. 

My own take on this is that I generally observe that the transition from amateur to professional is also a warp which not only removes some of the joy, but also transforms a pure approach into something constrained by what an audience demands. For a “professional” truly requires an audience more than the original passion. 

Nothing new. In the olden golden days, and even now, the true amateurs and those “following passion” are those with the resources and time to do so regardless of what anyone else thinks. As always, an endeavor usually rewarding but frequently misunderstood by others, to the point of generating loneliness.

I’ve been a proud amateur in some areas of my life for a long time _ still am, as this essay proves. People kept telling me to grow up and _ get serious _ and I’m glad I often ignored them. As almost any other true amateur would. 

I have always admired the Anatole France quote that the rich as well as the poor are forbidden by law from sleeping under a bridge. It summarizes the false illusion of an equality of power which does not exist. It is a position frequently sermonized by the elite wealthy who control any legal system. 

Not only laws of course. Any belief in equality where none is possible. The “right to work” assumes an individual laborer enters into contracts with the same power as the employer. That is a ridiculous thought to anyone who actually has been a laborer. The “freedom of choice” to pick insurance or medical coverage too complicated and convoluted for any person to read. The constant aggravating requirements of needy people to obtain any help. 

Sure, in such confrontations a few individuals have more clout than others. They and their friends who run government and media don’t see the problem. 

Not simply the wealthy, of course. A legion of the arrogant, the liars, the criminals, and the easily mobilized ignorant are convinced that they also can sleep under any bridge they feel like because they are sure that they can afford the fine, talk their way out of any problem, or simply run away and ignore consequences. 

If they can’t, they decide they are “victims.”

Civilization requires a rule of law, and the law will always favor those with power. That’s okay. But there is a limit to how cohesive a law which encodes “might makes right” can remain over the long term. Extending such simple truth to cosmic moral principle – and a hollow one at that – is what annoys me. 

Enshrining the “right to less” as holy writ is an insane way to run a country. 

“Game theory” is a segment of pure mathematics. It explains the possibilities of what “rational actors” can do when there is perfect knowledge, rules are known and enforced, and actions are limited. Left unsaid is that goals are usually clear and often singular. 

That works well in the math world _ obviously little of it truly applies in human social “real life” where actors are irrational, knowledge is imperfect, there are no rules, goals are multifaceted and vague. And possibilities are infinite and change instantly depending, for example, on the mood of the actors. 

I worry because my young grandson is growing up in a world of video games, like all his elementary school peers, adolescents and young adults. They tend to assume their real life will  resemble the electronic worlds they have continuously inhabited. They are shocked – often into semi-catatonic withdrawal – when it is not so.

A pernicious fallacy of all games is that you can start over and play under the same conditions again and again. Military organizations and whole civilizations have discovered _ to their chagrin and sometimes catastrophe _ that such is not the case. “Fighting the last war” is not a way to get better prepared for the next. 

I imagine that sometime the kids will have to grow out of it, as once-upon-a-time children left fairy tales behind and even I recognized that science fiction was a limited real-world skill. All grand theories tend to crash and burn whenever a few people and life situations are involved.  

The US founders, who thought long and hard about the mechanics of government, put strict limits on their constitutional version of representative democracy. People only directly voted for a  “mob” of House of Representatives who would yell about the issues of the day. More mature senators were to be appointed by state legislators. The elite would nominate the best “electors” in the land who would pick the wisest of the wise to be temporary leader. Party politics were never to arise. 

How’d that work out for ya?

We seem to be completely in an age of reviled or idolized avatar democracy. We seek not politicians to consider our “interests”, but rather politicians who are us – with all our prejudices, fears, hopes and especially anger at just about everything. 

More than that, we’ve decided the role is the person. Staff and bureaucracy does not count or is the enemy. Only the symbolozed candidate _ who should be exactly like us _ is acceptable. Very much like a video game avatar. 

Like a video game, short, dumb, and irrelevant. As the avatars are played by the mob, the real governance is done by the wealthy, who _being defined by their wealth _ care only about their wealth. 

Interesting to observe. Distressing to live through. 

“Educators” are bemoaning how “far behind” children are academically because of the pandemic. It’s the latest silliness as our society continues to believe that it must turn out masses of technocratic robots to keep industry and capitalism working. 

The teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic has always been less important than socialization of children into groups. Not to mention the acclimatization of children into industrialized work habits. 

The wealthy have always known this, of course. Children were sent to private or boarding schools -_and are still targeted into elite colleges _ less to learn artisan skills than to meet the right people. And, truthfully, less to even meet the right people than to find out how to get along with them and bond into the upper levels of society. 

Beyond that, it seems we are rapidly heading into a deskilled, post literate world. Automation does all the skilled work. Computers read, right, translate, and analyze. Nobody needs to do that stuff anymore. Just listen and talk and get along with others. 

Western ideal for a long time has been to enable everyone to live like the upper class classic Greeks, free of chores, just thinking, discussing, and enjoying all the time (when they were not fighting each other). If civilization holds, that scenario seems likely. In a post-apocalyptic world, social skills would still be the best tools, as they have been for the last hundred thousand years or so. 

The kids will be fine. The teachers _ not so much.