Failure, Mr. Obama, Will Be the Only Option

Who is to decide which things must fail, the employee who attempts to buck the evidence-driven policies of their company, or the evidence-driven companies themselves?

"Failure is never an option--not in America." Barrak Obama to CBS's Catie Couric

"COURIC: 'And let me just end by asking you about the stimulus package...some critics have said, "hey, that didn't really happen the last time." Why will it this time?'

"OBAMA: 'Well, there are a couple of things. [ ] We're gonna invest billions of dollars in health information technology so that we can drive down costs for average families. [ ] But the general framework, the general outlines of the plan are ones we have run by economists from the left and the right, conservative, liberal. This is a package that I think is gonna make sense. I have every confidence that it's gonna work. [ ] '

"COURIC: 'And if it doesn't work?'

"OBAMA: 'Failure is never an option. Not in America.'"

So, investing billions will drive down costs for average families? How? This pie-in-the-sky thinking ignores that those billions will take generations before a pay-off is seen. By then, the cost of living, combined with any possible inflation, will make today's $1000 emergency room visit cost us--perhaps--double or triple that.

By then, economists will be tripping over themselves to prove that the nominal price at that time, say in thirty years, actually is less than the nominal price was before the investment of those billions. I think the value in real-dollars will not prove a savings to anyone. It will cost our posterity billions more than was spent.

Ask yourself this: if, in a real-world economy--in other words, one that is not manipulated by government policies--the cost of doing business for a hospital proved that such computerized infrastructure would actually save their patients money, why wouldn't they do it anyway?

We see hospitals competing all the time. One cancer center competes with another, perhaps not only for prices by being as effective and evidence-driven as possible, but also certainly for the best hope and the best care.

Hospitals who want to keep their emergency rooms filled compete with others in their area for the quickest service possible. One emergency room in my area advertises "no waiting" service for heart and other fatal symptoms. Another advertises "no more than a 30 minute wait" for any emergency.

In a recent news piece on Fox News Network, the reporter was showing the debate between companies that raise insurance rates on obese employees, or otherwise take some action against the obesity, vs the obese people who say it is discrimination. The reporter even cited several cities around the nation where such things as "girth" and "body fat percentages" are protected by law--as "traits" and other silly descriptions.

But the reporter made it very clear that the corporations would not care to day anymore than they cared before if it was not for the fact that every thing a company does today must be driven by evidence, and the evidence is that obesity costs money and decreases profits because 368 million work days are lost as a direct relationship to obesity in this country every year.

Suits against employers who attempt such measures sometimes make the claim that no employer has the right to tell an employee what he or she must do or can or cannot do outside the workplace.

To that, I say it may or may not be true, since some employers have gotten away with the same tactics against smokers. But an employer does have the right to say that as soon as an employee walk into the workplace they must be healthy enough to work. Employers have always been able to send home employees who have the flu, or some other spreadable disease. It isn't fair to let one employee cost other employees a share of their paycheck because they themselves are home sick.

So how can it be fair to let an obese employee cost an otherwise healthy employee a larger pay rate or a larger check from the profit-sharing pool because the obese employee cost the company a measurable share of earnings?

"In August 1990, Stephen Grindle was hired by Watkins Motor Lines as a driver/dock worker. The job's duties included loading, unloading, and arranging freight. The job's description noted that it involved climbing, kneeling, bending, stooping, balancing, reaching, and repeated heavy lifting.

"In November 1995, he sustained an on-the-job injury. [ ]he commenced a leave of absence...[ ] On June 26, 1996, Watkins ordered Grindle to see the industrial clinic doctor, [who] found that he had a limited range of motion and that he could duck and squat but was short of breath after a few steps [and] noted that on physical examination, the most notable item was that Grindle weighed 405 pounds. [Though] Grindle met U.S. Department of Transportation standards for truck drivers, he couldn't safely perform the requirements of his job. Watkins placed him on safety hold. Since he was on safety hold, he eventually was fired because he was unable to return to work in 180 days.

"Grindle believed he was discharged because of his weight, so he filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The agency filed a claim on his behalf in federal court claiming Watkins' actions violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. The trial court ruled in the company's favor..." HRHero.Com

If, as Obama says, failure is never an option in American, who is to decide which things must fail? It must be either the employee who wishes to remain obese who fails in his attempts to buck the evidence-driven desires for the best for their company, or it must be the evidence-driven desires that fail.

Obama wishes to spread the wealth, and legally speaking, it can be done two ways: the obese person can lose weight or be fired in order to spread more wealth (less wasted work days) among the other employees:

or it can spread the wealth by giving to the obese employee what he/she is taking from the healthy employees.

The second method is the method of Marxism, whereby we get the humanist dictate "From each according to his ability..." meaning the obese person, "to each according to his needs"--which means the obese person.

There is no way that dictate can ever benefit the socialist-valued "greater good". That "greater good" would be all the other employees who are not lowering profits. Instead, to the Marxist, it means we all have needs and if the need of the obese person is to have a paycheck, it must come from the paychecks of all the others, "according to his ability."

Obama's plans to invest billions upon billions of dollars until they equal into the trillions means that money must come from each according to his ability, because when payback time comes in twenty to fifty years--when we are dead or collecting social security--the only one's paying it back will be those who can do so.

Those who can afford the payback because of "ability" will not be the Stephen Grindles and all the other Americans with "needs."

And it may not be our grandchildren either, because anecdotal evidence, collected by soviet bureaucrats, has it that when honest employees see the dishonest, the corrupt, and the sick collecting their loot, then they too will become dishonest by claiming "illness" in order not to have to contribute to the "common good" of those who take without giving.

Sally and Jose and Matumbe will become active hypochondriacs, but they will never believe their illnesses to be real; they will only believe their illnesses are necessary if they are to be treated equally with people who collect the loot, because, after all, "to each according to his need." Let the "chumps" provide civilization with their "abilities."

If psychology is "evidence," then "evidence-driven psychology" backs up the anecdotal stories collected by the soviets in their own Marxist empire. When the cost to society became too large for the economy to keep providing the sick with their "needs," they were simply taken out and shot.

That is the way that an "evidence-driven" collectivism solves its problems, or it collapses.

But the U.S. would never become that evil and ruthless, which means, Mr. Obama, that failure of your policies and a total collapse of the non-capitalist economy is the only option in America.

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The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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Sci Naturalism's Unintended Link to Xianity

Scientific Naturalism and Christian Theology

Come from the Same Roots of Causality

I

Free will and the will that is not contra-causal are the subject of the metaphysics of naturalism. Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) accepts free will, denying--where scientific naturalism (SN) asserts--that free will needs to be "contra-causal" to be called free.

It is not, nor can it ever be, contra-causal. To wish it so, to want it so, to propose that it must be so before it can be called free is to contradict the very nature of naturalism's epistemic roots.

What is "contra causality"? To have contra-causal will, you would have to have the power to move the wind and the stars; the power to control your genetic pool--before you are conceived; the power to manipulate your environment by supernatural means (since we are obviously able to manipulate it by natural means, yet this isn't good enough for SN, which denies anything supernatural); and to manipulate the behavior and activities of every minute detail of reality that touches your own existence.

Because you do not and cannot have this power, SN says free will is not free because it is always influenced by something; the wind, the stars, your genetic pool, your environment, your prior actions, and the behavior and actions of all other people who have ever lived and who are living now, and whether or not you have a sore toe, a headache, have had too much caffein, alcohol, or milk--or are in need of some, and whether you are depressed, or manic, etc.

Even normality as measured by the strictest determinations of medicine and psychiatry effects us, according to SN, in such manner as to prevent our will from being free will. Normality no matter how it is determined is still the effect of all the previous causes of the being of any human.

In short SN asserts that the butterfly effect prevents what would otherwise be independent and free will, i.e., the freedom to think or not, and what to conclude from thought, and how to conclude it. The phrase "butterfly effect" is a "reference to the [ ] theory that a change in something seemingly innocuous, such as a flap of a butterfly's wings, may have unexpected larger consequences in the future, such as the path a tornado will travel."

We are caused by the flapping of all the butterflys' wings, whether those wings are literal, or metaphorical.

So while you may believe you are exercising free will, SN says the "you" that exists at the moment of exercising your will shows proof that "we are fully caused creatures" by all things that have gone before. "Naturalism holds that everything we are and do is connected to the rest of the world and derived from conditions that precede us and surround us," it says. [see same link as above]

The most notorious concept of our being "fully caused" is called, in Christianity, by the name "Original Sin." Christianity has always believed in "full causation" of the human being through Original Sin, but gives it an "out" through "redemption." For this reason Christianity believes in free will.

SN states its aim as being the obliteration of anything but scientism in its metaphysical description of the state of being human, yet it supports the most illogical of all epistemologic arguments of Christian theology, proving that even SN cannot escape epistemological mistakes that put it on par with the worst logic of supernaturalism. What SN does it takes away the ability to be "redeemed" from our "full causation" by removing the concept of freedom from the concept of will power.

SN does not disprove the Christian epistemology of Original Sin, it upholds it by using the same logic of "full causality"!

But in its defence, it must be explicitly stated that SN denies anything supernatural. It cannot therefor uphold the idea of Original Sin as a religious concept, but by using the very logic of Christian theology it gives Christianity very good reason to support the epistemology of SN while denying its metaphysics, in the very same way SN denies the metaphysics of religion.

Scientific Naturalism is Not Scientifically, But Epistemologically, Wrong

II

While it is entirely true that humans are shaped by such things as their gene pool and their environment, and by all the other things that science is beginning to teach us about our biology, this does not constitute what SN calls "full causation." It is not necessary for the will to be able to change these things for the will to exist as free will. Free will does not mean independence from existence.

Yet it is the independent, libertarian will that SN says is not free because it is not free from the reality of reality. "Naturalism," it say explicitly, "is the understanding that there is a single, natural world as shown by science, and that we are completely included in it."

Of course we are "completely included in it." While religion argues that we are also included in a supernatural world, it does not deny being "included" in the physical world. As a matter of fact, being released from this "complete inclusion" in the natural world is the goal of religion. SN seeks to bind us to it with no power to "fully cause" our own metaphysical existence.

SN does not state that the will is impotent. To the contrary, it states that since we know, or can know, the elements of reality that "fully cause" us to be who we are, that we can somehow control our lives better through of will power that it describes as "not free."

SN is a humanist movement. It supports "compassion" for criminals in their treatment and sentencing: compassion, not justice. Criminals are still human, have the capacity to learn from their wrongs and from their time incarcerated. Most will get out of prison. Ignoring "compassion" for justice does not mean going back to bread and water, chains and leg irons, beds of straw, lack of proper medicine, or anything that is not proper in the treatment of humans who have the free will to become better for the justice of their sentence. Proper treatment is justice, not compassion.

What SN means by "compassion" is stated this way: " Seeing that we are fully caused creatures - not self-caused - we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do. This leads to an ethics of compassion and understanding, both toward ourselves and others. We see that there but for circumstances go I. We would have been the homeless person in front of us, the convict, or the addict, had we been given their genetic and environmental lot in life." [emphasis added]

This is all true, except for the "credit and blame" part. If the credit and blame are moral attributes of action, it is never true that they do not belong to us. If they are attributes of the chaos of reality over which we have no control, it is metaphysically unthinkable to assign credit or blame.

It is a case of barking up the wrong tree for SN to take note of "being fully included" in reality. No one has ever, to my knowledge, denied this. SN denies that we are included in any sort of super naturalism, and with that idea, metaphysical naturalism is in complete agreement.

If the unstated, implicit, and possibly unconscious goal of SN is some form of humanism be it termed "philosophical", "modern", or "secular", then it is not an honest doctrine, since it states its goal this way: "By understanding consciousness, choice, and even our highest capacities as materially based, naturalism re-enchants the physical world, allowing us to be at home in the universe." SN is a doctrine to "re-enchant" the world!

If its goal is to free us from supernaturalism, it forgot to "fully include" humanity in the reality of the fact that we would be absolutely nothing if not for reality itself. "In order to control nature, one must learn to obey nature."

It is in obeying nature that we find our will is free, and it is that freedom that has taken us out of the "inclusion" of being strictly bound to the earth, and opened the gateways to being "included" in the rest of the universe.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/