It, me, and we

Our reflections on Thanksgiving Day led us to thoughts over the question of choices we make in the fundamental issues of our lives, and on turkey day, our introspection helped me to embrace the reality that is given to us, whether it be the genetics of inheritance in our nature, or the consequence of our environmental nurture.

The specter of normal ordinary human beings going berserk in the department store line so consumers can reach the “sale” advantage some spend their midnight for, to get to Black Friday, gives credence to our behavioral psychologists’ conviction that all of us act on the basis of animal programming embedded in our genes, where violence and aggression for survival trumps sociality’s sanity and compassion.

The nature v. nurture debate rages in many academic circles and our propensity to divide issues so one side is pitted against the other has proven to be unhelpful. The U.S. Congress supercommittee that was handed incredible powers to arrive at a consensus on the government’s debt crisis decided not to decide. Ideological divide and partisan political allegiance prevailed.

(At least, our local politicos are unambiguous about their relationship to law. Re retirement fund indebtedness, GovCNMI just ignores the court’s ruling to ante up its past obligations; instead, it is using some of its more brilliant legal minds to delay any substantive action on the matter.)

This may actually be providential. It highlights the fact that the crisis at hand is not simply a matter of adjusting the currency rates (as we keep insisting should be done if only those guardians of the renminbi would consent to pay for our extravagance by triggering domestic inflation) but rather, it requires a rethinking and transformation of the whole financial basis of the global economy itself, heretofore defined by Wall Street. The overextended financial institutions have become too fat and unwieldy to right itself up. Besides, finances are simply the medium of exchange for concrete values like resource utilization and production systems, forces, and schemes. Finance on consumables devoid of any sense of value makes us bring mace to Black Friday!

Making strict dichotomies since the Persian Zoroaster drew the line between good and evil, truth and falsity, has been the bane of our existence, the last being Mr. George W. Bush’s conviction (along with Dick and Donald) that we hold the side of the good guys, and “them infidels” who are not within our corporate family represent the axis of evil!

Alas, even Obama-san seems incapable of distancing himself from the aforementioned line, and in Asia where the drums of U.S. military vigilance has accelerated its heartbeat, the season’s message of “Peace on Earth, goodwill to humankind” or even just “Peace to people of goodwill” will just have to wait a few more years!

Obviously, neither the captains of industry, or the lords of bloated financial institutions, or the indecisive guardians of public discourse will lead us into the future. The chaos of the Occupy forces makes it clear that the primal scream emanates from Main Street where ordinary Juana de la Cruz of the Sabalu market will have to initiate the transformative move. She’ll have to begin describing her experience, express the existential impact and her feelings on being a commercial unit, articulate her thoughts, and join forces with others to map out a course of action at the local level to guard her selfish market interest.

To build anew sometimes entails serious deconstruction. The first to go is the politico-blabbered CoC notion that we operate out of a free market. A report on four financial institutions—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan-Chase—shows that the four megaliths that have become “too big to fail” are the result of 33 other financial concerns being gobbled up in the last 15 years of mergers and acquisitions that hides real assets and inflates value with the magic touch of auditors.

But Juana’s task is not on what she will forego, and more on what she can do, which begins at the level of operating images, the unit of knowledge that determines behavior. Our pedagogy does not see much value in whining over past shortcomings, and shaking in fear over the uncertainty of the future. The current knowledge contenders for carpe diem are the “it“-approach of science, and the “me”-approach of market psych. Science transcends its subject by making the observer stand apart from the object of its observation. This is heavy on the cause-and-effect explanation and the “it” of causality reigns.

But the observer cannot be divorced from the object of observation so the subjective “me” whose propensities are exploited by the market that relies on chance based on the statistics of focus-groups and immanent testimonies gambles on the probability of certain responses to stimuli, to prevail. The assumption is that “me”’s demonstrated survival skills through the centuries will most likely enable self-preservation.

Happily, we are constituted on the “we”-approach. “We the People” is our credo, and though we do not often take that seriously, it is nevertheless, the basis of our 237 years of political existence as a nation of federated States. “We” is rooted on choice, which is freely exercised under both the purview of cause and chance. We choose our causality and probability! We are currently engaging in the global declaration of interdependence!

Cause, chance, and choice need not be exclusive of each other. We are served best when we operate out of all three—it, me, and we!

We the People, Juana, is where we begin. Shall we dance?