Organizing for Ontology

The change we need, that we have expected with a realignment, has to be organized. Realignment is empirically not enough. Nor is realignment logically sufficient considering it is a largely binomial (conservative) variable.

We do not need to wait for an ontology of change. We need to organize for ontology. (See the article, "Organized Ontologies: Waiting for Godot").

As we progress with an empirical ethic of thinking in the pursuit of knowlege and predicitve utility in a post-industrial age, the classic conflict between teleological and ontological truth diminshes. Induction does not exclude the deductive method of reasoning but supports it. The two methods of reasoning are not anymore in conflict than confirming the hypothesis of evolutionary development of life disproves the existence of God. It is not an inverese relationship but a directly positive one. Like Einstein observed, we are always confirming the existence of God by always trying to disprove it. The result is knowlege.

Pursuit of ontological truth supports the teleological hypothesis. Teleology is not cognitively outmoded. We have cognitively evolved to recognize it as much an article of truth (knowlege) as of faith (superstition). Ignorance becomes the only evil and responsibility becomes the probability of error in reduction of teleological possibility.

Politics and economics, as I have pointed out in previous articles, tends to lag the other natural sciences in recognizing the efficacy of embracing the empirical ethic.

The distinction between natural science and social science is false. It is intended to preserve the means for creating, rather than confirming, causal relationships and the legitimacy of power. Political-economy is especially isolated because it is infused with teleological expression afforded legal, constitutional protection.

Elit scientists that deliberately create false causal relationships are considered by their peers to be frauds. Elit business people that create false relationships, like selling CDO's both long and short at the same time, are considered shrewdly intellectual and the reward accumulated is private property that cannot be confiscated without due process of the law.

Saying, for example, a person must have a job to secure income, but businesses do not exist to employ people; or to say, for example, ensuring the welfare of the rich in priority systematically causes the fullest employment while handing out pink slips is an ignorance that is no longer an article of faith. It only exists with the force and legitimacy of a public authority, giving it the character of an ontological truth that cannot be denied. The ontology is really a gamma risk created with a character of inevitability that can be easily reduced to a teleological deduction and an article of faith rather than the force and legitimacy of a truly empirical ontology.

Someone is going to take the means of power to manage the accumulation of gamma risk, it may as well be "We The People."

Instead of opposing the conservative model with one big imposing choice that becomes painfully imperative (which is really no choice at all considering it mainly relies on an ontological, dialectical shift that conserves the elitist model), we can decide to ensure pluralism (an organized ontology for the maximum probability for freedom) in priority as the primary function of government authority. Ensuring a plurality of firms ensures the plurality of small choices necessary to apply an empirical ethic of continuous, verifiable improvement that avoids the punctuated pain of accumulated retributive value.

Maintaining a plurality of firms, rather than encouraging consolidation, allows the sanctity of privacy and property to operate toward the general welfare. Consolidation perverts that sanctity into a tyranny of tastes and preferences that demonstrates power and dictates the value of organizing private enterpise as a public utility without the distributive benefit.

Despite the need to prevent consolidation into firms that are so big they can dictate the marketplace ("too big to fail" being one, but not the only, dimension), there is still sentiment within all branches of government to allow it. Instead, allowing firms to grow "organically" is considered to be the solution, not the problem, despite the overwhelming evidence.

Slow-to-no-growth, inflation, unemployment and a dangerous accumulation of systemic risk (gamma risk) are not attributes of the general welfare. Size of the firm, despite the verifiable detriment, is still considered to be the measure of success because it is the model of "organic growth" that enables big profits with the least amount of alpha and beta risk. It is also where the legitimacy of economy-of-scale modeling gets complicated.

If the size of a firm determines the size of its profit rather than a competitive multiplicity of the marketplace (an organized ontology),
the profit then becomes a measure of the ability to command the marketplace rather than the consumer to demand it. The profit margin can then exceed the reliable measure of customer satisfaction and results in the accumulation of a retributive value. Accumulation of that value presents too-big firms with a gamma risk since the only remedy left to consumers is big-government authority.

The gamma-risk accumulation is not the cause, it is the effect of organizational size. The accumulation represents the benefit (consolidation of wealth and power) that causes crises (illiquidity, the need for government and deficit spending).

The overwhelming size of the deficit measures the size of the problem, it is not the problem itself. In other words, reducing the size of the deficit does not solve the problem (reduce the risk). The size of the deficit (the size of the firms) measures the amount of risk accumulated rather than, as the economy-of-scale argument purports, the amount of risk reduced. It is a symptom, like a fever is a symptom of a cold or flu, and we are being told relieving the fever or, alternatively, increasing the fever will cure what, metaphorically, must be the flu.

While increasing a fever (the deficit) creates an inhospitable environment for a virus, it is also likely to cause brain damage if it does not kill the host. So, continuing with the infectious disease analogy, it is best to just let the disease cycle through, kind of like we do politically and economically. However, we can "choose" to ignore the natural immunity to the disease (pluralism) and cultivate the cause (the elitist "organic" model of growth). This "organic growth" is not growth at all, but contraction--consolidation into organizations so big that they are irrational (accounting for the bad choice) and a threat to the host society being starved of the resources for a healthy, peaceful and prosperous pluralism.

With pressure from independents, the Obama administration has come up with a new slogan: "Organizing for America."

While the adminstration is at least recognizing that the problem is organizational, it still wants to support the hypothesis that the bigger firms are the more efficient they are for managing risk.

Politics is being applied to change the organized teleology rather than organize for ontology (a means of accountability in the form of a systemic risk). The "hope" is being expressed that large corporates will realign their mission (the organic telos that has been identified as beneficial "organic growth") with the ultility of the public good to reduce the gamma risk.

Large corporate conglomerates cannot reasonably expect to operate as private enterprise with the benefit of a public utility without massive risk and government support. Organizing to command the marketplace from the top down is antithetical to, the opposite of, a free-market organizational technology, and accumulates gamma risk. The legitimate utility (the benefit) of private property and enterprise is inverted: instead of production and the cost of production being demanded by the consumer from the bottom up (democracy), it is dictated from the top down in priority (trickle-down economics).

The amount of financing that did not trickle down (the amount of gamma risk) can be empirically measured by the amount being applied by government authority. It is the budget deficit. Over time, the accumulative deficit (the accumulated gamma risk) is the public debt.

The distributon of costs and benefits is the empirical, categorical evidence, the test, of legitimate power. As long as the test is organized into a micro means of resolution in which tastes and preferences are activley participated in daily practice by means of multiple choices in the marketplace (which requires the income, the distribution, to make those choices), value, including the plurality of moral values, is conserved in a legitimately non-retributive state with low (unaccumulated) gamma risk.

If, for example, a person values abortion as morally wrong, being able to do business with healthcare enterprises that do not perform abortions is highly valued. Whether anti-abortion, or not, the value is conserved yet retributed (tested) in the form of voting in the marketplace, or not, with income (discretionary spending). The discretionary value, the self-determination, including the dimension of choice essential to a moral existence, is disallowed or diminished in either case, if not dictated, if income is allowed to accumulate and consolidate.

Performing abortions is a viable enterprise if the demand is there to support it regardless of whether it is legal or not. Without the demand for it, the supply tends to be low and the price prohibitively high in a free-market environment. The consumer is much more likely to avoid the need for the service, to avoid the risk, in a free-market environment because the cost and the benefit is a readily apparent and facile calculus.

In a free-market environment, demand for a service with a highly negative value, like abortion, is also much more unlikely because it provides a much higher probability for an adequate distribution of income; and with the discretion of an adequate income, along with an added sense of responsibility, there is less probable need for the service.

If healthcare is provided as a public utility without first providing adequate income, a retributive value accumulates and is likely to present as a gamma risk with unintended consequences. People may resent being provided healthcare without adequate income to otherwise enjoy life, or may not get needed healthcare, or the care they want, because they cannot afford to pay for it, or the system will not pay for it, at any price. The public utility is, then, for the provision of the service without addressing why people cannot afford to pay for it which, contrary to the theory of free-market economics, supports the price without adequate demand. (Notice, for example, how the cost of healthcare continues to rise despite the massive decline in demand in the current deflationary macro trend.)

The Democratic plan for universal coverage did not pass muster because it does not make economic sense.

If incomes are not adequate to pay for healthcare because the wealth is too consolidated from, for example, what healthcare providers charge, and hire lobbyists to legislate in their interest if not retire and become legislators themselves, what organized power in the marketplace does the consumer have to ontologically demand the bid? The only alternative left is to command the bid by government authority (or use that authority to ensure a pluralistic ontology--free market economics--in priority, as I continously suggest).

If all that obtains is the ability to command the bid, what is left is a huge accumulation of funds retributively valued, a huge gamma-risk overhang, and an attempt to reinvent, or innovate, the perception of the risk as a public utility--to turn it into a systemic risk (like the public debt), and we all know what that does! The result is a huge tax liability that the wealthy have much more power to resist than all other classes, supporting the gamma risk.

Universal healthcare has failed because it supports the gamma risk. There is little if no resistance, on the cost or benefit side, to the distribution of income at the heart of the problem. Instead, the program largely supports the phenomenon of supply meeting demand only by the non-market dictate (the public utility) of taste and preference.

Dictating the marketplace is an emblem of power that varies directly with income and its probable accumulation, which becomes a measureable quantity of value to be retributed. When progressives (people with middle-class incomes), for example, decided that eliminating child labor was morally imperative, the families that relied on the child's income literally starved from lack of income. Instead of attacking the source of the problem--lack of income which decidely makes them less powerful, they attacked the effect--child labor. These are the same people that want to dictate tastes and preferences in the marketplace in the public interest which, again, is as much a demonstration of power (feeling powerful) with the virtue (the strength) of doing the right thing in spite of the empirical evidence (the categorical calculus of empirical values).

Keep in mind that progressive philosophy and activism emerged from the conservative element of American bivariate politics.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the Republican party bifurcated into "stand-patters" (the more conservative wing) and "progressives" (the more liberal wing of largely professional, middle-class incomes). We see then, historically, how bivariation has evolved to conserve the stakes in an organized ontology. The distribution of rewards and deprivations is conserved with "change" being operationalized into an automatic legitimacy of both disproportion and social security.

Progressivism is a conservative legacy. The struggle between liberals and conservatives is handed down to sham an elitist model of power with democratic process. It is a bifurcation into conservative and neo-conservative elements that safely conserves the distribution of power.

With just enough pluralism applied that a bivariation provides, conservativism, just as it was during the progressive era, is prevented from risking the stakes with a more equitable distribution of wealth and power (a more natural and stable distribution of gamma risk).

(Remember that gamma risk cannot be avoided. It accumulates with measures to avoid it. The correlation is direct when it is expected to be inverse: the more risk avoided the more risk accumulated. The relationship is confounding for analysts who expect a predicitive utlity to follow from what only appears to be a practical pluralistic model in the real world.)

The often bitter rivalry between what is essentially one party operates to conserve the essential category of imperative value--income. It is absolutely essential the value of class distinction be conserved so that measures like a progressive income tax to stabilize the gamma risk does not progress into a middle-class distribution of income, and power.

Within an elitist model of power, expansion of the middle class reduces class distinction to elite and non-elite. What defines the elite is the ability to dictate tastes and preferences in the marketplace and, along the way, accumulation of wealth, the income, that demonstrates and sustains the power of the ruling class.

As long as the market can decide (as long as income is adequately distributed), the virtue, the strength, of one preference over another is categorically verifiable by demand in the marketplace (income). Supply will not meet demand and choice never universally imperative if obstructed, for example, by a single payer. Not only does the price inflate, but the market, both qualitatively and quantitatively, becomes retributively valued. The disproportion is the empirical measure of power--who categorically has it (the elite), and who does not (the non-elite). People that have power seek wealth to demonstrate that power, and people that have wealth seek power to empirically confirm it if not enhance it.

There is no better way to confirm and enhance one's power than to dictate tastes and preferences in the marketplace with the deviant to be punitively taxed into the category of imperatively clean, healthy, righteous living (what progressives support and stand-patters resist with the difference, historically, being income and claiming the role of the ruling class). The moral imperative is really just a pious fraud, a scheme to accumulate income to consolidate and exercise power without obstruction or liability in the guise of righteous, authoritarian superiority (with the force and legitimacy, the primacy, of government authority).

Rather than government operating to protect the dictates of want-to-be tyrants, our constitution is designed to prevent their ascendancy to power with an inherently pluralistic organizational form. The Constitution provides for continuous application of the empirical ethic of power to be decided by democratic means, not the dictates of those who seek either wealth or power be it in the guise of providing for the public health or otherwise.

Democracy, whether the empirical proof of the popular vote is political or economic, provides the organized mechanism for applying the empirical ethic of power. Maintaining its categorical measure--the verifiable and accountable truth--of legitimate power is imperative for a peaceful and prosperous historical progression.

Empiricism, of course, challenges the old way of thinking, and in the old days when science was coming to the fore, an empiric was synonymous with a charlatan. Verifying the truth was considered to be perpetration of a fraud.

While today's conceptual modeling of political economy looks dynamic and organically pluralistic, it actually operates to reliably achieve stasis (disequilibrium) with minimal gamma risk (with a maximum legitimacy of power). Continuously trending from deflation to inflation conserves the distribution of wealth and power in a state of consolidation with an arguably plausible dynamic of legitimately pluralistic process.

The relationship between the variables of the process are complex and deliberately manipulated to be unpredictable without technical expertise. If you found the previous discussion about direct and inverse relationships to be confusing, it is a useful source of complexity. It is a variable, differential calculus that technical analysts engage to track and predict probable trends, intended to mask consequences and manufacture legitimacies, (legal justifications) for retributive values.

Complexity of the process is mistaken as evidence of pluralism, and successfully reducing the inherent alpha risk is mistaken as the reward for surviving a free market. Technical analysts then, of course, do not consider if the system is pluralistic or not. The model is assumed to be verifiably pluralistic when it is not and is a source of predictive error, with conflicted signals and indicators, easily reduced with proper analytical modeling that they are not trained to identify.

The means and ends are inverted to falsely suggest the legitimacy of the process. Instead of the means (pluralism) producing the reward, the reward (consolidation of market share) is used as the means of determining it. Self-determinism is then mistaken for the legitimate process of self-determination in which choice (the means) determines the reward (the ends).

With the ends determining the means, rather than the means determining the ends, instead of an ontology of means to ends, there is just the teleology of determined ends. It is a political, economic, and philosophical complexity that gives the inequality of rewards and deprivations a plausible propriety levergaed into legal justification.

For example, AIG says its current round of bonuses are legally binding obligations pre-dating the systemic failure the contracts were signed to compensate. Despite the materially altered circumstances, AIG averted the risk to its reward and shifted it to the accumulated, systemic, gamma risk to be managed by legal, administrative process where the reward gains plausible legal justification by due process. The probability of a reversal of fortunes is so predictably low using the elitist model that it is virtually zero in sum.

For the market analyst the results are highly stable and easily predictable until there is a discrepancy between theory and practice that is resolved with proper modeling. In the AIG example, it is the bureaucratic model.

While the bureaucratic model has both elitist and pluralist properties, with an overarching, elitist macro bias in operation, the elitist model is the better predictor with the element of pluralism retained to give the reward the "authoritative" force and legitimacy of public process. A conservative distribution of risk, despite seeming unlikely with a high populist sentiment, is not likely to fail expectation.

Recognizing the source of unexpected inversions at the fundament, the analyst is then likely to always be more dismayed than shocked by political-economic events and their ramifications, always expecting the unexpected with little expectation left to be surprised.

Whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, expecting the rewards of free-market mechanics to always default into a consolidation of power is not the logical conclusion.

Expecting pluralism to always naturally consolidate (grow) into an organized (organic) scale of efficiency to control risk is likely to always result in an efficient means of increasing the organized span of control and dystopically diminish the probability of a self-determination. A natural tendency to pluralize to achieve an efficient means of self-determination, rather than diminish it, is just as likely.

With just as much encouragement, freedom, and a truly categorical, and peaceful, legitimacy of the outcome, is just as observable as the tendency to consolidate wealth and power. Pluralism, as we progress, becomes not only more desireable but evermore imperative as well.

The strongest tendency of organizational technologies is the tendency to ontologize goals into an autonomic legitimacy of process. Pluralism is the most natural form of this process with both the means and ends of power structured in legitimate agreement.

We do not organize only to secure reliable results that agree with our goals, but we organize for ontologies that produce dependable outcomes without sacrificing the freedom to choose one's own destination.