Uhm. Apparently Ellen hasn’t heard of a kid named Mozart.

So what if Bretz is proven wrong? I’m not married to the idea, and if something turns up tomorrow to disprove him, so be it.

The problem is the inflexibility of thought and the dogmatic approach to everything that is typified by your construct of there being any such thing as a “contract” or this fantastic idea of “reciprocity” with the universe. Things are what they are, and they don’t have to conform to what you think they are or what your expectations are. The issue, I’m afraid, is with the observer. The underlying facts of the matter are still there, regardless of what interpretation you layer on over them.

If you perceive things as they really are, then it’s damned hard to pull a swindle on you. Con artists exist in that shifting space in between “reality” and “perception”. If your perception includes the concept of some random Nigerian prince contacting you out of the blue with an offer worth millions…? You’re a likely victim. If, on the other hand, you evaluate what you know of the world, see that there is no service you could possibly offer someone which was worth that kind of money, then you’re going to reject the offer that the con artist makes you. It’s not necessarily a matter of greed or avarice; it’s a question of grasping the facts of a situation at hand, and then acting in accordance with that.

Just so you understand.

The entire point of what I’m trying to get at is that there is no fucking “reciprocal relationship” with anything. You’re like a little kid who persists in playing with imaginary friends, and who anthropomorphizes all their little stuffed animals. It is insanity personified.

What I’m getting at with all of this is that your supposed “relationships” with everything exist only within your inherently flawed understanding of the situation. You think that the universe has some obligation to you, when it doesn’t owe you a damn thing, ever, in any way whatsoever. You persist in thinking that even consistency is “owed” to you, and the reality is that your own understanding of things is what’s flawed. You think “A”, behave in consistency with that belief (because, that’s all it is…) and then discover that no, the reality is actually now “Q” after your behavior gets you killed.

There are no hard and fast “rules”; what there is actually are a set of assumptions you’ve made about consistency and cause-and-effect. The point that I’m trying to communicate to you is that absent the God-like omniscience necessary to actually divine the true nature of things, you cannot be certain that you’ve gotten everything right about everything. In order to cope with the fact that you’re not God, you have to operate as though all that you know is more a tentative hypothesis than anything else, working from first principles whenever appropriate–And, fully cognizant that nothing is guaranteed.

The point here is that anyone who is operating inside the mindset that there is a coherent overarching rationality to things, that there are such things as immutable “rules”, reciprocal relationships with the inanimate…? Well, they’re mentally deficient. There is nothing inherent to the nature of things that things must always be “just so”–And, operating as though they were is what gets us killed, and holds us back from recognizing when we are wrong about things.

What I am trying to get across is that when you examine the truth of human history with regards to these things, we see case after case where the establishment “great minds” have created these shibboleth “just so” situations within their specialties–The examples in geology abound. J Harlen Bretz proposed that the channeled scablands of Central Washington represented the remnants of post-Ice Age flooding, and that there had been a vast inland lake that periodically drained, creating the scablands. This is now accepted by the mainstream, but when he first proposed it, it was a theory that they all hooted at, because it was not in accordance with the “contract” that the “authorities” had imagined they had going with reality. Same set of syndromes went on with continental drift–Another currently accepted understanding of reality.

Bretz and others of his ilk were derided, because they did not accept and conform to the then-current understanding of reality. The men who opposed those ideas thought that they understood reality, and had contracted with it for their meals. Where’d that get them? Along comes Bretz, with an open mind and no expectations of this idea of a “contract”, and everything they “knew” was upended.

The line from Men in Black spoken by Agent Kay comes to mind, despite the historical inaccuracies in it:

“1500 years ago, everybody “knew” that the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody “knew” that the earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you “knew” that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll “know” tomorrow.”

Keep thinking in terms of “reciprocal relationships” and “contract”, and shifts in your environment are going to kill you and/or leave you behind when you miss things of significance because they don’t fit into your understanding of what goes into your laughable “relationship” with the inanimate. There is no such thing, in any sense.

In your haste you’ve missed all of the interesting bits of my comments: evolutionary reasoning, spontaneity of order, hyperreality of the system.

And you keep droning on about how nuthin’s relly reel, maaaaan.

Individuals come and go but all act within behavioral parameters set by the system, grooves carved into reality itself.

Who cuts the grooves?

But this stuff about virtuous men being immune to fraud? No. Not every con looks too good to be true.
And if you defrauded someone, you’d say no one can defraud an honest man.