Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

20 Years ago a friend took me to visit Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. For almost 6,000 years the people in the area were able to exploit the behavior of buffalo to stampede - they would startle the buffalo into stampeding over a cliff, and then just harvest the crippled or dead animals below. It was a lucrative amount of profit for surprisingly little effort.

By taking advantage of the predictable nature of majority of individuals, a minority of individuals was able to compel the majority to act against their own self interests, in fact their very survival.

Now try to imagine a handful of humans going up against a hear of buffalo on more evenly matched terms, who would you normally expect to win?

This is such a successful competitive strategy it is still in common use today. Imagine a minority of people who want a majority of people to act against their own self interest, in order to benefit the goals of the minority. To make the game more challenging assume the majority and minority belong to a democracy in which generally the majority of people get to vote on how things are decided - in principle you expect the majority to vote in their own best interests. I mean if there were an election and people and buffalo each got to vote on whether the buffalo should jump off the cliff, and the buffalo had a majority, how would you expect the vote to go?

In the real world minorities of people often face this dilemma - how to convince a majority of people to act against their own self interests; how to undermine their common sense or better judgment and actually act in a way that benefits the minority at the expense or disadvantage of the majority.

For example, lets say you and ten friends are exceedingly wealthy. How do you get a huge majority of people to vote in favor of lowering taxes on the wealthy while raising taxes on the not wealthy? How do you get the majority of peoples' to give up their personal or collective influence in society in order to give more personal or collective influence to the minority or wealthy people? In particular, how do you avoid the mechanisms of democracy to favor your own personal goals at the expense of the rest of society?

One way is to view the majority of people as buffalo. What in their nature can you use to make them act against their own interests or survival. If you scare enough buffalo, group mentality can be exploited to make the buffalo exercise poor judgment and leap before they look. Can this strategy be used on people?

What if the economy was so bad you could scare people into believing the ones in charge of the economy were incompetent and should be voted out of office, and they should vote your party in to office instead. You could literally promise them anything because they are scared. Once your party was in office in control of legislation, well then you could do pretty much as you pleased then (in spite of any promises) - raise taxes on the poor and lower them for the rich, cut funding for social programs which benefit the poor but not the rich, vote away peoples' rights to form unions and collectively bargain, etc. What if once you got into office you lowered taxes on the corporations and the wealthy, creating an economic crisis - well you could foster that contrived crises to scare the masses even more, and try to get them to support even more stupid decisions against their own self interests.

Welcome to politics in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and other right-wing states in 2011. You see, it's all really quite simple to understand when you just take it all step-by-step.

Faith and Science

Faith is hope and belief in the goodness or trustworthiness, of a person, concept or entity. Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.

Faith always comes first because when we are born we have little experience or grasp on reality so we have faith in our parents to feed and protect us, and to do right by us.

In this statement the word 'right' is taken to mean ethical behavior and not competitive agenda. I point this out because many people do not disambiguate sufficiently the various meanings of the word.

The word "ambidextrous" is derived from the Latin roots ambi, meaning "both," and dexter, meaning "right" or favorable. Thus, "ambidextrous" is literally "right / favorable on both sides." The term ambidexter in English was originally used in a legal sense of jurors who accepted bribes from both parties for their verdict. A good friend of mine always claimed he was ambisinister - or equally left handed. In historical terms the word "left" seems to have a bad reputation.

I take this editorial digression to make it clear when I say 'right' and 'left' I am really using just labels for competitive or right agendas and collaborative or left agendas and no deeper meaning. Any double entendre that may appear from time to time, I prefer you consider it ironic or comedic.

Science always comes later. After we develop the faith in our parents to feed and protect us we innately begin to explore and test the world - we touch things, we put them in our mouth, we try new things and develop opinions about what works best for us.

So what does this have to do with agendas?

My theory is that faith-based reasoning tends to favor competitive or right agendas, while science-based reasoning tends to favor collaborative or left agendas. I don't (yet) know of anyone else who has put forth this theory so I cannot support it by citing any references. Consequently I will have to try to evolve support it in the narrative of this blog.

What is the point of putting forward such a provocative theory?

If the theory is correct, it can help better explain in terms of agendas the current state of the world, our politics and our social and environmental situations. If the theory is not correct, well this just becomes yet another intellectual misadventure.

Competition Versus Collaboration

In our lives we are often faced with two contrasting strategies: competition or collaboration. In simple terms when we set goals we can either choose to exclude others from the goal - competition - or to include others in the goal - collaboration. The strategies are often combined when one group of individuals collaborates together to exclude another group from a desired goal.

This fact of life is so prevalent in our psyche that we devote much of our leisure time to the art, science and practice of it - also known as sport. Perhaps this is our racial memory at practice, a compulsion in our essence of being.

In the metaphysics of life these are the two agendas.

Not surprisingly most dimensions of faith, belief, reasoning and politics are roughly lined up along these agendas:

• the right doctrine favors competition
• while the left favors collaboration

To be sure, there is overlap and variation but for now let's just keep things simple. In practice for any particular agenda any individual or group has, these are the two basic templates for all agendas.

So which agenda is better? It's hard to say without defining 'better' but we should keep in mind:

• Without mechanisms like collaboration multi-cellular lifeforms would not have evolved and we would not be what we are.
• Without competition humans would not be the dominant species on the planet.

For now let's just assume that there is a natural tension and balance in our lives between competition and collaboration. By that definition then any agenda that is too competitive or too collaborative, that is too right or too left is consequently 'unbalanced.'

Why would some one or some group choose an unbalanced way of life? As a species humans are incredibly adaptable, but as individuals we are less adaptable and tend to specialize, especially as we get older and more experienced - most of us like to stick to what we know best, and what skills and talents emerge to support what we know best. Some people find it more satisfying to realize their goals by emphasizing a competitive or right agenda while other find it more satisfying to emphasize a collaborative or left agenda. Statistically individuals tend to line up in the middle, probably along he lines of a normal distribution. However, due to culture, entire populations of individuals may be entirely shifted to the right or the left - for example, Americans are generally seen to be more right shifted than Europeans who are generally seen to be more left shifted.

For the purpose of this blog, I am assuming only two frameworks or templates of agendas. This is not necessarily true or accurate, but it goes a long way to simplify the narrative.