Applied Philosophy

The following was quoted in the Wikipedia article Brave New World:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”

—Neil Postman in the foreword of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Life is so diverse, so complex, that no one vision can capture it completely. Today we live in a world where:

• Books are banned and there is no reason to ban a book.

Books are not banned by a political censor but by a publishing industry that function as the gatekeeper to what may or may not be published. The Internet is full of text that would never be published by the industry and yet hardly anyone wants to read. So the political power has no reason to actively ban books (except a few that are written by insiders) because they know that most books will not be read.

Before the reformation books, including the Bible, were in Latin and there was no reason to ban them, attempts to translate the Bible were met with prosecution and massacre.

• We are deprived of information and we get too much of it.
• The truth is concealed and drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

We are deprived of exact and timely information and we are drowned in incidental and non-essential information. Without information—no matter how smart we are—we can never know the truth.

• We are a captive culture and a trivial one.

Those who are not trivial, who do not spend their lives following the latest celebrity “scandal” are captive in enclosed academia or high-powered career. They enter their cage willingly, even competing to get a place, because it is the only escape they know from the triviality.

• People are controlled by pain and pleasure.
• We are ruined by our fears and desires.

People are so different, so diverse—this is a natural consequence to the fact that each person is physically different: some are tall others are short. Some are healthy; others are sickly, et cetera—that while some give up to their pleasures, others have more self-control and vision and have to be intimidated by the threat of pain. Nevertheless a generation grows up that is willing to endure the pain and that is when physical elimination becomes necessary, the Russian Empire achieved that by exile to Siberia, the Military rulers of South America by ‘disappearing’ tens of thousands, other countries do it by constructing the world’s largest prison system.

In High Treason in Zimbabwe I suggested the introduction of a gold coin, which I called the Zimbi, to solve the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe:

The zimbi would have turned the monetary system of Zimbabwe from the weakest on Earth to the only one based on gold, thus ensuring that Zimbabwe becomes the world’s only country with a trustworthy currency. Capital would pour into Zimbabwe from all over the world and its economy would boom.

Now Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Dr Gideon Gono has suggested a plan to reintroduce the Zimbabwean dollar as a gold backed hard currency:

THE GOLD STANDARD

1.23 The gold standard is a monetary system in which money in circulation is freely and fully convertible into a fixed amount of gold. Under such an arrangement, the value of local currency is fully backed by gold. The system allows holders of local currency to redeem paper money for gold at a specified rate.

1.24 The total amount of money in the country would be fixed in relation to the amount of monetary gold. The Central Bank is only able to expand money supply if there is a corresponding increase in gold reserves.

1.25 The gold standard, which is characterised by stable exchange rates removes business uncertainties and facilitates trade and commerce.

THE CURRENCY BOARD

1.26 Under a Currency Board arrangement, Monetary Authorities only issue domestic currency, backed by foreign exchange reserves. The Central Bank issues notes and coins that are convertible into the anchor currency at a fixed rate of exchange.

1.27 Under a Currency Board, however, the country loses monetary autonomy to the anchor country.

OPERATIONAL MODALITIES OF ISSUING THE GOLD/DIAMOND BACKED LOCAL CURRENCY

1.28 Under the gold/diamond backed monetary system, Government will need to provide adequate mineral resources to back each unit of the local currency issued.

1.29 It will be critical to capacitate local gold and diamond producers in order to produce adequate mineral resources.

1.30 Government will establish an Independent Committee of Stakeholders to ascertain and certify the quantity of gold or diamonds produced to back the issuance of the local currency. This Committee would, thus produce certificates of authenticity, indicating the true levels of gold, diamonds, platinum, against which now money would be printed.

1.31 The operational modalities of the gold/diamond backed local currency issuance are as follows:

Step 1:

1.32 Diamond/Gold producers deliver to the designated delivery point

Step 2:

1.33 An all inclusive Independent Panel of stakeholders certifies the quantity of gold/diamonds produced and delivered.

Step 3:

1.34 Upon delivery of gold/diamonds the Independent Panel of experts issues gold/diamond certificates to RBZ, authorizing it to issue local currency equivalent in value to the amount of gold/diamond delivered.

Step 4:

1.35 RBZ instructs Fidelity Printers to print local currency equivalent to the value of the gold/diamond certificates and reports back to the Panel for verification and transparency,.

Step 5:

1.36 Fidelity Printers prints local currency amount equivalent to the value of gold/diamond delivered.

Step 6:

1.37 RBZ issues local currency to the Public through the Banking channels.

RESULT

1.38 The result would be smooth functionality in the country’s payments system, without the risk of over supply of money.

—Reintroduction of Zimdollar – the Defence, by Gideon Gono

Although this plan will not solve all problems and will have problems of its own, it is a thousand times better than the treasonable act of dollarisation. Reaction:

“Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor, Dr Gideon Gono who has identified inflation as the country’s number one enemy and fought to give the national currency a semblance of value, has generated intense debate after he recently called for the reintroduction of local unit.

In a presentation he made in Parliament this week, Dr Gono proposed that the new currency be backed by gold or diamond production in the country, so that it has actual value, as one could have a measure of gold in exchange for money.

The reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar, he said, was therefore ‘not a blind return to the money printing press.’”

—Zimdollar Debate – More Than Simple Economics

Addendum

By adding diamond to gold in his plan, Dr. Gono, is confirming what I wrote in Liquidating the Debt of the United States:

Gold is the most liquid hard asset and at the same time easily manageable and transferable, but other hard assets could be mobilised by a government.

“But our people could not be got to see how artificial our prosperity was—that it all rested on foreign trade and financial credit; that the course of trade once turned away from us, even for a time, it might never return; and that our credit once shaken might never be restored.”

—George Chesney, The Battle of Dorking

This post is dedicated to those who are still reading and to the dead,
who cannot read anymore.

In Scale Appreciation in Modern Science I wrote the following:

Almost all resources have been put towards developing better computational implementations and bigger computational capacity; while very little has been devoted to developing theories that need less computation.

Now we read in a recent article:

“The models run on these computers can generate visualizations of everything from supernovas to protein structures.But even with the speed supercomputers provide, the complex models are quickly overwhelming current computing capabilities.”

—Mock Supernova Created by Supercomputer [my emphasis]

The real problem is that supercomputers are being overwhelmed by the models, while scientific theory has hardly moved forward for the last two generations. Now that is a scientific crisis.

In the past science advanced by bounds and leaps from one generation to another, sometimes the scientific output of one country declines while that of another increase. Now the whole modern world, with its modern science, is declining without an alternative to take over. There is a real qualitative difference between the so-called scientists of today and real scientists who advanced science in the past.

Newton, who died in 1727, built on the foundation of his predecessors. His three abstract laws became the foundation for scores of empirical laws already discovered by great scientists like Johannes Kepler (died 1630), Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) and Christiaan Huygens (d. 1695), to name just a few.

Those men had built their empirical laws on a solid foundation consisting of observations collected by their predecessors, great names like Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543) and Tycho Brahe (d. 1601).

They in turn built on the science developed by the Islamic East and in particular the invention of Algebra, the basis for all subsequent mathematical advances (see the Wikipedia articles: Astronomy in medieval Islam & List of Muslim astronomers).

Newton himself acknowledged this when he wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants”. Unfortunately the view of modern science is blocked by huge super-computers.

In The Fable of the Cannoneer and the Observer I wrote the following:

They have spent huge amounts of money on building larger and larger accelerators, the failure of each one to advance the science becomes the reason for building an even bigger one; this process of enlargement has resulted in an accelerator as big as a city, the biggest pyramid is always built shortly before the end.

And now the recent article:

“The world’s largest scientific machine has cost $10 billion, has worked only nine days and has yet to smash an atom. The unique equipment in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel with cathedral-sized detectors deep beneath the Swiss-French border has been assembled by specialists in many countries, with 8,970 physicists eagerly awaiting the startup.

But despite the expense, thousands of physicists around the world, many of whom hope to conduct experiments here, insist that it will work and that it is crucial to mankind’s understanding of the universe.

…

The collider emerged as the world’s largest after the U.S. canceled the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas in 1993. Congress pulled the plug after costs soared, and questions were raised about the value of the science it could produce.

…

They hope the higher energy will enable them to see particles so far undetected, such as the elusive Higgs boson, which in theory gives mass to other particles — and objects and creatures — in the universe.”

—Particle collider: Black hole or crucial machine? Associated Press [my emphasis]

I can say no more than: “the biggest pyramid is always built shortly before the end”.