The weekly Library of Congress bulletin said this morning that Feb. 18 is the anniversary of the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina turning control of the city over to the Union general Schimmelfennig. The news today mentions electricity bills far higher than usual being delivered to some Texans because of extraordinary actions taken to deal with the recent extra cold storm and consequent disruption of typical Texan power delivery.
I got to wondering if anyone along the line between extra emergency expenditures and the delivery of bills of inordinate size to the customers thought about the effect of unusually large bills. I hope somebody went to a supervisor and mentioned the large and unusual amounts. I also wondered about the mechanics, the politics and the communications involved in surrendering a city to an invading (and hated) army. I have mentioned the little book by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University titled "7 ½ Lessons About the Brain". The final lesson is that our brains can create reality. She writes about "made up" things such as laws and cultural practices and language.
I have been quite conscious of all the things on my mind that have to do with human costumes and ideas. It is true, I think, that a great deal of my life concerns human inventions that have no material existence. Much of our talk about politics relates to vast immaterial ideas such as "freedom", "communism", "liberal", "conservative" and many other terms. When a large and lively community (population about 300,000 at the time) such as Charleston, South Carolina surrenders to an invading army, there are likely to be some people inside the city that don't get the word that the city is now in the hands of the Union army. When a number of Texans, already cold and unhappy with their lack of heat and electricity get the word that they owe $7,000 for recent energy costs, there are going to be some people who are outraged and confused.
So many things that concern us in life relate to concepts and ideas that I picture something like cyberspace, only bigger and more complex and more diverse. All the names we use for people, places and things are in this language-space but so are many words for immaterial concepts that matter and can affect us deeply but are not physical, such as feelings, plans and purposes, not to mention fantasies.
