It is a time to speak ill of the dead, but I don't want to compromise this message by personalising it.

While you definitely do not choose your family, most of the time you don't really get to choose your friends either. They just happen and short of malevolence they often survive years of neglect. So I'll also leave out, because it isn't true, the "you are not a friend of mine" that some would jump to as a rational conclusion to what I am about to say. And I know many will just shake their heads when I try to remind them that "rational" is far from all it is cracked up to be, because their submersion in the adversarial tongue of polar opposites will take that as defending the irrational.

No not that either. The problem, and the only reason I'm willing to take a few minutes away from the topic of the much more important thread below, is that emergence is not rational, except sometimes with the curse of hindsight.

On to the topic here.

THE enemy I speak of is the assumption of authority. It lies mostly hidden behind the presumed ills of later modernity. It is propped up by a never ending flood of uncontested motherhood statements: "strong leadership", "rule of law", "efficiency", "employment", "save", "safe" (even more so in relation to children), "national integrity", "growth", "legislature", etc., etc.. Of late it is increasingly compounded with the cult of celebrity despite the lack of any even rational grounds for association there. All these lies and even more so the God lie are joined to that enemy of a hopeful future, authority, by positive feedback loops.

The last thing I am trying to say is that we do not need some agreed standards for the human plague to maintain some chance of realising any positive transformative potential, especially in the area of communications. We sometimes even need critical mass to get through a nexus. But we don't need such necessary aids to cooperation to ossify themselves as growth industries.

The real problem with the almost always absurd conspiracy assumption is that it reinforces the foolish idea that there are actual people in charge. Let me tell you very clearly there are not. We long ago abdicated operational control to the systems we once put in place to serve us.

One of the many great, but overwhelmingly unrecognised/ignored, lessons of systems theory (and especially of the system in the thread below) is that behaviour emerges naturally which could never have been anticipated.

So every time you blame shift to your favourite conspiracy theory you add to the mountain of bullshit which props up the delusion that there are and should be authorities in charge. At best they are us in our day jobs. Most often they are the cracks taking on a life of their own in organisation space.

Another Smith's granting of moral authority to an invisible hand was arguably the stupidest idea to take off post Descartes.

Our systemic servants do not good masters make!