Occupy

I see the goal of Occupy as bringing sufficient attention to the structural disarray. After the 99% all are clearly observing the messes and the impacts, then it will be time for ideas and actions towards new methods. And there are not leaders because leaders are about following, followers delegating responsibility and risk to another, and then going along. Occupy is about shared responsibility for actions and results and a continuous individual duty to oversee and adjust the common structures to which we consent.

Whose interest?

I was reading an article about ethics. The dilemma below seemed to me to fit nicely with the concerns about hospitalizing peers, calling the police, force, and maybe open up a way to think about it:

“Whose interests am I holding at the moment? … I don't think you can pursue everyone's interests at the same time. So whose interests are we going to hold paramount?”

So if someone is harming others, it seems clear to me that the community ought to be protected – police, hospital, talking down, …

If someone is unable to care for themselves, can peers tide the person over or does this need long term intervention. Are we intervening in the interest of the individual or ourselves, not willing to see the deterioration, or the community, a social good?

And then, the hardest one, if someone is or wants to harm themselves. In whose interest do we intervene?

Licensed practitioners have a legal duty; Second Story*, because of it's funding and integration in the System of Care, has almost a full legal duty. Individuals may want to pass on the responsibility to the system, not want to be responsible. Intellectually, I believe my life is mine to care for or dispose of – in practice it becomes not as clear about when to intervene or whether to.

 

* http://secondstoryhouse.org/about.html

 

entropy and order

Brian Greene on Nova's Fabric of the Cosmos used the big bang theory of order to connect the directionality of time and the expanding universe's move towards disorder. I think there's a compensating self-organizing drive to order, from water finding good routes for flow to the structure of the observing human consciousness. Maybe as consciousness grows more subtle the cosmic expansion to entropy, even time, might slow.

The particular

The weight of the particular presses down on me, prevents expansion and connection, maintains the status with only tiny perturbations – this is what it seems therapists do, ... How can there be discovery?

Patterns

Assume for the index moment that there is no order or pattern that human conscious minds can now recognize. There is motion, only motion, only change. We name that state random or chaotic or unpredictable. Then, happenstance, one thing bumps another, sticks, then clusters, … and the non-clustered, what didn't fit didn't thrive, became still, decayed ... The disorderly is discarded. Human consciousness seems hard-wired to see patterns and order and wonderment. Systems develop and that seems miraculous and is attributed to the supernatural. There are some expectations of prediction, and then influencing the prediction with prayer and hope, wishes and visions for an other future.

Consciousness has evolved to recognize some patterns. Were there patterns when humans think there weren't? Is there another layer looking at us as we look at ants?

Wellness

I've been watching the healthcare, health insurance conversations. And in particular about longevity, end-of-life costs, futile interventions, .. I was thinking today that the longer we live with chronic illnesses, the more pharmaceutical profits.  Kleinman uses the word 'pharmaceuticalization.'  

The war on pain relief

I am intrigued at the focus on pain relief, interpreting use of medications as abuse, interpreting looking for a doctor who will prescribe adequately and appropriately as 'shopping' - but I don't understand this war on pain relief, the benefit to those looking to cut health care costs to have a hurting, and thus maybe angry, constituency.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-04/elderly-drug-abusers-may-cost-medicare-150-million-a-year-senators-say.html