Starting Conditions

It's New Year's and time for our resolutions, hopefully the starting conditions for the New Year. We are going to go on a diet and become slim and handsome or beautiful. We are going to start setting aside small sums of money and become financially independent. We resolve to be nicer to people and win new friends and influence people. We pledge to stop smoking and jog 4 miles a day. Each of these simple acts constitute starting conditions and if we really and truly follow through on them, they will change our lives.

The starting conditions for the building of a termite nest which will ultimately hold 6 or 7 million individuals, a good sized city by any standards are modest by any description. In the beginning, the termites seem to be wandering aimlessly, randomly picking up grains of sand and randomly dropping them. If by chance a few grains of sand happen to fall into a pile, all the termites cease their random movements and concentrate their efforts on the small sand pile and that is where they build the nest.

The meteorologists say that the atmosphere is so connected that any disturbance in it effects the whole atmosphere. This gives rise to the "butterfly effect". The notion being that the beating of butterfly wings is enough to change the starting conditions of the atmosphere. Tipping the carbon dioxide balance of the atmosphere just a tiny bit is enough to bring drastic changes in climate. A physical chemist at Ohio State, in my graduate student days, asserted that a decrease of the earth's average temperature of 8°C is enough to bring back the Ice Age.

At the time the Lockian principles of the rights of man were proposed, the social environment was hostile to them. The principles could easily have been described as treason. John Locke's proposals were modest but, as we speak, they are changing the world in startling ways.

The Institute for domestic Tranquility is about starting conditions. Our prime objective is to teach ecology, foster citizenship and promote the exercise of the unalienable rights. John Wolfe, my teacher at Ohio State, used to say ecology is not subject matter its process. Ecology is not about some thing. Its about the relationships of things. Since ecology was invented to study the world of nature, it is logical to think that ecology is one of the biological sciences, and sure enough it is almost always taught in the biology department at the university. That's good for what it is and what it does but it should be taught as a part of every subject.

I recently attended a Federal Executive Management session in Ocean City, MD. One of the sessions had to do with strategic planning and strategic management. Business words but ecological concepts. If strategic planning and management were taught with ecological terminology, they would be seen to be universals and the concepts would have universal applicability, not just to the work place. To the speakers credit, he used examples from his family life to illustrate his business points, indicating at least marginally that there is some relationship between the office and home environment.

Things that have relationships fall into two categories. Things that have real cause and effect or things that are really correlative and things that are thought to have cause and effect or are thought to be correlative relationships. All of science is based upon understanding these relationships and sorting out the things we know from the things we don't know.

We will be guided by the scientific method (hypothesis building and experimentation) or some similarly rigorous method. Ecological processes sometimes lend themselves to experimentation, but for the most part are analyzed by observation. Many of our concepts of long term phenomena are products of observation and acute, penetrating observation in many cases will be all we have. Used properly it will suffice, if one accepts that eventually all hypotheses may be overthrown with new observations and new evidence. Paul Ehrlich wrote a book, the Population Bomb. Few if any of the predictions came true, but the book did alert the bulk of the reading public that unregulated population growth is a problem of which we should be aware and to that extent it was a good book, not because of its proven relationships, but because of the implied consequences. I make this same argument for global warming. It doesn't matter whether the relationships between CO₂ and climate are real or imagined. If the alleged consequences of global warming are bad and the cure is simple, energy conservation with emphasis on solar energy—sun, falling water, wind—if there is no harm and much to be gained by playing it safe, then the provability of the original proposition is irrelevant. These examples merely indicate the elasticity of ecological thought.

With a simple leap we arrive at systems. Two or more things or one thing and its environment are systems. The things can be physical/chemical; solar energy, water, wind, minerals, CO₂, et al; edaphic; relating to the soil, or biotic; plants and animals. For human ecology we have to add the human mind and the products of human thought i.e. technology. Biological systems are thought of in terms of communities or technically as associations (plants only) or biomes (plants and animals), e.g. the Deciduous Forest Association or the Spruce/Moose Biome, with subsidiary structure.

For the world as a whole we can speak of the major components as spheres: the rock part as the lithosphere, (lithos = rock), the watery part as the hydrosphere (hydro = water), the air part as the atmosphere (atmos = air) and the living part as the biosphere (bios = life). With all of the above we have the world without human influence. If we add the human we have the noosphere, (noos = mind). We would have human ecology if man did not have language. It would be like the ecology of any other animal, except without another human-like mind it would not be known. Human language makes the difference between man and all other life.

The lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, noosphere make up the Earth. If we move up from the Earth we have our Solar System, our galaxy, the Milky Way and the universe. If we move down from the major systems of the Earth, we have the component systems; the associations, and biomes, nations and states with all their subdivisions. Finally we come down to communities, families and individuals. If the primary focus of our attention is on individuals, we are dealing with autecology. If the focus is the community level we are in the realm of synecology. These are important distinctions since they tell us what the important part of the discussion is, and what relationships and processes we should look for.

Finally we have to show that ecological thought applies equally well to the universe, the Earth, the world, the nation and state and its institutions, cities, villages, hamlets, our neighborhoods, our households and families and ourselves. Ecology and systems thought applies to our language based technological world, our culture, society and human activity in general, as well as to the rest of the universe.

The study of ecology is our first starting condition. It allows us to analyze events or systems of events from purely neutral points of view.

Ecology allows us to look at complex phenomena and see it as a whole or a unity, it encourages holistic approaches to analysis. It makes it a lot easier to understand the world around us, natural, cultural, and political. The more we understand, the more efficiently we can act as citizens and as citizens sovereign. We will never exercise our authority as citizens sovereign until we know what that means and how it fits into our system of governance.

If IdT succeeds as an organization, it will succeed because it teaches ecology. IdT is a self-designing ecosystem. What it does and how it works will depend upon the genotypes, biotypes, ecotypes, and technotypes who make it up and what they do and how they work as a system.

IdT is dedicated to the forming a more perfect Union. This we hope to accomplish by fostering citizenship through voluntary association. We have to grow and bloom where we are rooted. We live in the United States of America. We have as starting conditions for that system, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. These documents are the culturally active genetic material that have given rise to all other aspects of our governance. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have the same type of relationship to our rights and freedoms as expressed in detail in our laws and the decisions of our courts as the relationship of mathematics to theoretical physics or molecular biology to genetics or genetics to biology. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the system that underlies our government and our nation and its society. We know from previous discussion that small changes in the underlying system have a great effect on the systems above. We have to guard these documents with our lives, since they are the well springs of our being. They hold the potential for good in our system if cherished and protected and they form the basis for evil if they are polluted or distorted, as was the case with the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution that was corrupted by the Supreme Court. This is the current situation where the Reagan court is seeking to reverse and re-interpret long standing civil rights precedents. When the Supreme Court fools around with the Constitution it is doing genetic engineering on our system of governance, and our way of life. We have to make damn sure they are not doing it to deprive citizens sovereign of their sovereign rights.

We have to read and teach others to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as if they were written in plain English. These documents do not need scholars to translate them to us. They are ours to read and interpret, and if we can get a common sense meaning out of them that is the way we should interpret them. Anyone who can see a corporation as a person in the 14th Amendment is a seer, not a reader of English.

IdT is introducing a new paradigm to our civics lexicon, the concept of the citizen sovereign. I would be lying to you if I said I knew what it meant. But I do know what it could mean if we all had the same working knowledge of the term. All of us would understand the contract between our government and its citizens sovereign.

Our national government is a republic. A republic is a government where the supreme power is vested in the people and their elected representatives. We the People created this government it is our property. It was not created by the confederated states of America. Our Federal government was created by Us the People and if it does not represent our will, it is because we either do not know how to make our will known, or we don't care to or both.

We have laws against discrimination in employment as well as other things, where the discrimination is based upon, color, creed, previous condition of servitude etc. Yet we have a sitting President who used racism in his election campaign. We have a newly elected senator from the New(?) South who got elected on a blatantly racist campaign strategy and we were about to have a national party leader who was spoiling for a fight on the grounds that racism is a good old fashioned American way of doing business. I believe that George Bush could have been elected President without resort to the Willy Horton ads and that his campaign managers debased him. I believe Jessie Helms could have been elected without the racist ads debasing civil rights. Jesse Helms won the election but lost his Christian principles. I believe by taking pride in America no political party has to resort to racism to be influential with the electorate. The fact that racism is a campaign tool in the 1990s, is a complete and utter disgrace in our national life. It debases the loss of life in the Civil War on both sides and places the United States on the same plane as South Africa, with our system of apartheid on an informal basis.

There is no rational basis under the sun that explains debasing and denying the basic rights of the citizen sovereign. Racism denies the citizen sovereign sovereignty, or the Constitution is just a piece of paper. A Supreme Court that in one era can justify slavery and in the modern era, limit the sovereign rights of the descendants of the earlier transgression, has not shown too many indications of understanding the basic documents underlying our system of government. Moral indignation is the answer to racism and from the moral indignation a pervading sense of justice, not based upon some judges benevolence, but upon fundamental human rights as defined by our starting condition documents. If the New(?) South is racist, the moralists of our nation should condemn it for racism. If New York is racist, the moralists should condemn it also.

How can We the People form a more prefect Union, with such blatantly hostile subversion of morality that erodes the very foundation of the nation? We the People doesn't mean we the whites, or the Christians, or the Democrats. It means the people—ALL THE PEOPLE! Discrimination and racism are lese majesty. They are crimes against Us The People—the sovereign.