Emails from the Year 2002

Society's interest in the preservation of persistent social problems; That society or cultures often have an unspoken, often unrecognized interest and some sort of gratification from the continued existence of most persistent and loudly decried social and economic even political problems. Since this appears to be the case, one way of attempting to solve such problems is to attempt to articulate or otherwise indicate which specific interests and needs are being served as a result of society's ongoing inability to formulate or agree upon any specific course of legislation, policy making, or even some sort of specific discourse whose utilization might lay the groundwork for some sort of improvement. Consider the possibility that humanity might, while engaging in ever more efficient and less expensive modes of computerization and automation, effectively destroy real human economic activity. The possibility exists that as human "work" comes to be defined as ever less efficient and necessary for the production of goods and services, that real people will begin to be paid less and less. Eventually, however, humanity's ability to purchase these ever more mechanized goods and services will begin to be seriously depleted. So that a point could theoretically arrive when a vast plethora of goods and services would be available for sale, however, the numbers of available purchasers would be constantly diminishing to the point where civility would begin to disappear, theft would become rampant. The scene would not be pretty.

Andreas Daniel Fogg was voluntarily admitted into psychiatric hospital shortly after entering graduate school in Anthropology, in an attempt to, through participant observation research, ascertain more about the nature of the psychological roots of human self destructiveness, which understanding he hoped might help humanity avoid large scale self destructive disasters. He currently lives alone in Somerville, Massachusetts.