FROM THE WILDERNESS

Selective Application

By James Strauss

The human condition of high civilization coupled with hugely successful population increases is based upon selection and application.  Nature is responsible for some of this choosing, while beyond genetics and our response to external stimuli prior to our species becoming cogently self-aware, we make most of the choices leading to our success.  When it comes to social interaction the process of choosing is founded on generalization from life experience, tribal influence and whether we see others supporting our success strategies.

Technology is changing our ability to make these choices.  As computers, phones and televisions become ever more interactive and data becomes almost infinitely available we are continuing our patterns of choice while at the same time much more effectively disguising the reasons for our choosing.

Selective application has been a much discussed and well understood force in our continued development.  Fairness and justice are often used to describe this force.  Much of our grand development has been dependent upon building and maintaining a mythology that life as we make it strongly opposes selective application. Life’s events and results are presented as ‘fair,’ when they are anything but.  We have created and supported documents and tenants to force humans to look away from selection based on anything other than objective merit, rules of law and the convictions of justice.

Technology is allowing almost all information about the most intimate of movements and matters with regard to the entire human race.  This information is collected in minute detail, processed at huge information centers and then stored for evaluation and use by a very few individuals.

Some of this information flows out to the general populations through Internet search engines and other filter devices.  But the majority of batched ‘facts’ collected with respect to any individual are held, considered and maintained by a few individuals running the organizations collecting the information. Facebook, Google, Amazon, The NSA, the CIA are just a few of those collectors.

Selective application occurs when something is done about the data collected.  Action is taken.  Lives are affected and changed.  We are used to this in everyday life and, although most don’t like it, we accept it. A police officer cannot pull over a whole flock of ten speeding cars. So, he picks one and writes a ticket, hoping to use the event as example to the other speeders. The law cannot be applied to every violation, so prosecutors, judges and juries make decisions upon the few who are caught, again hoping to force conformance by example.  Selective application that is coming however will be much more pervasive.  It will also support the ever-greater success of the individuals possessing and controlling these massive amounts of minute data.  These few will be able to reveal information to cause either damage or support to any individual and, since the data will not be known by others, the person damaged or assisted will not know where or from who the actions originated.  It will also allow for secret motivations to be applied and the secrecy maintained. Politics has changed because of this new threat, and our society with it.

Fear has increased.  Slates of candidates for office grow more clownish all the time with only the mentally damaged willing to expose themselves to the information feeding frenzy created by other would-be rulers supported by an out-of-control mass media.  Selective application reveals sealed complaints of sexual harassment for one candidate while uncovering idiotic public statements made years before by another. We have accepted this in politics under the cover of humans living as public figures.  It is in private that the real danger lies.  Mind control is wending its way into the human condition.  Any expression of original thought or action not in line with accepted thought or action will be punished, but not directly.  The world is becoming noticeably affected by a nearing universal fear, felt but not seen.

What normal human today, sitting in his or her car pulled over by a police officer for speeding, does not worry about information the officer might receive as he hunts for negative data in his onboard system?  Only the uninformed or mentally damaged do not experience this worry.  There are no total innocents anymore.  Innocence is merely the lack of having enough