Decentralization is the Antidote to Terrorism and Mass Shootings like the one in Las VegassteemCreated with Sketch.

in #philosophy7 years ago (edited)

I used to live in Las Vegas from the fall of 2007 until late spring 2013, though a lot of the time after I founded my LLC there, I was on the road. Las Vegas is a place where few people have roots. Most people come and go and it’s mostly a tourist town. I did get to know some of the locals who live and work there (one of them was a floor manager at Caesar’s Palace) and am glad they’re all OK and sad for the ones who didn’t make it.

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(Taken late March 2003)

Too often the media focuses on the emotion of such tragedies and I hear some say “never let a good crisis go to waste”. Obviously political agenda’s abound to try to push change in a particular direction using the latest crisis as an example. But I’ve never heard the mainstream media state what seems to me completely obvious about all of these tragedies.

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(Taken late March 2003)

Life has a way of forcing balance in the universe. Usually we don’t notice the most important reasons for why we do the things that we do. We have a narrative that is ever present in our heads that often convinces us that one reason is the cause for something else. Aristotle is partly to blame for this because science tends to ignore anything that is not an efficient cause. The Hegelian dialectic is also to blame.

The reality is that the most important reasons for why we do the things that we do aren’t often known to us. We might think that something is the case when the real reasons lie elsewhere. This might be hard for a lot of people to accept, but it is fact. It’s also the “reason” why you will never hear the truth from main stream media; not because they’re trying to hide it, but because their success depends upon their not understanding it.

In physics, one can mount a convincing argument for a single efficient cause (a vector force) that generated an expected result. It can often be replicated. Life is not the same. Whenever you use a single reason as the motivation for a behavior, you will always lose all of the material, eidetic, and contributing causes as well. They will form the shadow that consciousness cannot confront.

When the solution depends upon something that is assumed impossible or “unthinkable” to do, you can’t find the solution. Instead we hear calls for gun control, because outlawing drugs was how we got everyone to stop using drugs, right?

Here’s the reason that you have an aversion to hearing; you are programmed toward life and toward centralization. You prefer easy instead of hard, convenience instead of inconvenience and leisure instead of work.

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(Taken mid August 2007)

What’s the common theme that you see in all of these tragedies? Crowds. Why don’t terrorists hide behind cows in Montana? Or behind the sheep on Amish farms? These other areas are heavily decentralized and are hence largely immune. So what’s the answer? No large crowds? But you can’t do that right? Unfortunately some can’t, but there's a solution lurking in the most unlikely of places.

We might try to do away with statism where everyone is in everyone else’s business and that would provide some relief. There are other reasons such as egotism, media hype, consumption as a form in inner compulsion promoted for profit, etc… We have become victims of our own success and nature is telling us to downsize.

Decentralization is an IT idea that just happens to fit real world security scenarios as well. Just as having all credit records on a few central servers is proving to be a security nightmare (see the Equifax data breach), so too is having too many people in one place. If a nation was like an organism, then growing cities could be seen as tumors forming on that national body. Cancer results.

There's a solution developing in the decentralized technologies underlying bitcoin. It has sprung a leak in the reservoir of national fiat currencies. I have a prediction. Once that reservoir is drained and replaced with decentralized P2P cryptocurrencies, "terrorism" and mass tragedies will begin to fade into the past. This is because terror is largely a byproduct of central authority.

The metaphysical picture is this: just as the bullets caused people to scatter and "decentralize", so too will the causes be alleviated when central authority can no longer centralize power.


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Deep. I think you are on to something. Though I don't know if the decentralization of currency will lead to the degradation of terrorism. As a visualization of a philosophical thought, large cities and the problems that arise from them can be seen as a cancer. But, I think, they form due to efficiencies of decreasing the distance from people, places, and things. A reduction of crime will happen when a redistribution of wealth without penalty (taxation) occurs. An economy that more engaged in trading amongst its members (more specifically least wealthy members) can be advantageous to the decrease of crime among the largest metro's. Anyway, good post. Thanks for sharing.

I too have been thinking about the "petro-dollar" and wage slavery that turn us humans into cattle. Why are Bush and Cheney not in prison or hung for war crimes? A million people who were standing on top of America's oil were killed by weapons far more deadly than modified semi-automatic rifles. yawn.... that was a "war" so it is ok peachy keen that brown skinned people with a different "God" are dead, eh?
the similarities to JFK assasination are like they are still using the exact same script. Patsy, check, tall building, check, big crowd, check, witnesses saw other gun fire, check, dead gunman, check, media complicit, check, no autopsy reports, check, mystery bullets, check, in the street, check, media disallows any reports from eyewitnesses, check.... what else? Americans don't give a shit who really did it as long as someone else is dead for it....

Yeah, check out that Breakdown of Nations link I posted a few days back. Right on your assessment, and from the 1950's no less.

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But cancer call also be decentralized. We can have local warlordism (such as the feudal states that emerged from the collapse of roman empire) and also micro-fascism. But I concur with some things you said: our states are indeed rigid and cannot act subtly enough to cope with the flow of nature - and our cities are unsustainable. Something must change.