The woods...

Sometimes I just have to "disconnect"... even if for just a few hours... and "reconnect" with nature. Yesterday was one of those times. I went into the Shenandoah Mountains to hike to my favorite spot... the headwaters of the Hazel River. I've fly fished in its pools often although now I just take a camera and my journal. A ham sandwich just tastes better by a babbling brook.

Nature, left to its own devices, knows what to do. It isn't "cruel", its "pragmatic". Natural selection requires that the strongest, most adapted survive while the weaker fall to the side... usually as something else's "lunch". One of my early lessons about nature is that everything is something else's "lunch". That scales literally and metaphorically to our own species.

Nature is timeless. As I walk through the trees or watch a brook trout in one of the pools, I realize that they are made of "stuff" that has been around "forever" (although there's an argument to be made that its just been sound for the live of the current instantiation of our Universe). Right now, that "stuff" self organized to be a tree or a fish or me. I wonder what I was... and what I will be.

Nature self organizes. It unfolds to adapt to its environment and circumstances. All living things in nature fit within the food chain somewhere. No matter how high they are on the food chain, they will end up as "lunch" to the modest organisms within the food chain and will return to the soil from whence they came.

I'm a Libertarian. I chose that path because it recognizes the rights of individuals and questions the right of others to tell us what to think, do or say. I consider the Sermon on the Mount the only "rules" (more of "guidelines") that I need and endeavor not to hurt other people or take their stuff... and I mind my own business. That being said, you will find that I rise quickly to protect the rights of others to live as they please whether I agree with them or not. "We" must protect everyone's rights to protect our own personal freedom.

We are "pack animals" who, by out nature, prefer to self-organize according to some tribal connection. As our numbers grow, self-organization becomes more "complicated" and the tribal connections become more "complicated" and "blurred". For the record, I am a fan of seeing those tribal connections becoming more "blurred" through assimilation, intermarriage, etc. Genetically, we are one tribe indistinguishable from each other at the genetic level. The things that make us physically different are mere static in our DNA.

Some among us think they know how to organize the rest of us. They claim the right to finance that organization by taking the stuff of those they perceive as having more than they need and giving it to those they wish. It is the decision of men who by force, charisma, luck, or birth hold domain over other men. Regardless of the rhetoric, this is seldom a fair process. It isn't driven by nature or any natural law. The history of this model isn't really filled with success. It's characterized by wars, catastrophic failures, genocide, and the failure of the institutions established to organize the rest of us. The complexity of these institutions tend to become more complicated over time. Each is an instantiation of something new since there is little history, experience or successful models upon which to draw.

Perhaps its time to "scale down" the efforts of some to organize the rest of us. Perhaps Government should reconsider its predisposition to take from its people to finance, grand schemes, boondoggles, bloated Government Agencies and Departments choking on their own incompetence, and... wars. Perhaps the days of grand, complicated, expensive Government are crumbling under their own weight. Perhaps its time to try something different.

It will be difficult to "be first" and our Government won't change quickly. I am happy to look to the simplicity of nature and its predisposition to self-organize and apply this pattern to how we self-organize. We need to plan for a common defense (Department of Defense), a way to manage relationships with other groups and nations (State Department), a way to manage disputes (Department of Justice), and a way to collect the revenue necessary to finance these things (Department of Revenue). Everything else, at least IMHO, should go.

On my way out of the woods, I saw the cutest baby bear in a tree... thought it was a squirrel. When I took a closer look, this little head popped out. I may be the first human it ever saw. I heard brush crashing in the distance and realized "mama" was coming to check things out... so I "doubled timed" out of the woods. In retrospect, I realized that mama bear was simply fulfilling her genetic predisposition to protect her young... just like any mother... and I made the rational decision not to be that mama bear's "lunch" today.

We have evolved from worrying about looking for our own "lunch" everyday while avoiding being something else's "lunch" to the complex social and economic structures that exist today. We don't understand these structures, we don't control these structures, we don't know "what's next". I would suggest that perhaps now is the time to "simplify" these structures to reduce the variables that will decide the fate of the human race.

This could be a long blog... but I'll stop here. Anyone inclined to discuss these things is always welcome to join me at my "office" (Starbucks) or my front porch to discuss these things over a cup of coffee.