I hope that got y'all's attention. This is an arguably true statement. One has only to look around at the U.S. and the world to see this. Charleston for example, sadly enough. And, arguably, them's fightin' words. As Robert Pirsig's Phaedrus said in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in his provocative letter to the University of Chicago chairman of his Ph.D. committee, "no one was really accepted in Chicago until he had rubbed someone out. It was time Aristotle got his." In America, winning a fight, preferably a big one and against a much bigger opponent, really helps one get noticed. Well, I'm ready to start and have that fight, and it's a big one. I know who and what I'm taking on, and more importantly, why. And I believe I can win, with the help of you Kossacks.
Follow me down below if you're curious.
As I said, all the world's religions and value systems are failures. Not complete failures; millions, even billions, of people have gained great solace, peace of mind, wisdom, and inspiration from human values and their various proponents. I'm one of them. Many have made solid contributions to humanity, our social advancement, and our cultural evolution. But that they are failures is recognizable from the mere fact that human beings, even of common faiths, are still at each others' throats. Christians against Christians, Muslims versus Muslims, even feminists against each other, and atheists attacking themselves. This doesn't even begin to address the folks of different faiths, cultures, and beliefs being at daggers drawn with each other.
We can examine the state of relations between women and men, which is problematic at best. Women are the still the most exploited class on the planet, abused and misused because of their biology, sexuality, and gender. The status of children may be even worse, especially as we've discovered their exploitation and abuse at the hands of seemingly every organized faith that places unquestioned respect and authority in the hands of men. Tensions, violence, and outright warfare between races, ethnicities, and nationalities are commonplace. And finally, they've all failed in the face of capitalism. That fact is inescapable.
Not all of these internecine affairs are violent, but more than enough are to make the failure of these human values endeavors quite striking. Further, many people seem quite willing to impose their values upon others, especially children, by force, domination, or psychological manipulation, which kind of defeats the purpose of "values" in my view. It's also my contention that any real and true value system worth its salt should actually bring some measure of peace, justice, and freedom to our tortured and benighted species.
But there's one value system that hasn't yet failed yet, largely because it's unknown and has never been tried on a large scale and the big stage. But before I introduce you to this not-so-new but undiscovered thing, I should introduce myself. You'll understand better then why I'm doing what I'm doing. And fasten your seatbelts; things are about to get weird.
My name is Bruce Banner. No, really. Bruce Barrett Banner in full. BBB, 3B, or B-cubed. I've included a photo of my driver's license as a bit more proof of my identity. I've also opened up my Facebook page for public perusal, which can be found here: Brucifer Bulk Bandera. But wait, it gets weirder. I was born on March 3, 1962, the third day of the third month, the 62nd day of the 62nd year, with 303 days left. Strange numerology; coincidences and lots of threes. This was two months before the first Incredible Hulk comic was published, so I had the name first lol (Disney's lawyers will be hearing from me). It was a strange experience growing up at the same time as the unjolly green giant.
My birthplace and hometown is Odessa, Texas, where I attended Odessa's Permian High School, the football powerhouse immortalized in the book, movie, and TV show
Friday Night Lights. Another weird coincidence.
I served briefly but honorably in the U.S. Navy, as a nuclear power machinist mate. You can imagine the jokes: "There are gamma fluxes coming off the primary coolant loop. Don't turn green Banner." "Ha ha sir, very funny sir." After my discharge, starting in 1985, I attended the University of Texas at Austin, where I graduated in 2000 (I was, and still am, poor) with a bachelor of science in mathematics plus a lot of credits in physics, some electrical engineering, and pre-med. More coincidences. (One may be forgiven for thinking I was trying to become a comic book superhero's alter ego. I wasn't.)
In the mid to late 80s I was an undergraduate fellow in Prof. Harry Swinney's Nonlinear Dynamics (chaos theory) lab at UT. I worked with a brilliant physical chemist, Zoltán Noszticzius, on a team that created a new experimental paradigm for the Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. Zoli designed, and my team helped execute, the creation of a chemical pinwheel system, an experimental breakthrough. That got me a mention in the scientific journal Nature. I also worked briefly in the chemistry department on artificial bone material. I was president of the Biomedical Engineering Society because I was pre-med and a former EMT.
UT Austin is also where I learned institutional warfare (for a variety of very good reasons) as well as radical politics. Both served me well when, after graduation, I became an executive officer of the first merged NEA-AFT teachers' union local in Texas, Education Austin. Because of my service as a Special Education TA in the Austin school district in the 90s, I represented school support employees, people like janitors, bus drivers, and food service folks. That lasted from 2000 until 2008, when I was politically purged for being just a tad too wild, crazy, and radical, but also effective, in doing my job. I made way too many enemies.
Since then, I've had a number of teaching gigs in public and charter schools, mostly teaching high school mathematics and science, being certified in both (my students LOVED my name btw). So I know the decline of schools and teaching first hand because I've been there.
During most of the time between 1985 and 2008, I was involved with and married to (twice) a most formidable woman, for 23 years, though we're separated now. How formidable? A BA in Psychology, a BS in Electrical Engineering, and a Master's in Library and Information Science. We have a daughter, Julie (though she likes to go by Amber now; she's 12).
After my indecorous exit from Education Austin and the labor movement, I fell in with the Austin social bicycle scene. Most of my friends now hail from this wild and wonderful
community and most are 20+ years my junior. I fell in with a particular group of folks and we formed a little bicycle gang called the "Frienly Fellers" (this link is to our old fb page). We describe ourselves as a drinking club with a bicycle problem. These people threw me a surprise 50th birthday party that raged for two days and had up to 80 partygoers at one time. My Facebook page is almost exclusively from this period of my life until now. I don't think I could have joined this community without Poemworld. My friends helped me heal a lot of trauma and ultimately find a lot of love. They took me on adventures and showed me sights that I would never had seen without them or a bicycle. They basically gave me a second adolescence, which is really nice, considering the first one wasn't that much fun.
One last coincidence: I've been a DailyKos member for a long time. My UID is 40668. I met Marcos in Austin sometime around 2005, iirc. He was visiting us to gin up excitement about winning races for statewide and national Democratic candidates. This was after my union local's political action campaigns had eliminated every republican in the Travis County delegation to the state legislature. I met him when he had a meet-and-greet at the Parlor bar on Guadalupe.
I've taken the time to tell you who I am because this will help you understand what else I'm about to tell you, which is this: I've had a rather unusual hobby for the last 28 years or so: value theory, aka axiology. I stumbled quite accidentally into this pursuit, mostly because I was completely dissatisfied with the value systems and politics that were on display in 1987, liberal, conservative, and religious. So, like many others, I began to cast about for something better. I found inspirations, the Tao Te Ching for one, but nothing that was ever, well, satisfying.
But as chance and fate would have it, an existential crisis occurred, brought on by my watching my college career blow up in my face for the second time in two years. This crisis gave me my one-and-only revelation: five words. While sitting on the couch in my girlfriend's and my apartment in Austin, on March 14, 1987 (one year before the first Pi Day as well as Albert Einstein's birthday - coincidence upon coincidence!), and nearly two years after the suicide of my friend and foster brother, I asked myself, "Why should I go on?" And I answered myself, but with the oddest feeling that it wasn't exactly "me" answering (more like a different part of me that I wasn't very familiar with but that I scared with my question), "Because the individual is the value. That's why you go on."
That was the day my value system, which I call Poemworld, was born. Those five words would be the seed crystal for the development of a complete philosophical and value system. As you will soon see, "seed crystal" is an apt metaphor indeed.
So this is what I want to tell all of my sister and brother Kossacks about. Permit me to introduce you to my baby. Daily Kos, meet Poemworld.
What you're looking at is a complete, balanced, and aligned value system. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's the first truly modern value system. It's composed of ordinary language yet achieves a high level of abstraction, simplicity, and complexity. Its brevity gives it an almost viral character and makes it relatively simple to translate. It's gender-neutral and inclusive, but can distinguish women from men, at least ontologically. It's an instance of, and I believe a fulfillment of, the
perennial philosophy. (My friend Jason says I've created my own religion. Perhaps. But if so, it's unlike any I've ever seen before.) Curiously enough, it has the same number of statements as
W. Edwards Demings'
14 Points and the
Emerald Tablet by the apocryphal
Hermes Trismegistus. Coincidences. And it's a work of poetry and art whose design (including 2- and 3-dimensional poetry) was guided by my aesthetic sense and perception. Poemworld is my life's work and I could not be happier with how it's turned out. It's changed my life in the most remarkable ways.
[Author's note and a caution to readers: I would be remiss if I did not mention that reading and thinking about Poemworld may carry some risks for some readers. Over the years of sharing this work with friends and acquaintances, there have been instances where a person's behavior began to change, sometimes radically, subsequent to my introducing them to Poemworld. I had no real understanding of this phenomenon, nor even the ability to point to causality, just a sporadic correlation. Then I discovered the little-known psychological theory of positive disintegration by the Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski. Reading this theory (and speaking as a trenchant critic of psychology and psychiatry) was like reading my autobiography that I had never written. It also gave me an insight into what happens to some folk who are exposed to this type of thought, meaning, and philosophy. Positive disintegration doesn't happen to everyone, or even most, but it seems to be enough of a risk to mention. Good luck! BBB]
Poemworld may be critically described as a "nomothetic axiontology." Axiontology is a neologism of my of my own coinage combining "axiology" and "ontology," meaning a theory of value being or being value.
Most of the overall structure was derived from the woefully under-appreciated American philosopher and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse") and his architectonic, or system-building, philosophy. He hypothesized that a complete "normative science" could be built from aesthetics, ethics, and logic, along with some other considerations. I agree.
Peirce was not the first individual to predict this. Plato came close with his theory of forms, including the Good (his summum bonum; my ethics), Beauty (aesthetics), and Truth (logic). Aristotle's modes of persuasion, namely ethos, pathos, and logos, come very close indeed. The celebrated Tamil poet and philosopher Thiruvalluvar also anticipated this structure in his 1330 couplets of the Tirukkuṛaḷ (those 3s again). These couplets are divided between Aram, good ethical behavior with conscience and honor ("right conduct"); Porul, the right manner of conducting worldly affairs, or roughly speaking, logic ("worldly" was the giveaway); and Kaamam, love between men and women, or aesthetics. Thus, much of the overall structure of Poemworld appears to be of venerable provenance. Thank you Wikipedia.
In addition to Peirce, Poemworld's strongest intellectual influences are Noam Chomsky, who needs no introduction, and Terry Eagleton, the British literary theorist and critic. These men's influences on Poemworld and its evolution cannot be overstated. Without both, I would have never pulled this project off. I've had the pleasure of meeting both men, Eagleton in 1994, Chomsky in 2002. I'm adding Paul Krugman, whose hard-headed empiricism, cool-headed rationalism, and splendid model-making provided a wonderful example of a working intellectual, and even scientist, in his economics, writing, and criticism.
But I'm not here to tell you all about Poemworld. My purpose is simpler; I want to present you just some of the results that I've reached by and through this structure and these ideas. I hope this will stimulate enough curiosity and interest amongst you all to get you read it and think about it. Even more, if you do have the curiosity and interest, I invite you to check out Poemworld's exegesis, or explanatory text. It's Poemworld's technical manual, which explains and demonstrates what this value system can generate. It's written as a letter to Chomsky because if you're going to write to this man, you'd better be on your A-game (see Sam Harris for details).
So, let's get to showing those results and making some outlandish claims, which are the best kind to make. Some of the things I've discovered and invented via Poemworld include, but are not limited to, the following:
- a common structure for the ethical concepts of equality, liberty, and justice, all derived from a single underlying aesthetic principle
- a nondeterministic democratic politics based upon aesthetic principles of integrity, freedom, and love
- a complete and integrated ethics
- a set of aesthetic and ethical telelogies
- an extension and generalization of logical quantification, moving from logical statics to logical dynamics
- a set-logic composed of a mathematical epistemology integrated with a naturalistic metaphysics, that appears to be autocatalytic
- an empirically-founded and rationally-operant, as well as naturalistic, ontology
- a novel theory and model of mind that is introspectively self-verifiable
- a psychological and phenomenological theory describing the evolutionary event that led to the development of human language
- and the most outlandish and controversial claim of all, a solution to Chomsky's problem of universal grammar, one that is iterative, recursive (pdf), and computable, and seems to comport, at least to this amateur's understanding, with the basic outline provided by his Principles and Parameters framework and Minimalist Program.
The proofs of these outlandish claims and bold assertions is contained within the exegesis, which, at 30 pages, is a light-weight considering the ground that it covers. It also contains a lot of speculation that might very well be wrong. But our mistakes, errors, and misunderstandings are fodder for progress and advancement. I would add that none of these results are anything I was ever aiming at. I backed into them accidentally. All I wanted to do was figure out my own value system. The rest of this has been the delightful, exhilarating, and serendipitous side effect of pursuing this project.
You now know why I took the time to introduce myself. I needed to show that I have the age (53), the time-on-task (28 years), and the depth and breadth of experience to be able to make these claims with any credibility whatsoever (my friends have called me "The Credible Hulk" heh). And the weirdness, which by this point should be quite striking. A guy named Bruce Banner, from Texas of all places, writing such things. His crazy birthday and its coincidence with the richly trinitarian structure of Poemworld. The strange life, sometimes paralleling a comic book character, and taking the wildest twists and turns. A hobby that became an all-absorbing life's mission, even obsession, but (mostly) without the downsides, while bearing some pretty interesting fruits. What are the odds?
And finally, what's with the big fight then? In creating Poemworld, I slowly began to become aware of and then recognize that I was often reacting against something. That something turned out to be domination. Domination is the general class of problems that Poemworld has been designed and interpreted to detect, resolve, eliminate, and prevent. Domination, in all of its active and passive forms, its hard and soft modes, is the bug in our human software that this value system was partly created to address. This is not all that it's designed to do, but it is a lot of its purpose. Domination is the action and effect that can nullify, negate, or corrupt all or any of Poemworld's parts or the system as a whole, which is why it is designed to exclude and avoid it. I'm more confident (not arrogant) than ever that Poemworld has a coherent and plausible answer to this, the most vexatious of human curses. I would really like humanity to avoid George Orwell's bleak prophecy: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
I believe this is the value system we liberals, progressives, and radicals have been looking for. It's the product of nearly three decades of sustained meditation and values clarification around the nature and meaning of "the individual" and "the value," as well as "people" and "free." It addresses many issues that I've noticed are conspicuously absent from our discourse. Thus, I'm offering up Poemworld, my life's work, to the Daily Kos community to check out, criticize, attack, verify, refute, validate, reject, or whatever. I could use this audience's feedback, should y'all wish to contribute it. Further, if there is sufficient response to this work, if we make enough noise, then perhaps we might catch the attention of Mr. Chomsky or others. Who knows? I'd like to know what people think of my little work of art, poetry, and meaning. It's now open and ready for your examination, criticism, and comment.
[Author's personal note: Doing this kind of work seems to involve a curse, or at least a continuous series of really severe tests. Peirce's life was grim; Joseph Brent's biography of his experiences while doing his work was brutal. Robert Pirsig, whose work and ideas I've always resonated with, ended up having a nervous breakdown and electroshock "therapy." My observation is that these challenges arise from playing with these kinds of ideas, which tend to pull one away from one's prevailing social value system and culture, producing estrangement and alienation. Anyway, at this juncture of my life, I find myself homeless, jobless, and penniless, but rich in friends. They're helping me out right now but I could really use more help to get back on my own two feet. I've considered an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for Poemworld's phase 3: "a user's manual," or how to use Poemworld to build our lives and change our world together. If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or help to offer, I would gladly accept it. Thank you. BBB]
Sun Oct 04, 2015 at 1:16 PM PT: UPDATE: Welp, I now find myself a homeless pedicabber down and out in Austin Texas. This is largely the consequence of my walking away from my life for 7 months or so to finish interpreting Poemworld and writing up its exegesis. It's tough going but I guess it's also a test of Poemworld and myself. I'm dedicated to rebuilding my life but, as many others know, these are probably not the best economic circumstances under which to proceed. Body and soul are still together, I have peace of mind but my material situation has never been worse. For what it's worth, I think this actually recommends Poemworld as a value system. It's designed to help the individual with their integrity even in the worst of times, but to reject domination as both an end and a means. I'm also learning an immense amount about poverty and the impoverished. For those of you sharing the struggle, I again offer up Poemworld as a framework for coping with the evermore antisocial environment of the US and the world. I wish us all the best of luck in our efforts. Peace y'all.