Irreni Introduction: Shapeshifting

Shapeshifting

"The majority of U.S. Senators now represents 18% of the United States population."
-Dave Wasserman, NYT Opinion

Given that you just read the above headline taken from today's New York Times can you declare the U.S. constitution a total failure? That now is the time to go back to square one and start over? I can.

Welcome to YAII!, yet another Irreni introduction.

Why can I do this? Because I am a shapeshifter of a sort. I'm a free thinker. When people hear the word free-thinker they think atheist, someone who does not believe in any god. That's true. But being a free-thinking personality does not mean skepticism stops at heaven's door.

Free thinkers and iconoclasts challenge everything and not just the supernatural.

The United States constitution has been dead for decades and is now just the walking dead. The only thing left is for us zombie killers to chop off it's head, the document itself.


Why are we so reluctant to admit failure about the U.S. constitution? I'd like to put forth an argument that the root cause is the same reason that we have ignored the ethics recommendations of speculative science fiction in order to prepare for today: our identity.

My personal character and identity of free thinking is heavily influenced by my youth and reading science fiction, specifically what is now called speculative science fiction. Speculative science fiction rose from the ashes of the atomic bombs of the 1940s. Politicians and philosophers alike were alarmed that we had no ready public ethics regarding atomic warfare. Joseph Campbell created "science fiction" as a fiction classification in the Dewey Decimal system to tackle the important questions of tomorrow: what should be the ethics regarding new technology:

1. atomic warfare
2. genetic engineering
3. cybernetics
4. space travel
5. robots
6. computers

Joseph Campbell promoted the idea that a solid understanding of historical and ancient human myths such as with stories of physical shapeshifters were fundamental to understanding human nature and could be a foundation to extrapolate future ethics of technology as yet unavailable.

Speculative science fiction had a mission of real world consequences: ready human ethics for technologies yet unrealized. I call this ethics readiness.

"I don't know what weapons WWW III will be fought with, but I do know what weapons WWW IV will be fought with: sticks and stones."
-Albert Einstein

The urgency of preparing ethics for future technical advancements was visceral in 1945. School class room drills for atomic warfare were enacted. The entire cold war was an exercise in future ethics of being M.A.D., mutually assured destruction readiness.

How have we done? Can you grade speculative science fiction? If so what grade would we give it, an A? an F?

There are two dimensions I want to consider here:

1. technology prediction
2. ethics readiness

Technology prediction has been spot on and I give it an 'A' grade. Genetic engineering and robotics are hot topics of new technology today, as well as cybernetics. Should we allow human embryos to be edited by CRISPR? What should our society's response be to automation replacing jobs be?

Ethics readiness I give an 'F'. Our world is ethics surprised by every emergent technology like CRISPR used for gene engineering the same as if speculative science fiction never existed because the ethics recommendations have been completely ignored.

Why? Why have we ignored all the speculative ethics readiness? Why are we ignoring all the total failure symptoms of the U.S. constitution? Are the two questions related?

Yes.

The reason speculative science fiction was never able to fulfil its conceived mission is the same reason we deny our U.S. constitution is 100% failed: our identity.

If anything challenges one's identity then one is immediately thrown into an emotional crisis: who am i? can I change?

Cognitive dissonance (CD) is a relative new field since the 1990s of cognitive study. The definition of CD is the emotional pain one experiences all the while holding two opposing ideas as true.

The United States constitution has completely failed. However, for most Americans accepting this fact challenges the very emotional core of their identity. Even more so than even religious failures like the pedophilia of the Catholic Church. Americans will leave the Catholic Church before they leave America.  Today we hold both ideas as true in our minds: The U.S. constitution is both still functioning and also failed.

Except for those of us who are free thinkers.

We are identity shapeshifters. There is erroneous belief in politics and academia that truth and facts alone are sufficient to change minds. We now know that this is not true. Any truth that challenges one's identity falls into a cognitive dissonance trap, we can believe two opposing truths are both true.

As a free thinker and shapeshifter changing one's mind involves changing one's identity freely and easily. However, even for me changing identity can even be difficult. My most difficult identity change was that I was born in Indiana and considered myself a Hoosier though-and-through until I moved to California. I took a year of very challenging emotional upheaval to re-identify as a Californian and it was a part of this change that I changed my name to "Mybrid".

Rejecting religion, on the other hand, wasn't even a flea bite of a emotional change pain. That's because I have always been an atheist. I never accepted the Bible as anything other the pure, unadulterated evil. The bible in my mind is one of most heinous pieces of writing to ever have been put to pen. The bible is disgusting filth, the bible is pornography and degrades to human existence to one of subjugation and servitude. That opinion has never changed with all my education and only been reinforced with every reading of the bible.

But being Hoosier was my identity. Changing my identity was upheaval, even as a free thinker; sometimes even as a free thinker emotional, identity shapeshifting is not just a flip of a switch.

This is why people "vote against their best interests" today. Interests are the ephemeral powder, here and now, compared to the mental diamond of self identity. As someone once said, it is easier to fight and die for one's values then it is to live up to them. That's because identity is permanent. Changing identity to match interests means becoming someone else, shapeshifting. That doesn't bother me as a free thinker. People are not voting against their own best interests but rather they are voting for their existing identity.

Now we can put the two pieces together of resistance to accepting the U.S. constitution as failed and resistance to speculative science fiction, ethic readiness. Joseph Campbell and the speculative science fiction writers tackled both human nature and emerging science when considering ethics readiness. Joseph Campbell, however, was flawed deeply in his mandate because he believed all human nature truths had already been revealed. In other words he required speculative science fiction to draw upon the well of mythic archetypes and so was blind to speculating new findings of today's cognitive science.  Speculating human nature understanding changes were never considered a key part of the speculative science fiction mindset. Therefore throughout speculative science fiction then human nature is pegged to ancient mythical archetypes. We now know that cognitive dissonance is fundamental to our human nature and so any politics and governing change must address the challenges of people shapeshifting identities as technologies emerge.

Irreni World Scale recognizes everyone needs to change their identity in order to reject and replace the U.S. constitution. That's just not going to happen. And that's okay. It has to be.

This inability of human nature to identity shift is a reason why Irreni World Scale is a two-hundred year plan: people need time to change identities. Free thinkers are shapeshifters, people who can change identity instantly, but we are the exception not the norm. We are the kinds of people who can change our mind during a debate. We are the most convincingly capable people in the world because we are the most able to overcome cognitive dissonance.

Free thinkers of the world unite! Ha! This another problem for Irreni World Scale. The very nature of free thinkers is that we *are* independent.

So now what? How does Irreni World Scale begin to update our governing systems?

The answer is both easy and hard: the answer is easy to express but difficult to implement. The answer is our identity changes for changing governing require a difficult effort of generational campaigns to redefine our identities slowly. That is an easy sentence to write in a handful of words but a difficult, long, long sustained effort of difficulty solution. This is why human nature is such that we do not accept long term planning easily.

Welcome to Irreni World Scale! The fact that the majority of U.S. Senators now represents 18% of the United States population is a sufficient statement just in-and-of itself to say we need to replace the U.S. constitution with something different. However, we Americans will resist all arguments of U.S. failure because we identify deeply as Americans. It is up to us free thinkers as our role in nature to be the sparks that ignite new identities.

This is why the initial campaign of Irreni World Scale is a jobs program, called "Make 2018". People also deeply identify with the work they do. As Irreni World Scale can govern folks with jobs based upon the new governing principles then gradually people will include Irreni into their identity and so their cognitive dissonance will include being both an adherent to Irreni as well as a U.S. citizen.



Freethinkers unite!

Freedom!

Party On!

Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!