Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) : “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
Since the beginning of its existence on this planet untold millennia past, life has been a dangerous proposition for all creatures. The big fish eating the little fish has been the model for most interactions between living entities. All living entities have been either predator and/or prey. Evolution needed to develop in each entity methods of recognizing danger and thus trying to ensure that it will be able to replicate itself through procreation. Each species of course has different means of recognizing danger in its environment and various diverse senses for doing so. The importance of these senses varies by species and sometimes varies infra-species. Its own hierarchy of life preserving senses and activities can change in a species as it evolves to meet each new environmental challenge.
As humanity evolved there is no doubt that there were variations in the relative importance of our five senses at different times in our evolutionary history. What many humans believe is our most important attribute is of course the collective of our senses known as intelligence and the ability to reason. We are the singular species of this planet that has developed incredibly complex means of communication leaving us as the seeming masters of our world. Nevertheless, most of what we know of reality is our personal constructs of information that our senses have perceived and then compressed into a usable conception of our world, which despite the breadth of any one individual’s intelligence, is merely an approximation of the whole. However, to continue existence each human must make certain choices based on their personal perception of their environment. Sometimes these choices are successful ad sometimes they are disastrous. Since the arc of human existence has presented an ever-widening range of information, we have learned to edit and approximate much in own personal constructs. An example of this is that behavioral science has determined that we develop pictures in our mind of particular individuals and in our subsequent encounters rely mainly on those original pictures. Anyone who has raised a child knows that it is hard to see them as they grow, as anything more than the infant they were. While it’s true our picture of the child changes with growth, the lasting overlay of impression is usually quite dated. This is at least my conception of human perception.
With this concept in mind let me bring this post to the America of today, illustrated as a microcosm of the difficulty humans have in living with each other. Our politics have become perhaps more polarized and deadlocked than at any point in our history. Many people respond to each new issue that crosses public consciousness based on their personal sense of correctness, informed by a long developed political belief system that structures the nature of their response. The deeper ingrained this belief that there is only one path to political truth, the more mechanical the response becomes, and the less capable becomes the individual’s ability to react to the information from its environment to save itself. Those species unable to evolve to meet each new challenge to their existence became extinct. As humans our evolution has become more than just meeting actual physical challenges, we have evolved to the point that we represent the greatest danger to ourselves. Human existence is now dependent upon collectively being able to comprehend the dangers we face. How can we understand these dangers if our only method of understanding them is filtered through an ideological certainty that categorizes them based rote methodology? This is my attempt to try to make sense of why our political scene today seems so irrationally skewed by the inability to collectively recognize and adapt to dangers.
Can we agree that the information revolution has presented all of us with a dilemma? We are not quite ready or able to absorb all the information about the world that is available and that most of us are bombarded with on a daily basis? All of us, even geniuses, have learned to develop constructs of our environment and of the opinions that inform us. To a greater or lesser degree this allows us to cope with our lives. These human constructs include, but are not limited to, philosophy, religion, politics and economics. Such is the daily assault of information that we perforce need to “pigeonhole” each bit of new data as passes into our consciousness, just so we can seemingly make sense of it. I readily admit to using this shortcut, do you? I’ve come to see though, that this process of fitting prior perceptions into current situations can lead to misunderstanding. Because of that I’ve tried in my life to be self critical of my actions and opinions. As I’ve aged wisdom has taught me how much even a person like me, egotistically awash in intellectual self-esteem, can be completely wrong in any given instance simply because I filter new situations through past perceptions. I believe this is a human trait. Because of that trait, to a greater or lesser degree, our conflicting perceptions handicap our ability to make this world livable for all of us humans. In my own case some here may remember that on numerous occasions I boldly stated I was convinced that Jeb Bush would be this years Republican Presidential Nominee. My wrong conclusion was based on a wealth of information on the Bush family that I’d absorbed, but which kept me from seeing current political reality.
In prehistoric times, in a world of incessant danger the emerging human species had to rely on reacting with quickness and certitude to escaping impending danger. This was true either in the role of being predator and/or prey. Those that equivocated were those whose genetic heritage was not passed on. We are bred to look for patterns of certainty, yet how much of anything in life is really certain? The basis of almost all religion/philosophy is the need to establish a sense of certainty about our lives. Without that certainty, for many of us given our genetic heritage, comes disorientation and fear. This is a fact I believe for all of us, but its primacy of need differs from human to human.
A common complaint of Fundamentalist Religion is that the world is changing too quickly to not only keep up with, but also that change is a downward arc towards human degeneracy. Yet this change and this danger can be mediated if only one would follow the path described by Yahweh, Jesus, Allah or perhaps The Buddha. With that belief firmly rooted those so inclined view all new experience filtered through their pre-conceptions of what life is all about. If you think about it in a political sense you see the same pattern professed by politicians and political partisan from all parts of the political spectrum.
Many Republicans, Conservatives and Right Wingers express their nostalgia for the ”Roaring 20’s”, “Golden 50’s” and/or “The Age of Reagan” as if somehow it was a better world back then. Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, and Left Wingers too view the world through their own lens of nostalgia as if the “Roosevelt Era” and the “60’s” were times of clarity. The fact is there are no times of “clarity”, no “Golden Era” and no “better” past to emulate nostalgically. We are here now and it is in this “now” that we need to operate. All of us are genetically hard-wired” to abhor uncertainty in our lives, though some can tolerate the anxiety of it better than others. Therefore we seek broad-ranged “certainty” to dull our anxiety and calm our fears. We all know that the main fear of being human is the certain knowledge of our own mortality, but perhaps peculiar to our species is also the fear of not being remembered, of having not contributed anything to life and of having no purpose.
So all of us strive to quell the fear of uncertainty in ourselves, to ameliorate the anxiety it causes us, to fit our preconceptions into each new situation. We develop philosophies; adhere to religions and view the world through the lens of our personal politics. Fritz Perls, the Founder of Gestalt Psychotherapy, in which I am trained and in the philosophy that I use to live my life, once stated: “I see my role as destroying people’s character”. What he meant was that in our interactions with the world each of us develops a rigid “character”. “Character” is our personal construct of how we wish other humans to see us. He believed and I also believe that the danger of “character” was that it limits human choices in dealing with our environment. “Character” is a construct that developed in tandem with and possibly as an assist to, the civilizing of humanity. It possibly is the reason why tragedy has plagued human history. In an uncertain world the “survivor” hopefully is able to react to each new situation of conflict, danger, excitement, and pleasure in terms of their current feelings/information and not based on past pre-conceptions/premises. An example of the possible dysfunction of character might be a man threatened by someone bigger and stronger, who has the ability to run away, yet whose “character” dictates that he must “man up” and face certain pain. Are there times when one must rely on the certainty of their moral/ethical compass? Absolutely, and to one’s death if need be. However, these “life or death” decisions would serve us better if they are a true response to a present situation, rather than a decision filtered through pre-conception. To make that life changing decision, we’d be better served if we viewed each potential threat and/or pleasure in the present, without pre-judgment?
We see today in the political arena the effect of this search for certainty. The deep divisions that exist between people all arise from the fact they so strongly cling to the “certainties” they adopt to stave off the anxiety of uncertainty. Humanity as a whole must learn to live with the uncertainty that life presents, encounter it in the present moment and in essence “be here now”. Until then the “certainties” that we adopt to keep “uncertainty” away, will keep us from evolving into a species at one with our existence and possibly sow the seeds of our species extinction.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Mike:
Jeb knows better than to run against an incumbent. Next term should be better for him.
“There is ‘schmoozing’ and there is ‘blogging.’ The former is engendered by wanting to replace uncertainty with certainty, the subject Mike S blogged about.”
Then there is thread-jacking and shameless self-promotion.
Uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality, but somethings are predictable with a high degree of certainty. Predictable as in consistent. Now what was that Emerson said about consistency again?
leander22 1, May 19, 2012 at 12:46 pm
Dredd, this is an absolutely interesting comment. I noticed the theme in passing. But Mike managed to pull me on into the interesting axis between the necessity to form concepts and the too easy concepts of prejudice, which admittedly have been on my mind occasionally during the last decade.
I by the way react pretty strongly to the Darwinian line of thought. It was central in all the Nazi period thesis in my field I read. It seemed to be the Nazi core assumption. To what extend is it related to winners and losers?
Something I am struggling with in this age of communication, as an obstinate outsider, is that my core assumption, or concept if you like, if the frightening aspect of masses, surfacing in the topic Malisha alludes to–somehow ironically it feels, as the “lynch mob”–is not a completely outdated concept of the masses in the sense of majorities.
Now I should try to get that into short sentences. Right? And seriously reflect if I really understand American punctuation rules?
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There is “schmoozing” and there is “blogging.”
The former is engendered by wanting to replace uncertainty with certainty, the subject Mike S blogged about.
Like Einstein, Darwin was misunderstood, so social Darwinism and later Eugenics, both psychotic interpretations of Darwin’s work, emerged.
As you say, the NAZI realm loved both of those sicko myths. But truth be known, some of our own U.S. propagandists in the U.S.eh? were the idols of NAZI propagandists, not the other way around.
A lot of the evolutionary pollution that took place after Darwin was because biologists left the study of microbes, which Darwin and contemporaries were quite focused on, to concentrate on notions of human evolution.
They abandoned cosmology which covered ~14 billion years of evolution, to focus on about the last million years, which is like trying to figure yourself out based on the last two seconds you just experienced.
They abandoned the study of microbes, the oldest and most abundant life forms, who are the creators of ~98% of our genes (infamously called “junk genes” until recently) and who compose about ~98% of the cell quantity in us.
It is only very recently that they are getting back to the study of microbes in any significant quantity and quality.
You wrote:
Read “The Ways of Bernays” for my take on this phenomenon.
And yes, the mob psychology has been socially engineered, and yes again, it is scary as hell.
Have you read EINSTEIN’S DREAMS by Alan Lightman?
I didn’t get that book either but I really did appreciate it!
“theses”. Well yes, the telephone rings. not that one should try to look for subterfuges, really.
Dredd, this is an absolutely interesting comment. I noticed the theme in passing. But Mike managed to pull me on into the interesting axis between the necessity to form concepts and the too easy concepts of prejudice, which admittedly have been on my mind occasionally during the last decade.
I by the way react pretty strongly to the Darwinian line of thought. It was central in all the Nazi period thesis in my field I read. It seemed to be the Nazi core assumption. To what extend is it related to winners and losers?
Something I am struggling with in this age of communication, as an obstinate outsider, is that my core assumption, or concept if you like, if the frightening aspect of masses, surfacing in the topic Malisha alludes to–somehow ironically it feels, as the “lynch mob”–is not a completely outdated concept of the masses in the sense of majorities.
Now I should try to get that into short sentences. Right? And seriously reflect if I really understand American punctuation rules?
Excellent article, Mike. What is so interesting, is based upon the comments you’ve received so far on the blog post, no one gets it, save one. Everyone has their own agenda for sure, as well as their own hard wired perceptions. They read the piece, and respond based on those pre conceived expectations. It’s notable that the comments themselves, so fully support your essay.
CLH 1, May 19, 2012 at 11:56 am
Dredd- You must have posted your comment as I was writing mine.
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You write well.
I didn’t mention religion, as you did.
So let me say that I subscribe to the old adage “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lord Acton). Acton applied it equally to religious endeavors and to secular endeavors, equating “the Pope is infallible” with “the King can do no wrong.”
The greatest danger to the human species, and all those we threaten today, is misuse of power through corruption.
Both religion and government are the greatest threats to the species, and it is growing more deadly dangerous with every passing day.
Mike,
I thought you conveyed your point quite clearly. Just so, the interaction of presenter and audience is one of influence. The best a presenter can do is influence the perceptions of the audience. Or as my grandfather used to say, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”
“Then there was a moment of clarity when I realized that the maxim “the only constant is change” requires uncertainty.”
Gene,
Perhaps it’s our long relationship here, or maybe our agreement on many issues, but you seem to be the only commenter who gets what I’m trying to convey. This is not a “put down” of the other comments, but of my own inability to clearly convey a point. I was not writing about evolution, biology, political orientation, or to infer even that I’m in any better position than anyone else to accept my environment openly, without pre-conceptions fogging my vision and judgment. Each human is an organism, interacting not only with other organisms, but also with an environment including social constructs and the material world. Optimal interaction requires utilizing experiential material earned through growth/education, with an unfiltered view of our current environment in the here and now. The widespread failure to do this has led to much of the strife and horror of human history, while dissipating the pleasures each of us can have in our own lives and give to others.
“However, it’s not because of a desire for certainty that motivates irrational behavior- it’s the desire for competition.”
Fallacy of simple cause. There are more roots than one for the weed of irrational behavior. A desire for certainty and competition are but two of many causes of irrationality.
“The certainty desire only comes into effect within a single model of community,”
And yet the desire for certainty as a mechanism comes into play across every model of community as no communities composed by humans are homogeneously unafraid of uncertainty.
Dredd- You must have posted your comment as I was writing mine. I have zero background in biology- I hated the subject in college, and stuck to physics and chemistry for my ME. The article was very interesting, but I really and truly hate biology, so I doubt I’ll spend the time necessary to educate myself to the point I can comment on that theory intelligently.
Darwinism is really more of an exercise in logic than actual scientific process. Hopefully, it’s more of a narrative theory that we work on till we disprove it, or modify it to correct for existing understanding. I wanted to add that religion doesn’t provide the answers we need in the environment that exists today, but adaptation of DNA and the triggers that we use to behave as a species is far to slow to meet the current issues. Are we headed towards ecological damage induced extinction? Probably not. We really are very, very good at surviving as a species. Can there be an apocalyptic style breakdown of human society? Yep. The result, I think, would be a mass redux in human population, followed by a new barbaric period, followed by another modern civilization. The same rule that applies to life applies to species- they all die. Whether or not humans die or simply evolve into something else is the key. I so wish I had a time machine. How will a future society learn from that kind of event? Will preconceptions be hardwired to a point different from today? Will they create a “religion” where care and minimization of the natural resources becomes the new hardwired “moral” preconception that guides a person’s choices?
But I seem to have talked myself into agreeing with the original post. Hate it when I do that. Basically, I agree with the fact that we aren’t currently situated to best mitigate against global disaster. However, it’s not because of a desire for certainty that motivates irrational behavior- it’s the desire for competition. The certainty desire only comes into effect within a single model of community,
“The fact is there are no times of ‘clarity’, no ‘Golden Era’ and no ‘better’ past to emulate nostalgically. We are here now and it is in this ‘now’ that we need to operate.”
Although modern physics is starting to suggest that time may not be as we perceive it, I think in many ways this is a moot point even if we are technologically one day able to understand time in a different way than we do now. Unless the human brain fundamentally changes, the perception of time is as being linear and that it is so is fundamental to our ability to quantify. Our ability to quantify is the root of all understanding and logic; the ability to ask of a thing what is it in itself and derive an answer. Tangentially, your statement reveals the problem with nostalgia is that it is a sense “out of time”. The perception of the past is skewed by the perception of the now. As the Buddha said, “There is only one time when it is essential to awaken. That time is now.” To let the information of the past inform your decision making in the now is only prudent, but romanticizing the past is as fictional and faulty a perception as a delusion in the present.
“All of us are genetically hard-wired to abhor uncertainty in our lives, though some can tolerate the anxiety of it better than others. Therefore we seek broad-ranged ‘certainty’ to dull our anxiety and calm our fears. We all know that the main fear of being human is the certain knowledge of our own mortality, but perhaps peculiar to our species is also the fear of not being remembered, of having not contributed anything to life and of having no purpose.”
A concise summation of an idea that I recognize as percolating through the layers of past conversation. In my house as a child, there were a few maxims that fluttered about and the ones with utility stuck with me over the years. It is perhaps one of these maxims that better prepared me for the topic of uncertainty. “The only constant is change.” When I first read about quantum mechanics and how uncertainty figured into that system, it was a world changing moment. Uncertainty as a basic property of the universe? How could this be? For weeks the idea troubled me. I was plagued by uncertainty. It really bothered me. Then there was a moment of clarity when I realized that the maxim “the only constant is change” requires uncertainty. Uncertainty was in itself certain. I found that idea to be strangely comforting and the fear of uncertainty disappeared, never to return. You cannot change the nature of uncertainty. It is built in to everything. To fear uncertainty is as irrational as fearing hydrogen.
Great article, Mike. Maybe your finest yet.
This seems to be to be a summation of the theory of social evolution. I’ve had my own pet theories regarding this, which are frankly unsupported opinions based on preconceived notions, so I might write about them on my own blog, and not bore you with the details here. He asks if we are better off lacking the filter of preconception, and I can’t agree that we are. Like it or not, human’s have a limited mental capacity. We must have a means of making decisions, rapidly and without interrupting our daily lives, simply to make it through. An awareness of the existence of these preconceptions is very useful in academia and in decisions regarding long term strategies, but it’s usefulness, as the species exists today, is limited. In the end, we simply have to function and focus on priorities higher than focusing on the mechanics of our thoughts. That is the primary reason that we specialize and sub specialize so many different tasks and functions that society thinks it needs.
As far as working collectively to recognize a threat and react to it in a way that benefits the species as a whole, that is completely counter intuitive to the way evolution works. Evolution is a competitive process, because, well, evolution has made it that way. The strong survive, the weak die out or adapt. This process is wildly skewed when the species as a whole can protect weaker members, but it simply slows adaptive evolution instead of stopping it. The selection process becomes less of one of survival, and more of one of competitive advantage.
I don’t find his argument that religion is a sop to the need for continuity convincing. I believe religion to be one of the ways that humans actually have banded together to avert danger. Look at some of the things that ancient religions have in common. 1. Killing is immoral. That one kind of speaks for itself. If people are trained with the preconception that wasting human life is inherently against it’s interests, then that mitigates murders within a collective. 2. Origin of the species- a shared origin creates commonality within a collective, and understanding helps create a communal basis of the extended family unit. If one has a preconception of how a person came to be, the commonality makes it so that he’s less inclined to remove competitive obstacles with an arrow to the knee. 3. Property rights (theft is wrong). This reduces damage done to the collective by removing the stored resources of a member within that society by another, a competitive act that invites counter acts, typically violence or counter theft. This creates that more stable society that he was referring to. 4. An afterlife- This incentiviises the individual in the collective to adhere to the restrictions on his ability to compete in the market for mating partners. Without that incentive, the rational actor would be less inclined to follow the collective agreement to mitigate dangers.
In other words, it’s not the need for normality that causes people to act the way they do. It’s the need for survival. It’s the need to compete with each other. It’s the need to protect themselves and their family units, because genetics mandate that we fight and strive continuously to advance not just our own DNA, but the DNA of those we identify with, because if we view them as “like us”, we inherently desire those genetic traits to be passed on. Without competition, the process of evolution stops. Cold. Without death, we don’t grow. It’s the old yin/yang of life. We have to have a means to try our DNA against the dangers of the environment in order for the genetic code to continue to evolve. Until we master genetic engineering. Then all evolution theories kind of go out the window. I personally want some extra arms. And a knee that is immune to arrows.
Mike,
Very interesting article. I have to agree that the Right does seem to be stuck in the past, but I think the true reason for this thinking is their desire to maintain their corporate control of the government and the social mores that must remain in order to control the masses. All of the new information and factual information, including science, just gets in there way of gaining and keeping control and power and money.
Mike S,
Deep post. I agree with your main theme and premises, however, I do have some comments on some of the Darwinism.
Quote:
Except the earliest life forms, microbes (which are still the most abundant life form on Earth), that developed community, symbiosis, altruism, and mutual co-existence, issues which are studied in the realm of sociobiology:
(Abstract). Dr. Lynn Margulis received various scientific awards for her work in that light:
(Endosymbiosis, emphasis added).
Quote:
The greatest extinctions, mass extinctions, were not Darwinian.
For example, the latest mass-extinction 65 m yrs ago (“K-T extinction”), that eradicated ~90% of land creatures, including the dinosaurs, and ~50 of ocean creatures, was caused by an asteroid that became a meteorite, hitting the Earth at the southern boundary of the Gulf of Mexico.
The current Anthropocene Epoch, and its Sixth Mass Extinction event, now ongoing before our eyes, is a result of human behavior at odds with the successful species in the environment.
Human ecocide is causing the ongoing 6th mass-extinction, not because of defects in the species we are destroying at an unprecedented rate, but because of defects in the “most evolved species” (that is our story and we are sticking to it).
Old school Darwinism is inaccurate on several fronts, as is the “selfish genealogy” mythology.
Quote:
One of those “certainties” is old school Darwinism, a mythology, which gave rise to “Social Darwinism” and “Eugenics”, which still lead us in a wrong direction a century later.
And as you say, that direction can be our own extinction.
When the sheep are are confined to a fenced pasture and the wolves enter the pasture to fleece some of the flock, the barking dog is sometimes called in to run off the wolves. Usually some snarling does the trick and the sheep in the flock populating the pasture come out ok. Put several pastures together and you have a community and then you have wolf police. Sometimes the wolf police call upon help for the dog. Its all for the sheep and the fleecers who are legit. Now the hoodie kid in this instance was perceived by sheep dog to be a wolf. Whether he was a wolf in sheeps clothing is a fact to be determined. When all is said and done, Zimmerman is gonna walk because the sheep on that jury are not gonna wanna take any chances in their own pasture without a guard dog.
Mike, thanks for your article, for the meditation that it presents too. Usually I don’t get interested in the threads that are on subjects other than the Trayvon Martin case, but this one particularly spoke to me, perhaps because, in its way, it is very germane to that case.
Zimmerman — I see him as someone who couldn’t stand the uncertainty, who couldn’t coexist because he had to have the certainty, and it had to be HIS certainty. Aside from just plain being a liar to get off after committing a crime, I think that has a lot to do with the way he saw the whole event and thus, the way he would describe the whole event. HE didn’t see himself as an aggressor — he was just trying to find out what that guy was doing there — it was his perfectly understandable, perfectly righteous search for certainty that gave him a right to act on his personal feelings of discomfort with the uncertainty of seeing a stranger where HE was not comfortable seeing a stranger.
As to control of the masses by deliberately inflicted fear that can then be manipulated to produce unquestioning political support, the pump has to be primed and then it will work, every time. We have something happening now that I find very irritating as well as astonishing: continuous nameless fear by advertisers. Just recently I learned that snoring could kill me. (Since I was too scared to read the article, I’m not even sure whether it’s just MY snoring, or someone else’s, that could kill me, so I have to bear that uncertainty as well!) A friend of mine is always calling companies to check on whether there are recalls of the products he owns!
But uncertainty is and must remain our constant companion. If we can’t adjust to that, we can’t adjust, period. The good of the chipmunk in the woods who sits up in alarm and checks out the location of the nearby snapped twig is that after he figures out what he thinks the danger is, he takes off in the opposite direction and then forgets about it. We can’t forget about it like chipmunks and we think there is a way of warding off all danger. Even if we shot every single stranger in our neighborhoods, though, we would not be able to banish the continuous uncertainty that is our human inheritance. To know is to be unsure.
Oh, there, I said it. Give me a biscuit.
I think that the folks who are nostalgic for the age of Reagan are slidding into alzheimers disease themselves and are nostalgic for a time when the President was our senior dementia in faux paux. The last article on the blog was getting us dogs in the dog pack thinking about the role of religion in controlling things like cohabitude with notions of marriage sanctioned by law and religion. Which brings us to the central issue here on this topic is how the minds of man are controlled. The flock analogy is best because that is the dynamic employed by religions worldwide. The controller annoits himself/herself as Preacher, Rabbi, Imam, Priest, and then takes aim at a collection of humanoids in a given terrain. He needs a pasture to control the flock and some food source. While they are eating, procreating, basking in the sun the preacher lays out the notion of diety and the history of the specie. Sometimes they say origin of the specie but lets not get specious. The preacher has to eat and for him to eat, build his abode, lay out his clothing, fed the wife and kids, he needs to fleece the flock.
Now the flock on the other hand needs the preacher to ease their mind from concerns about tornados, wolves, floods, droughts, and whatnot. So the preacher can rap about floods for example and keep the flock in the pasture. To fleece the flock the preacher needs to lay on a little more rap about creation and the place of man and wife and whatnot. Nowadays, if one is a preacher who employs music then he can also be called a rapper. Once he puts the flock into the pasture, lays down the rap about the place for man and beast and procreation et al and gets them fornicating and growing some fleece, he is in business. The dogs come in when the preacher needs some help keeping them in line. We even help the blind. Of course they are all blind to a large extent. Humans. Cant live with them and cant live without them.
BarkinDog