Amygdala Hijacking sounds uncivilized. But it's hard to imagine a society without it.
Societies will always vote for a dictator over chaos, or in reaction to a fear of anarchy. But this isn't a political post, at least not yet.
First a disclaimer... I believe in "Western Civilization", but think the term "West" is in some ways a historical accident. The great library burnings in the mideast, Alexandria, and most especially the Aztec/Inca libraries destroyed by self-proclaimed Spanish "Christians" hid the evolution of other logical and obviously city-pyramid-construction-capable cultures.
But while "cultural cleansing" is a historically obvious problem, the current DEI narrative fails to recognize its universality. Am I mistaken, or didn't Hopi Indians build pueblo structures whose sole purpose was to protect them from the Apache "race". Incas had wars and who knows how many libraries were burned by Alexander the Great? Or how much of the greatest loss - the library of Alexandria - was pilfered from other libraries in Mesopotamia and south Asia conquests?
So the theme today is taking an actual provable problem and weaponizing it to achieve Authority. And as the symbol of that authority let's not use "high priest" or "ayatollah of e-waste" or "priestatollah", but the Mayan Howler Monkey God.
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No one really knows who or how the authorities of Mayan societies enforced societal worship and belief, but let's postulate that if people lifted up with their bare hands huge stones to make pyramids and carve them into howler monkey god likenesses, that they may have shared techniques in common with other pyramid, mosque, and cathedral carving societies around the globe. If the carpenter born by a virgin, prophet, or Hindu deity has the power to invest into its believers the moral and ethical authority to declare "blasphemy", let's assume that power is part of the equation... from donations from society, taxes, tithings, fees, or whatever, that there is a collection of resources involved in maintaining that authority. Mayans documented wars between native american rulers and cities long before Spanish conquistadors brought de Landa priests to burn their libraries, and when the library of Alexandria was burned, who knows how much of that library had been stolen by Alexander the Great during his conquests of other kings libraries?
In the theme of "Ethical Recycling", let's look at how a current and someday completely forgettable emergency in Information Technology can be whisked into a tornado of compliance authority, like appeasement of a Howler Monkey God to address a drought or pestilence that wrecked a maize harvest.
Here are some examples in my field of expertise.
= Y2K. I was at MassDEP when the Y2K hysteria happened. There is a narrative that had society not over-reacted or "ambitiously-reacted" to the calendar challenged firmware problem in countless devices, that it would have been a real emergency, and I'm sure that in certain banking/internet/national-defense scenarios, that was true. But I was there when the fear of Y2K was being "sold" to society's mass-amygdales to replace hardware, such as FAX MACHINES. I raised my hand and objected during a "top management" Y2K "urgent" conference organized by a guy whose title was Information Technology chief, Doug Priest, but who among the department's tech department was nicknamed Control-Alt-Delete or "Power Off", because whenever he was called to solve a computer bug those were the only things he allegedly knew how to do. And at the DEP meeting, Mr. Priest (not making up that name) was telling the staff that the fax machine had to be replaced. And I raised my hands and called it out. "Look, it's not going to start spewing out letters from Abe Lincoln or Mark Twain. This is not an emergency meeting material."
Andrea Carneiro, the Public Relations chief for DEP, touched my arm and whispered something to the effect that I was out of line. She and I had a very good relationship, and she was brilliant in press matters and recognized my knowledge of journalism through my family press history and dad's lectures. But she didn't understand that the fax machine's firmware would not cause it to stop receiving analog signals on January 1, 2000.
The takeaway is that Y2K was simultaneously BOTH a problem that we had to take seriously in certain cases, and ALSO simultaneously an excuse for Priests to call all-hands-on-deck top management meetings about fax machines, and to increase his budget to purchase newer fax machines, phones, etc. So from 50,000 feet in the air, the real technological threats are also opportunities for exaggeration... build this Y2K statue or the Howler Monkey God will be displeased with you.
= HIPAA. The US The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, 1996. Purportedly it is about keeping health care providers from, for example, selling data to insurance companies which could then use the information to discriminate against Americans with pre-existing threats and conditions. A health insurer can find out your age and price according to the associated risks of your age, or know your location and assess increased or decreased risks in that geography, but cannot learn whether you took a test showing you are borderline diabetic of have high blood pressure, because health care providers have to keep that information secret by law. Sounds like a good law, and if it's confined to actual risks, it's a good thing.
However, in the 1990s, used computers and electronics were being sold with programs like the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system installed on the hard drive, or Intuit Quickbooks, or video games. The first used computer I ever sold was literally worth more in software than the hardware was worth. But based on the hypothetical risk that the used computer MIGHT have personal health care data (despite being reformatted, which has been deemed not sufficient wiping to protect against a skilled hacker), the shredding and ITAD destruction industry and certification bodies like SERI developed destruction protocols that destroy the software value, and the software companies benefit by selling more software. As more software has gone to a "subscription" (annual payment for access by single users), the "hardware-containing-software" model has been effectively negated, but we are still told to be afraid that some insurance agent is seriously in the business of finding ten year old personal computer hard drives and running data harvesting software to find ten year old health data in order to screw our insurance rates. It's even bigger malarky than Y2K in terms of the number of devices that seriously pose any such risk to any actual individuals, but everyone has been convinced to be very very afraid. From 50k feet, or 50 years hindsight, this is Howler Monkey God amygdala lasso civilization, using fear to drive authority to gain profit.
Now there are genuine risks, and genuine common sense reasons to take care of hard drives. If your ex-partner's divorce lawyer gets ahold of your personal laptop, for example, that is a risk... but it's a risk confined by time and chain of custody. If your laptop is in a gaylord at my company warehouse, the risk that your ex's lawyer will break in and go through hundreds of laptops is a pretty expensive scenario, and therefore super unlikely.
= Basel Convention Ban Amendment. Most of this Ethical E-Waste blog history has been spent upon the erroneous claims that electronic junk in Asian and African cities was dumped there by unethical recyclers who take money and ship the electronic waste to countries with poor environmental enforcement. This "war on exports" approach always makes reuse minded individual like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson into "collateral damage", because reuse is not worth the "risk" perceived by privileged upstream rich OECD countries. The convention is now being used by non-OECD economic giants like China to cut Europe and the USA out of trade deals with those emerging markets. The risk that orphans who push shopping carts through Lagos city streets collecting scrap metal appliance are somehow pooling their money to pay shipping and customs fees to import western junk to burn is ludicrous. It's just not the only ludicrous thing going on.
At a meta level, reasonable and intelligent and educated people understand that there are real problems and real risks which all of these laws are intended to reduce. But we also have to understand how these laws are manipulated and abused by the same type of authority-seeking individuals who may or may not have historically sacrificed virgins from conquered neighboring villages to appease Howler Monkey Gods to ward away locusts swarms eating the maize fields again next year.
So I'm hiding behind a lot of paragraphs that most people won't take time to read to explain why I'm moderate in my views of correct DEI and exaggerated DEI, and moderate in my views of regulation, and moderate in my views of Western Civilization. The use of the word "genocide", for instance applying it to language instruction ("cultural genocide" in the teaching of English to colonized societies was usually enforced by early adapters of the language in those societies, I suspect), is a way to leverage our greatest fear of the greatest crimes to establish linguistic victimhood. See my foolish Facebook Philosophy post below.
picture of Mayan Codice NOT burned by Spanish priests below.
Ethics means not denying risks, and not being reckless, but also means making solid judgements about the odds versus the stakes, and if the risk of collateral damage - like to hospitals and schools in Gaza and Ukraine - is greater than the risk of a second Hamas attack or NATO takeover of the Kremlin, then it is right to question what's actually behind it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
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