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It’s All in the Programming!
This is at the heart and soul of the left’s focus on education. If you control the programming, the culture, the way kids think, then you end up controlling everything.
Cancer cells don’t kill people. The programming of the cells, that which makes them cancerous, is what kills people. Similarly, we don’t fear someone because they have arms or knives or a hoodie. We fear them ultimately because we fear their programming: intentions and choices make a person harmless or dangerous.
I was thinking of this similarly with respect to Sun-Tzu. The point of strategy is not to defeat the enemy: it is to defeat the enemy’s strategy: this can be done in any number of ways, only some of which involve actual armed conflict. Discouraging the enemy is what usually leads to the decisive victory.
The only way we win is to change the programming. Ignore the red capes being waved in front of our faces; they are only there to confuse and misdirect.
Published in General
I thought this note was profound.
It reminded me of two familiar maxims. They go something like this–close enough to this for now.
They are, taken together, true but defective according to the philosophical method of criticism: they are special cases of a more general truth, one that transcends the special case of war.
The thing I like about iWe’s insight is that it recognizes the more general (more abstract) truth.
I greatly admire the above comment now.
Merely being the author of it meant very little to me: I always speculate that my comments are wonderful, sure, but I recognize that until an experimental result has been replicated, it doesn’t even qualify as a hypothesis.
Two of the most respected researchers on Ricochet have now confirmed (with their Likes) my guess that my comment is good.
This does not seem correct to me.
Cancer cells do kill people. You are correct that it is the programming that makes them cancerous — i.e. that makes them, well, cancer cells. It is the cancer cells that do the damage, right?
Jerry,
Technically you are precisely correct.
The interesting thing about people is that they’ll change their own programming. Somehow this always catches the folks trying to program them by surprise.
Mind you, that doesn’t absolve us from understanding the foeman’s programming and doing what we can to disrupt it ourselves.
After all this time, I wuz wrong: It is guns that kill people after all, not the people who fire them. I have a lot to learn!
This kind of inflexible and surface-level thinking is precisely why we have been destroyed in the culture wars.
I understand what you are saying, and I should have criticized my response, “Technically, you are precisely correct,” more carefully before writing it. (Actually, I regretted not doing so almost as soon as I commented!)
We think of the world as a series of states, with each state causing the next, according to the timelessly invariant principles of cause and effect. This way of understanding the world is the limit of human knowledge as set by God, not knowledge that transcends God’s knowledge.
So there isn’t one cause that is THE cause of death in the case of cancer. There is a series of causes. We can speak of the proximate cause of death, to any desired level of maximum error (which we can reduce without limit by considering shorter time intervals in the Classical approximation), or we can speak of any intermediate state in the causal chain as a “cause” of death. A researcher or clinician always uses this verbal shortcut: he or she isn’t a metaphysician, after all.
So the program of a cell, starting at the time of the cancerous mutation, determines its malignant effects, beginning with local changes to vasculature, uncontrolled growth, immune responses, and so on, and then pathological effects on surrounding tissue, metastasis, and continued changes to the program as the colony differentiates itself into different kind of tissue. Finally, organ failure and death.
But the mutation itself is the effect of some prior combination of differential causes.