Email about Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” soliloquy
2020|6|21 email exchange with Friend#6, copied to other friends
Subject: [Best Version] The Great Dictator Speech – Charlie Chaplin + Time – Hans Zimmer (INCEPTION Theme)
There is so much hate being spread in the country right now.
We know Chapin contemporary of Einstein , famous actor with out a voice in early film.
What if this went viral , and all in our country heard three times.
Let’s help that happen.
Friend#6
From: Ray Gangarosa
Happy Father’s Day, Friend#6!
You know, it’s funny, but I think Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” speech is going viral. I heard it once before this week. I took your advice and listened to it twice more again in this wonderful version with the music from Inception.
What Chaplin’s speech has in such abundance is a sense that science and engineering can merge perfectly with spirituality. What I have found lacking in Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel is any of that sense of wonder and spirituality. When they talk about the economy, it seems like a long-dead fish with a dollop of business and technology, as if the tartar sauce of a little high profit high tech will improve the smell. They have become the academicians whom they criticize.
One of the videos you sent recently shocked me with the assessment that science is the middle finger, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is a sense of wonder, pure and simple, and if that doesn’t lead to some profound spiritual path, then people ought to keep quiet and keep looking until it does. As I pointed out, the recommendations that flowed from that “middle finger” worldview were to kill the subject under study to see how it lives.
Where that blind spot has led Thiel is an unquestioning support for Trump, based on an assumption that any leader who puts up good economic numbers for a little while must be good. And now that the economy has gone south with Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, Thiel has seen that Trump isn’t so good for the country after all.
Trump isn’t just an awful manager. Trump is a dictator. His language is hate speech. He is the dictator that Charlie Chaplin was criticizing. We are fortunate that he is so obsessed with proving he was right about opposing the Iraq War to cover up the lie that he didn’t at the time, because otherwise he would try to distract us from his pervasive incompetence and ubiquitous failures with military misadventures. So instead now he just uses lies for distraction, which are just slightly less toxic. Why can’t conservatives see that???
There is a mathematics to this optimization process we are living through, and God is exposing us to it, painful as it is, at the threshold of our awakening from a deep sleep. We cannot enter into intelligent, aware, intentional, responsible civilizational design and transformation without seeing the pitfalls of dictatorship. Trump is that lesson, and conservatives who have supported him will feel great regret for their own complicity in the harm he has inflicted.
I realize there’s a lot of provocative speech on the left, but those on the right have to realize the poor are in a defensive position of having been dumped on endlessly. There is institutional bias that creates high energy barriers to the poor and oppressed minorities. I was expecting Trump’s attempts at installing dictatorship in America would vindicate our press and democracy, but instead they ignited protests that may debride deeper wounds that are utterly invisible to the rich but all too apparent to the poor.
My father’s family escaped poverty, in large part because World War II and its aftermath of the Cold War offered them opportunities that Italian immigrants wouldn’t have had in previous generations. However, my father never forgot that the generous education, welfare, and public transportation systems peculiar to Rochester, New York, kept the family alive during the Depression when everything was going wrong with them — his illness with rheumatic fever, a one-year inpatient convalescence, eviction when they couldn’t pay off the last tiny bit of their mortgage, my grandfather’s chronic unemployment, my aunt’s developmental sequelae from measles, etc. In most other cities then and now, people like my father would have died in childhood instead of going on to a career that saved tens of millions of lives.
It’s too easy for conservatives to retreat to the “whataboutism” of criticizing the left. But what we have been witnessing, accelerated by increasingly antidemocratic maneuvers by the right to solidify a weakening position, is two rivals wrestling for control of the steering wheel and trying to push each other out of the driver’s seat — when the best that either could do is drive around in circles, hitting every obstacle in the car’s path! The two unicellular worlds that only see themselves as being right are actually a single multicellular world that must integrate once-oppressed minorities as the mesoderm — or else undergo spontaneous miscarriage.
It is incumbent on those who are in power, even if they are losing it to demographic changes and democratic ferment, to cull hate speech from their own ranks first, to set the stage for rational discussion, to remove barriers to civic participation in democracy, and to give others the same advantages they’ve had. Much is asked of those who have received much. Chaplin’s speech did not come from where the Republican party is now, that’s for sure. Trump has devolved the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. Trump is the personification and enculturation of everything humanity has been doing wrong — and his enablers in the Republican Congress would sacrifice our democracy for his ambitions.
I’m sorry my blogging has gone quiescent as I’ve been thrashing out challenging new aspects of the mathematics of life — and helping my father continue to breathe — but there is a science of spirituality on the horizon for all of humanity. The next major blog I’ll be writing after that is a proof of the existence and nature of God, which everyone, from devout Christians to atheists and agnostics, will all agree is perfectly consistent with the world in which we now all live. There is a language for a universal, nondenominational, ecumenical theological discourse that spans from first principles of physics and mathematics to 1500-to-2000-year-old Christian doctrine to spiritual insights from all other religions, too. We just had to see what technology has to offer before we could realize that our civilization is an embryo, not a decrepit old man about to experience the end times.
By comparison, the videos you’re watching are vastly too narrow in scope! I’m not saying to give them up or stop sending them, but notice the difference between Chaplin’s message and Weinstein/Thiel’s pontifications and you’ll see what I mean. They are on a technocratic journey, not a spiritual one — and people are reinforcing them too much for broadcasting their opinions to the rest of the world when instead they should be getting the message to go back to the drawing board.
I think our conversation will be much more revealing than theirs. I only wish I had followed my instincts and started it much earlier. But then again, maybe I would have gone on to pontificate too early instead of letting the spiritual journey guide my path.
Enjoy your Father’s Day!
Ray G
From: Friend#6
Is a unifying talk all Americans can adore .
We may differ on Trump. I am by nature a contrarian . If the crowd is going one way I look the other. Clearly the mantra of the crowd is hate Trump.
Thiel you may want to study more. He has a brilliant mind, is very balanced , and in all the decisions I have seen him makes , is toward solutions which reduce violence . Some times he is counter intuitive . Be open to that. He is a strong Christian .
Eric is A non practicing Of Jewish origins. (Not an atheist) . He is Revolutionary, againat the “academy” , from his perceived use of foreign students to suppress wages of grad students. On that I clearly agree. Lots of cheap labor for tenured faculty , producing 10 PhD’s for each avail faculty job.
How much bitterness does that produce?
But they are all adults. Someday like “amateur sports” , folks will wake up to their exploitation. Free markets are not free when hidden hands are at play, you would agree.
Friend#6
From: Ray Gangarosa
Subject: Re: Chaplin
Hi Friend#6
today’s musical interlude:
Sarah McLachlan, “World on fire” low-cost video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDmPcSWE0WU
Placido Domingo, “An American hymn” (Main theme from East of Eden) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjO4khB097Y
I’m going to respond again to your last email in a different light because (1) I think it will appeal to your contrarian nature, (2) it illustrates my perspective much better than harping on moral arguments, as a constructive addition to the blogs I could post on my website, and (3) it shows where I want to go with what’s left of my career as I emerge from solitary scholarship and break out into the world again. It was really the latter line of thought that stimulated these ideas, constructing a wish list for the rest of my life, realizing the longevity in my genes might allow me another 30 years of productive work. I hope that the voluminous archives that I have recorded and assembled could jumpstart a movement to examine the mathematics and theology of human civilizational development.
However, in retrospect, I noticed afterwards that I’ve also gone off on my obligatory screed, just because I couldn’t help myself, but I did somehow manage to pare it down to a single paragraph! Feel free to skim through it and move forward to the heart of my point.
Let me start by explaining how I think when I latch onto an important issue. I’ll give a very good example — how I developed the epidemiological and legal basis for suing tobacco companies for aggregate healthcare costs attributable to their products. An analysis by one of my colleagues identified me as the first of five people whose work led to the $235 billion Master Tobacco Settlement, which is the largest civil lawsuit in American history.
From 1980-81, I was in a state of constant exhaustion during my internship. I used to complain bitterly to myself that the alcohol and tobacco industries ought to pay me for treating alcoholic, lung cancer, and COPD patients. In a health policy class in 1988, the first year of my MPH program, I suggested the same kind of compensation and thought I could easily develop and implement the strategy in a few months (!), but I worked on it steadily until legal colleagues and I published a law review article in 1996 and then I intensively explored corporate accountability until 2003. When I started that process, cigarette companies had an easy job overwhelming individual smokers who sued because they shared in culpability for their own illnesses, suffered from end stage disease that sapped their energies, and would get buried in the defendant’s legal stonewalling, deliberately escalated costs, and never-ending delays. By contrast, I saw as my “client” the same kinds of public hospitals where I had worked, who actively opposed their patients’ smoking, got harmed financially as innocent bystander and rescuer, and could sue for a huge aggregate of uncompensated care — thereby overcoming every aspect that made the tobacco industry’s legal strategies that had been so successful against injured smokers. It was to my advantage that I literally did not want any money at all to go to injured smokers, who were close to death and could only add a small amount to their estates and play almost no role in prevention of further similar injuries. I wanted to shift the axis of economic power from harmful industries to social safety nets by making all businesses pay for the costs and harm they inflict on society. I wanted to start a movement, and I quickly recognized the relevant epidemiological measures for imposing corporate accountability were product-attributable risks and costs. I circulated my ideas among antitobacco activists, and one of them, Dick Daynard, recognized the breakthroughs I had identified and used them in a more limited way in the state attorneys general Medicaid lawsuits that ultimately led to the Master Tobacco Settlement. One of the legal scholars I had enlisted to help make our case against the tobacco companies tried to get me compensation from that fund for my contribution to the legal strategy, but few if any people on the trust’s governing board had heard of me or knew of it. After working on these ideas and extending them into vastly more general realms, the sum total of money I’ve earned for 32 years of almost full-time work was a $100 honorarium for a set of presentations I gave at Morehouse College in the late 1990s — i.e., averaging $3.12 per year! I’m perfectly happy and downright proud to have made my contribution so far as pro bono work without fanfare or credit.
Corporate accountability activists have given the law review article we published much more attention lately, but I see enough residual problems with my earliest approach that I’d rather not oversell those ideas, even though doing so could greatly benefit me personally and professionally. Later, I saw that corporate accountability alone couldn’t drive such a movement because virtually all industries currently impose significant social costs and most industries couldn’t pay for the harm they inflict. As far as the economy goes, emphasizing the negative would kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
It took me a long time to realize it, but the impasse results from the difference between adaptation at the individual level and evolution at the civilizational level. Acknowledging that my dissertation topic had a fatal flaw, I had to abandon what would have been a high-profile academic career fighting harmful industries and go back to the drawing board (as I’ve suggested others should also do, for other reasons, as you’ve read). I never really explained to my dissertation advisor why I abandoned my PhD program in epidemiology after doing so well in coursework, my comprehensive exams, and what seemed to be poised to become a revolutionary doctoral dissertation. Having taught me, supervised my MPH thesis, and known my father, he had hopes I would be one of his best students, and instead I was his worst failure.
It has taken me all this time since then to get my act ready for prime time, but I have enjoyed the quest immensely and haven’t regretted taking this path for one moment. In the publish-or-perish world I wanted to enter, I voluntarily let my career perish, but I continued recording in my scientific journals in diary form, averaging 500 pages per month, probably now around 90,000 pages total, plus two EndNote bibliographies spanning 40,000 references, an Evernote database with almost 100,000 documents, and countless other resources that I’ve archived over the past four decades. I was able to support myself working part-time with my father in our public health consulting business, mostly providing analyses and reports for his expert testimonies in legal cases involving infectious diseases. That wasn’t exactly the public health career I wanted, but if necessary, I was willing to compile a large compendium on civilizational design and transformation that might only reach public attention after my death. I have always wanted to publish these ideas, but for many years before I resolved the dilemmas, I imagined that all those publications would be posthumous contributions by first authors I never would know.
[screed alert, next paragraph]
So, you see why I’m not enamored with Eric Weinstein’s argument that cheap foreign labor is competing with American graduate students. I’ve made vastly bigger sacrifices than are imposed on American graduate students, and foreigners often have far greater dedication than we do. Protectionism spawns mediocrity. My family lived in Pakistan during the Kennedy administration as my father built the research capacities of foreign nations when there was lots of work to go around. In those heady days, we Americans were revered for our generosity and expertise, our commitment to joint public-private enterprise, and our magnanimous support of international development. Over the 60 years since then, we let all that prestige and good will go straight to hell. Idiots with ideological obsessions with small government have also pissed away all the advantages of robust cooperation between large public and private sectors, thereby shrinking our economy, putting harmful industries in charge of it, widening the gap between rich and poor, weakening social infrastructures and safety nets, and torpedoing awareness of common interests. The rest of the world needs Western academic training even more than we do. If we were patient enough to let globalism work, it would lift everybody’s fortunes, but we’re so shortsighted that slight transient drops in our income and opportunities are too much for us to bear, despite our much greater wealth. We’re so jealous and spiteful that we can’t stand letting minorities and foreigners prosper, even when their good fortune would make them better consumers and strengthen the U.S. and world economies. After all, conservatives’ mismanagement and ideological purity is what has made the pie shrink, by sabotaging government. They have made their mantra that government is the problem, not the solution, a self-fulfilling prophesy by consistently installing the very worst of leaders who are intent on making government and its policies look as bad as possible. On a smaller and less blatant scale, this is a continuation of the spite that reacted against the success of former slaves during Reconstruction that restored the cruelly subsidized mediocrity of Southern white privilege on the backs of blacks with vigilante terrorism, Jim Crow laws, state-sponsored oppression, and systemic institutional racism.
But let me not continue to belabor those arguments if I can’t convince you from that standpoint. I had infinitely bigger fish to fry in pursuing the mathematics and theology of civilizational design and transformation.
The bottom line is that progressives’ awareness of collective responsibilities and conservatives’ emphasis on individual responsibility are not competing ideologies, but rather complementary dualities, manifesting as a Fourier pair generated by the Schrödinger equation. The limited capabilities of the unicellular mode force it to trade one perspective off against the other, setting up the basis for competition that figures so prominently in our current culture war. The picture that results is two drivers vying for control of a car’s seat and steering wheel, when neither could do more than drive in circles!
However, the bouncing oil droplets on sonicated water baths of hydrodynamic analogues of quantum processes (See yesterday’s videos) illustrate that we can observe the position of particles and the velocity of pilot-waves simultaneously. This stunning and unexpected new revelation about Fourier pairs becomes even clearer in multicellular systems. In that setting, duals can exist as separate functions in a division of labor.
The reason things are going so badly is that we’re in the “hypoxic zone” of a unicellular-to-multicellular transition, analogous to approaching the peak of Mount Everest. We’re wasting time on ideological conflict despite the urgent imperatives of forming a global circulatory system and enlisting the oppressed — including immigrants and foreign graduate students — as mesoderm. If the counterproductive conflict continues too long without leading to multicellular transformation, by analogy with embryogenesis, our civilization could end in the higher-level equivalent of a spontaneous miscarriage. Conservatives’ pissing away the effectiveness of government with jealousy, spite, and mismanagement may be a requisite setback in the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity, which only reinforces the commitment needed to make the final multicellular form coalesce irreversibly and function coherently. The financial investment required to stabilize the final multicellular operating mode may impose budget deficits so large that the system would not be able to return to its original unicellular form.
Once we settle on a multicellular-like civilizational design, we will need to do things entirely differently. Instead of pitting a Republican against a Democrat for elective office, we should elect one conservative in a position relating to individual responsibilities and one progressive in a complementary position relating to collective responsibilities. They should cooperate in their respective offices, not vie for the same position.
Indeed, my theory predicts that we also need a third offsetting pole, to protect the rights, engage the energies, and channel the potential of once-oppressed minorities. The triad is required because (1) preexisting imbalances involving the past cannot be neglected as the system moves on to map out its future operating mode, (2) vicious competition between the progressive and conservative positions would inevitably reemerge if the duality continued to exist as a dyad, (3) the Schrödinger equation of chemical-like reactions in lifelike systems dictates a third term, even before irreversibility effects are considered, and (4) rotating interactions are easier to balance. My intuitions about the physical systems has convinced me that the equations and mathematics will paint this same picture.
Thus, we need to structure some aspects of government with triads of cooperation modeled after life’s structure of mesoderm | endoderm | and ectoderm. Presumably, such a cooperative arrangement will reduce the incentives for electing extremist ideologues, help to make government function better, and restore democracy to a strong position.
Now that I’m on the verge of proving these points, I no longer think my notes must wait until my death to make sense. I would like to donate my archives for academic studies, publish my theories, and revisit my notes over the rest of my career in systematic fashion to develop || revise || and expand the ideas. I’d like to make some kind of arrangements to get a PhD in mathematics, a faculty position, research | service | and teaching opportunities, and computer support, perhaps even for deep learning analysis of my notebooks and other archives.
You mentioned that your stepson had taken large chances on his doctoral dissertation, picking a topic that might not have panned out, but subsequently finding that it opened up very important research areas. In similar fashion, I see myself as having made an entrepreneurial intellectual and scholarly investment in an exploration that addresses the most important issues of human civilization and now seems to reveal great potential.
Just as I was not concerned about compensation for injured smokers, I have no interest helping American graduate students benefit by forcing foreign scholars to fend for themselves to struggle against impossible odds for doctoral level education in their own countries. Even aside from the moral issues of systemic discrimination and post-colonial exploitation, the routine practice of Western academic research and grant agencies — mired as it is in specialization, preconditioned patterns, and stylized trajectories — does not materially seem to advance the unicellular-to-multicellular transition toward civilizational design and transformation that humanity urgently needs. The way quantum physics got bogged down in the Copenhagen interpretation that is now almost obviously dead wrong is a perfect example. We need a new way to do research, and I propose the way I have worked these past 40 years may offer one alternative and provide resources for getting past the barriers that confront the current system.
As a further illustration of this perspective, I offer the lyrics to Vienna Teng’s song Copenhagen, which I cited as the musical interlude in my last email:
Copenhagen (Let Me Go)
Call out what we’ve become
The news has turned to numb
Locked in nearsight
On the latest device
Let the yet-to-be pick up the tab
Say we can’t escape
Though there’s plenty of space
Barring holding on to what we used to have
In your head, where we’re headed
You gotta let it on by, let me go
And get it in your head, where we’re headed
You gotta let it all die, let me go
We lay it out on the map
Debate it all in caps
Lock our eyes on
Distant horizons
Where we will shift to some informed accord
In another town
Settle up, settle down
We insist on the option or we’re out the door
So get it in your head…
Gone, it’s gone
Gave in again, now let me go
Gone, it’s gone
Gave in again, now let me go
Or maybe this is a test
Maybe this is a course correction
Oh I said it, no no …
Best wishes to all,
Ray G