Is Barack Obama John Henry?

The following is my response to a post by MarcLord at Adored By Hordes. Marc raises the honest question of hope through the lens of the Camusian Imperative. His "rational" question was: Are things so bad we should contemplate preemptive suicide? His question was a macabre, tongue-in-cheek sanity check, complete with ivory-tower black gallows humor (I say that because I don't think Marc was really going to act based upon his heartfelt underlying fear). And for this, I applaud his honesty.

This is what a system looks like when it is dying. We are caught between two forces: one being the internet and the other being biologic structure. They are fighting on a metaphysical level. The internet can't afford capitalism's antiquated notions of business and individual failures – those processes are too slow for the junk the system has been snorting. It requires national health care (and not just AMA medicine), efficient but accurate justice, and a desire to get it right – or something that looks like divine socialism.

The internet cannot survive as a redundant replicant. It cannot function without novelty. It has to grow, replicate, and do all those things biology does. But without novelty, just as in linear algebra, the matrix collapses is there is not true independence between the vectors. Novelty is a truth of survival in any system, ranging from our daily lives to abstract mathematics.

On the biotic front, we are no longer purely animals. We have evolved. But now we are fundamentally questioning whether we have been relegated to serving machine-language gods, individual Bobby Fishers battling Big Blue (or John Henry). This relegation is somewhat analogous to our historical experiences with slavery, indentured service, and the student loan program – all of which restrict and dominate creativity (which is how novelty comes into being). So our capitalist system that begins with homogeneous religious experience, tv, conformance education, student loan indenture, and ends with 401K/HMO/paycheck protection and the hope of a better eternal life for our reincarnated DNA.

And this is what is breaking down. It has been leveraged, nipped and tucked, carroted and sticked, broken and beaten, excommunicated and reborn to a point we don't really understand, on an individual level, much of anything except the kabuki rules of how to carve out some shelter in this harsh virtual world.

We are fast approaching the pinnacle of our humanity (well at least the current version). We, in the west anyway, have everything that has ever been promised by society, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. And it is not working.

We have a choice. Are we going to move into a Gaian reality of balance and sustainability (with or without technology) or are we going to hire Halliburton/Bank of America/Carlyle Group to develop our strategy for the next eon?

My biggest concern is that the latter does nothing to preserve novelty. In other words, dharma comes to a stop.