Etiology of Social Dementia - 17

An etiological exercise

Over eight years ago I started this series concerning the origin of "social dementia" (Etiology of Social Dementia, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16).

By "social dementia" I mean the dynamics of cultures, civilizations, societies, and groups (not individuals).

In other words, when large numbers of people go crazy for the same reasons during the same span of time.

I have quoted A. Toynbee, who studied some 26 civilizations, then, after mulling it over, wrote: "In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." (Etiology of Social Dementia - 13).

Concerning Toynbee's work, a premier encyclopedia has refined that statement a bit, by specifying how Toynbee indicated that the suicide or murder takes place:

"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces"

(Encyclopedia Britannica, emphasis added). I am reminded of: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization” (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

One of America's forefathers, some years prior to Toynbee, explained how the madness develops in a culture like ours:

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied: and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Those truths are well established."

(James Madison). The U.S. has become imperialistic, hegemonic, and addicted to the notion of war as a cure-all, rather than seeing it as a cultural dementia (Is War An Art or Is War A Disease?, 2, 3).

Some years after my initiation of this series, an interesting book came out.

Part of its title is "How Culture Shapes Madness" which is in accord with the thrust and essence of this current series and others (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala, 2, 3, 4).

An interesting observation, in a review of that book, is worth contemplating:

"There is a pattern of circumstances that can make us more vulnerable to delusions and schizophrenia, the authors write. We all have a “suspicion system” that is always on the lookout for threats to us. When it is functioning properly, we are protected. When it malfunctions, we have problems, such as feeling that we are actors watched and controlled by others.
...
You may be predisposed to certain problems, they write, but it is your interaction with your culture and environment that affects whether you develop those problems, as well as how they manifest."

(PsychCentral, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, bold added). This can be expanded upon (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala, 2, 3, 4).

There is ample evidence that our culture has "lost it."

For example, consider our cultural "suspicion system" and its vastness:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy, quoting the Washington Post). After trillions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars are spent because of paranoid delusions, we now fret about Russia taking over our elections (instead of fretting over our incompetence).

The demented among us are so addicted to war as "a cure," that they are now trying to destroy national systems that take care of citizens:

"The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?

But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care."

(Your Health Is Their Number 1 Enemy?!). The domestic enemies within us compose the despotic minority who Encyclopedia Britannica mentioned as the focus of Toynbee, when he studied and figured out the dementias of the previous ~26 civilizations that have committed suicide.

Suicide is a suspicious activity for civilizations to embrace and carry out (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

As I have written several times, S. Freud was ahead of the curve on this (because he saw it coming) long ago:

"If the evolution of civilization has such a far reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization——or epochs of it——possibly even the whole of humanity——have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends? To analytic dissection of these neuroses, therapeutic recommendations might follow which could claim a great practical interest. I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. But it behooves us to be very careful, not to forget that after all we are dealing only with analogies, and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to drag them out of the region where they originated and have matured. The diagnosis of collective neuroses, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the patient and his environment which we assume to be normal. No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities." [p. 39]
...
"Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature
to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this——hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension." [p. 40]"

(Civilization and Its Discontents, S. Freud, 1929, emphasis added). This brings up a question that is not limited to the Dredd Blog realm: Is This Country Crazy?

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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One of the authors of "Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness":

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On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction - 26

Fig. 1a First graph of this series

Fig. 1b Thermal Expansion

Today, let's look at thermal expansion and contraction at each depth level.

But first, let's remember that all "water contracts (decreases in volume) when heated."

What ??!!??

That is just as true as the most oft quoted statement concerning the thermosteric dynamics of water, which is: "water expands (increases in volume) when heated."

The ghost dynamic in these statements is that whether thermal expansion or thermal contraction takes place in any case depends on the in situ temperature of the water at the time when the hotness or coldness is applied to that water.

Regular readers know that this series started by pointing out that thermal expansion is not the only "thermal" in town (never forget thermal contraction).

The graphs at Fig. 1a and Fig. 1b  show both of the thermal dynamic players in the game.

Fig. 2

The gist of what is portrayed in those graphs is that there is both thermal expansion and thermal contraction (when water is heated or when water is cooled it expands (increases in volume) or it contracts (decreases in volume) depending on the in situ temperature when that warming or cooling takes place.

Fig. 3

Note that those graphs were done before I discovered TEOS-10, a toolkit developed by scientific organizations (Thermodynamic Equation of SeaWater 2010).

Fig. 4

TEOS-10 is a toolkit that makes calculating and graphing thermosteric volume change (thermal expansion & contraction) more accurate, meaningful, and certainly more professional in terms of coherency and consistency.

Fig. 5

The other graphs in today's post (Fig. 2 thru Fig. 9) show actual (not hypothetical) thermal expansion and contraction at various depths using TEOS-10 values (e.g. S_A, CT, and P) that are calculated and computed from in situ practical salinity, temperature, and depth measurements stored in the World Ocean Database.

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

In other words, the salinity, temperature, and depth measurements involved are real measurements taken by real scientists at work in "the field."

Fig. 8

I think that the real graphs of the real situation at the various depths of the real oceans of the world support and validate the hypothetical assertions made by Dredd Blog over the years and also in Fig. 1a and Fig. 1b.

Who in their right mind is going to deny the existence of both thermal expansion and thermal contraction in terms of thermodynamic reality?

After all, any and all measurements in the CTD and PFL datasets of the World Ocean Database (about a billion) were used to produce graphs at Fig. 2 thru Fig. 9.

Now that we have been brave enough to admit the existence of thermal contraction, we can consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I mean that we can do so at least in the sense of the movement of heat in the oceans (which has one and only one direction) which is from warm to cold (NASA, Univ. of Winnipeg).

The big take home from this is that heat in the ocean is always on the move spontaneously when the lawful conditions arise.

That movement is shown in the graphs as upward and downward lines of expansion and contraction while the flow of time moves horizontally.

I want us to also remember that this flow can reverse direction under certain lawful conditions.

Fig. 9

For example, when the water below is colder than the water above, the heat will spontaneously tend to move downward, but when that water above later becomes cooler than the water below, the warmth will move upwards rather than downwards.

By downward and upward, I am in reference to to the depth level.

We see that happening in these graphs too.

So my fellow citizen scientists, let's all remember that "the ice of Greenland and Antarctica is seriously melting."

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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The ice is seriously melting ... (Dr. Eric Rignot) ...

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On The More Robust Sea Level Computation Techniques - 6

Fig. 1 S_A 0-200 m

In this series I have provided some views on how best to calculate and compute thermal expansion and contraction with the in situ measurements available in the World Ocean Database (WOD).

One important event in that process is the use of the TEOS-10 toolkit provided by the scientific community (On The More Robust Sea Level Computation Techniques, 2, 3, 4, 5).

The importance of TEOS-10 should not be underestimated:

Fig. 2 S_A 201-400 m

"On climatic time scales, melting ice caps and regional deviations of the hydrological cycle result in changes of seawater salinity, which in turn may modify the global circulation of the oceans and their ability to store heat and to buffer anthropogenically produced carbon dioxide." (Abstract, Metrologia 53 (2016), R1)

Fig. 3 S_A 401-600 m

"Melting polar glaciers raise the sea level and influence the surface salinity distribution, and in turn may affect the large scale vertical and horizontal circulations in the oceans which continuously store, release or displace huge amounts of heat and dissolved gases." (ibid, R2)

"It is evident from climatology and geosciences that atmospheric

Fig. 4 S_A 601-800 m

relative humidity, ocean salinity and seawater pH are key parameters for observing, modelling and analysing the increasing effects of global warming on ecosystems and society. However, despite their widespread use and relevance, the metrological underpinning of these parameters is inadequate, relies on century old provisional concepts, lacks

Fig. 5 S_A 801-1000 m

traceability to the SI, or suffers from ambiguities and deficiencies of definitions, conventions and measurement techniques. The recent introduction of the international standard TEOS-10, the Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater 2010 (IOC et al 2010), has raised new awareness of these long standing and increasingly urgent problems, and has at the same time offered new perspectives for overcoming them." (ibid)

(IOP Science, PDF, emphasis added). The PDF is well worth downloading (no cost) and is filled with helpful reasoning as to why coherence is in the cards since the introduction of TEOS-10.

Fig. 6 S_A 1001-3000 m

I have provided some source code as an example for using TEOS-10 (The Art of Making Thermal Expansion Graphs).

Thermal expansion and contraction is claimed to have been the major factor in sea level change for a century or so, and is claimed to have been more of a factor way back when than it is now (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25).

Fig. 7 S_A >3000 m

That assertion does not pass the smell test when, at the same time, it is also asserted that global warming has been increasing, with most of the increasing heat (~93%) ending up in the oceans.

The TEOS-10 and other formulas show that thermal expansion has decreased over the past ~50 years, even as more heat has been going into the ocean (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction - 25).

Fig. 8 S_A All depths

Based on the in situ ocean temperature and salinity measurements processed by TEOS, ice sheet melt in Greenland and Antarctica has been going on in greater amounts and for a longer time than previously thought (Antarctica 2.0, 2).

Today's graphs focus on Absolute Salinity, an advanced concept for not only studying ocean water thermodynamics, but also for clarity and consistency (see  IOP Science link above).

Like temperature, Absolute Salinity (S_A) varies with depth, and does so in a non-intuitive manner from time to time.

In these graphs (Fig. 1 thru Fig. 7) I used the usual Dredd Blog depth levels to show each level compared to the mean average of all the depths.

In the graph at Fig. 8 I placed all depths, along with the mean average again, on one graph.

It shows a relatively stable Absolute Salinity, the largest departure from the pack being the shallowest level (Fig. 1).

That probably reflects ongoing surface water freshening due to ice sheet and glacial melt acceleration.

Remember what the experts wrote in the quotes above: "Melting polar glaciers raise the sea level and influence the surface salinity distribution, and in turn may affect the large scale vertical and horizontal circulations in the oceans" (see IOP Science link above).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.