Productivity: Substantive (Solid)

Having Bought into a Wreck -- What Now? (Part #10)

NB: This section, and the three which follow, are an attempt to articulate ways seemingly open to me for engaging with my "automobile" -- in the light of the fourfold framework adapted above from Arthur Young. Given the greater subtlety he acknowledges with respect to the threefold articulation of a 12-fold pattern, no systematic effort is made to explore those nuances here, although allusions to them may be variously made. As indicated above in the light of Rubik's Cube, arguments might well be more appropriately moved between these four sections, as with any allusions in terms of the threefold pattern.

Little needs to be said about the many concrete issues with which getting my "automobile" to work is now faced. These are systematically profiled in the online problems database of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. The same could be said of the multiplicity of remedial strategies, profiled in the related strategies database, that are recommended by a wide variety of constituencies as "concrete" or as "approaches that work -- at least eparately, if not together.

So many define themselves as unquestionably "right" in identifying the problems of my "automobile" and what is required to fix it. Their understanding necessarily extends to recognizing that those who disagree with them are unquestionably wrong and have been unfortunately misled, as can be speculatively argued (If Writers are Necessarily Right... Who are the "rongers", so necessarily wrong? 2015). .

The set of problems which can be defined therefore includes those "meta-problems" which recognize the unrelated nature of the categories by which the problems are so definitively distinguished beyond question -- and the manner in which this reinforces the fragmented nature of the essentially incoherent strategic responses to them. Many have argued the catastrophic nature of the current condition of my "automobile" -- from a variety of perspectives (Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times, 2011). A speculative caricature is also readily elaborated (Earth as a Shithole Planet -- from a Universal Perspective? Understanding why there are no extraterrestrial visitors, 2018). My concern with my wreckage of an "automobile", accords with the concern of environmentalist, George Monbiot (Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an Age of Crisis, 2017).

It is easy to argue that relevant knowledge is effectively imprisoned by various processes (Inhibition of creativity through incarceration of knowledge, 2018). As implied above, the very process of "classification" of knowledge can be explored in such terms. Despite the definitional and cognitive rigidity, is the erosion of any integrative understanding of my "automobile" somehow a reflection of the so-called "half-life" of facts. This challenge to conventional thinking is usefully made in a book review included in the special issue of the Scientific American focusing on the State of the World's Science (October 2012). The review of The Half-Life of Facts: why everything we know has an expiration date (2012) by Samuel Arbesman is introduced with the phrase:

Many medical schools tell their students that half of what they've been taught will be wrong within five years -- the teachers just don't know which half.

That said, in my relative ignorance I may well be obliged (unwittingly) to make use of obsolete knowledge in dealing tentatively with the challenge currently posed by my "automobile". However, essentially my sense is that I am "stuck" in determining how to do anything fruitful about that wreck.

Faced with multiple suggestions regarding my "automobile" , many made quite forcefully by processes of advertising and propaganda (of which I may only be slightly aware), I recognize the pressure on me for "buy-in" -- an expectation that I be faithful to one remedial process rather than to another. Any vacillation in this respect may even endanger my reputation and career, if not my life. It is also of course the case that my own sense of identity may be intimately associated with one such strategy or another -- and with the categories which they so clearly highlight. They form and inform my reality as I experience it -- effectively my cognitive "real estate" in which I tend possessively to cultivate a degree of pride in ownership.

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Productivity: Substantive (Solid)