The Manipulators

The Manipulators Of the three primary mandates imposed on us by our advanced state of evolutionary awareness, To Be of Good Council may be the most important. Our advanced language capabilities define us as a species. We alone can formulate and exchange complex ideas in debate or in writing and the results of these exchanges form our social arrangements, our governments and our laws. Language in any of its many forms will never be able to capture all of reality. Our mathematics fails when descriptive limits become infinities. Our speech fails when words prove insufficient to carry an idea or when they are manipulated to mislead or misdirect. Words define and structure our most important organizations and are sustained by men of good council who understand the limitations of language and the fragile nature of the organizations created by other men of good council. The institutions that create order in our lives are built on processes described by our words and work well as long as the processes described are followed and allowed to evolve through considered debate. Being of good council requires knowledge, understanding, forethought and effort. To think before one speaks and to listen with an open mind while being mindful of the forum in which the exchange is taking place are the courtesies that allow civilizations to form and continue. Unfortunately economic systems, government processes, and legal systems can be manipulated by skillful detractors and disruptors. Legislative manipulators use committee positions to sideline important debates and flood the debate floor with useless bills and speeches to avoid regular order. Sophisticated investors manipulate the stock market to make millions through short selling, lawyers manipulate jury selections to insure verdicts, banks manipulate lending rules to take advantage of a gullible public, wealthy investors manipulate elections to insure outcomes, corporations manipulate suppliers and shippers to insure greater profits, and the wealthy manipulate tax laws to avoid taxes. Manipulation has become so rampant in our capitalistic democracy that it is flagrantly practiced in our institutions, in business and in the stock market. Manipulation has become ingrained and accepted but it erodes the institutions it feeds on, weakens the economy and the nation. Reason and restraint sometimes intervene but are but whispers in the shouting contest for advantage. Have we become a nation of competitors, forgetting that it was cooperation that made us great, a nation of profiteers instead of patriots, a nation of manipulators instead of managers, or are we just undergoing a temporary setback in reason and civility?