Head line of the contemporary social science..

The world is changing before our eyes, but WHAT or WHO is making it do so?
Noetic positivism - Welcome to the real Future!!!
Noetic positivism is a synthetic concept to define a new, explanatory social science.

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“Come to Me, Bandar-logs” - a contemporary slogan of banks...

written 2009
(essay)

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...“I entirely agree with both of you – with you, Viktor, and with you, Mr Queensley.  In my opinion the banks, as the toolkit of capital, have changed the meaning of the concepts and have themselves become the personification of capital, i.e. have failed to distance themselves to the extent necessary from the misapprehensions of members of society in relation to the rectitude of the social structure, but have done everything to reinforce misapprehension of this kind, thereby creating some semblance of a false (as we see it) but powerful ‘religion’.  And in the process the bankers of today, like the bishops of the Middle Ages, have overrun the whole world and are engaged in very active recruitment to their faith – these days they are the true world rulers.”

No sooner had I finished than Viktor began to speak again. 

“It seems obvious to me that the banks have perpetrated a change in the semantics of definitions, and from a straightforward centre for the interaction of finance, i.e. facilitating life for society, they are now trying make themselves a substitute for the very idea of commercial relations in society.  It should never be forgotten that money is, above all else, the equivalent of labour or MEDIATED commodity value.  But today the banks, by creating their own laws of banking activity and levying payments for this, that and the other operation, are turning money into their own means of production, having forgotten, besides other things, that they are, above all, no more than authorised centres for carrying out cash settlement activity for a society’s economic system or the infrastructure of social provision.  In their time they have been mere cash desks, depositaries and safes.  And they should remain cash desks, but they have gradually started to take hold of and bring under their influence ever greater assets to ensure their own continued existence, through the expansion of their control over the global economy.  In the end, having repeatedly valued and re-valued everything around us, they have expanded their control over society to the extent that many more specialists have been needed to support them.  They have started recruiting them, or taking them on, almost by dragging them off the streets. And now that these poorly educated people, ‘single operation specialists’, can no longer produce results (elementary overproduction), the crisis has affected the entire realm of business, and not only where economics is concerned.  But how can this be so, why should simple people be at fault in this, i.e. in the way the banks have got into politics because politicians no longer think of their activity as being outside this doxa, the doxa that all banks are now propagandising.  This unconscious trust in the bank, by whom or what has it been established? 

“Through the media.  By means of the subconscious.  How many films have been made about banks, about money?  I am certain that we lost count ages ago.  But, you know, it all sinks into our heads as a stereotype, and into the heads of our children, establishing unconscious, absolute trust; for example, certain recent films about freestylers or surfers that apparently have no direct connection with the world of finance.  The loose shorts of the main hero always display an indispensable attribute, the plastic bank card, nattily encased in waterproof laminate.  It is essential that the card should be seen.  It goes without saying that wherever you are tossed by the waves of the sea or the storms of life, there will be a cash machine for you, as a fundamental prerequisite.  The cash machine as saviour supplies everything you need: warmth, care and relaxation.  With a System X payment card you are always ‘on a roller’.  It is of no account that in reality seawater will very rapidly, perhaps within ten minutes, ‘eat’ the magnetic strip on your plastic card.  What does matter is that true freedom is thought of these days as impossible without a plastic card and a cash machine.  Or take another scene from a film: the public cutting up of a credit card as it is destroyed because there is no money to back it up.  In the eyes of the people who are witnesses, this has the appearance of a public execution. What are the terrors engendered in this way in the subconscious of the viewer, or what are they made to fear?  Ask me why this occurs in precisely the way it does, easily and simply.  I will answer that it is all very straightforward: a person can forget what they know and not believe what they hear, but what they see gets into a matrix in their subconscious and finds a cell there at once and for ever.  This is the peculiar thing about human psychology: that once something has been seen it cannot be consigned to the chaos of non-existence.  These days many people find it generally simpler to believe in what cannot be achieved than to analyse what has already taken place.  Falsehoods about the future and the past are more readily believed than the truth about the present.

“And, what is more, these modern specialists in selling DVD images of thinking and creators of lifestyles have now reached the point where they compete with each other over who gets the highest fees from premiere screenings.  The bigger the box office the more modern and powerful the technological background used in conditioning the brain of the member of the audience, the person who is willing to pay out of his own pocket for the right to be in the flock when its fleeces are shorn.  And when an upstanding member of society emerges from the cinema he is bound to check the balance on his credit card and top it up just in case, for his peace of mind.  When a teenager is choosing surfing gear in the sports shop, what will he go for?  He may not yet have his plastic from the bank, but his shorts will certainly have part of the lining strengthened to hold a card.”

Following these words from Viktor, we all fell silent.  I noticed that Mr Queensley was feeling cold, as was I.  It turned out that in our enthusiasm for the conversation we hadn’t noticed that evening had approached and along with it, its chill....

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                                                               A small extract from the “The Sigma Passion” part 2. written 2009

DUAL ECHO OF TRUTH... (essay).

                                             Vlad K Once web site..

...Continuing our discussion of the role of the upper class in society, Viktor’s contribution was to say that in his opinion a real upper class has only been able to be considered and can only be considered a social elite if, while concerning itself with its own interests, it never once forgets about the interests of the population in which it is institutionalised, and whose elite or upper class it is regarded as being.  This means not forgetting about the interests of the section of society that it exploits and thus concerning itself with a system for its continuous renewal and development.  The representative of such an elite does not think that he can stuff his pockets and make a quick getaway, no: he has to concern himself with people’s right to remain people.  Otherwise, people who have no rights soon turn into slaves.  But even sooner they start to hate those who have deprived them of these rights, and hate them for it with an animal passion.  Therefore the representative of an elite, while thinking of his interests, of the comfort of his personal circumstances, of himself, will never forget that those whom he exploits need their own comfort and posterity: he can’t – never mind the degree of exploitation involved – if the process, in this case a process of man’s exploitation by man, is to be of a rational and long-lasting nature. 

After all, in any event some kind of upper class will always emerge, whether it be hereditary, appointed or, as is now the accepted case, elective.  The upper class will in any event, in one way or another, exploit the majority beneath it and the form of this exploitation will be determined by, among other things, the state of development and, most of all, the level of culture of the elite wielding power.  Is this not the way in which the social contract works, or should be honoured? 

But if it operates under different rules, for example those of ‘social Darwinism’, when the ‘powers that be’ in a de jure capacity exercise control de facto by force, without actually meeting the requirements of the social order, then there is no way of avoiding conflict within the society.  In order to keep the seething mass ‘reined in’, while maintaining the appearance of legitimacy for their actions, modern feudal rulers invite endless ‘Muggins and Buggins’ teams of ‘political consultancy professionals’ equipped with modern PR and NLPR technologies, in order for these ‘specialists’ to manufacture or ‘tailor’ a high-quality outfit or disguise, so as to present the ‘saviour’ or ‘champion of democratic ideals’ image that the patriotism consultant specialises in.  These people are therefore constantly forced to put on various guises that in fact mask ever more weird ‘images’, which may quite possibly also turn out to be unreal.  And all this for the sake of ensuring that the people, or the electorate, in whose midst these ‘champions of ideals’ operate, should be prevented for as long as possible from seeing their true essence and should perceive them as whatever they are pretending to be at the time.  But they (these ruler-underwriters and their kind) are, as a rule, haughty, arrogant, conceited and big-headed.  And it is only lest they be seen as such, whether by those close to them or by the majority, that they are forced to put on their various guises, showing those around them in this way the ‘right’ imperatives ‘for today’, demonstrating by their conduct and ‘outfits’ what is ‘in fashion’ today or what it is ‘acceptable’ to consider up to date, and surrounding themselves with other false faces like their own.  And when a society has more and more of these people in guises, then people without guises, to put it mildly, stick out like a sore thumb or like sacrificial victims, perhaps because they are tired of it all and cannot or do not wish to follow the endless leapfrogging change of political ‘masks’ and their owners.

Teenage movements like the hippy, punk, goth, or emo and many other similar ‘informal’ movements come from the psyche of the child acutely sensing the contradictions between the real and the necessary, the proper and the actual in society.  And this is the reason they come together, they are looking for common understanding, empathy, common suffering.  Why on earth should they try on for size whatever common dirty clothing is used by people without principles, slaves to their own amorality and to the flesh.  They do not wish to live by the laws of deception, or of a ‘difficult geopolitical situation’,  for some contrived purpose that sensible people free of vices find unnatural, and which changes with the way the political wind blows (whatever the wind, it is the lot of the weathervane to stay in one spot) when an undereducated trickster who has got his hands on the levers of political power hides his personal incompetence under labels of social needs or dangers to the public, and refashions the laws of society and public morality to suit himself.  The one thing is inseparable from the other.  Our children do not wish to become like that – which is why we get these ‘informal’ movements, expressions of a collective, implicit fellow-feeling, empathy, common suffering.  Who else can tell the emperor he has no clothes?  Only a holy fool or a child.  Who do they become, these children, when they grow up?....

'The ∑ (Sigma) Passion'     science novel  by Vlad K Once

Copyright © 2010 Vlad K Once        http://noeticpositivism.com/


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part of  'The Chance Confession' book 

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'ETHICS' (academic essay).

or why, though revolutions may have different names,
they are always a social phenomenon..

                                             by VLAD K ONCE

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It is no secret to anyone that our modern world is less than perfect. And things have been this way for a long time! But how exactly does the imperfection of our world manifest itself?
What criteria can be taken to form the basis of a comparative judgement?
Obviously, we cannot judge the fairness of the world order by how effective technology is.  So should we take the cost of a basket of shopping as our yardstick, the health care system or the length of the working week?  One could spend a very long time drawing up a list that would take the many and varied aspects of modern living into account.
But suppose we start with ETHICS, or the science of morality. It is a science whose subject is the good of society.  Its aim is to find the integral or formula for achieving this good.
When we speak of morality we understand it to mean above all the imperatives to which it summons us.
Thus since as long ago as the time of Aristotle (who carried out a great deal of research in this sphere of philosophy), the study of ethics has been regarded as one of the most important lines of philosophical enquiry.
The Aristotelian principle for a fair society sounded like this: one person’s happiness should not interfere with the happiness of another ….
You could hardly put it more precisely or succinctly than Aristotle.  Well, after all, he is Aristotle!
But - you will ask – how is this ancient principle applicable to modern life? The more so, given that even in the Stagirite’s own time some
manifestations of ethical norms (from the point of view of a modern human being) were, to put it mildly, far from salubrious (for example, the slave trade)!
Yes, that is all true, and there are many questions.  There are far fewer answers, but then that is the science - finding the right answers to questions that have been correctly put, and when the reality is current and the need is there, the process of perfecting the methodological aspects will develop.  Without doubt, it has to be noted that the trend in development will correspond to requirements and expectations (in this case the expectations of society).  Yes indeed, precisely that - the expectations of society (whichever society it may be), because ethics is a social science! And, of course, I don’t think anyone would suffer from doubts over the truth of the proposition that the modern world with its problems has not become any simpler than the ancient world was in its time.  And this process can be seen (in the foreseeable future) to be getting worse.
It seems entirely reasonable to suppose that the failure of this science in ancient times (as now, by the way) was not merely caused by the authorities’ unwillingness to change things in order to make progress - progress in the development of positive relationships between social strata.  I rather think that another idea should be added to unwillingness on anyone’s part (in this area) and that is – not knowing how to.

           In fact, where can you find and learn an exact definition of the boundaries between fairness and unfairness in the social context?  The life of a society (from as early as the time of the great exodus from Egypt) is regulated by a corpus of rules and norms that are called law.  The law is the sum total of those generalised and non-contradictory practices of human imperatives expressed in ‘may’, ‘must not’ and ‘allowed’, and the leeway between them.  It is all like this.
But where, you will ask, is the room in all this for social ethics? Or, who is in a position to foresee change in the way the paradigm of social morality develops?  Who is capable of foreseeing the moment when ‘allowed’ turns into ‘must not’? Who is there today who is able to teach this?  Humanity today is in a position to work creatively at the level of the gene (genetic engineering) by introducing corrections to natural processes. How old are such sciences?
They are young, these sciences, but they are in great demand and they are subsidised.  This is where their success comes from.  And how old is the science of Ethics?  And what success has it achieved if, as in the time of Plato and Aristotle, we can still conclude without the slightest fear of contradiction:

- Our world is unjust!

The urge to strive for perfection and fairness is implanted in us by nature! Is this a contentious postulate? Not at all. History teaches us that at the root of any social revolution lies the masses’ dissent from the norms of moral imperatives that exist for a specific period of time. 
Or is everything the same as it was before, with humanity’s striving for perfection (in the age of space travel and nano technology) unachievable without social cataclysm?
This question is addressed to those who have become accustomed to discussing ethical norms and values sitting in a comfortable armchair without paying any attention to the maidservant deftly laying the table for dinner …..
For everyone else, it is time to find out what Noetic Positivism means.

Copyright © 2011 Vlad K Once        http://noeticpositivism.com/

                                        

       part of  'The Chance Confession' book





                part of  'One of Us' book