Aging issues

Cause of the Month – Issues of the Aged

Continuing from last year

So many dimensions to this question.

We have a friend staying at present who is a teacher in our largest city.

In her experience, she see’s exponentially more children’s potential being destroyed by P, as parents whose lives are already badly effected by drugs and economic poverty face children being born addicted to P in the womb and unable to be comforted as a result. Those children then disrupt not just their peers but every adult they encounter.

The spiral of abuse and antisocial behaviour goes out of control.

Many otherwise normal people cannot emotionally deal with the dimensionality of the issues present, and so retreat to using the “rules” of the system. Then the illusion that the rules work is broken.

No rule based system can ever work on its own – we are too complex for that.

Rule based systems only ever work because most people within them are honest and actually want the system to work, and do what it takes through informal networks to actually make the system work.

But when that becomes “too hard” then the entire structure is at risk.

But one of the key systemic issues is that all “cheat detection” strategies have an element to them that requires accurate memory of transactions over time, and as such memory fidelity reduces, the probability of cheating being detected exponential drops. So the impared become become vulnerable to all manner of depravity – and not all from external sources. We all carry our own internal demons, and detecting and controlling them is every bit as much a function of effective memory as is dealing with the external “demons” of others. So it becomes a very complex set of issue, without simple definition or remedy, and simple remedies often tend to become cures worse than the disease. Deb is right about male aggression and male sexuality. The difference on average between men and women is only small, 60/40, but at the extremes of such distributions such small difference in the mean make huge differences in the tails of the distributions. And those distributions can occur over quite small ranges of time and context.

So as higher order functionality degrades, the ability of individuals to culturally modulate their own internal drives also degrades – and all such things seem to be probability based.

For me, the biggest issue is ensuring that I live for one more day, every day.

Next after that is ensuring that I have maximal probability of continuing to do that.

Next after that is maximising the degrees of freedom possible, at the same time as acknowledging the necessary limits required to maintain the structures to support both my existence and my freedom – social and ecological responsibility.

And it is so much more complex than that, but I am out of time for now.